Well, it's a wonderful morning here in deepest, darkest Russia where we spread the Russian Welcome to the David Knight Show.
I'm Gardner Goldsmith, and thank you so much to David for asking me to fill in today.
He and his wife will be celebrating their anniversary, and I couldn't be happier for them.
I hope everyone is having a fantastic morning wherever you are.
If you're watching us live...
Please spread the links and share with your friends.
Share and share alike voluntarily.
You don't even have to be forced by a socialist system.
And of course, check out David's libertitarian And if you're watching after the fact, please share the videos after the fact as well and visit the website whenever you get the opportunity, especially if you're watching over the weekend.
I'm incredibly gratified that David has asked me to be here and what an honor, just an amazing time to be with you and share some ideas, break apart some of this news that's coming around and maybe derive some long-standing lessons.
I often call it intellectual ammunition.
That we can use.
Philosophical, economic lessons, axioms, historical ideas, and of course theological ideas as well.
So share your thoughts.
We're going to do some very interesting back and forth with some questions I'd like to ask you and get your answers, on which I'd like to get your answers.
And some breaking news about the incoming Trump administration and the Middle East peace.
So welcome to the program, everyone.
On this, the last business day of the Biden administration, as he says, bye-bye, and we get off the plane like Saturday Night Live.
He is utterly dismissive of anything that has to do with honor, anything that has to do with the United States Constitution, and utterly dismissive of politics.
The concept of natural rights.
Never forget that sneer that he gave to Clarence Thomas when Clarence Thomas was being grilled as he was the nominee to join the Supreme Court many decades ago.
So, what is on tap today for the David Knight Show, the 17th of January?
Well, we're going to have a very busy show, sort of dovetailing from my program last night.
I get to do Monday through Friday a 6 p.m.
program called Liberty Conspiracy, and I also do work for MRCTV. In fact, the executive director of MRCTV, Eric Shiner, will be joining us during the 11 o'clock hour, and I'm looking forward to talking to him about the end of the Biden administration.
And what people are thinking as they look at the media's analysis of the Trump administration.
So we'll talk about some of their flip-outs over things that they could have flipped out about regarding the Biden administration, perhaps.
And we'll get your opinions on all of these things as well.
Well, today on the program, everybody, and by the way, on my program, I often use this opportunity.
To say tonight on Liberty Conspiracy at 6 o'clock.
But of course, whatever time zone you're in, it could be day, night, or as they say in Repo Man, day, night, what's the difference?
But let's talk a little bit about my little audio test.
I always like to do this to make sure that the audio I'm playing is going to be coming through.
I mean...
That our Russian handlers are playing in the back here in this massive studio in Moscow, Hampshire, that the audio is coming through.
And I often like to play Genesis, who also poses as Humpty D.
So you just let me know if, as we all know, Humpty D was a member of Genesis.
He left Digital Underground.
Phil Collins left for a while.
I know my music history, just like Joe Biden knows the Constitution.
I'm already hearing in my Russian brain chip plant that implanted in the back of my skull that we have someone who is offering us a positive vibe for today's program.
Martin Thorne is in the house on X and joining a lot of people as they populate.
Thank you, everybody.
I'm greatly gratified.
And let me know if you got to hear Humpty, and that will let us know that our Russian system is still operating in the United States and hasn't been blocked by the Biden administration or sanctioned by the Trump administration.
Yes, we've got that story.
Well, on our program today, everyone, including a visit from Eric Scheiner towards the end of the program, our big story is about the outgoing Biden administration.
Outgoing Biden adds a flurry of insults, executive orders, and says, fare thee well, as an added bit of salt in the wounds.
His farewell address.
Are you faring well?
Are you?
For some reason, I'm not feeling the vibe, sir.
I'm not.
It's just not coming through to me.
Perhaps it's sort of like the song by the Dukes of Stratosphere that I often play on my program for the theme for American warmongering and hegemony.
My love explodes all over the world for you.
I'm just not feeling it, Joe.
It's not translating.
But we've got...
Another major story that broke yesterday afternoon, and I got to cover this, and it concerns in particular a journalist whose work I have featured often on Liberty Conspiracy and whom I admire greatly, Max Blumenthal.
And it was the final press meeting between so-called Secretary of State, more Secretary of Socialist Statism, Antony Blinken.
And Matt Miller, along with a number of other lackeys and officials standing around in the State Department, as journalists literally got pulled out, physically pulled out of the room for asking questions about the genocide in Gaza that is being...
Conducted and has been conducted by the IDF and the Israeli officials.
It was an amazing, amazing show of integrity on the part of these journalists who have shown such great integrity.
Got the footage for you, and we've got one of the responses from the pop media lackeys.
We'll also talk about Mike Walsh's deranged view of innocent Palestinians and...
Question whether or not this is a real ceasefire in Gaza.
One of the early breaking stories is about what's happening right now and the potential that even though the United States could have pretty much brought peace there anytime by stopping the unconstitutional weapons flow to that place, just like they could have gotten Zelensky to back down and stop and ask for peace by stopping the unconstitutional weapons flowing to Ukraine.
Well, there is a chance for a ceasefire.
But is it really a ceasefire?
We'll also talk about Marjorie Taylor Greene proposing a bill to drop charges against Ed Snowden.
And the Securities and Exchange Commission has been called on by a circuit court to finally resolve what the heck it's calling Bitcoin.
Is it a currency?
Is it a commodity?
Well, you let me know what you think and what you think.
of the SEC delaying this, which has really been a big problem for people like Coinbase and others who would like for more people to enter the market, but people have been afraid to because they don't want to get slammed by the SEC. We'll also talk about the LA fires, the Hunter Biden arc going up, and the anger growing.
Out West.
Many of my friends out there, as you know, I worked in television on two TV shows.
One was up in Vancouver.
One, Star Trek Voyager, was, of course, in downtown LA. I lived in Pasadena.
Most of the houses around there are now gone.
Probably the house in which I lived as well.
It's just unbelievable.
And to translate it from my personal experience to other people, I can't even imagine what they're going through.
And many of my friends out there, I still haven't found out.
My old agent, I think he's lost both of his houses.
He used to rent one.
And then Eric Scheiner will be joining us on the program.
And he will be talking to us from MRCTV about the new administration and the old.
Out with the old, in with the new.
How different is it?
So again, thanks everyone for being there.
And I want to welcome everybody inside the chats.
I really appreciate you being there.
And of course, spread those links.
And don't forget, I'll be looking at, I mean, the Russians.
We'll be looking at your comments at any time because, of course, they control me as, you know, the Biden administration or many of the pop media figures probably told you.
I want to thank Karen Carpenter for being in the house.
Jason Barker sent me a text a little bit earlier, Knights of the Storm.
Occult Priestess, who is a hostess as well.
Hostess with the mostess.
Check her out on Rockfin.
And also, over at Rumble, feel free to drop your comments in there.
We'll try to see those.
As often as we can.
And again, spread those links.
And don't forget, you can donate while I'm here.
That always makes me feel really good.
I really appreciate that as well.
I see Hal 9000 Watson is inside the Fruit Stripe Gum Colors of the Great Rumble Land.
Opossum King is there.
And we're going to be talking about TikTok as well.
As Will, Two Box, and a lot of other folks.
Not Tupac, but Two Box.
He's living in a box.
So, as I often do on Liberty Conspiracy, I'll open with a song, maybe I'll mix in video cuts, or I'll get a visit from the past.
Not our old-time newsreader who comes in with black and white and has that tinny voice.
It's the news!
Let's go!
And it's all scratchy.
But I go back a couple decades to Saturday Night Live, and we welcome a man from New Jersey.
Who's a big Trump supporter, actually, a Republican, Joe Piscopo, to tell us it's time for...
Yes, it's time for the big story.
And for me, the big story really is about what happened down in the State Department and what it reveals about Anthony Blinken.
And the final note of the Biden administration's suppression of free speech as they literally had police officers carry away two journalists just for asking questions.
But these journalists knew this was their last chance.
And what's going to happen to them?
They just went with it.
And it was great.
However, I want to get to the Joe Biden goodbye.
He said, fare thee well.
Are you faring well?
Let's find out about this.
About five minutes into Thursday night's Joe Biden farewell speech, he offered us a series of points, and I have some notes that I took about these things, and you might want to offer some of your fondest recollections from Joe Biden's presidency and Joe Biden's vice presidency and time in the Senate, just to see whether or not...
Whether or not this man's claims about how much he respects you and respects the office of the presidency and the Congress and the court systems, whether they really hold.
Here he is, after a few minutes spending time with the obligatory, written-for-him speechwriters offering him...
Some historical story about, you know, in 1825, there was a man who, yeah, once you get past that, you can scroll about three minutes into it, and you get to hear him actually getting to puffing himself up by praising the United States, but really he's praising himself and telling us how great he is.
So, here he is, and you let me know substantively what items have popped up in your mind that have been affronts.
to the U.S. system, affronts to your liberty, your pocketbook, and have damaged you or your neighbor because of this proud, prideful, shameful, deceitful, murderous man.
Oh, we're going to have...
Going to have a little something that I've got to get past, it looks like, which was not on there last night.
Okay, we'll continue.
here we go so
i will get into the philosophical arguments against any group of people forming a government claiming that they can make a claim for you and call themselves we the people.
They can only speak for themselves.
Let's just get that straight.
And the pronoun we is the most dangerous pronoun.
For the political force to use to force you into their government inclusion.
It's we, whether you like it or not.
And don't forget, the writer Zemiatin wrote an entire novel called We.
He was a dissident Soviet writer.
And the novel was not published in the Soviet Union.
It was published probably in the 1920s or 30s in France.
George Orwell read it, and so did Ayn Rand.
And the book heavily influenced 1984 and Anthem, because in his world, no one has a name.
They only have a number, just like the prisoner.
And it's a collective.
There's no I, just like Anthem.
So that man's writing, for some reason...
The people who were in charge of the collective we back then, they didn't like the novel we, which was a cut on this.
Let's look at these institutions.
And I'd like to welcome a guest in a couple minutes to get his opinions on some of the things we're discussing.
As I go through some of these, Eric Peters is ready to join us.
This is great.
And I'm really excited about it.
He'll give us the information.
And this was something that was on tap, but I didn't mention it just in case he couldn't join us.
He can.
So we'll talk to Eric Peters about this transition as a special guest in this first hour in just a couple minutes.
Here we go as we hear some of the specifics about the things that this man supposedly respects.
Again, another canard.
He's...
Intentionally, they funnel this maintaining our democracy thing.
That is one of the themes they constantly, constantly hammer so that people will think that the United States system is a democracy.
Benjamin Franklin said it.
James Bovard said it.
Democracy is, of course, two wolves and a sheep voting over what's for lunch.
Democracy is majority rule.
But again...
I'm an anarchist Christian.
I'm a Christian anarchist, what they call a voluntarist.
I don't support the polis in any form on ethical grounds, on moral grounds.
I would be satisfied functionally if they could get back to the U.S. constitutional system.
I'd be more satisfied if they opened things up to the Articles of Confederation and went with that system.
But just as far as when I'm teaching or lecturing in class, I try to explain to people, even the Constitution has no real authority over you.
It's not something that you signed.
You were never asked.
You didn't give your permission.
It was people who set up a Constitution that claimed power over people at that time and set up a system, a bureaucratic system, that allowed people to enter those offices to continually...
Claim power over other people.
And it said, we promise that the people claiming power over you will only do X, Y, and Z. All the rest, they have to amend things and you have to give your support.
But of course, if you don't give your support and you're in the minority for even an amendment, well, you can see it's not you governing yourself.
Self-governance is self-governance, not an independent nation state.
That's not self-governance.
That's you.
That's you operating on your own.
And if people think that you have to have a political system in order to have a police and so on, historical examples abound that you do not have to force your neighbor to pay for your protection.
That's essentially what the state is, even on the most basic federal level.
So when they instituted the Constitution, they didn't institute a democracy.
They instituted what is called, obviously, a constitutional republic.
It's something that most people in this audience, I assume, know and they're very conversant with.
However, the one thing I would like to add to that is really a constitutional republic is really just democracy a couple steps removed.
It's a little bit better according to their rules.
They promise you they'll only do certain things.
But it's still a majority voting to have a constitution that you never asked for, that you never gave your support for, and it is imposed on you.
It's still a majority rule within a pocket that then comes forward.
And that's always the way it goes.
It's majority rule inside Congress.
It's majority rule inside the Senate.
They have the so-called checks and balances.
It's not a democracy.
At least we can mention that, because that is just an explicit acceptance of sheer majority rule without any bounds of the Constitution, which is something, of course, that that man right there seems to love.
The idea of saying that when the government imposes its will through majority on you, that it's somehow you.
It's somehow this wonderful, rich environment where everyone's had a chance to have his say.
Well, if you would like to have your say over your own life, then majority rule over your life has to be eliminated.
Well, we're going to get another.
is...
They're not supposed to have these things in here.
I need to get my blocker.
All right.
Sorry about that.
that.
Here we go.
Okay.
So we know it's not a pandemic and they're faking people on that.
It's not a pandemic.
It wasn't a pandemic.
There's no way they can...
Claim it was a pandemic because they were subsidizing the death numbers and they were using fraudulent PCR tests that were ramped up to tell people that people were turning up positive for so-called COVID-19.
But what about those institutions?
Let's get to this.
Okay, if you say so.
I don't believe it, but...
Are you laughing now?
So let's go through some of these institutions.
I've taken some notes, and maybe you've taken some notes, mental or physical notes.
The presidency, the Congress, the courts, freedom of speech, right?
Okay.
Well, let's talk about the presidency, and here's a little bit from this deceitful man.
How about not just the presidency, but when he was vice president with Barack Obama as vice president and...
We'll look at since 2021. Let's see what testifies to his respect for the institutions and what actually testifies to this murderous charlatan's disingenuousness.
As vice president, he used his position to curry favors in businesses, foreign businesses, for his son.
He supported drone strikes.
Through the Obama administration with John Brennan, he supported the overthrow of Libya, the overthrow of Ukraine, starting in late 2013 and then early 2014, and not only worked with Nazis in the Slovoda Party for this overthrow and the cobbling together of the new pro-Atlantic Council, pro-NATO, pro-American government there under Yatsenyuk, but also...
Worked to get his son on the board of Burisma and then worked to get fired the investigator who started to investigate the corruption of Burisma.
He, as president, issued executive orders left and right, willy-nilly, to mandate jabs for federal workers and for people trying to transport goods across the border.
And for dock workers coming off of boats, his executive orders locked away huge swaths of state land that is supposed to be controlled by the state, locked that away from energy exploration.
He arbitrarily imposed unconstitutional so-called sanctions on Russian citizens while shipping Ukraine over $115 billion in arms, ammunition, and money.
I wonder how hypocritical that looks to some people.
He tried to expand Title IX, which already is unconstitutional under an unconstitutional Department of Education.
And he tried to expand it so that men dressed as women could go into girls' bathrooms and play sports against them while they're physically much more dominant and could hurt the girls.
Not only...
Not to mention the fact that it's unfair to have that happen with a physical advantage like that.
He fed weapons to Israel.
