Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Oct. 25, 2024 - The David Knight Show

03:08:50

The David Knight Show -10/25/2024

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Piano music
	Piano music Using free speech to free minds.
	You're listening to The David Knight Show.
	Piano music As the clock strikes 13 here on Airstrip 1.
	it's the David Knight Show.
	I'm Gardner Goldsmith filling in for David on this October 25th, Year of Our Lord 2024.
	We're gonna have a great morning this morning as we get to touch on many of the breaking news stories and derive some long-standing lessons for liberty and peace out of them and We get your opinions and invite two guests today.
	Eric Peters will be joining us in the 11 o'clock hour, and Tom Monteleone, very well-known author in science fiction and horror circles, will be joining us to tell us about how he exposed the wokeism of the Bram Stoker Awards.
	It's all here on The David Knight Show.
	The David Knight Show
	The David Knight Show Good to have you along for the ride, everyone, as I get to move over from MRCTV to fill in for David Knight today on The David Knight Show.
	I'm Gardner Goldsmith, and if you want to find my work, go to mrctv.org or check us out over at Liberty Conspiracy, my evening program in the Eastern Time Zone at 6 p.m., Where we gather and plot and plan and crouch and conspire for greater days of freedom by breaking apart many of the news stories and trying to derive long-standing intellectual ammunition from those things.
	We cogitate and ruminate and hopefully we have a great, great time.
	And thank you very much if you're watching us on X. Please hit the thumbs up on any of the platforms that might be streaming us.
	We're on Odyssey, we're on DLive, we're on I want to make sure that I mentioned that and the David Knight Show website where you can find great items at the David Knight Show shop.
	And of course, you can go to davidknight.gold if you want to connect with the great Tony Arterburn and Wise Wolf Gold and Silver Exchange.
	Become part of the Wolf Pack.
	It's a great idea, especially during These troubling times, but almost any time, it's very good to have some precious metals on hand.
	And of course, if you're watching on X, please hit that recycle and send it out to other friends as well.
	And if you're watching after the fact, welcome to whatever platform is hosting the program.
	What I try to do on Liberty Conspiracy is make sure that the news stories that I'm discussing are also available in my X feed.
	And on Sundays, I put together a A compilation of about 20 stories or so, plus a couple video links at my substack.
	And you can just go to the Gardner Goldsmith substack.
	It's G-A-R-D-N-E-R, like the Gardner Mass of Gardner, Massachusetts.
	In fact, our family was one of the five that founded Salem, Massachusetts, and the Gardner Museum, Isabella Stewart Gardner, married into the Gardner family.
	So they're all They came over on the Mayflower, so they're all part of that group from Massachusetts that has hung out there for many, many years.
	I want to thank Emmy Moore already for joining us on a beautiful, beautiful morning.
	She is inside X and commenting, and she says this.
	I could actually show it.
	I mean, our team here could actually show it on the screen.
	Top of the morning to your guard.
	Always love it when you host.
	Thank you so much.
	Thank you so much.
	And our fellow Liberty Conspirator, who goes by I Can't Believe, is greeting us this morning.
	Big G, always a pleasure, bud.
	What a way to start filling in for David Knight.
	And again, I hope you'll support the program.
	You can contribute on Rumble, on Rockfin, and he has a lot of really cool stuff on Subscribestar.
	They're thinking about doing some changes there.
	Just go to thedavidknightshow.com for all of the links.
	Let's see what's on tap for today.
	10-25-24, my friends, on the David Knight Show.
	I come over from MRCTV and I get to offer, hopefully, what is good grist for the mental mill.
	We're looking at salvaging reputations.
	The UK Center for Countering Digital Hate has been cited again for internal documents showing political plans in the United States.
	We heard a few days ago about Twitter slash X. Internal documents being exposed about their plans to try to bring down X. Then, just last night, I saw the breaking news and had to make sure that I included it in the conversation today on David's show because we're hearing about new exposure of new documents about none other than RFK Jr.
	looking at him as a potential threat for the election.
	But I thought...
	It was bad to have all that Russian interference.
	And clearly, this has got to be Russian interference.
	Oh, I'm sorry.
	Sorry, I guess I don't win at the game.
	I'll get that rice and rhodi, the San Francisco treat, and the parting prizes for being wrong.
	No, it's UK interference because the organizer and founder of the Center Countering Digital Hate, It's very closely allied with the Labour Party leader, Keir Starmer.
	Oh, wonderful.
	Just warms the cockles of the heart, doesn't it?
	Absolutely.
	Our second story is going to be about the Atlantic magazine, otherwise known as the Atlantic Council magazine, because it's sort of their bow of the ship.
	The magazine, of course, goes after Donald Trump We're good to go.
	He's a fascist.
	Well, I guess it takes one to know one, doesn't it, Mr.
	Brennan?
	Mr.
	Drone Killer with Obama?
	Mr.
	Hey, we've got the Russian collusion story.
	That Hunter Biden laptop clearly has all the earmarks, as they say, Okay, Mr.
	Brennan, sure thing.
	I'm really glad that the old dinosaur media trots you out there every once in a while and pulls you out of the mothballs.
	We'll talk about that, and then we'll talk about some larger questions as to is it actually appropriate to say that...
	Almost everything the U.S. government does is fascist in some way.
	My answer, quick answer, yes it is.
	We'll also look at Harris' town hall, the Herodin version of the town hall.
	We'll look at Blinken nodding to Israel to attack Iran and BLM money woes.
	Got to talk about this on Liberty Conspiracy last night.
	Black Lives Matter.
	I know it's shocking with all those free bricks they laid out there for Antifa and Black Lives Matter a few years ago in places like Portland.
	How could they have gone, I know, gone into some sort of financial troubles?
	And I know, you know, Patricia Collors, but she had those houses.
	I mean, that must mean they're swimming in dough.
	She's swimming in dough.
	Again, I don't win at the game show.
	I'll get the rice-a-roni.
	Our sixth story, if we can get to it, US and UK tried to pay off Petroleum workers in the UK and the United States separately, the governments that have been attacking coal and natural gas in the United States are trying to pay off the people they've displaced from work with, yes, you got it, my friends, government-subsidized green jobs.
	It was a beautiful day.
	It's still a beautiful day.
	We're going to turn their political frowns upside down.
	And then our guest in the 10 o'clock hour got to have a great conversation.
	And I teased this last night on Liberty Conspiracy with one of my mentors, the man behind Borderlands Publishing, a multiple Bram Stoker Award winner.
	But they tried to revoke his Bram Stoker Awards when he got internal documents that That actually showed that they are using prejudice, skin color, gender identity, and the XYXX chromosomal differential to decide who gets into slots to be considered For the annual Bram Stoker Award.
	He's got it.
	He sent me the PDF. I'll show it during our pre-recorded conversation that we got to have last night.
	And in the 11 o'clock hour, that'll be at 10.
	And in the 11 o'clock hour, Eric Peters will be joining us on the program on The David Knight Show.
	So welcome one and all.
	I am so glad that we get to get together on David's program and hopefully I'm doing an okay job.
	Let's check in on the chats and say hello to everybody in my first home, which was Rockfin, where they accepted me.
	To do my streaming show.
	Of course, I was doing MRCTV work over there before.
	And I have to say, you know, the MRCTV folks and I have differing opinions on things like U.S. government weapons support going to Israel and things like that.
	We originally had differing opinions on the centralized command and control federal government's control of the borders, which is not in the Constitution.
	We'll talk about that.
	The word immigration isn't in the Constitution.
	It was a state issue until a Supreme Court decision in 1875 Just basically created it out of thin air to say, oh, the feds can do this.
	And in fact, as I've mentioned before on David's show, you can look in the Texas Constitution that was adopted in 1869, and they actually had a Bureau of Immigration in there.
	The Supreme Court case that ruined everything, much like the Roe v.
	Wade case for abortion on that issue, was called Chi Lung, C-H-Y-L-U-N-G, Chi Lung v.
	Freeman.
	So you can check that out.
	I want to say hi inside Rockfin, our first home after MRCTV. But the MRCTV people were very, very nice because originally we had differing opinions on the immigration issue.
	But now editor Brittany Hughes actually approaches me to talk about those issues.
	So that's cool.
	Maybe I can convince him on a few other things too.
	Inside Rockfin, I want to say hi to Dustin Helm.
	Little Ford Schoolhouse, hello.
	And OctoSpook, hello.
	Dougalug, hello.
	Going through a few, I'm probably missing a number of folks.
	And also, I want to say hi to the good folks inside the chat on Rumble for David's program.
	So feel free to recirculate, repopulate.
	A lot of good people.
	I see Cicada.
	Cicada 17 is in there.
	Gustav 7.
	Sounds like a rocket.
	Ah, they flew the Gustav 7.
	And Opossum King and a number of other folks there.
	I always call that the fruit-striped gum colors because it looks like fruit-striped gum.
	So let's get started, everybody.
	On my program, oftentimes what I try to do is we cover many of these breaking stories.
	As we look at the UK Center for Countering Digital Hate and so on, I often do this.
	I play a little segment from a film that I did, an independent film, that was called Skippy Binderman, where I played a master of disguise, Frank Harker, along with my big muscle-bound friend, Spike.
	Yeah, yeah, he went by Spike, who played Alan Granny Liquor Spindle.
	And we were escapees and masters of disguise together.
	And so we approach a home.
	It's actually on Gardner Street in Massachusetts.
	This is how I start things off with the news flash.
	Yes?
	Oh, hello!
	Hello, we're Mary's parents.
	Oh, well, come on in, fellas.
	Hold it a second!
	Mary's parents burned to death last year!
	Wait a minute!
	I know you guys!
	You're from the News Flash.
	All right.
	Yes, I was the guy in all the white face paint.
	So let's take a quick look at some of these major breaking stories.
	First off, let's discuss the breaking story about the CCDH. You know, I gotta say, I don't know how they're gonna be salvaging their reputation.
	But they clearly are showing themselves to be, I think, not exactly the most trustworthy people when it comes to things like guarding over so-called digital hate.
	Because when it comes to digital hate, I don't think they'll be able to answer any sort of salvage in any way to bring back their reputations.
	Even if Sanford and Son were involved.
	We'll be right back.
	We'll be right back.
	And what a great...
	I love that theme song.
	And this one is coming to us from The Daily Skeptic.
	This is the earlier story.
	Now we've got the other shoe that has dropped.
	I think this might be an octopus with a lot more shoes dropping.
	On the 23rd of October, we heard about how the group called the Center for Countering Digital Hate was exposed for having internal documents that said on their item agenda, kill Musk's Twitter. we heard about how the group called the Center for So just some background again, leaked documents.
	This is from a few days ago, leaked documents from the Center for Countering Digital Hate over in the UK.
	The censorship outfit founded by Keir Starmer's new chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, show the group plans to kill Musk's Twitter while strengthening ties with Democrats like...
	like Senator Amy Klobuchar, who has not commented.
	So inside the documents, you can see, as you enlarge it, you can actually see that part of their agenda is right there, Kill Musk's Twitter.
	Okay, maybe you might want to go back to the drawing board, because I think maybe the idea of digital hate is sort of lost on you.
	So that was the first shoe to drop.
	Now let's talk about the other story that came out last night because, again, yep, they're being exposed.
	Here it is.
	This comes from GreenMedInfo.
	Exposed.
	CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed orders Black Ops against RFK Jr.
	in shocking memo leak.
	Here it is.
	Yep, Imran Ahmed, CEO of CCDH, RFK, Black Ops being set up to look at RFK, nervousness about the impact of him on the election.
	Now, I'm a voluntarist.
	I don't believe, in fact, I know that there is no such thing as a legitimate political control over someone else.
	That doesn't work that way.
	The polis is involuntary.
	It's funded involuntarily.
	It forces people to pay for it.
	So I'm not involved with putting someone into that office.
	I don't pick sides on either one of these instances with Kamala Harris or Donald Trump leading the pack for the Dems and the GOP. But I do think that there is something to be said as we come along to the election that maybe, just maybe, some folks who are interested in the races are probably paying attention to this.
	Imran Ahmed, CEO of the UK-based CCDH, has been exposed in a leaked memo admitting to orchestrating a black ops campaign against RFK Jr., Also probably not cool when you are the head of the Center for Countering Digital Hate and you are claiming that you are engaging in a black ops campaign against the Sun Here
	it is.
	These revelations come from the same leaked document that contained the now infamous Kill Musk's Twitter directive.
	Many pages down, the involvement of a foreign organization in potentially covert operations to undermine a U.S. candidate raises legal questions.
	You think?
	Including violations of U.S. election law, the First Amendment, and the foreign interference statutes like FARA. Well, I'll just mention that FARA actually runs counter to the First Amendment.
	There's nothing in the First Amendment other than Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, religion, freedom of the press, or freedom of association to ask for redress of grievances.
	It doesn't apply just to Americans who That the federal government will come up with no such laws.
	If you're a foreigner and you want to be critical of the United States, even if, I know, even if you're people who work for RT and you want to pay Tim Pool or Dave Rubens to do video work for you, you have no, there will be no blocks put on you by Congress, according to that document that they swear to uphold.
	So there you go.
	I know it's a little rough.
	Now I know some people have a lot of different opinions about Elon Musk.
	And they think he's playing the long game, that he's part of the technocracy and so on.
	David's brought it up many times, his familial background and so on.
	They think that this is a long game theater, as we just saw.
	Thank you, team.
	Someone comment over on X. I don't know.
	The way I take it, I don't come down with a judgment one way or the other.
	I look at what he's done, which is he's accepted government loans.
	That's Unconstitutional.
	He has been in conversations with Donald Trump about reducing the size of government, and literally in the next minute and a half, they talk about how great it will be to have federal government funding rockets and special so-called freedom cities.
	How ironic is that?
	So he understands what causes price increases, which is the inflation of the money supply, especially from a central bank that is buying up U.S. Treasuries.
	To keep supplying the money because the taxes aren't sufficient to do so.
	So he understands those things.
	He puts up a good game talking about those things, Elon Musk.
	And he has opened Twitter a lot more.
	I know that for sure.
	Not completely as we'll hear from Eric Peters later, which is one of the great reasons why I wanted to get him in today on David's show because Eric has been doing a lot of work on this.
	So the jury's out, but I take each instance as it goes along.
	I don't want to be compartmentalized about these people.
	I sort of want to draw in and eventually sort of evaluate.
	But over time, as I see that they're consistently doing good things, I say, okay, on balance, This person is doing good things.
	I don't completely trust him.
	It's like Tucker Carlson, right?
	Again, why didn't he leave Fox News earlier?
	Why didn't he speak up?
	I understand he tried to be a little deft when he brought up the MyPillow analogy, and then he left.
	But, you know, again, I've worked at radio stations where they literally told me, don't be critical of the governor of the state.
	And I said, well, you know, I'm going to do what I'm going to do, so you do what you could do.
	And of course, they fired me.
	So, you know, But that doesn't mean that I won't take some of the things that some of these other people are saying and say, okay, that's valuable.
	I think that's worthwhile.
	I want to get it out to people.
	So yeah, absolutely.
	And yeah, here we go.
	This is another one from Free Thinking FL Mom.
	Yeah, Elon believes in a digital cage, not free speech.
	And we're going to hear more from that.
	I want to get Eric Peters' opinions on that.
	So I thought that that was interesting, coming from the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
	Right?
	Right.
	Now, when we talk about hate, what is one of the big things that they've used on Donald Trump over and over again?
	And is it actually applicable, at least in a political, philosophical sense?
	Well, there's a Boston band you might know about.
	They're pretty darn okay.
	They were called the Unnatural Acts.
	And many years ago, they did a song called They Saved Hitler's Brain.
	So let's talk about Donald Trump and whether or not he is a big fan of Hitler.
	I got to see them about 40 years later and they ripped it out.
	It was great.
	It was so much fun to see the unnatural acts because I was too young to actually get into any of the rock clubs to see them when I was a kid.
	But I used to hear them on Boston radio.
	We were just on the fringes.
	You know, that was when you actually had to get things through the radio waves.
	And they were just on the fringes of our reception.
	So you'd be like, stand there.
	You know, trying to do the antenna in the right direction, just like television.
	But I got to hear the unnatural accent.
	I would write it down and write down all the good bands on the back of my notebook.
	So, okay.
	The Trump-Kamala cartoon.
	As we know, The Atlantic...
	has inspired many conservatives to come out and defend Donald Trump without, I think, looking critically at some of Donald Trump's fascist ideas.
	Like, oh, I don't know, getting the government to put out Jabs with corporations backing him.
	Starting up so-called emergency powers in March of 2022 that he doesn't have.
	Sitting inside a third of Syria, even though he didn't start new wars, he didn't end them.
	Occupying Afghanistan.
	I had the best plan to get out of Afghanistan, but you didn't do it, Donald.
	You didn't do it.
	And of all things, recently talking about how people at Fox News, they shouldn't be allowed to put on that conversation with Kamala Harris, when previously people like Rachel Maddow had accused Donald Trump of being like Hitler and wanting to shut down journalism, which was an empty accusation, simply applied to Donald Trump because he called the pop media the enemy of the American people.
