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Feb. 19, 2025 - The David Knight Show
51:26
Trump's Sacred Suit Scam, “Blessed Threads”, and the Escalating Enserfment Thru Auto Mandates
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Time Text
Joining us now is Eric Peters of Eric Peters Autos.
Always great to have Eric on.
We were just talking off air as we were waiting to try to get these streams restarted.
And tell them what you just saw that Trump is doing.
Yeah, I found...
Almost rendered speechless by this.
Do you remember that there was a TV evangelist back in the 70s named Ernest Angley?
Yeah, yeah.
He was such a fraud.
He said, be healed!
You know, he was...
Put your hand on the TV. And one of the things that old Ernest would do, he would sell you what he called the blessed cloth.
Which was supposedly something that he had prayed over, and if you gave him some money, you would get this piece of cloth in the mail, and that would somehow, as you were talking about earlier, help you to be prosperous.
It would solve your financial problems if you carried around this blessed cloth.
Well, Trump is doing essentially the same thing now.
There's a website devoted to his Trump cards, which you've probably heard of, and if you scroll down and look at it a little bit, you'll find that you can actually pay to get a piece of the suit that he wore during the assassination attempt.
It's like he's got the effrontery of a Roman Caesar to deify himself while he's still alive.
I bet if you bought all those pieces of that suit, you'd probably find that it's like 45 different suits.
Of course.
You can only cut the thing into so many pieces.
I wouldn't even trust that it was a genuine piece if I was buying it from him.
You know, we just saw what we're talking about, the fraud here and everything.
The Trump crypto coin that he had, and then he had a Melania coin as well.
Remember that?
How that was always, as these things always are, they're pumping dumps.
And his guy they put in as Commerce Secretary, Lutnik.
A lucky Howard Lutnik.
He is, I call him lucky because he didn't show up on 9-11.
You know, he was, all the people in his office died, but he, somehow he didn't show up that day, just like Larry Silverstein didn't show up.
But he is the master of doing all this stuff.
Well, it turns out that there was another pump and dump coin called Libra.
And they have impeached the Argentinian president there, Javier Malay.
They're working up on, I don't think they've completely impeached him, but they're filing the paperwork and that type of thing.
I'm sure they'll still have to vote on it or something.
But anyway, they brought impeachment charges against him for being involved in that Libra pump and dump.
And that has a connection to the people of the Melania coin.
Imagine that.
It's just like one hustle after the other.
It's speculative vaporware, and it's fundamentally designed to be a speculative instrument to rip off people who think they're going to cash in.
It's the oldest game in town.
Appeal to people's greed.
They think, oh, if I buy this crypto, it's going to explode in value, and I'll be able to make a fortune.
Of course, the only people making a fortune, generally speaking, are the ones operating the scam.
That's right.
Yeah, the greater fool theory, that's there.
But isn't it a perfect metaphor for the Trump administration?
A bump and dump ripping off his own supporters like he did in 2020 and all the rest of this stuff?
I mean, it's just, hopefully he won't get them arrested like he did on January the 6th, you know?
I'm drinking coffee.
I feel like sometimes I should be drinking vodka instead.
It is a crazy world.
Well, you know, when we're looking at...
And what is happening, one of the things I saw that I thought was interesting, and we're going to get to some of the topics that you've recently covered on ericpetersautos.com, but there's one that I saw, which I thought was kind of interesting.
They've got now this Chinese electric car company, BYD, I think it is, has now surpassed Tesla in terms of being the biggest globally in terms of number of units shipped.
You can get...
An electric vehicle from this company in China for under $10,000.
But you can't buy it in the United States because they've got all these safety regulations and things like that.
Right.
Exactly right.
The idea, apparently, is that we want to limit mobility rather than increase mobility.
And also, if you look at it from the so-called environmental point of view, if these people actually really did believe that the climate is changing, which is the predicate for the whole push to electrify everything, then why wouldn't you want to do everything possible to make affordable EVs more available to people in this country?
You know, a $10,000 car, hey, that's great.
You could get a lot of people into these $10,000 cars.
And if it's necessary to do that, to save the planet, to keep the climate from changing, then why not do that?
Why could that be?
Why is it that all the EVs that are available in this country start around $40,000 for the most part?
You know, so that only really affluent people can afford to have them.
Well, it's because it's another scam.
It's another grift.
You know, it's all about wealth transfers with the pretext of this climate change shibboleth applying the virtue signaling.
Hilarious things.
As we were talking about a little bit before we jumped on the air, sales of Teslas are tanking, and I don't think it's so much because of the affordable Chinese vehicles.
It's because his demographic, the person who typically would buy a Tesla, Sheryl Crow, for instance, have decided that Musk is now Satan incarnate, and they have to walk away from him and his cars.
And they've got people that are out there doing graffiti on Teslas and everything.
They hate him so much now.
But it was only just a couple of years ago that he was one of the biggest climate hoax people out there, you know, pushing the climate MacGuffin.
And, you know, and it was just a couple of five years ago that Trump was pushing and not even five years ago.
I mean, he stopped pushing the vaccine well into his campaign.
He was still pushing it.
And so you got Trump who was pushing the pandemic MacGuffin.
You have Elon Musk who was pushing the climate MacGuffin.
And now they're the heroes of the right that don't believe and despise everything that comes along with all that stuff.
That's how he got to be the world's richest man was by pushing this climate MacGuffin nonsense.
And that's one of the reasons why the left loved him so much.
And now that he's moved away from it, he's not an evangelist for it anymore.
But that is the basis of his whole business model.
Oh, sure, and the really interesting thing to me is that just as...
A lot of the red hats have completely forgotten all about Trump's warp speeding of those beautiful vaccines into circulation.