And of course, let's see.
Oh yes, that's right.
He had the January Sixers locked up far beyond anything that even the government might describe typically as a time to provide a speedy trial.
He broke half of the Bill of Rights by doing that.
He favored things like red flag laws, just like Donald Trump, which again, breaches half the Bill of Rights.
And he also was dismissive of Congress.
Let's talk about this.
He not only didn't veto last year's anti-speech, anti-Semitism bill, he allowed them to sanction members of the ICC. The International Criminal Court.
While a few members of Congress, the ones who actually uphold the Constitution, he dismissed people like Thomas Massey and others who tried to hold up the fact that the United States Congress has to declare war in order for there to be allies and enemies and in order for the weapons to be shipped during declared wars.
Let's see.
Oh, and the courts.
Does he mean the courts that he and the Democrats, like the Supreme Court, respect so much that they wanted to pack the courts after Donald Trump had his opportunity to fill vacancies that were emptied, and he did, and they just didn't like the balance of the court?
Was that it?
The Justice Department, that's...
Something that deals a lot with bringing people to trial and bringing charges against them.
Again, I wonder how the J6ers feel about that.
Or I wonder how parents who were targeted by his Justice Department's FBI feel in knowing that just because they expressed concerns about the pedagogy or the trans ideology in some of their local schools, his FBI sent agents out.
And not only that, To portray those people as possible domestic terrorist threats.
But in addition to that, literally had his Department of Education and FBI try to work with the National Association of School Boards to get them to write a letter to the Biden administration claiming that they were concerned when the idea initiated At the Biden administration.
And they had not expressed any concern over terroristic threats.
And then, of course, we have the three-strike sentencing that he came up with when he was a senator.
The three-strikes laws.
How many thousands of people and families had their lives ruined because of the three-strikes federalization of crimes like drug possession?
How many people got harmed just as bystanders because of the high speed chases in which police engaged to get after some of these people?
How about the United States pulling out of Afghanistan the way that it did?
How about him looking at his watch while there were dead soldiers in front of him and grieving families?
How about that?
And again, those soldiers Who swore owes to the Constitution should not have abided by the orders to go to those other countries without, yes, a declaration of war from Congress.
And don't forget, let's not forget that sneering dismissive look that he directed to Clarence Thomas.
And how about a free and independent press?
Were any of you like I? Were any of you silenced at Facebook?
Or Twitter?
How about NewsGuard?
As you know, if you watch my program, my work for MRCTV has been attacked numerous times, as has other people's work in MRCTV, by the federally subsidized NewsGuard.
Which will downgrade certain websites and make it more difficult for them to get advertising revenue and they send emails out to us to give us busy work when all they have to do in their questions about the veracity of our articles is hit the hyperlinks we intentionally put in there to support our arguments.
How about Anthony Fauci having a midnight phone call to try to figure out and coordinate How about Joe Biden using your tax money to try to fight those people who were just merely standing up for their right to free speech under the First Amendment that is supposedly protected by it and having your money used
for attorneys to argue in the Supreme Court that they don't have any argument?
How about the very existence of the FCC? Or, as we will see, what happened yesterday as the final capper to their amazing respect for freedom of speech.
Joe Biden, freedom of speech, at the last bye-bye of Antony Blinken, Members of the press for asking questions.
This shameful, shameful, deceitful, deadly life of Joe Biden capped off in the United States with reporters honestly and I think very, very courageously asking about genocide in front of Antony Blinken.
First, I want to show you this.
I don't know if you're familiar with this reporter, but Sam Husseini, as Dave DeCamp of Anti-War News notes, Sam Husseini was physically dragged from Anthony Blinken's briefing yesterday afternoon.
Why aren't you in The Hague, he asked finally, as the goons carried him away.
The final visual and aural...
Punctuation mark to this long time, even before the Biden administration, deep state attack against real journalists like you, perhaps.
Here we go.
Watch this.
That's Anthony Blinken up there.
That's Sam Husseini.
As he is asked a question, he's supposed to be able to ask questions.
People just shout out things when they're given those opportunities.
not happening.
Oh, God.
Yeah.
Now you see him trying to turn his arm behind his back.
There's another angle of this that has stronger sound and a closer picture of it.
So check this out.
Here's the new angle.
As Gerald Salente writes this.
Here's what happens when actual journalists ask questions in the USSA. The back and forth between Fox News and CNN is just a performance.
And Fiorella Isabel also.
Posted it.
She says, breaking.
Let everyone know.
This is what the U.S. State Department does to a journalist asking real questions.
And this is what's coming for anyone doing the same.
You won't see this in China, Russia, or Iran, though.
Well, they definitely haven't done this in Russia.
And there he is being carried away.
Thank you.
Respect the process.
Isn't that great?
Anthony Blinken says we will respect the process.
They make up the process.
The process is supposedly the U.S. Constitution.
If they abided by the U.S. Constitution, he wouldn't be there.
He'd be in prison.
100%.
He'd be up for war crimes.
They wouldn't be sending those weapons anywhere, regardless of where they're sending them, to the Philippines, to Poland, to Taiwan, or to Ukraine or Israel.
And then we have this, because I didn't know that just before this, Max Blumenthal spoke up, and he got thrown out.
And this is the final note of a shameful, abysmal, anti-speech administration that will do anything it possibly can to silence dissent.
Of honest people who are actually real journalists.
This is Max from his phone standing up in this last moment.
The courageous people who are trying, trying to stop the United States from looking like Airstrip One in 1984. These are the people who, if you've read that novel, would be Winston Smith's fighting the system.
And you'll see what the government did to these people.
And watch as most of the journalists just sit there, sit there, waiting for more dribs and drabs.
This is the last press conference.
What have they to fear?
There's not going to be an Antony Blinken to cause them problems and shut them out in the future.
There's a new administration coming in next week.
This is their last chance.
But instead, they sit there.
They sit there and wait to try to look good in the face of Anthony Blinken so they can get the last bit of information spoon-fed to them from Anthony Blinken.
More propaganda and lies from Anthony Blinken so they can shovel that back to their editors and say, look, we're a conduit for the agency.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Excellent, excellent work.
The internet, at least X, exploded.
The information that was spreading about this was 10 times as large as the information from some of the other trending topics.
Some of the other trending topics, maybe 6,000 posts.
This had 300,000, 400,000.
It was excellent.
It was excellent to see this.
And that's just when I looked, so maybe nine times.
Now I want to show you this one.
This is from a different angle.
As Nader Abed writes this, and the volume picks up as he's pulled away.
Thank you.
Excellent.
I love that.
You too, Matt.
Matt Miller.
And absolutely, absolutely.
No wonder they compare him to a vampire.
And this, by the way, this is how they framed it on CNN. And check this out.
This is utterly incredible.
As you see here, cringeworthy heckling, they claimed.
And while footage of Sam Husseini being dragged out of police plays, one CNN personality heralds the open policy It's stunning.
It's as if these people will just talk without allowing their brains to function, just get sound out there to fill the time.
They don't even know who these reporters are.
They think they're activists.
Well, CNN, with its various acts of so-called journalism, has shown us the truth about people.
Journalists are not objective.
Human beings are not objective.
We're all subjective creatures.
But the least we can do is try to be fair in our reporting.
Try to offer as much information to people as possible.
And if we don't know something, don't try to claim that we know something.
If we don't have enough information, don't try to drag out the information.
Don't pretend that you're just encountering a prisoner of Assad who hasn't seen the light for three months when, in fact, the guy just went in there and got under a blanket.
Don't tell us that when you're covering the United States so-called defense of Kuwait that you're in Israel and getting attacked by Scud missiles when you're actually CNN reporters in Georgia in a studio.
Don't give us all of these lies.
How about that, CNN, for journalism?
And maybe find out who Max Blumenthal is.
Here we go.
So let's stop it there.
Now, what do you think?
Either they don't know who he is, they don't know who Sam or Max are, or they do, and they're lying to the public.
Because everybody's an activist for something.
These guys are journalists.
They have journalist credentials.
Watch this.
I mean, the visuals kind of tell you what's going on.
Unbelievable.
Let's get the thoughts of a great guest who has been with us throughout this administration on the David Knight Show.
And he was with David just recently, and he's been waiting.
And I appreciate him coming on on very short notice.
And Eric Peters of Eric Peters Autos is here on the David Knight Show.
Eric, nice to have you here.
And of course, this being the last business day of the Biden administration, hopefully people will be able to make some money in their businesses to pay their taxes.
But then again, maybe they can't because they might be shut down for environmental regulations or other things.
How are you, my friend?
Well, it looks like you're not coming through on your mic.
Hold on a second.
There you go.
Are you there?
How about now?
Am I good?
Yeah.
All right.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Yes, indeed.
Thank you for having me on, and I'm sorry if I looked a little derelict, the Zoolander reference.
I got your text asking me to come on the show, and I hadn't yet taken a shower, so excuse me.
Well, I appreciate you doing so, and I know that there, of course, you're in deepest, darkest Siberia, so it's rough.
You're coming from a long distance to spread that Russian propaganda, so thanks for doing so.
Well, the nice thing about doing what I do is that I do it at home.
So I don't have to go into an office per se, or I do.
Well, my office is just down the hall from my bedroom.
So I have that luxury, which I indulge in.
But I wanted to make an observation about what you were talking about just a moment ago, which is this, what would you call it?
This lunatic despicability of these people, of the entire Biden regime, and all of these freaks that are part of that.
I listened.
As much as I could tolerate to Biden's farewell address in which, among other things, he talked about how it's very, very important that people pay their fair share of taxes and don't get away with not paying taxes.
And this is the man who just pardoned his son for federal tax evasion, among other things.
Absolutely.
And of course, he'll define what fair share is as he steals from you.
I hope that this is simply...
A case of a senile, elderly man.
Because the alternative?
That he's that unbelievably vicious?
You know, I mean, how could you even do that?
What kind of person do you have to be to lecture others about how they need to pay the taxes that whatever they are, however high they are, that the IRS imposes?
At the same time, he uses his power, the power of the office, to excuse his son from paying taxes.
Wouldn't you have a problem at the table if you had even this much conscience?
How could you get in front of a camera and say such a thing?
Absolutely.
It's amazing how they'll continue to try to spout that rhetoric that makes them try to look like they identify with the little guy when they are part of the cronyist, upper-class, political control grid that not only forces all the little guys to pay the taxes, also...
Games the system so that their friends can do great and not pay the taxes.
It's incredible.
And I think it also is dependent upon this short attention span that people have combined with, what's a good word for it?
This reflexive ideological posture that rank-and-file people have on both sides.
Not just the left, but also on the right.
You know, Trump can say or do something execrable and people who are, you know, the most virulent red hat MAGA people will excuse it, rationalize it, ignore it.
You know, because it's their guy who's saying it.
Move on to the next thing.
You know, it's always urgent.
We move on to the next thing.
And just of a piece psychologically with what the people on the left side do.
And so people like you and I who still sort of have our sanity are kind of caught in the middle of all of this.
Oh, and you know, Eric, I'm glad you brought up Trump because I think it's very important to fold in Trump every once in a while as one gives...
What I believe is very appropriate opprobrium, offers that opprobrium, you know, looking at Joe Biden.
When we talk about things like free speech and we see people like Sam or Max literally being pulled out or pushed out of a room where Anthony Blinken, who literally sat in a pizza joint with Nazi regalia on the wall in Ukraine and shakes hands with a man.
Whom he is giving weapons to slaughter people in Gaza.
They, simply asking questions, Anthony Blinken is seen as the respectable one as they silence them and gag them just like Planet of the Apes with Charlton Heston on trial.
Yeah, it could have been Charlton Heston.
You know, it's like, Dr. Zayas, you can't stop me.
That's what it was like.
Well, I've got another reference that's even darker.
And, you know, it seems to be where we're headed.
Do you remember back in the, I guess it was probably in the 80s or 90s, Saddam Hussein convened his parliament and he sat there, you know, like a gloating demon as he identified and called out his political opponents that were in the audience.
And I think it was the parliament.
I don't remember what the term is in Iraq for whatever their legislative.
of the room.
Yeah, I remember that.
I remember that.
Because, of course, those people were being dragged out to be put in front of a ditch in a firing squad and killed.
Absolutely.
And they were put out there on camera as an example to others.
So they had the double action.
That's exactly it.
It serves multiple purposes.
And Donald Trump, what amazes me is, what's curious here is, You actually might see some of the MAGA folks who support Trump and especially the Christian Zionists like the Mike Huckabees out there or the Pete Hegsess out there applauding not only what CNN was saying but what was done to those reporters because those reporters were calling out a very clear genocide being
conducted by the IDF and Netanyahu.
But they don't think so.
They somehow think that they're constitutionalists, while they're dragging reporters out of the State Department, that they're constitutionalists while the United States has no declared war and is sending weapons abroad.
They think they're constitutionalists, and this is where we're going, while the Congress recently voted to sanction...
The individual members of the International Criminal Court and while Congress, except for a couple like the people on the squad and Thomas Massey, voted literally to say that criticism of a state called Israel is anti-Semitism.
Because of something that occurred, what, about 100 years ago.
I'm sure you're familiar with the Schofield Bible.
And these people managed to...
Effectively rewrite the Bible in a way such that the veneration of Israel uber alis is the prime directive.
And thus, we have arrived at a point now where a lot of Christians believe that to criticize, as you say, the state of Israel, not Jews, you know, not attacking Jews as individual human beings, but to criticize Israel, the state, that constitutes, as you say, anti-Semitism, and that's synonymous with being anti-Jewish.
Absolutely.
And you know, Eric, David brings it up often.
There's a difference between political Israel and biblical Israel.
And of course, with the New Covenant, with Christ's coming, the followers of Christ are part of that line of Israel.
But regardless of that, of course, is the fact of these people swearing their oaths to the Constitution and the supporters of Trump all along the line.
As Biden would silence people, as we heard more from Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger, and I was reporting at MRCTV starting in 2016 about the Portman Murphy countering foreign propaganda bill.
I said, this is the United States government funding news agencies and censorship organizations.
This is what's coming.
And conservatives, some, paid attention to it.
But now, when they're in Congress voting to say, you know what?
It's anti-Semitism to do this.
When people are standing up against this genocide and when Donald Trump says and Pam Bondi, I call her Bondi, Bondi says, yes, we should make sure that no university gets federal money if they allow for pro-terrorist, otherwise known in most we should make sure that no university gets federal money if they allow for pro-terrorist, otherwise known in most cases They portray that as, well, that means you're pro-Hamas.
That means you're pro-terrorist.
Is the United States government?
Is the Israeli government pro-terrorist?
Because they funded Hamas.
Yeah, I mean, it's another example of this mind diddling that they do, this gaslighting that they do, this blaming of the victim that they do.
And we have seen some authoritarian shots across the bow with regard to this issue.
Where they have said, effectively, that they're going to start prosecuting people for, quote-unquote, anti-Semitism, anti-Semitic activities.
Which means, you know, if I, as a journalist, write an article that says, you know, there's something really fishy and wrong morally about what's going on over there.
Maybe we shouldn't be funding it.
Or maybe, at the very least, we should be looking into it and asking some questions.
