Part Of The Problem - Dave Smith - The Great Scott Horton on Corona, Martial law and Everything Else
Aired: 2020-03-25
Duration: 01:58:18


=== Deadly Virus vs Conspiracy (08:42) ===

[00:00:02]  We need to roll back the state.
[00:00:04]  We spy on all of our own citizens.
[00:00:06]  Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
[00:00:09]  If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
[00:00:15]  Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
[00:00:27]  Hey, what's up, everybody?
[00:00:28]  Welcome back to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem, live from the apocalypse.
[00:00:34]  And I've wanted to have on my favorite person, the guest I've had on more than anybody else, the great Scott Horton, the man who I'm convinced might, in fact, be the vaccine for the coronavirus.
[00:00:46]  Scientists are testing his blood.
[00:00:48]  Not sure yet.
[00:00:49]  But how are you, Scott?
[00:00:50]  It's good to see you.
[00:00:51]  How's everything going?
[00:00:53]  I'm doing great, Dave.
[00:00:54]  How are you, man?
[00:00:55]  Very good.
[00:00:56]  No, so far, you know, family is all together and seem to be healthy for now.
[00:01:02]  So I hope your family is doing good.
[00:01:04]  I know you got a little girl just like me, a little bit older than mine, but you got a little girl and a wife as well.
[00:01:09]  So a little bit of a scary time, but getting to spend more time with the family, which is kind of nice.
[00:01:15]  Yeah, I got them locked up tight.
[00:01:16]  The only thing is, man, yesterday or day before yesterday, the microwave burst into flames for no reason.
[00:01:23]  The wife, she hit the timer on it.
[00:01:25]  She wasn't even, the microwave wasn't even on.
[00:01:28]  And it just burst into flames on the inside there.
[00:01:30]  But luckily, she was right there and put it out.
[00:01:32]  We could have all died.
[00:01:35]  That's good.
[00:01:36]  Yeah, you don't want to, in the middle of the corona pandemic, you don't want to get taken out by a microwave.
[00:01:41]  That just doesn't seem like the way to go.
[00:01:43]  Seriously.
[00:01:44]  General Electric, watching you.
[00:01:47]  War profiteers.
[00:01:49]  So yeah.
[00:01:49]  Lousy microwave makers.
[00:01:51]  That's right.
[00:01:52]  And they don't pay any income tax, which is the real outrage.
[00:01:56]  Yeah.
[00:01:58]  So I'm curious.
[00:01:59]  You know, I've been getting a little bit of shit from some libertarians and some people maybe who are a little bit more on the prone to the conspiracy end of things.
[00:02:10]  And not that we're not all prone to conspiracies in our own way, because every, you know, like we, a lot of the stuff that you talk about that I've interviewed you about, you know, dozens of times are like real deal conspiracies, you know, like, I don't know, Obama and Brennan planning to arm the enemies of America in order to help, you know, overthrow Bashar al-Assad.
[00:02:35]  That's pretty serious conspiracy, and that's completely real.
[00:02:38]  But anyway, a lot of people are like, oh, you're giving in to the media narrative and this whole virus is being blown out of proportion and this isn't real.
[00:02:45]  But I'm taking this thing very seriously and it's actually really freaking me out and scaring me.
[00:02:51]  So I'm wondering, where do you come down on this?
[00:02:53]  Like how scary?
[00:02:54]  Just the virus first.
[00:02:56]  What do you think about the virus?
[00:02:58]  Well, I guess I'm not too afraid of getting it myself, but I am worried for people that I know.
[00:03:04]  My wife has lupus and so, you know, oftentimes she has a flare.
[00:03:08]  They have to give her a big shot of steroids or this, you know, the, what you call it, the malaria drug even sometimes to crash her immune system, which makes her especially vulnerable.
[00:03:20]  And of course, you know, I got old parents and things like that.
[00:03:25]  You know, so my personal fear isn't really for me, but I absolutely am taking it seriously.
[00:03:31]  You know, and I understand why people aren't because, hey, it's TV that says you're supposed to, and TV are a bunch of damned liars.
[00:03:38]  That's all they ever do is lie about everything.
[00:03:40]  In fact, there's a brand new James Bovard piece out at the Daily Caller that just hit today where he's talking about the clampdown and all the restrictions and stuff.
[00:03:48]  And one of the things he talks about in there is how at first the government was advising everyone, don't wear masks because you don't know how to wear it right and it won't help you and all of these things.
[00:03:59]  Well, that's just not true, right?
[00:04:01]  Like any idiot can figure out how to wear a mask.
[00:04:03]  And yes, it will help you.
[00:04:05]  And every study that's ever been done says that they cut down on the rates of flu back when it was SARS or whatever.
[00:04:12]  Of course, masks are a good way to protect yourself.
[00:04:16]  And he links to this article in the New York Times where the lady says, even homemade masks, as in, you know, something you cut out of an old t-shirt, provide some protection.
[00:04:26]  And so when government was saying, no, don't wear masks, they make it clear that really, see, they're lying to you.
[00:04:33]  They're manipulating you because they're trying to manage the shortage by making more masks available for hospitals.
[00:04:41]  But instead, they just come across as dishonest.
[00:04:43]  And so people end up going, aha, see, they're trying to lie us out of the masks.
[00:04:47]  I'm going and getting as many as I can.
[00:04:49]  And they're going to get a year worth of masks when, for real, the hospitals do need them more than you do.
[00:04:55]  But that doesn't mean you don't need them.
[00:04:57]  And it's that kind of thing that makes people just say, look, you're the same people who pretended my president was a secret agent of the Kremlin for three years.
[00:05:05]  You're the same people who told me Gaddafi was going to murder every last man, woman, and child in Benghazi if we didn't start a war that, by the way, has killed at least 100,000 people since then.
[00:05:17]  You know, you're the same people who told me Saddam was making nuclear bombs to kill me and my mom and our jammies in the middle of the night if we didn't start a war.
[00:05:26]  And so, yeah, why would you believe Jake Tapper?
[00:05:29]  He's a damn liar.
[00:05:29]  In fact, there was one just yesterday or the day before yesterday where Alexandria Cortez was on Jake Tapper and says, Donald Trump said the virus was a hoax.
[00:05:39]  Well, that's just not true.
[00:05:40]  What he said was that the Democratic criticism of him that he wasn't doing enough about the very real virus was a hoax.
[00:05:48]  And that thing had been debunked by PolitiFact and whatever a hundred times.
[00:05:52]  Well, Tapper let her get away with it.
[00:05:54]  And then on Twitter, he tried to justify it by saying, well, but the Democrats really were right that he was playing it down.
[00:06:00]  So that wasn't a hoax.
[00:06:01]  But still, what she said he said was not true.
[00:06:05]  And so everybody just takes Tapper apart and go, look, man, you're a liar.
[00:06:10]  You're an admitted liar.
[00:06:12]  And then you get up here and try to justify the fact that you're a liar.
[00:06:15]  Get the hell out of here, man.
[00:06:17]  Why would anyone believe what they say on CNN?
[00:06:20]  You're absolutely right.
[00:06:22]  They're interviewing real guests, real epidemiologists who are saying this virus can kill your mama.
[00:06:27]  And so it doesn't matter that it's stupid Jake Tapper, the liar who's bringing this stuff to you.
[00:06:32]  Some of this is important and good.
[00:06:34]  And people need to figure out how to separate the wheat from the chaff.
[00:06:37]  I think I told you before, all I'm reading about this is the Wall Street Journal.
[00:06:41]  I'm not watching TV and I'm not reading the post in the Times.
[00:06:44]  I'm reading the journal because their audience matters unlike us plebeians.
[00:06:48]  These are the corporate chieftains of America, the property owners of America, the 1% of the 1%, and they need to know the truth.
[00:06:55]  Never mind the editorial page.
[00:06:56]  Those are the worst people in the world other than the Washington Post editorial page.
[00:07:00]  But the hard news section of the Wall Street Journal has been doing a great job on the hard science of this thing from the very beginning.
[00:07:08]  And, you know, these things happen.
[00:07:10]  I mean, the fact is, you know, viruses, they're mean little strands of messenger RNA and they go around murdering people.
[00:07:17]  That's what they do.
[00:07:18]  And sometimes we get lucky.
[00:07:21]  Sometimes a virus is so terribly dangerous and deadly that it kills the host before it can spread too badly.
[00:07:29]  So that's why with Ebola, for example, it's relatively easy to contain.
[00:07:33]  Boy, if you get it, that's a hell of a way to die.
[00:07:36]  But when there is an outbreak, they usually can contain it because it hits people so hard, they're sick in bed before they have a chance to infect anybody else.
[00:07:44]  A cold, on the other hand, has evolved in humans over millennia to never kill you, virtually never kill you, but to make you sick enough to cough and blow your nose all the time so that you'll help infect other people and help propagate the disease.
[00:07:59]  And so not that it has a personality and made this decision, but we're personifying evolution here for conversation's sake.
[00:08:06]  But so that's how it works.
[00:08:07]  So that's why a cold is an effective virus and Ebola is not a very effective one.
[00:08:12]  Well, this one is kind of somewhere in the middle, right?
[00:08:14]  It's not nearly as deadly as Ebola, but it's much more deadly than a cold or the flu, or quite a bit.
[00:08:21]  I'm not the master of the statistics, but it's quite a bit deadlier and more dangerous.
[00:08:25]  But also it's very easy to spread, just like the cold and the flu.
[00:08:28]  And the part where the devil came in here and edited the code was the part that makes it where you can spread this thing for up to a week, three to five days, something like that, before you even have the first symptoms.
[00:08:40]  And so that is, you know, I never paid attention to bird flu and SARS and all these other ones.

