Andrew Clavin and Tom Woods expose the FBI’s Strzok-Page texts—"insurance policy" admissions and FISA abuses—while Democrats block House Intelligence memos, mirroring Obama-era IRS scandals. Woods’ libertarian history argues capitalism, not government, drove prosperity, dismissing redistribution myths and blaming Venezuela’s collapse on socialist policies like Sanders’. The episode also debunks porn culture myths during crises, critiquing hookup culture’s rejection of commitment, framing deep state abuses and ideological shifts as threats to both economic freedom and traditional values. [Automatically generated summary]
The FBI seems to have lost thousands of text messages that could make the FBI look bad, although not as bad as they look for having lost them.
The text messages came between two FBI employees who were having an adulterous affair and conspiring against first a presidential candidate they hated and then the president-elect, but they were otherwise honest in every way.
The news networks jumped on the story in order to perform the important journalistic function of present, pressuring the government to tell the whole truth.
Here's a montage of the network's hard-hitting coverage.
That's right.
The Nets did not give this story a single second of coverage.
I guess they're just assuming the missing emails will turn up as soon as they find the missing emails from Barack Obama's IRS that might have shed light on the misuse of that agency to silence conservative activists, which in turn may show up buried under the missing videotape showing a State Department spokesman being asked about the Obama administration's lies about their secret talks with Iran, which might be in the attic next to the NSA's missing data concerning surveillance of Americans,
which may in turn have gotten lost amid the emails from Hillary Clinton's secret server, which accidentally went missing when they were accidentally bleached, then accidentally burned, then accidentally destroyed with a hammer, then accidentally tied to a rock and dropped to the bottom of the sea accidentally.
The media's silence on the deep state cover-up was followed by deep state silence on the media cover-up, which was followed by media silence on the deep state silence about the cover-up of the silence.
One thing you got to love about the media in the deep state, they may make a lot of noise, but at least they never say anything.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety boom.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Shipshape, hip-sy-topsy, you're welcome to zippity-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, we're going to be talking a lot about silence today because there is an awful lot of silence coming from the Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee and from the Justice Department and from the text messages from the FBI.
So much silence that the silence almost speaks for itself.
We also have Tom Woods, a libertarian historian who's going to talk about the kind of history that you never hear, a little bit more silence.
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All right.
So, you know, I'm going to be talking about the FBI, these text messages, and this FISA memo that you may have heard about, but I will tell you about it if you haven't.
But I'm going to start off on something that seems a little bit off.
topic for just a minute.
Because so much, there is not, I think I said this recently, but I'll say it again, there's not one important right-winger trying to silence anybody on the left.
You never hear this from the right.
You never hear anybody saying that person should be shut down, that person should be taken off the air, that person should be banned from Google or Twitter.
You never hear anybody on the right saying that.
But the left, it is all they do.
They silence, you know, Ben when he goes to a university, they silence him with mobs.
They silence people by banning them, shadow banning them on Twitter.
Google just got rid of its policy of fact-checking, which they were only using on conservatives like us at the Daily Wire, and they dropped that.
Good for them.
But the effort is always to silence one side.
And one of the most important ways they silence us is by using identity to replace ideas.
And what I want to start off with is Guy Benson, who is, what does he do?
Town Hall, right?
I just want to make sure I got his right venue.
He is contributor of Fox News, Townhall.com.
That is.
So he did something for our friends at Prager, at Prager University, where he talked about the fact that Guy is gay.
And here he put it in perspective.
Just listen to the opening of this because it really is smart and sharp.
I'm a Christian, a patriotic American, and a free market, shrink-the-government conservative, who also happens to be gay.
What I mean by that is my values define me, while my sexual orientation sometimes feels more like, well, a footnote.
Literally, in fact, I came out as gay in a footnote in my book, End of Discussion.
When it comes to my political beliefs, my orientation is only one part of the story.
It's not the totality of who I am.
Some unimaginative leftists like to claim that this qualifies me as a self-hating gay person.
This is so boring.
That intellectual laziness only underscores my point.
Far too often, people are sorted by their gender or their skin color or their sexual orientation or any other immutable characteristic that has nothing to do with ideas or values.
So go to PragerU and watch the whole thing because it's really a good video from Guy.
And the thing about it is, this is purposeful.
Think about this for a minute.
Good things are always harder than bad things, right?
It's always easy to slide down, go down the slide into perdition, but it's always hard to climb up the mountain to the peak, right?
