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Jan. 15, 2025 - The David Knight Show
57:20
INTERVIEW Eric Peters: CA Banning Classic Cars, NYC Congestion Tax, UK Parking Tax
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Welcome back, and it's always a pleasure to have Eric Peters join us.
EricPetersAutos.com, and he's got a lot of articles about automobiles and about liberty and mobility because you can't have one without the other.
You can't have liberty without mobility.
It's kind of like an open-air prison if we don't have that mobility that's there.
So Eric has a lot of reviews of practical cars.
He doesn't do reviews of these hypercars that are show cars or something that only one or two billionaires in the world can afford.
But he's got some great practical reviews.
We don't usually talk about that when he comes on, but he's got great car reviews if you're in the market.
But he also talks about what is happening with Liberty, and he's got some great articles about that.
Thank you for joining us, Eric.
Oh, thank you for having me, David.
By the way, I was listening to the tail end of your last segment.
You were talking about Elon Musk, and one of the things that I just find endlessly fascinating about this guy is the Yeah.
Where does it end?
He talks about free speech, he charges you for speech, and then he suppresses speech.
I got kicked off with X for making a somewhat uncouth comment about that creep Keir Starmer in the UK. And, you know, he made an outright obscene comment about anybody who dares to question his promotion of the H-1B visa thing.
But that's okay because it's God Elon who does it.
That's right.
Did he actually kick you off?
I know you've been shadowbanned.
I got noticed saying that my account had been frozen due to abusive or hateful comments.
Something along those lines.
And I could potentially get back if I were to bend the knee and go through something called an ASCIIOS challenge.
I don't know what that is.
It's probably some kind of struggle session, which I'm not going to do.
And of course, delete the comments.
So what I did, I cleverly went to another browser and created a new account.
So if anybody wants to find me on Twitter, my new handle is EricTheApostate.
It's a riff on being excommunicated.
You can put that there.
Yeah, that's great.
Yeah, I've been thinking that I need to create a new Twitter account.
I've been so heavily shadow banned that the number of followers that I have has been frozen since about 2018 when they got kicked off of every other platform.
Facebook kicked me off, Instagram, and all those things.
I just consider that to be a liberating thing.
I don't have to worry about it anymore.
I don't have to worry about YouTube either.
I felt really good after it happened.
I had a kind of deja vu moment.
You'll remember when I got kicked out of that coffee shop during the pandemic because I wouldn't wear the mask.
And at first I was kind of disappointed and angry and sad, but afterward I thought to myself, you know, I feel really good because I stood my ground on it.
I didn't give in to these people.
And I wrote an article a couple of weeks ago, and this happened about X, about how...
We kind of unconsciously self-censor ourselves.
Because we all know we've got that anvil hanging over our head.
You know, if we use the wrong word, if we touch on the wrong topic, that we're going to get banned.
So, you know, it's really insidious and really clever.
It's not the overt suppression of your post has been removed.
It's, I better be careful about what I say.
So I think it's a really salutary thing to just disconnect ourselves from these tech overlords and their centralized control mechanisms.
And talk amongst ourselves with each other like real human beings are supposed to.
I agree.
I made that point yesterday, talking about Mel Gibson.
Now, he went on with Joe Rogan, and he said, so here's the good news.
I've got, I think it was three friends who had stage 4 cancer, metastasized other places, because they didn't give them long to live.
But he goes, now all of them are okay.
And they didn't use the standard stuff.
And so Joe Rogan says, oh yeah, so what'd they do?
And he goes, no, you know, the stuff that's out there.
Joe Rogan threw a few things out there, but Mel Gibson was afraid to mention it.
And I said that.
I said, here we have a situation where you got friends who took some stuff that saved their lives, and you're unwilling to tell people about that?
And this is the thing that has driven me insane.
From 2020, when people that I know, that I work for, like Alex Jones, would not tell people, you know, what was going to happen with these vaccines.
And they would pretend that it was a bad vaccine from Bill Gates, and we're being saved by Donald Trump.
And, hey, it's just sugar water, and don't worry about it.
And it's only just got some adjuvants in there.
You've been telling people for decades they're giving kids autism.
Don't worry about it.
Just take it.
You know, that kind of stuff.
They knew better.
And so did Mel.
And that's the thing.
It's a self-censorship.
It's so bad that we will let our friends die before we will say something to oppose this stuff and educate them.
The magnitude of it is...
What's he afraid of?
What is the threat that they can wield against him?
You know, a relative small fry like you and I might suffer actual consequences for wrong think.
You know, say something, we might get demonetized or deplatformed.
He's largely immune, and even he is afraid.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's not his first rodeo either.
You know, he said things that they either misconstrued or that he was anti-Semitic or whatever, and they came after him.
They said, oh, just because you're doing something about the crucifixion of Christ, oh, you're now anti-Semitic or whatever.
There's other things that he's said and done.
Some of them he said he was drunk with or whatever, but he's been under the microscope before, and it worked.
You know, they've got him intimidated, even though, as you point out, you know, he's a multimillionaire.
He's got his own film production companies, and he can do whatever he wants.
He's still afraid.
And, you know, that's what Solzhenitsyn was talking about.
He said, don't live by lies like that.
You know, don't say that two plus two equals five, as George Orwell was saying.
And that's the worst thing that we do is the self-censorship, because that's when they really got us.
Sure, and also that when we accept their verbiage, we were going to talk about this congestion pricing thing that they're doing in New York City.
And the way they phrase it is interesting to me.
They call it congestion relief.
And it's of a piece with asking that you pay your fair share of taxes or that you contribute to Social Security.
They use these really subtle techniques to orient the way you think by the words that they use and you accept.
And we shouldn't do that.
This isn't about easing congestion.
It's about making driving more arduous and expensive.
That's like calling a heart attack congestive failure.
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
So I think etymologically, it's really important to examine the words that they use before you even have a discussion.
Let's agree on what we're actually talking about so as to not let them win the debate before it even happens.
Yeah, I've started calling them the flatulent Earth Society.