People don't want to talk about how Musk has in no way abandoned his support for carbon credits and for taxing people based on carbon.
Oh no, we can't talk about that, even though that is a dagger placed right directly over our chests and at our standard of living that's going to further insert the American people.
Yes.
Yes, they're going to come at us from another way.
They're going to come at us from the carbon credits.
They're going to come at us from the carbon pipeline and all the rest of the carbon dioxide pipeline, all these other things.
They'll do it differently.
And that's one of the things that we need to be concerned about.
You know, when they talk about, we're not going to have CBDC, but then you've got all the people around Trump who are pushing, you know, Tether and the various crypto...
They're going to have a...
Kind of secure coin.
They're going to make partnerships with Visa.
Musk is all about making his platform another WeChat so that you do all of your financial payments and everything through it.
A digital wallet, all the rest of the stuff.
People don't look at the functionality of this.
They look at the name.
And so they get real excited about the fact that Trump is going to get us out of the World Health Organization.
Got to wait a year.
But he's getting us out.
Supposedly he has stopped.
The funds, we'll see.
But at the same time, he has elevated this Office of Pandemic Preparedness, and he's got a veterinarian there that is the alleged expert on bird flu.
And they don't see that.
You know, they're wondering why eggs are so expensive and why the shelves are empty of eggs.
And yet these people have been, you know, he's been part of this cabal that is out there killing all the chickens.
And this is a guy that Trump has put there.
Publicly, Trump makes this big display about getting us out of the World Health Organization while he takes a guy who has worked with the World Health Organization, worked with One Health, and he puts him in as a chief of the new pandemic nonsense.
The Pandemic Preparedness Office is about predictive programming is what it's really about.
There is a tragic element to this in that people are so PTSD in this country, good people, who are desperate to hear something that will give them some hope.
And that desperate hoping is what I think causes them to sort of close their ears to things that contradict that and might make them feel uncomfortable.
So they see Trump as he's our savior.
He's the guy who's going to pull us back from the brink of this woke left takeover.
He's going to restore America's greatness.
And the same thing with regard to Musk.
You know, all of a sudden he's the guy who's going to root out all the corruption in the federal government.
Never mind that he's the guy who's been profiting to the tune of billions from the corruption in the federal government.
It's because people just are so eager and desperate to have some relief.
You know, we're constantly barraged by chaos, machinations, and evil.
So that when you're presented with something that might be an antidote to that...
You really glatch onto that.
And I can relate to that.
You probably can relate to that, too.
You want to believe, you want to hope that there's something better around the corner, even when there probably isn't, and there may be something worse.
That's right.
I remember at the end of the Obama administration, you had an actor, a very well-known actor, who said, I don't know who this guy is.
We projected onto him what we wanted him to be.
And that's exactly what the right is doing with Trump.
You know, they've got this idea of how the universe should work, and they have this idea that, hey, he's not beholden to anybody.
You know, he actually used that.
I played that clip from when he was running in 2016, the debate that they had at the Reagan Library with a plane behind him and everything.
And he was hectoring.
Jeb Bush, over the fact that Jeb Bush had brought in, like, $100 million worth of donations and everything.
It's like, now we look at Trump in 2024, and he brings in $250 from just one guy, you know?
And then, of course, he gets $100 million from Adelson and, you know, for Israel and all the rest of the stuff.
You talk about somebody who is for sale, and he was projecting himself out in 2016 as, I'm independently wealthy.
I don't need to take money from anybody else.
I'm going to pay for my own campaign.
That is not who he is today, but that's who people still think he is.
They want to believe that.
They're projecting what they want onto him.
They're projecting what the image that he created eight years ago, they're projecting that onto him as well.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I mean, the same thing happened in Germany before the rise of the Austrian house painter, right?
Yeah.
The whole country was thrown into a state of chaos, and people were hoping that they weren't going to find themselves in the street tomorrow.
And they heard what this guy had to say about making Germany great again.
History echoes, doesn't it?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, it is sad when we see this.
But, you know, it's also...
I don't know.
How do we get people to wake up and actually see it for what it truly is?
I think part of it is that they are looking for a dictator.
And you mentioned Germany.
I played all the clips from 60 Minutes and everything yesterday.
And the fact that they're bragging about arresting people for speech and for joke memes and all the rest of this stuff on the Internet.
And, you know, so you've got J.D. Vance out there saying, well, we don't do that.
You know, we're all about free speech.
And you've got Elon Musk who's saying we're all about free speech.
Well, no, he's not.
He shuts people down.
He's calling for the arrest of people who criticize him.
You've got Trump wanting to shut down 60 Minutes because he doesn't like the way they edited the Lala Harris interview.
And it's like, hey, man, you won.
Where's the damage to all of that stuff?
And as Reason looked at it, they said what they edited was not deceptive.
One of the edits made her look better than she actually did, but she didn't say anything in either one of them.
And so he wins this, but he wants to punish them, and he wants to use We have to weaponize the FCC against them.
I remember when Obama was going to do that.
Everybody got upset about it.
And then you've got all these Republican governors, including, I would say, Trump and the presidency, bought by Israel who have put all these anti-Semitic laws out there.
So, you know, you can criticize trainees, but you can't criticize the foreign government that has bought our politicians.
I mean, what hypocrisy we have across the board.
Well, sure, but that's what it's been for so long, right?
You know, the left and the right fundamentally agree on the same thing.
It's just that they have a different approach to how they want to implement it.
So, yeah, Trump's been on record saying essentially that if you dare to question anything that the government of Israel does, it's very important to...
Dream it that way.
Somehow that means you're anti-Semitic.
