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July 30, 2025 - The David Knight Show
01:04:53
The Surveillance Trap Masquerading as ‘Green’ Freedom
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Well, my first guest, as I come back, is so happy to be back.
And my first guest is Eric Peters, somebody I really respect who really gets it, who's been on the side of liberty and freedom for a very long time.
And he's been on my side as well.
Really do appreciate his offers of help when I was in the hospital.
It's great to have you on, Eric.
Thank you for coming.
It's a privilege and an honor.
And I'm so happy to see you back in the saddle.
Well, thank you.
Thank you.
And thank you for your offers, even to give blood, as I said yesterday.
Let's talk a little bit about what is happening right now.
I was looking at your diaper report, and I was thinking, you know, it's interesting.
Here we are five years later, and you started the diaper report making fun of people who are wearing, you know, the diapers on their faces.
And yet, as you point out, that is still going on.
You know, what's happening?
We've got Trump back.
Oh, wait a minute.
He was the one who was there when they did the diapers stuff, right?
Right.
Well, I think because it never really got cured, did it?
That's right.
The report focused on what's going on in Honduras.
Apparently, the Honduran health minister has reinstated mandatory mask wearing in pretty much all public areas again.
And I just thought to myself, oh my gosh, it's kind of early, but I need a drink.
Here we go again.
And then I thought, well, okay, maybe it's just Honduras.
But you know, it really isn't.
Every time I go somewhere, whether it's to Lowe's or the supermarket or any place here in the United States, at least in my part of Virginia, it's 99.9% certain that I'm going to see at least one person still wearing a mask.
Oh, yeah.
And that's an indication of just how effective they were in pathologizing and PTSDing people.
And I guess the underlying point that I wanted to make in that article is that all that's happened is that this psychosis has sort of waned a little bit.
It hasn't gone away.
It certainly hasn't been cured, I don't think.
And it hasn't been cured because it hasn't been forcefully repudiated.
We haven't had any kind of official announcement by the authorities.
Hey, we erred.
This was wrong and foolish, and we shouldn't have done this.
They'll never admit to that, will they?
They'll never admit to that.
They'll make two mistakes rather than never admit to one.
You know, when I was in the hospital, they had a sign up saying, you need to wear a mask.
And I thought, what?
I looked at it.
It's like, if you've been around anybody exposed to measles, you know, that's the new thing.
Isn't it interesting how we had all this press hype about, oh, we got an epidemic in Texas and blah, blah, blah.
They misattributed a death there to measles.
And they're telling everybody, it's the most contagious disease ever.
Well, it appears to have just died off, even according to their narrative.
If you believe them, it just disappeared.
We don't hear anything more about it.
But they do have the signs up at a hospital in Tennessee because they had a couple measles cases in Texas.
I mean, that is absolutely nothing.
But, you know, that we're still expected as a society to pretend that there's nothing abnormal about people walking around wearing these masks.
And I'm not trying to be mean.
I understand that the people who are wearing the masks genuinely probably believe that they are effective.
And they're afraid.
And they think that if I do this, I'm not going to catch a sickness.
So I don't intend to disparage those people.
The point is they do still believe.
And the point is we are expected to go along with that belief.
And it's an aberrant belief.
If you had somebody in your family, remember the old Bugs Money cartoon where the crazy guy thinks he's Napoleon, and he dresses up like Napoleon.
He wears the hat, and he demands to be called emperor.
Now, if you had somebody in your family who started wearing Napoleonic outfits and demanding to be called the emperor, you could be kind.
You don't want to hurt their feelings and you could address them as the emperor, but you're not really helping them.
You're not doing them any favors.
All you're doing is enabling their mental illness.
Well, you know, it has a lot of parallels to a lot of things that are going on in our society, right?
Everybody's got their own truth, and we don't have any objective standard of truth.
It's just like what this person thinks, and, you know, it's their felt experience and so forth.
We see the same thing with pronouns and gender imagination, right?
Yes.
And so it feeds into all of that stuff.
And so we're supposed to play along.
And that's part of the way that I think that they have silenced us.
Well, I can't criticize their mask fantasies any more than I can criticize somebody's gender fantasies.
We've got to get away from the objective realities here.
And I've said for the longest time, even if you go through their science of virology, you know, it's kind of like watching a bad sci-fi movie or a bad superhero movie.
They create a universe, right?
And you expect them then to abide by the rules of whatever that universe is or that particular character.
And so if they start just, you know, they create this fictional world.
And if they don't abide by it, then you have to call BS on that.
And yet, you know, they create this fictional world, which, you know, as I've looked at this, I've talked to Dr. Sam Bailey and her husband, and also a physician, both of them physicians in New Zealand.
And they looked at research that's done by Christine Massey going around asking all these public health officials, have you isolated the virus?
And she talked to over 200 of them.
Nobody did it.
As a matter of fact, some of them started saying, we never do that.
It's like, wait a minute, if you don't do that, what are you doing from a scientific standpoint?
And so what they pointed out was, is that whether or not viruses even exist is in question.
But certainly what is not in question is that none of this is scientifically proven.
If you look at the PCR test, none of it is consistent with their fictional world.
Absolutely.
And there's another aspect of this that I think bears discussing, which is that no one has been held accountable for the extraordinary psychological, social, and economic damage that was done over the course of that pandemic.
And again, it's not about retribution.
It's about justice.
And it's about putting this behind us by holding to account the people who did this to us.
It's imperative that that be done.
And if that isn't done, then they can get away with acting like they were somehow kind of in the right.
That it wasn't really wrong what they did.
In any other case, if somebody had committed a serial murder, you wouldn't just stop talking about it.
You wouldn't let the serial murder go on about his business.
That person has to be brought to trial, has to be held accountable.
That's right.
Medical martial law unconstitutionally imposed.
And we let that go.
We forget it.
We just move on.
Now everything is great because Trump's back again, the guy who did it.
And what is he doing?
He's making up one emergency after the other to rule by executive order.
And so there's a real issue with that.
Of course, the very first thing that he did when he came back was to set up Stargate with his crony capitalist billionaire friends to push mRNA combined with artificial intelligence.
So now we're going to add AI into the mix of nonsense that is here.
And, you know, there's nothing from RFK Jr. to stop this.
They're not banning the RNA.
They no longer recommend it for some groups of people, but they're not banning this thing.
And every week, we see more studies coming out talking about death and disability of people who took that jab, and yet they're not banning this under any other circumstance.
It ought to be banned.
And of course, RFK Jr. is just letting this go.
As a matter of fact, they also approved yet another mRNA in the meantime.
And the Trump administration is really doubling down on DNA and mRNA research, just like they are with AI, as he did his first day in office.
Yeah.
I think that RFK is kind of the beard of the Trump administration.
They bring him forward.
I think he seems to be a genuine person, not perfect.
I disagree with him on a number of things, but I think he's well-meant.