By the way, did you see the fart coin thing?
Yes, yes.
We'll talk about that coming up.
But, you know, let's talk about the congestion relief zones first.
Because, again, you know, we see this stuff begins in Europe or the UK. And then it comes to California or to New York.
And we're seeing various aspects of this coming to both California and New York.
This congestion relief zone.
You've got an article about it.
I've talked about it.
How expensive it is to get in.
It's going to be $9 to get in by car.
In the evenings, you can pay $2.25.
But you go through and you calculate out the annual expenses for people that do it every day.
For commuters, it's going to add like $2,160.
That's a lot of money for most people.
It is.
And it's also incredibly obnoxious in that these roads were paid for by motor fuels, excise taxes that everybody pays for.
Right?
And essentially what's happening is that they're giving preferential treatment to people who are affluent enough to be able to pay that $9 fee.
So it's another example of the way in which the American people are being proletarianized or Sovietized.
You know, average people who have to work in the city but can't afford to live in the city are no longer going to be able to afford to drive into the city.
So they're going to be herded into buses, trains, and other forms of government-controlled transportation.
So that little sliver of freedom that they enjoyed of being able to go to work on their own schedule in their own car, safe in their own car, listening to whatever program they want to listen to without having some babbling schizophrenic sitting in the seat next to them, And if they want to stop on the way home and grab some groceries or whatever they need to do.
It's a small, but it's a really important thing that people have taken for granted.
And it's being taken away by these elite overlords, who, by the way...
They will never suffer the consequences of the impositions that they dump into our laps.
And that's part of what goes on.
You know, the arrogance, the infrontery of it.
Everything that they do, they're insulated from because they're rich and they're powerful and they can do these things with impunity to us.
And because they're sociopathic people, in my opinion, they do it because they don't care.
They have contempt for the average people of this country.
That's right.
And it's not just about the elitists who can afford to have their cars and they can pay anything, you know, just to keep the rabble off of the road so they don't get the roads clogged with the hoi polloi out there.
But it's also, they're taking all this money that they're going to be making, you know, about $2,200 a year from the average Joe, and they're not going to be using it to fix the roads, not even to fix the potholes.
And, of course, as I've said many times, one of the things that Elon Musk got right...
Was when he started talking about, hey, we're going to have to, our cities are going vertical, and they're too congested.
So what we need to do, and we sold his boring company idea.
He said, so we need to, you know, go.
Three-dimensional on the roads.
We can't expand them in two dimensions, so we're going to have to go.
Now, most of the time you've seen in all of the old science fiction movies, everybody understood that.
And so they'd show these congested cities with the skyscrapers and all the rest of this stuff.
And they would have roads that are stacked.
You know, you'd see that in the early 20th century, you know, movies of the future, you know, where they depicted a futuristic city.
You'd have multiple layers of roads.
And then they start just having flying cars that are flying.
But it has to go vertical.
But they're not willing to do that.
They're not even willing to maintain the potholes.
They're going to take all the money from this stuff, and they're going to pour it into public transportation because the goal has always been about controlling your movement and making you dependent upon them.
And that's what it's always about.
But you're talking about people not being able to come into the city.
That was what started all this yellow vest protests in Paris because they were pricing people and keeping them from coming into the city.
And the mayor of Paris is a full-on Marxist, and she was the one who pioneered all this 15-minute city.
She may not have been the one to come up with the idea, but she was the first one to implement it, this 15-minute city idea.
They don't want anybody having any mobility except them.
I think there's going to be some pushback here, too, because I think awareness is dawning that it's not about good motives that are misplaced.
In other words, these planners, these people who are pushing all of this stuff, they're genuinely trying to deal with what they consider to be a legitimate problem.
It's not that at all.
Awareness is percolating upward that there's a maliciousness to this, that they're systematically just trying to put the thumb on average people in this country.
And as that realization begins to spread, I think you're going to see more and more pushback.
And not just with regard to congestion pricing, but with regard to so many other things.
Insurance is another example.
You know, people are just waiting for the next tsunami of increases in your homeowner's bill as the insurance mafia transfers the cost of what happened in California onto your policy and my policy.
They're going to do that, too.
And the car insurance, because of all these electric cars and the expense that they've added to the cost of coverage, again, it's the same kind of a thing.
People are going to arrive at a point where the choice is, well, I can pay for this or I can eat.
Or, you know, I could keep a roof over my family's head, and the choice is pretty obvious.
And if we get mass disobedience, which I think would be great, mass disobedience is really healthy in a free society.
That's how we fix this problem.
You and I have talked over the years about how, if only, in the first few months of the pandemic, 20% of the people had just refused to put on that mask, just wouldn't do it.
Take me to jail if you're going to do that.
Fine.
If enough of us had done that then, that whole thing would have been over within a few months afterward.
Absolutely.
And that's how it ended.
It ended because people just said, you know, I'm tired of wearing this thing anymore.
I'm just not going to do it.
But unfortunately, we just walked away from this situation.
And we didn't say, all right, now fix it so this never happens again.
And I want the people who push this on us to be in jail.
Instead, what we did was we voted for Trump again.
We're going to have the greatest gulf.
We're going to have the best gulf in the whole world, the Gulf of America.
And by the way, you may have thought about this too.
There's a really sinister aspect to all this.
Initially, at least for...
Blush, inexplicable jabber about the Gulf of America and the American Canal and making Canada the 51st state.
Doesn't that sound a lot to you like the North American free trade zone that they were pushing back in the Clinton era?
And this is how they're going to do it.
Because it's Red Hat MAGA guy that's doing it.
So it's okay.
Just like gun control by executive order is okay if it's done by Trump.
Fortunately, I can do whatever I want to against the Second Amendment.
You know, that was in 2019. Yeah, a lot of people pointed to MAP from 1968 showing that that's exactly what they wanted.
You know, the U.S. and Mexico, all the way up to Greenland, all of it together.
I think that the Greenland thing, and I said my take on this is, I know it's not about national security, because they had at one point in time, they've got a military base there.