Somehow that means you hate Jewish people and you want to see Jewish people persecuted because you criticize what B.B. Netanyahu is doing to people in that part of the world.
That makes you an anti-Semite now.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Well, there are 350-plus rabbis that got a full-page New York Times ad saying, we're not standing with this stuff.
So I guess they get deported now.
Yeah.
No, it's exactly the piece with, you know, during the pandemic when if you raised your hand and said, look, if somebody wants to take these drugs that they're marketing as vaccines, hey, they're adults, they can make that free choice.
They can choose to go ahead and get themselves injected with that.
Somehow that became you're an anti-vaxxer.
You know, that's the kind of political language now that we are mired in.
R. Emmett Terrell, the editor of the American Spectator, came up with a great term many years ago.
He called it the kultur smog, you know, which he meant that we're all sort of Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
People bought into these paradigms.
Getting back to the car stuff, you know, one of the things that's interesting is that with BYD, they're offering their self-driving stuff for free.
And, of course, you pay a big premium for that with Elon Musk.
And he has a worse safety record than the Pinto.
And, you know, it was legendary with a Pinto, but now he's got a worse safety record than that.
But you pay extra for that.
You can get that kind of fiery collision death for free.
We pay forever with Tesla.
It's not as though you pay for it once.
It's a subscription.
If you buy the car that has the full self-driving, let's say, and then you decide to sell it, well, whoever buys it next doesn't get the self-driving unless they then sign up for the subscription to get it.
More fundamentally, I'm not the least bit surprised by the safety issue because you're encouraging passivity behind the wheel.
The whole point of this is to take the driver...
Basically, out of the driving equation.
So what do they expect?
You put a technology in a car that encourages people to literally go to sleep and take a nap behind the wheel of the car so that when the system glitches, somebody walks in front of the car and the cameras don't see the person or they see something else or whatever it is that causes the car to run into something, of course that's going to happen.
You're either a driver or you're not.
It's really binary.
You're either the person who is responsible for controlling the car or you're not.
It has to be one or the other.
Well, you know, he doesn't really care about how many of these things he's selling, I don't think, because his new approach, and he's already put out the cyber cab or whatever it was, right?
It's got two seats.
It's got no steering wheel, no brakes, no gas pedal.
It's going to do all the driving for you.
And you're just there as a passive passenger.
It's what you and I have been talking about for the longest time.
It's more profitable for them to rent a car than it is for them to sell you a car.
And where they really want to go is to rent.
And that's really where Elon Musk wants to go.
He wants to have robo-taxis, and he doesn't really care about anybody owning cars, and he's saying that this is going to happen in the next few years.
And, you know, that's what really concerns me.
About seeing him get so much power, so much inside information, backdoors into all the computers and all the rest of this stuff.
That's what really concerns me, how he's being worshipped by the right when he has these evil agendas.
And that's not the only evil agenda he has.
It's a different agenda than the evil ones that I was talking about earlier, where he wants to put a chip in your brain and have you join with a singularity.
I mean, that's ultimate evil there.
But, you know, he wants to pacify you with his cyber cab as well.
Yeah, it's all about monetizing everything.
It's no longer about owning anything.
You know, this archaic, antiquated model wherein you would purchase a car, and once you purchased it, it was your car.
Well, that's just so very 20th century.
What we want now...
Is to have you paying a regular fee in order to be able to use the vehicle.
And that really is what Cole Klaus Schwab meant by, you will own nothing and be happy.
Exactly right.
And yet, you know, Musk does this all the time.
You'll own nothing and you'll be happy.
You'll be much better, you know, when you're not driving the car and all the rest of the stuff.
And it's the same stuff that Klaus Schwab is saying, and yet the right...
He hates Klaus Schwab rightfully, but they love Elon Musk.
Isn't it amazing that he can say the same stuff as Klaus Schwab?
He can actually make it happen, and they love him instead of hating him like they do Klaus Schwab.
Well, I think part of the reason has to do with the gradual transition which has occurred over the last 50 years of our culture into a culture that is comfortable with debt.
And with not owning things, with living beyond our means.
Because most people now are making payments on a car.
They're making payments on a house.
They're making payments on all kinds of things.
And so they've gotten used to not really owning things.
Well, why not?
I can just make the payment.
As long as I can make the payment.
Sure, I'll get whatever that thing is.
They're not uncomfortable with that.
Earlier generations of Americans were very uncomfortable with getting into hock for things.
There used to be the layaway, where you would pay some money every month, and then eventually, once you paid it off, whatever the item was, maybe it was a TV or a sofa, then you got it.
You paid it before you paid for it.
But that whole thing has been reversed now, and a whole generation of Americans, two generations of Americans, have grown up Being kind of hypnotized and narcoticized by the idea of getting things that they really can't afford.
College kids now, the first thing that happens when they go to campus, they get presented with these tables where MasterCard and Visa are there, handing out credit cards to these college kids who have no job.
That's right.
Yeah, well, they've shown their willingness to go into debt.
Right.
They want them to go into debt.
What they want is to get you on that train so that you're just making those monthly payments.
And if you get used to that, if that's the way you want to live, well, why not just rent the app and rent the ride?
I remember my mom, you talked about layaway.
I remember my mom heavily doing that.
And then my dad, whenever I was with him and he bought something, he would always say to him, 90 days, same as cash.
They would not pay any financing charges.
They would absolutely flip if they saw the credit card rates that are criminal, I think.
It's what we used to lock people up for loan sharking.
In those days, they didn't want to pay a 5% rate or something like that, which was just slightly over what they would pay you in the bank.
They might charge you 6% for a home mortgage, but they would pay you 5% in the savings account.