All of a sudden, I'm a Nazi.
All of a sudden, I'm an anti-Semite.
You know, I'm somebody who wants to put people in gas chambers.
Absolutely.
That's what they're going to try to do.
And by the way, there's a related issue.
I don't know whether you have been following any of this, because on one level, it's so juvenile and cartoonish, you just want to turn off the TV. I'm going to do my bad Trump impersonation now.
You know, we're going to have the Gulf of America.
It's going to be the greatest Gulf ever.
In the America Canal, and Canada is the 51st state.
Now, it occurred to me that what they're doing here is setting the psychological groundwork for something.
That if it had been Trump doing it, if it had been Kamala or if it had been Clinton or anybody on the left, there would be great hues and cries and wailing and gnashing of teeth from people on our side, so-called, the conservatives.
Because they're talking essentially about the North American Union.
They're talking about making a block out of this, a hemispheric block that is one more step toward this global form of government that they want.
We're all subsumed under one central world authority.
But Trump's doing it, you know, and he's doing it with the rhetoric of patriotism.
It's going to be great.
Yes, yes, absolutely, absolutely.
And, you know, Eric, I got word, evidently, there was something that we weren't getting audio on.
So I do want to play, and I apologize for that, everybody.
That's disappointing.
There was something that happened.
So it's coming through now.
I do want to play at least this little bit.
From these folks, you got to hear my interpretations of these things, but you didn't get to hear the audio starting things off.
So let me just go back for you here a little bit and just show you what we got to see from folks like Max Blumenthal as he actually spoke up.
So here's Max versus Blinken.
And I'll play this again, and I apologize for that, everybody.
So it's disappointing that that was the case.
I apologize about that.
It's frustrating.
Why did you keep the bombs flowing when we had a deal in May?
We all knew we had a deal.
Everyone in this room knows we had a deal, Tony, and you kept the bombs flowing.
Why did you sacrifice the rules-based order on the mantle of your commitment to Zionism?
Why did you allow my friends to be massacred?
Why did you allow my friends' homes in Gaza to be destroyed when we had a deal in May?
You helped destroy our religion, Judaism, by associating it with fascism.
You waved the white flag before Netanyahu.
You waved the white flag before Israeli fascism.
Your father-in-law was an Israel lobbyist.
Your grandfather was an Israel lobbyist.
Are you compromised by Israel?
Why did you allow the Holocaust of our time to happen?
How does it feel to have your legacy be genocide?
How does it feel to have your legacy be genocide?
You too, Matt.
You smirk through the whole thing every day.
Thank you.
So there's that, Eric.
And I'll play one other segment for you.
And again, thank you to Steve Swan for giving me the heads up about the audio.
And I was hoping that I would get the signal.
I got the signal, but I didn't quite see it.
And there had been a problem, it looked like, for the mic connection on that.
And it had to get rejiggered inside the system, which is very frustrating.
But I also want to show you this one.
As they pulled away Sam.
And let's go with this right now.
This is Sam as they pulled him away.
Jimmy Dore has this report.
Here we are.
Two or three people.
You pontificate about a free press?
You pontificate about a free press?
You are hurting me.
I'm asking questions after being told by Matt Miller that he will not answer my questions until I'm asking questions.
It's shameful.
Absolutely shameful.
The concept of the United States is the land of the free when they do something like that.
And then the CNN people framed it in such a way, obviously, as I described.
But you'll see this as these people being activists when the people who are daily...
Daily engaging in activism.
At least they could try to be fair.
They're not even aware of who these reporters are.
At least when Max gets out there, he tells people what he stands for.
He's pro-peace.
He's written novel, written nonfiction books about the Middle East.
And here's the way CNN portrayed it.
As you heard, he was repeatedly interrupted by some cringeworthy heckling by activists.
We were both sitting here pretty stunned, frankly.
This is supposed to be a press conference with a room of journalists.
Those were activists who were interrupting the secretary.
And then they had the gall to say that, well, this actually shows the openness of the Biden administration for journalism.
Because they allowed people like that into the room.
Those people have press credentials.
Just amazing.
In the meantime, when Donald Trump just said, even though he didn't stop people from coming into the meetings, when he just said that the pop media is the enemy of America, they claimed that Donald Trump wanted to shut down free speech while members of the deep state were actively working to shut down free speech during the Trump administration and then ramped it up during the Biden administration.
Amazing.
Hey, Gard, a couple of things about that.
First of all, I really like the term that Paul Craig Roberts The former Secretary of the Treasury back during the Reagan era has for these people that you just showed on CNN. He calls them prostitutes, and that's exactly what they are.
They will say whatever the teleprompter tells them to say in return for a paycheck.
They're high-paid, low-rent people is what they are.
The other thing with regard to what's going on in this country, I'm reminded of a story, and it may or may not be apocryphal, but you and I both love to read about the World War II era.
Hitler was talking before the war to a British politician who was expressing exasperation about what was going on in Mirage, in India, and the rabble-rousing.
And Hitler said, shoot Gandhi.
Easy.
That's how you solve the problem.
And that's exactly it.
That's this thuggish authoritarian instinct that we are seeing manifest as this country descends into kind of a medieval barbarism.
There's no longer any give-and-take back and forth.
You know, it is hysterical, violent reaction when authority is questioned.
And it's amazing how dismissive they are of honest questions and honest dealing, even as they say, as Sam said, pontificate and puff themselves up.
You know, it's so childish, Eric.
Eric Peters is with us, and I greatly appreciate you joining us, Eric.
It's been interesting finding out that those segments weren't playing, but it's great to have you here.
And I'd like to get your thoughts as we see.
We'll sort of wrap this up about what's been going on as far as the Israeli-Gaza situation goes.
I do want to mention that we've got the vote coming.
As Netanyahu appears to have agreed to this, Netanyahu's office says the hostage deal is now agreed.
So, what do you think?
Do you think, and this is mere speculation, but based on the agreement, it looks to me like the Israelis can resume attacking people at any time.
There's supposed to be a release of hostages, sort of a three-for-one.
The Israelis are holding thousands, while the Hamas group is holding over 100, just over 100. And this is something that, you know, the last I looked, there was a report that Israel, up until July last year, was holding upwards of 20,000 people.
On various things, oftentimes not even charging them.
And they do that every year.
They'll just pull hundreds of people off the streets, not charge them with anything, and then just bring them in.
They just basically kidnap them.
And of course, before October 7th, Netanyahu was cited by the International Criminal Court for crimes that they had committed against prisoners that they had pulled in and not charged as well.
So that's already an illegitimate justice system there.
What do you think about this agreement?
And they say on Friday morning, his office said Netanyahu had been informed by the negotiating team that agreements on the deal had been reached.
Or do you think that it's just something to allow for some time and allow for Trump to look like he's done something really positive?
Well, let's start by that great mugshot that you just posted because it's perfectly apropos of that literally indicted war criminal.
That's exactly what has happened.
He's literally wanted for the things that he's done, the horrific things that he's done over there.
And the next thing that I'll say is what Chamberlain said.
I have here in my hand the document that assures peace in our time.
It bears his signature.
Does anybody believe that this government, the government of Israel and Netanyahu, are going to be restrained in any way whatsoever by this quote-unquote agreement?
It's absurd.
Absolutely.
And, you know, David played something with Mike Waltz coming in.
He's going to be the new national security advisor, it looks like, talking about Hamas.
And I'd love to get your thoughts on this one, because as David played it...
It just shows that they are ready for Israel to basically do anything.
Jeremy Scahill posted, Trump's national security advisor, Mike Waltz, lays out a plan Netanyahu has hinted at.
Israel views this deal as only one phase to get the Israeli and U.S. hostages out.
He says Hamas will be destroyed and Gaza totally demilitarized.
But here is the cut, and this actually will play.
Here he is describing Hamas again.
And from your perspective, if this deal goes through and we enter what's characterized as the first phase, does that effectively mean the war is over?
Does a ceasefire mean that Israel's work is done in Gaza for the foreseeable future?
Well, I certainly think Hamas would like...
To believe that.
But we've been clear that Gaza has to be fully demilitarized.
Hamas has to be destroyed to the point that it cannot reconstitute.
And that Israel has every right to fully protect itself.
So all of those pieces, all of those objectives.
Look, I mean, October 7th was a terrible day.
They put everybody in a terrible position, including the Palestinian people of Gaza, whom they regularly hide behind and are willing to sacrifice and have sacrificed for their own...
Okay, so I just want to stop there, Eric, because again, we know that the United States and Israel supported Hamas, that Netanyahu openly said that he wanted Hamas in there to make sure they got the millions to the Hamas leadership in Qatar, because he knew that they would be oppositional to any negotiations, because of course, they are the militant wing of resistance against the Israeli, the immoral.
Illegal Israeli occupation of the land.
So who's initiating the aggression?
The Israeli forces and the Western forces.
It's very clear.
And as we know, members of the Knesset and the Likud party and the IDF have openly stated that they consider every child In Palestine to be a potential member of Hamas.
And they say that they're all potential targets.
So when this man, Mike Waltz, says this, he's saying that more children can be slaughtered because the Israeli forces consider them to be a danger too.
Sure, they're all but saying it.
There's a German word, Wernichtungskrieg, which means a war of annihilation.
And that's what the Germans attempted to do when they invaded the Soviet Union and Ukraine, interestingly enough.
Along the way.
And that's essentially what's happening here.
And another way to look at this, it's sort of like you've seen the videos of cops arriving at a house, domestic disturbance.
And the guy comes out after beating his wife to a pulp and says, look what you made me do.
Right?
And I wanted to add something else, too, which just sticks in my craw because I guess I'm irritable.
But I'm so tired of seeing these thuggy clowns wearing their stupid party pins, whatever the pin is.
You know, enough with this stuff.
It's nauseating.
It just makes you want to, if only we could figure out a way to sort of, I don't know, take a scissors and just kind of cut and divide ourselves from these people and put a gigantic ocean between us and them.
Absolutely.
And I would refer to basketball, where they were wearing ribbons for a child who was sick.
And every time they came back, the sportscasters' ribbons were getting bigger and bigger and bigger until they just took up half their shoulder.
Eric, let's talk a little bit about...
What's going on for you and your website, ericpetersautos.com, and on X. Very interesting developments on X. I'd like to show everybody your new presence on X, which is Eric the Apostate.
Do you like that?
I love that.
I'm riffing on the whole X communication thing that happened to me a couple of weeks ago.
Yeah.
Well, you're back in, and people can find your post if they just look up Eric the Apostate, but the actual X handle is at apostate.
27832. So tell us, how's it been going?
I know you're just starting and you only have a certain number of followers, but hopefully we'll get more people to approach Eric the Apostate and see some of your posts.
Obviously, you've got a lot of information on your website, and I hope people will spread the word by going to the website and sending the links out themselves.
What's your thought on...
Elon Musk and how honest he is about freedom of speech.
I'll give you a very specific example that shows exactly how disingenuous the man is.
I got blocked, banned, my old handle, because I used what was called abusive language with regard to Keir Starmer, the pedophile suppressing a prime minister of the UK. You and I know all about him.
Jimmy Seville and everything else that's been going on there.
And I got a little irritated with it.
I saw somebody...
And so essentially, I wrote something to the effect that I hope that the things that have been happening to children over there under his watch happened to him, and that he's left bleeding in the streets.
I said that, and I granted it was coarse language, but I thought it was appropriate.
Anyway, that was the basis for my being kicked off of X, or at least blocked.
And yet, Elon Musk, when people started posting their objections to his pushing of the H-1B visa thing, He said, F you in the face, is what he said, to people who would dare to do that.
And he will purge their accounts, silence them, and all of that.
So here you go.
You know, abusive content, hateful content.
You know, we don't have a piece with the press conference that we saw.
It all depends on who's got the power to decide what constitutes abuse, right?
Right, right.
Wow, that's really interesting.
Yeah, sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander.
But you're back on.
Are you worried that they'll try to dump you again?
I really don't care.
It was actually an interesting experiment in that I didn't really notice any kind of diminution of the traffic that I have at EP Autos.
Generally, I only used X to put links to my stuff on there so that people who follow me could see it.
But they all know where I am, so they go there anyhow.
I did it mainly for the amusement value of it.
That's it.
I'll tell you something else about it.
Initially, I was a little upset about my having been kicked off.
When anything happens, I think the natural human response to that is to feel bad about it.
But I actually began to feel really good about it.
And I remembered how I felt when I got kicked out of that coffee shop that I used to go to back during the pandemic.
I got kicked out of that because I wouldn't bow knee to sickness kabuki and wear a mask.
And I loved going to that place.
I used to go there all the time with my laptop and sit and work.
I enjoyed the atmosphere.
So initially I thought, man, this really sucks.
I'm not going to get to ever go here again.
But after about 24 hours, I started to feel really good because I had my self-respect intact.
I didn't kowtow to these people.
And I'm not going to kowtow to Elon Musk either.
I really don't care if he ends up kicking me off the platform for good.
Permanent ban.
It doesn't matter to me.
And I think it's a take-home lesson for all of us to not bend the knee to these authoritarian, technocratic people.
Let's talk amongst ourselves and deal with ourselves and exclude in pariah eyes these thuggy, hypocritical people who want to direct and control our lives.
One other thing, if I may, I know I'm rambling, but another thing that occurred to me when all of this happened was It's a really insidious thing.
When we use these social media platforms, whether it's X, Facebook, or whatever it is, don't we engage in self-censorship?
We're very careful.
I mean, I know I found myself with my hands above the keyboard thinking, well, should I use that word?
Should I express that sentiment?
Because we all know there's kind of an anvil hanging over our heads, that if we affront the algorithm, if somebody out there who knows who it is, says that what we're saying is hateful.
Yeah.
And they report us or whatever that, you know, that we'll get kicked off.
So we're very careful about what we say.
And that's so insidious because, again, we're diminishing our own brains.
It's not even the blunt instrument of Elon Musk and his algorithm coming in and suppressing us.
We're doing it to ourselves.
Yeah.
You don't want to say anything indelicate.
You're careful to see what is indelicate versus what would be acceptable.
And, you know, it's...
This is the sort of thing that obviously many of us do in many social situations.
If we're walking into a room at a party, there might be acceptable behavior and unacceptable behavior.
So we try to behave in certain ways that way.
But this is different in a way.
Because in a way, when we're going out there, we're broadcasting to a number of other folks.
We're entering someone else's realm.
So in the back of our heads, or many of us, I'm sure, we're thinking, how can I phrase this the best so that I'll still get my point across, but I won't be shut away?
And yeah, it really does affect people, I think.
It's a difficult...
It's a difficult area to navigate, but you've done a great job, I think, in testing that so that now, as an example, you've been an example to other people, and you can get that information out there and show the hypocrisy.
And maybe things will change.
Maybe it'll be a momentary bit of hypocrisy, but that sort of thing does pop up often.
And, you know, as a person who was censored over and over again, NewsGuard would come and give us that busy work and not click on the links, you know, that sort of thing.
The last time...
The last time I had to write a letter back to NewsGuard, I said, listen, if you have some opinions about climate change and you think that I'm not addressing these things, I've given you all the information.