=== Wolfowitz Quote Exposed (06:56) ===

[00:08:45]  But as soon as I read that, that people are going around and spreading this thing without knowing they have it.
[00:08:49]  People are slipping right through fever checkpoints because they don't have a fever yet.
[00:08:53]  That was all I needed to know back in January to know that this thing is coming here.
[00:08:58]  There's no stopping it.
[00:08:59]  There's no containing it.
[00:09:01]  And we're going to have to play it out the hard way.
[00:09:03]  That's just how it's going to have to happen.
[00:09:05]  So.
[00:09:06]  Yeah, there's, you know, it's funny to see that thing with Jake Tapper and AOC.
[00:09:11]  And I saw some of like the Twitter responses back and forth to it.
[00:09:14]  And it really is like, you know, there's something, first off, that I just kind of love.
[00:09:18]  I love when Jake Tapper is exposed as a liar or like Chuck Todd is exposed as a liar.
[00:09:22]  The ones who are supposed to be the kind of serious down the middle, like, I mean, this isn't, this is an opinion guy.
[00:09:28]  This is Mr. Journalist.
[00:09:29]  Like, I thought the, what's his name?
[00:09:32]  The Brian Williams, when he got exposed as a liar was just like the greatest thing ever.
[00:09:36]  Cause, oh, yeah, here's the guy who all the rest of the media respect as the noble, you know, true journalist.
[00:09:41]  And then he's just a freaking liar too.
[00:09:43]  But it does go to show you, I mean, you know, you listed off a lot of their, their lies.
[00:09:47]  I mean, listen, these are the people who will tell you that Joe Biden's in good health.
[00:09:51]  So that might just be the worst lie out of all of them.
[00:09:54]  That might be even worse than WMD's, the gall.
[00:09:56]  And it's happening in real time, right?
[00:09:57]  It's happening at the same time here.
[00:09:59]  They're saying, don't ask any questions about Joe Biden.
[00:10:02]  Even though, you know, if you go to Glenn Greenwald's Twitter feed today, you will see he has a collection from last fall when all these other Democrats were still in the race and all these other Democrats and TV personalities were very worried that Joe Biden is just not up to this, man.
[00:10:17]  He's slipping.
[00:10:17]  He's skipping a step.
[00:10:18]  He's can't finish the sentence properly.
[00:10:21]  He's having a terrible problem.
[00:10:22]  And now they're all lying and they're going, dude, who are you going to believe me?
[00:10:26]  Or who are you going to believe?
[00:10:27]  Me or your own lion eyes that tell you that you can just click play on this and watch me saying I'm concerned about Biden's mental health or mental capabilities just a few months back.
[00:10:38]  And now these people are essentially covering it up and say there's nothing wrong with Biden at all.
[00:10:44]  He's just, he's just got to stutter.
[00:10:46]  How dare you pick on him for stuttering?
[00:10:48]  And then these are the same people who are telling you about the virus.
[00:10:51]  So somebody like you or me, Dave, who swims in media all day long and parsing nuance and shades of gray and all these things, we've got a leg up.
[00:10:59]  But for the average Joe out there, these people are just damn liars.
[00:11:03]  Why would you believe a thing they say about a thing?
[00:11:06]  And that's a fair question.
[00:11:07]  And this has actually exposed one of the things, you know, it's like, I think people like me, like I've seen, I've seen some people in the media and I, you know, know a few of them who have been very concerned about the lack of trust in media.
[00:11:23]  And they'll be like, this is a real problem for the country that everyone looks at at the corporate press and thinks you're all a bunch of liars.
[00:11:29]  And I've always been on the other side of it.
[00:11:30]  Like, I think this is the greatest thing that's ever happened to the country.
[00:11:33]  Like, I think the best thing about the Donald Trump presidency is that he constantly calls them the enemy of the people and the liars because they are.
[00:11:39]  Like objectively, they are the enemy of the people of the United States of America.
[00:11:43]  But this might actually be an example where I'll give a little bit of a point to some of those people when you actually have a real like health crisis.
[00:11:53]  And yeah, you actually could use like a media that can be trusted, that people can look to and get objective information.
[00:12:01]  And even if some of them are trying to give out objective information now, like you said, when they're interviewing scientists and stuff like that, they fall into this like the boy who cried wolf syndrome where people just don't, people have tuned you out and don't believe you and they're right to do it.
[00:12:15]  And so it's, you know, there's something dangerous about all of that.
[00:12:19]  The Joe Biden thing particularly, right?
[00:12:21]  I was, I listened, I can't remember the name.
[00:12:23]  It was like some, you know, like, quote, left-wing publication, but really like a neoliberal one of them.
[00:12:30]  It wasn't HuffPost, but it was like one of those type of, and they were going off on their Twitter saying this thing about how it's really everyone's making a big deal out of the fact that Joe Biden hadn't been heard from for five days.
[00:12:41]  But it's no, campaigns often regroup and reset.
[00:12:45]  And you're like, dude, are you kidding?
[00:12:48]  The worst pandemic of our lifetime, the economy is being shut down.
[00:12:54]  Something we've never seen before.
[00:12:56]  Trillions of dollars injected into the system.
[00:12:58]  A huge stimulus package being debated right now.
[00:13:02]  And the presumptive nominee just goes dark for five days.
[00:13:08]  And you're going to see normal.
[00:13:11]  Yeah.
[00:13:11]  And Sanders is hosting a thing out of his living room every night.
[00:13:14]  And Biden's excuse is like, well, we're trying to get a whole new TV studio set up in the rumpus room and all this.
[00:13:21]  Man, all you need is an iPhone.
[00:13:22]  It records in 4K.
[00:13:24]  Yeah, right.
[00:13:25]  That's all you got to do.
[00:13:26]  It doesn't have to be live.
[00:13:27]  I mean, if you really have, I don't know where he lives, maybe he really has broadband problems out at his house in the country or something.
[00:13:34]  But still, all you got to do is just hold up a phone and record it and upload it slowly then, you know, over the 4G.
[00:13:40]  What are we talking about here?
[00:13:41]  He's gone for six days.
[00:13:43]  And then when he shows up on the sixth day, he completely breaks down.
[00:13:46]  When the teleprompter stops, he goes, oh, come on, teleprompter, teleprompter.
[00:13:51]  And then when it doesn't work, he doesn't know what to do at all.
[00:13:55]  And he goes, well, let's just skip to the second subject then.
[00:13:58]  Trump should invoke the Defense Preparedness Act more than he already has or some kind of thing.
[00:14:04]  Just total fail.
[00:14:05]  You know what I mean?
[00:14:06]  Don't you remember?
[00:14:08]  You, of all the people I know, you would probably be the one who would remember this, but it was in, I believe it was one of Pat Buchanan's books.
[00:14:15]  I think it was in where the right went wrong or something like that.
[00:14:19]  This is like a decade ago I read this.
[00:14:20]  So I'm just, this is just coming to my memory now.
[00:14:23]  But he had some quote in there from Wolfowitz.
[00:14:26]  And I don't know how he got this quote, but it was a quote about Wolfowitz being excited by how dumb George W. Bush was.
[00:14:34]  And he was like excited by that.
[00:14:35]  And he was like, this is the perfect guy to get in there because he doesn't know shit.
[00:14:40]  And Paul Wolfowitz basically said, he said, it's not only that he doesn't, he doesn't know anything.
[00:14:47]  He asks questions that expose how unbelievably little he knows.
[00:14:53]  And he's not embarrassed by asking the question.
[00:14:56]  Like very, very basic things.
[00:14:59]  And he said that Wolfowitz said this not as a criticism, but like with excitement, where he was like, so basically we can lead this guy in whatever direction.
[00:15:08]  Like if we get George W. Bush in there, it's open season.
[00:15:11]  This isn't even like having George H.W. Bush in there who might have an idea or two of his own.
[00:15:16]  This is open season if we get him in.
[00:15:18]  And which of course it was.
[00:15:20]  And I wonder if there's almost something about this Joe Biden, you know, senility that some people around him probably really like, where they're like, this guy is going to be completely, you know, just malleable.
[00:15:33]  Well, first of all, I need that quote, Dave.
[00:15:35]  You find me that thing.
[00:15:36]  Okay, I'll find it for you.
[00:15:37]  I promise it's in a Pat Buchanan book.
[00:15:39]  I'm not sure which one.

=== Deng Xiaoping Capitalism Shift (03:29) ===

[00:15:41]  Yeah, no, that's great.
[00:15:42]  And listen, I mean, my thing with Biden is they may be thinking that, but I just don't think that there's a chance he's going to make it to November.
[00:15:48]  There's just no way in the world.
[00:15:50]  I mean, for people who are keeping track of the thing, where he's called Angela Merkel Margaret Thatcher twice and Teresa May, Margaret Thatcher once, when didn't Margaret Thatcher die in like 97 or something like that?
[00:16:02]  I think so.
[00:16:03]  He said that he negotiated the Paris Climate Accord with Deng Xiaoping, who has been out of power for like 25 years and has been dead for at least 10, if not 15, something like that.
[00:16:18]  And then in the argument with Bernie Sanders, I love this part.
[00:16:21]  I don't think anybody probably cared about this, but I just thought it was funny.
[00:16:25]  When they're calling out Sanders for praising Castro's literacy program or whatever, he goes, well, look, I'm a Democrat.
[00:16:32]  I've always believed in democracy.
[00:16:34]  I'm not for totalitarianism or authoritarianism in any way.
[00:16:37]  Of course not.
[00:16:38]  But seriously, are you going to deny that China, which is an authoritarian dictatorship, that they've made great strides in progress in 40 years?
[00:16:47]  Which, of course, this is funny because that was after Deng Xiaoping was released from the concentration camp and kicked the communists out of power and turned China into a fascist sort of pseudo-capitalist country.
[00:17:00]  That's when all the strides were made.
[00:17:02]  When the communists were in power was when 40 million people starved to death, right, in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution and under the rule of the Gang of Four.
[00:17:10]  So here the commie on the stage is going, yeah, man, you know, they've done great since they embraced capitalism.
[00:17:17]  And then Biden, who claims that he just negotiated with Deng Xiaoping, the hero of China, says that's not true.
[00:17:25]  Any progress they've made in the past 40 years is completely marginal.
[00:17:30]  Really?
[00:17:31]  I mean, they took Shanghai and they took it from a town the size of your backyard and they turned it into a megalopolis like Dallas times Houston in 10 years, in 15 years, you know, beginning in like the 90s, really.
[00:17:47]  It took a while to really get it going.
[00:17:48]  But once they embraced capitalism, the standard of living for the average schmuck in China has improved by 100 billion percent.
[00:17:57]  It's just immeasurable.
[00:17:59]  It's, as Lou Rockwell said, from death camp to civilization.
[00:18:05]  Besides, the only thing you could compare it to is the Industrial Revolution in terms of a mass pulling of people out of poverty.
[00:18:12]  Those are the only two moments in human history where that large of a group of people, you're talking about hundreds of millions of people being pulled out of extreme poverty.
[00:18:23]  But you can't say that's a good thing.
[00:18:24]  Now, the funny thing is, the capitalists.
[00:18:26]  And in fact, wait a minute.
[00:18:26]  It's not just that because it was an industrial revolution, but imagine an industrial revolution starting in 1990 something where so much technology and improvement and productive capacity and engineering and everything's already been done.
[00:18:41]  Right.
[00:18:41]  So they're not just.
[00:18:42]  Yeah, they're not starting from scratch.
[00:18:44]  They're starting from the 1990s and then up from there.
[00:18:46]  So yes, of course, they put up skyscrapers to rival New York City.
[00:18:51]  You know, my dad used to do business in China.
[00:18:54]  He said, flying into Shanghai in 1990 and then flying into Shanghai in the year 2000, you just wouldn't believe it.
[00:19:01]  Okay.
[00:19:01]  It's like taking a small country town and turning it into Dallas in 10 years.
[00:19:06]  And then Biden's like, no.
[00:19:08]  And Biden is the right-wing Democrat capitalist.

=== Liberal Media Nomination Split (02:40) ===

[00:19:10]  And he's like, no-uh, they were better off during communism.
[00:19:13]  And it's so stupid because it's not even the point to hit the point isn't that you can't compliment any country that's a bad country on one or two things that they've done right.
[00:19:25]  The point to hit, and by the way, I was on my podcast, I was being very, when it looked like Sanders was going to win the nomination, I had a very kind of gloves off approach on criticizing Bernie Sanders because I just hate, I always hate the establishment more than I hate any insurrection candidate.
[00:19:42]  And I, you know, I like, I just think the Democratic establishment deserves to all be, you know, destroyed.
[00:19:48]  So I was kind of, and there, and truthfully speaking, there's at least like three or four positive things about Bernie Sanders, and there's like nothing positive about Joe Biden.
[00:19:56]  So I liked, you know, and I kind of was rooting for that.
[00:19:59]  And then I was like, look, if he does win the nomination, obviously I'm going to be critical of a lot of things that Bernie Sanders has to say, but I couldn't let the Castro thing go because that actually, that just, it drives me crazy that anyone could praise Castro's literacy program, which was designed. very clearly as a government propaganda tool.
[00:20:19]  I mean, this was all, this was the reason for the literacy program was so that these people could realize they had to be loyal to this evil communist government.
[00:20:29]  And Cubans could already read before under Batista and before the revolution anyway.
[00:20:34]  It's not like they were all illiterate peasants.
[00:20:36]  That's crazy.
[00:20:37]  And it's so, but anyway, but so that's what you hit Bernie Sanders with if you're Joe Biden.
[00:20:42]  It's such an easy thing to hit.
[00:20:44]  This wasn't a literacy program.
[00:20:45]  You're talking about, you're praising government education where you're not allowed to read books that criticize the government.
[00:20:52]  Hey, that's not education.
[00:20:54]  By its very nature, that is not, that's indoctrination, not education.
[00:20:58]  So it was so easy.
[00:20:59]  But then he, but he's, he is incapable of like figuring this battle out.
[00:21:04]  And, and, you know, there is, I, look, I was saying all along there's no way the guy's going to get the nomination.
[00:21:10]  And I had to eat crow a little bit because I was like, well, okay, I did not see Super Tuesday coming the way it did.
[00:21:15]  I was surprised.
[00:21:17]  The establishment, you know, I learned a couple of lessons through that whole thing, which is that the Democrats are the Democratic establishment, I think, is stronger than the Republican establishment, at least what they were in 2016.
[00:21:30]  They had a better control of their voting blocks than the Republicans did.
[00:21:34]  And I also think that the media had more of an effect on the Democratic voters.
[00:21:39]  I think that even though a lot of the Democratic voters are pretty unhappy with the corporate press, they're not at, they don't hate them as much as the Republicans did, who have always hated the liberal media.

=== Ridge Wallet Sponsor Plug (02:48) ===

[00:21:51]  Like even your Republican grandfather hates the liberal media or whatever they always called it, right?
[00:21:56]  The liberal media.
[00:21:57]  Now it's like the fake news media.
[00:21:58]  But, you know, but so they were able to get Joe Biden back in there.
[00:22:02]  But I do, I don't know.
[00:22:04]  I'm almost a little split on it, but it does seem to me to be like, how the hell is this guy who's already fallen apart so much since the beginning of this election?
[00:22:12]  How the hell is he going to make it through a general and through three debates or four debates with Donald Trump?
[00:22:17]  No, I don't think, look, I don't think he's going to make it through to August, man.
[00:22:20]  He's not going to make it to the convention.
[00:22:22]  They're going to have to pull some stunt, try to give it to Bloomberg or some kind of thing.
[00:22:26]  It's not going to be Bloomberg, dude.
[00:22:28]  There's no way.
[00:22:28]  There'll be a revolt if it was Bloomberg.
[00:22:31]  The base hates.
[00:22:32]  They tested the waters with Bloomberg and it was just...
[00:22:34]  You know what they'd rather lose, though, Dave?
[00:22:36]  I mean, look, their choice is either put Sanders in there and all the Democrat establishment players lose their job or keep Trump in there and they keep their jobs.
[00:22:47]  Let's take a quick second and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Ridge.com.
[00:22:53]  They, of course, are the makers of the Ridge wallet, which is my wallet that I absolutely love.
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[00:24:25]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:24:27]  So, for all these people who say that Donald Trump is a pro-Russian traitor and the most dangerous force, and he's going to get us all nuked and all of these things, at the end of the day, they care more about their job.