Identity is easy, and this is true whether you're on the right or the left.
Identity is easy.
Ideas are hard.
When a gay guy who's a fascist goes and sues some poor baker because he won't serve his wedding and he's a Christian and tries to drive him out of business essentially for his religion, and people say, ah, those gays, it's not those gays, it's those ideas.
It's those ideas, because there are plenty of gays who think that's disgusting as I think it's disgusting.
And there are plenty of gays who don't think that.
It's easy to say, ah, the gays.
It's easy to say, ah, the blacks, the black.
It's the ideas.
It's always the ideas.
It is always the ideas that define what people are.
Why does the left use identity to shut down ideas?
They use identity to shut down ideas because their ideas are wrong.
So if you say your idea is wrong, you say, well, you're just saying that because I'm a woman.
You're just saying that because I'm black.
This is what they do.
And this, and the reason I link this to what's happening at the Justice Department is the entire story of the Barack Obama administration was a man with bad ideas.
He was an arrogant little fool with bad ideas who was so arrogant, he didn't know how bad his ideas were and couldn't learn.
You walked into a room with him, I'm told, by people who knew him, and he did nothing but lecture you about how wrong you were and how things really were.
His ideas were wrong, but nobody would touch him because he was black.
He was the first black president.
You know how online they put TM next to things, trademark, you know, he's like first black president, TM.
And everybody, including me, did not want to see the first black president fail, but he did fail, and he failed not because he was black, he failed because of his ideas.
But more than that, more important than that, he was corrupt.
And the thing about Obama is I don't believe he was personally corrupt, like give me the money and I'll do a favor like Hillary Clinton.
I think is money corrupt.
I think he was corrupt in the sense that he thought his ideas were more important than the process by which we preserve our freedom, the constitutional process by which we preserve our freedom.
He was constantly making speeches about what he couldn't do.
Oh, I can't just have an executive order to let the illegal immigrants stay and give them amnesty because that would be against the Constitution.
Then he do it because he realized over time, like Henry VIII realized over time, how powerful he was.
Obama realized over time that he could do virtually anything, including strangle Michelle in the Rose Garden, and the press wouldn't touch him because he was black.
So he realized the ideas didn't matter and he could do anything he wanted.
And he stacked, especially the Justice Department, but also the IRS.
He stacked the important agencies of government with his pals.
Remember, Eric Holder, the Attorney General, said, I'm his wingman.
Not I'm the chief law officer in the country, sworn to uphold the law.
I'm the president's wingman, and I'm going to protect him.
And Loretta Lynch, or as I call her, blandly corrupt Loretta Lynch, was the same way.
So now, after, you know, the House Intelligence Committee has been, all these committees in Congress have been studying this Russia collusion thing.
And the Russia collusion thing more and more looks like a complete boondoggle, exactly what President Trump said it was.
It looks like a way of getting back at him for winning the election, but also of hampering the new president who they didn't expect because Obama had so corrupted the Justice Department and the FBI that they didn't think they'd get caught because they were sure Hillary was going to win.
And when Trump won, they thought we've got to devalue him.
We've got to delegitimize him before he exposes what we've done.
And by the way, I just want to pause for a minute and say my heart goes out to all those honest FBI agents.
And I'll bet there are a lot of them.
I bet some of them are Democrats, some of them are Republicans, who just want to capture bad guys.
They're working in bureaus across the country.
They're all over the place.
They're just trying to do their job.
They don't corrupt those guys so much.
What they do is they corrupt the people at the top.
And that just corrupts the entire agency.
And suddenly you're trying to do your job and you're working for this completely politicized agency.
So after months of hammering the Justice Department for information, the FBI, the FBI sends over thousands of text messages between Peter Strzzok and Lisa Page, these two FBI people.
Strzok was involved in the Russian investigation and the Hillary Clinton investigation, and they were having an adulterous affair.
And they're sending these text messages back at such an incredible rate.
It was about 70 a day.
It was about 70 text messages a day, right?
And they send them over, but they send them over with a note saying they had failed to preserve the messages between these two between December 14th and May 17th, December 14th, 2016 and May 17, 2017.
So think about that for a minute.
By the way, I should mention that Byron York at the Washington Examiner is doing a fantastic job of covering this and keeping it up front and center and just giving the information.
But think about that.
That is when all this stuff happened.
That's after the election.
And as Trump takes power, and as the Russian thing begins, and as Comey is being fired, remember, and Comey is then engineering the appointment of Robert Mueller to be an investigator.