	Which I think is one of the many enemies of the American people, right?
	But in addition to that, I believe the polis is the enemy of anybody.
	It's just one group trying to take advantage of another group.
	But now, people like Rachel Maddow actually can say that he wants to shut down free speech and journalism because he's given them the ammunition.
	Talk about lacking intellectual ammunition.
	So first, let's discuss a couple things.
	You're probably familiar with Viva Frye.
	Viva Frye, I thought, did a pretty darn good job yesterday covering the appearance of the Drone Meister and King talking about Mr.
	Kelly's accusations in an Atlantic article that Donald Trump praised Hitler.
	Now, I don't want to necessarily draw out equivalencies, but who is one of the big, big heroes for the left of the 20th century?
	It's FDR. Who was a big, big fan of Joseph Stalin, who literally had an eye collection on his desk?
	That's Joseph Stalin.
	Yes, FDR and many on his staff.
	And if you get a chance, check out Amity Schley's wonderful book called The Forgotten Man.
	Because in the first chapter, she talks about how they're on a train praising Stalin.
	Okay, so me thinks that the people who admire FDR maybe don't have a lot of solid ground beneath them when they're critical of this statement, which is uncorroborated, that Donald Trump claimed to have said, can't we get generals like Hitler had?
	Okay, let's turn to the Canadian lawyer and a great, great fighter against the lockdowns in Canada, Viva Frye.
	And hear what he had to say because he throws in one of the men who is one of the political banes of my existence, the drone killer in residence for pop media.
	John Brennan, who is responsible for tens of thousands of deaths, including Americans like Soleimani, an American, his son and his daughter.
	That they drone killed overseas.
	A totally extrajudicial murder.
	Here is the commentary about the rumor about Donald Trump.
	It's just ridiculous.
	But I think it's valuable because it opens up a little window for a lesson about the way the American government actually operates nowadays.
	Let's see here.
	Remember, the same play over and over again by the same players who are the filth of the earth.
	This is not surprising at all.
	We have seen this continuous...
	John Kelly, deep state extraordinaire, war whore intelligence painting the asset.
	John Kelly says Trump said Hitler did some good things.
	Let me steal this for a second.
	Everybody has made the joke.
	Everybody has made the joke.
	Well, as they say, Mussolini made the trains run on time.
	I think it was Mussolini, but then they also transposed it for Hitler.
	Everybody has made that joke at some point in their lives.
	Therefore, anybody who made that joke, someone can say, oh my goodness, that person complimented Hitler.
	Everybody has also made the joke, well, Hitler drank coffee.
	And then someone can say, he made a flattering comment about Hitler.
	John Kelly, who I'm sure you can trust, says Trump said Hitler did some good things.
	And who's this dude on the right?
	Oh, I won't spoil it for you.
	This is not surprising at all.
	We have seen this continuous pattern over the course of many years of Donald Trump endorsing individuals such as a Hitler, disparaging the U.S. military.
	Endorsing Hitler?
	I've never heard him endorse Hitler.
	All right, so let's just pause it there.
	So, again, I think John Brennan is one of the most obnoxious, unctuous pieces of political filth To have ever, ever gone into Washington, D.C. He is evil, incarnate.
	He is a mass murderer.
	And if he wants to sue me, we can go into it.
	Not a problem.
	Totally extrajudicial drone strikes.
	The guy was an avowed communist.
	Got into the CIA. Worked in the Middle East.
	Then became part of the deep state that pushed the Russian collusion canard.
	Also was the main guy behind the 51 intelligence agencies.
	Say that the Hunter Biden laptop...
	It has all the earmarks of Russian propaganda.
	When, of course, the possession of it at the computer shop had been validated, the internal information of it was validated, and all that was going on was the FBI was asking the New York Times, please don't talk about this.
	Why?
	Just like the Center for Countering Digital Hate, behind the scenes they were saying, we want this guy to get in rather than this guy to get in.
	Okay, so now again, whether or not one supports Donald Trump or they think Donald Trump is some, you know, great A part of a giant Hegelian dialectic.
	I don't know.
	But that man, that man on the screen, actually both men on the screen, are people I would never, ever trust in my life.
	And John Brennan should be in prison.
	That's for sure.
	Good job.
	And I felt great satisfaction seeing Viva Fry just go off about John Brennan.
	But there's something else about this that I want to give to you.
	You know, there's something sentimental about That I think is valuable to bring up about this story, this terrible story from the Atlantic.
	And so I want to turn to the Federalists on this.
	And I often don't quote the Federalists.
	They're very much in favor of the United States backing Israel with weapons and things like that.
	They're very pro-Trump.
	But I want to mention this.
	Oh, and by the way, I should mention also, John Brennan.
	John Brennan was never called out by Donald Trump for the things that easily Donald Trump could have called him out for, to leave a preposition dangling, like mass murder with drones.
	Why?
	Donald Trump was engaging in drone strikes as well, right?
	At the same time that Donald Trump was listening to Mike Pompeo, and Mike Pompeo was, according to most reports that I've seen, plotting to assassinate Julian Assange.
	And he's still listening to advisors who are connected to John Brennan with this unsubstantiated claim that Iranians were trying to assassinate Donald Trump.
	That came from a woman who's very close with John Brennan.
	Why in the world do you even want to get within 100 miles of these people?
	I don't know.
	And by the way, when it comes to Julian Assange, I know that some Republicans don't seem to appreciate what Julian Assange did.
	And what he went through after he exposed incredible wrongdoing by the U.S. military, and, you know, Chelsea Manning, of course, then known as Bradley Manning, he had an oath to expose wrongdoing in the military, war crimes.
	Otherwise, he would have been guilty of a war crime.
	So getting that video out from Iraq, from the guys shooting people, reporters from an Apache helicopter, he had a sworn oath to expose that.
	And I'll just mention this very briefly about Julian Assange.
	My old roommate from college, Sean Naylor, and we were roommates when we did a journalism internship in Washington, D.C. Sean was one of the three reporters who exposed the CIA spying on Julian Assange.
	We were roommates in college.
	I used to bother him playing psychedelic furs music until he realized they were really, really awesome.
	So here is the Federalist coming from a slightly different perspective.
	Here are all the people on record debunking the Atlantic's latest Trump hoax.
	Now this isn't to, again, praise Donald Trump or anything.
	And I've got some good stuff from Jacob Hornberger to actually expose the fact that many people are praising Donald Trump at the same time That they're ridiculing this unsubstantiated claim.
	Well, it turns out that many things or most of the things that the United States does are a mix of Marxism, that's, of course, international communism, statism, socialism, and national socialism like Nazism.
	So here it is.
	Many people close to this situation immediately went on record to blast the Atlantic's allegations of faults and as being politically motivated.
	And we've got this.
	It's the same guy that about two weeks before the 2020 election did a similar thing.
	Shortly before the 2020 election, Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, and of course the Atlantic is basically the spearhead For the Atlantic Council.
	So unless he gets in a lot of trouble, he's basically assured a job.
	It's not like another publication that has to just, you know, rely on subscribers and try to attract people.
	They're part of the Atlantic Council, the Atlantic Magazine.
	They're going to be perpetuated.
	So Goldberg published in 2020 a sensational, anonymously sourced rumor that then-President Donald Trump In response, 25 people, 14 of whom were with the president in France at the time, went on record to call the story a hoax and debunk its claims.
	One election cycle later, history is repeating itself.
	Two weeks before Election Day, with Trump on the upswing and all the joy vanished from the Kamala Harris campaign, Goldberg has once again found anonymous sources to accuse Trump of a smorgasbord of outlandish comments, including a negative remark about a murdered Army soldier.
	Now, this is all part of the same attack on Trump.
	Again, I'm just trying to show the lack of journalistic ethics, the lack of sourcing, and of course the games people play, as the spinners might have sung.
	And once again, multiple and credible on-the-record denials immediately undermined the story.
	So here is the first phase that they discuss.
	Goldberg's hatchet job begins with a retelling of Trump's interactions with the family of murdered Army Specialist Vanessa Guillen.
	Interactions which were so respectful and personal that even Goldberg couldn't make them sound anything but gracious.
	Then, Goldberg claims, without citing a source, that Trump later angrily refused to pay Guillen's funeral expenses, saying, quote, it doesn't cost $60,000 to bury an effing Mexican, end quote, according to this writer, Goldberg.
	As the piece in the Atlantic continues, Goldberg, again, without attribution, claims Trump wished for, quote, the kind of generals that Hitler had, end quote.
	Not until paragraph 24 does Goldberg even kind of attribute any accusations to a named source citing claims in a book written about Trump that alleged the president once asked his former chief of staff, John Kelly, why can't you be like the German generals?
	Goldberg goes on to include more salacious snippets he attributed to Kelly.
	Kelly has made no secret of his disdain for Trump.
	Meanwhile, Goldberg reached out to multiple people intimately familiar with Trump's interactions with the Guillen family, and they went on record to deny the accusations.
	Moore ended up publicly calling out This man, after the piece was published.
	So far, nine people have gone on record to debunk Goldberg's outrageous claims.
	One of them, Myra Guillen, said through her lawyer that Vanessa Guillen's sister Myra gave a statement saying, I am beyond grateful for all the support President Donald Trump showed our family during a trying time.
	Eyewitness firsthand how President Trump honors our nation's hero's service.
	Okay, we're going to pause there for a quick moment.
	If you're in the military and there's no declared war and they're deploying you somewhere, there's a problem if it's outside the United States.
	There's a major problem that they even call the U.S. military, the branches, the army.
	And the Air Force.
	There is supposed to be the U.S. Navy, according to their constitution, and the militia.
	Not the National Guard, not the U.S. Army, not the Marines, not the Special Forces.
	Ixnay on all that.
	Those are all fantasy terms.
	Anybody, and this is the thing.
	Again, I'm an anarchist Christian.
	I believe that government is illegitimate, the state.
	I believe that it is immoral to force my neighbor to pay for his own protection.
	Eh, the force is the problem.
	Doesn't matter whatever canards or excuses I come up with to say, you better pay now because this threat is really bad.
	So give us your money.
	Again, that is immoral.
	And practically, how do we know whether that guy wanted to spend that money on that?
	How much of it he wanted?
	Whether or not it's actually going to provide him with protection?
	Just ask the people in New York on 9-11.
	People in Pennsylvania, the Pentagon, you know, I mean, yeah, we all know that it was solely, solely some so-called terrorists from Afghanistan.
	It was only them, right?
	But if we look at the protective idea, that's a canard.
	You have to judge how much protection you want, and you have no right to force someone else to pay for your protection.
	Because, of course, that's an infringement of rights, which is aggression, which means you're engaging in anti-protection.
	So you can see the philosophical circle on that.
	That's the QED, the tautology, as they would say.
	So when they talk about the heroes, I do want to mention that when people thank the military for their service, what exactly are they doing there?
	I believe, and I want to touch on this as softly as possible, but I would like to remind people, and I've spoken to guys being deployed, In airports, they've had their uniforms on.
	I've been in the terminals and I say, do you mind if I ask you a question?
	I said, sure.
	I was like, you know, I noticed you're in your, you know, you're in your outfit there and you're heading out.
	You got your sand colored, you know, military, U.S. military fatigues on.
	So tell me, you swear an oath to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution.
	Yes, I do.
	There's no declaration of war.
	That's true.
	The U.S. military can only be deployed and used by the president if there's a declaration of war.
	That's true.
	Has a capital W. It means you don't kill civilians.
	You don't shoot people from an Apache helicopter as they're trying to rescue people that you just shot.
	You know, journalists in Iraq.
	You don't sit on oil in Syria.
	You don't try to topple governments.
	You don't engage like Victoria Nuland with CIA and special forces inside Ukraine to help train people.
	You don't give them weapons.
	All those things.
	There's no declared war.
	You don't have any official allies and you're not defending the United States.
	So I said, you know, how do you feel that you're getting deployed overseas and there's no declaration of war?
	And I've asked this of at least three people that I can remember.
	Every one of them has given me the same answer.
	Well, I do what they tell me.
	I'm sorry to say that's not your oath.
	Your oath is to abide by constitutional orders, lawful constitutional orders.
	If they're giving you an unconstitutional order, it's your duty to truth to God and your own integrity to not comply.
	The more people who did that, the less often tragedies like this would happen.
	So they said, we're grateful for everything he has done and continues to do to support our troops.
	After the story was published, Mary Ann blasted Goldberg for exploiting my sister's death for politics.
	And there's a lot more.
	But I'd like to show you a little bit of the reaction to this rumor from none other Then you know who?
	The vice president.
	Donald Trump's former chief of staff, John Kelly, a retired four-star general, confirmed that while Donald Trump was president, he said he wanted generals like Adolf Hitler had.
	Donald Trump said that because he does not want a military that is loyal to the United States Constitution.
	So let's just pause it right there.
	She has the unmitigated gall to talk about being loyal to the United States Constitution.
	This a woman who wants to hand out $25,000 to new home buyers.
	This a woman who hasn't lifted a finger to stop Antony Blinken promising another $5 billion in military aid to the Israeli IDF Zionist government.
	And it is not anti-Semitic to criticize a polis in the generic form.
	So, and by the way, my last name is Goldsmith.
	I'm not Jewish.
	But I'll mention this again.
	I went to Boston University.
	The population there is like 80-something percent Jewish.
	And the things that I would hear some of the Zionists, the Ashkenazi Jews, saying about the Semitic Palestinian people would turn your toes upside down.
	They literally would say they're nothing but animals.
	I heard that in the 80s at Boston University because they thought I was Jewish.
	So I guess they accepted me into their little cliques sometimes thinking they could say these things in classrooms and stuff.
	I don't know what the deal was.
	But this is a woman who literally is part of a regime that That has drone killed people extra judicially and that has continued to feed weapons to Ukraine, that has been involved in fascist subsidies to green corporations and doesn't want you to know, evidently, the history that, you know, is not that long ago.
	Loyal to him.
	He wants a military who will be loyal to him personally, one that will obey his orders even when he tells them to break the law or abandon their oath to the Constitution of the United States.
	In just the past week, Donald Trump has repeatedly called his fellow Americans the enemy from within.
	And even said that he would use the United States military to go after American citizens.
	And let's be clear about who he considers to be the enemy from within.
	She's working with Joe Biden, who was vice president with Barack Obama when Biden and Obama tried to use the Espionage Act to prosecute more whistleblowers and journalists than all presidents prior to them combined, going back to the passage of it in World War I. Oh, this is a rich dish.
	You want some gravy on top of that lard and butter?
	Holy moly!
	Anyone who refuses to bend a knee or dares to criticize him would qualify in his mind as the enemy within.
	Okay, so does anybody remember what she just said a couple weeks ago when she was with Jake Tapper about social media sites if they don't conform to what the United States government thinks is proper speech?
	Oh man!
	Ah, they really hope that your memory is about as long as the lifespan of a flea.
	My goodness, just unbelievable.
	I see comments on X. FreethinkingFLmom says, I feel peace that John Brennan will meet his maker one day.
	It's in God's hands, Freethinking.
	I know what you mean.
	And of course, the team here at the Liberty Conspiracy Studios...
	Also has this Ann Barr and Haspel.
	Oh, great points!
	Trump surrounded himself with the swamp.
	Absolutely, absolutely great points.
	Now, as another little example...
	Of just, you know, how much Kamala Harris evidently wants you to hear one thing but not hear another thing based on where she is.
	Let's go to the CNN town hall, which in no way was prefabricated and trumped up and didn't already have the questioners selected.
	And I mentioned on my Liberty Conspiracy program, In my book, Live Free or Die, which is a collection of nonfiction essays and there's short stories and a script that never got made when I was over at the Outer Limits in Vancouver.
	I have an article that I wrote called A Story of Two Forums.
	And it's about how when Al Gore was running against Bill Bradley for the Democrat nomination years ago, they had a town hall forum on Nightline with Ted Koppel.
	And he brought his little wood stand and all that stuff.
	My brother is an attorney and he was the head of the bar association in this town for a while.
	Sort of goes around robbing for different attorneys and stuff.
	And, um, so he got, uh, he got a, uh, a fax from ABC and they said, would you like to come to this town hall meeting with Bradley and so on?
	And they, you know, they must've thought being a lawyer in that town, he was Democrat.
	I don't know.
	So, um, so he said, Hey guard, I can't go.
	Would you like to go?
	And I said, yeah, sure.
	So he goes, yeah, you got to call his phone number.
	So I called the number and there's a nightline producer that calls you back or something.
	I can't remember.
	And, um, And he said, yeah.
	He said he must have thought I was my brother.
	And so he said, oh, what question do you want to ask?
	And I thought, well, that's a curious thing to bring up in a phone call.
	What question?
	I just thought maybe it was just passing conversation.
	It was just being, you know, loquacious or something.
	So I said, oh, well, you know, I'd like to ask these people how they can justify things like the Department of Education if they're swearing an oath to the U.S. Constitution.
	He goes, oh no, that's much too in-depth.
	I think I mentioned something maybe about the Second Amendment or something.
	He goes, no, no.
	And I was like, oh, okay.
	All right.
	So anyway, it came to the day for the thing.