Let's have a debate.
It could be a fruitful conversation.
We could have an audience.
We could do it for charity.
What do you say?
I was very pleasant about it, and we have never heard from them.
Yeah, exactly.
We know that they are afraid to allow a lot of this information out there.
And I think it's been very interesting because many people, when it came to choosing between Elon Musk supporting H-1B visas and Donald Trump...
Maybe want to be more restrictive on this or more populist people who are saying, well, I don't like those people stealing American jobs.
They started to turn on Elon Musk a little bit.
Now, the idea of someone telling me or you or anybody else that we can't freely contract with anyone with whom we want to associate is an offensive idea.
And they get into groupthink, thinking, well, we've got to do this to protect American jobs for the American worker, whatever it might be.
I should be free to be able to hire whomever I want.
And I'm not stealing an American job away from someone by doing that.
If that's the case, then I should never be able to buy the product I want to buy.
I should never be able to talk with the person with whom I want to talk to.
Just never date the girl I want to date.
Because somebody else will be telling me, I'm stealing that date opportunity from another girl.
I mean, it's just absurd.
Not like the girls would want to go out with me in the first place.
And as Walter Williams said, when I asked my now wife to marry me, he said, I discriminated between my wife and other people.
We all have to discriminate.
And choosing the people with whom we want to work or converse or anything is a form of discrimination.
All I would ask is, those people who are opening up these platforms, if they just be consistent.
About their forms of their preferences as they offer us the opportunities to go on their platforms.
I understand it's their platform.
I'll go by it, but please just be consistent, right?
We touched on something interesting I wanted to get back to, which is on a civilized level, when you go to, let's say, somebody's home or you go to an event, of course.
There are rules of civilized conduct in that context.
But what we're talking about very specifically here is the discussion of ideas.
And that should be a raucous, roiling conversation at times.
You know, one of the things that I just love about reading about the colonial era, you know, before the revolution, there was incendiary speech.
You know, they weren't pulling any punches.
Read Sam Adams.
And read Patrick Henry.
You know, those are the kinds of things that made this country great.
Of course, very quickly, you know, once we got the new government in place, we had the Alien and Sedition Act, where it became seditious to mention certain things.
So this goes back a very long time.
You know, during the World War I era under Woodrow Wilson, it became a criminal wrong thing act as a government.
We had Attorney Mitchell Palmer going after people just like they do today for essentially the same kinds of things.
Yeah, and it's amazing how they hold some of these people up as heroes.
You know, they'll say something about Abraham Lincoln.
Oh, he was a heroic figure.
Abraham Lincoln tried to arrest an entire representative body on an assembly of a state just because they were going to choose to be neutral in the Civil War.
He deported a sitting congressman.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And when a judge said that he couldn't do it, he sent magistrates to arrest the judge.
You know, it's stunning.
As you mentioned, John Adams.
You look at the Alien Act.
Again, if we can just try to steer some of the Trump people on the immigration issue, again, to look at the fact that the word immigration isn't in the Constitution.
So we have these instances where John Adams posts the Alien Act.
The federal government is not supposed to have anything to do with aliens on the soil of any state, as Jefferson wrote in the Kentucky Resolution 4, as Madison wrote in the Virginia Resolves in 1798. It's up to the states.
And I would just, again, talking about consistency, in a very calm, hopefully peaceful way, I would like to engender some of the conservatives who hold on to these ideas, who hold on to the collectivist central command and control idea of things about immigration, or things like...
Well, I'll support these people on X, Y, or Z with the FCC or the threats against colleges that the college campuses should shut down this protest.
Look at what your supposed stance is, please, and say, am I really a constitutionalist?
Am I really a conservative if I support even...
Federal funding for colleges.
If I support the federal government controlling the immigration situation when it's supposed to be a state issue, do I really believe in federalism?
Do I really believe in smaller government?
I also can carve out sections of my mind and my moral stance to push away what actually is the Constitution and what it actually says and the concept of federalism.
I would just ask for room to talk to people about that.
And oftentimes what's interesting is I find that conservatives...
Just don't want to hear it on certain issues.
When you're talking about Donald Trump, when you're critical of Donald Trump on things like sanctions or something like that.
And I'd like to get your opinion on this one.
It actually works as a really good transition.
And I also want to talk to you about one of your big, big stories just out, the mafia's adjustments.
As we look at the flames on so many people losing lives, houses, fortunes.
The incoming Treasury Secretary had something to say how this man wants harsher sanctions against Russia.
It's just unbelievable.
Let me offer you this.
This is the Trump pick for Treasury Secretary backing federal independents, the Federal Reserve independents, the dollar.
And sanctions on Russian oil.
Now, I understand that it'll be a good idea to, again, conform with the Constitution and stop the federal government from controlling ANWR and all those areas that they've locked off away from coal, like the Grand Escalante National Monument that Clinton started, that they've locked off from natural gas.
To stop them from steering money into the green boondoggles that Biden has pushed so much that also J.D. Vance supported when he went into Michigan a few months ago and talked to people at a green EV car plant and said, well, the Biden administration is just not giving you enough.
So I can see what their tactic here is, which is to continue shutting out Russian oil and Russian natural gas What I don't understand is how people can say that the first half of that is beneficial to American consumers.
Why not allow for the natural gas to come in?
And what is a sanction but a threat against an American for engaging in peaceful activity?
They want to increase tariffs.
We'll talk about that.
But also, they want, literally, To bring in more sanctions against Russia.
What do you think of that?
Well, what's a tariff?
What's a sanction?
It's just another euphemism for tax.
And we're all going to hate is what it comes down to.
You remember that old Joan Didion book, Slouching Toward Bethlehem?
Yes, yes.
It's kind of like this is why we are slouching toward authoritarianism.
Well, we're already here.
The right, and I just kind of use this as a general term, agrees with the left fundamentally.
They bicker with each other about how they're going to use the authority, the power of the federal government.
That's the source of their disagreement.
It's not a disagreement about, well, should the federal government be doing these things at all, period.
As a matter of principle, it's, well, we don't like the way you're using the power.
We're going to use it this way.
Exactly.
And in fact, let me bring this up for you here.
Said that U.S. sanctions against Russia's oil sector have been too weak.
Too weak!
In the meantime, what was Donald Trump saying about Joe Biden's policies?
He was making energy much too expensive.
That was one of his big campaign things.
We've got to open up the oil.
We've got to open up...
But now the man who's coming in from a hedge fund corporation called Key Square Capital Management is saying that we have to, we, again, we have to stop more of, we have to impose harsher, harsher sanctions. we have to impose harsher, harsher sanctions.
Scott Besant, amazing.
He's openly saying, I think if any officials in the Russian Federation are watching this confirmation hearing...
Oh, sorry, this is...
Yeah, or watching this confirmation hearing, they should know that if I'm confirmed and if President Trump requests as part of his strategy to end the Ukraine war, that will be 100% on board.
I will be 100% on board with taking sanctions up, especially on Russian oil majors.
Now, thanks to the fact that we've got the audio going, and I appreciate it again, Steve, for what you've done.
Here's what he said.
I believe that the sanctions regime, especially, well, first of all, I would say in my adult life that the tragedy going on in Ukraine is one of the greatest tragedies of my adult life.
And ending that as soon as possible, an inner role the Treasury can...
Play in that, if confirmed, I would like to do.
As we discussed, I believe that the sanctions were not fulsome enough.
I believe that the previous administration was worried about raising U.S. energy prices during an election season.
And I am...
So, I'll just stop here.
Unfortunately, he doesn't have a problem with raising U.S. energy prices.
It's amazing.
And he believes that energy prices should be higher?
But actually, it doesn't matter because he's insulated from them in the sense that this guy is extraordinarily wealthy.
Notice the commonality.
You know, whether they're on the left or the right.
These people are all fabulously wealthy, and therefore they are insulated from the consequences of the actions that they imposed on you and me, you know, the lumpen proletariat, the deplorables.
You know, we're the ones for whom it really does matter if you're paying another dollar for a gallon of gas.
For him to think it matters?
I mean, it's absurd.
So, you know, that's part of, I think, what explains the way they operate.
They're so disconnected, so divorced.
From us and our reality.
And that's why I think the people, and this includes people on the left and the right, are so furious and so enraged about everything that's going on.
To bring it back to the car business, which is my little thief, this business of imposing a tax slash tariff on vehicles that are not made in the United States.
Okay, GM and Ford both have major truck operations in Mexico just across the border.
Why?
They have them over there because the regulatory environment is a little less onerous.
What do you think is going to happen to the cost of the trucks that come to this country?
Do you think they're going to go down when Trump imposes tariffs?
No, they're going to go up.
If Trump understood economics at all, and if he understood the source of the problem, what he would do is attack the regulations that are making it impossibly expensive to produce anything in this country.
Exactly.
You know, I went through Trump's so-called external revenue service and how absurd that is.
First, to, in an Orwellian way, try to claim that tariffs are paid by the foreign countries.
They're paid by American consumers, whether they be the final end consumer or they be businesses that rely on trying to get the best bank for their buck and rely on foreign goods.
And all of that money in the aggregate, I was speaking with a 13-year-old girl, the daughter of a friend of mine.
Who's a professor?
And she said, yeah, you know, the money that Americans should be able to save based on their choices is money that they could spend on other things.
And I was like, yeah, that would start other jobs.
Those are the jobs that aren't seen.
And she is familiar with Frederick Bastier's What is Seen and What is Not Seen, how these opportunities are smothered by the politicians.
And the other thing is the idea that this is somehow...
Appropriate to help American businesses, you know, the American jobs.
And again, these are jobs that won't be created now because you're forcing people to pay the tax to the government.
And I'll just mention sanctions, as you mentioned.
sanctions are a threat of violence by the government against peaceful people engaging in voluntary contract.
There is no other way to describe that.
And this guy's idea of this Scott Bessett, the Treasury Secretary nominee, saying that somehow he should have a role in using the power of the government to hit us in order to affect some change between Russia and Ukraine is so perverse and so...
Disgustingly sick that they can actually think we, the all-inclusive we, have a place in deciding what happens over there and you're going to be part of it.
Your life will be affected by my interest in affecting change there.
If he wants to affect change there, he can move there.
Why does he have to make everybody else abide by his diktat in this, the supposed land of the free, Eric?
Yeah, well, that's just it.
These central planners, these industrial managers, it's astounding.
And they get away with it because people don't really understand what's going on.
I'll give you another example of something that amounts to the same thing as a sanction.
Have you heard of the chicken tax?
What's that?
Okay, this is something that dates back to LBJ. And it's the reason why we don't have in this country access to small, affordable pickup trucks.
There was a tit-for-tat tariff that was imposed on small trucks that are made outside of the United States that makes it uneconomic for a company such as Toyota, let's say, to bring a vehicle like that into this country because the federal government applies a very onerous tax.
That pushes the price of a basic, no-frills, small truck to the point where people look at it and go, well, why would I buy this little truck without that much capability when it's almost the same price as this bigger, more powerful, more well-equipped truck?
This is a measure of the way we're impoverished for the sake of these industrial managers.
Because per your friend's daughter, if I could buy a truck for $15,000 rather than $30,000, that means I've got $15,000 in my pocket.
You know, rather than being spent somewhere else.
So now I can use that money, not only for my own benefit, but for the benefit of other people that I might hire to do something for me, you know, or for some product that I might buy.
And that brings us back to Bastion.
You know, isn't it a shame that kids don't get to read those things any longer in the government schools?
And of course, there's a reason for that.
Yes, absolutely.
There's a reason for that.
And, you know, when I start my classes, I've mentioned this once before on David's show, Eric, you know, I always start with the simple machines.
I have the students come up and say, can anybody draw me any, out of your memory, can you remember what the simple machines are?
Did you get any of that in science class or physics or anything?
And so somebody might draw the inclined plane or the lever or something like that.
And I said...
What we're talking about here is we stand on the shoulders of giants economically, and they're just average people.
Those giants came up with ideas, they tested the ideas, and then those were translated.
Every one of the things that we use today has been tested by somebody in the past that has been beneficial, is something that was done through freedom.
That people got to test.
I said, so let's give an example just to be clunky about it.
I said, let's talk about the simple machines.
You got the inclined plane.
I was like, let's look at the inclined plane and talk about what the inclined plane did.
In the past, let's say, ancient man, not settled agriculture, it was pre-history man, they would have developed ways to use levers, just like monkeys use little twigs to get the ants.
They would use tools.
And these tools, if they helped them, they would keep the tools.
If they hindered them and make them work harder, not get the food that they wanted, they would discard the tools.
So if they found that by...
Pushing something up a ramp by increasing the distance, rather than going straight vertical up, they increased the distance at an angle.
That allowed one man to do the work of two men, so they might have something that was a hill.
They might push something up a slope that's slightly slippery.
They would learn to say, you know what?
If I... Can plane this board.
I've got something where I can now get something up.
That frees someone else to go.
It used to take two people to do the work.
Now one person can do the work with the tool.
A contemporary tariff supporter or someone who is supportive of these so-called American jobs would look at it the other way rather than saying, wow, that's great.
Now you've freed up somebody else.
One person can do the work of two people.
Instead, they're saying, you just made the second man unemployed.
That's what they're saying.
They're saying, get rid of that tool that can help you because that's putting somebody else out of work when the work could be maximized by doing something else.
It's amazing.
And that gets to what I've often mentioned in class, division of labor.
The ancient people would send the stronger people out on the hunt, while the maybe more frail or pregnant women would stay in the caves.
Men who were older, they'd create spears, they'd tan, they'd hide, or whatever.
And as they did repeated iterations of what they did well, they got a surplus.
You have division of labor, and then you have a surplus.
At a certain point, you reach the point of marginal.
Marginal utility diminishing for every new thing that you make.
It's not really worth your effort because you don't need it.
So you've got a surplus.
You can now realize that trade becomes valuable.
Why should we stop that trade between some arbitrary political border that's drawn by politicians?
And how do we even know anybody wants that?
There's no border there if people are forced to pay for it by the politicians.
Political borders are just mandates that people pay for a wall.
They're just mandates that people pay for a policing somewhere.
It doesn't mean that anybody even wants it there because they've been forced to pay for it.
Maybe somebody else wants it policed more.
Maybe somebody wants it policed less.
Maybe they want it 50 feet further in or further away.
We don't know.
All of this is arbitrary, and all these tools, including division of labor, that's a simple machine as well.
And we have to allow individuals to decide these things to actually let them express their values.
And the politicians claim that they represent our values.
So that's my little soapbox.
And we can't have all the things that people could have because they replace our decision-making.
That's very well said.
And I'd only add the following, which I think is also an important thing.
This sets us at odds and sets us against each other.
Whereas if you have a system that is a free market system, a voluntary system, it diffuses this pressure.
I'm not your economic enemy and you're not mine.
You know, if this works, great, I'll pursue it.
If it doesn't work, I'll do something else because I know there's a reward to it.
You know, human beings are very clever, inventive and creative and they figure things out if they're free to do it.
You know, they figure out ways to engage in commerce with other people.
And if it's free, it works really well.
You know, it's kind of counterintuitive because it's not, like, predictable and organized.