That's the stuff that has vanished, okay?
But in it, there is some telling stuff.
In the text messages they've got, there's some telling stuff.
But before we get to that, I just want to go back and play.
Have I got Obama?
Yes.
This is cut number 10.
This is Obama when they were investigating Hillary's emails, promising in this blandly corrupt way that his administration really mastered, promising that the investigation was going to be on the up and up.
Can you guarantee to the American people, can you direct the Justice Department to say Hillary Clinton will be treated as the evidence goes, she will not be in any way protected.
I guarantee that there is no political influence in any investigation conducted by the Justice Department or the FBI, not just in this case, but in any case.
And she will be.
Full stop, period.
And she will be treated no differently.
Guaranteed.
Full stop.
No political, nothing political, nothing, nothing, nothing.
Okay, now we have blandly sinister Attorney General Loretta Lynch, right?
And she has a meeting.
She has a meeting on a tarmac, a secret meeting with Bill Clinton, the husband of the woman being investigated by her people, by the FBI.
And she says, oh, that doesn't matter.
We're just talking about our grandchildren.
That's all we're talking about.
And she comes out, and pay attention to this.
This is July 1st, right?
This is on July 1st.
She comes out and she says, whatever the FBI says, this meeting, this tarmac meeting meant nothing.
Whatever the FBI says, that's what we're going to do.
We're going to follow the law.
This is cut number seven.
As I've always indicated, the matter is being handled by career agents and investigators with the Department of Justice.
They've had it since the beginning.
They are interested in.
Which predates your tenure as Attorney General.
It predates my tenure as Attorney General.
It is the same team, and they are acting independently.
They follow the law.
They follow the facts.
That team will make findings.
That is to say, they will come up with a chronology of what happened, the factual scenario.
They will make recommendations as to how to resolve what those facts lead to.
The recommendations will be reviewed by career supervisors in the Department of Justice and in the FBI and by the FBI director.
And then, as is the common process, they present it to me, and I fully expect to accept their recommendations.
Okay, so that was probably the day before July 1st.
So then on July 1st, Strzzok sends a text message to his lover saying this announcement looks like hell.
Loretta Lynch's announcement that she's going to back the play looks like hell.
And Paige says, she says, yes, it's a real profile and courage since she already knows no charges will be brought.
She already knows no charges will be brought.
So what do these guys know, these FBI agents?
And remember, Strzok is on this investigation, so he already knows she's cleared.
I mean, that's how blandly corrupt these guys are.
Plus, plus, there's other stuff.
Alicia's Secret Society Rumor00:03:16
Now, I don't want to blow this out of proportion yet because we really don't know what it is.
We remember that Paige especially hated Trump, and Strzzok's comments about Trump got worse and worse as his affair with her deepened.
And they had this one comment about we know where he said we know that he's going to lose, but if he doesn't, we need an insurance policy.
And people have been wondering, is this Russian investigation, the insurance policy, they cooked up?
And now in these, there is another thing.
And again, it's very hard to put this in context, so don't jump to conclusions.
Don't think it's a conspiracy right away, where they talk about we're forming a secret society.
And here's Trey Gowdy, the investigator, commenting on that.
Congressman Gowdy, do you want to expound on the secret society idea?
Sure, I wish I could.
I wish I'd been the one who either sent that text or received it.
You had this insurance policy in the spring of 2016, and then the day after the election, the day after what they really, really didn't want to have happen, there's a text exchange between these two FBI agents, these two supposed to be objective, fact-centric FBI agents saying perhaps this is the first meeting of the secret society.
So, of course, I'm going to want to know what secret society are you talking about because you're supposed to be investigating objectively the person who just won the electoral college.
So, yeah, I'm going to want to know.
Okay, so there's stuff we don't know, and there's also stuff we don't know about FISA.
I'll get to that in a minute, but first let me talk about my head.
You know, Alicia, I saw Alicia on Alicia.
It's Alicia.
I keep saying Alicia.
It's Alicia.
Sorry about that.
She tweeted today that if you rub my head, you get 10 years.
Good luck.
It's like Buddha's belly.
This is only true since I subscribed to dollarshaveclub.com, which was long before they were a sponsor.
I went on dollarshaveclub.com because I was tired of paying a lot of money.
I got a lot of real estate to shave.
I was tired of paying a lot of money for disposable razors I then had to throw away.
They're locked away.
With Dollar Shave Club, you just subscribe.
That's all you do.
And they send you the razors you want.