	And I went over to this little college in Nashua.
	Or as out-of-state radio advertisers call it, Nashua.
	That's how you know if you hear an ad in New Hampshire and they say Nashua.
	You know, it was actually spoken.
	The narration came from somebody outside New Hampshire.
	So I go there early, about an hour early, and it's a theater with microphones in either aisle going down to the stage where they've got the podiums and Ted Couples, a wooden platform thing.
	And so I go and I notice there aren't too many people there yet.
	And near the microphones, there are these blue pieces of paper on On the chairs.
	So it said for questioners or something.
	So I was like, oh, I want to ask a question.
	This is great.
	I got here early enough.
	I'm going to be good.
	So I pick up the piece of paper.
	I sit down and some person comes down from ABC and he says, are you one of the questioners?
	I was like, well, you know, yeah, I want to, I have a question I'd like to ask.
	Yeah.
	He says, no, are you one of the questioners?
	I was like, well, what do you mean?
	He goes, Well, you know, the people asking questions, they've already been selected.
	I was like, what?
	He says, yeah, you know, they arrived at four this afternoon.
	They're in the other room.
	So they already had selected the questions based on the phone calls.
	They flagged the people.
	It was all prefabricated, but they called it a nightline town hall, right?
	So we got to be entertained by such wonderful and insightful questions that just showed great cognition about, do you support a manned mission to Mars?
	And I know it wasn't Elon Musk asking the question.
	While I was asking questions about the functionality of how they're going about making the U.S. government completely veer away even more and more from what they swear owes to uphold their constitution.
	Even the very concept of having a written constitution.
	So the second forum...
	I was in Manchester, New Hampshire.
	Actually, it was Derry, New Hampshire on a local TV station where Eric Scheiner of MRC TV was working.
	And he called me up.
	He said, hey, guard, you know, we're having a forum.
	Would you like to come over?
	Bill Bradley's going to be there.
	Senator from New Jersey who was running against Gore.
	And I said, sure.
	He goes, yeah, I figure you probably have a pretty good question that you might want to ask.
	So I got there.
	It was open to the public.
	People could walk in.
	I sat down.
	And the question I asked Bill Bradley, he clearly didn't like.
	Because I said, Senator Bradley, many people try to justify further expansion of the U.S. government in things like education or welfare by claiming the Constitution is what they call a living document or relying on Supreme Court precedent.
	I said, since that leaves states, businesses, and individuals' rights open to judicial or congressional whim, do you think that that is justified?
	And if you do think that reading anything into it is justified, why do you think that the founders put an amendment process in there, and do you think that there's really no reason to even bother having a written constitution?
	So, he sort of blinked.
	Because, you know, as I mentioned on my show the other night, you know, I had sort of figured out what his possible answers were going to be and closed off those doors.
	I plugged up all those little holes in the dike.
	And...
	So, he sort of blinked.
	He had to think about it for a second.
	He goes, well, I consider myself a child of the Declaration of Independence.
	And I believe that government is there to provide us with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
	And I believe in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
	And I believe that in these days, government is there to give us these things.
	Like, oh, okay.
	You kind of flipped what Thomas Jefferson wrote, but whatever.
	Okay, thank you.
	I think you sort of exposed yourself to a lot of people there.
	Let's hear Kamala Harris.
	And remember, she talked about how Donald Trump doesn't like judges.
	He wants to control the courts, this sort of thing.
	Wants everybody to answer to him.
	This is what she said in her statement.
	And now we got this from the CNN town hall.
	Increasingly are losing confidence in the Supreme Court.
	And in large part because of the behavior of certain members of that court and because of certain rulings, including the Dobbs decision in taking away a precedent that had been in place for 50 years, protecting a woman's right to make decisions about her own body.
	Okay, so you know there are about 8 million canards in that, because if she's making a decision about her own body, then you're not stopping another human being from existing, are you?
	Life begins at conception.
	The human who is created has separate DNA from the parents.
	The fetus is human.
	The fetus is being.
	The 14th Amendment requires that any state that has statutes, and it's supposed to be a state issue, abortion, the Dobbs decision was correct.
	This, again, coming from a Christian anarchist here.
	I don't support any polis, but I'll remind them of their rules.
	The Constitution leaves the punishment for capital murder up to the states.
	It's possible that the states might never have any statutes punishing people for committing capital murder.
	But if they've got statutes that punish people for committing murder and taking the life of another human being, the 14th Amendment equal protection, not equal treatment, equal protection clause requires that the states protect people equally.
	So if someone takes the life of a human being who's 17 years old working at a 7-Eleven behind the counter, And the state prosecutes that person, but a doctor takes the life on hire from our tax money with Planned Parenthood or somebody else going in and paying for it for an abortion.
	That also is the taking of a human life.
	The 14th Amendment would require all states to equally protect all human beings.
	It's not about a woman's right to choose about her own life.
	It's not about privacy, because if you can use that argument, then murder inside your own home is clearly acceptable.
	And if you do it somewhere where nobody sees it, that's clearly acceptable too, because you can do it privately.
	You can hire somebody to kill somebody else in a room, right?
	And then sell their body parts.
	Center for Medical Progress has done a great job covering that stuff.
	So this is just amazing that evidently the Democrats really don't want folks to know about this astounding hypocrisy.
	But let's take one final glance at fascism.
	Jacob Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation writes with this rather salacious headline, What's wrong with admiring Hitler?
	Obviously, he's being sarcastic.
	But he notes this.
	According to an article in the New York Times, former Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, who also served as Donald Trump's longest-serving chief of staff, confirmed previous reports that Mr.
	Trump had made admiring statements about Hitler.
	Kelly made the statement in the context of discussing Trump's authoritarian proclivities.
	Trump isn't the only one, though.
	According to an article in the Daily Mail, a fifth of Gen Z Americans, 12 to 27 years of age, believe that Hitler had some good ideas.
	Alright, that's not necessarily the important thing.
	What Jacob brings up is not the Holocaust period of Hitler's reign, but the decade of the 1930s when Mr.
	Hitler...
	Was serving as Chancellor of Germany.
	How do American statists feel about the pre-war, pre-Holocaust Hitler?
	He says, let's consider some of Hitler's positions.
	First, Hitler was a big supporter of Social Security, which is a socialist program that is near and dear to the hearts of Why?
	Even reform-oriented libertarians favor the continuation of this socialist program for at least one generation and possibly longer.
	In fact, the concept of Social Security originated in Germany.
	And so it's no surprise that Hitler would favor it, especially given that his philosophy was based on national socialism.
	The concept was made part of the American system in the 1930s and has remained a permanent and extremely popular part of American life ever since.
	And of course, the first year that they started paying out, the first woman who got it got more than she put into it.
	It has always been a parasitic Ponzi scheme.
	Number two, Medicare and Medicaid.
	Hitler strongly believed in government-provided health care.
	So do American statists.
	For that matter, many reform-oriented libertarians favor the continuation of these socialist programs as well, calling for health savings accounts or something called direct medical care as reforms intended to fix and improve.
	America's long-standing health care crisis, which of course is rooted in government manipulation of the insurance market and regulations.
	Three, a large permanent military established to provide so-called strong national defense.
	These are things that Hitler favored and that American conservatives and liberals as well as Republican-like libertarians favor as well.
	Then you've got the interstate highway system.
	Again, there are only three forms of land in the Constitution that the federal government can control.
	One, a 10-square-mile area for the capital, which is Washington, D.C. Two, territories, and then territories become states.
	When they enter the United States as states, the Constitution says they enter with all the rights and privileges of any other state.
	And, of course, that means that they don't have to cede land, and even if they could cede land, There's nothing in the Constitution that lets the federal government run parks or national monuments or anything like that.
	It's just not there.
	Just like the word immigration isn't there.
	You can read it.
	You'll be there for a long time searching.
	You won't find it, right?
	And of course, if you're in a debate with anybody about these things, you'll win the debate.
	Just bring this stuff up.
	I've debated Pat Buchanan, Tom Tancredo, J.D. Hayworth about these things, and they all agree on the immigration thing.
	Well, Gardner, you're right.
	And then they continue to move on.
	You say, well, we're being invaded.
	What's the answer if you're being invaded?
	You have to declare war against the invading nation state.
	Congress has to do that.
	If it's not a nation state, then you issue letters of mark and reprisal because they're non-uniform so-called combatants.
	And then you can hire mercenaries.
	The president can do that.
	Those are the only ways you do it.
	Sorry to say for people who want to see American hegemony everywhere in the United States central collectivist system running the immigration programs.
	It's been real good so far, huh, conservatives?
	I hope you take another look.
	And maybe not you, but you can remind other people.
	You'll be able to win the argument if you mention it's a state issue.
	So then we've got the interstate highway system.
	Clearly, the other aspect is military garrisons.
	So you've got DC, military garrisons, and territories.
	So is a highway a military garrison?
	No, it's not.
	Interstate highway system, unconstitutional.
	A lot of people praise it.
	They think it's a great idea.
	Of course, it's based on the Autobahn, Hitler's idea.
	Then we have public schooling.
	Hitler, like Marx, like all American statists seem, they love the concept of government-run schooling.
	And of course, even some libertarians think that it's a nice idea to have the state give vouchers to people, which will then infuse the schools with the poison of the government money.
	Yeah.
	Then we have a government-regulated and government-managed economy.
	Yep, absolutely.
	Hitler, like American status, like Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, going to have the freedom cities.
	We're going to have the tariffs.
	They like to decide for other people what is essential and non-essential.
	That's what tariffs do.
	And we've got paper money and a central bank.
	Like American status, Hitler was a firm believer in both paper money and a central bank.
	And of course, keep in mind that Franklin Roosevelt abandoned America's constitutional monetary system.
	I agree with Ron Paul.
	All you have to do is allow for competitive free market banking and people will be attracted to a system that actually has gold or something valuable in it when they're issuing their currency and they're not fractionally reserved currency lenders.
	Because you want to make sure that if you go in with your piece of paper, you can redeem it for something valuable.
	Nobody would take the money if they knew it came from that sort of a bank.
	But we all have to deal with their stuff.
	We've got things like invasions and wars of aggression as the United States invaded Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria.
	And look what's going on with the United States funding proxy wars with the IDF and Ukraine.
	And things like trial by tribunal.
	Hitler favored this type of trial for accused terrorists, as do American status.
	Just ask Ron DeSantis when he was a JAG and visited you-know-where.
	Yep.
	Yeah, they say he was in Guantanamo Bay.
	There were people who were there who recognized him, and so they say he had to have known what was going on there.
	So that, I think, is valuable information.
	Now let's take an opportunity to turn to someone who exposed not the CCDH from the UK, not the Trump administration or the Kamala Harris gang for being fascist in many ways, or collectivist socialist in many ways, and pandering to people, not draining the swamp, as we see a free-thinking Florida mom says, and Barr and Haspel Yep, Trump surrounded himself with the swamp.
	So right.
	And also inside Rockfin, I want to thank Jeb Clayton.
	Rock on guard.
	He gave a contribution to the program.
	And I appreciate that inside Rockfin.
	He says, rock on guard, doing a great job.
	Happy Friday.
	And you too.
	And Amos Poole.
	And in relation to Tim, I heard there's been a shakeup in Tim's show.
	He's been getting a little tired, I think.
	Guard, love your knowledge of music.
	I'm reminded of something that Dead Kennedys sang And may be appropriate in this political season.
	She's no stranger to...
	I can't mention that one, but yes, I will give you...
	And unfortunately, Jell-O has come out as, of course, a real hardcore leftist, no surprise.
	Let's talk about a guy who's not a hardcore leftist.
	He's one of my mentors in writing.
	His name is Tom Monteleone.
	I got to have a conversation with Tom last night on the program.
	And I want to offer it to you right now.
	On my program, Liberty Conspiracy, I take my time at Star Trek Voyager and in the script department, I like to remember the old Vulcan mind melt.
	So let's give you this on the David Knight program.
	For our mind meld with a man who exposed some other people at the Horror Writers Association and the Bram Stoker Awards for their unbelievable prejudicial wokeness in handing out awards for writing.
	I must try to mind meld with it.
	Trinity ends.
	Mine's a merging doctor.
	Amen.
	Our minds are one.
	I feel what you feel.
	I know what you know.
	Alright, alright.
	Let's go to our conversation with Tom Monteleone.
	Tom is a very good guy.
	I really appreciate all the things that Tom Monteleone has done for me.
	And so I'd like to give this to you right now.
	And let me just pull this out here for you.
	Interview with Tom Monteleone from last night.
	One of my mentors in writing on the David Knight Show.
	Always a great opportunity to be able to chat with my mentor, a great guy, a former fellow New Hampshireite from the Granite State, the live-for-die-state here in deepest, darkest Russia, where we propagate the propaganda.
	And he is a great writer on his own, a great editor, a great publisher, and a great hero for integrity and People who believe in the merit of someone's work rather than slathering it with all sorts of labels that show instead that you're a woke prejudicial jerk.
	So let's bring in a guy who is not a jerk and expose some people who have engaged in that sort of thing.
	He is the award-winning, Bram Stoker award-winning Science fiction, horror, and adventure writer and publisher.
	He is none other than my friend and mentor, Tom Monteleone of Borderlands Press.
	Tom, how are you, man?
	Man, I feel great, and it's an honor to be on this thing.
	I really thank you for the invite.
	Yeah, I'm looking forward to having some interesting conversations with you.
	Yeah, well, you know, you and I have spoken about this over at the Liberty Conspiracy Show on the evening show that I do.
	And I want to mention, of course, people might be familiar with your novels, with your nonfiction work on how to write novels, with the editorship of many award-winning books, and, of course, with Borderlands Press and what you've released there.
	And so I wanted to welcome you to the David Knight Show for David's audience because...
	Yeah.
	Yeah, you have done something that in addition to your publishing and, you know, raising a family and, you know, being an all-around good guy, pro-freedom guy, and of course, amazing stories about meeting mafiosos in the north end of Boston.
	I love that story.
	I love that story with the Don.
	I wanted to bring you in because over the past year, your name has floated around as one of the people who, along with, there's a writer named John De La Rose, Yes, yes, and I've been corresponding with him somewhere.
	Yes, John is a good guy.
	I have a couple of his novels.
	Good writer and a very conservative pro-liberty guy.
	And people like Nerd Roddick, Gary Bigler, and a number of folks who used to call themselves the Fandom Menace, rather than the Phantom Menace from Star Wars, who are people who are pro-liberty.
	And are interested in quality and had noticed that a lot of entertainment, including prose fiction, was getting waylaid by the people who wanted to infuse things with their agenda.
	Deconstructionism writ large and infusing everything with leftist, collectivist, neo-Marxist ideology.
	And one of the things that really came up, and I would never have expected it, was your name As a guy who uncovered something inside the very well-known Bram Stoker Awards, and I had already known that you had stood up for quality work in your anthologies and people tried to excoriate you and said, you've got to do this, you've got to bring in this group or that group or representative of that, and you just said, I just want good stories.
	How about representation of good stories?
	Oh yeah, I got Borderlands 6, which won a Stoker Award for best anthology.
	Two or three people attacked it because all the writers were American.
	Two, 60% of them were male.
	And none of them were people of color.
	And I thought...
	You've got to be kidding me.
	That's the way I'm supposed to select stories for my anthologies.
	My Borderlands series has won the Stoker Award three times for really good anthology fiction.
	And it wasn't because I worried about what you had between your legs or how much melanin you had in your skin.
	It was because you wrote a good story.
	That was it.
	That's all I was interested in.
	And I was amazed.
	I was amazed on Facebook, which I hardly ever visited anymore.
	But on Facebook, you had mentioned, look, we stripped the names off of these stories.
	I read for the quality and the merit of the story.
	Isn't that what it's all about?
	And people attacked you.
	They said, no, you've got to make up for this.
	You've got to make up for that.
	This wrong in the past.
	So in other words, they said it was my duty as an editor to seek out What they called marginalized writers, right?
	Unbelievable.
	So in other words, you have to engage.
	I'm not a social worker.
	Yeah, if they want to publish something based on that, they can go ahead and do that.
	But they shouldn't tell you.
	It's amazing.
	Go do your own anthology.
	Go $10,000 out of your pocket to pay for all the freaking stories and see what it's like.
	Oh, it's amazing.
	Don't tell me how I got to do it.
	Go do it yourself.
	Yeah, yeah, exactly.
	And see how well it sells.
	If you think you can give it legs, you know?
	And the thing about it is that you go layer upon layer upon layer.
	First, they've got that assumptive usurper attitude, that conceit and arrogance to tell you, hey, You're being racist or sexist or homophobic or whatever if you don't make up for what we perceive as past wrongs done to completely other people.
	It's reparations within the writing community, right?
	Whatever community it might be.
	That means you've got to be prejudicial.
	Yeah, that means you've got to have prejudice against somebody else.
	You've got to decide, well, I'm going to view first your skin color.
	I'm going to view first, which is not why you're there.
	You want people to read good stories.
	And my track record proves that that's what I was doing.
	I was not pandering to any particular agenda.
	And I refused to do that.