And right after World War II, they had 10,000 soldiers there.
Now they've got 400. And it's because it's not necessary anymore.
They're not going to be able to do anything from a surveillance standpoint that you can't do with a satellite.
And they're not going to be able to stop any hypersonic missiles that come flying over Greenland for the U.S. either.
So, you know, it has absolutely no utilitarian purposes at all for that.
There is, however, a lot of mineral wealth there.
Tremendous amount.
But he's going to wind up.
This is what I think he's going to have.
And I said it on the show.
I think he's going to wind up paying a fortune and a half to buy Greenland.
He's going to pay off the people that live there.
He'll pay off Denmark and all the rest of the stuff.
And then they'll socialize those costs, and then they will privatize the profits with his friends like Elon Musk.
They'll be able to go in and exploit all this stuff, make a ton of money, because the U.S. taxpayers bought that playground for them.
I think that's what's going to happen.
Yeah, you know, I hear all this cheering on the Red Hat side about how Elon Musk is going to make government more efficient.
Well, that's the last thing we want.
You know, the Soviet Gulag system was extraordinarily efficient.
I'm rereading Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago.
It's one of my favorite go-to books.
Read that book every couple of years.
And he describes in minute and great detail about how efficient the secret police apparatus was back then, about how they were able to round people up and then transport them and put them in these camps and dispose of them ultimately.
That was very efficient.
We don't want efficient government.
That's right.
Hitler made the trains run on time.
That's what everybody likes to say, right?
Well, it's like, where are the trains going?
That's what I want to know.
Right.
That's crazy.
Yeah, you know, the first time I had you on, we were talking about Elon Musk.
I remember we were talking about him.
You had an article, The King of Crony Capitalism, and we talked about how he got his money and how here he is.
He's going to be the guy that brings us government efficiency.
Look, we've had one of these things, commissions after the other, going back to Ronald Reagan, and none of their recommendations are ever put into use because you have to do, in order to save money, you've got to drastically cut back the welfare state and the militarized state as well.
So the warfare welfare state's got to be cut back, and they don't have the will to do that.
None of them want to do it.
Even these Republicans, 18 or 19 of them said, we're not going to cut back on any of these green projects because some of them are in my district, and I want that money from that so-called Inflation Reduction Act thing that was put in by Biden.
But like I said today, earlier, all the MAGA media is cheering Trump because he's now going to do an external revenue service instead of internal revenue services.
And I said, you realize, of course, that the IRS and the income tax are going to remain, and we're all going to be paying the tariffs because you don't tax a corporation.
All those costs are going to be passed on to us.
But they're cheering it, and Trump is selling it like Democrats always sell their tax increases, saying somebody else is going to pay this tax, not you.
It's crazy.
Just call it a different name.
So somehow a tariff, not a tax, because it has a different name to it.
This idea that, for example, they're going to apply a tariff to vehicles that are manufactured in Mexico.
Ford and General Motors have big truck manufacturing operations across the border in Mexico.
So what's going to happen?
They're going to impose a tariff on those vehicles that's simply going to result in those vehicles becoming even more expensive than they already are.
And by the way, with regard to Musk, you know, it astonishes me that people ostensibly on our side, and I speak loosely here, the liberty, freedom side, support this guy when he continues to support a carbon tax, which is probably the greatest existential threat to liberty that could be conceived of.
That's right.
Yeah, the carbon tax, he's always supported that, and of course the people around him are supporting what is essentially going to be all the functions of CBDC, but they won't call it CBDC.
And the reason they won't call it CBDC is because they're watching to see what each and every person does.
just like they watched you, just like they watched me, and they know that everybody's onto their game if they call it a CBDC. Nobody wants that.
So they'll do the same function with their friends like Lucky Lutnik and all the rest of them.
them, they will run their tokenization games and all the rest of the stuff, and they'll say that it's not a digital currency that violates your privacy, but that's exactly what it will be, a digital currency that violates your privacy and allows them to confiscate things very easily from you.
And so they'll just do it in a different way.
And that's why you have this back and forth, left, right march, is so that people let their guard down.
And that's what Trump is.
He's the big pacifier in the mouths of all conservatives.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And another thing related to this that really concerns me is he ran on and largely was elected on the promise that he was going to deal with the tsunami of migrants and refugees, the illegal aliens that have entered the country over the past four years.
Well, how exactly is he going to do that?
You know, the only way that I can see is by in order to identify who these people are and to know where they are is to identify you and me and everybody else.
I foresee that there's going to be some kind of very aggressive national ID thing imposed on the country, and we're probably going to have an expansion of the already in existence internal checkpoints that you have within 100 miles of the border.
Whereas an American citizen, you have to submit to an interrogation and an inspection by some border Gestapo guard.
They're probably going to do that at the state level.
So now if you move from one state to another state, you're going to have to go through some kind of a checkpoint.
Because how else are they going to do this?
I'm not yet to have anybody give me an answer.
And they'll control, you know, they'll use the interstate system to control you going across the state borders and everything, because, you know, they've already used it for the 55 mile an hour speed limit type of thing.
But they're all talking now about mandatory e-verify.
And I see, again, all of these so-called conservative MAGA media, I call them just MAGA media, but they're out there cheering it, just like they're cheering.
They are literally cheering, Eric, the external revenue service.
It's like, what is the matter with these people?
What is conservative about any of this stuff?
They used to always be about anti-tax increase and everything.
They used to always...
Now, because it's Trump, they're like under a spell.
You know, there's two types of Never Trumpers, as I pointed out.
There's the people who are delusional about him, and that would be the MAGA people.
And then there's the people who are deranged about him, you know, who absolutely hate him personally.
But the MAGA people are deluded about him.
And they will never blame Trump for anything.
It's another form of Never Trump.
You know, the other people who want to blame him for everything, they will blame him for nothing.
It all revolves around him.
It really is amazing, isn't it?
Well, it's psychologically interesting, isn't it?