=== Banks Socialism and Bailouts (13:32) ===

[00:24:40]  They don't really believe any of the things that they say about him, not enough to cause them to make a sacrifice.
[00:24:47]  Like, hey, maybe we should support the winger in this race.
[00:24:52]  And after all, he does get that when people are allowed outside.
[00:24:55]  He has thousands of people come to his rallies.
[00:24:57]  There's all this excitement.
[00:24:59]  There's a problem with young people not voting and only old people vote and that kind of deal mostly.
[00:25:03]  But still, look at what are their options, right?
[00:25:08]  You know, they have Bloomberg, they have Hillary, who didn't even bother running, Bloomberg, who got completely stomped.
[00:25:13]  They got Elizabeth Warren, who's a total joke and whose candidacy went nowhere.
[00:25:17]  You know, a friend of mine asked me, Well, so what would you do then?
[00:25:20]  I mean, if you're advising the Democrats, what would you do?
[00:25:22]  I said, Well, I would just find the most handsome Democratic governor and run him, whoever that is.
[00:25:28]  You know, somebody who is tall and capable looking and doesn't sound like a complete clown.
[00:25:35]  And so it's funny because my friend hates Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, but he says, Well, he fits the bill at least.
[00:25:42]  Now, I would think that would be the guy to run if you're the Democratic Party establishment and you refuse to accept Sanders and all the excitement around him.
[00:25:50]  But Gavin Newsome didn't run in the primaries either.
[00:25:52]  They're just going to rig this thing at the election.
[00:25:55]  But the Democratic Party establishment, their point of view is no Sanders, no matter what.
[00:25:59]  They would rather run Joe Biden's corpse against Trump and lose.
[00:26:03]  But I don't think they're going to settle for that.
[00:26:05]  They're going to try to come up with something else.
[00:26:06]  And let me ask you how this nility advances.
[00:26:10]  But there is no way that Biden is up for this.
[00:26:12]  He's just not up for it.
[00:26:13]  Oh, no, I agree with you on that.
[00:26:15]  And then, let alone how he could actually be president with what a demanding job that is.
[00:26:19]  But let me ask you why.
[00:26:20]  I have my own theories on this, but I'm curious what you think.
[00:26:23]  What is it do you think that makes Bernie Sanders so not an option for that?
[00:26:31]  I'll tell you, it's easy.
[00:26:32]  Remember in the WikiLeaks, thank you, Chelsea Manning, finally out of jail after trying to kill himself.
[00:26:38]  Chelsea Manning liberated the WikiLeaks, the State Department cables, the Iraq and Afghan war logs.
[00:26:43]  And in the State Department cables, somewhere in there was a copy of an email that the Obama government got, the transition team, after he was elected, but before he was sworn in, the end of 2008.
[00:26:58]  It was an email from a citigroup vice president based out of Chicago.
[00:27:04]  And it went like this: All right, here's your marching orders.
[00:27:08]  Your new cabinet, you're going to keep Gates at defense.
[00:27:11]  You're going to put Hillary at state.
[00:27:13]  You're going to put my guy Goldman Sachs at Treasury and down the list.
[00:27:18]  And that was Obama's cabinet.
[00:27:20]  We know for a scientific fact that is where Obama's cabinet came from.
[00:27:25]  Why did he keep George W. Bush's Secretary of Defense?
[00:27:28]  Because an executive vice president at Citigroup said so.
[00:27:32]  That's why.
[00:27:34]  And Biden, I mean, Sanders is just not likely to play that game.
[00:27:38]  He just won't play that game.
[00:27:39]  He's been an independent and he caucuses with the Democrats, but he's not even truly a member of the Democratic Party.
[00:27:47]  And he is not willing to play that game with Wall Street.
[00:27:50]  He means what he says about taxing their ass.
[00:27:53]  And they're just not going to have that.
[00:27:55]  I think that's goodness in a way, but still, you know.
[00:28:00]  You're right.
[00:28:00]  Me and you were talking about this on the phone recently and on an unrelated topic, but it's an interesting thing that I think a lot of times libertarians get wrong.
[00:28:08]  And it's not just semantics, but where they'll say kind of like, oh, well, you know, we live under the largest, most powerful government that's ever existed.
[00:28:17]  And that's socialism.
[00:28:18]  Like big government is socialism.
[00:28:20]  And, you know, there's different types of socialism.
[00:28:22]  And this is, you know, that, that.
[00:28:24]  And really, if you just want to be more, you know, accurate and describe what we have, what we live under is a crony corporatist fascist state.
[00:28:34]  Now, it's not fascism, you know, is almost historically now when you when you use the term fascist, like if somebody calls someone a fascist as an insult, basically it all comes down to Hitler's genocide.
[00:28:45]  That's like what's remembered in everybody's mind is, you know, you're talking about fascist, you mean killing six million Jews?
[00:28:50]  Like that's what it means to most people.
[00:28:52]  But this is, but I'm just speaking more in a kind of like Mussolini, you know, fascist state, like what he described as the merger of state power with corporate profits and that merging.
[00:29:02]  And that's what it is.
[00:29:03]  And Bernie Sanders, look, he obviously is a complete ignoramus, I mean, like on economics and he runs on economics.
[00:29:11]  Like that he's running on what he's in, like he's just an absolute joke on this stuff.
[00:29:16]  But he does, and you could see it with Bloomberg when he was in those debates.
[00:29:20]  He hates rich people and he hates banks and he hates pharmaceutical companies.
[00:29:29]  Bernie Sanders, his first question of what do you think about this global pandemic?
[00:29:35]  He just started talking about how much he hates pharmaceutical companies.
[00:29:37]  Now, I'm no fan of the pharmaceutical companies, but they have nothing.
[00:29:40]  They are nothing but maybe the would-be saviors of this situation.
[00:29:44]  There's nothing to blame pharmaceutical companies for here, but he just has such a passionate hate for them.
[00:29:50]  And I think that, you know, a lot of times people like Hillary Clinton or someone like that will speak in a kind of socialistic language.
[00:30:00]  You know, we need a higher minimum wage and we need health care for everybody and we need these things.
[00:30:04]  But it's just like the same stuff when she speaks the woke PC crap.
[00:30:08]  This is just to win votes.
[00:30:10]  They don't believe in any of this crap.
[00:30:11]  And that's why Hillary's going back to the bankers and saying, hey, don't worry, I have one public persona and one private persona.
[00:30:18]  So I'm out there.
[00:30:18]  This is just to, you know, get populist fervor going.
[00:30:21]  I'm never going to do anything to you.
[00:30:22]  But Bernie Sanders, I think they look at him and they go, no, no, no, no.
[00:30:25]  He's not playing this game where he just speaks a socialist language and really is going to govern as a corporatist.
[00:30:31]  He really hates the banks.
[00:30:33]  So yeah, I don't think Citigroup is going to send Bernie Sanders his marching orders.
[00:30:38]  I just don't think so.
[00:30:39]  Yeah, they try it and you throw them right in the trash.
[00:30:42]  And yet, no, you're totally right.
[00:30:43]  And of course, the right wing makes it that much worse because Sean Hannity all day calls Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton and Nancy Pelosi the far left when he doesn't have any idea how much the left hates the liberals.
[00:30:56]  The liberals being, I mean, hell, even the liberals are considered the far left from the right, but the liberals can, to the left, the liberals are the center.
[00:31:05]  The liberals are the right-wing Democrats, the corporatist capitalists, which is part of what's horrible about them and part of their saving grace.
[00:31:13]  But listen, you're completely right.
[00:31:15]  And the term socialism is just used and abused way too much.
[00:31:19]  But I think the proper perspective on this is you can find it in Murray Rothbard from 1965.
[00:31:24]  It's his great essay, Left and Right, the Prospects for Liberty.
[00:31:29]  And in there, he describes, he explains so well, Gabriel Kolko, the Marxist historian, wrote a great book about this.
[00:31:36]  It's called The Triumph of Conservatism, a reinterpretation of the progressive era, 1900 through 1913, something like that.
[00:31:44]  And the idea is that progressivism is a right-wing plot.
[00:31:49]  That, you know, essentially the J.P. Morgan faction at that time decided that there was a real threat from the labor unions and the Marxist agitators and revolutionaries, and that what they needed to do, rather than just opposing them from the right, was to buy them off, to attack the left from the left, to figure out how to get them to be nothing worse than controlled opposition.
[00:32:13]  And from the point of view of the J.P. Morgan Board of Directors, you guys want to control the economy?
[00:32:18]  Okay, we can live with that, right?
[00:32:21]  This wasn't a contest between laissez-faire and command.
[00:32:25]  This was a contest about which kind of command.
[00:32:27]  The last thing in the world that the corporate elite want is a free market.
[00:32:31]  That's the kind of thing that can destroy their power.
[00:32:34]  What they want is what you described, state capitalism, right?
[00:32:38]  And frankly, like this goes back to Alexander Hamilton and the creation of this constitution in the first place, to permanently, in his words, in the Federalist Papers, to permanently intertwine the interests of the rich with the interests of the state so that they will continue to perpetuate each other throughout time.
[00:32:56]  And to keep, as Madison said, to keep the interests of factions in check.
[00:33:01]  We'll have one strong federal militia.
[00:33:04]  So if there's an uprising in any one state, we'll be able to crush it.
[00:33:08]  And so this is kind of the whole thing.
[00:33:11]  So what they did in, you know, 100 years ago was they bought off the left.
[00:33:15]  They brought in the labor union leaders and made compromise, enough compromises with them to get them to shut up and get them to not rob the corporate elite.
[00:33:25]  So now look at what's going on this week.
[00:33:26]  I just interviewed David Stockman.
[00:33:28]  That guy's completely besides himself.
[00:33:30]  You know, this is as free market as you can get of an economist here.
[00:33:33]  And he is just freaking because in the last 10 days, the Federal Reserve has literally created a trillion dollars to buy up bad debt.
[00:33:46]  A trillion dollars, $100 billion a day.
[00:33:50]  They are essentially printing, right, or creating in a computer and inflating in order to buy up bad debt.
[00:33:57]  It's the hugest bailout.
[00:33:58]  It makes 2008 and 2009 look like nothing, the amount of crony capitalism that's going on here.
[00:34:05]  And it is, you can call it socialism, but only if you're being smart and using the term ironically, right?
[00:34:11]  Yeah, it's corporate socialism.
[00:34:13]  They get to privatize all their profits and socialize all their costs onto us.
[00:34:19]  And it's, you know, it's just a heist.
[00:34:21]  That's all it is.
[00:34:21]  They're holding a gun to your head and they're robbing you.
[00:34:23]  It's crime.
[00:34:24]  That's not the market.
[00:34:26]  That's the government under the control of big business and working together against us.
[00:34:33]  And that's to me like one of the, you know, a lot of people have been saying, I was talking about this on my last podcast, but a lot of people have been saying, you know, like how a pandemic like this disproves libertarian ideology because, you know, what you need is a government to clamp down and, you know, this, that.
[00:34:51]  And like, look, I can understand on a few different points how somebody on the surface would look at things that way.
[00:34:58]  But the counter, at least in my mind, to that is like, well, here's the problem of having a government and relying on them is that look what they did.
[00:35:08]  I mean, look at the criminality of this, where not only do you have the first thing they do is they go, okay, well, there's a real big emergency here.
[00:35:17]  We better rob the American people to give a massive handout to the big banks, the people who need it the least.
[00:35:26]  Let's rob Joe Sixpack, who's scared to death right now.
[00:35:31]  Let's rob him and bail out these banks.
[00:35:33]  And then you saw this, which I just, I love this story because it just exposes so much of, you know, so much of the kind of statist philosophy or the statist ideology or whatever.
[00:35:43]  It relies on the idea that there are this class of people that are called public servants and that they are like, it's a, you know, a rejection or even before it was ever really figured out, but a rejection of the public choice theory where it's like, well, no, these are people who weigh out decisions in the public interest.
[00:36:02]  Like that's what they do.
[00:36:03]  And even though public choice theory has been introduced a long time ago, they all act as if it doesn't exist.
[00:36:08]  I mean, it's all like, well, no, these people, when they make a decision, they're thinking about what's best for people and what's best for the country and all of this stuff.
[00:36:16]  And look at those, what was it, five different senators who got briefed on the coronavirus, sold off, sold off all their stock.
[00:36:25]  Now, I said this on the other- House members too.
[00:36:28]  There's a news story in Politico yesterday where they busted five or six more of them.
[00:36:32]  And these are the people who they claim, you know, like Senator Dianne Feinstein, supposed to be this hero who went through this gun violence thing and then really cared about cleaning it up.
[00:36:42]  Oh, why is she selling all her hotel and airline stocks and telling the American people everything's going to be okay?
[00:36:48]  I'm not really, I don't believe insider trading should be a crime or anything, but man, if you for congressmen on classified briefings, while they're lying to us, hang them.
[00:36:59]  I mean, public hangings after a trial, after a trial, if anybody's listening.
[00:37:05]  And we'll get fierce to play the show.
[00:37:06]  Hot dogs and beer for everybody.
[00:37:08]  It'll be great.
[00:37:09]  But it may be, you know, this is not the best time for hot dogs.
[00:37:13]  Maybe like canned goods or something.
[00:37:15]  I don't know.
[00:37:15]  We'll all wear gloves.
[00:37:16]  Well, we could, we could Skype it or whatever.
[00:37:18]  We don't have to go there live if we're all social distancing.
[00:37:21]  But I want to be safe about this.
[00:37:23]  I don't want any good people to be hurt.
[00:37:25]  But yeah.
[00:37:26]  So anyway, it's just like, yeah, so this is your government.
[00:37:29]  You might say that you need the government, but what are you telling me?
[00:37:31]  You need this group of people to fucking rob you, to sell you out every way imaginable.
[00:37:36]  I mean, that same week when the CIA was giving these classified briefings to the Senate, they were telling us that we had to impeach the president for holding up an arms deal with Ukraine on behalf of his secret master, Vladimir Putin.
[00:37:51]  And that, oh, by the way, the Russians are trying to help Bernie Sanders win and all of these things.
[00:37:57]  They wasted all of February on Russia Gate 2, on the fake impeachment and Russia Gate 2 when they could have been getting the American people prepared that this was coming.
[00:38:08]  And instead, they care, again, only about themselves at our expense, just as you said.

