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March 14, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
31:58
Things I admire about PROGRESSIVES
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I've had some friends who are progressives ask me lately, like, what's going on?
You used to be a leftist.
You used to be a Clinton supporter, like Bill Clinton, I'm talking.
Like, what's going on?
What do you have against liberals today?
What's the deal, Mike?
What's the deal?
All right.
So, um...
I am going to actually, in this podcast, I'm going to say some nice things about leftists.
There are some things that I agree with where leftists deserve some credit.
So, you know, instead of always being critical about everything, even though I'm a critical thinker, it's just in my nature to see what's wrong.
I think it's also important sometimes to see what's right with different ideologies.
And as you know, I'm not a political party sycophant.
I don't worship politicians.
I don't worship ideologies.
Which, of course, is a dangerous thing in today's tribal environment of politics where you have to be on, like, Gang A or Gang B. Otherwise, neither gang, you know, will accept you.
Not that that matters.
Basically, I'm anti-status quo.
That's the simplest way to describe it.
But it is true that when I was young, when I was in college, I actually, I wasn't very active in politics, but I did sort of casually support Bill Clinton.
Again, I wasn't active.
I didn't, I don't even think I voted, frankly.
And I didn't, you know, I didn't protest or wasn't involved in politics.
I didn't even give a crap about politics at that time.
But I remember sort of seeing Bill Clinton on CNN, which at the time I did not know was fake news, because, you know, hey, you're 22 years old or whatever.
How do you know what's real?
But I thought Bill Clinton, at that time, I thought he looked pretty awesome.
You know, he was hip.
He didn't look old and shriveled up like the competition, like Bob Dole and other sort of stodgy Republicans and so on.
So I thought he was pretty cool at the time.
It was only later...
That I came to learn that the Clintons are such corrupt criminals.
So it took me a few years to wake up to that.
And that's true.
I have to allow that same awakening period to other younger liberals today.
It's not really reasonable to expect some college-age student Who's been trained in the University of Snowflakia to be able to, you know, just suddenly wake up and see the whole truth.
They're young, you know?
They haven't lived through enough stuff yet to know how deeply corrupted the system is, what liars most politicians are, and how especially Democrat politicians can just lie through their teeth without giving it a second thought.
Like Obama and Clinton, you know?
Like the world-class liars, right?
Whereas Bush, Bush was a different kind of liar.
He was more like, you know, I'm talking about Bush Sr., the CIA Bush.
He was more like a behind-the-scenes spook president, you know?
He didn't have social skills.
He didn't get on camera and woo you with Playing the saxophone or speaking in a way that just lifted your spirits.
No.
He was basically like, screw all you, we control everything.
He used to run the CIA, remember?
Before he was president.
He ran the CIA. He was the head of the CIA. And then he became president.
A lot of people forget that.
Anyway, enough of the political history.
When I look at liberals today...
They say that if you're not a liberal when you're young, you have no heart.
And if you're not a conservative when you're older, you have no brain.
And it's quite true.
It's a very observant comment, really.
It means, of course, that If you don't have compassion when you're young, you're not really human.
You've got to have compassion.
And liberalism is very often focused on just this idea of trying to help the world, trying to save people, trying to give things to people.
It's like welfare and citizenship.
Come on in and have free health care and free education and Free this and free that.
It's a great idea when you're like 12 or perhaps 19 for that matter.
Some people believe that their whole lives, that that's the way the world works.
But it is important when you're young, when you're college age, that you've got to have a heart.
It's not unusual to believe a lot of those things.
I did too, because I have a heart.
I want to help humanity too.
But then as you get older and you go through the job world or you own companies perhaps or you hire and fire people or you work as an employee or what have you and you grow up, your brain matures and you look at the world and you start to really learn and observe things that weren't necessarily obvious to you before.
You come to find out that, my God, if you just give everybody free stuff, they become dependent on you and then it's kind of an entrapment system.
And that compassion really isn't expressed just by trapping someone in that system of neediness or dependence.
Instead, compassion is teaching people, uplifting people, giving them opportunities and perhaps training and a head start to uplift themselves so they can become self-reliant and self-dependent.
And that's when you tend to become more conservative, when you realize those things.
Look, even these third world countries, they're shown on television.
You have all these celebrity singers who are trying to help out.
They want to do all this virtue signaling.
So they say, we're going to send a container load of shoes over there to Africa.