It's sort of a hysterical, a psychologically hysterical frame of mind that, you know, on the one hand, people would say that it afflicts the left.
You know, the left will endorse anything that the left's leadership does because it's the left's leadership.
Well, the other side is exactly the same way.
Yeah.
So, you know, we've got these two sides and you and I, same people, are caught in the middle between this.
You know, these rabid ideologues who are not able to examine a question objectively and look at the facts and let's decide whether is this true or false.
Does it make sense or not?
Is it in accord with a baseline principle of some kind?
No, it's just our guy who says it.
So even if what he says is completely at odds with what he's supposed to be about, it's okay because it's that guy who says it.
That's right.
Yeah, clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right.
Here I am stuck in the middle with you, Eric.
Yeah, right.
Right.
Well, by the way, you know, I don't know whether you had a chance to look at it.
How prophetic it was, wasn't it?
Completely.
I posted an article on some breaking news that happened just overnight about a memo that was disclosed about the future of Chrysler, you know, which is in a parlous, disastrous state right now.
And more than likely, that brand is about to have its plug pulled.
And the reason why, really, again, brings us back to Elon Musk.
Stellantis, the parent company of Chrysler and Dodge and Jeep and Ram, for many years was paying exorbitant amounts of money to Elon Musk to pay off carbon credits, to get carbon credits so that they could be allowed to continue to produce the vehicles that defined those brands, that were big, V8-powered American cars that people like.
The problem was those things got progressively more expensive as a result of those carbon tax costs being transferred onto the sticker price of the vehicles.
So if you skate Carlos Tavares, who used to be the CEO of Stellantis until about a month ago...
The thing to do so we can stop paying these carbon taxes is to stop selling those vehicles altogether.
Instead, we're going to start selling electric cars exclusively.
That's gone over like the proverbial lead balloon.
The management is realizing what a disaster it's been.
They had plans to turn Chrysler into a purveyor of electric luxury vehicles.
They decided we're not going down that road because we can't offload these things.
They're just going to offload Chrysler.
Chrysler is done.
It's gone.
You can thank Elon Musk for it.
And like a parasitical wasp, you know, he flies away with his abdomen full of the nutriment that he got from his victim.
Oh, yeah.
Well, you know, and that's the thing about his doge thing.
The only thing that I've seen anybody mention concrete is, well, he's going to stop these subsidies to his competitors, right?
He's already maxed out on all of that stuff.
So now I'm going to stop the other people who are trying to get into the same business that made me wealthy as a king of chronic capitalism.
I got to stop them from getting the subsidies that worked for me.
And that's the only thing I've seen anybody talk about.
I said, well, that's pretty certain that's going to happen.
Of course, it's just to benefit him.
benefit him.
But they're not going to make a scratch on the rest of the deficit.
And you know, the other thing that sticks in my craw that you should start pointing out to people as well is the fact that all of these Democrats and Republicans who do not care a whit about the deficit or the debt, why do they keep fighting to put more taxes on us, right?
It is absolutely not about balancing a budget.
They don't even remotely care about that.
Why does Trump talk about we're going to have fiscal responsibility with Doge while he throws a temper tantrum over the fact that he couldn't get rid of the debt ceiling growing for two years, right?
And then all the Democrats, they've bought into this stuff.
It says the magic money tree, the modern monetary theory, MMT. They say, hey, deficits don't matter, except when it comes to your tax cut.
And then they all become budget hawks over the tax cuts.
It's disgusting.
And they love to rub our faces in it.
And, you know, one of the things that it really gets my goat is how to put this.
One Zelensky is worth millions of Americans.
You know, think about all the money that has been transferred over to that corrupt regime in Ukraine.
And by the way, it annoys me to hear him referred to with the honor ethic of President Zelensky.
He's not a president.
He's an unelected dictator who suspended elections.
Yeah, that's right.
And he's on the receiving end of great, great hordes and tranches of grift.
And meanwhile, these poor people, you know, in my area, I'm not far from Asheville, North Carolina.
You know, and these poor people literally lost everything.
What did they get?
They get a $750 loan, $950.
Not even, you know, here's $750 to help you buy some food.
It's a loan secured by the deed to their property.
That's what they get.
But Zelensky gets another $800 million today and another $500 million next week.
And that's what they're doing in California as well.
They're still giving out billions of dollars to Zelensky for the war.
And another $750 to the people there.
Now, most of them don't need it.
In the Palisades area, they're multimillion-dollar homes and that type of stuff.
But there's a lot of other people who weren't multimillionaires, and they do need that kind of thing.
I've got a comment here from Marky Mark in New Jersey.
He says the congestion pricing is, of course, above and beyond the road tolls, the bridge tolls, and the parking.
And while we're talking about parking, I'm glad that he brought this up because I was going to talk about what we're seeing in the UK now.
They pioneered this congestion pricing stuff there in London.
They pioneered the ultra-low emission zones or no emission zones, which now California is going to copy and say, no, you can't have any classic cars in these certain areas.
Anything that is 1978 or earlier, we're not going to allow it to be there because we're going to start creating net zero low emission or no emission zones.
But another aspect of this, again, beyond even the 15-minute cities, is charging you for parking based on the emissions of your car.
Think about that.
Your car is not emitting anything while it's parked.
But they're going to have a fee structure that gets really expensive for, of course, they charge people for parking even with electric cars, but it gets really expensive if you have a gasoline car and really, really expensive.
If you've got a diesel car, and it was only about a year or two ago that I first saw that, and at that point in time, they were only putting a surcharge on for diesel.
Now they're putting a surcharge on for diesel and for petrol, as they call it, gasoline car, and of course it's much higher for the, they bumped it up another notch for the diesel stuff, but that's coming here as well.
Emissions-based parking fees, based on what they claim your car is emitting in terms of CO2. You know, the punitive aspect of that is despicable, but circling back to the article that I wrote about what's going on with Chrysler, it makes me so sad to think that these companies didn't have the backbone to try, at least, to explain the facts about these so-called emissions to people via a media and PR blitz.
They had the resources, and they could have...