=== Human Lives Over Economy (07:01) ===

[00:38:13]  Oh, by the way, back to David Stockman for a minute here in the bailouts, because it's not just the banks.
[00:38:17]  It's all the airlines, all the biggest corporations, Boeing and all of the guys that make the planes and everything else.
[00:38:23]  Boeing, they ran themselves into the ground with the 737 MAX.
[00:38:28]  Remember that?
[00:38:29]  Planes falling out of the sky.
[00:38:31]  That was what their problem was.
[00:38:32]  And then you go back and look, and there's been research done on this.
[00:38:35]  All of these companies who are lining up for their bailout now are the very same ones who spent the last 10 years with all that funny QE money and those extra low interest rates taking out loans so they could buy back all their stock and trump up their stock price and pump up their stock price.
[00:38:54]  And now they're like, oh, geez, we haven't saved for a rainy day at all.
[00:38:59]  We have no cash reserves whatsoever.
[00:39:01]  We need a giant bailout from you, Dave.
[00:39:04]  You're going to have to buckle down and tighten your belt and do some more comedy shows so that you can carry Boeing around on your back, dude.
[00:39:13]  Yeah, that's the whole thing of it, too.
[00:39:15]  It's like, you know, it's so funny because so often, and this is where I feel like the libertarian voice is, and this is, I guess, why I'm a libertarian.
[00:39:23]  I mean, it's just like it seems to be the only group who kind of get this, but you have almost like there'll be the debate will be between like a Bernie Sanders type and like a Ben Shapiro type.
[00:39:34]  And the debate is over whether we should redistribute money from wealthy, successful people to poor people who are in need.
[00:39:42]  And the Bernie Sanders side, like the typical left side, will say, yes, of course we have to do that.
[00:39:46]  And then the Ben Shapiro, the right-wing side, will say, no, we shouldn't do that.
[00:39:50]  A free market works better.
[00:39:52]  But nobody ever seems to come in and just point out, like, okay, okay, okay, fine.
[00:39:56]  Have this debate if you want to.
[00:39:58]  But shouldn't we all agree that we shouldn't distribute money from poor and working class to multi-millionaires and billionaires?
[00:40:06]  Because that's what we're doing.
[00:40:07]  Can we all come together and say, yeah, there's definitely no argument, like no moral argument that could support, you know, taxing some guy who makes $70,000, $80,000 a year to help prop up Boeing, right?
[00:40:24]  Like that, that shouldn't be good.
[00:40:26]  But nobody.
[00:40:27]  And I think look, that argument should, that should totally appeal to liberals and leftists.
[00:40:31]  That, you know, when you hear David Stockman, I mean, look, all liberals and leftists presume that we're just apologists for big business, right?
[00:40:39]  Where the rich white man's anarchy is all we want.
[00:40:42]  Where, well, David Stockman is on my show today going, they bought the tickets.
[00:40:46]  They knew the risk.
[00:40:47]  I say, let them crash, right?
[00:40:50]  Like he wants to see Goldman Sachs burn.
[00:40:54]  Why?
[00:40:55]  Because they won't keep their hand out of his pocket.
[00:40:57]  They're not engaging in the free market in any way.
[00:41:01]  It's a crony capitalist system.
[00:41:03]  And the more of a crony you are, the more you deserve to suffer.
[00:41:06]  We're not here because we favor business.
[00:41:10]  We're here because we favor capitalism.
[00:41:13]  And that means profit and loss.
[00:41:16]  You make your bad decisions, you lump it.
[00:41:19]  That's the deal.
[00:41:20]  And, you know, when I said, yeah, but devil's advocate here, David Stockman, it's not their fault.
[00:41:25]  There's some crazy virus broke out and it's taking down the whole world's economy right now.
[00:41:30]  And then, geez, what would we do if all our biggest businesses crashed and all this?
[00:41:34]  It would hurt us all.
[00:41:35]  And so maybe they're right.
[00:41:36]  And he's like, yeah, right.
[00:41:38]  That's what Chapter 11 bankruptcy is for.
[00:41:40]  Any decent assets that they have that need to be redistributed, other businesses will buy them up.
[00:41:46]  And, you know, Wall Street, the NASDAQ, the Dow Jones, forget that.
[00:41:52]  The Dow Jones isn't a representative.
[00:41:54]  It doesn't represent real wealth in this country.
[00:41:57]  That's just a casino.
[00:41:58]  Think I give a damn if the whole thing crashes?
[00:42:01]  This is Reagan's budget director, okay?
[00:42:03]  This is as capitalist an economist as you can find in this society.
[00:42:08]  And he's saying, let these rich welfare mongers burn.
[00:42:13]  How dare they?
[00:42:15]  You know, you go to his website and his article today is called WTF.
[00:42:19]  Before that, it's, you know, the heist of the century, the worst criminals in the world.
[00:42:24]  Like these are the titles of all of his articles.
[00:42:27]  He wants Congress and their co-conspirators on Wall Street sent out of this country on an ice flow, never to return.
[00:42:34]  How dare they?
[00:42:35]  And let the Dow Jones crash.
[00:42:38]  So that to me, you know, I'm looking on Twitter and I see liberals saying that, oh, yeah, Donald Trump, which he's a bad example, but Donald Trump is saying at some point we're going to have to get back to work here.
[00:42:48]  And they're saying, oh, yeah, sure, sacrifice human lives just for the economy.
[00:42:53]  Well, you sacrifice the economy.
[00:42:56]  That's human lives too.
[00:42:57]  People are dying.
[00:42:58]  You know, my sister's a nurse and she's intelligent and concerned about this virus.
[00:43:05]  But when I talked to her about this a few weeks ago, she said the very worst thing to her was the panic because people are being driven to such a state of panic that they're taking crazy decisions.
[00:43:15]  They're locking themselves in one room and they're, you know, they're foregoing their heart medicine, right?
[00:43:20]  So you're going to have people who you're going to have the 911 line is going to be completely jammed.
[00:43:25]  So people are having a heart attack and a stroke just like they do every day and they can't get their care.
[00:43:30]  You're going to have the suicide rates go up.
[00:43:32]  I just saw a thing yesterday where they said for every 1% that the unemployment rate goes up, the suicide rate goes up three.
[00:43:40]  And this kind of thing.
[00:43:41]  This is real.
[00:43:42]  You know, the economy, yeah, that means people going to work and making money and being able to take care of their families and their lives.
[00:43:50]  So it's not a question of the way the left-wingers put it on Twitter that you're sacrificing human lives for your Dow Jones God or something like that.
[00:43:59]  We're talking about the ability of people to take care of themselves.
[00:44:03]  And then the socialists, all they can imagine is, don't worry, we'll just mint $2 trillion coins and pay for everything and everything will be free and scarcity will be abolished and no one will ever have to work again.
[00:44:14]  And that'll solve that.
[00:44:15]  But that's just nuts.
[00:44:17]  That's not how it works.
[00:44:18]  And these are massive trade-offs.
[00:44:20]  In this case, so far, I'm in favor of at least voluntary clampdown and anyone with a bully pulpit who can possibly influence anyone to encourage them that this is very real and you should stay inside.
[00:44:33]  You should stay home.
[00:44:35]  And if it's at all possible to avoid going out and spreading this thing around, then that's exactly what we should be doing.
[00:44:41]  But at the same time, to sit here and say, oh yeah, no, completely shutting down all commerce except Amazon.com for the next half a year is the solution to our problem with no costs on its own side of the ledger is just crazy.
[00:44:57]  No, I don't know.
[00:44:58]  I saw that lady Crystal Ball, who I really like on Hill TV saying, we must abolish capitalism.
[00:45:05]  That's what this proves is we can never have.
[00:45:08]  Well, what's the alternative then?
[00:45:09]  You're really going to put Congress in charge of every economic decision from now on?

=== Sheath Underwear Sponsorship (02:33) ===

[00:45:14]  Is that what's been proven in the last weeks?
[00:45:16]  And see, what she's talking about is this corrupt crony bailout system.
[00:45:20]  But this corrupt crony bailout system has the name capitalism.
[00:45:24]  And so all of the baby is being thrown out with the bathwater.
[00:45:28]  The free market.
[00:45:29]  So I've done two episodes on those two, Cigar and Crystal Ball on their show on the Hill.
[00:45:36]  And I've said on both of them, I actually really like their show.
[00:45:39]  They do one of the better shows.
[00:45:41]  They've actually had good coverage of the presidential race and like they're pretty good on Russia Gate and Russia Gate.
[00:45:47]  They're great on Russia Gate.
[00:45:48]  They're good on populism.
[00:45:49]  They're good on neoliberalism, neoconservatism.
[00:45:52]  When they talk about libertarianism, oh, God, it's painful.
[00:45:55]  They're just, they're terrible on that issue and like really outrageously ignorant on it.
[00:46:00]  I was taking Cigar's thing apart the other day.
[00:46:03]  Oh my God, it just drives me crazy.
[00:46:05]  I spent an episode on that recently.
[00:46:08]  Actually, my last episode.
[00:46:09]  Oh, God, they just have no idea.
[00:46:11]  He's like, this is proof that the Republicans have finally abandoned libertarianism.
[00:46:16]  Finally, they've moved away from it because these strict libertarians.
[00:46:21]  Anyway, it's bad.
[00:46:22]  But she is good.
[00:46:23]  And he's good on some other issues.
[00:46:26]  All right, let's take a quick second.
[00:46:27]  I want to thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Sheath Underwear.
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[00:47:04]  He developed the prototype in Iraq and raised money on Kickstarter to launch Sheath.
[00:47:09]  And now they're here supporting the show.
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=== Hoover Warehouses Boom Cycle (09:27) ===