Just pick your country in Africa, wherever you think they want to be.
And Or some other celebrity is like, no, we're going to send a bunch of socks, you know, because people need socks.
And so one singer is sending a container load of shoes.
Another singer is sending socks.
Another one is maybe sending, I don't know, some kind of, like, water pails or something for carrying water.
The point is that all this stuff arrives on the shores of this African nation.
And then these celebrities pop out of their jet planes so they can be photographed, you know, handing out the stuff to all the poor people that they say they're helping.
Turns out that what actually happens because of market forces is that it collapses the local economy that used to make the shoes.
Or the socks or the buckets or the sewing machines or whatever is being provided for free is actually destroying the local production of that item.
Because if you're a shoemaker and you're in business making shoes for people and you're making a poverty living putting together shoes or fixing shoes or whatever you do as a shoemaker, And then Katy Perry shows up with a freaking container load of 150,000 shoes.
All of a sudden, you're out of business.
Why?
Because nobody needs to buy your shoes anymore.
Katy Perry just brought a boatload, literally a boatload of shoes, and gave them away to everybody for free.
And then Katy Perry leaves because she's got to go to a concert to make her millions.
Meanwhile, you, the shoemaker, you're screwed.
You don't have any customers anymore.
The local economy collapses.
It turns out that if you try to help people just by giving them stuff without creating a system for self-reliance and independence, all you do is you destroy local economies and you destroy lives.
But again, that idea is not necessarily obvious to a 21-year-old or a young college student.
It actually requires more in-depth thinking, or some people call it three-dimensional thinking, although I don't think that's an accurate term.
It requires more in-depth thinking, all up and down the supply chain, to really understand why you become more conservative as you become older and more intelligent and more informed.
But that said, I did say I'm going to point out some things that I agree with from progressives.
So number one, and actually what I just said is kind of a background of this, I always do appreciate the good intentions of people on the left.
They tend to be people who have good intentions.
I'm not talking about the corrupt politicians at the top.
Those are evil, insidious people, you know, like the Clintons.
But the everyday, run-of-the-mill leftists Just a guy or a gal on the street.
They're actually well-intentioned people.
They don't even think in terms of doing evil.
And that's why they tend to be anti-gun, by the way, because they just want a world without people shooting each other.
That's it.
That's all they really express in that.
They haven't thought about The far deeper issues of what happens when you disarm the population and then you have a corrupt government that has a monopoly on firepower and is engaged in a tyranny.
The point of the Second Amendment is to be like a nationwide immune system against government tyranny.
These thoughts don't occur to young progressives.
They're just basically, all they know is that guns go bang and And they don't want bangs to hurt people, and thus they don't want guns.
And that makes sense to them, and that's fine when your brain is kind of immature like that.
But again, I'm not blaming them.
They're just young and inexperienced, and they haven't had a chance to really mature and become more informed and more engaged in deeper thinking, let's say.
So they have these simple, simplistic even, thoughts.
Just like, oh, we don't like bang.
A bang is bad.
It's a band of guns.
That's it.
But at least they're coming from, for the most part, a place of attempted good intentions.
They're not trying to hurt people.
It's like this whole thing about the borders.
You know, a lot of young progressives, they come from a place of good intentions when they say they don't want borders.
They think there should be no borders and no nations.
They chant this, by the way.
They chant, no borders, no nations, no effing deportations.
This is one of their chants.
And I've marched with leftist groups as part of the anti-Monsanto marches, by the way.
So I've been part of these marches, just not on those topics.
I just marched against GMOs and pesticides.
That's what I marched against.
But I've seen the way these marches work.
I've been part of these marches.
I've spoken at that march, the Monsanto march.
Or what's called the March Against Monsanto, more specifically.
But these marches, they're chanting these things and they have like drummers, you know, and people wearing face paint and everything and everybody's all dressed up in their tattoos and their dreadlocks, at least in Austin.
And It was a very colorful affair, very loud, noisy, colorful type of event.
And, you know, there's kids and there's family members and there's, like, men and women and there's transgenders and there's gays and lesbians and everybody all just marching down the street.
You know, which is kind of energetic, in a sense.
And then the problem is they're chanting no borders, no nations, no effing deportations.
What they're saying is, and they don't understand this, they're saying that there should be no border control of any nation.
Which is a very dangerous idea.
Very dangerous idea.
Look, I lived in Ecuador, and even in Ecuador, these South American countries have very strict border controls.