	But the interesting thing is that A lot of people would post on Facebook, or they wouldn't, but they would send me emails and they would say, listen, I'm on your side, but I don't want to say anything.
	And I would say, you know what?
	Keep your head below the foxholes.
	No problem.
	Be quiet.
	You don't need to go to bed for me.
	I'll go to bed for myself.
	And, you know, if they beat me down, they beat me down.
	My accomplishments speak for themselves.
	I'm not worried about that.
	Well stated.
	And, you know, there are different folds to this, too, because then this expands into the next phase, which came around about a year and a half ago.
	And we'll talk about that with the Bram Stoker Award panel and the Horror Writers Association.
	So that was the first example that I saw a number of years ago with Borderlands 6.
	As you were you know getting ready to accept stories always stripping the names off just going by the stories and What I always found interesting was these people I I would bring up having worked at as you know Annie's bookstop for years The owner told me 90 some percent of what we sell we sell to women.
	It's romance novels There aren't guys who write these novels so I I'm not out there saying you know you should get more guys to write these It's just the market if that's what somebody wants then that's what somebody wants it I'm not gonna force it on somebody or say that it's some innate inherent imbalance and then we get to the next level Tom which is even when you were when you are to say I stripped the names off these things then they'll come back at you with this deconstructionism the second layer is
	well you don't even know your inherent balance your inherent prejudice So because you're a white male, you already come slotted in, programmed with certain prejudices that therefore when you see a story, you will think that that story is X amount better than another story by some person of personhood that has been put down for all these years.
	So you yourself, so in other words, you should never even bother editing Exactly.
	What am I doing with the hubris to think that I can create an anthology of good stories regardless of who wrote them?
	I obviously have been...
	Excuriated from that position.
	It's ridiculous.
	Yes, it is amazing, and they're all defensive walls, really.
	What they are, really, are...
	We talk about this a lot on the show.
	It's cultural Marxism, and they want to pick the whatever David it is that they're supposedly going to be helping.
	They get all ginned up about these things.
	They want rules and regulations from the top down.
	In this case, we'll see in a minute, is the Stoker Awards panel and the Horror Writers Association Club starts to circle their wagons to make sure that people who are actually just interested in merit are pushed out and they can virtue signal.
	But that's what they start to do.
	It's all postmodernist cultural Marxism.
	You got to pick the, you know, minority group of this or that or whatever.
	And as Ayn Rand said, the smallest minority in the world is the individual.
	Yeah, and that's the perfect minority.
	Yeah, right.
	So tell us, Tom, let's take a look for, well, before we go into the press, Borderlands Press, I'm going to say the name first so people remember it.
	Won't show it on the screen quite yet.
	Here on the David Knight Show, our guest is Tom Monteleone.
	He is a writer of his own stature.
	Look for his novels out there.
	Check them out, especially the digital versions.
	Go to Borderlands Press.
	We'll show you the website in the And I don't want to sound like it's too much.
	You know, I don't want to be like promoting the site all that much or whatever, Tom, but it's great.
	It's a super cool site and there's great stuff there.
	But before we do that, Tom, with people with loaded with that information, let's talk about what happened a few years after Borderlands 6, because and again, there.
	I found out about this later as I saw your name was actually trending on Twitter and I was like, what's going on?
	What is this?
	And what a lot of people did not know was that as this controversy bubbled up, you got your hands on a document that comes from inside the Horror Writers Association.
	Which issues the Bram Stoker Awards.
	You have gotten the Lifetime Achievement Award and they approach people for the next nominations for the Lifetime Achievement Awards and you started a brush fire because you and and if people know you're writing from your Mafia columns, from Cemetery Dance, they know the way you speak.
	I don't take any prisoners, man.
	I try to just look at the situation and comment on it as I perceive it to be the truth.
	I've written a column for 40-some years Doing that.
	And this used to be no surprise to anybody.
	You know, I don't suffer idiots or untruth.
	And so I snarkily, I had been watching the HWA, it was the Horror Writers Association, I was actually part of its founding membership.
	I was the emcee of their very first Stoker Awards.
	I was part of that organization from the beginning.
	I noticed that I had won the award in 2017 and the award is supposed to be for Individuals who have contributed to the horror, dark fantasy genre and have made significant contributions to the genre as a whole.
	Well, I think they gave it to me because I had edited an anthology series for 30 years that won a lot of awards.
	I ran a writer's boot camp for 20 years and had 80 percent of my people that came through the boot camp ended up getting published.
	I won six Bram Stoker awards for in four different categories and you know and I'd written you know 30 some books so you know I had I paid my dues I had put my um Nuts on the table and handed out hammers.
	Okay?
	I'd been there.
	I did it.
	And they rewarded me for it.
	Then I started seeing, they were starting to give the award over the next three or four years to people that I knew and liked as people, but I didn't perceive them to have Made these significant historical contributions to the genre.
	And one of the reasons I noticed was that they were, what has become the catch word, marginalized people.
	And I thought, this is crap.
	And I noticed that HWA, when they would send out their newsletter every six weeks or so, They're starting, all of a sudden there's these pronunciamentos about, you know, backing Pride Month, backing Black Lives Matter, backing, you know, the flavor of the month.
	And I'm thinking, you can't speak for all of us.
	You didn't poll us.
	Did you ask us if you wanted HWA to Be a standard bearer for Black Lives Matter?
	No, you did not.
	Did you check it with us, how we feel about Pride Month?
	Right.
	You didn't.
	So the people that were running the organization were just running roughshod with these, what do you call them, you know, backups and backing these things.
	Yeah.
	I don't like this.
	We're starting to tilt left.
	And we're a writer's organization.
	We shouldn't be getting into this political crap.
	Absolutely.
	And I can see it coming, too.
	They're like, oh, we're giving our first award.
	I told several people, I said, look, the only color I'm interested in is black type on white paper.
	Other than that, I got no use for any of it.
	And not because I'm a conservative idiot, it's because I'm trying to be objective about what I do, what my career has been.
	So look, so here's what I did.
	I send a letter in to the HWA because they would say, we invite you to nominate people for the Lifetime Achievement Award.
	So it's your privilege as a winner, you get to nominate.
	Well, anybody does, actually.
	But I had actually served on a prior committee to select Lifetime Achievement people.
	So, you know, I had some cred and I had some knowledge.
	And so I write a letter, and it was a little snarky.
	And I said, you know, despite my feeling that we've been leaning into the DEI end of selecting Lifetime Achievement Awards, I said, I'm compelled.
	And I said this kind of funny because it's like my column.
	I said, I'm compelled to nominate a smart old white guy, right?
	Right, right.
	And it was Stuart Schiff.
	And Stuart Schiff If people don't know him, he was the editor of a little magazine in the early 70s called Whispers.
	And this was before Stephen King, you know, rewrote the horror genre and made it a crazy legitimate moneymaker.
	Stu was keeping this little fire burning like out of a Jack London story under a tree dropping tons of ice on it.
	He kept the fire burning for horror fiction.
	Nobody was publishing horror fiction.
	Hardly anybody was writing it.
	But Stu was dedicated to this little magazine called Whispers, and he published an incredible number of people like Carl Wagner, Robert Block, Jack Cody, Ramsey Campbell.
	I mean, he published all these guys, Dennis Etchison, back when nobody was publishing or reading these guys.
	Stu Schiff was...
	He kept horror alive until King came along and, you know, set it on fire.
	Right.
	And I said, this guy, he was a new guy.
	A lot of people don't even know who he is, but he deserves some recognition.
	Well, I sent the letter in and I noticed that after a week or two, it never showed up on the HWA website as where they would post all the nominations for the award.
	So I sent a note in to the guy that was running it.
	I can't remember his name.
	And he said, no, we didn't find your letter appropriate.
	That's why we didn't post it.
	So I posted it on my own Facebook page.
	I put it up there.
	And it was a sort of firestorm.
	I had the usual 50-50...
	50% of the people said, good idea, great to hear it.
	The other 50% said, you're a racist, a transphobe.
	Yeah, the usual litany of crap.
	Yeah, of course.
	And they hated me.
	And I was accused of...
	I was accused of...
	Violating the HWA harassment code.
	And I'm thinking, well, I've never seen that code and nobody could show it to me.
	So it was a kind of this ethereal violation.
	And they got really upset with me.
	And I bantered back and forth a few times.
	And then that night, this is where I went off the rails and I did it.
	This podcast guy called me and he said, would you like to go on?
	Well, you know, it had been a long day.
	I was pissed off at all these people that were attacking me.
	I'd had a couple of bourbons.
	I went on the podcast.
	And I said some dumb stuff, right?
	That was not harassment by any means.
	But, you know, I accused them of giving the award to Owl going back because he claims he was an Indian.
	Which, by the way, a tribal council has discovered that he's not an Indian.
	That he's actually from, his family is from Germany.
	Oh, related to Liz Warren.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	He's got that Liz Warren gene, right?
	But they gave one to Al going back.
	They gave one to a black poet, okay, who's a consummate, wonderful person, but she's published like two volumes of poetry, right?
	Yeah.
	Horror poetry, but she got it.
	They gave it to a A gay guy.
	And then they gave it to a woman.
	Her name is Carol Clover.
	Have you ever heard of her?
	No, no.
	She got a Bram Stoker Award, a Lifetime Achievement Award, because she wrote an academic feminist treatise called The Final Girl.
	Oh, I'm sorry.
	I thought you were talking about Carol Clover, who for years has written a lot of really influential horror stuff and actually deserved the award.
	I mean, we must be talking two different people.
	Not yet.
	Yeah, she wrote one piece examining the slasher films, how there's always a girl that survives.
	And it was kind of this feminist examination of the horror film genre.
	That's it.
	It's like a 12th grade English essay.
	They gave her a Bram Stoker Award.
	Lifetime achievement.
	Wow.
	I called them out and I said, this is bull crap.
	Are you kidding me?
	You're going to compare what this lady did to what Stuart Schiff did for 10 years?
	Keeping a little cheesy fire, horror fire going?
	Yeah.
	With his magazine.
	I said, you've got to be kidding me.
	And you talked about that on that podcast, and that got more inflamed.
	Oh, yeah.
	And then I said, the other person they gave it to was someone named Jewel.
	Oh, God, I can't remember her name.
	But anyway, she's known for writing lesbian, black lesbian vampire novels.
	That's what she does, right?
	That nobody reads.
	Other than, I think, you know, people that are...
	Partial to, you know, black lesbians, I think.
	But it's important.
	I mean, I don't know who's reading this stuff.
	But you've got to promote it because it just shows you care.
	You care.
	And then they gave one to a lady who I submit no one's ever read.
	But she's known as the African Queen of Horror.
	You'd have to look up for names.
	You mean like the boat with the Humphrey Bogart movie?
	The African Queen.
	Yeah, it's like nobody's ever heard of her, but she got a Bran Stoker Award, a lifetime achievement.
	So they weren't even, you know what the problem was, Gardner?
	They weren't even trying to hide it.
	And they were shocked that somebody like me, who's a, you know, pretty outsmoking mook, called them out on it.
	And they hated it.
	They freaking hated the fact That I had to call him out.
	You know what I'm saying?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	And they went after me big time.
	And they decided that I was going to be banned from their HWA. Persona non grata.
	Literally ban you from the Bar Writers Association.
	They said I can't show up at any of their events anymore.
	They couldn't take away all the awards that I've won.
	But they have said that I'm totally disenfranchised.
	They had the Daily Beast call me and did an article showing everybody what a transphobic, racist I am.
	It was incredible.
	Unbelievable.
	Absolutely incredible.
	Incredible, incredible.
	And none of that.
	And you're simply standing up for the standards that promoted you and others like F. Paul Wilson and others to get awards.
	People like Dallas Mayor, people like Eric Gwynard who have won these awards and done very well because of the quality of their work.
	Not because they were smart white guys.
	Yeah and the thing that you know I saw it blowing up after the fact I didn't know what was going on because all these people heard what you had to say and and yet what you were actually saying they were doing you actually got in your hands somebody gave you actual confirmation of exactly what you accused them of doing they actually One of our longtime customers at Borderlands
	Press, she sent me a note and she said, I want to share this with you.
	I sent in a letter to nominate, I forget the two people that she did, but they were both white guys.
	I nominated them and I got a letter back from the chairman of the Lifetime Achievement Committee And I have a copy of it.
	It said, thank you very much for your nomination of these two writers.
	However, we feel that it's time that we emphasize, you know, marginalized writers above, you know, white guys.
	So I want to pause there, everybody, and just bring myself back in just briefly here.
	Just to let you know, I would like to show you this document that Tom forwarded to me.
	It's a PDF. I'm going to blow this up for you because this is on record now and you can see it.
	Here it is from 2020, December 20th, 2020.
	Dear so-and-so, always a pleasure to hear from you.
	I hope this email finds you well, safe, and healthy at holiday time.
	Thank you for your nominees.
	They have been added to the list.
	In the interest of full disclosure, given that only six of the 54 Lifetime Achievement Awards have been awarded to women, I have asked the committee to prioritize female nominees.
	Although all nominees will be considered, including yours, So Tom has the goods.
	He knew they were doing it.
	And he has the goods.
	And he sent them to me.
	Let's get back to our conversation.
	He said it out loud to her.
	He told her what their agenda was.
	And I have a copy of the email.
	And you have sent me a copy of it.
	We're recording this the night before the show.
	So I'll see if I can call it up and put it out there.
	And I'll show it to people.
	I called them out on it and they got so pissed off at me that they threw me out.
	And literally, Tom, I just have to say, if you wanted to, they're telling you you can't even go to their conventions.
	You've been ostracized from so many things.
	And they wanted to take your Stoker Awards back, didn't they?
	Yeah, but they can't do that.
	Obviously, there is something in the bylaws that doesn't allow them to do it.
	Otherwise, they would have tried to do it.
	But you know what?
	I got them on my frigging shelf.
	Come on in and try to take them.
	Yeah, exactly.
	You know, walk past my NRA sticker and come and try to take it.
	Exactly, exactly.
	Come and take it, right?
	You know, you should make up t-shirts for Tom Monteleone supporters.
	You could sell them at Borderlands Press with a picture of the Stoker and a gun that says, come and take them, right?
	Yeah.
	That would be classic.
	And it's like a silhouette of you on the back holding one in each hand, you know, like, ah!
	I did do one thing that I regret because I had been drinking.
	At the last Stoker Awards I went to with Paul, which was Paul Wilson, it was in Denver in 2021, I think, or 22.
	Paul and I, when we left, we said, wow, they should change the name of the StokerCon to WokerCon.
	Almost half of the panel events and discussions and programming It had to do with this identarian, you know, political crap about, you know, people of color, writers of this, editors of that.
	Oh, and they also had the editor, the new editor at that time of the magazine of fantasy and science fiction, a woman named Cherie something.
	Oh, they have had such problems.
	Oh, my God.
	The magazine is dead.
	She killed it.
	Yep, absolutely.
	She came in and it had been a monthly or a bi-monthly for 50 friggin' years.
	She came in as the editor and it didn't have one issue this year.
	And then they were supposed to bring one out in the fall called the Autumn Issue or something.
	She totally trashed the magazine.
	No, no, it's pretty much dead.
	But anyway, she was there with this entourage of POCs, right?
	And they did all these panels.
	Oh my God, you know, so wonderful.
	And at the awards They gave the Volunteer of the Year Award, which they give out to somebody every year that did selflessly serve the organization.
	So they give it to this lady.
	I'm not going to mention her name.
	I've already done it publicly.
	She goes up there and she accepts the award.
	And instead of just saying, thank you, wow, it's great working with you guys, you know, have a nice day, she references a blog that she apparently does, which I had never heard of, but the blog is called Stoker So White.
	That's what it's called, right?
	And it's all about, you know, how awful the history of the organization is because it's always been concerned with white people.
	Right?
	But, you know what?
	That's not racist, is it?
	I don't know.
	Maybe I'm just a dope.
	But, I mean, I'm sitting there listening to this and I thought...
	Are you kidding me?
	This is your acceptance speech, right?
	Yeah, exactly.
	You use this platform to To pander this crap?
	Yeah.
	You're denigrating the people who just gave you this award.
	Yeah, exactly.
	You obviously think nothing of this award if you think that it comes from a legacy of white dominance and hatred.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
	Exactly.
	But anyway, I sat there and I went, oh my God.
	Anyway, so I mentioned this on the podcast that I appeared on.
	While alcohol was involved.
	Yes, yes.
	And I refer to her as a fat black chick.
	Okay?
	And again, just to let people know, you use a lot of old jazz lingo.
	You use that stuff.
	Two weeks later, I saw the Grammy Awards and some guy introduced Lizzo as a smokin' fat black chick.
	And everybody cheered, right?
	No, not you, Tom, not you.
	There's always this ambulatory bag of suet, you know, right?
	That happens to be able to sing.
	But it's like, okay, it was okay for him because he added the word smoking.
	There you go.
	Right?
	To what I said.
	Now, you know, okay, I shouldn't have said that.
	I should have said, you know, she was a plus-sized African-American, you know, Binary.
	And then have to explain why you think that, you know, that seems to be emblematic of past behaviors from the Stoker.