They could have just put it on the table and pointed out, you know, we're not talking about throwing oil down storm frames.
We're not talking about old junkers with blue smoke pouring out the tailpipe.
We're literally talking about zero, zero point something's difference in some gas that has no meaningful impact on anything.
And for the sake of this, you are being insurfed, you are being impoverished, you are being Sovietized.
It is outrageous, and it is something that could be explained if only somebody would do it.
I mean, I do my best to try to explain it, but, you know, I don't have the wherewithal and the means to get a huge mass audience such as a major corporation could by buying, say, a Super Bowl ad and explaining this stuff to people.
That's right.
Well, you know, and of course, the outlet for you to be able to do that is social media.
That's why they look so carefully at anybody who is opposing the agenda that's there.
And it is...
It's not just about adjusting and micromanaging what people are going to buy.
As you and I have been saying all along, the ultimate goal is to get rid of the electric cars as well.
And they're making that very clear when they talk about the various pricing schemes that they got there.
You're not going to be allowed to have an electric car either.
That's just a transition to full prohibition of privately owned cars and the freedom to move around.
I think the most effective way to challenge all of this, and this is a general thing, it's not just with the EVs, is to challenge the premise.
You hear people accuse someone of, say, anti-Semitism, meaning or implying that somehow you're opposed to Jewish people or you don't like Jewish people, when in fact what you're saying is, I don't like mass murder.
I don't like the policies of the government of Israel.
It's got nothing to do with whether somebody's Jewish or not.
Just the same as...
I don't hate black people when I question affirmative action or racial set-aside policies.
So don't wear the label.
Question it.
And the same with regard to emissions.
No, my car is not polluting anything.
My car is as clean as you can possibly imagine.
Heck, you could close the garage door and idle one of these things and it would take forever to asphyxiate you.
That's how clean they are.
And it just needs to be challenged because they're counting on your guilt mechanism.
They're counting on you feeling bad.
Oh, I'm driving a car that's causing environmental damage.
It's causing the climate to change.
I want to be a good person, just like they did with the whole masking thing.
I don't want grandma to die.
I don't want to hurt somebody else's feelings.
I don't want to make them scared.
Well, the time has come to stop playing by their rules.
That's right.
And it is a behavioral science approach.
They even call it that, nudging people.
And they've got the same organization We've already got...
People who are poor and elderly on pensions, they can't afford to run their air conditioners right now in Australia, where it's hot.
They're shutting that down because of that.
And in the UK, they can't afford to run the heat because they can't afford to pay for it.
Oh, and that's going to happen here.
You know, you and I were talking a little off the air.
Right now, where I live in southwest Virginia, it's in the low teens, and it's going to get colder than that in the next couple of days.
It's going to get down to two or three degrees.
There are people who can't afford the utility bill.
And what's going to happen when they start rationing electricity, which they will do?
That's what the smart meters are for.
That's what the smart appliances are for.
You know, to prevent you from having too big a carbon footprint.
People are literally going to freeze to death.
And they're going to suffocate to death in the heat, too.
And they don't care.
In fact, I think that's what they want.
Yeah, if you look at the electricity rates in the UK, as they're shutting down all their coal power plants, which, just like a car, can be made very clean, but that's not going to be allowed one way or the other.
Not even with scrubbers, you're not going to have it.
Well, their power rates there are four to five times what they are in the United States.
And so, you know, take your electricity bill.
Is it $150?
Let's say that it's $200 or something each month.
You want to see that jump up to $1,000 each month?
Can you afford that?
That's what they're going to do to people.
And they're already working on it up in New York on Long Island.
They've got this massive windmill farm that's there.
I've talked about this many times.
And it's being run by a country, I think it was some oil companies out of Finland, I believe.
And, ironically, are setting up this windmill grift.
And I call it a grift because right now, the wholesale price was in the low 30s per megawatt hour that they're selling on wholesale.
They look at it megawatts instead of kilowatts, like they do with us.
But the number is in the low 30s, but it's going to be in the high 50s is going to be just their profit, whereas the entire cost right now.
The entire cost is in the low 30s.
Just their profits will be in the high 50s.
And why is that?
Well, because it's got to be a windmill.
And there's another aspect to this that not many people are aware of.
It's extraordinarily subtle and extraordinarily vicious.
The regs are such now with regard to...
HVAC equipment, things like heat pumps and so on, that they are increasingly enormously expensive to replace, and you effectively are forced to replace them because they will change the regs with regard to what the allowable refrigerants are.
So if you had a unit that was otherwise repairable, you have to throw it away because it's no longer compliant.
So your choice is to do without or spend potentially $6,000, $10,000 or more.
You know, on a new environmentally compliant heat pump in the past, these things would last 25 or even 30 years.
And they were repairable.
Now they last 7 or 8 years and you throw them away.
And the basis of all this stuff is the Paris Climate Accord, which Trump is pretending that we're in, in the same way that it was a pretense for Kerry and Obama to say that we were in it.
It's not going to change.
And he's not going to be able to do anything with all these tariffs and controls and everything.
He's not going to be able to bring back manufacturing.
If the Chinese can get their electricity at one-tenth the cost of us, there's no way that you can compete with them.
And it's even going to be more obvious because, you know, they've...
Gotten to where they are right now because they exploited their slave labor that's there.
But now it's going to be about energy as they start to automate things more and more.
Your slaves, your robots, you know, the Czech word for slave was robot.
Your robots are going to be running off of that electricity, and they'll be able to get their stuff at an order of magnitude cheaper than you can.
So there's not going to be any way that you can do it.
You can just make things more expensive for the people who live in America if you put these tariffs on.
If he were serious with regard to cars, one thing he could do right off the bat would be to get the federal government out of the business of imposing what they call safety requirements on new vehicles, which have nothing to do with whether a vehicle is safe to drive.
It just has to do with whether they're compliant with whatever the latest regulations are having to do with all sorts of arcane things, such as the position of a headlight or a turn signal and how big it is and things of that nature.