And I think that's why they brought him aboard, because a lot of people do respect him and believe that he's legitimate on those issues.
So it makes it more difficult to pin the tail on the appropriate donkey, which is Trump.
Well, what he said, and of course, Tulsi Gabbard said as well, we're here to restore trust in the institutions.
I'm here to destroy trust in institutions.
That's my life mission, is to destroy blind trust in government and their unconstitutional institutions.
But that's what they're trying to restore.
And so that's why they use people like RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard who have, as you point out, they have this certain public perception whether or not it's deserved.
They have that perception.
They're trading off of it to try to restore confidence.
Well, that kind of blew up in their face with Mongino and Cash, didn't it?
If you pop that interview, which I'm sure you did, where Mongino and Patel looked like somebody was holding a gun to their heads when the team team came up.
You know, this whole, everything that has been happening over the course of the last four or five weeks makes me feel like I'm in a circus funhouse.
All of the populist nationalist things that Trump ran on have just been cast by the wayside.
I have some Red Hat friends, and I asked them, would you have voted for Trump if he had campaigned on imposing real ID, continuing the aid to Ukraine, and pushing an AI technocratic surveillance state, a la Palantir, and instituting some form of digital currency via the so-called Genius Act?
And yet, if you look at what he did his first term, none of that stuff is a stretch.
It was kind of predictable that he's going to go in that direction.
You know, he is basically, how do I put this politely?
He is the servant, we'll say, of the deep state.
And you can see this in everything that happened in the first term.
He's throwing everything against the wall, isn't he, to try to distract from the Epstein thing.
And, you know, some people even say, oh, now we need to go investigate Gina Haspel.
It's like, why don't you ask Trump why he made her his head of the CIA after she was the one who produced the lies?
And Trump said we were lied into the Iraq war.
Well, she's the one who did it with illegal torture.
And he put her in charge of the CIA because she was right at the epicenter of London and Langley Axis where they were doing this RussiaGate stuff.
I'm so sick of RussiaGate.
I got sick of it from the very beginning.
There's one.
Oh, yeah, of course.
It's now Trump's look, a squirrel.
Obama.
It's now not lock her up.
It's lock him up.
They're going to do any such thing.
That's right.
But, you know, there is a silver lining to this dark cloud of, I think.
Now, I hope I'm not being Pollyanna-ish here, but my sense of it is that Trump's bizarre and cornerbrat behavior over the last several weeks on the Epstein stuff has kind of given us our peek behind the curtain.
You know, in the Wizard of Oz, when they finally pulled the curtain back?
And we see that it's not the Democrats, the Republicans, it's them.
They're all like, the thing is fundamentally unreformable.
They're run by a mafia.
I agree.
A disgusting cohort of people who are engaged in not just grift and graft, but some of the most sordid and reprehensible things you could possibly imagine.
And I think that's part of what you're trying to do with Ghelane Maxwell in terms of, I think he wants to bring in Clinton and try to revive the partisanship, at least for his people there.
You and I are going to look at this and say, yeah, they're all part of the same club.
You know, Clinton was partying with Trump and vice versa.
They're going to the same Jeffrey Epstein parties and, you know, she's at his wedding and so forth and so on.
But, you know, we'll look at that and say, yeah, it's all just one big eyes wide shut party.
But he will look at it and say, yeah, the Clintons, we need to lock them up.
That movie, for people who are not aware of it, it was Stanley Kubrick's last movie.
And I think that he deliberately wanted to give us a peek inside that world.
Watch that movie if you haven't seen it, and you can kind of get a sense of what's going on here.
And it helps to understand like Trump's disingenuous assertion that, well, if they had anything on me in the last four years, they would have signaled it.
No, they wouldn't have because it's like it's mutually assured destruction.
They're all guilty and they know it.
And so, you know, they know that if I say something about you, you're going to say something about me and we both go down the flames.
So they shut up and don't say anything.
And we'll get more to that too.
As a matter of fact, you've got an article about that and a little bit of a clip of Eyes Wide Shut to give people an idea of that.
But before we do that, I wanted to talk a little bit about cars.
You've got a funny article, Kick Me, about that.
And talking about, I guess, one of your favorite cars because you've also got to review the VW ID Buzz.
And I thought that was kind of an interesting name for a car in the age of surveillance, the VW ID.
It's interesting.
It could be the name of another, the next Samsung generation phone.
It's like all of, they've succeeded in turning things that used to have emotional appeal into these cold, distant, remote.
Who cares?
Why wouldn't they come up like the old micro bus?
That was a cool name, micro bus, you know, or an affectionately known as the hippie van.
It was just kind of, it was cute and it was fun.
And that thing is the antithesis of everything that the old micro bus was.
And that kind of might fit that kind of a name if you called it a micro bus because it is a device now.
That would kind of fit.
To get back to what you were talking about, I was so frustrated with the ID buzz.
I was only able, when they sent it to me, I was only able to drive it twice because they didn't include a charge cord, if you can believe that.
Really?
It's extra cost.
So this is a vehicle that starts at $60,000.
And if you want to have the home charge cord, you have to pay almost $700 extra for it.
So it wasn't included in the press car loan that they sent me, which is even more crazy because I'm a journalist.
So it's like batteries not included, except they put the batteries in, but no way to charge the batteries.
So that essentially forced me because what am I going to do?
I can't charge it at home now, which is like the main thing.
They try to sell you the EV with, well, you have the convenience of being able to charge it at home, but now I don't even, I'm not even able to do that.
So you're forced then to rely on this sketchy network of so-called fast chargers.
Well, I drove into town and I went to the first place in my area where there are fast chargers and it's completely offline.
They're like doing some construction to it.
So that didn't, you know, that didn't work.
And so now I'm sweating and nervously eying how much range have I got left?
And I think, okay, I can probably make it to the other one that's on the other side of town.
So I drive to that one and that one's working, but it won't accept my credit card or any of them.
I tried six different credit cards.
I had it down on the app.
In other words, they needed access to my phone and access to my bank account, basically, my debit accounts, in order to charge me for this service.
And I'm not willing to do that.
I'm not willing to let this creepy third-party entity that I don't know these people.
I don't want them having access to my phone.
So long story short, I wasn't able to charge it.
So I limped it home at low speed and it became a 6,000 pound, not a joke, curb weight, 6,000 pounds for the next five days until they came to pick the thing up.
I left just enough charge in it so the poor guy, you know, the delivery guy, can pick it up and get it.
He can deal with it.
Then it's not my problem anymore.
With all these electric vehicles weighing so much money, weighing so much in terms of weight, it's going to tear up the roads.
And of course, they're not going to replace them either.
So it does a couple of things for the elites.
They don't want us to own private cars.
And they don't want to maintain the roads, obviously.
So now they've got these heavy EVs to destroy the roads for them at the same time.