[00:47:47]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:47:49]  I do.
[00:47:49]  Listen, there was this one guy on Tucker Carlson.
[00:47:52]  I just saw the clip online the other day.
[00:47:54]  I didn't actually watch the episode, but what he was saying, which I actually thought was kind of thoughtful and interesting, and not that it's completely right, but it's something to think about.
[00:48:02]  He's like a 73-year-old guy or something like that.
[00:48:04]  And he was like, look, I'm at high risk for this virus.
[00:48:09]  And I, believe me, I don't want to die.
[00:48:11]  Like, I really, I got a lot of living left to do and I don't want to go anywhere.
[00:48:14]  But if you were asking me to choose to risk death or to ruin a country that my grandchildren can prosper in, like I would roll the dice on my own life before I would ever rob my grandchildren of that.
[00:48:27]  And there is something to think about there.
[00:48:29]  Like these are very hard things to balance.
[00:48:31]  But the problem is.
[00:48:33]  I mean, the problem is that's Dan Patrick.
[00:48:35]  He's the lieutenant governor of Texas.
[00:48:37]  So he's not a human.
[00:48:38]  He's a government employee.
[00:48:39]  And he wasn't speaking for himself.
[00:48:41]  He was speaking for other people too.
[00:48:42]  And I read the clip there.
[00:48:44]  He talks about, yeah, me and other people my age.
[00:48:46]  Yeah, well, you know what?
[00:48:48]  You don't speak for my mom, who I would very much like to see live longer, dude.
[00:48:53]  You know, and that's his attitude, unfortunately.
[00:48:57]  And also, I think it's really important just to point out, and this is something that came up in the Stockman interview today, where, you know, he was just saying, look, we're not going to have a Great Depression.
[00:49:08]  This is going to be a recession.
[00:49:09]  The bubble has popped.
[00:49:10]  No lie about that.
[00:49:12]  I mean, we're in trouble.
[00:49:14]  But this is basically a supply side shock.
[00:49:17]  All the demand is still here.
[00:49:19]  And as soon as people can reopen their restaurant, they will reopen it.
[00:49:23]  As soon as people can reopen their barbershop, they're going to reopen it.
[00:49:26]  As soon as people can go back to work, they're going to.
[00:49:29]  And things aren't going to be exactly the same as they were before.
[00:49:32]  But at the same time, we haven't had the kind of permanent interventions.
[00:49:39]  FDR prolonged the Great Depression by a decade because him and his government just would not stop screwing with the economy.
[00:49:50]  And even before, as all libertarians know, and apparently nobody else knows, it all started with Hoover.
[00:49:56]  And right after the crash, Hoover goes, I know a good experiment.
[00:50:00]  Let's put a floor on wages and have a minimum wage where no one can pay less than this.
[00:50:06]  Well, all he did was just price a third of the population out of the labor market, right?
[00:50:11]  I mean, they were just experimenting with completely nutball theories that had nothing to do with how markets work.
[00:50:18]  As Stockman has explained, the markets had cleared all the bad debts and were ready to get the economy back up on its feet before FDR was even inaugurated in March of 33.
[00:50:30]  If he had sat and done nothing, if he just had a Woodrow Wilson stroke and done nothing, everything would have been fine.
[00:50:38]  Instead, they prolonged the depression by intervention after intervention after intervention.
[00:50:44]  And again, Hoover started the Smoot Hawley tariffs and all these other things.
[00:50:49]  But so in this case, and plus, we're starting from, you know, on that line graph of economic growth from 1933.
[00:50:56]  We're way up here compared to that.
[00:50:59]  So the amount of capital that we have to work with here is astronomical.
[00:51:04]  And, you know, we talked about this before, you know, during the last crash 10 years ago and all that.
[00:51:09]  Like if you go to Temple, Texas, which is a relatively small town between here and Waco, it's a small town.
[00:51:16]  But if you go there, man, there are warehouses after warehouses.
[00:51:20]  They got, you know, 21st century freeway systems.
[00:51:24]  They've got, you know, every kind of healthcare facility, all kinds of factories and trucking and mechanics and engineers and universities.
[00:51:36]  And it's a self-contained, it had to be.
[00:51:40]  If you had to build a wall around Temple, Texas, they would be all right.
[00:51:44]  They've got, that's just one example of one town where there's, you couldn't measure the amount of real wealth in the town of Temple.
[00:51:53]  It's in the tens of billions of dollars.
[00:51:56]  And it's just one tiny town in this state and out of 35,000 towns in this country.
[00:52:02]  And there's a lot of capital here to be worked with that can't be destroyed or inflated away.
[00:52:07]  That's already been created, engines that run, mines that know engineering, you know, the rest of it, warehouses that are already standing on pillars that aren't, that have not been blown down.
[00:52:20]  So when this crisis is over, the economy will be able to pick back up again.
[00:52:26]  If anything, maybe it, it popped that massive inflationary bubble sooner than later in our interest.
[00:52:33]  You know, it might have lasted another couple of years and we might have had an even worse crash than the one we've got now.
[00:52:39]  Yeah, I've, you know, I was reading, I mean, first off, I hope Stockman's right about that because I've been very concerned about entering a new a new depression after all of this.
[00:52:47]  And it was, Jeff Dice wrote something, he had a piece this week where he was talking about this where, and I'm starting to feel this way more and more, where I go like, you know, I really would like to, if at all possible, experience, I mean, my daughter's only 15 months old.
[00:53:04]  Like I'd like to experience some of this pain sooner rather than later so that hopefully we can kind of get out of it and be in a better, healthier place by the time she's actually growing up and, you know, like going out into the world.
[00:53:19]  Like I, even though I don't exactly take responsibility for what all these criminals have done, I do feel like some, you know, like whatever the world is right now is more on me than it is on her.
[00:53:29]  And, you know, I'd like to kind of like handle it to some degree.
[00:53:33]  The problem though is that, and you already see it in this crisis is that, look, obviously, by the way, great book, if anybody wants to read, there's a book by James Grant called The Forgotten Depression, which is all about the crash in 1921 when the government basically didn't respond at all.
[00:53:50]  And it took less than a year before the market had, you know, like basically taken care of the problem.
[00:53:55]  And it was actually a steeper crash than in 1929.
[00:53:58]  But the problem is, what are we going to do?
[00:54:00]  We're going to live in 0% interest rates again.
[00:54:02]  Government spending is going to be something, I mean, deficits might top $2 trillion after all of this is done.
[00:54:09]  And so, of course, they're going to do everything they can to prolong this recession or depression or whatever we're facing when we get out of it.
[00:54:17]  And it's going to be another Obama recovery type deal where basically the people who recover will be Wall Street and big corporations and the middle of the country and the working class in the country are going to get nothing.
[00:54:31]  Yep.
[00:54:31]  And look, that's been the same song my whole life, man.
[00:54:33]  You know, there was a giant crash after Iraq War I.
[00:54:37]  And then there was the false prosperity of the Bill Clinton years.
[00:54:41]  And everybody thought that this is just great.
[00:54:43]  You know what?
[00:54:43]  We don't need our peace dividend.
[00:54:45]  We can go ahead and expand our world empire even further because apparently it's free because everything is going so great.
[00:54:51]  But it turned out, nope, that was just Alan Greenspan and the money machine.
[00:54:54]  And it led to a massive crash in 99 and 2000.
[00:54:57]  And then what did Bush do?
[00:54:59]  Print that money.
[00:55:00]  Hey, Alan Greenspan, lower that interest rate all the way to zero.
[00:55:04]  And that was what led to the next boom.
[00:55:06]  Oh, and the part I meant to mention, where the people at the top are the ones who benefit.
[00:55:11]  You know, they talk about the financialization of the economy.
[00:55:14]  That wasn't the free market that did that.
[00:55:16]  That was Alan Greenspan, the government commissar over the currency, who created, you know, essentially a trillion dollars of new money and shoved it all up into the stock market and up to the very top.
[00:55:30]  And I remember well in 1999, before the crash, and they were saying, oh, yeah, the economy's never been greater.
[00:55:38]  And look how low unemployment is and whatever.
[00:55:41]  And critics were saying, yeah, but bankruptcies are at an all-time high.
[00:55:44]  And real wages have not gone up in 10 years.
[00:55:47]  And people are still just barely recovering from the crash of 92.
[00:55:53]  And then the crash hit them 99, 2000.
[00:55:55]  Then we saw the same thing again in 2007, 2008.
[00:55:58]  People are going, well, the economy's never been better.
[00:56:01]  Really?
[00:56:01]  Because we're only just getting our act together from the last crash.
[00:56:05]  All that money went up to the top.
[00:56:07]  All that money went into housing and mortgages and the stock market and all these, you know, again, connected, politically connected crony industries.
[00:56:16]  Real wages are only just starting to catch up.
[00:56:19]  Oh, sorry, crash again.
[00:56:20]  Pull the rug out for money and make you start all over again.
[00:56:23]  Now here we are a decade after that.
[00:56:25]  And just as you say, people are only just getting their act together from the last time.
[00:56:30]  All the benefits have gone to the very top.
[00:56:32]  Real wages are only just beginning to climb.
[00:56:34]  And oh, sorry, bubble popped again.
[00:56:37]  And so no wonder Crystal Ball thinks that capitalism has failed.
[00:56:41]  If this is capitalism, man, it's a really bad system.
[00:56:45]  Yeah, but no, you're absolutely right.
[00:56:46]  And it's state capitalism.
[00:56:49]  That is what ails us.
[00:56:51]  No, absolutely.
[00:56:52]  And to be fair, you know, there are like it's not exclusively, 100% exclusively the politically connected and the people playing in Wall Street who gave up.
[00:57:01]  The truth is that I did like, if you think through like the 90s and the two and the first decade in the year 2000, after the year 2000, the 20, you know, single digits, whatever you call that first decade of the 21st century.
[00:57:14]  Yeah, right.