You know why?
Because they don't want the narco-state Colombian drug lords to come in and take over their towns and cities, man.
It's serious stuff.
You go down to Peru and Bolivia and Colombia, you know, even Venezuela.
Strong border security, even all through Central America and up into Mexico as well.
You know, strong border security.
Why?
Because they don't want to be overrun by the narco state or a wave of poverty-stricken immigrants fleeing some insane dictator in a place like Venezuela.
Strong border security all over the place.
If you don't have a border, you don't really have a nation.
If you can't control who's coming in, you don't have a nation.
It's just sort of a Mad Max, Badlands scenario.
But again, today's youth, they're just not mature enough to understand that.
They don't get the geopolitics yet.
They haven't lived long enough to think through these issues.
Just like they haven't lived through a stock market crash.
They think that stocks are going to go up forever.
They literally believe this.
That's why all these millennials invested in that company called Snap.
It's the parent company of Snapchat.
And they love Snapchat.
So they all threw their money into Snap.
When it went public, there was this IPO that was issued.
And sure enough, it started going up and everybody was throwing all their money into all these young millennials.
We're all going to get, you know, making money on Snap.
Because they're just not mature enough to know that, yeah, we've done all this before.
It doesn't fly, people.
It's a scam.
Yeah, it's a scam.
You're going to get wiped out.
And sure enough, the stock price reversed and started plummeting below the opening price on all these young millennials.
About 25 years old, first job out of college, they're plowing all their money into this snap stock, and they can't figure out why they got burned.
They don't understand it.
So everything was good.
I was thinking positive.
I had my candles burning in my meditation room.
I'm not making fun of meditation, by the way.
Well, not intentionally.
Meditation is actually a very valuable therapy.
I'm just trying to make fun of the sort of archetype of this.
I had taken 12.5% of my paycheck and I'd put it into snap stocks and it was going to be my retirement.
And then they find out, oh my God, it was all BS. Well, that's the kind of thing that comes from experience.
It's a very costly education to find out that the stock market is rigged.
Haha, the joke's on you if you're a millennial and you got burned by Snap.
Yeah, the stock market's rigged.
I was warning people about that, let's see, 19 years ago in 1998, before the dot-com crash that wiped out the life savings of practically an entire generation.
But again, today's millennials are too young to know that.
They don't remember that.
They didn't live through that.
They were little toddlers, perhaps, when that happened.
They didn't know anything.
So it's not real to them until it happens to them.
All right, getting back to things that I admire about progressives, I also admire the fact that most progressives tend to be interested in protecting the environment and pursuing what we describe as a sustainable lifestyle.
Now, I have to qualify this.
They think they're pursuing a sustainable lifestyle.
They have a lot to learn.
But at least they're starting from the right place.
And I share that desire to protect the environment.
That's why I'm an environmental scientist.
That's why I run a laboratory, cwclabs.com.
And we do environmental science.
We test water for heavy metals.
We test soil samples for heavy metals.
We can test for 250-plus different pesticides and herbicide chemicals.
Using mass spec instrument analysis.
I already told you in a previous podcast about my liquid handling robot, liquid automation system that I'm scripting right now.
I'm doing a lot of programming for that because I have to make I have to make really seven sets of seven different concentrations of pesticide standards to use as external standards in the liquid chromatography auto-sampler for the LC mass spec combo system to, well, the whole point of that actually is to quantify the concentration of every single pesticide in the sample that is being tested.
So, you know, we look at We take a food sample.
We take a water sample.
We take even a nutritional supplement sample.
I can even take a hair sample.
And we use acetonitrile extraction technique.
Basically, this is like buffering agents and mag sulfate and acetonitrile.
We pull out the pesticides, and then we make these 49 different standards using the liquid handling robot, and we put them into the auto-sampler of the liquid chromatography system, throw in the right column.
And hit go.
In any case, I'm an environmental scientist.
And we are an accredited lab, too.
We're ISO accredited.
So we're globally recognized as a science laboratory.
And so I see the pesticides in things.
I see the herbicides.
I can tell you...
I can list the chemicals that are found in a water sample that you provide.
For example, we actually can look for thousands of different chemicals using our in-house chemical database.
So I agree with this idea that progressives have of, you know, protecting the environment.
But again, in so many ways, they're misguided.
They believe this entire global warming scam, for example, Which says that human activity alone is responsible for, well, rising temperatures on the planet.