But today, they pay you less than a fraction of a percent, and they'll charge you 20, 30, 40. 40%.
That's criminal.
We actually got a solicitation in the mail.
And we have good credit.
And they pitched us a credit card with 40% compounded monthly.
You're better off dealing with Winnie in the alleyway.
I know, it's absolutely crazy that they can get away with this.
But, you know, when we look at getting back to the Chinese thing again.
Okay, so part of the reason why it is cheaper is because of what you've always talked about.
How, you know, in other countries like in France, you know, a young driver could get a special class of car and it didn't go as fast.
It didn't have all the safety stuff.
They load up.
Our cars with safety regulations and all the rest of this stuff.
And that's part of it, all the regulations and all the add-ons that are mandated here.
But I think a big part of this, and I think it is something that we're seeing all the automobile companies circling the drain, Volkswagen, for example.
Why is Volkswagen circling the drain?
Well, part of it is this push towards EV, but another part of it is...
The energy costs.
There's no way that they're going to be able to compete with China on manufacturing, especially in something that is energy intensive, when China is given an advantage with the Paris Climate Accord.
They're adding a couple of coal power plants with no scrubbing, no cleaning at all, each week in China.
And they've got dirt cheap, literally dirt cheap power plants.
They're very dirty.
And yet, the West, they're mandating all of this stuff.
This is all part of the...
I mean, what do you think about...
The tariffs that send a lot of shocks to the automobile industry, these tariffs that have been announced by Trump on steel and aluminum and all the rest of this stuff.
Well, let's start by defining our terms.
What is a tariff?
It's fundamentally a tax.
That's right.
There are all these different names for taxes.
Fundamentally, you're talking about increasing the cost of whatever the item is by 25%.
That's what Trump is talking about.
And it'll be paid by us.
It'll be paid by us.
Exactly.
Yeah, he's bragging that he's going to get a trillion dollars worth of new taxes.
Well, he's going to get it from us.
That's the whole thing.
Fundamentally, the stated objective of this is to provide an inducement for manufacturers that have located outside of the United States.
Such as Mexico, for example.
All of the major automakers now have these operations south of the border.
But the reason for that has to do with the cost of manufacturing things in this country.
So Trump is approaching it, in my opinion, in exactly the wrong way.
Rather than apply a tax to the manufacturer of vehicles, how about do something about the regulatory costs and the environment in this country that makes it so expensive and so difficult to make anything in this country?
That's the reason why these companies left this country, because it costs less to manufacture stuff in other countries.
That's right.
And, of course, key with that regulation is going to be the emissions regulations coming from the EPA and all the rest of this stuff.
I agree with you 100%, and I've said the same thing.
I said, if you really want to help us, don't play around with the tax stuff, don't play around with tariffs, because now...
We have, and this was always the case, and everybody would talk about, oh, I don't like the income tax, and there's better ways that we could do taxes and everything.
So they'd propose these different things, whether it's a flat tax or whether it's a national sales tax, whatever.
But everybody was always concerned before Trump that we would have the new tax and we would keep the old tax.
Now with Trump, he's openly talking about it.
And they don't have a problem with it.
And you've got people like Dan Bongino trying to sell people on the idea, well, the income tax is going to go away.
It's not going to go away.
He's talking about what he's going to have the corporate tax rate at 15%, which, by the way, is what everybody internationally, all the globalists agreed, was going to be the minimum corporate tax.
So he's obeying the globalist minimum.
He's not going against that.
And he's keeping all the taxes, all the stuff about, well, I'm not going to tax waitresses on tips and things like that.
He's going to keep the tax in there, so we're going to have internal and external revenue, but it'll all be internal.
And even by calling it external revenue, that's a lie, because it's all going to be paid, as you know, by people here.
Republicans used to always understand there's no such thing as a corporate tax, because those taxes get passed on to the consumers, or this business is going to go out of business.
But they buy into that double-think, that Orwellian double-think, because it's Trump.
It's amazing.
Well, and because they don't really have an understanding of what they're talking about or what's being talked about.
Again, we hear people talking about tariffs, and there's no mention of the fact that it's a tax.
Is it some sort of different species of thing when, in fact, it's exactly the same thing?
And this is of a piece with the way they call what you're forced to pay into Social Security a contribution.
It's a tax!
All these things are taxes.
They can come up with various different names for them, but at the end of the day, you're being compelled to pay more for whatever that service or product is.
By the government, because it's a tax.
That's right.
So let's have that discussion instead of talking about all of this completely irrelevant peripheral etymological shock and jive.
Yeah.
And of course, you need to get right down to it.
Since Trump doesn't care about the deficit, he wants the debt ceiling removed for several years.
Maybe he had a fight with...
You know, Congress over that.
He doesn't want a debt ceiling.
He wants to keep going into more and more debt.
And the Democrats say that we have modern monetary theory where deficits don't matter.
So why do we even have an income tax, right?
But instead, they're going to double down on it.
Whenever you start talking about cutting taxes for us...
Then they all become fiscal hawks, whether they're Republicans or Democrats.
But when it comes to their spending, they don't care about any of that stuff.
We've got Bernie D says, why don't they just advertise these things as battery cars?
Battery included.
Hey, it's a selling point, you know?
Instead of batteries not included, the batteries aren't included.
When you hear batteries, you think of a toy, don't you?
You think of like a kid's toy.
And, you know, that's not good marketing.
So they have to call them something else.
You know, Don Draper from Mad Men understood this.
You know, it's all about how you present things to people if you're trying to sell something, particularly if you're trying to sell them a bill of goods.
I've got another comment here from Brian and Deb McCartney.