You can either get the simple one that has two blades or you get the one that I have that's the executive that has 147 blades.
I'm making that up, but that's what it feels like.
It has so many blades.
I always say that I start shaving in the morning and right around lunchtime, I'm finished.
The final blade goes over.
Not only that, they also have all this other great stuff, much of which I have used, like shave butter, hair gel, you know, body cleanser, all these other things that you can just put in the packet.
It's easy to change what's in your package from month to month.
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Bernie Sanders and Capitalism00:15:36
Now, the other thing that's going on is this stuff about FISA.
And why this is important is FISA courts are supposed to be there.
They're secret courts, but they're supposed to be there to protect you from the government spying on you.
And we don't know.
We don't know what the House Intelligence Committee has come up with.
But it sounds as if, it sounds as if the FBI was misusing stuff like the STEAL document, this opposition research, this kind of rumor-mongering, Russian trolling.
They were using this to get FISA warrants to spy on Donald Trump and his campaign.
That's what it really seems like's going on.
But we don't know this because a lot of the information that the House Intel Committee is getting is classified.
So what the Republicans on the committee did was they put together a memo, and this you've been hearing about, and they're talking about, they're saying it's really bad.
A memo details the FISA abuses, what they feel are the FISA abuses, and we don't know what's in it yet, but it sounds pretty bad.
Here's Congressman Matt Gates of Florida talking about having looked at this memo.
Four pages of a memorandum prepared by the intelligence committee that will shock the conscience of this country when it comes to the horrific abuses that occurred during the last administration and that I believe continue to pose a threat to Donald Trump's presidency.
It is so important, Judge Janine, that we are fighting to get this memo released to all of the American people.
I don't think the right answer is just to allow members of Congress to be horrified and outraged.
All Americans need to see what was happening to undermine this president duly elected.
How do we release this information?
When do I get to see it?
Well, at any moment in time, the intelligence chairman who has done an excellent job, Devin Nunes, can schedule a vote in the intelligence committee.
If the intelligence committee votes to declassify this information, and if President Trump doesn't overrule that, it will immediately become available to the American people.
So that's the idea of this memo.
It is so you don't have to declassify all the information that came in, but you can declassify the memo itself and send it out.
And what's really interesting is who do you think?
Obviously, the Democrats are standing in the way.
Some of the Democrats haven't even gone in to look at the memo.
They won't even read the memo.
The Republicans are going in to read it, but the Democrats won't in the House, but the Democrats won't even go in and look at it.
It's in a secret room and all this stuff.
So who do you think is leading the charge to keep the people from finding out what this information is?
Adam Schiff.
Adam Schiff is a McCarthyite louse.
He is Joe McCarthy.
He really is bad.
Before I play what he said about the memo, which is absurd, I just want to play a couple of cuts.
These are a couple of cuts our guys laced together of him accusing Donald Trump, making these outlandish accusations against the president.
And then when the interviewer says, well, where's your proof?
He says, oh, I can't tell you the proof.
No, no, I can't tell you the proof.
I can just make these charges.
It is truly, remember Joe McCarthy, Senator Joe McCarthy used to say, I have in this envelope, I have in this envelope the names of several communists in the State Department, and nobody ever opened the envelope.
That's what Adam Schiff does.
He is a McCarthyite.
You know this.
The Russians offered help.
The campaign accepted help.
The Russians gave help, and the president made full use of that help.
And that is pretty damning, whether it is proof beyond a reasonable doubt of conspiracy or not.
Do you know of any instance where the Russians said, we're going to do it this way, we're going to do it through WikiLeaks, we're going to do it through DC leaks.
This is how we're going to get this information out there.
I can't comment.
All you have right now is a circumstantial case.
Actually, no, Chuck.
I can tell you that the case is more than that.
And I can't go into the particulars, but there is more than circumstantial evidence now.
So again, I think you have seen direct evidence of collusion.
I don't want to go into specifics, but I will say that there is evidence that is not circumstantial and is very much worthy of investigation.
He's a bad guy.
I mean, that is a bad thing to do.
I mean, you know, that is genuine McCarthyite tactic.
So now they have this memo, and it says, I mean, you heard what the words Gates was using, horrific abuses of FISA, which means spying.
You know, the IRS scandal where Obama shut down conservative activists during an election by using the IRS to not give them tax-exempt status, I think, was the biggest scandal of my lifetime, and I was alive during Watergate.
Far, far bigger, far, far worse abuse.