	Yeah, because that's the other thing.
	In her bio, she says that her pronouns are they, them.
	Oh, wow.
	That was the other thing that I did on Facebook.
	I said, look, I'll call you anything you want.
	You want to identify as a kitchen table, as a gerbil, as a guy, a girl.
	That's fine.
	I'm really okay with that.
	But you know what?
	I'm not calling a single person they or them.
	I'm just not doing it.
	Because it flies in the face of not only logic and grammar, but you're trying to bully me into buying into your delusion.
	Sorry.
	You're not a plural entity.
	You are a single person.
	You're an individual.
	You want me to call you Zay, Zim, Dumb, dim.
	That's fine.
	But it ain't gonna be they and them.
	I know.
	I had that conversation when I spoke about this.
	I had this conversation with one of my students and she was just adamant at first.
	She said, no, you can use the plural pronouns.
	Like, here's an idea.
	You work in an emergency room.
	You're getting a call from the ambulance.
	You got to prepare a bed because somebody's coming in bleeding out.
	If they use the term they from inside the ambulance, how many beds are you going to set up?
	You want to know, is it one person?
	Is it male?
	Is it female?
	When you hear that the police have arrested somebody, and I've literally heard this on the WMUR TV out of Manchester, they said, Goffstown, there was a fire and arsonist suspect that they had apprehended.
	They said, and because they didn't want to mention whether it was male or female, they said, they will be arraigned on Tuesday.
	And I said, so they've arrested more than one or one?
	Yeah, right.
	I mean, it's just so it flies in the face of it utterly flies in the face of logic.
	It's so obviously and offensively stupid that people do that and they continue to do it because they're uncomfortable.
	It's just so dumb.
	So obviously that really inflamed people bringing that up and using that.
	They hated me for that.
	That branded me as a transphobe.
	What does transphobe mean?
	It means that you fear people who believe that they're transgendered?
	I don't fear them in the least.
	I actually feel very sorry for them because I think that they're suffering from serious psychological problems.
	I certainly don't fear them.
	But the whole idea of insisting that we buy into their delusion, that's bullying.
	They're so anti-bullying.
	It's so terrible to bully anybody.
	But we can bully you, no problem.
	No problem.
	And it comes from such a source of a lack of information, too.
	You know, I think I mentioned to you when they had the free speech rally in Boston and a number of the writers in around the Boston area whom you and I know who go down to Camp Nikon in Orlando.
	Yeah, we know them all right.
	Yeah, you know, they were communicating with each other about how proud they were that they were going to go and protest this rally that was going on, this hate-filled rally around 2017 or something, 2018.
	And I said, do you even know who organized that?
	An Indian guy, a dude who's married to a Filipino woman.
	They're like, all these racists and all this stuff.
	I was like, it's about free speech.
	You are a writer.
	Do you get it?
	And they're literally on the train posting on Facebook.
	We're on the train now.
	We're going to go down.
	And they went there.
	And at the same time, Tom, the mayor of Boston and the governor of the state of Massachusetts held a press conference the day before that event.
	And they said, we don't even know.
	We don't know who these people are.
	And but their hate is not welcome here.
	So I'm watching the stream of WBZ in Boston covering these two fatuous politicians, Marty Walsh and whoever the governor was there.
	The guy that Joe Biden called, who was the Birdland jazz sax off and a sax player?
	Charlie Parker.
	So Charlie Baker.
	Yeah, it was Charlie Baker and Marty Walsh.
	And they're up there and they're like, yeah, we don't.
	So I think it was Marty Walsh says, no, it was Charlie Baker said, we don't know.
	We don't even know who these people are, but their hate isn't welcome here.
	Not one reporter in the audience said, excuse me, if you don't know who these people are, how do you know they're full of hate?
	Like, how do you get that?
	Yeah, it was it was it was just it was totally, totally contrary to anybody who had any sense.
	And then Marty Wallace says they don't even have a permit.
	So I opened up another tab while the stream was going on WBZ News and I went to Facebook to that group's Page.
	And they had a photo of that permit from two weeks before.
	And I'm sitting there, I was like, is anybody in the audience actually calling this stuff up to check?
	Nobody checked it.
	And that contributed to an atmosphere of absolute rancor and hatred that these guys fed into coming down on the train, our writer friends, who are so peace and love and all this stuff that literally people were throwing bottles filled with urine And all sorts of stuff at these people who just wanted to have a free speech rally.
	And they're calling them racist.
	I'm like, so let me get this straight.
	The dude who's married to the Filipino girl is somehow racist, as is the dude from India.
	It's totally ridiculous.
	It was so stupid.
	And you know, and it's that they reinforce it.
	It's an echo chamber.
	And that's what the Bram Stoker Awards has become.
	It has become an echo chamber from people who celebrated good writing.
	And I have to say, Tom, also, Final point that I'd like to make is how you rose above this and you have seen people who didn't support and not that they necessarily have to, but turned away, who had business connections with you, who supported you or did things that were associated with you.
	And they say, oh, you know, it's like your kryptonite, can't even touch you.
	Not standing up, whether it's for you as a friend or for the principal.
	The principle of what is going on.
	And some people have stood up, which is really cool.
	Well, I kind of liken it to being at the Alamo.
	You find out who your real friends are.
	Because a lot of people showed up with me on the ramparts.
	When they, you know, the Woke Stoppo attacked me.
	Yeah.
	And they were my, I found out who my real friends were.
	I had people that I had mentored through the Borderlands Press Bootcamp and basically helped create their careers.
	Tone their back on me and completely.
	And it really kind of shocked me.
	It was like four or five writers that, you know, I had really spent a lot of time helping to develop their talent, which they all had.
	Yeah.
	And I encouraged them and I helped them in a lot of ways.
	Oh, I know.
	I know.
	I'm one of the guys that, you know, you mentored me and Malcolm.
	I'm not going to mention some of these people's names, but you know who they are.
	Sure, absolutely.
	I published their stories in Borderlands anthologies.
	Now they won't even talk to me.
	They treat me like a leper.
	Yeah, and you know, Tom, it's interesting on an intellectual and also, you know, just an emotional level, when you're with people at a boot camp like that and you suddenly see the learning curve shooting up as they get the tips from you, it's a life-changing thing.
	Absolutely.
	And to neglect that or downplay it, Because, you know, they're looking towards how am I going to shape my position for the future?
	What chess piece, you know, what movement on the board am I going to make here to continue being associated with these people?
	It's like, boy, oh boy, I would not be making your decisions in life.
	Oh boy.
	No, it's terrible.
	I mean, and several of the dealers that had been buying our Borderlands Press books They shut us down.
	They said, we don't want to carry your stuff anymore.
	That's pretty amazing.
	They actually actively tried to destroy us.
	It didn't work, but it's very disheartening to see.
	I notice, and Tom, this is where we sort of get to the positive outcome of this.
	We mentioned people like John Delarose and others.
	Yeah, yeah, he's great.
	He's great.
	I want to communicate with him over on Substack and bring him on as a guest on my show sometime.
	But what has arisen from this has been a new, not a phoenix from the ashes in any way sort of a thing, but a new alignment of people starting to rise to the fore.
	They didn't get crushed.
	You didn't get crushed down because there's this new realignment of people who still stand for quality, who still stand for writing, and common sense and this is why I think it's so valuable to have you on David's show today and I'd like to talk about how you have kept this standard and Borderlands Press is available and out there and your writing is out there and now people are in touch with each other the people who value good writing
	are starting to rise to the fore and I think it's it's it's maybe not a new renaissance but in a way On a cultural and I think emotional or soulful level, it is a renaissance in a way because we've been able to have those trappings burned away from us and we can stay true to truth, which is great.
	So let's talk about the publishing company.
	I think that's very important what you just said because when all this crap went down, I decided...
	I'm going to start a sub stack of my non-fiction writing.
	It's real personal and, you know, conversational.
	A lot of fun.
	And see who responds.
	And, you know, it's only been up for about 30, 40 days.
	And I've got like almost 400 subscribers.
	And I've got a lot of people that have pledged money to actually subscribe.
	And I don't want to do that yet.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I got a lot of people that have signed on and said, I really like what you're doing and I'm really happy that you're doing this.
	And I just did it as almost a social experiment.
	I wanted to find out how many people are out there that would value whatever I have to say, whether it's just entertaining or illuminating or educational or informative or, you know, just a kick.
	And I'm having a lot of fun with it.
	It's great.
	And every week I get new subscribers.
	You're doing the same thing.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	The Substack is a great, great place.
	They fight tooth and nail to make sure that you have your stuff.
	And they're always coming up with new ways, new ideas.
	You can post audio podcasts, you can do video clips if you want to.
	It's really really nice and as you say there's ability for people to subscribe without paying or they can you know donate five bucks a month whatever levels it's great and the other thing too Tom that I really love is your writing for the Mafia column which was in Cemetery Dance was just a wonderful excursion into someone's ability to think and comment and be witty and The amazing artful prose that you provide, you know, that to me is incredibly valuable.
	I had a ball writing that column and, you know, I collected the first 50 columns into an omnibus collection and they gave me a Bram Stoker Award for Best Nonfiction.
	I mean, you know, and all of a sudden now the stuff that I wrote back then was racist and transphobic and, you know, Fascists and, you know, the usual crap.
	And it's like, you guys know who I am.
	Yeah, exactly.
	What the hell?
	Are you kidding?
	To me, it's also very sad, too, because there are only two options that I see, Tom.
	Either these people who've known you for so long are so afraid themselves To stand up for actual truth, actual quality, that they will let themselves down and try to adopt the mantle of wokeism and progressivism.
	And they're already progressives, but they literally know you.
	They know your work, you know, or they're that corrupt.
	That they will drop somebody like a hot potato.
	It's really kind of sad.
	I just sent my last...
	My final collection of short fiction to the printer.
	It's all the stories I've published since 2000 or so.
	It's called Memos from the Abyss.
	I got a really great response from people.
	It's going to sell out.
	I'm thinking This is very heartening because you never know if the progressive wave could bury you, could destroy you.
	I mean, because that's their agenda.
	That's their intention.
	They want to see us go away.
	They want to see us be destroyed.
	And at the same time, you see as these giant corporations have to continue to downsize, you know, Disney, all these different people are starting to see, gee, you know, it looks It's like the market isn't really big for, oh, I don't know, a lot of woke ideology in kids' shows.
	Disney's been taking it up the aft end.
	You know what?
	You got it.
	Hey, in fact, let me do this.
	Let me do this, Tom.
	I want to bring this up on the up on the screen here.
	This is the latest one, Memos from the Abyss by Tom Leone.
	Yeah, that's my last short story collection.
	There you go.
	There it is.
	And if people want to check out the website, let's talk about how, as we mentioned, people like John De La Rose, people like Nerdrotic.
	I mean, they are really kicking up steam.
	They're doing great.
	And Borderlands Press is right there for everybody to check out.
	Let's talk about BorderlandsPress.com.
	Right at the front.
	We started 33 years ago.
	We've been a small press since 1989.
	So we feel like we had the staying power to publish material that people wanted.
	We did a lot of limited signed editions.
	We've done Peter Straub, we've done Bradbury, we've done Paul Wilson, Blake Crouch.
	I mean, you know, we've done Dean Koontz.
	We've done pretty much anybody that people were interested in collecting and reading.
	Yeah, that's Paul's adversary.
	Great stuff and amazing, amazing artwork.
	You know, it's funny when you mentioned Paul, I have Aftershocks over here.
	Great collection from him.
	Oh my god, fantastic!
	Yeah.
	And it's funny because, as you know, I have relatives who are in Italy and the Aftershock story actually brings the main characters to Italy.
	And Paul...
	That's true.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And you know what?
	He hadn't actually been there when he wrote that.
	Wow.
	Wow.
	That's incredible.
	And then I've got this.
	I just want to show people from the olden days.
	Oh, my God.
	There he is.
	That's when I was a sci-fi writer.
	Yeah, good stuff.
	Good stuff from Tom.
	And great, great ideas in here with great characters that are so important.
	And so let's talk a little bit.
	If people want to go to Borderlands Press, let's discuss, obviously...
	Your collection is probably going to sell out soon.
	Let's talk about that collection.
	Again, right there, Memos from the Abyss.
	I'm telling you, his short stories are amazing.
	And Tom, sometime, if we ever get the chance, I would love to read out loud that short story that you did of the guy writing the fan letters.
	Oh my God, love letters!
	Yeah, yeah, love letters!
	That is such a great story.
	In a way, I know you and I have spoken about this man before, but T.E.D. Klein, obviously editor of Twilight Zone magazine, put the novella collection together called Dark Gods and wrote the ceremonies.
	He was a great writer that just stopped writing.
	God, he was good.
	Absolutely.
	One of my favorites, in fact, my favorite by him is Nadelman's God, which is in the Dark Gods collection, about this guy who, yes, yes, he's a PR writer in New York, but in college, he had written a poem that some friends of his were like rock producers, and they said, remember that poem?
	I've got a heavy metal band, and they could probably use that for lyrics.
	They turn it into a song, and it's about this...
	Wasn't it tied to the Lovecraftian?
	Yes, yes.
	He never says specifically, but it's about this evil rival god to God.
	Yes, yes!
	And it's waiting for something to be able to emerge.
	It's just toying with us.
	And when somebody does the dumb thing, and it turns out, spoilers, that it's this song, which is actually the descriptor of how you open the door to this thing.
	Oh yeah, it was brilliant.
	And I loved it because he tells the story as this guy starts to get fan letters, of all things, from a dude named Huntoon out on Long Island.
	And Huntoon is writing and saying, hey man, You know, your poem, I know that the metal song based it on this, and it's really telling the truth.
	It's truthful.
	And he's like, wow.
	And he wrote to write it back like, well, thanks a lot.
	And I don't know what you're talking about, but, you know, the God who was just made up.
	And then he writes back and he's like, it's funny that you say that was just made up.
	You don't know anything about any God because the God says that he knows you.
	Yes!
	I remember that.
	Oh, man.
	That was scary.
	Yeah, that was Ted at his best.
	He was so good.
	Yeah, so good.
	He wrote a great novel called The Ceremonies.
	Right.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And I think that was based on one of the novellas, the events at Poroth Farm, which is in Dark Odds.
	Yeah, he expanded it.
	Yeah, and it's all based around Connecticut stuff.
	In fact, Tom, you might remember many years ago I had a short story.
	I don't know if you read this one.
	I think you might have.
	I had a short story about a guy and a girl.
	Oh, yeah, because I sent it to the Borderlands thing.
	The short story about the girl and the guy in the convertible car in Connecticut, in the farmland in Connecticut.
	Of course, of course.
	Right.
	And they end up at that derelict farm stand, right?
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	And I remember you were describing the walk-in freezer as a car.
	Yes, yes, because I actually worked in one.
	And we were thinking that it was one of those things that they carry to a cookout, you know, like a little cooler that carries beer.
	Cooler?
	It was obviously a regional term.
	Right.
	It was a colloquialism.
	And I didn't realize that.
	Exactly.
	Exactly.
	Had to fix that.
	Had to fix that.
	I remember that.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	So what was funny was I set it in Connecticut so that it would be close to Powell Farm.
	That's because that happened in Connecticut.
	So I tried to associate it with, you know, something from that T.E.D. Klein vibe.
	And because because, in fact, I should mention this.
	You probably are aware of this.
	When I was a kid, I used to send stories into Twilight Zone magazine when T.E.D. Klein was the editor.
	I didn't know.
	That's correct.
	Yeah, I was like 14.
	You know, I had a subscription.
	My mom got it for me.
	And Mrs.
	Serling, Rod Serling's wife, was the publisher.
	Carol, yeah.
	Yeah, and I know, yeah, Carol Serling, and rest your soul.
	They would get rejected, but she always put little pencil notes on the top.
	Oh, that's so cool.
	Yeah, it was always awesome.
	And I got to meet her later at Ithaca, one of those Rod Serling conventions.
	And we corresponded later, like when I went to work at Outer Limits.
	She'd go, oh, yeah, I remember you.
	I remember you.
	You know, good job.
	You're achieving it.
	And I'm like, oh, hey, this is really cool.
	You know, so that was awesome.
	She was a nice lady.
	She was really a sweet lady.
	Yeah, she was really, really nice.
	And their kids are great, too.
	Really nice people.
	But listen, Tom, let's just close things off.
	Let's talk a little bit more about the website.
	Again, it's Borderlands Press.
	And it's interesting doing the recorded show with you right now because...
	I'm not looking at comments from people in the audience or anything like that as we stream, but I will heartily recommend all of the books that you've got.
	Let's look at the shop.
	Let's look at what people can order from the shop.
	So many different special editions.
	As we mentioned, you've got special editions of the Wayward Pines duology.
	That is absolutely great.
	That thing was really popular.
	That went over really well.
	Yeah, our little books are very popular.
	You actually did a little book!
	Yeah, the little book.
	I loved being able to do the little book for Robert E. Howard.
	That was just great.
	It's a series.
	We do 15 books in each series because we can find 15 different colors and every book is a different color and it's dedicated to a different author and we get really well-known Competent people to edit them.