And let manufacturers build vehicles with or without some of the things that are now mandated by government so as to lower the cost of those vehicles.
Imagine if a vehicle manufacturer were allowed legally to design a vehicle that didn't have airbags.
You know, it's not just the airbags.
I harp on this a lot because I think it's important.
The airbags are expensive, but the hidden cost is that the vehicle has to be designed around the airbags.
The whole structure of it, the dash, everything.
The doors, the seats, everything.
This adds thousands and thousands of dollars to the price of a car.
And that's fine if you're in a position to pay for that and if you want that.
But if we live in a free country, why shouldn't I be free to buy a vehicle that doesn't have those things, that's more affordable, that meets my needs and serves my budget?
How is it my so-called safety is any of the government's business?
Oh, I agree.
I agree.
People make that kind of decision all the time.
We used to be able to drive Pintos, as I said.
Karen had one of those when we first met.
Let's get to the point where I'm kind of a fanatic runner.
Most people aren't as crazy as I am and won't go out and run on a day like today.
Because it's 13 degrees out and it's windy.
That's pretty harsh.
But I'm, you know, I have no problem doing it.
I'm healthy enough to do it, so I go out and do it.
But it's going to get to the point probably where the government's going to outlaw that for my safety.
Because, you know, oh, it's too cold for me or for anybody or whatever the generic standard is.
That's what they always do.
It's never individualized because we as individuals are not to be permitted to make our own risk-reward calculations.
It's always got to be done by some expert technocrat within a bureaucracy someplace.
And inevitably, that means it's one size fits all.
And it's just insufferable to constantly feel like you're having a rope tied around you and being parented and pushed around by people who have no moral business doing it at all.
That's right.
They're going to eventually use in that argument, the outlaw motorcycles that are thinking.
That'll be coming after they get rid of the cars just to lock everybody down.
High Boost has got a question for you, Eric.
He says, what is the government and big tech's carbon footprint to keep the data centers running to spy on us and record every keystroke?
That is a big elephant in the room, isn't it?
Along with their wars.
I don't really understand it, which is part of my problem with it, but you hear that the Bitcoin and these cryptocurrencies, somehow they mine data.
That's somehow how the value is created.
I don't have any idea.
But my understanding is that that entails the use of tremendous computing power that soaks up a whole lot of electricity, which means a pretty big carbon footprint.
But that's okay, because again, it's always okay if it serves the agenda, if it's something they want.
Then they turn a blind eye to it, for now, until they change their mind, and then it becomes another matter.
It's just the rank hypocrisy of it.
It's really sometimes it makes you just want to pull your hair and rend your fabric of your clothes, doesn't it?
And just take me back to 1985 when the world was still somewhat sane.
Well, if you go back and look at CBDC, one of the things that blew up about that, you know, had Biden in 2022, I think it was the spring of 2022.
He gave all of the alphabet agencies, which are all under the president.
You know, the deep state is completely under the president.
He gave them all six months to come back and talk about What they were going to do to push forward CBDC. And they had four different areas.
One of them was, how do we completely redesign the financial system?
And people were like, whoa, wait a minute.
Another one was, let's create the code for the CBDC. A third one was, I want to hear from the FBI and Homeland Security how we're going to clamp down on people with this.
But the final one, the fourth one, was to get people to talk about the energy that was being used by crypto.
And so that was a big deal three years ago.
But now, they don't talk about that anymore.
They don't talk about the mining of Bitcoin.
Because now they want the data centers that are going to use to spy on us and to data mine our lives and to collate everything.
They want those.
And so now they've shut up.
about the crypto energy usage because now they're just concerned about how do we feed these AI centers that are going to give us all the information that we want about everybody.
You know, they've been collecting this massive amounts of information.
They need something that's going to data mine that and collate that and feed it to the government in a summary about us.
And so it's like pedal to the metal, how we're going to get energy for all these centers, these AI centers that are out there.
And they don't care anymore about the amount of energy that they're going to use.
And they're going to set up their own private grid, whether it's nuclear or even if they have to set up plants, power plants that use gas, one way or the other, by hook or by crook, they're going to have their AI centers that are going to be surveilling us.
Sure, because it's the ultimate control mechanism, isn't it, at the end of the day?
It's not just that they can know about every transaction that you make.
They can prevent you from making transactions.
This is the means by which they could implement the social credit score.
You know, if you are somebody who is disobedient, if you are somebody who holds contrarian views and had the effrontery to actually express those views...
Well, no gas for you today, or no electricity for you.
You might have X number of dollars in your Bitcoin account or whatever they're going to call it, but what good are they if you can't use them?
At least during the pandemic, one of the saving graces of that time was that you could still use cash.
So face-to-face, in my rural community, I'm friends with the guy who owns the local country store down the road.
He knows me, I know him, and we could transact business anonymously using cash.
And he didn't make me wear a mask because he knows he was opposed to it and he was able to sell his produce and I was able to buy it.
In this dystopian CBDC regime, he wouldn't be able to do that.
The pressure that would be exerted upon him in the sense that it comes down to, can I make a livelihood?
I know you're my friend and everything and I'd like to help you, but if I do this, then I'm not going to be able to take care of my family.
It's horrific.
It's exactly the sort of thing, except in a technocratic way, that they did in the Soviet Union.
And they did in Maoist China and Cambodia and every other place that they've instituted this type of authoritarianism.
But they've learned and gotten more clever.
It's no longer sort of the brute bayonet in your back.
It's these remote, centralized, technocratic control mechanisms that they're using this time.
And they're going to do it in a very subtle way, and in a public-private partnership with Trump, because people kind of caught on to what they wanted to do.
It's another reason that they're coming after the cars.
I mean, you know, when you look at their COVID lockdown, and it was a global lockdown, and Trump was one of the key leaders in I talked earlier in the program about the fact that Davos is kicking off right as he's becoming president.
So he's got to appear at Davos.
This time it'll be...
Virtually, he'll give a speech that's there.