If this is true, if they were using FISA to spy on the opposite, to use the FBI to spy on an opposition candidate, that is genuine tinpot Republic behavior.
That is genuinely bad stuff.
And only the color of Obama's skin protects him from the charges of corruption, which should be really swept over him.
So why doesn't Adam Schiff want you to hear it?
Because you just aren't smart enough to handle what it has to say.
Here's cut five.
Why not allow people to look at it and let Americans make the decision for themselves about whether it's useful information or not?
Well, because the American people, unfortunately, don't have the underlying materials, and therefore they can't see how distorted and misleading this document is.
The Republicans are not saying make the underlying materials available to the public.
They just want to make the spin available to the public.
And I think that spin, which is a fulsome attack on the FBI, is just designed to attack the FBI and Bob Mueller to circle the wagons for the White House.
And that's a terrible disservice to the people, hardworking people at the Bureau.
But more than that, it's a disservice to the country.
You can't handle the truth.
Yeah, that said, you're not good enough.
You're not smart.
You don't have the context to handle the truth.
You know, the entire Obama administration was the avatar, the absolute triumph of the left's obsession with using identity to supersede ideas.
And if we fall for that by being bigots, by being actual homophobes, by attacking people en masse for who they are, we have lost the way because what we want to do is we want to fight back with ideas, make them bring their ideas out into the open and discuss only their ideas.
Obama failed because he did not know what he was doing.
He did not know how the world works.
He's an incompetent and an arrogant guy, and he had to use his identity ultimately to cover that up.
We've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
We've got Tom Woods, the historian, coming on in just a minute.
Come on over to thedailywire.com.
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All right.
Tom Woods is a historian, a libertarian, and a New York Times best-selling author who wrote the politically incorrect guide to American history.
He wrote Meltdown.
He has a book called Bernie Sanders is Wrong.
He has two podcasts, Contra Krugman, where he refutes Paul Krugman's weekly columns.
And he has another called The Tom Wood Show, which you can find on tomwoods.com.
And you can also visit tomsfreebooks.com and get a free digital copy of one of Tom's books.
This is a pre-recorded interview.
We talk to Tom about the things people aren't learning about American history.
Tom, thank you for coming on.
I appreciate it.
My pleasure.
You know, let's begin with this.
I mean, one of the most popular history books among young people is Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States.
And it gets promoted on movies in that picture, Goodwill Hunting.
They sell it very strongly as a radical way of looking at the world.
I was happy to see in this new movie, Ladybird, the kind of jerk is reading it, the kind of abuser is reading the book.
But basically, the idea of this book is that America is always in the wrong.
I mean, we came here, we killed the Indians, we held slaves.
He even blames us, I think, for World War II.
Give me, this seems to be a theme on the left, is that America is basically a force for ill, a force for bad, capitalism, a force for bad.
Give me the other side of that.
What is the argument that young people should know when they're confronting their professors with the history of America?
Well, I take, I don't want to say I take a nuanced view on that because I don't, but I do believe the U.S. government is a force for ill in my life and in the lives of a lot of people.
But in terms of the people of America, that's what I love.
When I say I love America, I don't mean like I love the fact that we have a bicameral legislature and an upper body.
What I love about America is the people, our traditions, our culture.
I would be a fish out of water anywhere else in the world.
And when you say that America is a force for ill in the world, if you're talking about the American people, I just don't believe it.
Because for one thing, I don't believe capitalism is a bad thing.
I think capitalism ought to be embraced.
The word ought to be embraced.
We ought to celebrate it.
We ought to mock and ridicule people who oppose it.
Because if they really believed in the welfare of the poorest, they would be the biggest capitalists of all.
If you look at how well are the poorest people in a society doing all over the world, the single biggest indicator of how well they're going to be doing is how much economic freedom there is in that country.
That's just a fact.
Whether even if you're talking about the Scandinavian countries, which are always thrown in our face, look at the Scandinavian countries.
They have big government presence and they're doing very well.
Well, a couple of things.
They have a lot of capitalism too that overcomes the big government presence.
They actually have, in some cases, more competitive economies than we do and better rule of law and monetary policy and all that.
But also, if you actually measure how well Swedes do in Sweden and how well Swedes do when they come to America, well, in many cases, they earn 50 to 100% more in America.
So yeah, they do really great in Sweden, but they do even better under American capitalism.
So hooray for it.
And in fact, over the past 200 years around the world, just 200-year period, there has been an 11-fold increase in the per capita income.