=== Boomer Taxes and Free Money (12:22) ===

[00:57:15]  So that, I mean, like, I know, you know, people who like really did gain a lot of wealth in that, but it was all people who owned houses.
[00:57:23]  You know, you knew, like, I knew a bunch of people who owned a house that was worth, you know, families.
[00:57:27]  I was kind of a kid at the time, but like my friend's parents who like owned a house that was worth $50,000.
[00:57:32]  And then it was worth $250,000 just, you know, like a few years later.
[00:57:35]  And it's like, oh, look at that.
[00:57:36]  Now they feel like they're way wealthier than they were back then.
[00:57:39]  But you see, it's not like real wealth.
[00:57:41]  Like they didn't actually create anything.
[00:57:42]  They're just sitting on their house and now they feel like, oh, I'm up here all of a sudden.
[00:57:46]  And then, of course, a lot of that got taken away from them in the crash of 2008 and in 2009 when the real estate market did terrible.
[00:57:53]  But, you know, so it's kind of now I do think there is something.
[00:57:57]  I don't know.
[00:57:57]  Maybe I'm wrong about this.
[00:57:58]  I'm kind of just working this out in my head, but there also is something about the boomer generation who kind of like, you know, just lived through all of the.
[00:58:08]  Now, I'm not, of course, not all, you know, boomers.
[00:58:10]  A lot of them are really great people.
[00:58:12]  Like my mother's a really great person.
[00:58:14]  But, you know, there's like, they kind of took some of the benefit of this system and just kind of lived through, you know what I mean?
[00:58:21]  Like that part of it.
[00:58:22]  And are now, you know, I've just seen one of the things, it kind of rubs me the wrong way, but there's been a lot of like demonizing of the younger generation through this whole thing.
[00:58:31]  Like, look at these kids out on spring break and they don't even care.
[00:58:35]  And I just see like, I don't know, something struck me as perverse about listening to boomers demonize 20-year-olds.
[00:58:44]  Like they're somehow the villains in this whole, okay, there's a group of them who went out to spring break, who probably shouldn't have gone out to spring break.
[00:58:50]  Okay.
[00:58:50]  But like, it just seems kind of like, like, first off, I know not everybody's connected in this way, but it's like, if my daughter's generation turned out to be really shitty, like say me and you, our daughter's generation turns out to be really shitty.
[00:59:04]  And me and you are just sitting around going, man, this generation just sucks.
[00:59:07]  It's like, well, you raised that generation.
[00:59:10]  So don't you bear some responsibility for how they turned out?
[00:59:13]  Oh my God, I can't believe this group of people who we basically taught their entire lives that there's nothing more to life than what makes you feel good are concerned about what makes them feel good.
[00:59:24]  And they're not thinking about things like responsibility and family and community.
[00:59:29]  Oh my God, like, where did this come from?
[00:59:30]  It must be just that they're so terrible.
[00:59:33]  Like, I don't know.
[00:59:34]  Don't you have some responsibility in all of this?
[00:59:36]  I don't know, just a thought.
[00:59:38]  And look, they lecture the millennials all the time.
[00:59:41]  Like, oh, you're broke.
[00:59:42]  Well, maybe you should stop drinking designer coffees and having avocado toast and all of this stuff.
[00:59:49]  Well, when the boomers went to college, they could pay their way through college on a part-time job.
[00:59:54]  Yeah.
[00:59:55]  Why are the millennials not able to do that?
[00:59:57]  It's a simple answer.
[00:59:58]  Because the boomers, through federal law, rigged it so that tuition prices are so high, you have to go into a lifetime of debt to the federal government, even to just get a bachelor's degree.
[01:00:14]  So, you know, whose fault is that?
[01:00:16]  It's the fault of the people who voted for Bill Clinton and George Bush and Barack Obama.
[01:00:21]  People who can't think for a minute that, geez, I wonder if having the government subsidize tuitions up to a certain rate has anything to do with the colleges raising tuitions up to that rate.
[01:00:32]  Oh, well, back to my Netflix and paying attention to my own self.
[01:00:36]  And so, yeah, no wonder their children are mad.
[01:00:39]  No wonder.
[01:00:40]  And then, oh, but now we're being told, I saw a great tweet by some millennial leftists the other day.
[01:00:46]  Oh, Boeing needs a bailout.
[01:00:47]  Well, maybe they should stop drinking lattes and eating avocado toast.
[01:00:51]  And maybe they need to, you know, get their economic house in order.
[01:00:55]  These are the very same people who've been lecturing the young all along.
[01:01:00]  And yet, boy, they're first in line for a bailout.
[01:01:03]  They're the ones who put the young in such a position that they're so broke in the first place.
[01:01:08]  They're the ones who said that Alan Greenspan was the world's greatest genius.
[01:01:12]  If only he'd inflate another bubble, everything would be fine.
[01:01:16]  And so, which is exactly why these kids still live in their parents' basement, right?
[01:01:20]  The same houses that you're talking about were artificially worth three times as much and then crash back to their real price level again means the parents are so broke.
[01:01:30]  They can't help their kids to get, to take care of their own selves, to get a good, to pay for their college, to get them a good enough degree.
[01:01:38]  And then the housing and the job market sucks bad enough that they can't get a good enough job to move out of their parents' house.
[01:01:45]  Yeah.
[01:01:45]  And then it's the same people lecturing them for being so young and lazy and stupid.
[01:01:49]  Yeah.
[01:01:50]  And then what if George Farlan was here?
[01:01:51]  He'd be pointing his finger at the boomers.
[01:01:54]  They're the ones.
[01:01:55]  100%.
[01:01:55]  And then on top of that, they're also the generation who like just decided that like, oh, if marriage gets tough, you just split up.
[01:02:05]  And, you know, that's that.
[01:02:06]  It's really no big deal if your kids get raised without their dad around.
[01:02:09]  It's pretty awesome, actually, in fact.
[01:02:11]  And that's totally, I got to do what's right for me, man.
[01:02:13]  You know, marriage was tough for a year.
[01:02:15]  So we're just going to split up and that's no big deal, you know, no problem.
[01:02:18]  And then they're wondering why like their kids are self-centered or are not like thinking about their responsibility to the previous generation.
[01:02:25]  And I know I'm speaking in collective language here and there, there are lots of exceptions to this.
[01:02:29]  But like, who the fuck are you guys to think that like anybody else should be sitting here all concerned with you?
[01:02:35]  And the other thing, by the way, which is fucking infuriating is that people really do use the term millennial to mean 19 year old today, which is not what the millennials are even.
[01:02:44]  The millennials, I'm a millennial.
[01:02:46]  Millennials are like pushing 40 and like a lot of them are worried about taking care of their own families and shit.
[01:02:51]  But imagine being the Zelennial, the Zoomer generation or whatever.
[01:02:55]  Imagine being some fucking 20-year-old.
[01:02:57]  And right, you're literally at this point, you're 20 and you're already got like 80K in student loans.
[01:03:04]  You're like, how the hell am I ever going to pay?
[01:03:06]  The only place that's hiring is Starbucks.
[01:03:08]  I don't know what you're talking about.
[01:03:09]  The only thing I have going for me is that I got another six years.
[01:03:12]  I can stay on my mom's health insurance plan because the government allowed that.
[01:03:17]  They've propped up the price of housing.
[01:03:19]  So I'm never going to, literally never going to be able to own my own house.
[01:03:22]  I'm 20.
[01:03:23]  I'm 80K in debt already.
[01:03:25]  And the house is that I can get a shitty house for like a quarter million dollars or something like that.
[01:03:30]  Like I like, how the hell would I ever get married, have a kid, have a life, be independent, and then being lectured to by a country that, and on top of that, growing up with divorced parents with no sense of like, no, you know, like, listen, there's a lot of problems with like the old order.
[01:03:49]  And I'm not like a guy who's like, God, country, military, this, that, chivalry, all these things.
[01:03:54]  But they just grew up with nothing, like no meaning, no purpose, just kind of like, yeah, the point of life is to have fun.
[01:04:02]  And then they get lectured to about their personal responsibility.
[01:04:06]  And it's like, and the same people who are lecturing them like, oh, you want those, those loans forgiven?
[01:04:10]  Oh, what do you just want to leech off of the taxpayer?
[01:04:13]  Are the same ones who tell you that we need to go bail out every airline company, every hotel chain, everything.
[01:04:18]  It's just, it's infuriating.
[01:04:19]  They're the same ones that you were just talking about who are celebrating the artificially inflated price of their house.
[01:04:25]  Look at how rich I am.
[01:04:26]  It's because of how smart I am when all they did was sit there while their house got older and more and more rained on and somehow worth more and more money all the time.
[01:04:35]  It's nothing but welfare for the middle class.
[01:04:38]  But of course, it's a bubble and you don't even get to keep it.
[01:04:41]  You just get the illusion of that wealth for a little while, long enough to refinance and put some marble on your countertops and then and then crash.
[01:04:50]  So you're all welfare recipients too.
[01:04:53]  I was talking about laissez-faire types, you know?
[01:04:55]  Yeah, no, no, that's right.
[01:04:56]  And then they give us that, that's what they associate with capitalism, right?
[01:04:59]  Is those people?
[01:05:00]  So I was talking to this accountant, this woman who did my taxes like a couple years ago.
[01:05:06]  And she wasn't very good.
[01:05:07]  I went with someone else, but she did my taxes a couple of years ago.
[01:05:10]  And it was like one of the first years that I actually like made okay money.
[01:05:14]  And I was, so I was like, for the first time, I was like, oh, I got to get straight with the IRS.
[01:05:17]  And I'm just, I was furious.
[01:05:18]  I was like, I can't believe how much money they're taking from me.
[01:05:20]  And I'm like, me and you and guys like us, like, I don't, we don't have anyone cutting us a check.
[01:05:25]  So we don't even get that nice withholding feeling where you're like, well, I know this is what they say, but this is just really what I make.
[01:05:30]  You got to go into your bank account and give them money.
[01:05:34]  And it's just brutal.
[01:05:35]  It's gut-wrenching.
[01:05:36]  You have to look at the money that you could have for yourself and give it to them.
[01:05:39]  I mean, this was even before I had a daughter and it was still brutal.
[01:05:42]  But anyway, but I was complaining about it.
[01:05:44]  I was like, God damn, like, really?
[01:05:45]  Oh, man.
[01:05:46]  I got to pay this much.
[01:05:47]  And she was just kind of had no sympathy for me or whatever.
[01:05:49]  I guess she's, she's a tax accountant.
[01:05:51]  This is what she does all the time.
[01:05:53]  But she was saying that we just started having a conversation and she was talking about how the thing that drove her crazy the most was these, because her office was like in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
[01:06:05]  And it's like this real nice area in Brooklyn where the houses are like multi-million dollar houses.
[01:06:10]  I just, I just went there to get her.
[01:06:12]  But she was saying all these people who sell their houses who are furious about the taxes that they have to pay.
[01:06:18]  And now, okay, she's a statist.
[01:06:19]  She's not a libertarian or whatever, but I kind of got the point she was making where she's like, they're like furious that they have to pay taxes.
[01:06:25]  And she's like, you did nothing.
[01:06:27]  You did nothing to earn this money.
[01:06:29]  This isn't like your money.
[01:06:31]  It's like, this is kind of ridiculous.
[01:06:32]  Like, and her, you know, perception, okay, like we all hate the state and she doesn't get that.
[01:06:36]  Fine.
[01:06:37]  But like from her perspective, she's like, well, you just sat on a house and got half a million dollars because you happened to be in the right area at the right time when the real estate was going up.
[01:06:49]  Shouldn't you kick a little bit of that into the pot for the rest of us?
[01:06:52]  Now, I know that's not what the government is, but that's, you know, her mentality.
[01:06:55]  But I kind of got her point from her perspective where it's like, yeah, you're bitching about your taxes.
[01:07:00]  You literally did nothing.
[01:07:01]  You did nothing and just were basically gifted all this money.
[01:07:05]  And seriously, like we're talking about, you know, at least the Democrats are honest that they're all a bunch of welfare mongers.
[01:07:10]  The Republican, upper-middle-class white Republican voters of America all think that they did it themselves when actually you didn't build that.
[01:07:18]  Alan Greenspan filled your bank account with free money, you schmuck.
[01:07:23]  And now you want to pretend that, oh yeah, you worked so hard for it.
[01:07:27]  No, you didn't.
[01:07:28]  Why should a house that's getting older and older and older every day continue to appreciate?
[01:07:35]  That's not what happens to a Ford truck.
[01:07:38]  Why is that what happens to your house?
[01:07:41]  Because we have a corrupt economy and you're on welfare.
[01:07:44]  That's why.
[01:07:45]  Now, there are some places like in Austin where people are moving here in such numbers that it really is a supply and demand thing too.
[01:07:53]  But come on, the interest rate is nothing.
[01:07:57]  That's a scam.
[01:07:58]  That's not the market.
[01:08:00]  And so, especially for young people looking, you know, not just at the boomers, but the, you know, more wealthy Republican boomers, who many of whom are just as bad of welfare recipients as anybody else, as any banker or any food stamp, you know, poor person on food stamps or Medicaid, pretending like, oh, yeah, no, they're all self-made men and nobody ever helped them.
[01:08:26]  And why should anybody else need help?
[01:08:28]  When actually that's just not right.
[01:08:30]  You know, they refinance their house three times and take all that cash and go on vacations and buy new trucks and whatever they want with free money.
[01:08:38]  Yeah.
[01:08:39]  Yeah.
[01:08:39]  And man, free money.
[01:08:40]  You know, it's funny because we've been we've been railing about, you know, particularly since, you know, 2008, which is really, you know, that's around the time I came into the liberty movement.
[01:08:52]  And, you know, that really, that was an amazing time to be in the liberty movement.
[01:08:57]  There's, there's a reason why it, I mean, obviously it was Ron Paul, but there's a reason why that was the perfect time for Ron Paul because it was the age of, you know, financial collapse and bailouts and 0% interest rates.
[01:09:08]  But man, if we thought 2008 was the age of low interest rates and bailouts, we are about to live through the true, the true era of the bailout.
[01:09:19]  And this is going to be, this is why, you know, what people are out there saying like, oh, this is, you know, libertarianism is dead and stuff like that.
[01:09:26]  It's like, no, we're actually more needed than ever because we're going to be living in the age of bailouts, 0% interest rates, crony capitalism run amok.