And I think that's part of why people think they have to have some sort of centralized control apparatus for economic activity because they want to see, you know, the five-year plan.
What are we going to have at the end of the five-year plan?
The beauty and the fearsome thing to many people about the free market is we don't know.
Who knew that Henry Ford was going to come along and figure out a way to standardize basic parts and basically stamp out cars at a fraction of the cost that it took previously to hand-build a coach, you know, body by Fisher, right?
You know, so much that only a handful of people were able to do that.
Before Henry Ford came along, you know, most people just assumed, well, I'll never have a car.
That's for rich people.
And boom, all of a sudden, just like that, anybody could afford a car.
Yes, yes, absolutely.
You know, this applies in so many areas.
And you had the recent one with the fat car.
That was excellent over at Eric Peters Autos.
And I'd like to, if I can, ask you a question about one of your most recent pieces, Eric, at Eric Peters Autos.
He's our guest on the David Knight Show.
I want to talk to you a little bit about the California fires and get into this subject.
Yeah, if I can get into it by over in California, they're already saying that the so-called insurer of last resort is facing potential shortfalls.
And so I'll just show you what NBC News is playing here.
This is the insurer of last resort.
Facing pitfalls.
And then we'll talk about what that even means.
These were the harrowing moments the Edwards family saw their Alcadena home of 30 years go up in flames.
It feels like a bomb just came and exploded upon our town.
Everything's gone.
Across town in the Pacific Palisades, the Andonian family stunned by the complete devastation of their community too.
I froze.
Literally.
When you saw your home.
Sorry.
And then the next house, and the next house, and the next house.
Two different neighborhoods, two different life stories, but similar in one way.
Both families are on California's fare plan, the state-created insurer of last resort that has more than doubled its number of residential policies in the past four years, as private insurers have either drastically raised homeowners' rates or simply...
All right.
So I want to pause it there, Eric.
The Edwards family says they were dropped by their...
There we go.
Okay.
So I want to pause it there because this story actually pertains to your latest story at Eric Peters Autos.
Tell us a little bit about this as I bring this up on the screen for us.
This one right here, the mafia's adjustments.
Yeah.
Well, let me preface it by explaining why I use that term to describe the insurance industry.
It's not just a pejorative.
I think it's factually correct.
They are a mafia.
What is a mafia?
Well, you know, in the stereotype, the mobster comes into your place of business and says, you've got a great place here.
It'd be a shame if something happened to it.
They make you an offer you can't refuse, that classic line from The Godfather.
And that's exactly what's happening here, only it's the government that's serving as Luca Brasi, you know, who was the Don's enforcer in the movie.
You know, it's not a free market system where you are free to consider the purchase of this insurance policy.
Does it make sense?
Is the cost of it a good value relative to my risk and so on?
You're compelled to purchase this thing because the government says you have to have it.
And what happens then?
You know, you've got a mafia that can tell you what you're going to pay.
And, you know, pay and pay and pay.
And then when the time comes that maybe you have a claim, like these poor people in California, they all of a sudden find that even though they've been paying for years, oh, we're not going to pay because they figured out some way to get out of having to pay.
This is becoming a very, very common issue.
And another thing that they do that's really, it's awful in and of itself, but it's also something that I think is going to become explosive, which is to transfer costs onto the people who are not.
Incurring the costs.
In the world of car insurance, last year, the typical premium for car insurance policy went up by 25%.
Now, that's everybody.
And the reason it went up that much, chiefly, is because all of a sudden you've got all these electric vehicles and all these other vehicles that are extremely expensive to replace if they're totaled, and they're expensive to repair if they're in an accident.
Now, it doesn't matter that I've got a 23-year-old truck that's very inexpensive to replace, should that happen.
Nor does it matter that I have a perfect driving record.
I have had absolutely no claims filed against me, nor have I filed any for decades.
It doesn't matter.
My rate goes up.
Well, why?
Has my risk somehow gone up?
Have I done something to justify this?
Of course not.
What's happened is that the mafia is figuring out a way to make you and me pay.
They don't pay.
I mean, it's absurd to think that, oh, this company is out there, it's a benevolent organization, you know, and they're going to, at their expense, pay you.
No!
It's just a wealth transfer scheme.
That's all it is.
Why do you suppose these companies have so much money such that every other commercial that you see on TV is for insurance?
If they're so destitute and broke, how is it they can afford that?
How is it that they can afford to pay their executives literally $10- $20 million a year?
It's one of the most profitable businesses that there is, business, in the sense of mafia.
It's just business.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's interesting, too, because part of it comes from the litigiousness of society and judges allowing all sorts of claims to go into courts that really shouldn't go into courts.
And also, a lot of it comes from government activities.
For certain favorite insurance companies, and I'll give the example here in New Hampshire when they mandated that insurance companies have to offer policies to people with pre-existing conditions and that they couldn't charge over a certain amount, they...
Had lobbyists from companies that already were doing that, like Blue Cross Blue Shield, which was the insurer of last resort for high-risk patients, they were saying, I'm going to Concord, I'm going to lobby for that, because that will force all of our competition to have to do what we're already doing.
And so the state imposes these things, and out in California, I was reporting on a number of insurance companies, MRCTV, we were mentioning.
A lot of these companies are stopping their policies for people in California because of the higher and higher risk of fire, which is brought about because of government And dependency on government, government ownership of lands, the government running the power line system with PG&E, running the power lines over those dry lands, a lack of private property initiatives, lack of real liability for private property owners.
If I own the land and a fire is on my land and it spreads elsewhere, I'm liable for that.
So these are the types of things where government involvement ends up...
Increasing the risks, increasing the negative externalities in these areas, and then you see insurance companies pulling out, and only the ones that are close to the government will get the favors, which is where we go for this high-risk pool thing in California,
because the government said to the insurance companies, You will put money together and a new government insurance system called the high risk pool will be brought about because we've created such high risks for fire.
Some people can't afford the regular policies from the companies.
So we're going to tell the companies that you have to fund this new government run high risk home insurance pool.
Just like many other government organizations, it now is over bloated and in the red.
And there's no way they're going to be able to pay out for all the people who already signed on for it because they've been hit by, yes, the effects of the badly managed government lands.
They didn't expect it would all come at once, and here it is.
It's a real mess, isn't it?
And I'd like to get back to what I consider to be the underlying viciousness of this.
What do I mean?
You mentioned before the pre-existing condition thing.
Of course, on a human level, every one of us is sympathetic to somebody else who has got an underlying condition, who has a problem of some kind.
But what's happened is this has become an obligation enforceable effectively at gunpoint on us, an open-ended one.
So, you know, if I or A, whoever it is, is very careful about the way they live, they eat modestly and healthily and they exercise and all of that, and so they greatly reduce the chance that they'll ever have a chronic medical problem.
Instead of being rewarded for that, which they should be, with a low-cost insurance policy, they end up having to pay more because some other person, whether through their actions or their misfortune, didn't do those things, and their costs are higher, and now you get to pay them.
And what does that do?
Doesn't it not make us resent other people?
And then we get gaslit because somehow we're selfish, because we're supposed to accept literally open-ended, without restriction, obligations.
Yeah, in New...
In New Hampshire, at the same time that they forced the insurance companies to accept people with pre-existing conditions for individual policies, they established what was called community rating, where younger, healthier people were then thrown into age categories with older, relatively sicker people, and that would cause the younger people's rates to rise, because the older, sicker people are making more claims.
I like to bring that up, because when I was a young guy back in the 90s, You didn't have to buy health insurance.
You know, that was optional.
And so when I began my career, when I got my first salary job at The Washington Times back in the day, you know, when you fill out all the paperwork and everything, they gave me the opportunity to enroll in the company-provided health care plan for, you know, an amount of, I can't remember the exact figure, it was probably a couple hundred bucks a month, whatever it was.
And I thought to myself, you know, I'm 25 years old and there's nothing wrong with me.
You know, and I take good care of myself.
I don't need this.
I do need the $200.
You know, so instead of being forced to buy the health insurance, I was able to save money, which was what chiefly enabled me to get the down payment money for my first house.
Now look at today, you know, these poor kids, you know, who are entering the workforce under this crushing burden.
You know, they have to pay for this.
They have to pay for that.
It's not possible for them to ever accumulate capital, you know, and it's really vicious.
And then they wind up.
Going for communism and socialism, which I understand on an emotional level because they feel like they have no chance, that they're never going to be able to get a leg up.
But it's precisely and ironically because of the kind of government that they want, that they're in this position to begin with.
And also, I think, contributory to that is the acceptance of a central bank, which will feed even more money into the system, which this incoming Treasury Secretary seems to have no problem with at all, and then feeding that money to the people who want their manna from the government.
To hand it to them, not realizing that when the government goes into this system handing out money and the Fed prints it up, they're diminishing the buying power of all the units of money that are out there.
And they're harming themselves by actually going for this.
deficit spending and borrowing and debt and the Fed facilitating it by buying the bonds.
They're so far from understanding real fundamental economics that it's stunning.
And you mentioned North Carolina in this piece, Eric.
I want to scroll down just a little bit because you say that's only part of the worst of it.
Let me just start at the top here.
Who's going to pay for the losses, probably in the billions, incurred in California as a result of the fires fueled by incompetence and malice as much as Santa Ana wins?
It won't be the insurance mafia, which is a mafia in a literal as well as rhetorical sense because it makes people offers they cannot refuse.
They face repercussions enforced by the state if they fail to hand over money for protection.
The latter often being declined once damages are incurred.
People who thought they were or would be so-called protected discover they're not.
And just in the nick of time, too.
See also the recently dirty business in Western North Carolina after the hurricanes related flooding that thousands of homeowners haven't have discovered wasn't actually protected.
That is covered.
And never mind the years and even decades of paying for it.
But that's only part of the worst of it.
The other part will be arriving in the mailboxes of millions of people who don't live in California or North Carolina in the form of adjustments, which always means an increase in the cost of what they're obliged to pay for their policy, as if there were which always means an increase in the cost of what they're obliged to pay for their policy, as if there were a civilized transaction to offset
So this is a very important point that you bring up that, you know, People outside these areas are going to be forced to pay for this in the form of more expensive policies.
Their rates are going to go up because they have collectivized these systems.
Sure.
And there's something else, too, with regard specifically to California.
You know, the cost of rebuilding is exorbitant there, probably higher than anywhere else in the country due to all of these.
These endless regulations that govern what you're allowed to build and what materials you're allowed to use.
And the things that you have to do now, I think one of the requirements for new construction is that you have to have solar panels.
You have to have the ability to charge an electric car.
So many of these homes that burned down didn't have those things because they were built before these regulations came along.
Now they're going to have to.
This is going to add thousands, tens of thousands of dollars, maybe even hundreds of thousands to the cost of rebuilding the home.
Somebody's going to pay for that.
It's going to be us.
Yep.
Yeah, absolutely.
And it's amazing because I was talking a little bit to folks on my program about this shifting of costs and trying to explain to people a couple of weeks ago about how insurance companies are mandated to carry people and how they collectivize all these systems.
And it's fascinating to me to think.
How inculcated people have become in the idea that the government should be essentially setting what is fair in any business.
And the way that they do these things, in California, they'll say, well, we've got this reason or that reason.
California, they imposed new houses have to be 50% electric by solar.
And then you discover...
That most of the electric power that's being generated during the day is shuffled off by PG&E. The houses are reconnected to the systems and they don't utilize it.
They end up selling it to other states because people don't need it when they're not at home.
They need it.
At night, when they're not getting it, and PG&E doesn't have the storage capacity to hold on to the battery.
So all these things they're telling us are for our good.
They're replacing our decisions, and then they're forcing more costs onto people.
And now...
In most states, it's illegal to disconnect from the grid.
Now, wouldn't you think...
If we take it face value that these people want us to have green energy and want us to use these technologies that don't entail the burning of horrible hydrocarbon fuels, wouldn't they love it if you on your own nickel went out and disconnected from the grid by having solar panels on your house?
And so you're not dragging on the utilities at all.
Therefore, your carbon footprint is zero.
It's illegal to do that.
Even if you buy a solar array and battery system that is sufficient to completely power your house all the time, they still require you to be hooked up to grid power and to pay a fee each month.
Yes, absolutely.
And you know, I think it's almost metaphorical to...
How they force everybody to get attached to the tentacles in some way.
How they collectivize everything.
And you just can't escape from their grid.
They want the bigger grid.
If I can, Eric, I want to ask you about, in a way, how this, in some ways, has affected one of the former big auto manufacturers, Chrysler.
Can we talk a little bit about that piece that you recently published on Chrysler is over, January 15th?
It's really quite sad.
To just set the stage for it, Chrysler has had just one model, new model, available for sale now since 2023, and that's the Pacifica minivan, which is an aging model, and minivans aren't very popular.
So you can imagine what it must be like to be a Chrysler dealer when you've got literally just one vehicle to offer people.
That's it.
They're no longer able to sell the car that they used to be able to sell that was very popular, the 300 sedan, which was one of the best sellers of the last 30 years.
And the reason for that is because Stellantis, which is the parent company, not just of Chrysler, but also of Dodge, Jeep, and Ram, decided to go along to get along.
And to stop making combustion-powered vehicles like the 300, the Dodge Charger, and the Challenger.
These are all related platform vehicles.
And also the V8 engines that are popular in a number of the other models that I just mentioned.
And the reason that decision was made chiefly was because the CEO of Stellantis wanted to save money, money that he was having to spend to buy what are called carbon credits, which were payable to Elon Musk.
And the way this works is, you know, the manufacturers are punished by the federal government.
They're allowed to build a car like a V8 Hemi-powered 300, but the federal government applies punitive taxes.
And they're also essentially required to produce a certain number of what are called zero-emissions vehicles to compensate.
And they're given the alternative.
That they can just buy carbon credits in lieu of making their own zero emissions vehicles.
Well, who makes those things?
Who could it be?
It's Elon Musk and Tesla.
So, you know, they're forced essentially in an extortionary way to hand over money to Elon Musk, which then funds Tesla.
You know, it's a really it's an incredibly devilishly genius operation.
Well, anyway, so they thought that that would be the prudent thing to do.
They figured we don't have to pay Elon Musk anymore if we make our own zero emissions battery powered vehicles.
The problem is nobody wants these things.
There's no market for them.
And particularly, particularly with regard to Chrysler and Dodge, you know, these are the brands that, above everything else, were sort of the complete diametric opposite of the whole electrification thing.
They were popular because they made big American cars.
Got the Challenger and, yeah.
So this idea that they are going to somehow be able to...
Pivot and pirouette and start selling basically the same thing as Tesla and make money that way has proven to be a fiasco.
Here's some inside baseball that pertains to this.
It's been two years now since Dodge has had a Charger in the lineup because they pulled that model from the lineup.
They were supposed to have had this battery-powered replacement called the Charger available sometime last year.
It was supposed to have been out in the fall.
It still isn't.
Now, the interesting thing about it, it's been discovered that they actually have been producing them.
They have thousands of these things, and they're sitting on distribution lots waiting to be sent out to the dealer network.
You know why they haven't been sent out?
Why?
They're all bricked.
Every last one, they don't work.