	And the next one is going to be Sax Romer edited by Paul Wilson.
	Oh, wow.
	Sax Romer.
	I was just looking at some of his stuff.
	Some of his old detective stuff.
	Whoa.
	There you go.
	There you go.
	Here it is.
	Here it is.
	Little Yellow Book of Sax Romer Tales.
	Let's bring that in.
	And he didn't worry about being politically correct.
	He said a yellow book of perilous tales.
	And isn't it great to remember, you know, like when Fu Manchu novels were out there.
	Obviously, they were part of the yellow peril thing, and people didn't even really understand, I think.
	If you look at, for example, if you look at the late 1800s, the Chinese immigrants coming over to the West Coast, a lot of the people in San Francisco, Chinatown is very big, but a lot of the native workers didn't like people coming over from Asia because they would work for less in the gold mines and so on.
	And I brought this up before, the first time In the United States, as you know, because you read my substack and you're probably aware of this, that immigration isn't a federal issue.
	It's actually a state issue.
	And it was 18...
	Originally, that's what it was.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Exactly.
	And it was 1875 that part of this growing push to stop immigrants from Japan or China or wherever started to rise up.
	Because they didn't like the competition.
	So they would use all sorts of excuses.
	Oh, the women are going to be prostitutes.
	They're carrying diseases.
	And in California, they actually put up a statute that blocked immigration for Chinese or Japanese women.
	And that was appealed to the Supreme Court in a case called Chi Lung v.
	Freeman.
	And it was decided in 1875.
	And at that point, that's when they started.
	The federal government just took over.
	And we got Ellis Island and only these certain places where you could come in.
	And now we can see it's such a mess.
	It's all central command and control.
	You know, it's...
	It's not in any way what the founders originally envisioned, you know?
	And so the yellow peril thing right there, then actually, this is going to be great.
	When's that coming out?
	November 2nd.
	It'll be out in about a week.
	Wow.
	Wow.
	This is going to be great.
	And Paul, I mean, Tom, let me just do this.
	Just grab this.
	There's a message for you.
	So this is the one that I got to edit, the Robert E. Howard stories.
	Correct.
	That's about the size of the books, everybody.
	If you want to check them out, go to Borderlands Press.
	And then you've got the E.F. Benson one, which will be out.
	What color is that going to be?
	Pink or something?
	Or is it...
	I don't even know.
	E.F. Benson...
	Not sure.
	I'm not sure.
	I had to look it up.
	And that was a blast, too.
	Just exploring E.F. Benson was so much fun.
	Like I said, I didn't...
	Nobody, that's part of why we did that series, is to reintroduce to new readers these writers that were so influential and so good, and that we just didn't want them to be forgotten, you know?
	Yeah, it's great.
	Well, Tom...
	Nick Saltos, I don't know if you know Nick, he's doing Richard, Robert Middleton.
	The guy that wrote The Ghost Ship.
	Really?
	Yeah, Middleton was really amazing.
	Short stories by him.
	That's great.
	And the series where you were in, we did Richard Connell, the guy that did The Most Dangerous Game.
	Oh, man, what a great story.
	And you know, the other thing I want to say, Tom, you know, it's like I'm a fan, too, right?
	But the thing about these is what I love is they're just the right amount.
	They're just the right little package.
	And I know you've sold out of a lot of them, but if I can engender and convince a number of people to go to BorderlandsPress.com.
	BorderlandsPress.com.
	Check out the Little Book series and all the books.
	People love them.
	They've become the serious collector of each series.
	It's crazy.
	I love it.
	I love it.
	Finally, Tom, can we talk just finally about the availability of your books in total?
	We've got, of course, the new one that's coming out, Memos from the Abyss, right?
	Sign and limited to 300 copies, 500 pages.
	Amazing, amazing stuff.
	But in addition to that, your other works, That people can get and as we say uh there we have we have Blake Crouch with Wayward Pines they made a tv series out of that which was his sort of homage to uh Twin Peaks very very yeah definitely yeah yep absolutely and then let's uh show these again Blood of the Lamb Thomas Monteleone definitely not Kansas co-written with F Paul and The Secret C plus many many other ones by you that people
	can check out Time Walker, cool story.
	I loved the opening of that because I was always a fan of archaeology and stuff.
	Yep.
	Night Train, a very, very amazing story.
	Super cool stuff.
	So people can check this out.
	You know, Centipede Press is doing a big special edition of that?
	Really?
	When's that going to be coming out?
	I don't know.
	But they want to do it.
	Centipede want to do it.
	And they do these crazy, beautiful, you know.
	Now, Tom, I see a lot of these are out of stock.
	Can they get the e-book versions of these?
	Well, that's a good point.
	My e-book publisher was David Wilson at Crossroad, and I had all my stuff in e-book, and it was all doing very well.
	He is also part of the Wokestapo.
	He decided that he didn't want to be associated with me anymore.
	He canceled 65 of our books that were in e-books.
	All of my stuff, all the little books, he just blew them off.
	So now I have a new publisher.
	It's called a new e-book publisher.
	It's Mean Cat Press.
	They have a new website.
	They're doing all my stuff in ebooks again.
	And, you know, I'll be...
	I'm back.
	Excellent.
	Excellent.
	All right.
	So I'm going to put that in.
	They tried to destroy me, but they couldn't do it.
	Oh, excellent.
	Excellent.
	Well, I'll try to make sure that I bring that up, Tom.
	And I want to thank you so much for first joining me on David Knight's show, talking to the audience pre-recorded, but I hope I can convince the audience to head over to the website and check out what you do.
	And remember, That this is a guy who stood for quality and truth.
	And Tom, you know, as a guy who was reading your stuff before I knew you, I'm just, you know, I'm pleased as punch to know you and call you my friend.
	If people go to my substack, they can read some of my writing for free.
	It's not going to cost them anything.
	Yeah, let me put that in there.
	If they like my Substack stuff, you know, that's good for me and good for them.
	Yes, excellent.
	My latest one is called Talking the Marble Orchard Blues.
	I went with some ghost hunters to see what was going on in a graveyard.
	Oh, wow.
	Kind of fun.
	Were you ever there with us with Heather and Dennis when we went to the Lizzie Borden?
	The one in Rhode Island?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, once.
	We were with you guys the first time.
	Yeah, that's right.
	That was an interesting experience.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Yeah, you know, and I personally think that Lizzie did it, but they let her off because of the Protestant Catholic.
	Oh, I think she definitely did it.
	Yeah.
	But because she was a woman, they couldn't believe that a woman was capable of such a horror.
	Oh, with two people.
	I mean, just crazy.
	Right.
	Yeah, and I remember it was funny because it wasn't there, were you there that time that like Dennis and Heather wanted me to lie down in the place where they found her father's body on the sofa?
	No, we weren't there that time.
	Oh yeah, that was uncomfortable.
	I didn't want to pose as the body.
	I can't believe you did.
	That was wild.
	Well, look, Tom, thank you, thank you, thank you.
	God bless you, man.
	You are just a true gem.
	BorderlandsPress.com, the Tom Monteleone substack.
	And by the way, Tom, when people look you up on various search engines, Oh, they're going to see all the people.
	Yes, and right off the bat, they're going to see Christopher Golden's stuff about that.
	And it's just like, oh boy, okay.
	They're going to see the Daily Beast thing.
	But you know what?
	I survived because I am a survivor.
	You are.
	You are.
	All right, Tom.
	Thank you.
	We'll close this up.
	Thank you.
	I love you and I love your show.
	You got it, man.
	All right.
	We'll pause this.
	You and I will keep talking, say goodbye, and we'll do a little something on the show live for the David Knight Show so the audience gets to see it.
	Okay, and you saw me pop in there for a second.
	And a big, great thanks to Tom Monteleone for being such a great, great guy.
	And I wanted to show you, there's his Substack.
	Look for thomasfmonteleone.substack.com.
	A great new one that he just put out a couple days ago.
	A true ghostly tale that you'll like.
	Again, it's thomasfmonteleone.substack.com.
	And in case you didn't get to see it, I just wanted to mention again, This is the documentation of what the Bram Stoker Award people were doing, where they said, in the interest of full disclosure, given that only six of 54 Lifetime Achievement Awards have been awarded to women, says this person inside the Stoker Committee, I have asked the committee to prioritize female nominees.
	So, yeah, not exactly full disclosure when it takes an internal document to have to get it out there and they don't tell people When they give the awards out, that that's what they're doing.
	So, Tom Montagnoni, a hero for truth, a guy who believes in quality, and a guy who I hope people will visit over at, of course, Borderlands Press.
	Check out Borderlands Press.
	Now we have the opportunity to do something else that I am really looking forward to.
	And he has been patiently waiting to join us.
	And here on the David Knight Show, you know this man.
	I am very pleased to be able to offer us the opportunity to bring in a man who fights for freedom all the time.
	He's the kind of guy who actually stands up for individual liberty, for being able to travel and move, and for exposing the lies of many people out there.
	I'm going to hear a little music that David put together and then be joined by Eric Peters of ericpetersautos.com.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	You're listening to The David Knight Show. - No.
	All right.
	Wonderful stuff.
	And thank you, everyone, who's contributed to the program.
	And thank you also to this man joining us right now, Eric Peters.
	Eric, thank you for being patient.
	I really appreciate it.
	You got to hear a lot of that conversation with Tom Monteleone and you yourself.
	Have been fighting censorship and a lot of other things.
	And I wanted to bring up, before we even get into many of the amazing pieces that you have, and you just posted another one over the past couple hours over at ericpetersautos.com.
	Of course, people are familiar with you if they watch the David Knight program, if they watch Liberty Conspiracy, because I've gotten to fill in for David.
	Admired your stuff.
	You've been nice enough to join me on my show.
	You've been in a battle on X to try to get word out about X and you've been doing some experiments on things.
	There's this debate as to whether or not things are really changing at X, at Twitter slash X, and whether Elon Musk is playing some sort of false dialectic or anything like that.
	Do you want to offer any thoughts on that and what you've been trying and what you've been experiencing at X yourself, getting word out about your own work?
	Well, sure.
	But before I begin with the introduction that you gave me, I feel like I ought to go get my Captain Freedom outfit.
	Remember Captain Freedom from The Running Man?
	Absolutely!
	You got it!
	Jesse Ventura and Arnold and all these action stars that we liked back in the day have turned out to be these sad, tired, old, authoritarian, collectivist people.
	It's very, very demoralizing.
	To find out the truth is always a good thing, isn't it?
	Yeah, it really is.
	And like I said, you know, in the chat with Tom, you know, being able to sort of burn away all that fluff and so on.
	And, you know, it's a process that we go through in many cases in various times in our lives.
	But it has been quite a crucible, I think, to discover the people who are true to truth and try to remain true.
	Even though there's so many different things that pop up and sometimes people can stumble and we have different opinions on certain things, but you try to be as honest with people as possible.
	And those guys, unfortunately, they've been pulled aside, I think.
	Maybe in conversation, if someone were to speak with Jesse Ventura, they might say, oh, I guess I had the wrong impression about what you did or what you're doing and so on.
	But yeah, we assess it as it goes, I guess.
	I think Elon Musk has proven to be kind of a younger iteration of that and we're finding out I'll preface what I'm going to say with regards to my personal situation by taking note of the fact that when Brazil threatened him, initially he pushed back a little bit, but then he caved in.
	Because he wants the money at the end of the day.
	You know, he wants to maximize his revenue stream.
	So he has acceded to these thugs in Brazil who have told him, essentially, that if they tell him to censor the account of anybody, you know, the decree only applied to one particular person, I think, or a handful of people.
	I think there were four or five political figures in Brazil that the authoritarian regime doesn't like and wants to prevent from expressing themselves publicly on X. Well, he kowtowed to that.
	So what makes anybody think that he's not going to do the same thing here?
	Now, I'll segue from that to here.
	He does do that here.
	In the first place, if you don't pay him a fee every month, You're put into kind of an alleyway of free speech where most of what you post isn't seen.
	And it's kind of like back in the print newspaper days, and I have a background in print newspaper, it would be like expecting people to pay the newspaper to publish their letter to the editor.
	But it's even more egregious than that because...
	In my case, for example, in the case of people like Naomi Wolf, who's another person who's in my predicament, and Rappaport is another one who's had the same situation happen.
	John Rappaport, sure.
	We're literally providing content to X. It's not as though we're just posting one sentence, pithy little comments.
	We're actually providing content, and we're being expected to pay him.
	To put the content on his platform so that he can make advertising revenue off of our content.
	And then this applies to everybody who happens to be on X. They are mining your data to sell ads.
	So they're making money off of you and they're expecting you to pay for the privilege.
	It is a grift on par with his EV grift.
	So, you know, there's that.
	Then there's the really subtle way they...
	To shunt the wrong-thinkful comments.
	They don't outright ban you, usually.
	You have to really do something blatant for that to happen.
	You'll think that you've posted something.
	It'll show.
	The problem is nobody sees it.
	Right.
	And I have been trying to document this on a day-to-day basis.
	Yeah, I was curious about that.
	I don't know how you have gone about that.
	And I was fascinated because I know this has been a multi-week project of yours, right?
	Yeah, well, it's fairly easy.
	I've got a significant number of followers and traffic.
	So on a day when, let's use the analogy of a water spigot, when they turn the spigot on and people can see what I've posted, I'll typically get 20 plus comments or replies to what I've posted within a 12 hour period.
	Then the spigot will turn off.
	And for the next 12 to 24 hours, sometimes even longer than that, literally nothing.
	That's not natural.
	That's not organic.
	Because I'm posting the same amount of material pretty much every day.
	I'm kind of a workaholic.
	I do a lot of stuff every single day.
	So I'm posting links and things on X. So it ought to be consistent.
	It does not make sense that all these people who are following me and who will typically respond to something that I've posted on, say, a Tuesday, Would not respond at all on a Wednesday to similar things.
	It just doesn't make any sense.
	So I've tried to take screenshots when I get up in the morning of what's happened overnight or in the past 12 hours to show people, okay, look, yesterday I had 18 or 19 or 20 responses to something.
	And now here it is 12 hours later or 24 hours later, and there's nothing.
	Zero.
	How can that be?
	Yeah.
	So, you know, that's what they're doing.
	And it's There's a good analogy here, I think.
	The federal government, these bureaucratic apparatchiks, are smart enough not to outlaw cars with engines, because there might be pushback from that.
	It's too blatant.
	It's too obvious.
	So rather than outlaw them, what they do is they out-regulate them.
	They enact these regulations that effectively serve to push them off the road, because you can't comply with them.
	Not realistic.
	Exactly.
	So, you know, okay, well, sure, you could, you know, Harris even said it the other day, you know, oh, we're not trying to suppress people's opportunity to buy a gas engine car if they want to.
	Well, yeah, you are.
	You're forcing the manufacturers to not make them anymore in favor of either pure electric cars or hybrid cars, which are the only vehicles that can comply with these regulations.
	And that's how they do it.
	And it's really, it's very insidious because most people do not understand how the regulatory apparatus works.
	And we were talking about fascism before, and I didn't even bring up the economic definition of fascism is the nominative and name-only ownership of private property or business with the mixing of government and corporate interests together, as Mussolini loves so much.
	So that's exactly it, whether it's The EPA or OSHA or it's the state of California dictating to car companies because they have such a large pool of customers there that car companies will fall in line.
	These types of things.
	They literally are taking away people's opportunities to see variations, to be able to freely associate with people and decide for themselves.
	Yeah, and the adversarial relationship that once existed, say, between the car makers and the government, that's gone away.
	You know, fascism, more finally, is when the corporate structures literally embed themselves with the government.
	And effectively, they are the same entity.
	You know, they are serving each other's interests.
	And that's what's happened.
	The car companies, and I've been witness to this, I've been doing this for 30 years now.
	Back when I started out in the 90s, They would push back.
	When the regulatory apparatus would propose something, airbags, for example, when that first came out, I was witness to this first person.
	They brought in engineers, they tried to talk to the federal regulators at NHTSA, and they said, look, it's not just about the money.
	These things are not perfect, and they're going to hurt some people, and they're probably going to kill some people, and you should take that into consideration before you pass a mandate or a requirement that every new car has this.
	They stopped doing that.
	Now, they actually anticipate mandates.
	In fact, they will propose things be put into cars because they can make more money.
	It's rent-seeking grift.
	I was just going to say, you've inspired me because just yesterday I saw a report on how the carbon capture so-called industry...
	at this point, unregulated, they claim, is asking for the federal government to regulate it out of their great magnanimous nature, which everybody knows is rent-seeking because they are established and they want these regulations and impositions to block other people which everybody knows is rent-seeking because they are established and they want these regulations something that is a totally ginned up, non-market oriented field of endeavor that shouldn't even exist in the first place.
	Here's another example.
	You know, we are presented with this notion, this hysterical notion, That we face an existential crisis on account of the climate changing.
	And the climate is changing, they tell us, because of gas engine vehicles.
	So we've got to get people into electric cars.
	That's what they tell us.
	Existential crisis, right?
	Serious business, if we take that premise.