David, can you ask Eric if he saw that Tetris, the World Health Organization, was at the Global Conference on Road Safety?
I didn't see that.
Did you see that?
Oh, sure, because they're going to try to find that as a public health thing, too.
Oh, yeah.
Absolutely.
Go ahead.
Sorry.
I was going to say, I had an experience recently because we've had a couple of snowstorms back-to-back, and these new cars that I test drive, of course, have all the advanced driver assistance technology.
Well, when the snow and the ice obscures the cameras that the system depends on, you get these...
Klaxon warnings about how driver assistance is not available.
And I got to thinking about that.
Well, if the premise is that you have to have this technology in order to safely drive the car, and the weather makes the systems inoperative, then implication is it's not safe to drive the car.
So probably we should just lock down whenever the weather is bad, because...
The cars aren't safe to drive.
And I think that that's coming.
I don't think that that's an exaggeration.
Oh, no, no.
They'll do a climate lockdown for any number of reasons.
They'll do it because you've got too many emissions and everything.
But I think they're really going to be coming after us with this bird flu stuff.
I think they're really ramping up on that.
I mean, we look at all of this.
Does it just scream at you like it does at me that they would go in and kill every last bird on a farm because they got a phony PCR test on one of them?
What is the logic of that?
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
What is the logic of that?
You know, they're out there trying to scare everybody and say, we're going to have a case fatality rate of 25 to 50 percent.
Well, first of all, Redfield, Trump's guy, doesn't have any idea what that is.
He couldn't possibly.
He's just making these numbers up.
But, you know, okay, 25 to 50 percent, that's really bad.
Well, why would you kill 100 percent of all the birds then?
You know, how are you ever going to get herd immunity that they always talked about, or flock immunity?
It's nonsense.
Well, fundamentally, let's go back to the, you know, the old pop shows.
Think about Columbo.
You know, they used to have the corpus delecti.
You had to have the body, you know, in order to prove that there had been a murder.
We've gotten to a point in this country where you can simply assert that there might be harm.
You don't have to produce harm.
Go back to the VW thing with the diesels that I've written about extensively.
Not a single victim, a person who was actually damaged by the Volkswagen diesels, was produced as evidence of, hey, these things are causing a problem.
We have to get them off the road.
It was enough to say, well, they affronted the regulatory standard.
They cheated.
They threw their cars to pass the federal test, but in fact, under wide-open throttle, oh my gosh, for a moment, it blipped a little bit and it emitted a slightly higher than allowable amount of oxygen.
Nobody says, well, wait a minute, who's actually been harmed by this and to what extent?
So, in other words, there's no cost-benefit analysis anymore for any of this.
You and I talked about that at the time.
We talked about the Takata airbag recall and how many people have been killed globally off of that, how they'd mandated the airbags and it was killing people.
But, you know, now we've got far more than that happening with Tesla.
It's now become a fiery crash type of thing.
Worse rate so far than the Pinto.
Hasn't got up to the number of deaths that the Pinto did because the Pinto was on the marketplace for 10 years.
But its rate is double what the Pinto was.
And yet nobody is coming.
The National Highway Traffic Safety.
The safety association is not coming after Tesla for that when it's actually killing people, but they came after Volkswagen and made them bow the knee, stop making diesel, start making electric because of the emission cheating, quote-unquote.
Yeah, I agree.
I don't think it really was because of that fundamentally.
I think the timing of that helps to explain why that happened.
At that time, which was circa 2014-2015, Volkswagen was offering an entire line of TDI-powered diesels that were affordable.
They were $22,000, $23,000, and these things had 700 miles of range, and they could get 55 miles per gallon.
And being diesels, they would last 300,000 miles with any kind of decent care.
And it was right around that time that the push for these electric vehicles began to get really serious.
And I think, at some level, there was this realization, we can't have this.
We can't allow this comparison to be out there.
Of a $22,000 Volkswagen Jetta with a diesel that goes 700 miles in between Phillips that gets 55 miles per gallon on the highway versus this $40,000 EV that maybe might go 240 miles before you have to sit and wait.
For an hour for the thing to charge back up.
And it's going to need a new $10,000 battery after six or eight years of driving it.
They had to get rid of the TDI diesels.
And so they came up with this pretext of, oh my gosh, they're dirty.
They're not clean, they're dirty.
Because of some fractional increase in NOx emissions under wide open throttle.
That was never explained to people.
One of the listeners is a mechanic, and he goes around the country grabbing these diesels and fixing them up and reselling them.
That's his specialty.
So he heard that my head gasket had blown last Christmas.
And so he came by last year and he fixed the Miata for me because he was making a trip northeast of me.
He's in the Austin, Texas area.
I think it's Austin.
It's in Texas or San Antonio, somewhere around that area.
But anyway, that's what he's doing.
He's going around and grabbing these diamonds in the rough and fixing them up because they're great vehicles.
They're very durable.
They're cheap to run.
Of course, it would be even cheaper if they hadn't added all the extra charges.
To the diesel fuel.
But it's such a criminal shame.
And when we look at what's going on with the EPA, they're still not going to get rid of the EPA. They're not going to get rid of the EPA. They're not going to take away the powers of the EPA to use emissions to shut things down.
They're not going to take away the powers of the Department of Energy to use energy efficiency to ban appliances.
All that stuff is going to stay.
It's the regulations that are going to stay.
They may play games with this.
And here's the thing.
What do you think about this, Eric?
I've talked about how Elon Musk in the World Government Summit and everything has talked about how he wants to minimize government, but he wants to maximize governance.
He didn't use that exact phrase, but that's a paraphrase of what he was talking about.
And so he wants to get rid of a lot of these people who are in the bureaucracy.