But, you know, remember back in 2020, he went there in January the 21st, he gave a speech, and then within 10 days, his pharmaceutical executive that he put in charge of HHS locked us down with that stuff.
And nobody had died.
There wasn't any pandemic.
But they agreed that they were going to create a pandemic.
And so, you know, when we look at this moving forward, they've got their agendas, and they're going to...
Push these things through one way or the other.
I've got a question for you here from Brian and Deb McCartney.
Can you ask Eric if he has heard of propane being added to the new refrigerants?
Have you heard anything about that?
I have.
It's one of the new refrigerants that are being looked at, which is kind of alarming because it's highly combustible.
You get a leak in the line and you've got a leak of that highly flammable gas under pressure inside your house, potentially near electricity, and kaboom!
Yeah, wow.
And they're getting desperate because there are only so many refrigerants that are at all effective.
You know, they're getting rid of the ones that actually work, and they're trying things that, in a sane world, they would never use because they're dangerous.
That's right.
Well, it's all about them getting somewhere.
They've got a new design that they want to sell people, and so let's ban all the other ones, so now everybody's got to buy our new design.
You know, that's part of the crony capitalism that's there.
But, you know, the refrigerants that they're banning were the ones that they were mandating just a few years ago.
Right?
And so now the worm turns.
But it's all about planned, not even just a planned obsolescence, but it's about a planned prohibition that they put in.
It's another form of obsolescence.
Don't Frag Me Bro says, Carbon tax is a pretext for taxing the air you breathe.
An unremovable face mask linked to rationed oxygen.
Low score?
No more O2 for you.
I agree with that.
You know, I wanted to mention a thing that's relevant to this discussion, too.
It used to be the case that you could go and buy, as a regular guy like you and me, over the counter, you could buy refrigerant, whether for a vehicle or whether for a home HVAC system.
So if you had some technical know-how, you could repair your system yourself.
You can't anymore.
You have to have an official government license in order to buy these refrigerants now.
And you have to have special equipment.
I mean, I'm lucky because I've got two friends who are professionals.
I think I may have talked to you about how the heater core blew up in my truck.
So part of the repair procedure is I have to evacuate the AC system because you have to remove some lines to be able to get the duct work out.
Luckily, I've got a buddy who's got the very expensive equipment that can be used to draw the refrigerant out.
If I just opened up the lines myself, not only would I have committed an environmental crime of some kind, but then I would have lost the very expensive refrigerant that I then would have to go to a certified HVAC or AC technician to get put back into my truck.
The more I look at Terry Gilliam's Brazil, you familiar with that movie?
Yes, actually.
Okay, so at the center of that, right, was Robert De Niro's character who was going around and doing unauthorized air conditioning repairs.
Remember that?
That was the whole thing.
It was like Tuttle or Buttle or something at the very beginning.
This fly drops into the typewriter and puts out the wrong name.
And so then you've got another subplot where they invade the home with a SWAT team and all the rest of this militarized police stuff, which was pretty much unheard of in 1984. You know, Daryl Gates hadn't even really started his stuff in L.A. that everybody patterned it after.
So, you know, he kind of predicted that with an over-the-top SWAT team raid.
Here we are.
We're in 2025. It was funny back then.
It's not so funny anymore.
Exactly.
It was done as a comedy, as a dark comedy, and yet it's all coming true.
It's just like 1984 or something, except this was done as a comedy.
So now we're going to have to have underground air conditioning repairmen.
That's what it's going to come down to.
By the way, I wanted to talk about this if it's okay.
You know, a couple weeks ago when that guy drove the cyber truck up to Trump's hotel in Vegas and blew it up, supposedly, the most interesting aspect of that story to me was that within hours...
All over the media, they had a complete record of his peregrinations because the vehicle was constantly tracking where the guy went.
So they knew he went here, he stopped there, he came here, he did this, he did that.
And it's not just Tesla.
I love to whack the Tesla and Elon Musk pinata, but it's not just him.
It's all the manufacturers.
Your vehicle is...
A spy mobile.
It is watching you.
It is keeping track of everything that you do.
And all of that data is being sent to what I call the hive mind.
And it can and will be used against you at some point.
And this has been going on for 30 years.
And it's gotten to the point now where, I mean, it is surreal.
You have cameras now in the new cars that I test drive that are facing you.
That's right.
And watching you.
And the microphones are listening to you.
And, you know, they're just waiting to turn that switch a little bit more where the insurance company is going to have real-time monitoring capability of your vehicle, you know, and every single time that you drive a little faster than the speed limit or you swerved because a kid ran in the road or, you know, some other thing along that lines, they're going to use that to jack up your insurance rates and you'll have absolutely no choice because they've already made it mandatory.
They'll say that you can't drive unless you pay up the money.
And that's one of the questions that I had about that Cybertruck thing.
You know, Elon Musk is saying, yeah, all of our telemetry was 100 percent and everything.
We tracked everything they did.
Well, you don't have any footage of him shooting himself in the head to prove it when people question that.
I mean, you know, they've got a camera there, as many people talk about.
Well, did he put a body in there and then remotely take it over there and shoot off the fireworks in the trunk?
And so they could disprove all of that by putting out the footage, but they don't do that.
And, of course, they do say that, well, we've got a camera there that's looking at people's eyes to make sure they're actually paying attention, that they're not asleep, and to make sure, warn them if they're not moving enough or if they don't have their hands on the steering wheel or this or that.
So they're watching you in the cab with that stuff, but they haven't released any of that footage yet?
That's one of the things that stinks about this whole narrative.
And another thing, too.
It's interesting, isn't it, that you buy the vehicle and it's ostensibly in your name.
You're the one who's making the payments.
The title has your name on it.
And yet somehow the car is under the control of some other party.
And you don't even know who it is.
It's just a strange disconnect.
And I think most people don't even realize it, though they're beginning to.
And I think they're beginning to have a big problem with it, because why shouldn't they?
I don't necessarily have a problem with this stuff if it were opt-in.
If you were given the choice, hey, you know, we have the capability to mine your data.