=== National Guard Activation (15:04) ===

[01:09:38]  And also, the other thing that's really freaking me out, which I wanted to ask you about, is the kind of acceptance of martial law and how close we're actually going to come to like legit martial law.
[01:09:49]  There's already a lot of talk.
[01:09:50]  Bill de Blasio is out there.
[01:09:52]  He's furious at Donald Trump because you see, Donald Trump is literally Hitler.
[01:09:56]  And also, he hasn't ordered the military into every major city yet.
[01:10:01]  So what's get, come on, literally Hitler.
[01:10:03]  What are you doing?
[01:10:04]  Why won't you lock down the entire country?
[01:10:07]  So this is the perspective we're at now.
[01:10:09]  And I get real worried about that because that's something that's going to be very difficult to roll back once it's been rolled out.
[01:10:16]  Yeah.
[01:10:17]  Well, so I'll tell you, people can go and check my archives.
[01:10:20]  It's on antiwar.com right now and it's on my site at scotthorton.org.
[01:10:24]  I interviewed this reporter, William Arkin.
[01:10:27]  You may be familiar with him.
[01:10:28]  He's a really important reporter.
[01:10:29]  He wrote the book, American Coup, about the revolution within the forum during the Bush and Obama years, torture and the spying and all the secrecy and all that, the turning of the CIA into just a drone targeting assassination machine and all these things.
[01:10:48]  He did the Top Secret America series with Dana Priest for the Washington Post back 10 years ago.
[01:10:53]  Okay.
[01:10:54]  Okay.
[01:10:55]  So Arkin wrote this thing for Newsweek last week about the military's plans for continuity of government.
[01:11:02]  And so we have a 22nd Amendment that says if the president dies, the vice president takes over.
[01:11:06]  If he dies, it goes to the speaker of the house.
[01:11:08]  So she dies, it goes to the president pro tem of the Senate, then the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, and on down the cabinet.
[01:11:15]  And they have their designated successors.
[01:11:17]  So all this has been, it's in the amendment.
[01:11:20]  It's also in the laws passed under the amendment that have this chain of command in case the Russians nuke D.C. is what it's really for, right?
[01:11:28]  But then it also applies to, you know, other situations.
[01:11:32]  And they have essentially in waiting, they have a shadow government for the continuity of government.
[01:11:38]  What if everybody on that list is killed?
[01:11:40]  Then who takes over?
[01:11:42]  Well, the military at that point still doesn't take over.
[01:11:45]  At that point, they have a second string of civilians who are ready to take over the government.
[01:11:50]  Now, typically speaking, that would be people you've heard of before.
[01:11:54]  It would be Donald Rumsfeld would be pulled out of retirement, something like that.
[01:11:59]  Robert Gates or Hillary Clinton or somebody who, okay, they didn't get elected, but you know who they are and they're in a position of public responsibility and that kind of thing.
[01:12:10]  And Arkin's real worry is that right now, that second string is basically made up of a bunch of nameless, faceless bureaucrats that none of us know who they are.
[01:12:19]  And that if something, if the West Wing gets wiped out by this virus and Washington, D.C. is evacuated in this crisis, you could have some guy named Joe who you've never heard of say that he's the president now and, you know, from Mount Weather or from somewhere in Colorado Springs or something like that and claim to be the president of the United States.
[01:12:42]  And at that point, you can have a real problem because you have a fight over different people claiming that authority.
[01:12:48]  And you have to have somebody who the 50 governors will go along with.
[01:12:52]  You have to have somebody that the military will go along with and accept as the new civilian leadership.
[01:12:57]  And if they won't, then the military will take over.
[01:13:00]  All right, let's pause for a quick moment.
[01:13:02]  I want to thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Untuck It.
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[01:14:14]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[01:14:16]  One of the things in the article, he quotes a senior officer.
[01:14:20]  When he says senior officer, I'm pretty sure he means like from the Secretary of Defense's office, saying that the American people have better get used to the name General Terrence O'Shaughnessy.
[01:14:33]  He is the commander of the Northern Command.
[01:14:36]  You know how they have the whole world divided up into AFRICOM and CENTCOM and EUCOM and whatever the different combatant commands for around the world?
[01:14:45]  Well, they've got one for the United States of America too, Northcom.
[01:14:49]  And it's run by General Terrence O'Shaughnessy.
[01:14:51]  He's an Air Force general.
[01:14:52]  And worst case scenario, he would be the military dictator of the United States.
[01:14:57]  And now Arkin assures me, and I think I believe him, that the military really does not want this responsibility.
[01:15:05]  Their job is killing Iraqis, man.
[01:15:07]  Don't want to rule Kansas.
[01:15:10]  What the hell are they going to do?
[01:15:11]  And by the way, being young and strong and in the infantry is no real protection from this virus either.
[01:15:17]  You know, all of these guys, you know, have wives and kids at home, and they're just as susceptible to an infection as the rest of us when it comes to this kind of thing.
[01:15:26]  So they're not really in a much better position than any of the rest of us.
[01:15:30]  But I think, Ark, if you go back and listen to the interview, I think Arkin makes it pretty clear.
[01:15:35]  He's not really concerned about actual martial law, like real martial law, where there is no law.
[01:15:41]  The civilian law is suspended, and law means only the orders of the local military officer, resist and get shot.
[01:15:51]  That's real martial law.
[01:15:52]  And he says that's not really his concern.
[01:15:54]  That's just an absolute worst case scenario.
[01:15:57]  But what is still concerning is the use of the National Guard and possibly even the Army in order to help civilian authorities enforce the law.
[01:16:11]  And, you know, the National Guard right now has been activated by Trump, at least in some states.
[01:16:18]  But then he got on the phone on a conference call with the governors and said, but you guys are still in charge, though.
[01:16:25]  You guys are still the commanders of the guard units.
[01:16:27]  I'm calling them out, but I'm leaving you guys in charge.
[01:16:29]  But you hear the language there.
[01:16:31]  He's leaving them in charge.
[01:16:33]  He can change his mind and nationalize and federalize the guard at any time.
[01:16:37]  That's how George Bush sent them all off to Iraq and Afghanistan.
[01:16:40]  He can take control of them if he wants to.
[01:16:44]  But they do have the statutory authority in all 50 states to help enforce the law, to at least insist, assist law enforcement, civilian law enforcement on some things.
[01:16:56]  And that could mean up to and including arresting people and clearing them out.
[01:17:01]  Even Arkin said, even the regular army, not just National Guard, even the regular army was used on the streets of LA in 92 after the Rodney King riots to put down that.
[01:17:10]  And so then that leaves the question of assuming that the crisis is over in the near term, it still leaves the question of how you repeal all that power and how, you know, we're familiar with what Robert Higgs, the great libertarian economist, calls the ratchet effect, where in an emergency, in a crisis, the government increases its power.
[01:17:31]  Then when the emergency is over, the power never goes back to the way it was before.
[01:17:36]  It might loosen up some, but we're never going all the way back to the day before the crisis started.
[01:17:41]  It never happens that way.
[01:17:42]  And that's how we went from limited constitutional republic to the biggest government in the history of the solar system in the space of a couple of hundred years here.
[01:17:50]  And so, you know, that's the real threat.
[01:17:54]  And then what if this virus, what if they can't come up with an effective vaccine for a year?
[01:18:00]  And what if the summer sun doesn't kill it off?
[01:18:03]  What if the epidemic spreads through the summer?
[01:18:05]  They're hopeful, but nobody really knows.
[01:18:07]  It could spread through the summer and through the fall.
[01:18:10]  It could threaten the ability of the American people to hold an election for president, for people to figure out.
[01:18:17]  I mean, maybe they figure out some way to do it on the blockchain or something.
[01:18:20]  Does that sound like something the U.S. government is going to figure out before November?
[01:18:24]  Probably not, man.
[01:18:26]  And so you could be in a situation where we have military forces, National Guard, and/or regular Army taking more and more and more of a role over the so-called keeping of law and order in at least some of the states, some of the time over the next year.
[01:18:45]  And then will America ever be the same again?
[01:18:48]  No.
[01:18:48]  And will that power ever get repealed back to the way it was?
[01:18:51]  No.
[01:18:51]  Now, if we did go, let's say we had to have had, in quotes, full martial law in New York City because 100,000 people are dead and there's nobody to build mass units but the Army infantry have to be made to do it and this kind of thing.
[01:19:08]  And if civilian, the mayor's dead, civilian authority is just totally canceled.
[01:19:14]  Once the crisis is over, they're going to leave.
[01:19:17]  They're not going to want the U.S. Army doesn't want to be in charge of New York City on any kind of permanent basis, right?
[01:19:23]  So I don't think we have to really worry about like the New World Order conspiracy where they've only been waiting to turn America into a military dictatorship this whole time.
[01:19:32]  And once they have an excuse, they're going to keep it that way.
[01:19:35]  It's not like that.
[01:19:36]  But in the gray area between here and there, there's a lot of lost freedom and including possibly a lot of dead people.
[01:19:45]  Because what happens when they call the army out in limited circumstances, they kill people.
[01:19:51]  You know, they use, I remember in the 90s, they used the Marines on the border in Texas and they shot a young sheepherder, Ezekiel Hernandez was his name.
[01:20:02]  It was probably 1996.
[01:20:04]  And the Marine snipers killed this kid because he had a 22 rifle.
[01:20:08]  Well, he had a 22 because he's a sheepherder and he's protecting his flock from coyotes, man.
[01:20:13]  He wasn't aiming his gun at them, but they're like, oh, no, a hostile.
[01:20:17]  And he was an American citizen on the American side of the border.
[01:20:20]  And they blew his head off because that's their job.
[01:20:25]  They're Marines.
[01:20:26]  Their job is not keeping peace.
[01:20:28]  Their job is bringing violence.
[01:20:32]  And so, you know, these are not the proper role.
[01:20:36]  This law enforcement is not the proper role for a soldier or a Marine.
[01:20:40]  And these, you know, more and more, of course, our cops are more like soldiers, but we don't want real soldiers doing those jobs.
[01:20:50]  But yeah, I mean, depending on how bad the situation gets, I think it's, you know, likely that we will see checkpoints, that we'll see, you know, remember after Katrina?
[01:20:59]  Did you ever see, it's in the Spike Lee movie.
[01:21:01]  There's a Spike Lee documentary about Katrina.
[01:21:04]  And he has footage in there.
[01:21:05]  It's really telling footage, okay?
[01:21:08]  It's this general.
[01:21:09]  I don't know his name, but he's an old black guy.
[01:21:11]  You can tell he's like in his 60s.
[01:21:13]  And I don't know if he's a three or a four star general, but he is at least a three star.
[01:21:19]  And the soldiers, they all just got back from Iraq.
[01:21:24]  And they're driving around in their Humvees and they're pointing their rifles everywhere.
[01:21:28]  But they're in New Orleans.
[01:21:30]  And so this general is screaming at them.
[01:21:34]  Put that goddamn rifle down right now.
[01:21:37]  Put it down.
[01:21:38]  Aim it down.
[01:21:39]  Stop pointing your rifles at these people.
[01:21:42]  And he's just screaming at them.
[01:21:43]  How dare they?
[01:21:45]  But they're soldiers.
[01:21:47]  They just got back from Iraq.
[01:21:49]  And when you're driving a Humvee around in Iraq, man, you're pointing your rifle at whatever target you might acquire.
[01:21:54]  You're looking around for roadside bombs going to blow you and your buddy's legs off, right?
[01:21:59]  You take those same guys, put them in the middle of New Orleans, and they're pointing their guns at all the houses as they drive by, as they're confiscating rifles.
[01:22:07]  People are looking out the window.
[01:22:08]  Remember in Boston when the cops are like pointing their guns at anybody looking out the window when they're civilian police in a city where there was one guy on the loose, right?
[01:22:18]  That was after the Boston bombing.
[01:22:20]  The one guy was dead.
[01:22:21]  The other, the little brother was on the run.
[01:22:23]  They locked down the whole city and it might as well have been martial law right there, just under the authority of the SWAT team.
[01:22:29]  And they were, and you can see the pictures, they're pointing their guns at anybody even looking at them.
[01:22:34]  No, I remember, I remember.
[01:22:36]  Yeah, I remember arguing with people back after the Boston bombing and people, I'd be arguing with people on, I don't know, it might have been Facebook, maybe Twitter back then.
[01:22:45]  I don't even remember, but I was arguing with people on social media over this stuff.
[01:22:48]  And they're like, I was like, dude, these fucking, this SWAT team is shutting down an entire city, just suspending everybody's constitutional rights because like two kids lit off a bomb and like killed a few people.
[01:23:00]  I go, this is like insane that we would just give up all of our freedom.
[01:23:03]  And then people telling me, they're like, dude, they're not, they're just asking people to stay inside.
[01:23:07]  Like they're not forced.
[01:23:08]  And then I would just send them all these pictures.
[01:23:10]  I found out with somebody just pointing a rifle right in a guy's face for stepping outside of his house, still on his property, like on his stoop in Boston, telling him to get back.
[01:23:19]  And by the way, the bomber got away with it longer because of the lockdown.
[01:23:24]  The guy that finally found him finally decided after waiting all day, screw this, I'm going out back for a cigarette.
[01:23:32]  And when he did, he noticed that the tarp on his boat had been disconnected, that someone must have climbed in there.
[01:23:37]  So he called the cops.
[01:23:38]  I said, I think I found your guy.
[01:23:40]  And it was only because he broke the curfew and started going about his day was how he noticed.
[01:23:44]  Yeah.
[01:23:45]  And then they just randomly, like a couple weeks later, murdered some dude in Florida.
[01:23:49]  Remember that?
[01:23:50]  They just like killed someone.
[01:23:51]  That was when they were like, they were like, ah, he was friends with them all.
[01:23:54]  So don't ask any questions.
[01:23:56]  You keep going.
[01:23:56]  You're like, hmm, something stinks about that.
[01:23:59]  I never got to the bottom of that, but like something stunk about that whole thing.
[01:24:03]  You know what sucks, man, is the person who wrote the most and best about that is now the completely discredited, shameless hack Marcy Wheeler, who should throw herself off of something tall for all of her Russia gate nonsense for three years.
[01:24:18]  Boy, did she make a lot of money grifting off of that?
[01:24:21]  But she's the only one.
[01:24:23]  Actually, she's not the only one.
[01:24:24]  I think there was a reporter in the Boston Globe who followed that story.
[01:24:30]  And it was a thing.
[01:24:31]  The guy they murdered, it was in the interrogation booth.
[01:24:34]  It's two FBI agents interviewing the guy.
[01:24:37]  And then they claim he just got up and started attacking them.
[01:24:40]  And they had no choice but to blow him away.