But a bureaucracy that is run with a few people that has AI looking at everything that you're doing and auditing everything you're doing, to me, that terrifies me.
Oh, me too.
Absolutely.
I hear that phrase about making government more efficient.
That scares me.
The government was very efficient in the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin in terms of...
Rounding up the entire populace of the country, essentially, and shipping them off to gulags.
You want to read about efficiency, read The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Zolzhenitsyn, and he'll describe how very efficient they were at putting people into trains and then sending them to a particular depot, and then that depot would then route them to a camp somewhere, and then about maximizing the productivity of those inmates.
For as long as possible until they finally expired from starvation and overwork.
They were extremely efficient.
The last thing we want is more efficient government.
We want less or no government, ideally.
Yeah, yeah.
They always like to talk about how these totalitarian governments can make the trains run on time.
You might want to ask where the train's going to be taking you, right?
That's a really good one.
Exactly.
Well, let's talk about the insurfment.
Picking up speed is an article you got talking about insurance and the insurance mafia.
Yeah, it's not just insurance.
We can start there.
You probably have the same experience that I've had.
You get your renewal offer, as they put it, sort of like the offer that the Godfather makes you in the movie.
And you find that, in my case, it doubled over the course of two years for no legitimate reason in that I haven't even gotten a seatbelt ticket in years.
And yet suddenly I'm having to pay twice as much for this car insurance as I paid two years ago.
And of course the reason that that happens is because they can make you, just like Luca Brasi holds the gun to your head and makes you sign the piece of paper.
And it's all part of this systematic effort to just fleece us to the point where we can't afford to drive anymore.
And then you add on top of the car insurance thing, people are starting to find that their home insurance policy has doubled.
And then on top of that, the assessment that's the basis of your property tax that you're forced to pay, then that doubles.
And it's getting to the point, back to the insertment thing, where literally people are going to be pushed out of their cars, pushed out of their homes, and pushed into the street by this trifecta of costs that are being foisted on people at the behest of the government for the benefit of these private entities, typically.
Yeah, it is absolutely insane.
I talked to Donald Rainwater, who was running as a libertarian for governor in Indiana, and he had a great idea, because we are...
You talked about us always being in debt.
You know, even if you get out of debt and you get your mortgage paid off, you never own your home because you've got property taxes.
We all talk about that, know that.
And he had a great idea.
He said, okay, so we charge people 7% when they buy the house.
And they can fold that into the mortgage, or they can pay it off in equal installments over a seven-year period, and then they're done.
And we're not going to have this constantly attributing more money to a home because of arbitrary home values when you're not selling your home.
It happens when you sell your home and then you're done.
What an excellent idea.
It's an unrealized capital gains tax.
That's essentially what this...
This property tax assessment is, which is outrageous because most people buy their homes to live in.
It's not a speculative instrument that you're using in the hopes of scoring some big gain.
You buy it, and typically you're buying it because that's what I can afford.
You go shopping for a house and say the house costs $300,000.
I can afford that.
Then all of a sudden you find out that five, six years later the government says your house is actually worth $600,000.
You didn't factor that into your purchase decision.
You didn't think you were going to have to be paying this massive tax on that value rather than what you paid for the house.
Another reform that I would suggest, if we can't get rid of it altogether, is that it caps at some point.
At some point, enough should be enough.
Once you have paid a certain percentage of whatever you paid for your house, that should be the end of it.
And at that point, you should be free and clear.
It shouldn't be this open-ended obligation to endlessly pay for these services that are demanded by other people that you don't use and you don't approve of and you don't want to subsidize.
That's right.
And I think there's a big disconnect, again, with the public's understanding of the fact that most of these property taxes go to pay for the schools.
The schools that they abhor.
They're doing such an awful job of what they think a school should be doing.
That's not the school's agenda.
School's got a different agenda, and the school's doing, unfortunately, a really good job on that framework.
And so that's why you've got these never-ending taxes.
It's really because of schools, and people can't get that around their heads.
Well, there's this audacious effrontery, too.
You and I and every other normal person, we have to live within our means, within our budget.
The government doesn't because it can force us to pay.
So, you know, in my county, for example, the county decided it just had to have a fleet of brand new Ford Explorer cop cars.
You know, each one of these Ford Explorer cop cars costs about $50,000.
So who gets to pay for that?
You know, so these cops can sit around running radar traps in a $50,000 Ford Explorer vehicle.
We do!
You know, you and I, if we're going to buy a vehicle, we look at our money and how much can we afford to buy?
And if we can only afford to buy a $15,000 car, well, that's all we buy.
Because we can't go knock on our neighbor's door and say, oh, I need a $50,000 car.
Here's your bill.
And by the way, if you don't pay it, you know, I'm going to come back later with a gun and I'm going to take your house.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Reason Magazine just had an article about how with civil asset forfeiture, they can auction off your car and you don't even know it.
You know, for whatever reason, they just take it.
They don't have to find you guilty of anything.
There's no due process involved.
They don't even charge you with it.
They can take civil asset forfeiture.
They can take it, and they've extended it in Hawaii to other issues as well.
But there was an article that I really liked.
It was in reference to the Super Bowl commercial, the 1987 Buick Regal Grand National.
I loved your article.
When turbos were power adders.
Talk about that.
It's interesting to me because there has been this shift that's occurred.
At one time, a turbo was just that.
It was a power adder, and it was typically only offered in a high-performance vehicle.
So a good example of it is a Porsche 911. You had the Porsche 911. It was already a really fast car.
But if that wasn't fast enough for you, you could pay a little bit more and get a turbo 911, and now you've got a really super-fast Porsche.
So you bought that with the idea of, okay, I'm getting a little bit of something extra for my money there.