Turns out the data are faked by the NOAA. That's the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.
They fake the data.
Yep, they fake the data.
And then there's this demonization of the CO2 molecule, carbon dioxide, which is, plants are dying for this molecule.
Plants need it so bad.
We need more CO2 to grow more food, to reforest desert areas all across the planet.
Higher CO2 would grow more plants more easily.
Greenhouse growers actually buy CO2 generators to put in the greenhouses to grow plants more efficiently because CO2 is like superpower magic molecule to plants.
They love it.
It's awesome for plants.
So we really don't have enough CO2 on this planet.
To have more efficient food production.
So CO2 is not evil, but a lot of today's youth have been told it is, and they believe it is, and they just don't know enough about science to really understand what they're talking about, which I guess is rather indicative of youth, right?
When you're 24, what do you know?
You don't know much of anything, but you think you know everything.
So that's what we're dealing with.
Nevertheless, they at least have the right idea to start with.
They don't want to see us destroy the planet.
They get it when we talk about things like bio sludge pollution.
They're against heavy metals pollution.
They're against industrial waste being spread on farms as fertilizer.
A lot of today's progressive youth, they're into organics, which is very good.
Again, a lot of them may not understand exactly why organics are so much better than They don't really understand the science behind food production, pesticides and so on.
For example, a lot of people don't even know that organic is managed by the USDA. And even further, a lot of people don't know, most people don't know, that the USDA organic certification does not require any testing for heavy metals whatsoever.
That crops can be heavily contaminated with, for example, mercury or arsenic in the case of rice.
And they can still be certified organic even though they contain deadly doses of arsenic.
That's a fact.
The USDA does not require testing.
In fact, USDA, you can grow food on heavily contaminated soils that are contaminated from the air, from factories or coal-fired power plants that are dropping mercury on farm fields.
And that's all certified organic, by the way, because certified organic only describes an agricultural process, not an agricultural result.
You understand the difference?
A lot of today's youth don't understand the difference.
They think that organic means clean.
It doesn't.
It just means that certain things were not done during the production of that product.
It does not in any way guarantee the end result or the composition of the final agricultural product.
You can have products that are certified organic.
They can still end up, even though this is usually not the case, they can still end up being contaminated with all kinds of different things.
This is why I don't trust organic from China.
But again, a lot of young progressives especially, again, they have the right idea.
They like to eat organic.
They like to support organic.
They don't really understand how organic works or what it means or what it doesn't cover, but at least they're coming from the right place.
So my message to any young progressives who might dare listen to something like this would be, you're on the right track.
Your heart's in the right place.
Don't be so confident in what you think you know, because the truth is you don't know nearly as much as you think you do.
You have a lot more to learn that will change your views on many, many, many things, from immigration and borders to finance, monetary systems, banking, central banking in particular, to politics, compassion, even, you know, Second Amendment rights, or issues like welfare, for example, or war, national defense, these kinds of issues.
Your position will change on those as you learn more.
You're coming from the right place right now, but you haven't lived long enough in the real world to know really how evil things are, how evil the rest of the world is.
This is especially true if you haven't really traveled outside of Western nations.
I know a lot of young progressives, they like to do like a foreign exchange thing where they go to Europe, man.
He's like speaking French, speaking German.
Which is fine, but that's just another Western nation.
That's not an adventure.
You want to have an adventure?
Like, do something like I did.
I moved to Taiwan.
Live in Asia.
Learn to speak Chinese like I do.
Or I lived in South America.
I had an Ecuadorian driver's license.
I spoke relatively fluent Espanol with mis amigos allá in Ecuador.
We had a great time.
And I was part of the culture there.
I had a lot of great friends there.
Same thing in Taiwan.
But the thing is, you want to have a real adventure, you've got to get outside of these Western nations.
You can't just go to France or Germany or the UK, for God's sake.
Does that even really count as a foreign exchange?
I don't know.
Or Canada?
It's like, ooh, you went to Canada.
Ooh, big adventure, man.
It's connected to the United States.
Did you know that?
They share a common border.
It's not really a foreign country.
It's just a polite version of America.
Yeah.
Or people, you know, they went to Mexico.
Yeah.
Big whoop.
Yeah, I live in Texas.
It's like half Mexico already.
Or Southern California.
Or, you know, Tucson, Arizona.
It's almost like being in Mexico anyway.
What's the difference?