They won't move.
And instead of being able to send out an overview or update to fix whatever the glitch is, they are having to send out technicians and one by one try to boot up.
Each one of those devices, and they succeeded in booting up a few of them, and then they put them into what's called ship mode, and they send them out to the dealer.
My understanding is they've got about 100 of those that have been sent out.
Well, they get to the dealer, and the dealer tries to unship mode them, change the setting or whatever it is, and then they brick again.
This is probably the greatest automotive fiasco since the Edsel and the Yugo combined.
When it actually becomes public and becomes something that people see is going on, it's going to kill off Dodge.
Chrysler is already dead.
The article that we started this discussion with was based on a memo that came out from Stellantis telling suppliers that effective immediately, we are putting on a definite hold future product.
There had been another battery-powered device in the pipeline for Chrysler.
There's a picture of it at the very top of the page.
I think it was called the Airstream or something that harkens back to a Chrysler name that they used back in the 30s and 40s.
And it was just another electric car, but they realized it's not going to sell.
So we're not going to commit more resources into the sinkhole.
We're just going to cut bait.
So this is going to leave Chrysler with nothing to sell, except this aging minivan that isn't selling very well.
So Chrysler is a dead man walking.
It's over.
And Dodge, more than likely, is going to follow suit because they've got nothing anymore.
They have got this little Hornet crossover.
It's not electric, but it's a little crossover.
You know, they tried to imbue it with some sporty flair.
It's not a bad car.
I've test-driven it.
But the point is, every other manufacturer out there is selling little crossovers.
Yeah.
They go to Toyota.
They go to Honda.
They go to Suzuki.
They go to Subaru for those things.
Nobody goes to Dodge for a small crossover.
So that's it.
You know, and now RAM, which was very, very successful selling the RAM truck, you know, big beefy 1500 truck.
Now it has this problem prone, highly expensive turbo hybrid system that they're putting in there and people don't want it and it's not selling.
And the Jeeps and all the rest of them, they're so overpriced now and so overcomplicated that sales are absolutely crashing through the floor.
It's devastating.
I think 2025 could be the year.
That perhaps all of those brands just go away, just like Plymouth and Pontiac and Oldsmobile and Saturn before them.
Well, I'm curious, Eric, with Chrysler and Dodge being in such trouble, is there the prospect of there's still...
Being any remaining value for them to be purchased by someone else, by some other corporate entity?
Or have they made such a transition and bowed so much to, as you call it, environmental extortion that they're really worthless now?
Maybe.
There might be some residual value left in some of the models.
The problem is, though, I think more general.
We're not going to comply our way out of this.
Whatever salvageable parts remain.
Would still have to be compliant, wouldn't they?
So what we're going to see, I think, going forward, unless there is a sea change shift in the way things are done, is a continued consolidation of the car industry into a handful, maybe two or three big players, you know, that offer sort of the universal garret, you know, the universal transportation appliance.
You know, it's going to be very Soviet, you know, except it's going to be expensive, you know, at least in the Soviet Union, when you finally got your Trabant.
Remember the Trabant?
Yeah.
Years and years of waiting for it.
At least the thing was cheap.
You know, what's going to happen here is, you know, the cars are going to be so expensive.
Most people won't be able to afford them.
And that's deliberate.
You know, it's now out of the closet.
They come out and say that in the future, they're going to be mobility companies.
And they're going to sell what's called transportation as a service.
They're shifting away from this idea that you go out and buy the car.
You make your payments.
You write a check.
And then after a certain point, it's your vehicle.
You own it.
It's your property.
Instead of that, you're going to pay for the ride.
Per the ride.
And it's kind of like the Bill Gates model, you know, where you don't buy the software.
You don't buy the box that's got the CD in it.
Now you have your Adobe or Cork or whatever the thing is that you can keep.
And, you know, maybe it's not the latest version, but it's yours.
You know, you get your kid for school or whatever.
Now you have to pay a license fee and, you know, to continue to be allowed to use it ongoing.
That's what they want.
And that literally is the meaning of you will own nothing and be happy.
It's all about putting everybody on this debt treadmill where you're just constantly making payments in order to be allowed to use things.
Well, and this, as you say, with the consolidation of the industry, and obviously there are mixed signals that I've been seeing from the Trump administration and J.D. Vance about whether or not they will stop these...
Regulatory burdens and demands.
Trump recently said that he was opposed to any more wind farms.
Windmills are a bad idea.
But again, I'm not seeing signals from Trump to say the entire regulatory schema of the United States telling auto manufacturers what they must sell or the EPA giving the OK for California to claim.
That in order to sell a car, you have to comply with this emission standards.
They recently gave the exception to long haul big rig truck engines that they're going to wait on those diesels and the same thing for railroad engines.
And I think that applies also to things like fire engines because those are diesel trucks.
What's that?
Yeah, for now.
And that's the problem.
You know, philosophically, people still buy into the climate canard and they're still pushing this sort of thing.
So it's going to take a lot of effort for people to overcome the already established massive government PR spin and data manipulation from people like Michael Mann and the IPCC and the University of East Anglia and others.
To push their climate canard, their data manipulation, their lack of honesty about where their temperature readers are.
The very idea that someone can compare a temperature reader now to something from 200 years ago or 300 years ago.
All their various theories and estimates about tree rings size pertaining to the actual temperature of the earth when it could be something else.
It's going to take a lot of work, and much of what we're seeing with the regulatory schema on automobile manufacturers and energy exploration and refining and delivery, much of that is...
Hinged on this political game that they play, which is serve up rhetoric to the consumer, serve up rhetoric to the public about so-called climate change, regardless of any of the data, constantly game the terminology, rework things, use verbal legend domain when you failed in one way, claim that it's something else.
Oh, we have more damaging storms now.
Well, how much more valuable is the property?
How many more people live in those areas?
Are you telling us that the storms are stronger or are you telling us they're just affecting more property because there's more property there?
These types of things, they don't want to deal honestly with people at the same time that they still have the subsidy powers, which also are unconstitutional.
It takes, I think, a lot of education or conversation with people on a positive way to say, hey, I'm trying to give you the signal.
What do you think about this?
And the pop media has bought into it so much that at least maybe now, through the breakup of some of those dinosaurs, we can still get that information out.
I don't know what you think about it, but fighting against a guy like Elon Musk on X is a very...
It's noble and it's a very isolating endeavor.
And hopefully you'll be able to continue to get your word out there, Eric.
And I want to give you the final word on this, on what you think you might see from the Trump administration regarding some of these regulations.
Whether or not you can even come to any determination, because from my eyes, he's been all over the map on a lot of this stuff.
Yeah, exactly.
You anticipated what I was going to say.
You know, one of the things about Trump that disturbs me is that he just appears to be a very thoughtless and uninformed man in a lot of measures, in a lot of ways.
You know, for example, he talks about how he's going to end the EV mandate.
There is no EV mandate.
Biden's right about that when he says that.
What there are are regulations that serve as a de facto mandate, regulations that only electric vehicles can comply with.
And the point is, it's really subtle.
You know, they don't formally outlaw vehicles that aren't electric.
They just make it so that's all you can build as a manufacturer.
Trump does not seem to comprehend that.
He doesn't seem to understand that the problem isn't the mandate, it's the regulations.
And you've got to go after the regulations.
And I don't think he really understands the nitty-gritty of those regulations either.
You know, I've yet to see him parse out and explain what we mean when we're talking about emissions, for example.
And the way emissions have come to encompass something that for the last 75 years has never been considered an emission because it's not a pollutant.
And of course, I'm talking about carbon dioxide.
It's an inert, non-reactive gas that has absolutely nothing to do with air quality.
You can have the discussion about the climate changing, but it's very manipulative and disingenuous, deliberately misleading to frame carbon dioxide as being synonymous with the blue smoke people imagine when they hear the word emission or pollutant.
Trump needs to explain that to people.
Somebody ought to explain it to people.
Is he the man to do it?
I don't think so.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Eric, thank you so much for being here, and you supply great energy to the David Knight Show after, as I mentioned, and the audience is just terrific when we talk about the audio not playing at the start, and that's a little frustrating, but it's so gratifying to know that there are good people in the audience that give you the tips as you're filling in, and you being here is just great.
It was last minute.
As we switch away from the Biden administration and start to look at the Trump administration.
And I think that that assessment is 100% correct.
And the only thing that I'm going to do is just continue trying to get out the real facts and information about some of these canards, some of the spurious ways that they make these claims, the ways that they have a sort of fascist system, and try to tell people,
at least if you call yourself a constitutionalist, look at what the government is doing and try to see many of the areas where maybe you, you've turned, sort of turned a blind eye, or if you're, you call yourself anti-fascist on a left wing side, maybe you might want to look at what the government's been doing on the climate change front and see that maybe you might want to look at what the government's been doing on the climate change front and see that maybe they're engaging in fascism, you Let's be careful about the words that we use.
Let's understand what those words mean before we even have a discussion.
Let's not be flippant about things.
And let's not engage in this sort of mindless juvenile soundbite argument kind of thing that we typically see out there.
Let's discuss things like intelligent adults.
And if we do that and we respect facts and we respect truth and we acknowledge it when somebody points out a fact to us that's inconvenient, that contradicts what we thought we knew, then we can have a civilized society again.
Well stated.
Eric, thank you.
You bring the civilization in your office.
And getting in there, I know it was a long trip.
You did a great job.
I really appreciate you coming in, Eric.
You made a good day even better.
And I'm just gratified to know you.
I hope people will go to ericpetersautos.com, ericpetersautos.com.
Check it out.
See what he has to say.
Click on those stories and get into the forum and drop some of your messages in there.
Thanks, Eric.
This is great.
Again, awesome stuff.
You got it.
You got it.
Eric Peters, thank you, Eric.
We'll talk to you soon.
Okay.
Take care.
Well, and thank you also to a fellow conspirator who's on our program in the text a lot in the chat.
I Can't Believe is his code.
He mentioned that there had been a problem there, and I didn't see that earlier, and I thank him for doing so.
And so I want to take an opportunity for you to, Check out some of the fantastic work recently by David Knight's team as they gave us what I thought was absolutely a hilarious, hilarious and very good commercial for...
A really good team at Wise Wolf Gold and Silver Exchange.
There's a post-election sale on silver and gold!
Trump euphoria has caused a dip in silver and gold.
It's time to buy some medals with fiat dollars before they come to their sense.
Go to davidknight.gold to get in touch with the Wise Wolf himself, Tony Arterburn.
He knows where to look to find silver and gold.
Wow! Yark!
Fiat!
Hello, Demir Zelensky.
I'm so tired of wearing these same t-shirts everywhere for years.
You'd think with all the billions I've skimmed off America, I could dress better.
And I could if only David Knight would send me one of his beautiful grey MacGuffin hoodies or a new black t-shirt with the MacGuffin logo in blue.
But...
He told me to get lost.
Maybe one of you American suckers can buy me some at the davidknightshow.com.
You should be able to buy me several hundred.
Those amazing sand-colored microphone hoodies are so beautiful.
I'd wear something other than green military cosplay to my various galas and social events.
If you want to save on shipping, just put it in the next package of bombs and missiles coming from the USA. Oh, yes, indeed.
Great stuff.
A very inventive team at the David Knight Show and great audience as well.
Just fantastic.
I want to thank...
The great Eric Peters.
And Eric Shiner should be joining us in this hour as well.
And I also want to invite you to head on over to the David Knight store and see not just the hoodies, but also check out all of the other items that they have available there because there are some awesome things.
I love the mug.
I use it all the time.
It just always reminds me of David and the fantastic work he does and all the people who are here on the show who supported the David Knight Show.
I'm Gardner Goldsmith filling in for David.
And I want to take the opportunity now to turn to a story that's not being covered very much.
And it has to do with the courts.
And something that maybe might concern people a little bit more.
If they knew how unconstitutional this agency is.
Let's talk about the courts and the securities and exchange folks.
Of course, Perry Mason never lost a case, or did he lose one?
Oh, I wonder what he would think about the future of Bitcoin in the hands of the SEC in this case.
Yes, Bitcoin is in the news, everybody, and so are the courts.
We're talking about...
The SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and how a court just told the SEC to get going on what it will do to regulate crypto.
Now, what's interesting about this is it was Coinbase that brought this to the court to say, get the SEC going.
We want to know what the regulations are going to be.
So it has to do with what's called regime uncertainty in political economics.
As Robert Higgs describes that, he wrote about it for the Independent Review many, many years ago for the Independent Institute in their journal, the Independent Review.
He's an economist, an economic historian, and he said, if you look at contemporaneous accounts and interviews with people from the FDR era, Who owned businesses or thought about getting involved with businesses.
Many of them delayed expansion of their businesses or delayed getting involved with businesses because they worried about what the FDR administration would do with taxes and playing favorites with unions.
So they waited and they said, I'll wait till the next administration.
He said that actually delayed a lot of economic activity.
And what's happening with Bitcoin and Coinbase in the Third Circuit Court of Appeals is actually very similar.
Because they're saying, unless we have some idea of where we're stepping, a lot of people don't want to get in and walk the path with us.
Now, some people worry about Bitcoin.
Is that preparatory to CBDC? Is it something that can really be kept private?
Well, let me just give you this information as far as the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission.
If you look at the US Constitution, you'll see...
That they have what's called the Commerce Clause in it, the Interstate Commerce Clause.
It's Article 1, Section 8. It says that the United States government can come up with rules regarding Indian interaction, can come up with rules regarding naturalization, and that they can come up with rules regarding the trade between the states.
They can regulate trade between the states.
But states is capitalized.
It was supposed to be, as James Madison said in a letter in 1808, it was supposed to be a remedial measure that if there were a conflict between states over trade disputes like tariffs being imposed by one state against products coming in from another state, protectionism, then they could resolve it in Congress.
It wasn't, as Madison said, it wasn't supposed to be an a priori.
Preventative measure telling people that they couldn't engage in certain behavior beforehand, like selling something over state borders, or this is how you will sell something over state borders.
You will conform to our labeling requirements, which would be clearly, if people were honest in Washington, an infringement of the First Amendment, because Congress is setting up a system whereby you have to say something on your product.
I shouldn't have to do that according to the First Amendment and according to basic ethics.
So if we look at this story, this comes out of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in the Third Circuit.
A federal appeals court says the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and based on what I just mentioned, based on James Madison, the original concept of the founders, there should be no such thing.
The SEC... According to this court, needs to better explain why it turned down a request from Coinbase to develop regulations to cover the booming crypto asset sector.
So if you're familiar with my friend Ian Freeman of FreeTalk Live Radio, Ian is now in federal prison.
Came up to New Hampshire with the Free State Project.
A wonderful guy.
We had a great conversation with Jacob Hornberger about his plight.
He wrote a three-part article, a massive, massive piece for the Future of Freedom Foundation about how the federal government targeted Ian because he was a very early adopter of Bitcoin, made millions, kept reinvesting, started to get Bitcoin kiosks, trained other people on how to run the Bitcoin kiosks.
A lot of people in the Free State Project love Bitcoin.
They think it's great.
I know people who've made millions off of it.