Now, you had that same problem when you were test driving the Mercedes, and you had an article about how they pulled your credentials with your press credentials with Mercedes after you gave them an honest review of what it was like to have range, panic, and all the rest of the stuff, not be able to get where you wanted to go with Mercedes in a very cold streak back in December of 2023, I think it was.
Yep.
Yep.
It was very interesting because I've been doing what I've been doing for a very long time.
And I had been getting regular press car deliveries from Mercedes for more than 25 years.
And they never had a problem before with anything that I've written or anything at all like that.
And I wasn't gratuitous.
I didn't insert my personal dislike of EVs, which I'm quite open about.
I find them to be just lacking anything that makes a vehicle appealing.
But that's just my personal preference.
And I don't bring that into the car reviews.
What I did bring into the car review was that I attempted to use their EQS, which was a $112,000 electric luxury sedan, to visit my mom, who lives 50 miles away in Bedford, Virginia.
50 miles.
Now, it happened that it was in December of 23, and it was very cold, if you remember that month.
That's it.
It was a bad cold snap.
So by the time I got down to Roanoke, which is the closest city to where I live, I looked at the range and boy, the range wasn't so hot anymore.
And I thought, you know, it might be smart.
Dawn and I were looking at the temperature and it's about, you know, 13 degrees outside.
And I'm thinking, I don't want to be caught on the side of the road with it being 13 degrees outside in this thing.
So maybe we should just stop and put some charge in the thing.
So again, same problem.
The first place wouldn't work at all.
The second place, Dawn put the app on her phone and we were able to hook up the charger.
But after sitting there for 40 minutes, we barely got enough charge to make it home.
And she put the kibosh on it by that time.
I thought, I'm just not going to risk driving this thing a significant distance away from home and being stuck on the side of the road with it.
It's difficult to charge them when the weather gets really cold like that.
Yeah, it's much harder because the battery in the car is trying to keep the battery warm because it's that cold outside.
And that uses anybody who has a heat pump or tries to use like one of those hot wire portable electric heaters knows they burn a lot of energy to try to keep you warm.
So I just wrote about that.
And I wrote specifically, your clientele, the people you're trying to sell this car to, this is $112,000 car.
These are affluent people.
Affluent people pay to not have hassles.
Affluent people pay to be able to do the things that we can't do.
And I thought, my God, I could get in my 24-year-old truck and easily drive to Bedford with the heat blasting.
I'm not worried about it because it's not going to leave me by the side of a road dead.
And that's ridiculous.
Even a virtue signaling leftist who has $115,000 to spend isn't going to put up with that.
I thought that that was a very fair and objective thing to say.
And now you've been vindicated.
Yes.
Oh, yeah.
That's the thing.
The elite people don't want the hassles of buying that thing and they're not buying it.
So Mercedes-PR gave me this stuff about how I'm now out of their delivery area, which is nonsense.
I know that that's nonsense.
I mean, I happen to have people who do what I do that I know who are still getting the cars, you know, who are as far away or farther than I am.
So that's just not true.
Well, anyway, fast forward to now, and they've had to announce a, they call it a pause, a pause in the continued manufacture of the EQS and the EQE because they can't sell them in this country.
It's been a catastrophe for them.
They've had to cut bait and cut prices massively.
They're marked down to try to desperately get rid of these things because we're getting to, we're in the middle of 2025.
We're at the 2026 model year now.
So the 2025s are already becoming kind of like old fish that you want to get rid of.
And people aren't buying them.
And part of the reason they're not buying them is also, this is another aspect of this issue.
The depreciation rates on these things is absolutely catastrophic.
You can find a year old EQS that sold for $100,000 more or more, what it was new for $35,000.
Now, rich people tend to be a lot of things, but they tend not to be stupid people.
And nobody wants to take a $70,000 bath on depreciation in the course of a year or two.
It's just, it's ridiculous.
That is amazing.
Yeah.
You know, I look at this VW ID buzz.
Like I said, it's interesting to call one of these devices an ID because they are going to be IDing you everywhere you go.
But I guess the other alternative would be called a bug or something.
I mean, that would also kind of harken into the Internet of Things and tracking you everywhere you go.
You know, originally it was the Beetle, or wasn't it the Type 1 technically?
Type 1 was the designation.
And then affectionately it became known as the Beetle, which I think is from the German, which I think is Kaffir, I think K-I-F-I-R, which was what Hitler came up with because he actually sketched the shape of it.
You know, there are sketches of Hitler's original concept of the Beetle that he worked on with Ferdinand Porsche to create the car.
Now, all that aside, the original Beetle was a great car.
It literally was the car for the people.
It was very basic.
It was very simple.
It was very light.
It was efficient.
And it was something that anybody could learn to fix.
You could do your own maintenance on the thing and save a lot of money that way.
You know, something that has been totally tossed out and kicked to the curb now.
This idea that you own this extremely expensive gadget.
And when the gadget glitches, what do you do?
Well, you either take it or have it flatbed towed to a dealer where you pay an exorbitant sum of money to have some specialist try to fix it for you.
Yeah.
And I remember even though it was a very inexpensive car, it had a reputation for reliability.
I remember a Woody Allen movie.
I don't even remember which movie it was, but he goes to sleep or something like that, maybe sleeper or something.
And he wakes up hundreds of years in the future.
And he sees, he's on the run or something, and he sees a Volkswagen in a cave.
And he thinks, wait a minute, no, it couldn't possibly.
But he opens the door and he gives it a push and it starts.
And it's like, oh, how about that?
So it had this reputation for being reliable.
I remember we had a VW dealer close to where we lived, and it was called Birdsong Motors, kind of as a reference to the noise that it made.
It kind of sounded like the Jetson car as it was running.
I had this little tweeting sound that it made with the air-cooled engine in the back.
They were funny cars.
One of the great things was they were, well, they were also kind of the first step on that ladder.
I can speak from personal experience to me also.
I had a Volkswagen when I was young.
It was a great car for a teenager because, again, it was like a step up from a Briggs and Stratton push mower, literally.
I mean, an air-cooled engine with a little one-barrel carburetor on it and a fan.
And then you pop the back of the hood, and there it was.
It was so simple.
It wasn't intimidating.
So if you're a 15 or 16-year-old kid, you can look at that and go, I think I could maybe figure out how to take those spark plugs out.
I can learn how to change the world.
I mean, there was just a bolt on the bottom of the engine.
I mean, you didn't even have to jack the car up.
You could just undo the bolt and wow, look, I just changed the world.
And it sounds trivial, but when you're 15, 16 years old, it's kind of intimidating.
You know, you're like, oh, do I want to touch that?
Do I want to mess with that?
I don't want to break that.
Well, the cars are intimidating today, aren't they, to work on?
Yeah.
Well, I had an interesting kind of lesson.
Now here I am, a middle-aged guy, and I'm afraid of computers.