Even if we include the worst, most backward, I dare not say a certain word, countries in that calculus, we still have seen an 11-fold increase.
In some parts, it's been even more than that.
I mean, we've gone from, in other words, people used to, in 1820, people were living on $3 a day.
And on average in the world, it's now $33 a day.
And in the advanced countries, it's $100 a day.
And in a pinch, you could get by on $100 a day because people do.
A lot of people get by on $100 a day.
The point is, nothing like this in terms of the growth in the standard of living has ever been seen in the history of the world at any time ever.
And this happened overwhelmingly in spite of government involvement.
It happened because of capital accumulation and the push on the standard of living that's caused by that.
So I don't want to hear these people grousing and whining about the poor.
They've done the only thing those folks have done is made this process prolonged.
Now, what about when you talk about the government?
You know, the government has been, you know, in the last, really since World War II, I guess it is, maybe since FDR, the government has grown exponentially.
It has reached into every, especially the federal government.
It reaches into every aspect of our lives.
But before that, before that, we really did have a hands-off government for a very long time.
And it really showed in the way that America became the great engine of democracy that it was.
I mean, isn't that what made America great?
Yeah, the United States became the greatest industrial power in the world basically before it even had an income tax.
I mean, just right around that decade.
And then when they introduced the income tax, it was so minor, almost nobody even noticed it was there.
So yeah, all these things did indeed happen just because that's how a free, spontaneous people operates.
But the, you know, if you read a typical textbook, it doesn't have to be Howard's Inn.
The textbook you get, I remember perfectly well what seventh grade was like.
The textbook was, if it weren't for your wise overlords in Washington, D.C., you and your kids would be working in a coal mine for three cents a day, getting your limbs blown off, and every sandwich you eat would probably be poisoned and your toaster would be exploding and your TV monitor would be blowing you into bits.
And people just go ahead and accept that.
And I get why they say that.
But every aspect of this is wrong.
The reason people had low standards of living 100 or 200 years ago is that the whole society was poor at that time.
It wasn't because all the rich people were hoarding all the big screen TVs for themselves.
There weren't any of those things.
And if you tried to solve this problem through redistribution, all right, well, everybody would get like one tenth of an extra chicken leg, and that'd be the end of it.
It would not have solved anything.
Yeah.
So I look at, when I look at the young, especially millennial generation, people in college relentlessly fed this diet, this intellectual diet of anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism.
I mean, they go out and they follow Bernie Sanders, who was essentially preaching the gospel that left Venezuelans eating their cats.
And people are cheering for this clown, a guy who honeymooned in the Soviet Union.
Now, you have a website, tomsfreebooks.com, tomsfreebooks.com.
And you have books that you give away there, basically.
They say Bernie Sanders is wrong.
Are you optimistic about reaching the young?
Do you feel that there's any chance to turn this generation around and re-educate them?
You know, you hate to see history have to repeat itself in order for people for another generation to learn its lesson.
But you almost think unless these kids get what they're asking for good and hard, almost nothing can reach them.
But on the other hand, there is a minority of younger people who aren't just people who listen to three sentences of Bernie Sanders, but who read real books and who think maybe there's more to the world than gimme, gimme, gimme as an economic policy.
And those are the people I think are reachable.
And I think those are the ones who are more likely to be active.
I mean, what could be easier and lazy than just to accept the Bernie Sanders view of the world?
It's very surface level.
There's no depth to it, not much, frankly, not many IQ points behind it.
The really bright kids are the ones who are starting to question this whole thing.
So that sort of makes me feel a little bit better.
But in terms of the sorts of things that he tries to argue, whether it's the minimum wage or all the sorts of arguments he makes.
Yeah, so as you say, I came up with a book called Bernie Sanders is Wrong.
Why Not Be Blunt?00:06:42
I thought, why not just be blunt?
And so I just have every single chat, whatever you hear him talk about, I've got something that goes in and refutes him, whether it's inequality or it's the minimum wage or whatever it is that he's calling for.
Every single one of these things can be refuted, or we should be more like Denmark.
What I like about your point about Venezuela is that when they actually ask Bernie Sanders, do you have any comment about what's going on in Venezuela?
I mean, you call yourself a socialist sometimes, and these are people who actually did it.
Do you have any comment on that?
And he actually said no comment.
Wow.
And yeah, maybe I wouldn't have a comment either in that situation.
Whereas the funny thing is the polar opposite of Bernie Sanders would be Ron Paul.