Ian was not liked in his hometown of Keene, where he had moved from Florida to be part of the Free State Project.
Because he would always do things like opposing zoning regulations or opposing new taxes or new regulations.
And he started up, along with others in Keene, the Robin Hooding practice, which was they would go down to the downtown and put quarters or other coins into the meters that were expired.
They would get ahead of the meter made.
And so that was starving the government of fines.
Versus the very small amount that they would be getting from the meters being fed.
The fines are much larger.
The city hated that.
But of course, the city is claiming control over the roads and basically mandating that if you own a business down there, your customers will have to feed our mafia meters.
So they opposed that.
They said that's not right.
It's also not right to force a taxpayer to pay for a meter made.
Right?
So all these things come into play and Ian was not liked.
The FBI has tried to infiltrate the Free State Project for years.
First, they tried to infiltrate the Free State Project with an FBI agent who was starting to try to talk to people about selling drugs.
And they realized that he was a fed.
He was a narco guy.
So he suddenly disappeared.
Similarly...
They did a similar thing with one of Ian's clients who, for a long time, did business with him and then said, oh, I've got this guy.
I think he's going to be selling drugs, that sort of thing.
Ian's like, I don't want you to buy from me at all.
Don't use any of my kiosks.
The guy, the FBI agent, used a kiosk and then they went after Ian to translate this so-called drug deal, which wasn't even a drug deal.
Totally fabricated all of this.
Now Ian is going to be in jail for the next seven years.
So I doubt Donald Trump will give him a pardon.
And I'm going to be wondering what happens on day one with the founder of the Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht, whom Donald Trump claimed he would give a pardon, to whom he would give a pardon on day one.
But as far as Bitcoin goes, the SEC, they say here, In the 3-0 ruling issued Monday by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, it was a partial win for Coinbase, which went to court after the SEC denied its July 2022 request that the agency make clear how securities laws apply to assets such as cryptocurrencies and tokens.
One of the things that Ian's attorneys brought up to the judge, they said, look, The Securities and Exchange Commission can't even tell us at our law firm whether they consider Bitcoin to be a money or they consider it to be a commodity.
They can't tell us.
Is this under the banking regulations or the securities regulations?
Which is it?
Which statutes actually apply?
The judge didn't care.
And this is what is causing many people some hesitancy to really get involved in a big way in things like Bitcoin.
You've got to have big, big legal teams to do this.
So, asked for comment, Coinbase has argued that the SEC has been applying existing securities laws to digital assets, prompting a need for wide-ranging rules.
Asked to comment, a Coinbase spokeswoman pointed out, A post on X by Paul Gruel, the company's chief legal officer, that said they appreciate the court's careful consideration.
A June 2023 enforcement action remains pending by the SEC against Coinbase, alleging its trading platform for digital assets operates as an unregistered broker.
So again, is it money?
Or is it a stock?
Or what is it?
Well, they're telling these people they're bringing action against Coinbase, but the court is saying you're not even offering rules for it.
And this is why Coinbase has said, we need to find out what your regulations are before you attack us for this.
That in the courts is very interesting.
Something else that came out as one of Biden's final insults has to do with the regulatory schema out there and how they're going to be pushing for digital identification.
We'll tell you about that in a little while.
As Biden leaves, however, I want to do something special.
I haven't had the chance to speak to this man on camera for a little bit, and I want to do so.
He is coming to us from near the belly of the beast.
He is Eric Shiner.
And now, we've got the audio, we've got it rolling.
rolling i want to do a mind meld going back to my days on star trek with that man eric shiner of mrc tv i must try to mind meld it eminence eminence Eternity ends.
Mine's a merchant doctor.
Our minds are one.
I feel what you feel.
I know what you know.
And joining us is the director for Mind Null.
Yes, fellow Vulcan.
Long live and prosper.
Eric Scheiner, director of MRCTV. How are you, my friend?
Good, good.
I see Eric the Overlord showing up in the...
Well, that works fine for me, Eric.
You are the Overlord of MRCTV and all we do there.
And I welcome you to the David Knight Show, Eric.
Thank you for joining us.
Short notice.
I really appreciate you being here.
And you are close to the belly of the beast.
Far enough away that maybe you can escape.
In your office there.
I can still smell its digestion.
It's not good.
Not good.
It's like that man who got swallowed by a whale.
A real man, just like Jonah.
A real man actually did get swallowed by a whale once on a whaling expedition.
When they opened up the stomach, he came tumbling out.
He was pale, but he was alive.
You're looking not so pale, and you're tumbling out of the belly.
Thank you, my friend.
Eric, so located in Virginia, outside of Washington.
Tell us a little bit about what you've been watching at MRCTV regarding the transition.
Everything's trans nowadays.
The transition from Biden to the Trump administration and some of the things that you're seeing from some of the pop media, whether they're freaking out and also some signals you might be seeing about Donald Trump and things like Freedom of speech,
which has been a big, big problem for us at MRCTV and others like Jay Bhattacharya and RFK Jr. Why don't you sort of run us through some of the things that you're noticing that are really prominent as we look at this transition from any signals from the pop media or your hopes about what can happen to establish a better, firm ground on which we can stand for free speech.
Well, you know, starting off with the pop media, you know, they're watching Biden go out right now, and the rose-colored glasses are on completely at this point.
I mean, CBS actually was pontificating after Biden's farewell speech.
You know, do we compare him to George Washington or another president that, you know, like JFK, who was doing some great things, but he couldn't, you know, he got killed, he couldn't remain in office.
Boy, only if Biden had another four more years.
So those are your options.
George Washington or another four more years.
That's where we're going to...
No one wants to say...
Yeah, we're looking at inflation and economics like the Carter administration.
And they're ignoring Gallup polls that just show people have a negative, completely negative view of this administration.
And they feel that historically that's how it's going to be remembered.
The media will not accept that.
I believe The View, Joey Behar, I miss him already!
She actually said that.
She misses Joe Biden already because now she just has to worry every morning when she wakes up about a bomb going off or something.
I mean, complete insanity.
It's amazingly unrealistic as well.
The idea that somehow Joe Biden was good for the people who engage in...
Free speech.
It shows us that they don't like free speech there, and they don't like free market economics.
Joy Behar doesn't have to worry so much because she's got her network spot, and they were playing favorites with the Biden administration.
The folks at Twitter under Jack Dorsey didn't have to worry so much because they got $3.5 million from the FBI to censor people like you and me.
NewsGuard didn't have to worry so much because they were getting money from DARPA, the global...
Well, Engagement Center didn't have to worry so much.
Newsguard, our favorites.
Oh, Newsguard.
I told the audience, Eric, about that last time that they sent us those letters and how you allowed me to keep that challenge.
And hopefully it was a friendly challenge to just say, hey, why don't we engage in a debate about climate change?
It might be a fruitful conversation.
They don't want to debate.
They just want to be the arbiters of truth.
And they stayed exactly to that line.
They didn't want to debate.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And you cannot question them, but they get to question you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Precisely it.
Precisely it.
Now, by the same token, I'm looking at signals from the Trump administration.
I just had Eric Peters on.
We had Eric and Eric today.
Two Erics.
Eric squared.
It's an all-Eric day.
Yes, it's all-Eric day.
I'm going to change my name to Eric the AFB. But I'll get Eric Idle to sing songs about me.
But I'm curious to see what you think about Donald Trump.
Let's look at it this way.
Remember when Donald Trump was, I think, unjustifiably accused of hating free speech when all he did was call out people like Jim Acosta and say that the pop media is the enemy of America?
He didn't say, I want to engage the FBI to pay...
I want Anthony Fauci.
I'm working with Anthony Fauci to try to find a way to counter the argument of the Great Barrington Declaration people.
He was unaware of those emails from Fauci until maybe now.
Maybe people might remind him.
And I don't like the fact that Trump gave an award to Fauci before he left office.
But the signals from Trump seem to be...
That those types of things won't happen as much.
When he entered office last time, he stopped the Portman-Murphy thing for two years, where they were given $75 million a year to fund newspapers or old guard dinosaur news agencies that would promote the government line.
Trump seems like he's more in favor of free speech there, but...
By the same token, I'm seeing signals from him where, for example, he said Kamala Harris shouldn't be allowed to say those things on Fox News.
Do you think those are just rhetorical slips on his part?
We've already seen him talk about college campuses and speech and so on.
What do you think Trump is going to do regarding things like News Guard and things like using the FCC or Section 230 to try to now push Well, I think Section 230 needs to be looked at and revamped, and I think that is a lot where they are heading.
You know, does it really apply to the Internet as it does to telephone communications, which is what it was originated for?
I think a lot of that is going to be looked at.
You know, will it be thrown out?
Will it be revamped?
Those are all important discussions.
What I think is really funny is, you know, the media is always, you know, Trump is against free speech.
This is horrible.
You know, look what he's making.
Poor Mark Zuckerberg and Meta do.
It's like Zuckerberg admitted himself.
Hey, you know what?
We were forced into this situation and, you know, we made some mistakes.
And guess what?
The fact checkers were politically motivated.
I mean, the media's like, well, Trump says the so-called fact-checkers were politically motivated.
This is a Republican conspiracy.
No, Zuckerberg himself said it.
Right, right.
Zuckerberg said it.
And let me ask you, Eric, one of the things...
Conservatives and Trump have been saying for a long time that the fact-checkers have been politically motivated.
Right.
And he's switching over to the community notes now, you know?
And that's horrible because Elon Musk does it.
It's a horrible thing.
The media doesn't like it.
Exactly.
I'm curious about this because if you look at the way Community Notes works and we look at Section 230, as you know, the leveraging language in Section 230 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act is that The two things that it does, as you know, but for folks who might not be familiar in the audience, most probably I've already looked into it, but just in case.
Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the federal government grants indemnification against...
For ISPs and social media sites, against states going after them, if one of the users posts something that might be illegal content, the actual platform can't be found guilty or liable under any state statute.
They can't bring those to court, and they will get that protection.
Plus protection against people suing them for defamation or slander if one of the users posts something that's defamatory about another user.
They say, you, the ISP, you, the social media site provider, we're going to grant you this beneficence and protection, but...
You'll only get it if we, the federal government, determine that you are curating your material in good faith.
That is the hinge clause.
Well, there's also the hinge clause, too, that they're not editors.
You get that protection if you're a platform, as in, I could call you up and say negative things about the president over the phone.
Well, that's it.
But they'll call them a platform only if they are curating.
And that's the key.
So they get that term platform, but that too is contingent on the good faith clause.
They won't be called a platform.
They'll be called something else if they don't conform to what the government says is curation in good faith.
But what I think is interesting, Eric, is now that they're giving their community notes the ability to put the information up there, in a way...
They sort of circumvented the, well, we're not the ones who are curating this now.
It's the users who are curating this.
Right.
And that's the move.
That's probably why Musk did it in the first place.
Right.
I only realized that a couple weeks ago.
It was when Zuckerberg gave his announcement, I thought, wait a minute, that actually makes a lot of sense.
Now, they can still be found for curating.
Things that the federal government doesn't like, let's say there's child pornography or there's something else that even something innocuous that the government doesn't like, that they can still go after and eventually say, no, you're not curating these things.
But as far as the truthiness of things goes, they will, I think, be able to skirt that.
And, you know, it's possible maybe the government, the federal government, even under Trump, could come up with some excuse.
But I do think that...
By doing so, they might have found a way around at least that little bit.
At least for now.
I think Section 230 is going to be looked at and revamped, especially in how it's applied to the internet.
And it might become more how a newspaper treats an opinion column.
It might be looked at more in that regard.
But obviously, there's a lot of work to be done there.
But I think a lot of people need to take a pause and a breath here.
This is a huge victory.
For free speech.
What Zuckerberg and Meta announced.
Now we've got to see if Alphabet, Google and all of them, YouTube, follow similar suit.
My guess is because of what you mentioned about the legality and how they get around it with the community notes, maybe just simply the comments will be enough to let them say, you know, we need to roll this back.
But historically, that hasn't been true.
You know, if you call a biological male that dresses in a dress, a he instead of a she, you know, Alphabet will come and zap your video.
You'll be flagged.
You know, will that loosen up?
It all remains to be seen how they'll fall in line.
But I think it's a great first step.
It's huge in this ongoing war.
For free speech, it's huge as far as, you know, even what the MRC has been able to push forward with Free Speech America and that effort here in Washington about making this a forefront issue.
And you're also going to see the secondary issue of free speech is going to be AI. That's going to be the next technology that people, who controls AI, what is it basing?
You know, we've already seen if you feed AI nothing but right-wing, you know, or left-wing news.
It's going to give you the divergence.
It's going to give you, if you feed it left-wing news, it'll give you a left-wing take for facts.
If you feed it nothing but right-wing news, it'll give you a right-wing take for facts.
So how do you get something that encompasses both?
What are the rules going to be there?
And that's going to be the next, the future of the battle for free speech, I think, is going to be AI. I agree with you.
you.
I agree with you 100%.
In fact, it's interesting because Joe Biden just signed 40 pages worth of executive orders.
And one of those executive orders pertains to AI.
And any company, they want to start up basically sort of a fascist AI support system where the federal government is going to be working with private companies.
And those private companies will work on AI.
And they will, any company that is doing business with the United States government will have to show, if it is using AI, they'll have to give their keys to the federal government.
And the Biden administration wants these organizations that are working on this to essentially start to find ways.
That they can come up with digital identification for all Americans.
And it remains to be seen whether Donald Trump is going to enforce that or not.
Let me see if I can find that information for you, Eric.
You know what would be more interesting and probably more practical is instead of the digital identification for all Americans, how about a digital identification of where the AI is coming from?
A reversal of that kind of concept, I think, would probably be more successful.
So if you have a certain AI and you're getting information from it, because of whatever identification it has, it tells you what it's taking in.
And you have an idea where it's taking in its information to come up with whatever information is coming from it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I'm finding that I would prefer to not have to get have the government getting involved at all, because to me, anytime they're asking for this information, They run the risk of breaching the Fourth Amendment.
So it's going to be very, very tricky.
It's interesting, you know, you mentioned Free Speech America, and I'd like for people to know...
Just the types of fights under Biden that you've been experiencing.
And Free Speech America is sort of an offshoot of the Media Research Center and other groups that really have been sort of behind the scenes trying and fighting and fighting and fighting on free speech matters.
Can you tell people about that, Eric?
Well, Free Speech America is a division of the Media Research Center.
They've done a lot of work both in cataloging...
And organizing, and this is what's really important, is they're providing kind of the ammunition for lawmakers that are going in and looking at these issues, especially regarding free speech.
So they will have a series of reports of all the censorship.
That has happened on Facebook or on Google.
They catalog it.
They measure it so people can report it to them.
And they actually have it documented because not every single report.
Someone can say, oh, I was censored on YouTube because I said this.
FSA will look into the case, contact Alphabet, see what's going on there.
Sometimes, yeah, you know, well, you clearly violated the rules here.
So, you know, you're in the wrong.
This isn't a legit complaint.
But many, many times.
Yes, it's clearly censorship.
They just didn't like what you had to say.
There is no actual rules violation.