So, you know, this is how I can sort of understand what's happened.
I had a problem with my laptop.
The battery basically wouldn't accept a charge anymore.
And I thought, gosh, do I dare, do I dare to try to open this thing up and maybe see about replacing the battery myself?
And I gathered up my courage and I did it.
I bought a battery online for $35.
And, you know, I very timorously, I removed the screws and I took the cover off.
And it wasn't so bad.
And I felt so good.
It made me feel like I did when I was a kid.
Wow, I learned how to do something today.
I did it.
It is so empowering as opposed to if I had gone to the computer store, which I've done in the past, when I've had a battery issue, and $300 later, there's your thing.
And you have no idea what they did.
Work's great, but now you're out $300 and you feel kind of emasculated because you had to go to get somebody else to fix it for you.
And I think we've lost that.
It used to be so common for dads and their sons to work on the car in the driveway on Saturdays or Sundays.
And I'm not talking about major gearhead overhauls of the entire engine.
I'm just talking about doing basic things like a tune-up, doing brake work, stuff like that.
And it was a good experience for the father and the son or the daughter, frankly.
And it helped to empower that young person.
That young person felt competent.
And that's extremely important, I think, growing up, you know, to feel like, hey, I can do things.
My hands are capable.
My brain is capable.
I can understand this.
I know how to do this.
And now they can change the blinker fluid, right?
Yeah, now they're inculcating helplessness.
There's this commercial that makes me want, it makes me feel like, remember the story about how Elvis would shoot the TV when Robert Boulet came on?
I saw this commercial.
I think it was for Evolvo.
It might have been a pseudo-group.
And it's a couple of teenagers and they're out in the car and they have a flat tire.
And what do they do?
They call mom who calls AAA or some roadside assistance thing.
And everybody's all thankful and grateful.
My God, it's embarrassing.
Can you imagine being 16 years old as a boy and you didn't know how to change a tire?
Your friends would have lapped you into the next county.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, you know, now you don't have to write.
You can just use AI to do your website there for you, right?
That is the ultimate emasculation and lobotomization, actually, I think it's happening.
But tell us a little bit about this kick-me article.
I thought it was a funny idea.
You talk about Jeremy Clarkson.
Yeah, I've never met Jeremy.
I'd love to.
I have always enjoyed Top Gear and his shenanigans.
You know, I think he's got the right kind of tally-ho pirate spirit.
You know, he's a guy who just, he has a knack for telling the truth in an interesting way, you know, a funny way sometimes.
Anyway, we were watching his most recent thing is a, it's called Clarkson's Farm.
And it just reminded me, you know, I should do things like Jeremy does.
Now, I don't Have the backing that he has, I don't have the resources that he has, but I thought it would be just hilarious if I could figure out a way to acquire to buy one of those ID Buzz electric vans.
And so it's mine now, and I can do what I want with it, like Jeremy does on top here.
And I could put a kidney sign on it and take it to a shopping mall somewhere, and people could just kick it.
You know, we could film it.
I think it would provide a great kind of cathartic moment.
I think so many people are so frustrated and angered by everything that's being foisted on us and pushed on us, and particularly these electric cars.
You think it could stand the kind of abuse that the Toyota High Lux got from top gear guys?
No, actually, I think they would act without even using implements, without necessarily getting involved with crowbars and hammers and things.
I think he would completely total an ID buzz within about probably half an hour.
Yeah, amazing.
Was there anything that you liked about it that you thought was clever that they laid out with it?
I liked, well, yeah, I liked that it looks immediately distinctive from everything else on the road, kind of like a car's two.
One of the attractions of the old Volkswagens was you didn't even have to see it.
You heard it.
You know, you knew it.
Here comes a beetle or here comes a bus because it had that distinctive sound.
So I like the way that they styled it.
I think it is a, the idea is great.
It's a perennial favorite.
The idea of the old micro bus was brilliant.
You know, what a fantastic, practical vehicle.
Now, if only they could have taken that vehicle that they created and instead of using a battery-powered drivetrain, imagine if they had put one of their TDI diesels in that thing.
Yeah.
Then you'd have a micro bus that would be able to go probably 600 miles on a fill-up.
Yeah.
And also would only probably cost about $35,000 to $40,000 as opposed to $60,000.
That would be great.
It'd sell a lot of those.
You'd actually make money.
Imagine that.
Instead of trying to sell virtue, they'd make money.
Well, the only thing better than putting one of those things at a shopping mall and putting a kick-me sign on it would be to do that to Klaus Schwab, who actually he had a big kick-me sign on, put on him there at the World Economic Forum, I think, or as I like to refer to them.
You can take like some gigantic piñata and let people take a turn at giving him a whack.
Yeah, eats the bugs.
But isn't it sad?
You know, it really breaks my heart to think that Volkswagen as a company caved into that nonsense about the cheating on the federal emissions certification.
Because its diesel engines that they used to sell were brilliant.
I had the opportunity to drive every vehicle that they make equipped with the diesel engine, and every single one of them outperformed the advertised mileage.
They were phenomenal.
Some of them would go 700 miles on a full tank of fuel.
I remember driving to North Carolina and back and still having a substantial amount of fuel in the tank of the thing.
And you could pick one up.
This is as recently as I think 2015, you could pick up a TDI-powered Jetta for about $22,000.
So naturally, that's why they had to go.
Can you imagine the juxtaposition?
On the one hand, you've got a $22,000 Jetta that gets 50 plus miles per gallon that goes 700 miles on a tank full of fuel, and it will probably last you for 25 years because it's such a durable car.
And on the other, you've got a $50,000 electric car that goes maybe 240 miles that forces you to plan your life around these constant charge discharge cycles and that in all likelihood is going to require a new $15,000 battery by the time it's about 10 years old.
Yeah, because it clicks all the boxes of what the elites want for us, which is nothing, you know, to own nothing and to go nowhere.
And that's the thing that ought to concern us about all this stuff.
You know, when you mentioned the Epstein thing and the other things, you say, well, everybody's looking at Epstein, they're missing the stuff about Palantir and the Genius Act and all the rest of the stuff.
And those things are not unrelated.
No, they're not.
Now, I'll preface my remarks by saying that obviously the allegations and the facts that we're aware of with regard to Epstein are just repellent beyond description.
And I think that that stuff definitely should be exposed.
I don't think we probably ever will get to the bottom of it, at least not with any of their help.
They don't want this stuff out.
But at the same time, it has served to distract attention away from things that are extraordinarily important for people to be aware of.
Palantir is one.
And, you know, by the way, I didn't know what Palantir was.
I wonder, what does that mean?
What does that word mean?
I'm not a big Lord of the Rings guy.
I never read Tolkien's books on it.
But it turns out that in the universe of Lord of the Rings, the Palantir is a sorcerer's stone.
And the sorcerer uses it to see what people are doing.
And that's what Palantir is about.