And even if you're asking him a really hard question that probably in his heart of hearts, he doesn't want to answer.
I never heard that guy say no comment.
I'll give an answer that all my campaign managers are going, oh, why is he not just sidestepping this?
At least the guy gave us an answer.
This creep won't even tell us.
You know, he's too busy moving from one of his three houses to the other to tell us how he feels about people scrounging around for scraps in a country that took his advice.
Now, you describe yourself, speaking of grandpa, you describe yourself as a libertarian.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah, I do.
Can you define that?
What does that actually mean?
Because every time I listen to libertarians, all they talk about is dope, is pot.
And I keep thinking, you know, I'm sorry, but that's just not the thing that wakes me up in the middle of the night worrying for my country.
No, no, it's not.
And I mean, you're looking at the squariest of the square among the libertarians.
I mean, you know, we drive a minivan with the kids and all that.
So I have actually, I've never consumed any of that stuff at all.
So as I say, I'm totally square.
My view is if somebody wants to do that stuff, I don't think the best way to fight against that is to ruin the person's life.
I agree.
I agree.
Throw them in a cage.
You know, I mean, I think it ought to be dealt with on a more local level.
What are libertarians all about?
We're not all about, you know, pot is incidental to the question.
If somebody's trying to tell you we're about pot, it's, let me perfectly blunt with you.
They're cowards who understand that libertarians believe in a lot of unpopular things.
So they'd rather kiss up to you by saying, hey, we're for cool things that you like.
Whereas I feel like it's better to be just blunt and honest up front.
And if we're going to like each other, fine.
If not, or maybe you'll come to like me a year down the road when you think about it.
But it's better than being dishonest.
All it means is that we believe that people should interact with each other on a voluntary basis.
No initiation of force against other people.
It should be entirely peaceful.
That's all we believe.
So that doesn't mean that any peaceful thing somebody does, I personally endorse.
I think a lot of knuckleheads out there who do stupid things all day.
But I also believe that I have plenty on my plate as a father of five kids as it is.
And it's everybody's responsibility to look after his own hearth and home first.
And that was the old, the old traditional conservatism was mind your own business.
So what is that?
Where is that?
Where does that become unpopular?
I mean, that seems pretty basic Americanism, you know, each his own, you know, takes different kinds of maker world.
Right.
So where's it becomes unpopular?
It becomes unpopular if I say, therefore, I want to abolish antitrust law.
Oh, wait a minute.
I just lost a lot of people.
Or I don't think there should be a minimum wage.
Ouch.
Or, you know, so I can keep on going.
Or I would like to see the government have to raise money through bake sales, you know, just like you used to see.
The Pentagon should have to bake sales.
I like the whole government to have to do that.
I'd like them to have to scrounge around to wonder where their resources are going to come from.
It comes when you say end the Fed.
So there's a lot of possible unpopularity.
But when I look at how screwed up American society is so far away from where I'd like to see it, I'm not afraid of holding an opinion that the New York Times doesn't approve of.
And even frankly, that the Weekly Standard doesn't approve of.
I'm not particularly impressed with the job either of these sources has done.
So you're also, I believe you're a convert to Catholicism, right?
You were a Lutheran.
That's right.
And I'm speaking of unpopular positions.
Well, I'm a convert from Judaism to Episcopalianism, so I'm close.
But now, where do you put it?
This is a question I get all the time because I'm basically a libertarian.
I have a few conservative views, but basically a libertarian.
But a lot of people say, I'm very much opposed to abortion.
And people say, well, aren't you a libertarian?
Why should the government interfere in this process?
Where do you stand on this?
Well, but it would be like saying I'm against murder and I think people should be punished for murder.
We wouldn't say, I thought you were a libertarian.
Well, okay, but I do believe that it's okay for anybody in the world to do the right thing.
So even a government official, it's okay for that person to stop me from killing somebody.
I'm okay with that because anyone, it's okay for anyone to do the right thing.
So when it comes to abortion, there is actually debate among libertarians about abortion.
There's a group called Libertarians for Life, and they generally make secular arguments against abortion.
Although there's nothing preventing a libertarian from making a religious argument against abortion.
But the argument would be that if an unborn child has rights, then it would be aggression to deprive that unborn child of rights.
And the argument would kind of run like this.
If I were, if I put you in a condition where you are at risk, you're in danger, like for instance, let's say I can fly my own plane, I put you in my plane, and we fly up 10,000 feet while we're at 10,000 feet.