No, you want to, you know, you're a young progressive.
You want to see the world.
You got to get outside of your little comfort bubble.
You know, go somewhere really interesting.
Go to Africa.
Go to the Middle East.
Go to Russia if you dare.
Maybe you can meet with the Russians and then work for the Clinton campaign next time or something.
I mean, I'm joking, but go to Indonesia for that matter.
Go to some Southeast Asian Muslim country or India.
Oh, there you go.
You want to have an adventure?
Ride on public transportation in India.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, make sure your camera's rolling because you're going to want to YouTube that stuff.
Yeah, there is an adventure for you.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, then go check it out.
Or go to Australia and discover for the first time in your life that Australia is freaking huge.
You know, the average American thinks Australia is this little tiny country, like maybe the size of Colorado.
They don't realize it's almost as big as the United States of America.
Not quite, but...
It is a continent.
You know that, right?
It's a whole continent.
It's not just a little dinky country.
It's a whole continent.
You do know, by the way, that the maps of the world...
That you see, that you study in school, were developed by British people, right?
And it just happens to make the United Kingdom the largest, most blown up part of the map, and it minimizes the size of Africa and everything else.
You know that, right?
Okay, maybe you didn't know that.
So, see, there's something else to learn.
Sí, podemos aprender muchas cosas, sí?
Juntos.
We can accomplish lots of things if we're willing to explore, visit the world, see what's going on.
you Ojalá que sí.
We can do it.
You know, I'm going to wrap this up and just a final message to a progressive.
Don't assume that people who are conservative have never seen the world or don't speak other languages or aren't well educated.
Don't believe the stereotypes.
There's a lot of stereotypes that conservatives are just like southern redneck Texans with pistols.
Wearing cowboy hats and riding horses in town.
That's the redneck archetype that is taught to you by basically your bigoted, narrow-minded, progressive universities that frankly have not seen the real world.
The truth is, a lot of people who are fiscally conservative, like myself, or pro-national security, or even pro-Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton, we have a lot more progressive experience than you might think.
My wife is a legal immigrant, for example.
From Taiwan, by the way.
Again, I speak Chinese as well as Espanol.
I mean, conversational.
I've lived in many different places around the world.
I'm 10% roughly Native American Indian myself.
And I've given lots of donations to different Native American tribes or veterans, veterans groups, disabled American veterans in particular, American Red Cross, done a lot of things that you would typically consider progressive.
And yet, I'm old enough and wise enough to know that there's more to how the world really works than the fantasies of a 19-year-old.
In truth, progressivism is a great idea, but in practice, it doesn't pan out the way that you intend it to.
And so the world is a lot more complex than you think.
It just takes time and experience to get to that point, to really be able to grasp it and perhaps participate in a more deeply constructive way.
Liberals suffer from the law of unintended consequences.
That's their biggest failing, is they want to do something positive, they end up supporting something or taking some action or passing some law, typically some government intervention, and it has an unintended side effect that is quite destructive.
It's not what they wanted, but that's the way things work when government tries to tell people what to do and how to run their lives.
So progressivism has the intention of being positive, but it often has the effect of being very destructive.
And that's why liberty is a far more important philosophy, and that's the philosophy that I espouse.
I'm basically, well, on some areas you would call me a libertarian, but on environmental issues I'm more progressive.
And on social issues I'm more progressive, like I'm not against gay marriage or gay rights or whatever.
LGBT is all fine with me as long as you're pro-liberty.
You see, I don't care who you love.
I just care that you love liberty as well.
That's important to me.
That's how I do judge people is whether they're pro-liberty or anti-liberty.
For example, I'm an enemy of communists, right?
I'm the opposition of socialists and communists.
I promote liberty and freedom and the republic.
So, not that there's ever been any question about that.
It's very clear.
So anyway, I hope this has been at least somewhat useful.
I always try to be open and honest with you about where I'm coming from and also offer ways that you might improve your perspective, and certainly I can as well.
I have a lot more to learn.
I'm still young, frankly, and so maybe in 20 years I'll do another recording that will make this one obsolete in some way that I can't even imagine now.
The important thing is that we be open to that possibility and understand that we don't know everything.
We know more than we used to know, but we still don't know everything.
There might be a lot more that we can learn about life and the world and how things work and cause and effect and so on.
At least I hope we learn more.
Otherwise, we're doomed, right?
All right.
Thank you for listening.
Take care.
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