I did reports on it about a decade ago, and I said, at the time, I said, no, the Palantir would allow the sorcerer to actually see into you, right?
Which is really what Palantir data mining is allowing them to do as well.
They're able to look at externals like metadata and other stuff like that and to anticipate what you're going to do, to make connections between you and other people and ideologies and religion and politics and all these other things that they want to track and control.
It is really insidious what is there.
And of course, they're not the only one.
You've got Endril, which is a sword, right, from Lord of the Rings that belonged to the king.
And there's a company called Endril that is working with Trump, and they want to use that for creating a no man's land at the border, basically having real high-tech surveillance and law enforcement that is automated.
And they're working with them hand in glove.
And he's another one of these guys from the PayPal Mafia, Palmer Lucky, I think is his name.
I get confused.
I always talk about Howard Lutnick.
I call him Lucky Lutnik because he didn't show up on 9-11.
He knew not to go.
And so he got real lucky, but not so much his employees, even his brother who was there.
The other thing that's related to this that's important, it's not just Palantir.
There are two arms of the pincer.
And the other one is this Genius Act, which essentially is the propagation of some form of digital currency, non-real money, digital money.
Now, what they're going to end up doing, in my view, is on the one hand, they're going to use the Palantir to draw these profiles of you and to be aware of everything that you do and then if you do things they don't like or don't want you to do they'll be able to use this digitized money to limit your ability to buy things oh you are you want to buy some hamburger well you've exceeded your your you know your carbon footprint this month so this month so you know your coin and it's interesting that they they use they just the psychology of it is fascinating they
about coin but there's no physical anything it's a coin and name only your wallet is your phone it's not your wallet you know you don't have physical money anymore so they control the money which means they control you and well they call them crypto coins and you think oh it's crypto you know it's got crypto it's got encryption in it and so they can't tell it no it's completely visible what's going on the encryption is there for the processing not to protect your privacy and it's a blockchain a public ledger that's available and visible to anyone and
everyone especially the government that's there yeah it's an absolute nightmare you know at least during the the pandemic when they attempted to throttle people's ability to engage in commerce to buy and to sell you know if you had cash and uh you know for example i was friends with a with a local guy who who operates uh a convenience store you know the gas station convenience store because we're friends he knows me i know him you know he didn't hassle me about the masks or anything and i could go in there and i could buy things with cash and
nobody knew except for him and i you know now in this this regime that they want to create not only will they know whether i'm wanting to buy something they'll know how i'm trying to pay for it yeah and if the two things aren't aligned and if their algorithm says oh no eric's been a bad boy you know he's he shouldn't be allowed to buy anything what are you going to do now you can't transact business that's what they want they want absolute total control and they exert this control using the data mining and using our ability to transact commerce well and
you know that's coming at us in a lot of different ways um i look at the stable coin and you know they want uh they want to tie it to the dollar which is a joke because the dollar is not stable so it's not a coin and it's going to be tied to fiat currency which is not stable and the crypto is not there to protect your privacy and letting them know anything about all of it is a lie but uh they're looking at the stable coin as a way to protect the dollar and to transition into the next
um uh monetary system you know we've had breton one breton breton breton woods two breton woods one and two and so now they're they've got to transition something else because they can only run these scams for a few decades until everybody catches on and people have caught on to this thing so they got to come up with something new and fresh a new con and that's a big part of that but uh i experienced this personally back in may of 2021 my program here independently it was only five
months old when paypal banned me and i still can't use paypal so they they banned me and venmo which is owned by them banned me at the same time i spent hours with him on the phone and the guy was very helpful but he finally came back and he said i can only find one thing it says uh delete this account immediately there was no violation no alleged violation of anything and no reason given for taking me off as matter of fact but that's what they want to do they want to use it to control content and we've got something very similar we talked about here on the show
last couple of days is some australian group of feminists called collective shout uh you should look this up eric it's uh i i think a better name for them would be the collective karens uh they're these uh i'll look it up yeah collective shout and so they're out there trying to use the uh you know banking bans or you know like operation chokepoint they're trying to use that against anybody that they don't like and
they have focused on some video games that they say are not safe for work um some of them are but some of them are not but what they're doing is they're setting a very dangerous precedent but this is something that the governments are very eager to do for them and uh and so are the corporations you know that's fine fine we'll just shut everything down so that's what's coming you know banning anything that anybody doesn't like and doing it right away and just completely shutting you off whether it's for your carbon footprint or because your politics or your religion or because
you oppose the pandemic or the vaccine it's just you know going to take you off for that stuff ultimately they want uniformity because they want predictability yes you know they they don't want anything unexpected to crop up they want to have the ability to know ahead of time what the reaction is going to be how people are going to move forward and all of this stuff and it's it's the most anti-human thing i can imagine yes it is it is the end of creativity it is the end of personal judgment initiative you know it is
literally the npc world where we're just the gray man all of us are just the same sort of representation human stick figures you know marching bleakly in line and it's just incredibly depressing to me yeah geospatial until um i've been looking at this for a long time and you know they've had a thing that they called uh ai before we talked about artificial intelligence they talked about anticipatory intelligence which was to predict what you're going to do before you did it and of course it's a big new brzezinski was talking about that back in the 1970s when
he wrote between two ages he said in the technocratic age we're going to know what you're going to do before you know what you're going to do and that really is their goal to know to surveil and to control everything that we do to live in a panopticon state now people got the message about cbdcs so now trump is here to gain their trust and to put in a different form of cbdc that's the stable coin i even call it cbdc in terms of crony billionaire digital
cash as opposed to central bank digital cash right uh it's just another cbd all he has to do is give it one of his narcissistic appellations about how big and beautiful it is that's right you know apparently people will fall in line for that i have gotten to the point i hope i'm not falling down the rabbit hole of madness but i begin to believe that this whole thing is just a gigantic form of political wrestling that they you know they put biden in there deliberately to create chaos and
demoralization yeah to to flood the country with random foreign people and to just rub it in americans faces that you know if if they if they make an illegal u-turn they're going to get prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law but you know people can just scamper across the border and do whatever they want.
They can drive without insurance that you and I will get nailed to the wall for if we do.
Anyway, they let that go on for a number of years, along with the whole tranny thing and all the other things that happened.
And in comes Trump on his white steed.
Trump is the populist nationalist savior.
He's going to correct everything.
And sure, I mean, it was attractive.
You know, people were desperate to hear that maybe we can fix this.
Maybe, you know, we can do something about it.
So, yeah, okay, I'm going to vote for the orange man.
Vote for Trump.
Yay, America, right?
You know, and then he gets in here and crashes everything.
And what ends up happening when he crashes everything, he will have completely demoralized and discredited the populist nationalist movement such that anybody who even tries to say, well, maybe free enterprise and, you know, all of that are a good idea.
It's going to be like Herbert Hoover.
Yeah.