Given that I put you in that position, I can't announce, well, I'm kind of tired of your company.
I don't want you around anymore to just throw you out and say, look, I'm just expelling him from my private property.
Not so.
I put that person in that dangerous situation.
Well, likewise, in the vast majority of cases, a child winds up in the womb for reasons we all understand.
And that child has been put in that vulnerable situation.
And therefore, you can't just do the equivalent of throwing the child out at 10,000 feet.
And also, I mean, one of the arguments that you even hear some libertarians use for abortion is the argument of Judith Jarvis Thompson from the 70s that the child is like a parasite or a trespasser.
Now, we can get into the biology of what parasites are, but in terms of trespassing, if trespassing means being where you're not supposed to be, where is the child supposed to be if not the womb?
Fair enough.
I'm running out of time.
Can you give me a quick answer to this?
When you look at Donald Trump, is he helping your cause or hurting it?
I would say a little bit of both.
I like that he's slashing and burning some things, but he's not slashing and burning nearly enough.
But I'm willing to be converted, I'll say that.
Hard Live Intimacy00:04:06
Interesting, interesting.
Tom Woods, TomsFreeBooks.com, the author of several books, including the Politically Incorrect History of America.
Is that what it's called?
Politically Incorrect Guide to American History.
Guide to American History.
Thank you very much for coming on.
It's been good talking to you.
Thanks.
All right.
let us move on to sexual follies.
So here's a story that I feel was kind of misreported a little bit.
Remember, it was last week, I guess, when they set off the alarm in Hawaii that the nuclear missiles were inbound.
Like, you know, it's easy enough done.
You know, you mean to hit the unlock the refrigerator button, but instead you hit the nuclear war button.
And everybody panicked.
And they had this thing where they said that after it was over, the traffic on Pornhub spiked as if, you know, everybody thought, oh, we're still alive.
Let's watch porn.
But that's not actually what happened.
What happened was during the event, the traffic on Pornhub dive-bombed.
It dropped about 77%.
So it was like people stopped.
When they thought they were going to die, people stopped watching porn and then it spiked as everyone went back to the porn and everybody rushed back to the site.
But I think that that's very different because when you're about to die, obviously you start paying attention to the stuff that matters, right?
Because time is running out.
You start to realize that life is beautiful.
You want to be paying attention.
You want to be running around screaming maybe.
I don't know what you want to be doing, but you probably want to be telling.
You know, it was like 9-11.
People called up their relatives and said, I love you.
They didn't call up their relatives and say, you know, they didn't go on Pornhub.
They didn't go on sites.
They went for the people who love them.
So I bring this up because my daughter Faith Moore, writing at PJ Media, wrote a piece today with the incendiary headline.
She probably didn't write the headline with the incendiary headline, Dear Feminists, if you want a real man, act like a woman, which I love.
I told her she's out of the sisterhood.
But she points out, she says, a recent article on Scary Mommy by popular blogger Samara says the article is called, Sometimes I Want to Be Held by a Man Naked Without Having Sex.
Is that okay?
And my daughter says it simultaneously makes the point that women need intimacy in their lives, which is true, and that they should be able to expect it from the random guys that they go out with one time, which is not true.
She quotes Samara: I dread the idea of having to make constant compromises.
Relationships are hard.
And if introducing a partner into my life is going to create drama and pain, I'd rather be alone.
Instead, she longs to find intimacy with the random people she dates.
She says, I'm a highly sexual person, and I like kinky sex as much as the next wanton woman.
Sometimes, though, I just want to lie next to someone who will hold me.
This never happens.
Boy, that's a head scratcher.
Faith writes, of course, it doesn't.
Samara's weird sexual preferences aside, she and many other women have been duped by a nonsensical philosophy into believing that engaging in hookup culture as if they were men will get them the intimacy they crave because they are women.
And the point is, again, it's the same point.
It's hard to live by ideas instead of by identity.
But once you realize that the things that are important in life actually aren't on Pornhub, the things that are important in life actually can't be found in a hookup culture, once you start to realize that, of course, it's hard to live by your ideas.
Of course, it's hard to live in a relationship.
Of course, it's hard to live in intimacy.
There's all kinds of difficulties with it.
But the straight and the narrow path is the path that leads upward.
The wide open path is the path that leads down and into perdition.
So that's why.
That is why you take the trouble to live by ideas, by good ideas, by true ideas, by smart ideas that actually describe reality instead of living by your pleasures and your identity, which pretty much come down to the same thing.
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