I'm sure they call it something more appealing.
But we'll give you a coupon for a free stake or whatever once a month somewhere.
You'll get something in return for it.
But if you don't want it, you don't have to have it.
You can say no.
You can't say no.
You know, you buy the vehicle and that's part of the package.
And so you never really own the vehicle.
Just like in this country, you never own your house because you constantly have to pay rent to the government in order to avoid being kicked out of what you like to think is your house.
Oh, yeah.
Well, no, they're not going to give you a free stake every week, every month or whatever.
They're not going to give you anything.
They want to own everything and you will own nothing.
I mean, these people who run this stuff and do it, they are, if nothing else, they're incredibly greedy about all of this.
Mark says early refrigerants were ammonia and methane, which were eliminated for obvious reasons.
Freon was invented to have a safe refrigerant.
Now we've got to ban that.
We've got to ban the second generation or whatever it was of that as well.
They claim Freon is toxic, but the molecules are actually heavier than air, so they don't waft up into the sky.
They settle down on the ground.
All of that was a gigantic hoax.
They managed to terrorize people about the ozone hole.
They always come up with one, as you call it, MacGuffin or Boogeyman after another.
There's a big hole in that whole narrative about the Freon hole.
Not only is it not going to float up, but I remember when the thing came out, they said, oh, look, there's a hole in the stratosphere or wherever, you know, that's over the poles or something.
And they said, well, we've never seen this before.
It's like, have you ever looked before?
Well, no, we've never looked before, but it must be ominous because it's there, you know?
It's like, you don't know if it wasn't always there.
So cheap, inexpensive refrigerants, you know, they've been pushed off the market in favor of...
Expensive and potentially dangerous refrigerants which will in their turn be pushed off the market for even more expensive and even more dangerous refrigerants.
So of course the people at the apex of the pyramid they'll be able to deal with it because they've got the resources and the money to be able to deal with it.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, you have an article about Trump, a convicted felon, you point out.
And you talk about how they throw their arbitrary laws at us.
And, of course, he was railroaded.
But at least the bright side of this, I think, is we finally got a politician with some convictions.
My hope here in the article, I wrote about something that happened to me when I was a 19 or 20 year old kid.
I got in trouble for growing pot plants back in the day.
And I thought about this and thought, you know, while not carrying water from the orange man, I do have sympathy for the way, you know, at least just on the face of it, he was pursued inspecting.
Dr. Javert like over these alleged crimes that had no victim whatsoever, that were mostly technical foul kinds of things.
And my hope was that he might have a moment of humanity in him and recognize that this sort of thing is wrong.
legal doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong and persecuting people for such things and putting them in jail and ruining their lives over literally nothing you know you can't adduce a victim which in a better time you know you had to produce a victim harm somebody got hurt somebody you know was defrauded something happened that was bad instead it's the state's authority was affronted in some manner and that becomes the basis for putting people in prison it's it's evil oh yeah i think about what happened to me as a kid i
I potentially could have gone to prison for growing pot plants in my state where it's now legal to grow pot plants.
Totally arbitrary.
Yeah, that's right.
Like H.L. Meekin said, a year ago if I had a gold piece in one pocket and a hip flask in the other, the gold was legal and the alcohol was illegal.
Now, here we are a year later after FDR gets in, and now the gold is illegal and the alcohol is legal.
It's just arbitrary stuff that's there.
And, of course, you would think that Trump would have some sympathy for people who are railroaded and had weaponized persecution against them, but there's still some question as to whether or not he's going to pardon all of the J6ers.
And J.D. Vance actually brought this up over the weekend.
Well, I don't know if they're violent.
I don't know about that.
You just had Biden pardon people on death row.
I mean, it's amazing.
There is absolutely no—it's all about him.
And he never thinks about anybody else.
He demands 100% loyalty to him, and he has absolutely no loyalty to his supporters.
And J6 is exhibit A. They maybe broke some glass or walked in a place where they ought not to have.
And these people, some of them have been in prison now for four years.
For what amounts to it— The worst, disorderly conduct maybe, you know, some relatively trivial thing.
Nobody was physically harmed that I'm aware of at that event.
And as you say, for me, it will be a big acid test if he does not issue a blanket pardon.
And not only a blanket pardon, frankly, in a lot of the cases, restitution for what was done to those people.
Yes.
Just as recently as, what, a couple of months ago, I saw a video of they actually sent the Hut, Hut, Hut crew.
You know, the body armored thugs descended on some guy's house because he had been there, I guess.
You know, he hadn't done anything.
They're still arresting people.
They got 200 more people on the list, you know, that they wanted to get that they haven't gotten.
And they were arresting people, you know, in the last month or so.
They're going and getting more people.
It's absolutely insane.
And of course, you know, he could always preemptively pardon people.
And now that Biden has done that, preemptive pardon for Hunter, now that he has pardoned 1,500 people, now that he has pardoned people who committed murder and terror events and all this other, how in the world does Trump not do that?
And yet it's Trump.
Right.
I can imagine that he won't do it.
If it serves Trump's interest, he may do it.
I think that's what it comes down to.
That's right.
Only if it is in his interest.
Because it was not in his interest to preemptively pardon people, even though we had historical precedents, many of them.
You know, just look at Gerald Ford and Nixon, you know, recently with that.
But, you know, there were precedents for doing that.
But his lawyer.
Who I think was looking after Trump's interests decided that they would throw these people under the bus.
So we'll see what happens with it.
But it's not a...
When you look at the things that he suffered...
He's had to pay some fines, and I know that's something that cuts him deeply to have to give part with some money.
He's not been in jail at all.
Eric, it's always great talking to you.
Thank you so much for joining us, and stay warm.
We're trying to fight that thing.
I'll do my best, David, except when I go out there for a run in a little bit.
Yeah, well, that's good.
I'm glad you can do that.
EricPetersAutos.com.
EricPetersAutos.com.
Excellent articles about mobility, about liberty, and also Some car reviews that are practical.
Thank you, Eric.
Appreciate it.
thank you
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