Right before the Great Depression.
And then, you know, they got Franklin Roosevelt.
We'll probably end up with Pete Budig for AOC.
Yeah.
And, you know, where has Trump spent so much time?
In professional wrestling.
I mean, he's even got Lyndon McMahon running the Department of Education.
It really is crazy, but he knows how that works.
And that's one of the key ways that he controls a narrative is by making these heroes and heels stuff.
You know, it's all the stuff about Canada, the 51st state.
That's as phony as Hulk Hogan on the ring, you know?
I mean, all of that was just to create these different issues out of nothing.
We also had something else that was also kind of interesting, also involving a bunch of women, and that was the TAT app.
I don't know if you saw that or not, but it was actually the number one free app on download on Apple before the stuff all blew up.
And what happened was this is another one of these deals where we've got to have your ID before you can get onto the internet.
And we've got to be very careful because Republicans are pushing that extremely hard.
You know, well, we don't want kids to be harmed by anything, so we're going to have to require ID in order to use the internet, you know, to use these porn sites or whatever it is, never mind the fact that they're going to be able to easily get around these restrictions.
They're always coming up with reasons that we've got to have an ID.
We've got to have ID because otherwise we'll have illegal aliens who are going to be taking your jobs.
So we've got to have mandatory e-verify and an ID for that.
Or we've got to have ID.
And I agree we should have ID for voting.
That's the one thing I would agree with because it is voluntary.
And if you don't want to vote and get involved in the professional wrestling match, then I don't have to give them my ID.
But for all the rest of these things, they're always looking for an excuse to push ID on us.
Well, this app, the T-App, was a place where women could go in and gossip about men that they had dated.
And it became extremely popular.
But they required that you give them a picture ID to show that you're a woman and so forth.
And they just put all of this personal information, give us a shot of your driver's license and all the rest of the stuff.
They put it on a page, a URL, that was completely no password, no encryption, nothing.
If you had that URL, you could see it all.
And guess what?
Somebody got it and showed it to everybody.
And one of the things that we could see that was really funny was a guy just wearing a wig.
That was his ID.
And they let him in because he, I guess, identified as a woman.
But one of the worst case examples of how all this stuff that is supposed to protect us and keep us safe and secure actually endangers us in our identity.
So all this kind of stuff.
That ID thing has stuck in my crawl for a very long time.
I understand, just as a moral matter, not a legal matter.
If I were a storekeeper, I probably would not be comfortable selling beer or booze to a 14 or 15-year-old kid.
I consider that to be not appropriate.
That's something that I wouldn't personally do.
But there's something efronterous about demanding that a guy our age, for example.
I mean, anybody's, I mean, there's no possible way that we could be underage, that we could be anywhere near 18, 19, 20 years old.
It's ridiculous.
Once upon a time, this is a few years back.
I was attending a press event in Southern California, and I was at LAX Airport, you know, waiting in the terminal for my flight to board.
And I went up to the, there was a bar there.
I just wanted a cup of coffee because it was too early to have a drink.
And I just sat there having a cup of coffee.
And this guy, who clearly was in his 70s, had a white beard, older guy, he sits down and asks for a drink.
And the guy who was manning the bar, who looked like he was maybe 24 or 25, you know, demanded ID of this guy.
And the guy, to his credit, said, you know, I was in Vietnam when, you know, you were still in your diapers.
And then he expleted, deleted, and just walked away.
And again, I think it's this constant pecking at us, treating us like stupid children, you know, the contempt that the system shows for us.
And also, you flip it around too.
These poor people at the cashier, for example, at a store, they probably know perfectly well that you're old enough to buy a bottle of wine with your groceries.
But because of store policy, they have to participate in this degrading kabuki, you know, of asking you to present your ID.
We can't even buy cough syrup anymore without begging and pleading.
Here's my ID.
Look at, I'm old enough.
I'm not a meth head.
I'm not a drug addict.
I just freaking want some cough syrup.
But now you have to be treated as if you were a meth head, drug addict, whatever, just to buy a box of cough syrup.
That's right.
Well, Lance tells me, he says, the UK's Online Safety Act considers all criticism of illegal immigration to be 18 plus content and requires that you register your face and a government ID in order to be able to see any content related to it.
So if you're going to criticize their policy of taking society down, then they want to completely ID you and get you into their files.
It's pretty amazing.
But that's where this stuff is all headed.
And as you point out, this is the government corporate thing that replaced the somewhat limited government that briefly existed until about April of 1865.
You have a statement about Lincoln.
You said, Lincoln was no more free than the country that he enslaved, By the way, owned by the railroads and by a kind of precursor to Palantir, the Pinkerton thing.
It's all very depressing, but no less true for being depressing.
You know, I remember years ago, I read an alternative history by Harry Turtledove.
It was called So Few Remain, and in it, he changes history slightly so that there's an early end to the war and the South is able to go its separate way.
And as a result of that, in his novel, Abraham Lincoln is despised by everyone and ostracized.
But he makes a comeback a few decades later when this book picks up.
And he comes back, guess what, as the Socialist Party candidate, which I thought was really accurate.
I think that's exactly where he would have been.
So he's a socialist to boot, as well as a crony capitalist and under control of the corporations.
And that's what we're seeing today, isn't it?
Yeah, you know, Tom DeLorenzo, who's written a number of books about this subject, points out that Lincoln was, until after the war, after his assassination, when what he calls the Lincoln cult was erected, Lincoln was widely loathed in the North as well as the South.
There were massive riots in New York City over the dragooning of people to be pushed into this war in what was then another country.
Understandably, these fresh off-the-boat Irish immigrants were like, why in the world?
I don't want to be dragged all down south of the Mason-Dixon line to get killed.
I haven't got a dog in this fight.
And the whole, Americans are so propagandized about that.
I mean, ultimately, the South just wanted to do exactly what the American colonies wanted to do.
They wanted to leave.
They wanted to no longer be under the control of the central authority.
You know, like the most foundational fundamental principle that Jefferson was writing about and that Tom Paine wrote about.
That's right.
You know, self-determination.
We want government.
And then Lincoln had the insolence to talk about government of the people, by the people, and for people, except the people of the South.
Yeah.
He's going to impose it upon them.
Yeah.
Well, they were able to, with massive propaganda and educational system, completely change history with all that stuff, weren't they?
They were.
And that's the way it always works.
Yeah, part of recovering our senses is recovering our history and getting at the truth of things.
And that the so-called Civil War, which was nothing of the kind, it was an attempt by the South to secede, a very different thing.
Not a civil war.
The South did not want to take over the North.
That's right.
They did not want to control the whole country.
They just wanted to depart.
Leave us alone.
We're out of here.
Yeah, the American colonies didn't want to take over England.
They just wanted their independence.
And that's what the Southern states were doing as well.
So if that's illegitimate, there was no legitimacy for the American government to start with.