	Well, if that's the case, then why don't they allow these extremely low-cost electric vehicles that are manufactured by the Chinese and other companies that you can pick up for 8,000 bucks equivalent in China?
	It's an existential crisis, isn't it?
	Don't you want more people in these EVs?
	Wouldn't you want more affordable EVs?
	Instead, what's being forced on people is this grift of these $50,000 plus high-end, high-performance luxury EVs.
	They almost all tout how quick they are, right?
	I mean, every time you encounter somebody who's an EV advocate, they'll tell you, my EV can get to 60 in 3.9 seconds or whatever it is.
	Wait a minute.
	If it's an existential crisis, if the planet is going to fall apart, we're all going to die, what are you worried about how quickly this thing goes from zero to 60?
	It should be minimalism.
	It shouldn't be anything more than the bare necessity of what it takes to get from A to B. Exactly.
	You've got to pare down that use of carbon.
	You can't enjoy a faster ride.
	In fact, you should just get sails, sit on skateboards, and go with the wind.
	Even that, you have to cut the trees.
	We've got to just walk.
	Don't even wear shoes.
	Just go naked.
	Everything's fine.
	It's much better that way.
	And you remind me, Eric, we're speaking with Eric Peters of ericpetersautos.com.
	Follow him at X as Libertarian.
	Libertarian card G. I'm Gardner Goldsmith filling in for David Knight.
	Eric Peters, a great regular guest on The David Knight Show.
	And of course, you can find my show and Eric is often there as well.
	And that is Liberty Conspiracy at 6 p.m.
	Monday through Friday.
	Go to Rumble and Rockfin and all that stuff.
	But I should mention, Eric, this will show you just seeing the politicians when they're appearing with the unions, when they're going to the automobile companies.
	It's this weird, bifurcated, almost cyclical thing where that right there, you're seeing fascism in action on video right in front of your eyes because they're catering to the unions or the car companies at the same time That they're leveraging off of regulations that have already been imposed and the regulatory state, which already is there and has been there for so long, that can continue to come down and hurt them or play favorites.
	So we have an example of the so-called freedom guy, J.D. Vance.
	And this is a great example of where, in one area, MRCTV and I had differing opinions.
	I had a piece about Kamala Harris and her EV bus adoration and how the Democrat Party ended up getting a boost cyclically coming back from an EV bus maker, not Proterra, a different one.
	They got money from the feds and then the head of that company gave money to the Democrat Party.
	So that was part of the article.
	But I said, you know, if you think that this is just Democrats, you're wrong.
	Because J.D. Vance, when he was in Michigan about seven days ago, actually appeared and told people he didn't like what the Biden administration was doing about EVs.
	It was terrible what they were doing, this EV stuff.
	And the reason he gave that it was terrible was because they weren't giving more money for EV development in Detroit.
	So he's just going to be adding to the fascism.
	And you just say, first of all, on the most basic level, you're supposed to be swearing an oath to the Constitution.
	Where in the world, in Article 8 million, are you finding that as something you are enumerated to do?
	And then we could get into the deeper philosophy that Lysander Spooner said, even if you have a group of people 200 years ago who signed a piece of paper that says, we who take these offices will have authority over other people, that doesn't make it legitimate.
	There's no authority over other people that a group of people can sign for themselves.
	It doesn't work that way.
	One of the most exasperating aspects of this to me, and I'm going to segue into something Trump said, is that they pretend on the right to oppose the left, but they agree with the left on the fundamentals.
	And so how do you contest the left when you yourself have already agreed with it?
	Here's the example that I'll bring forward.
	A couple of weeks ago, Trump was talking about how if he's elected, He's going to do something about the high cost of car insurance.
	He's going to buy fiat.
	He's going to issue some kind of price controls.
	He's going to say they have to lower them by 50% or whatever.
	So he doesn't question, well, why is the government in the first place forcing people to buy a product or service, any product or service?
	That's the problem.
	If you can't say no to anything, it's going to cost you more.
	It's the end of the day.
	You know, the reason that, say, you can still buy a $3 or $4 cup of coffee, and I know that's pretty ridiculous, too, is because you're free to not buy it.
	You know, can you imagine if there were a mandate that you had to buy a cup of coffee?
	And not only that, there were only, say, two or three places that you could go to buy coffee.
	And, you know, Eric, I should bring up also, then there are the hidden mandates.
	Even you bring up something like a cup of coffee, as James Bovard wrote in the book The Fair Trade Fraud.
	If you look at all the hidden mandates on even the people trying to bring you coffee or milk or cheese or women's brassieres, they've got tariffs against French brassieres.
	Sure.
	And textiles.
	So behind many of the things that are actually on the shelves are interlopers deciding for you that, no, you know what?
	If you wanted to buy that other thing, your freedom of choice is now gonna be penalized.
	We're deciding, as I mentioned, through tariffs, what is essential and what is non-essential, which is a form of fascism.
	You are playing up certain types of endeavors for your friends, the domestic friends, whether they're the union members Or people who think that the native jobs have to be protected and you're taking away someone's choice.
	It's insane.
	Well, there's a really simplistic, childish thing that has been imparted to kids now for generations so that they equate, when they hear that word fascism, what they think of are jackbooted stormtroopers marching in review before Hitler.
	They don't understand the economics of fascism.
	You mentioned what you said earlier about Mussolini, you know, the inventor of modern fascism and the symbols of fascism, which go back to ancient Rome.
	Very, very few people, I doubt one out of a hundred people would be able to tell you what the fascis are, what the word fascism itself means.
	Or the fact that they're on the Lincoln Memorial.
	Correct.
	Yeah, that fascist himself.
	And, you know, with regard to these costs, people have no idea.
	One of the reasons we're so impoverished is because you have to get permission to transact business.
	There's a middleman between you and your potential customer.
	For example, Dawn and I have thought about the idea of having a little food truck.
	You know, because we live in a rural area, so people have to drive very far to get things.
	And we thought, you know, wow, people would probably like to have, you know, like a little food truck that has some Chinese food, let's say, just some basic things.
	You know, spring rolls and General Tso's chicken and stuff like that.
	But you can't just get a food truck and, you know, and set it up even on your own property.
	You know, we couldn't put it on my land adjacent to the road without the government's permission and the government's supervision.
	And then there's the hassle.
	I have a friend who is a restaurant owner, and he was constantly being pestered and hassled and made to pay money to some officious little bureaucrat from the county who would visit his restaurant all the time to, you know, check things out.
	There are no assertions that anybody has been harmed by any of it.
	Nobody's being forced to eat there.
	Everybody's happy in terms of, you know, the customer is getting what they want, the services being provided, so what's the problem?
	But we've been so habituated as a culture and a society to thinking that, you know, in order for that to happen, you have to have the government's permission and you have to have the government supervision, as if entities like the FDA are doing a real fine job of making sure the food supply is safe.
	And you know, Eric, I do want to bring up, someone over on X brought up a point that actually opens up another dimension to this on the immigration side of it, and that is this.
	Galois writes, they're red-taping us to death and importing cheap labor.
	There is some very strong validity there when we think about what businesses end up having to do when their production costs, whatever the means of production are for them, where the government imposes higher and higher costs on, say, importing steel or other things from other countries.
	And then they have all these regulations that impose things like minimum wage and all these things.
	Well, of course, they're going to try to find any way they possibly can in their production line to lower costs somehow, some way.
	So now, when you've got a government which itself is artificially counter to what a natural market would be doing, Bringing people in through the central command and control immigration powers.
	Now they've literally got apps that the central government is giving people.
	They're housing people in New York City for free.
	So they're subsidizing moves in the other direction.
	So it's just ridiculous.
	And I do think that that's a valid point to bring up.
	I think that's a very good point.
	And I'd love to get your thoughts on that.
	And we have even more great comments from people.
	Yeah, well, you know, something that's related that pops into my mind, you probably heard about McDonald's and other fast food chains that are trying to automate their stores.
	Yeah.
	Because it's, you know, I worked at McDonald's as a teenager back in the 80s, and I made $3.35 an hour because I was a kid.
	Yeah.
	It's a really basic entry-level job, operating the fry machine like Donald Trump did a week ago, and handing people their bags of food.
	It's not a high-skilled job.
	I'm in no way denigrating it.
	It was a good work experience.
	You learn to show up on time.
	You learn to be responsible.
	All of these things are good and healthy.
	But it's not supposed to be a career, and it's not supposed to be something that can support a family.
	But the government has decreed in some states that you have to pay these people, what, $15, $20 an hour to operate the fry machine?
	And you wonder why a Big Mac costs $7?
	There's a reason for this, and it gets to the point of unsustainability.
	It gets to the point where McDonald's even can no longer make a profit when people go through the drive-thru and they buy a couple of burgers and some fries for themselves and their kids, and it's $50!
	It's $50 for McDonald's!
	So what does McDonald's do?
	McDonald's figures out, well, you know, we just can't afford to pay these people anymore.
	It's not personal.
	They're not trying to be mean.
	They just can't do it.
	So, you know, they come up with robots.
	And so now you go into the thing and there's a kiosk instead of a human being.
	And the thing that really sucks about that is that teenagers like I was back in the 80s no longer have access to those jobs.
	They no longer get that first leg into the workforce, which is unfortunate and tragic, which happens every time when these technocratic, busybody people that are the government interpose themselves in the free market.
	And, you know, Eric, one of the things that I do want to make sure that I mentioned, because involved with this, I think, are sometimes people have either what are soon to be traditional views or they sort of have, again, sort of a normalcy bias towards looking at things in a certain way that have been dictated sort of a normalcy bias towards looking at things in a certain way that
	So, for example, if we're talking about the different resources one needs in the production line for a business or whatever, one of the things that people will say is, well, yeah, you know, if the government is imposing costs on people through minimum if the government is imposing costs on people through minimum wage laws, that will incentivize them to then invest in machinery.
	And those young people are going to be locked out.
	And the key thing here is that either way, the consumer is now having to shell out more for what the consumer could have gotten for less in the past, which is one of the key things in James Bovard's writing in the Fair Trade Fraud.
	One of the key things in 19th century economist, Frédéric Bastier, what is seen and what is not seen.
	The opportunity costs that government impositions bring.
	And the other thing that I'd like to bring up is when in the other direction, you get the central government deciding for everybody what their human interaction is going to be, restricting their ability to be able to hire someone who might live in Singapore and be providing a product and Because they're putting a tariff on there or literally another human being from coming in to work at his place.
	If they're saying, you know what, we're going to restrict your pool of resources.
	We're going to make it more difficult for you to get steel.
	What does that do to the price of steel?
	It goes up.
	If we're going to restrict your ability to be able to hire employees, what does that do to the price of the employee line of your production?
	It's going to go up.
	So we go to Mark Krikorian.
	And many people admire Mark Krikorian from the Center for Immigration Studies.
	But he was utterly wrong.
	And even Rush Limbaugh said, you know, he was right.
	They were both wrong in this case.
	When back during the W. Bush administration, they were talking about having really strong central authority restrictions on immigration.
	And Krikorian said, oh, this will be great.
	And I put it in my book in Live Free or Die because he said, you know, it will push the businesses to have to invest in new technology.
	So over the long run, that'll be fine.
	It's like, look, why don't you leave it up to them?
	Why do you want to increase the cost for their labor force so that now the consumer will have less money left over because they got to pay more for the thing they could have gotten for less before?
	That money would have been invested in a different business that would have employed another person.
	But you and your central authority, you're telling people, no, I know better than you.
	I'm going to prevent your freedom of association from hiring someone.
	Where does that stop?
	Can you hire somebody from outside your state?
	Can you bring somebody in from outside your town?
	Can you bring in a plumber into your house or should you do all the work yourself?
	It is, it's, it's insane.
	It's totally ridiculous.
	It's not insane.
	It's self-interested.
	Yeah.
	Well, good point.
	You're starting their own interests.
	And you remember the butterfly effect?
	You've heard the phrase?
	Yeah.
	That work doesn't get farmed out because I can't afford to hire that electrician.
	So that electrician doesn't get paid.
	He loses the work.
	He has less money.
	So it just, it expands outward forever in this cycle of impoverishment.
	And to get back to this whole thing, it really gets my back up the way these mutative do-gooders, because they like to preen and posture and present themselves as the benefactors of humanity.
	They're nothing of the kind.
	They're really dark people in my mind.
	You know, some of them are dumb and maybe they don't know better, but the smarter ones do.
	They know what the game is, and the game is that they get control and power, and they reduce us all.
	You know, I have this little graphic that I sometimes put up with some of my articles called Yes Amasa!
	You know, and it's kind of a more coarse way of putting what Ayn Rand wrote about in a lot of her books.
	You know, this having to kowtow and be obsequious before these people in the government who have power over you.
	And, you know, you dare not question or say anything about it because they can make your life hell.
	They can ruin your business.
	They can really mess things up.
	So you kind of have to, yes, amass, I'll go along with what you say.
	You know, it's not as though Abe Lincoln freed the slave.
	Abe Lincoln enslaved us all is ultimately what it comes down to.
	Yes.
	Boy, these are great points.
	And of course, and again, I'll mention, you know, not to focus on tariffs too much during our conversation, but I do want to bring up We often hear the line that people say Thomas Jefferson balanced the budget and only relied on tariffs, not the excise tax inside the United States.
	They didn't have an income tax during Jefferson.
	And he said, no man saw the tax man.
	Well, yes, a lot of people saw the tax man.
	If you were an importer, you saw the tax man.
	And the fact that some people who bought the stuff from the importers who had to pay the tariffs and then had to increase their prices meant that they indirectly saw the tax man.
	They didn't see him directly, but they paid the tax.
	So this is an utter canard and you bring up the Civil War.
	That was the main driver for the reason why the South wanted to get away from the North because they were dominating the Congress and they were forcing such high tariffs on things that the South could use as imports.
	They were trying to drive the South to buy the Northeastern products rather than get them from France or Italy or England.
	Yep.
	As Tom DiLorenzo, who I think is one of the best writers on this topic, has explained, Lincoln even offered to come to any kind of compromise, provided that the South would not depart from the Union, because it was about the money.
	It had nothing to do with the slavery.
	That was the boogeyman.
	That was the moralizing boogeyman that they came up with and which has managed to perpetuate itself to this very day.
	The northern industrial interests that controlled the federal government were crippling the South economically.
	That's the bottom line.
	Absolutely.
	That's what it was all about.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And DiLorenzo's books, The Real Lincoln and Lincoln Unmasked are phenomenal.
	And of course, his book, How Capitalism Saved America is also just spot on.
	Talking about, as you and I have discussed before, the thousands of miles of privately run roads.
	People say, who will build the roads?
	The idea of the toll bridges, toll house cookies, and the idea that you're not going to take land through eminent domain.
	If somebody wants to build a road, they have to approach you and freely ask you if you will take money for the land.
	And businesses had incentives to try to set up their own roads and manage them well.
	This is great.
	Eric, let's talk about what's going on over at ericpetersautos.com.
	And feel free to mention anything else if you want to remind people.
	Again, let's talk about X. We can get your X feed out there.
	It's libertariancarg.
	I flashed up on the screen.
	I mean, the team here.
	The team here.
	Flashed up on the screen.
	One of your latest articles.
	Something else about airbags.
	And I love the picture.
	It reminds me of the old days when I would be with my friends, the leeches.
	Fix up Volkswagen bugs.
	And, you know, the stick shift would be there.
	The engine was open behind us.
	And you'd get in, it would just be a shell, like a dune buggy.
	And I love that airbag.
	Tell us about this article just published yesterday at Eric Peter's Auto's.
	Well, it kind of dovetails on what we've been talking about in the sense that it's another example of these interpositions by these busybodies who make cost-value, risk-reward judgments for us arrogantly.
	You know, they decide whether something is good for us, and never mind that there might be some bad aspects to it.
	In their judgment, the overall goodness of it justifies imposing costs and risks on everybody.
	That's just the way it is.
	You know, the kind of arrogance behind that is something that I find difficult to understand, and you probably do too.
	You know, I think people, adults, ought to be free to form their own judgments about risks and reward and cost and benefit, because after all, they're the ones who pay for both of those things, you know, at the end of the day.
	And I think it's presumptive and evil to take that choice away from somebody, because effectively you're saying, well, I'm going to do this thing and make you do it, and if you get hurt, well, too bad.
	I've decided.
	So, to get into this airbag thing, you know, the federal government has been requiring airbags in new vehicles since the 90s.
	And the thing with airbags is, well, one of the things, is it like any...
	Any apparatus, and it's not just airbags, it's a system.
	People have to understand that it's not just a bag.
	There's an inflator, there's wiring, there's sensors, all these things that go out throughout the car.
	Well, like any other mechanical electrical system, eventually, over time, they deteriorate.
	Parts stop working, things stop failing.
	They fail, and then they don't work.
	And with airbags, that can be a big problem.
	The thing might just explode in your face.
	That's happened.
	Or it might not work at all.
	A few years ago, I was pulling through one of the owner's manuals for one of the new cars that I test drive, and it said in the back that the airbag system should be replaced after 12 years.
	Because of safety, safety considerations.
	And that's true because the system becomes unreliable the older it gets.