Now because of all these government regulations having to do with gas mileage and fuel economy, they are being used as displacement replacements.
It's getting to the point of absolute absurdity.
A week ago, I was test-driving the Nissan Rogue.
So this is a 3,400-pound crossover SUV that has a 1.5-liter three-cylinder engine, you can imagine.
It's a motorcycle-sized engine, and it's totally inappropriate in terms of its size.
That was the size of my Spitfire engine.
I've got a 500-pound motorcycle that has an engine about that size.
So the only way you can make that work, To kind of recover the power that has been taken away by taking away the displacement, by taking away the cylinders, is to add a turbo, which is essentially, for those who don't really understand what that means, a turbo pressurizes the engine.
It forces more air into the cylinders.
And that effectively increases the displacement of the engine while it's under boost.
And the only reason they're doing this at all, the only reason you see turbochargers everywhere now, is because of compliance.
It is the only way that the manufacturers can figure out how to comply with federal regulations, because the small engine, when it's not under boost, yeah, it doesn't use as much gas, and it doesn't emit as much gas.
But of course, in order to make the power, it has to be under boost, at which point...
Physics is physics.
It's still going to burn as much gas and emit as much gas.
But they had to play this stupid game, this stupid game of regulatory compliance, which you and I get to pay for.
I had a 1974 Trump Spitfire, and they had boosted the engine size all the way up to 1,500, one and a half liters.
And it was so tiny.
It was a tiny car, and the whole front half of that car lifted up with a hood, and you could actually step inside the frame.
You could work on the engine and everything.
The thing was very, very crude, primitive, easy to work on and everything, but it was teeny tiny.
There's so much room in that thing to turbocharge it.
So you could get one of these things if you just didn't have to work with the electrical system, but you'd have to replace the whole electrical system.
It's all about what's appropriate.
I used to have a 74 Beetle, and it had a 1600cc, i.e.
a 1.6 liter.
Four-cylinder engine and totally appropriate for a little beetle that weighed 1,800 pounds.
You know, it wasn't designed to be quick.
It was just designed to be a good transportation appliance.
It used to be that you found engines that size in small, economical cars because it made sense.
And as you moved up in weight and power, you got bigger engines.
It used to be common to find a V6 in family cars like Camrys and Accords.
Not anymore.
They've all been downsized to these little one-point, literally.
1.5 liter eggs with turbos.
It was so slow, you know, the Spitfire was so slow that I don't know what the 0-60 time was on it.
It would just be embarrassing to clock it, you know?
It was probably like 15 seconds or something, because zero to 60. They even did a commercial where they show a guy and his girlfriend, they're just kind of cruising along the wind in their hair, and all these cars are zooming past them, and I'm thinking, why is that a selling feature in America, you know?
But it was okay.
These cars that are much more capable and are much quicker, and they're not driving any more rapidly than people did back in the 70s or 80s.
So, again, it makes my teeth hurt.
It's just so gratuitously wasteful to have all of this weight and power and technology in these cars when people would probably be perfectly happy driving around in just a good, solid, basic car that didn't have all of this junk.
Oh, yeah.
You've got an article, Safetyism.
Safetyism.
And boy, have we not seen that.
You know, I know because you've been on this for the longest time about cars that went all of this stuff with the masks and the six feet apart and all the rest of these superstitions that they pushed on us five years ago.
You know, you were fully on that, talking about the face diapers and the rest of the stuff.
And the security blanket, that exactly described what this whole thing was about.
But safety has become so embedded in our culture.
And isn't it really the antithesis of liberty?
Well, it's the distinction between rational evaluation of risk and this sort of neurotic obsession with everything being dangerous.
Mike Rowe, the guy who did the Dirty Jobs series, does a really good job of getting into this.
You know, it's paralyzed the country psychologically.
Everybody's being conditioned to be afraid of everything.
Trivial risks, like during the pandemic.
Oh my gosh, somebody might sneeze.
They might be a bacillus-carrying plague deliverer.
It's the kind of thing that in a healthier time, people would have recognized this as neurotic.
There's something not quite right about them.
It's safe to go outside.
It's safe to take a shower.
Yeah, you might slip and fall, but just be prudent.
Be careful about it.
Make sure that the surface isn't slippery and you won't fall, probably.
In order to function, in order to live, you have to be willing to accept some degree of risk.
But now it seems to be the central organizing principle of this culture that nothing can be done if there's even the slightest possibility that something might go wrong.
We have to quake in our boots and hide under the bed because of safety.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
And if you start talking about removing any regulations, you know, they'll talk about, it's the Wild West.
These people want the Wild West!
And with regard to cars, they managed to somehow conflate safety with compliance.
You know, I use as an example, if you went back just 10 years and got a full-size Mercedes S-Class, by today's standards, that car would be considered, quote-unquote, Because it's not compliant with 2025 federal motor vehicle safety standards.
But is a 10-year-old Mercedes S-Class an unsafe car to drive?
Yeah, yeah, no, it is, absolutely.
So what's going to happen to all of our used cars and everything?
What are they going to do in terms of, I know most places have just stopped doing any road maintenance.
You talk about how they're doing congestion pricing in New York and all the rest of this stuff.
What are they going to do?
Are they going to tolerate us geezers having our old cars for a little while longer before they push everything off the road?
What do you think they're going to do?
I think inevitably, unless by some miracle all of this really does change for the better, sure, that's going to be the next shoe that drops.
They are going to use some pretextual rationalization, something like, well, they're not safe, or they're dirty, or they're unclean, something along those lines, to effectively outlaw them.
They'll say, for example, well, yeah, you can continue to drive your 25-year-old car provided you bring it up to date with current safety standards.