So they catalog that so lawmakers can go into these hearings and make these arguments about things like NewsGuard and their government funding and why that is unnecessary and why they shouldn't be funded by the government by having all the instances of everything that NewsGuard's done and where their bias is.
It's all documented and it's available for everyone to see.
Boy, you know, you think about the amount of time and effort that has gone.
It's a lot of time and effort.
It really is.
They're a busy group over there.
And, you know, and you mentioned NewsGuard, you know, and I've spoken with people about this, Eric.
You know, the fact that many people weren't familiar with NewsGuard, we would talk about it, Matt Taibbi, Michael Schellenberger, they brought that up.
And, you know, the...
Just getting these emails from these people.
They send us these things.
They give us this busy work so that we can't do the work that normally would be out there for people to see.
Fighting the collectivist ideals, exposing the green canard, exposing a lot of the payoffs, exposing the pop media and their Marxist ideologies and things like that.
And in most cases, as you know, if they actually clicked on the links inside the articles, Their questions would be answered.
Exactly.
They send things like, well, you say this.
Where the heck are you getting this information?
It's in the article.
I just hyperlinked it.
Yeah, exactly.
And at the same time today, we're going to be probably hearing from the Supreme Court about the TikTok ban.
I think they have held it.
I think we've heard.
Oh.
Okay.
I think we've heard just before.
Yeah, I think I've got it over here.
In fact, Supreme Court ruling upholding ban on TikTok if not sold.
So I'll show it right now, Eric.
Thank you.
This is great timing.
Well, what do you think?
To me, I don't see anything in the Constitution that allows this.
It's not owned by China.
ByteDance is not owned by China.
I don't see...
The federal government with any power to say you either divest your company or...
You have to leave the United States.
But the Supreme Court, and I thought Brett Kavanaugh was leaning in that direction.
Let's read this.
The Supreme Court on Friday unanimously upheld the federal law banning TikTok beginning Sunday, unless it's sold by a China-based parent company.
Now, you've heard about this already, Eric.
I don't know if you know any details.
This is what I've been looking for, and I knew it was going to be coming, but this is my first blush sighting of this.
So, well, I only really heard about it right before I... I mean, at this point, this was passed as a separate law, so it's not like he can overturn it by executive order.
This is congressional law that's coming down.
I think maybe the government could have been a little more pragmatic about this.
I don't like TikTok censorship.
You know, MRC TV has been taken down from TikTok a gazillion times, you know, because, you know, we speak about free speech and the things that Chinese government doesn't like.
So I don't like their censorship.
I don't like their data mining either, but I don't like Google's data mining.
I don't like Meta's data mining.
I think that's the, there should have been a set of rules for what information you agree or not agree to let go forth.
And there should be some kind of set rules there maybe than just focusing on one particular social media entity, in my opinion.
But, you know, I have no love for TikTok as it stands personally.
But again, I don't have any love for any of the data mining and all the information that these social media companies grab from me.
Yeah, here's my take on it.
I was talking about this a little bit last night, and there are a couple things that come to mind.
First, the people who call themselves constitutionalists in Washington, D.C., the Congress, the President of the United States.
This is a great...
A great learning opportunity for people, I think, Eric.
And it's unfortunate because we've got almost 15 million people who use it and millions of people who are earning pretty good livings off of their use of TikTok.
The information exchange, even though there is some censorship on it, if you know or you're dissatisfied if it's open and you can leave and go to a competitor, then you should be able to go to a competitor if you want to, you know, if you don't like what they're doing.
The government shouldn't be getting involved with this.
And the First Amendment clearly prohibits it.
But the other thing about it is that the president doesn't need to do an executive order on this.
The president has a sworn oath to uphold the Constitution.
The Constitution prohibits, expressly prohibits the infringement of free speech by Congress.
And by banning them from being on platforms, again, they're mixing things in.
You can't be online.
You can't be purchased.
You have to divest.
All those things are mixed in with an infringement on free speech.
Every branch of every member of every branch of government swears an oath to the Constitution.
That's why George W. Bush, even though he was made fun of for having his signing statements when he signed statutes, that actually goes back to the oath that the president takes, which is, I will only enforce...
Constitutional laws, just like a soldier will only answer to constitutional orders.
If the Congress passes a statute that is, in the eyes of the President, unconstitutional, he is not only allowed to, he's obligated to not enforce the statute.
And then the Congress, if they think that what he's doing is egregious enough, they can bring impeachment procedures against him.
And it's the same thing with the Supreme Court's ability to be able to...
Do their, yeah.
But there's an element of the TikTok ban that involves national security.
It doesn't matter.
That doesn't matter.
That's their excuse.
The TikTok ban national security thing has nothing to do with it, especially during a time of no declared war.
But if you make an argument that it's for national security, I agree.
But it doesn't matter.
If they're going to do that, then you're getting to the Sedition Act under John Adams, where you can silence people.
They were claiming that the United States was closed to a war against France so they could shut down newspapers.
It's the same, same attitude.
It's the same approach.
They can make up anything that means national security, and they'll just say, well, for national security.
It's the same sort of opaque, malleable idea that they can use for climate change.
It's the same thing.
So from my point of view, that's not an argument because the First Amendment doesn't give a carve out for national security.
Congress shall write no law if they want to amend the Constitution.
And, you know, I'm an anarchist, obviously, so I don't even agree that the Constitution has authority over anybody.
But those people swear to uphold it.
And this is where Donald Trump could offer a lesson to people to say, I don't need an executive order.
I don't have to do that because I can just say I will not enforce this.
And if people don't like it in Congress, they can impeach me.
They've already done it for other things.
And that would be a very good opportunity to give people scholarship about the way their system is supposed to work.
Possibly, but can you imagine the media's reaction?
Talking about authoritarian, he's overruling what Congress and the Supreme Court.
He has just upheld a congressional law that the Supreme Court upheld, and here comes authoritarian.
So, you know, even under your setup, he'd be doing it under the guise of, hey, it's unconstitutional, and this is free speech, and this needs to be allowed, and the media would lambaste him.
You know, you're right.
And yet, look at the hypocrisy.
What did they do when the Biden administration shut down RT? Right.
They still allow the BBC. They still allow the CBC. Right.
So you get these double standards.
What if it were, you know, CNN offering some app and they suddenly said, you know, CNN, for national security reasons, we're going to stop you from doing that.
CNN would bring up First Amendment concerns.
NBC would do the same thing.
The fact that this is from another country, evidently there's a distinction there.
There isn't a distinction.
There are very hard facts.
Don't forget, it really kind of depends on who's in office.
You look historically, who's the one who called up the AP phone records?
Well, that was Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
Who went after James Rosen and James Risen?
With the government because they didn't like their reporting.
That would be Barack Obama.
You didn't see these institutions.
AP didn't rise up and sue.
No.
No, absolutely right.
Well, Eric, I know your time is short, and I really appreciate you being here.
This is great.
MRCTV, I hope people will head over there.
And one of the most popular segments, and you're going to be shooting that if you haven't already, the Wacky Mole.
Why don't you tell everybody about Wacky Mole before you go so they can check it out this afternoon and this evening.
Well, Wacky Mole is just a gathering of some of the most insane moments each and every week that you see from the leftist media.
If it doesn't make you laugh, you would have to go insane.
It would make you just so angry and frustrated.
So it was kind of a laughable take.
We poked some fun.
But, I mean, it really goes to the insane Trump derangement syndrome that they're in now.
By the way, you talked about the media reacting to Trump.
Rachel Maddow coming back five days a week because, I guess, ratings for MSNBC don't matter.
Yeah, she's coming back for 100 days.
Yay!
Isn't there a lotion to get rid of that rash?
I'm just wondering.
They're already gearing up.
You know, they're already getting their guns.
We saw Jim Acosta hold this big cartoon sign about Jim Acosta in free speech on his show.
Yeah, well, this is what I mean.
You know, you have all these cases of censorship under the Biden administration.
You have, you know, what do they care about all those national intelligence officers saying that Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation?
They all loved it.
They loved the censorship of that.
Not a single one of them complained until after the fact.
It was a conspiracy theory to say otherwise until, oh, that conspiracy was proven true.
So anyways, we gather moments like that.
We put them all together.
And we poke some fun at them every week.
And it's a good time.
It's a good time.
It is.
It is excellent.
And I wanted to mention inside the Rockfin chat, or Rumble chat, and also on X, if you have any final questions for Eric, we're going to be...
We're going to be looking at some big changes coming up, and I'm going to be very interested to see where Donald Trump comes down on free speech, and especially on the campuses, too, Eric.
I'm going to be curious about that.
I think the larger lesson, as you know in my writing, I try to remind people that the federal government's not supposed to be holding the carrot or the stick of federal funding for colleges at all, because they're not supposed to be involved with that at all.
Imagine how much the cost of college would go down if the government got under it.
Oh, that's so true.
And yeah, the funding through the loans, increasing the demand, and then now shifting the cost onto all of us, of so many of those people who got college loans, over and over and over again, both Obama and Biden doing that, and they call it forgiveness.
And nobody asked the principal question, especially in the media, nobody asked the principal question, how does that bring down the cost of college?
I think everyone agrees the cost of higher education is through the roof.
Yes.
As you know, you know, I have I have children in it.
You know, I know it firsthand.
We all know the cost of education is high of higher education is high.
But how do any of these policies of forgiveness or anything inspire the colleges and universities to bring down their prices?
Yeah, absolutely right.
And unfortunately...
The politicians claim they're making college more affordable by feeding more money into that.
And into that oven.
You're just feeding the beast.
Yeah, that's exactly it.
Eric, thanks so much for joining us, man.
I really appreciate it.
And I'll be looking at the Wacky Mole, MRCTV on Rumble.
Glad to be here.
Glad to be an overlord, I guess.
Yes.
Yes, Mr. Overlord.
I really appreciate it.
Coming on to the David Knight Show, the overlord is visiting.
And I appreciate very much everything that everybody does over there, Eric.
You guys are awesome.
So I'll talk to you later on text later this afternoon.
All right.
Watch out for the moles.
Take care.
Eric Scheiner of MRCTV, Executive Director of MRCTV. And I got to say, you know, when Eric and the team are getting those cuts, it really is astounding because they have teams of people.
They've been doing it for years, watching these videos, getting the cuts, sitting in front of the screens.
And I was amazed when Brent Bozell started to do that with videotape.
And I wonder how much data these guys hold on to.
I wonder how expensive it is.
Let's take a look at that Supreme Court ruling on the TikTok ban as we head up to noontime on the David Knight Show on the East Coast.
Here's the latest about this.
The full Supreme Court ruling upholding the ban on TikTok.
is in this linked by PBS. Supreme Court on Friday unanimously upheld the federal law banning TikTok beginning Sunday unless it is sold by its China-based parent company, holding that the risk to national security posed by its ties to China overcomes concerns about limiting speech by the app or its 170 million users in, oh, it's 170, I thought it was lower than that, in the United States.
A sale does not appear imminent, and although experts, which is something that Trump says he wants to work on rather than just saying I won't enforce it, although experts have said the app will not disappear from existing users' phones once the law takes effect January 19th.
The justices, this is really something.
So the full ruling, and this is my first blush look at this, everybody.
Let me just go into this real quick.
They've got their description.
They say a TikTok user's content feed is also shaped by content moderation and filtering decisions.
Of course it is.
People know that.
They enter onto it voluntarily.
In recent years, U.S. government officials have taken repeated actions to address national security concerns regarding the relationship between China and TikTok.
Really?
Okay, so how about the relationship between the United States and phone service providers or internet service providers?
Because already, after the Snowden revelations, the Congress wrote a law that gives the federal government the power to buy that information.
And now, Joe Biden has passed an executive order that says, if you're using AI in your systems, we're going to demand your key codes.
He also, a couple years ago, passed an executive order that said, if you're involved in writing any software that could be used for chemical or biological research, you must turn over not only your security protocols, calls, but the software you're writing, you're creating.
In August 2020, President Trump issued an executive order finding that the spread in the United States of mobile applications developed and owned by companies in China continues to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States. and economy of the United States.
So as we know, TikTok was a very, very big place for, of all things, people to take footage that the IDF had shot, members of the IDF had shot themselves, and they were And were indictments of themselves for war crimes.
That was something that a lot of the people who supported the United States support of Israel didn't like.
And the push to stop TikTok commenced.
Just days after issuing its initial executive order, President Trump ordered ByteDance LTD to divest all interests and rights.
In any property used to enable or support ByteDance's operation of the TikTok application.
Throughout 2021 and 2022, ByteDance negotiated with the executive branch officials to develop a national security agreement that would resolve these concerns.
However, again, last year...
That's when the statute came along.
They passed the Act last year, and they say it provides two means by which an application may be designated a foreign adversary-controlled application.
It is left up to the arbitrary whim of the federal government to do it.
They define it as a national security risk, and now they want either a divestiture or they want to ban it.
And they will do it.
Unless it's divested and sold off, it will be shut down.
And so, the Supreme Court unanimously found that this so-called national security argument that Eric brought up trumps the First Amendment.
The national security argument that they can just make up willy-nilly about anything.
Listen, Joe Biden said that climate change was a national security issue.
They claimed that the COVID scandemic was a national security issue.
They will claim that obesity is a national security issue.
You don't want obese people going in the military.
They'll make up any argument they can under national security.
It's for your security.
Well, maybe people could look at not just that fraudulent magic trick, but they also could consider The idea that political people creating halls of government, even the founders, writing a document that says, for your protection, we are taking power.
Maybe they can see that that's not the right start.
At least the founders tried to decentralize the system.
At least they had their constitution.
But as Lysander Spooner said, it hasn't held them back.
So now, even the First Amendment has unanimously been overridden by the people who tell you, for your safety and security, we are going to prohibit you from freely engaging in speech.
Again, are they going to block a BBC app?
Are they going to block a Canadian app?
It's up to them to decide.
And yet they were prohibited by the First Amendment and granted no power to command that a business divest.
Not only does the First Amendment prohibit the restriction on speech through communication over telecommunications, which they do all the time, just look at the FCC and licensing, but they have...
Acquired a power that never was in their constitution to force people to sell off a company or prohibit its sale entirely, shut it down completely.
If that isn't one of the capping, defining moments of the Biden administration and this Supreme Court, including Clarence Thomas, including the so-called conservatives on the bench.
I don't know what is.
But as a voluntarist, I will say that the very idea that you have to be forced to pay for your protection leaves it up to them to define what is your protection, not you.
And so this is a manifestation of the very germ that comes in the idea that the state is valid, as argued by the people who force...
Upon you, the state.
We're out of time for the David Knight Show today, everyone, and I want to thank the contributors for giving me the heads up inside Rockfin.
Thank you for that contribution.
Very nice of you, Risha.
Also, Steve and I Can't Believe, fellow conspirator, and all the viewers on Rumble, thank you so much for welcoming me here today, even with those tech...
This is just fantastic.
And as I go, I want to leave you with two things.
First, the hilarious AI Alfred Hitchcock generated David Knight segment.
And then some wonderful music to go.
So thank you everyone for being with us on the David Knight Show.
And please come back on Monday for David and join me tonight on Liberty Conspiracy on Rumble.
Six o'clock.
Take care.
God bless.
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