But I think it's a perfectly legitimate thing to do.
Yep, exactly right.
And so I think, you know, what we do, you and I and other people do, if we can just get people to see even one example of this sort of manipulation of history and truth and facts, it's like you can't unsee it.
You know, that's the one blessing of the whole COVID thing.
I think a lot of people have been disabused of the falsehood that the experts, the authorities, that they're well-meaning, that they have our best interests at heart, and they can be trusted.
We know now they are not to be trusted.
That's right.
Yeah, for years we talked about the harm from mercury and vaccines.
And they said, oh, we took that out in 2002, 2003.
No, they didn't.
It's still in the flu shots.
And they just had, they just revealed that and just said, well, we're going to stop doing it in the flu shots.
I don't know if I believe that or not.
We look at it.
But, you know, they're keeping their fingers crossed and say, well, what we meant was the childhood vaccines.
We meant the MMR and other things like that.
But they manipulate the information.
And as we see all this stuff coming together and the technocrat billionaires that have completely owned Trump, I don't know if you saw this or not, but Peter Thiel and Alex Carpu runs Palantir.
They have been tied together with their venture capital firms.
And now they want to come out and start making movies.
And they were talking about that, the kind of movies that they want to make.
And of course, they're all going to be very jingoistic, militaristic, high-tech, you know, and they'll throw in your subservience in the name of patriotism as well.
But this is the next big thing coming.
Sorry?
They're unwatchable.
Hollywood is collapsing.
Yeah, yeah.
There are occasionally exceptions, but for the most part, the drek that they are putting out is so awful as entertainment, leaving aside politics.
It's poorly written.
It's poorly acted.
It's full of clumsy cliched propaganda, political currents.
People are tired of it.
They don't want to watch it anymore.
They grab you by the lapel and yell at you about LGBT and DEI and all the rest of the stuff.
So there is perfect, there is a big opportunity for somebody to come in.
As they said, they want to do things like Top Gun, Hunt for Red October and stuff like that.
But of course, they'll put their technocracy spin on it as well.
Anybody could come in and start doing movies that are better in terms of acting and characterization plot, you name it, and not hector people over this left-wing nonsense and be successful.
The key is, are they going to come in and remake things to come?
H.G. Wells' book, Shape of Things to Come, if you remember that movie from the 1930s, that basically shows the kind of fascistic technocracy that they wish to put in.
And Elon Musk's grandfather completely bought into that.
And that's one of the reasons they wound up in South Africa.
He tried to instate that instead of the form of government that they had in Canada.
But that's really where these guys are going.
And I think they're going to be pretty successful at that.
And that should worry us because that's a different kind of threat that's going to be coming in.
It's going to take people a while to wake up to the people.
But listen, you know what?
I'm bullish and positive, actually, about this topic.
And I'll tell you why.
Look at how Joe Rogan, and he's just one example.
You and I are another example.
Look at how people like us have managed to sort of get around the mainstream media, as it's called.
Rogan's got a much bigger audience than CNN.
People have had it enough.
This whole thing has just reached its critical mass.
And I think with regard to movies, independent studios that come up with quality stuff that people like, there's now a vehicle for getting that out there.
I agree.
Maybe we don't have the media.
I agree.
It's just going to be a different subtext for a different way to come at us.
They're going to be coming at us from another angle.
I mean, you take a look at the collapse of the late-night talk shows that long ago stopped being funny and just hectored people with lectures.
It's like, who in the world was watching that stuff anyway?
Well, it turns out they weren't.
They were losing $40 million a year on Cobear's show.
But, you know, so there is a big opportunity for somebody who wants to come in and do it differently.
But then you've got to be careful what are they trying to sell you, even if they do it subtly.
Because, you know, Hollywood for the longest time has been selling very subtle, very subtle philosophy and a worldview and the rest of this stuff.
And if you just accept that without looking at it critically, that is what has had a big role in changing our society.
It goes back to the Franklin School.
I mean, they've been working on these types of things, very calculating the way they do it.
The problem with them was that they became a little bit too confident and they jumped the shark.
They did it right in your face.
They don't really care anymore.
If it was more subtle, it would be more effective.
And I think that's probably what's going to happen.
I think that trust is probably the most valuable currency that there is.
And once you lose it, it's almost irrecoverable.
And so now I think people are much more tuned into that.
They want to feel as though that they can trust whoever it is that they're listening to, that they're viewing.
And if they get a whiff of shadiness, a lot of people get immediately turned off by that.
And good.
There should be consequences for shadiness.
Yeah.
You know, for being a propagandist.
And that's healthy.
You know, people talk about a high-trust society.
And a high-trust society is a good thing.
But at the same time, you can't be naive.
You can't just assume that everybody's benevolent and there's nothing harmful to this.
I know it's a little more work to have to investigate and check things out and make a determination.
But ultimately, that's how we get back to some kind of an adult, healthy society instead of this fearful, infantilized society that we built up around us.
That's right.
Well, Patrick Henry said in his day, he said, trust no man, but bind them down with the chains of the Constitution.
If they're not going to abide by the Constitution, they certainly don't deserve your trust.
But you don't put blind trust in anybody.
And it's just part of critical thinking.
That's a key part of it.
And so I think that's one of the things that we need to be very, very wary of.
And one of the things that's always concerned me about Trump.
And that's why I see the Epstein stuff as very good, because at least some people are having second thoughts about blind trust in Trump.
The biggest issue is people will come back and say, well, if we can't trust Trump, who can we trust?
It's like, no one.
Trust yourself.
Trust your neighbors.
Start working at the local level.
You know, we just had a story about how on the sly they wanted to do these experiments to block out the sun.
Well, where did it get stopped?
It got stopped at the local government level.
There are things that we can do.
We need to understand the usual suspects of the federal government with its unlimited amounts of money and they're trying to keep that thing going.
And I think they will with the stablecoin.
But we need to understand that, especially if we use the Constitution, there's a lot that can be done at the local level.
And it's harder for them to control it.
That's why they keep trying to move everything to the federal level so that they can get rid of any of these restrictions.
We saw that with glyphosate.
They're now talking about moving things to the federal level on other pesticides and basically giving them a big pharma deal in terms of legal immunity.
We know exactly why they're doing that because they can buy a few people in Washington a lot more easily than they can buy people at the local level.
And so, you know, it's just, as you point out, it's, you know, people who are not a part of the system, and you have to look at what these people have done and actually hold them accountable.
I know for the longest time, one of the key weaknesses of Trump on this thing is not only did he campaign on it, but even before he was elected, the first time you had all this cue of nonsense, that's what I call it, about how, oh, he's going to wrap up all these pedophile rings that are out there and all the rest of this stuff.
I thought, really?
With his background, they sold that for so long.
That's why it's so much deeper.
It's not just a campaign promise.
They had this entire mythology about how he was the white knight who was going to come in and stop these known pedophile rings.