They do this in Japan already.
They have this pedantic inspection process that pretextually it's about safety.
But they use it to essentially force people to throw away vehicles that are more than about eight years old.
That's why you find so many of these Japanese cars, right-hand drive cars, that are sent to other countries.
Because they can't pass, they call it shaken, as in shaken down.
You know, you can't pass the inspection, so you have to buy a new car.
They'll probably do something like that in this country.
They'll find some, you know, some picky little thing to nitpick about.
But it's so expensive to fix it.
But she won't fix it.
So the alternative is, well, you have to go out and buy a new car, which will probably be an electric car.
And it is imperative for them to do this because they saw in 2020 with the lockdown, the only thing they couldn't lock down was us and our cars.
I mean, you might have a husband and wife in the car next to Karen and I, both of them wearing their mask with their windows up and everything.
We didn't have a mask.
We had the top down and all the rest of the stuff.
But, you know, they could be scared to death, but they would have enough courage to go out in their enclosed car to do things.
And it was kind of a leak to their system because they couldn't completely lock us down.
And they want to completely lock us down.
In these 15-minute cities, and so the car has to go.
You know, the 15-minute, all those yellow vest protests that were happening in Paris, that was over Hidalgo, the Spanish mayor of, leftist Marxist mayor of Paris.
They were issuing in the 15-minute city regulations at that point in time, and people understood that was what it was about.
It was about banning all cars, and that's why they started pushing back against it.
But now we're gone beyond that.
Nobody is protesting that anymore.
I see that as where they're headed.
Sure, and the infrastructure is already in place.
Pretty much all the cars that have been manufactured for at least going back five years, and probably about ten, have telematics.
They can send and receive information.
And they can be shut down remotely at any time by the vehicle manufacturer.
So all they'd have to do is effectively throw the switch if they wanted to.
If they declared a climate emergency, let's say, they could throw the proverbial switch.
And the majority of these modern cars would just be bricked.
You know, Tesla pioneered that.
You know, your car is tethered.
You can picture it.
You're electronically tethered to this hive mind.
So, you know, you might be the quote-unquote air fingers owner in a legalistic sense, but ultimately, who controls your car is who owns your car, and that's not you.
That's right.
I know you've got to go soon, and let's make this one last question here.
This is from Be My Valentine.
It says, what is the best car to buy these days?
Oh boy, that's a toughie.
It really is a difficult one.
There are still a number of cars that are worth looking at, and most of them are vehicles that haven't been significantly updated over the last several years.
The Miata is one.
Of course, it's not a very practical vehicle.
I'm trying to think of some of the other ones.
Actually, depending on your budget for food, you can get all the food you can afford to buy in the trunk now.
It's true.
It'll fit about two bags of groceries.
Exactly.
So it's real practical, yeah.
There is apparently some good news, though.
From what I gather, Stellantis, now none of this is official yet, but they are grappling with the debacle of having committed fully to electrification, and particularly with regard to the Ram trucks, you know, and using this new six-cylinder turbo hydro thing.
And they're talking about bringing the V8s back.
Because it's existential for them.
They realize that they're going to go out of business if they don't go back to selling the kinds of vehicles that the people who buy Ram trucks and Dodges and Chryslers want to buy.
And they gilded the lily so much with the Jeeps that people, their market segment can't afford the Jeeps anymore.
This is not a joke or an exaggeration.
Imagine paying $70,000 for a Wrangler.
You know the one that was in the Super Bowl ad?
The one that Harrison Ford was trying to sell you?
Yeah.
That's the last one you can get with a V8 engine.
The thing costs $90,000.
Oh, man.
Well, Harrison Ford can afford that.
Sure he can.
Exactly.
So he can follow his dream, but the rest of us won't.
So, yeah, that's amazing.
So what is this?
Okay, never mind.
Yeah, Whistler's going to write something there to me.
Well, I'm going to let you go because I really do appreciate you coming on.
I know you've got another commitment, and so it's always great talking to you, Eric.
And you and I see eye-to-eye on this stuff.
We're going to keep a lookout as to Trump.
I'll tell you just one last thing here.
You've got Trump 2028. What is that about?
Well, you know, it is about if this is not going to be the seesawing back and forth every four years that is destroying the car industry as well as other industries, because they can't make plans.
You know, let's say hypothetically Trump were tomorrow to say, OK, all of the regulations pertaining to safety and emissions and all of that are going to be put on a cost benefit basis.
Great.
We're going to go back to manufacturing big vehicles, V8 engines, all of that.
Well, four years hence, Trump is replaced by another Biden type, another leftist.
And all of a sudden, all of the investment that the manufacturers have made in that has to be pulled back and thrown away and written off.
And now they're going to have to reinvest in the woke electric car agenda.
It's going to bankrupt them.
They're already close to bankruptcy.
They can't continue to operate on that basis.
Well, and that's the problem that we have when you rule by executive order and when you have the problem with democracy as well.
Okay, so it's a problem with dictators.
It's a problem with executive orders.
It's a problem with, you know, a mass of people making these decisions rather than having a republic that is based on the rule of law and the respect of the rights of the individual.
And that's really where we're going.
And we're going to be seesawed back and forth in every aspect of our life, I think.
Well, always great to have you on, Eric.
autos.com is where you can find that and he's got a lot of reviews about cars and he tells you straight up what he likes and doesn't like about them he's very honest about that and he does practical car reviews but he's also focused on the bigger issue of liberty and mobility thank you so much eric always great thank you I appreciate you having me on.
Thank you.
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 is.
Go to davidknight.gold to get in touch with the wise wolf himself, Tony Arterburn.
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