	You've got a lot of vehicles on the road that are now in daily service that are 15, 20 years old because cars are pretty reliable now that actually have these airbags in them that are unsafe.
	And this goes beyond the defective airbags that everybody has heard about that involve millions and millions of vehicles that have been manufactured.
	Well, if the federal safety apparatus is so very concerned about our safety, why don't they do something about that?
	And they don't, of course, because it's situational, it's arbitrary, and they're not really concerned about safety.
	What they're concerned about is their authority.
	Really good example during this Takata airbag fiasco that's still ongoing.
	Yes.
	Because there's so many vehicles with these defective airbags that it's going to take years to get them through the dealerships, you know, to get the old airbags taken out and get new ones put in these things.
	It's a matter of throughput and flow.
	Well, the government concedes that these airbags are dangerous and defective.
	They said so publicly.
	They still will not permit people who are waiting For a dealer to give them an appointment that might take six months, a year, who knows how long it's going to take.
	They won't even permit them to have a temporary off switch or disable the system for the period of time that it takes to get the car in to get the airbag replaced.
	Why is that?
	We're so very concerned about our safety.
	That's maniacal.
	That's like when Lady Dole was pushing these things onto people.
	And they were, you know, breaking the necks of little kids who were in the front seat.
	Yes, exactly.
	And to get back, we talked about this when I first came on with you, the engineers told that to these people at the regulatory apparatus.
	They said, look, they were insisting, the regulatory apparatus was telling the automakers that you have to make the airbags deploy with a certain force that assumes an adult male in the seat.
	And they came back and said, well, you know, not everybody's an adult male of a certain stature.
	There are old people who are frail.
	There are kids.
	There are women who are small statured, small bones.
	And, you know, if this bag deploys with the force that might be necessary to cushion a 200 pound man and the person in the seat is 120 pounds, That could break their neck or smash their facial bones.
	And it has, and it did.
	They don't care.
	They don't care.
	Keep in mind, these are the same people who pushed the safe and effective drugs on people.
	And they knew it.
	They knew it before anything happened.
	They had their own internal studies.
	They knew about the myocarditis.
	They knew about the Bell's palsy.
	They knew about all these things.
	They don't care.
	And if there's a working Definition of a psychopath, that's it, isn't it?
	Somebody who's conscious and knowing that what they're trying to make you do is going to hurt you, possibly.
	And they don't care.
	There's no empathy.
	There's no remorse.
	There's no guilt.
	That's right.
	And it gets even worse oftentimes, as we see with Proterra, and I brought it up, Jennifer Granholm, and how she was governor of Michigan, and then During the Obama administration, they had the so-called American Recovery Act, utterly unconstitutional and morally, handing out billions of dollars.
	GM got, you know, millions and millions of dollars and billions of dollars, actually.
	And she was able to get six million broken off for this company, Protero, when she was governor.
	And then when she left the governorship, they brought her on their board.
	Then they gave her stock options when she left the board.
	And she cashed those in a few weeks before they declared bankruptcy, and she made $3 million almost.
	Yeah.
	I mean, they're dirty, rotten scoundrels, but they're not funny in the way that the movie was.
	So true.
	And you bring up a very important practical point here.
	I'd love to show this from the website, everybody.
	Our guest is Eric Peters.
	Go to ericpetersautos.com.
	Follow him on X if you get the opportunity.
	Open up a tab.
	Check him out.
	Come right back.
	Do it after the show.
	Whatever you can here in the David Knight program.
	He is at LibertarianCarG.
	But you bring this up.
	You say it would probably cost at least $3,000 to have the driver and front passenger airbags and all related components replaced.
	The truck is maybe worth $4,000.
	This is why so many otherwise mechanically sound older vehicles like my truck are declared total losses after an accident that results in the deployment of the airbags, even though the vehicle is or rather would be otherwise reparable.
	But the airbags must be replaced because if not, the vehicle isn't legal to operate on the government's roads.
	Yeah.
	Just incredible.
	And you know, again, it's like the seatbelt.
	You say to yourself, who am I harming outside of this vehicle if I don't do this inside the vehicle?
	No one.
	Why are you telling me that you are now just the very thought of telling me what to do peacefully in my car is a thought of aggression.
	So stop it.
	Well, what they come back with, and I'm sure you've heard this, society will pay.
	Of course.
	Of course, that's a hypothetical.
	There's a skirted harm in the first place.
	It hasn't actually happened.
	It's also completely arbitrary.
	What about the pot-bellied cop who's arteriosclerotic who pulls you over to issue you a ticket for not wearing your seatbelt?
	What about the cost he's going to impose on society when he finally keels over from a heart attack?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	It's completely arbitrary.
	They tell me I have to wear a helmet when I ride my motorcycle, but it's okay if I wear a t-shirt and shorts and flip-flops.
	And it's amazing because private insurance, and if you actually were free to get private health insurance or car insurance, they offer incentives to people.
	You don't have to take it if you don't want it.
	You might pay a little more if you're a smoking, skydiving, you know, heroin user.
	And you might pay less if you're, you know, exercise and eat well and that sort of stuff.
	Or if you're a safe driver, they'll incentivize that.
	But once they collectivize everything and give you the we all pay canard, you get England.
	Where literally they're telling people, you know what?
	You're obese.
	So we're going to put you on the waiting list for elective surgery.
	You smoke.
	We're going to put you on the waiting list for elective surgery.
	Even though you have the money to pay, even though you're in intense pain, even though we don't know the circumstances of your life, It's all collectivist now.
	It's the national health system.
	And God forbid anybody ever speak against the NHS, right?
	Yeah, and it takes away agency.
	You know, it's insufferable to know that even if you yourself are responsible, for example, I don't cause accidents.
	I've had no claims filed against me in 30 years.
	I'm a good driver.
	So why am I responsible for an accident that some other person who I don't even know has that causes the insurance company to jack up my premiums that I can't say no to?
	And this is across the spectrum.
	I believe it's very important that each of us be able to reap both the rewards and the responsibilities for our own actions.
	So if I choose to drive my car without a seatbelt, let's say, And I get into an accident and I'm badly injured because I didn't wear my seatbelt.
	That's my problem.
	That is not your problem.
	Yeah.
	And of course, one of the major things is before they collectivize a particular insurance system, they did this with health insurance.
	They'll say...
	Well, look at these health insurance companies.
	They're cherry picking.
	They're charging some people more who are higher risk.
	It's like, duh, that's because they're higher risk.
	But then they want it put into the government sphere.
	And I literally have Tom Brokaw on record.
	I had an audio recording of him when he was on Meet the Press with Doris Kearns.
	I plagiarized, but I'm blaming other people.
	Goodwin.
	When they were on there and he said, well, government's going to have to pick and choose.
	We're going to have to make decisions.
	So they excoriate the private business and you don't have to do business with them for incentivizing better behavior and charging more for reckless behavior.
	But then when it becomes the government system, well, you know, we're going to have to make decisions here.
	They can engage in the exact activity that they slam the private people for doing, but now it's imposed on everybody and we're all paying for it.
	It's imposed and it's indirect.
	With regard to private transactions, for example, before Obamacare came along, A healthy guy, if he wanted to, could buy a very high-deductible catastrophic care policy because he didn't need any regular medical care.
	And, you know, maybe it would be nice to know that, okay, in case, let's say, I get into a really bad car accident or I have a heart attack, some random unforeseen event, I'll be covered for that.
	But everything else I'm just going to pay out of pocket.
	And that was very affordable.
	After Obamacare, I'm a self-employed person.
	If I were to get a policy through this government rigmarole system, I have to pay for idiot things that I have no need for, like substance abuse counseling and treatment.
	I don't abuse substances.
	I don't need maternity care.
	I'm a man and I don't have any kids.
	I don't need maternity care.
	And that's why the cost is so exorbitant.
	And that's why I continue to not have it and just take care of myself.
	And if I have to pay for anything, I pay for it out of pocket.
	Absolutely.
	We have a number of comments.
	I just want to...
	The team here.
	We've got over on X. We've got Restaurant Portugal says, We're under occupation.
	A de facto government.
	A fake one.
	So people need permission to...
	Do everything because we're under military rule.
	And then they have the little correction there.
	Yeah.
	And also, we've got this here.
	Coldwind Digital.
	Bingo.
	They don't care.
	And profit.
	The politicians will work with anybody they can to make profit.
	Also in Rockfin, I want to thank everybody for being there.
	And And OctoSpook says, I would have Abraham Lincoln as governor of Minnesota.
	He'd actually probably be an improvement over Tim Walls.
	And I want to thank also, we had a monthly subscriber, a new add-on from Michelle Obama over in Michigan on Rumble, in the fruit stripe gum colors of Rumble.
	Just great.
	I really appreciate you joining up and helping out the David Knight Show that way.
	Eric, you've got a really good piece over on your site, and let's round things off with this.
	This is the latest one.
	I mean, literally just came out, I think, maybe just before or while I was on.
	Yeah, the worst tax.
	Tell us about this.
	Yeah, well, you know, in our circles, conservative libertarian circles, people often excoriate the income tax.
	I'm no fan of the income tax at all.
	But I think the property tax is worse.
	And what do I mean by that?
	Well, the property tax precludes the possibility of ownership of practically anything other than perhaps the clothes on your back.
	You know, we are allowed the fiction that we own our homes, but we don't.
	Even if you've paid off the lender, you paid off the mortgage company, you're still obliged to pay what amounts to rent in perpetuity to your local government.
	That's what the property tax is.
	And it has the effect of rendering you economically insecure because you constantly have to generate income in order to pay the taxes for the most part, unless you're lucky enough to be so affluent that you have enough savings.
	To cover those taxes for the rest of your natural life, which most people simply don't.
	So it's really vicious.
	It prevents, it precludes the thing that probably, in my opinion, would define a free person in a free society more than anything, which is to have a freehold, to have your piece of land, your home that's yours.
	Once you pay for it, you know what I'm saying?
	Once you've done that, that even if you lost your job, even if there were an economic downturn, well, you've got your house.
	And that's a very nice feeling to know.
	I've got a place to live.
	My family has got a roof over its head.
	We can get by.
	But what they're doing with this is just constantly bleeding people.
	And I think one of the most egregious aspects of it, people who bought a house, say, 30 years ago, and let's say they bought a house for $120,000 30 years ago, and they figure, well, we can afford a $120,000 house.
	Well, fast forward 20 or 30 years, and now the county says your house is worth half a million dollars.
	Right.
	And, you know, they're going to tax them on that, and they haven't got the budget for it, and now they're older.
	So they're literally driving people out of their homes, out of homes that they have paid for.
	It's beyond despicable that this thing exists.
	There is some good news, though, and that's what the article's about.
	In North Dakota, there's a ballot initiative.
	That will give the voters the opportunity to get rid of the property tax.
	Now, whether it passes or not, we're going to find out.
	But I think it's wonderful that that's on the ballot in a state.
	It sets a great precedent and it gets people talking and thinking.
	And, you know, I hope that that spreads and we'll see.
	That would be great in North Dakota.
	And, you know, philosophically, it really is just a modern form of serfdom.
	Your property is not your own.
	And they use all these excuses.
	And you have part of this in your piece about the government run schools.
	They somehow take it as an offense.
	If you say, you know, I'd like to be left alone.
	Why don't you leave me alone and stop coming up with all these so-called justifications and spurious rationales that tell me I have to pay.
	You say you must pay rent so that the government can school other people's kids.
	On the hypothesis that you obtain some vague benefit thereby.
	Never mind that these government schools regularly fail to school these other people's kids who graduate from government schools, both innumerate and illiterate, as well as ignorant.
	Their cognitive capabilities crippled by rote memorization And obedience training.
	Yes, all hail the government school, right?
	It's true.
	It would be less egregious if they actually turned out literate, numerate, cognitively competent people, but they don't.
	And everybody knows this.
	And the principle of it is still the same.
	They're still forcing you to do it.
	And of course, that predicate of the force is what opens the door to the lack of practical capacity for it to do a good job because they always have the ability to take your cash and to take your property if you won't pay.
	Everything's inverted too.
	If a parent is concerned about the education of their child, well, you empower that parent by having that parent be responsible for their child and finding and paying for tutors and teachers and so on, which they then have some control over because they're paying for it.
	If it turns out that the person who they hired to teach their kid math is incompetent, they can fire that person.
	Good luck firing the math teacher at the government school who's incompetent and can't teach your kid to add and subtract.
	And they don't even, you know, what's interesting as well, Eric, because competency, quality, those are all assessments we need to make and then express our opinions and satisfaction through our own choice over our own money.
	The minute somebody decides for you how your money is being spent, they've taken away your volition to show what you think is quality.
	There's a moment I wanted to get into before I have a Biden moment and forget it.
	And it is this.
	I think it's a philosophical thing.
	And I think it's really worth considering.
	All of this stuff has a very insidious effect in that it makes us kind of enemies of each other or suspicious of each other.
	If you take away the government interpositions and we're free to make our own choices and free to not do business with people that we don't want to do business with, all of a sudden we don't dislike our neighbors in the same way that we do now.
	When I drive down the road and I see a Harris Waltz I get annoyed because I think, you know, they're saying that they want to take more of my money and they want to exert control over my life.
	If we didn't have that element in it, I might not like them.
	I might not invite them over for, you know, for a meal or to have a beer with me.
	But live and let live.
	They do their thing, I do mine.
	We're not at friction, at odds with each other.
	But the reason our society has become so frictious and the reason everybody's so angry and upset is because everybody's using the state in one way or another to fleece people.
	And if you're not doing that, you're trying to protect yourself from being fleeced.
	Absolutely.
	You know, I've mentioned it a couple times this week on Liberty Conspiracy.
	As Frederick Bastier said, the state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live off of everyone else.
	And it just causes dissension and argumentation and anger.
	And yeah, I see those signs from various people.
	And I say, oh, you're putting a sign in your yard that says you're a predator.
	You want to mess with me.
	That's great.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	Eric, thank you.
	Oh, this is, yeah, yeah.
	I can't wait to get you back on Liberty Conspiracy Day.
	Thank you for joining me on this Friday edition of the David Knight Show.
	I really appreciate it.
	Eric, you are, of course, one of the great scholars out there.
	And practically every day you're on the road checking these things out and fighting for freedom.
	So thanks, brother.
	I appreciate it.
	I appreciate you having me on.
	Always a good time.
	Oh, absolutely.
	We're going to give you our going away as we get ready to round off the program with, of course, the Star Trek mind melt to say farewell.
	Thanks, Eric.
	We'll talk to you soon.
	All right.
	I must try to mind meld with it.
	Emeralds.
	Trinity ends.
	Trinity ends.
	Our minds are merging, Doctor.
	Our minds are one.
	I feel what you feel.
	I know what you know.
	Ah, yes.
	Good stuff from, of course, the mighty folks from Star Trek.
	I enjoyed my time at Star Trek Voyager and I enjoyed my time here on the David Knight Show, filling in for David.
	There's so many stories I didn't get to discuss today, whether it be about the United States funneling weapons over to Israel or The United States, of course, sending Antony Blinken there to just basically put up a good facade about things.
	We'll talk about many of those things tonight on Liberty Conspiracy at 6 o'clock.
	And I should mention, you can find Liberty Conspiracy on Rumble.
	Head over there.
	If you get the opportunity, please join us.
	That would be great.
	And, of course, check out TheDavidKnightShow.com.
	For the David Knight Show, find out all the links for that.
	DavidKnight's X is at LibertyTarian.
	You can find me at GuardGoldsmith.
	And I should also mention you can find our audios at my substack, at the Gardner Goldsmith substack.
	So Rockfin, Rumble, 6 o'clock Monday through Friday, my substack.
	Check it out at GuardGoldsmith and all that stuff.
	And thank you, everyone, for being there.
	I really appreciate it.
	We're getting great comments from so many people.
	God bless David and the family.
	All of you.
	Jason Barker inside Rockfin.
	We've got OctoSpook inside Rockfin.
	So many good people there that I really...
	What can you say?
	It's just been fantastic.
	Also inside Rumble, M Sellers, Do Not Obey with Elite Speak.
	That's beautiful.
	And all the other folks who've joined us, Texas Coast South.
	Thank you, everyone.
	Closing up, we've gone a few minutes past the hour, so time for me to say farewell.
	Join David on Monday, and I'm looking forward to seeing David.
	I'll be there in the chat.
	Looking forward to that.
	See you tonight on Liberty Conspiracy.
	Spread the word about that.
	I hope you'll do so.
	And again, if you get the opportunity, check out David Knight's excellent website.
	And of course, go to the store.
	I leave you with this.
	And again, my thanks to David and everyone.
	God bless everyone.
	Thank you to our guests today.
	We'll talk to you again soon.
	And I'll see you on Liberty Conspiracy if you stop by tonight.
	Take care.
	God bless.
	God bless.
	They created common past to track and control us.
	Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing.
	And the communist future.
	They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary.
	But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God.
	That is what we have in common.
	That is what they want to take away.
	Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation.
	They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us.
	It's time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide.
	Please share the information and links you'll find at TheDavidKnightShow.com.
	Thank you for listening.
	Thank you for sharing.

▲