They should have talked more about the actual pedophiles like on Capitol Hill.
Remember Dennis Astor?
Oh, my gosh, yeah.
We've forgotten about that, haven't we?
The longest-serving Speaker of the House for the Republicans.
And he was picked because he was a pedophile wrestling coach and then made Speaker of the House.
And, you know, while he was Speaker of the House, they had two pedophile scandals.
You know, remember the one with Mark Foley, the House Page scandal?
Mark Foley and Barney Frank were the rent boys from his townhouse in Georgetown.
That's right.
The Hastert thing, you know, it was Hastert.
I remember him going on with Rush Limbaugh and just poo-pooing all of it and saying, oh, they're only coming after Foley and these other guys because that's what the Democrats are doing.
This is purely political.
There's nothing real here.
Well, it was real.
And Dennis Hastert was eventually exposed as being a pedophile.
And the most interesting thing about that whole thing to me was that after it was all known, what did they do about it?
Nothing.
Zero zip nada, right?
They could have gotten rid of the statute of limitations, which is incredibly short for pedophilia.
And if they had done that, they could have prosecuted Haster.
Instead, what they did was they manufactured a crime so they could send him to jail and satisfy people into thinking that they're doing something about the pedophile networks when the whole system was set up to make sure they did nothing about the pedophile networks.
And so, yeah, nothing is going to happen with this thing with Trump.
But it's a little bit more cynicism and critical thought is going to be something that'll be very good if that can get into the module world.
In Trump's comments, the arrogance and the narcissism that is his probest weakness, I think.
In that it makes him do things that just from his point of view are stupid.
Calling his supporters stupid is stupid politically.
And yet he did that.
And you can see it, like snarling contempt that he has, even for the people who support him, the moment they don't support him abjectly.
The minute that they raise a question, that they take off their red hat and say, hmm, wait a minute.
Then he comes after them, doesn't he?
It's amazing.
He demands literally slavish, obsequious, like, you know, cur dog rolling on its back, kick-me kind of, you know, follower, followership.
And that brings me to, I think, this other point that I wanted to make.
I think all of us, whatever your politics, stop looking for secular heroes and saviors.
Yes.
We see ourselves.
That's how we fix this.
Absolutely.
Stop looking for these heroes.
It's idolatry and it's stupidity.
It's amazing.
You know, how many times, as one person said, you're talking about Trump's narcissism, you know, all these guys in politics are narcissists, and especially all these billionaires.
Just take a look at Musk, right?
It was a clash of egos as they were coming after each other.
But of all the narcissists, Trump does stick out in his own special category, doesn't he?
He really does.
Yeah, I mean, he's a tour to force.
Well, Eric is great talking to you.
Always is great talking to you.
EricPetersAutos.com is a place to go for honest reviews.
And you've got comments about new cars.
And we didn't get into the underneath pan, which makes maintenance more difficult and oil leaks more difficult to know about and all the rest of the stuff.
But there's a lot of practical articles in there.
The perils of the pan is that article.
I love your site.
Always have loved it.
And you focus on mobility and liberty.
We can't have one without the other, can we?
And it's great to have an honest review.
And if you're going to get shut down by a car company for an honest review, now you've been proven right to them as well.
But I don't expect they're going to restore your credentials.
I hope they do.
But you can still see.
Yeah, you can still talk.
Again, it's heartbreaking to me because I'm a car guy.
I love cars.
And, you know, Mercedes at one time made brilliant cars.
They had superb engines.
They're inline six-cylinder engine, their V8s, their V12s.
Remember those?
Just magnificent things.
And they just decided to give that all away and to basically make another Tesla with a cheap plastic three-pointed star on the hood.
That's right.
Yeah, I'm very negative on the survivability of the entire German auto industry because it's not just their craven subservience to that aspect of the Green New Deal, but the Green New Deal for manufacturing in general in Germany is just sabotaging them, whether it's the manufacturing of steel or the ability to be able to compete in terms of cost on energy.
The governments have put the businesses in Germany and France and especially the UK at such a competitive disadvantage.
I don't see how they're going to be able to do any kind of manufacturing, especially something like automobiles and steel and that type of stuff.
They've basically just given a monopoly or duopoly, I should say, to India and China with the carbon mandates that they have on it.
But again, it's always great talking to you.
And thank you for being such a great friend.
I really do appreciate it, Eric.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate our friendship and I appreciate you having me on the show.
Well, thank you.
Thank you.
Have a good day.
And before we leave, I just want to thank everyone for all the support in the last couple of days.
Thank you so much for supporting the show.
We would not be here without you.
Thank you for your prayers.
And let's go out with a clip from Dennis Haster, just as a reminder of what this whole thing looks like.
Thank you, Eric.
EricPetersAutos.com.
That shocking indictment.
Former House Speaker Dennis Haster charged with lying to the FBI and trying to hide secret payments, apparently to cover up misconduct in his past when he was a high school teacher and wrestling coach.
ABC's John Carl has the story.
Good morning, John.
Good morning, George.
The indictment alleges that Hastert had a dark secret in his distant past, and he was willing to pay millions to keep it a secret.
Dennis Hastert was once the most powerful man in Congress.
Now he stands accused of a dark past before his career in politics.
Federal prosecutors have charged the 73-year-old Hastert with bank fraud and lying to the FBI in connection to a promise he made to pay an unidentified person $3.5 million in hush money.
Prosecutors say Hastert started making the payments five years ago to, quote, compensate and conceal his prior misconduct.
It's quite a fall for the man who was chosen Speaker of the House because he had a reputation as being Mr. Clean.
It's popular these days to ask political figures what mistakes they've made, where they've failed.
As a former history teacher, I know such analysis is best tempered by time and reflection.
And that is probably best left to others.
The indictment doesn't say what Hastert was trying to cover up or who he was paying, but it points to his time as a high school teacher and wrestling coach in Yorkville, Illinois, and notes the unnamed person has known Hastert for most of his or her life.
The indictment alleges Hastert structured withdrawals from his bank accounts to avoid detection, taking out just under $10,000 in 100 separate transactions.
When asked about it, Hastert told the FBI, yeah, I kept the cash, but that's what I'm doing.
His former constituents are surprised by the news.
You're prideful of people that are coming from your community and trying to make a difference in Illinois.
It's just disappointing.
There's no word from Dennis Hastert this morning or from his legal team, but he has reportedly stepped down from his job at a powerful Washington, D.C. lobbying firm, and that firm, George, has removed Hastert's bio from its website.
But as you said, John, we really don't know what conduct he was trying to cover up.
That is a complete mystery here.
There is no indication whatsoever, except in that indictment, it says that his time as a wrestling coach and a high school teacher back in Yonville, Illinois, way back when, is material to this indictment.
So it apparently is something that he did back when he was a high school teacher.
Okay, John Carl, thanks very much.
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