=== Abandon Eastern Europe Empire (16:25) ===

[01:24:42]  I was like, yeah, I mean, it seems like he was under y'all's control.
[01:24:47]  You know, I don't know.
[01:24:48]  And then there was this whole weird thing about a murder that they had been involved in previously, where they had robbed and murdered these pot dealers and the cops had failed to solve that.
[01:24:58]  Oh, and then, of course, as long as we're on Boston, the great Trevor Aronson, who wrote the book, The Terror Factory, about the FBI and all their fake entrapments and put-up jobs, he showed that just like we had been warning, he and I both had been warning for years about this, that as the FBI is so busy chasing their tail, entrapping some idiot into saying he loves Osama, there's going to eventually,
[01:25:25]  after all the killing that Bush has been doing and so forth, we're going to have more blowback terrorist attacks in this country and the FBI is going to get caught unaware.
[01:25:34]  Well, it wasn't just the FBI, it was the Boston FBI that was all wrapped up in the middle of a fake entrapment sting when the Boston bombing took place right under their nose.
[01:25:48]  And when Vladimir Putin's government had warned that these two guys have been paling around with some bad dudes in Dagestan and you better keep a very close eye on them, the dastardly Vladimir Putin trying to stop a terrorist attack.
[01:26:01]  How dare he?
[01:26:02]  They really busy entrapping this retarded kid to protect the lives of the people at the Boston Marathon.
[01:26:09]  That really is one little data point or one little piece of information that the corporate press doesn't enjoy, but that Vladimir Putin went out of his way to warn America to say, hey, keep your eye on these Chechnyan maniacs because they seem to be like hanging out with the wrong crowd and they're up to no good.
[01:26:26]  And they were like, no, no, no, it's okay.
[01:26:28]  We got our own entrapment plans that we're working on.
[01:26:31]  We'll figure that out later.
[01:26:33]  And then, you know, all that stuff.
[01:26:35]  Hey, so let me ask you this because I'd be crazy to have you here and not ask you about this, just switching gears slightly.
[01:26:42]  What, if any effect do you think all of this might have on American foreign policy?
[01:26:48]  Because I think back to how, you know, the great Ron Paul, who's over your left shoulder there, how the great Ron Paul always said that, look, I'm going to try to convince as many people of this non-interventionist philosophy or foreign policy as possible, but really, this is never going to work.
[01:27:05]  What's going to happen is eventually we're going to have an economic crash, and that's when all of the troops will finally come home the same way like the Soviets brought their troops home after the economy was just in ruins.
[01:27:17]  And I don't know.
[01:27:17]  I've just been thinking about the fact like maybe this could be the beginning of some huge economic crash.
[01:27:23]  And so do you is it possible that maybe this will have some positive effect on foreign policy?
[01:27:28]  Or am I just grasping at hopeful straws?
[01:27:33]  Yeah, no, I believe me, I want to believe that.
[01:27:36]  Absolutely.
[01:27:38]  And isn't it obvious?
[01:27:40]  I mean, who in the world, of all of your listeners listening, can you think of what we might have blown $6 trillion on other than these wars in the last 20 years in the middle of this pandemic?
[01:27:54]  Where that capital could have been invested instead?
[01:27:57]  The answer is obvious.
[01:27:58]  And what did we get out of our war in Iraq and our war in Afghanistan, in Libya, in Syria, and Yemen?
[01:28:05]  All we got was more power and influence for Iran, our government's enemies, and more power and influence for Al-Qaeda, our government's allies, our enemies.
[01:28:16]  And we got nothing else out of it at all.
[01:28:18]  Except, you know, dead friends and loved ones.
[01:28:23]  And that was it.
[01:28:24]  And so it absolutely does not have to be this way.
[01:28:26]  It never had to be this way.
[01:28:28]  The doctrine that the middle part of North America is supposed to be the military hedgemen over the rest of the old world is just crazy and stupid and self-refuting on its face.
[01:28:41]  And, you know, Robert Kagan and Bill Crystal in 1996 wrote an essay for foreign affairs called Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy about how we need a morality-based foreign policy where we tell the world what to do all day.
[01:28:56]  And at the end, they actually say this, Dave.
[01:28:59]  They say, John Quincy Adams says that America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.
[01:29:06]  But why not?
[01:29:07]  Monsters are terrible.
[01:29:08]  Everybody hates monsters.
[01:29:10]  What are you going to do?
[01:29:11]  Just sit around and let a monster do a bad thing to somebody and not try to help?
[01:29:15]  And this and that.
[01:29:16]  And then, but they completely ignore the fact that John Quincy Adams answered that question in his speech.
[01:29:22]  He explained, because if we did, then our doctrine would change from liberty to force.
[01:29:27]  We wouldn't even be the USA anymore.
[01:29:30]  We would be the dicatrice of the world, which is exactly what we're trying not to be.
[01:29:35]  This is the land of liberty.
[01:29:36]  You guys are going to have to emulate us as best you can.
[01:29:40]  And that's as much as we can do for you: try to set a good example.
[01:29:45]  And the American people listened to stupid Bill Crystal, who never understood what America was supposed to be about in the first place.
[01:29:51]  His father worshipped Leon Trotsky, the father of the Red Army, you know, the founder of the Red Army.
[01:29:58]  What the hell does the Crystal family know about Americanism or freedom?
[01:30:03]  You know, same thing for the Kagans.
[01:30:05]  I mean, they're Israel firsters.
[01:30:06]  They don't care about the United States.
[01:30:08]  Donald Kagan and Fred Kagan on 9-11 said America should invade the West Bank and kill all the Palestinians and drive them into the river and give all the West Bank to Israel.
[01:30:18]  Really, huh?
[01:30:20]  Why?
[01:30:20]  Because Fatah knocked down the towers?
[01:30:23]  Is that it?
[01:30:24]  No, just because they don't give a damn about you or me at all.
[01:30:27]  That's why.
[01:30:28]  The Kagans and the Crystals, why in the world would anyone let them decide?
[01:30:33]  And then, so this is the world that they've wrought.
[01:30:35]  This is what they've done.
[01:30:36]  You know, Matthew Ho makes a great point.
[01:30:39]  There's a recent documentary about Biden's role in lying us into the war in Iraq.
[01:30:44]  And there's a clip in there, Matthew Ho, for people not familiar.
[01:30:46]  was the former Marine captain, turned State Department whistleblower who tried to stop Obama from doing the surge in 2009 and heroically quit his job and wrote an open letter to Ambassador Eikenberry about it and all of this stuff and tried to stop the surge.
[01:31:02]  And he said, look at Iraq.
[01:31:04]  And he was in Iraq before he was in Afghanistan.
[01:31:06]  He was a Marine in Iraq, State Department in Afghanistan.
[01:31:08]  And he said, you look at Iraq, you know, people say 4,500 of our guys died in Iraq, but that's not right.
[01:31:14]  Add up the contractors.
[01:31:16]  Everybody always leaves out the contractors as though they're all blackwater mercenaries, but that's not true because actually, yes, screw a blackwater mercenary, right?
[01:31:23]  But that's not the reality.
[01:31:25]  Contractor, you ought to think little old lady driving a Halliburton fuel truck.
[01:31:29]  That's who was the contractor over there.
[01:31:31]  Like some redneck who would have been an AC repairman or an electrician out here helping people in the marketplace in Texas is instead over there driving overpriced fuel from base to base and getting blown up by a roadside bomb.
[01:31:46]  And he says, you count all the contractors who died and you count all the veteran suicides from Iraq War II.
[01:31:53]  We lost 10,000 people in that war.
[01:31:56]  10, not 4,500, 10,000 people.
[01:32:01]  And what do we get out of it?
[01:32:02]  Absolutely nothing.
[01:32:03]  And if this virus does not drive that point home to people that, my God, how in the world could we have blown this century this badly?
[01:32:14]  And if they don't insist on this change, that we abandon this project and bring our soldiers home from Germany, from Japan, from Korea, from the Middle East, from Latin America and everywhere else so that we can get our reset and we can take care of ourselves, then they're the biggest disappointment in history.
[01:32:33]  You know, at the end of World War II, the people of England, they fired Churchill.
[01:32:38]  They said, great job with the war.
[01:32:40]  Now get out.
[01:32:40]  And they brought in, I think it was Heath, who was a child rapist.
[01:32:44]  But anyway, they brought him in and his deal was we're going to abandon the empire in order to shore up the welfare state.
[01:32:51]  The people of England want their medical care.
[01:32:54]  They don't care anymore about ruling India.
[01:32:58]  These tough choices, we're going to have to make them.
[01:33:01]  Ruling India is not a profit-making enterprise.
[01:33:04]  It's a money loser all the way around.
[01:33:06]  We have to knock it off.
[01:33:07]  That's it.
[01:33:08]  What are we getting out of it?
[01:33:09]  Nothing.
[01:33:10]  And so we're done.
[01:33:11]  And they gave it up.
[01:33:12]  And this is what Chalmers Johnson said.
[01:33:14]  Either give up your empire or you live under it.
[01:33:17]  And the Brits decided they would rather give up their empire than turn their country into a totalitarian police state in order to try to enforce the taxation required to prop it up any longer and to save the welfare state for the people who'd fought in the war.
[01:33:33]  And so that's the choice.
[01:33:35]  That's exactly where we're at now.
[01:33:36]  We're either going to give up our empire or back to your previous question about martial law, we're going to live under it because we're going to need a totalitarian government to be able to force the American people to continue to support this thing.
[01:33:49]  And so that's our choice.
[01:33:51]  And we absolutely got to make the right choice.
[01:33:53]  But then, so what's the opposite of that since we're never going to make the right choice, Dave?
[01:33:57]  The opposite of that is to follow FDR's lead and restart conscription and find a big new war to get us into, like say maybe in Persia.
[01:34:08]  And that'll bring the unemployment rate down.
[01:34:10]  We'll just take 10 million people out of the workforce and put them in olive green and ship them overseas.
[01:34:15]  That was FDR's plan and it worked for him.
[01:34:18]  And by the way, to this day, people go, FDR was great.
[01:34:21]  After all, World War II brought down the unemployment rate and they have no irony whatsoever in that.
[01:34:26]  You know, they really think that that is true and was a great economic program for that reason.
[01:34:32]  And so I brought this up to David Stockman again in the interview today.
[01:34:36]  And Stockman said, here's the deal.
[01:34:38]  Here's the difference.
[01:34:40]  Despite all of the problems from the way that they handled the Great Depression, they actually didn't drum up that much debt.
[01:34:51]  And so that's the difference.
[01:34:53]  Right now, we're at 23 trillion.
[01:34:55]  As you said, they just made it 25.
[01:34:57]  We're going, we're at a $2 trillion deficit minimum this year, maybe three.
[01:35:02]  Who knows what they're going to be done by the end of this fiscal year?
[01:35:05]  God knows how much money they'll have spent.
[01:35:07]  And so at that point, the debt is just too much.
[01:35:12]  And if they just try to double down on the war and use the war as a jobs program to keep more people in the army and off to unemployment rolls and all those kinds of things, at some point, sooner than later, we'll be facing a situation where people abandon U.S. bonds, where people no longer buy American government securities because they no longer believe in the dollar.
[01:35:36]  They no longer believe in the IRS's ability to tax us enough to pay them their interest on their bonds.
[01:35:44]  They don't think that the system can continue.
[01:35:47]  At that point, like you said, what Ron Paul says, when the dollar breaks, when there's just no choice anymore, you're going to come home the hard way.
[01:35:56]  And frankly, I hate to say this, man, but we really are better off having an absolute financial catastrophe that forces the American people to finally get it together and force our government to abandon the empire before they make things that much worse.
[01:36:14]  And look at what's their idea of using the Army as a jobs program now, building up tensions with Russia in Eastern Europe.
[01:36:23]  You know, never mind patrolling poshtuns in the Hellman province.
[01:36:28]  They're talking, you know, they're working very hard on expanding the containment policy against Russia and China.
[01:36:35]  The U.S. Army has a massive buildup in Eastern Europe right now, more troops in Poland, troops and trainers and equipment, you know, military equipment going to Ukraine, to the Baltic states right on Russia's border.
[01:36:49]  At the same time that the Air Force and the Marine Corps and the Navy are all worried about building up against the Chinese as the Special Operations Command is worried about spreading throughout Africa.
[01:37:03]  I mean, as bad as that is, getting us into a fight with Russia will make a Great Depression look like a blessing.
[01:37:10]  And that we got to hope for is that the people will say, you know what?
[01:37:14]  Actually, we don't give a damn if Putin rules Eastern Europe, which he obviously has no intent to do anyway.
[01:37:21]  But if the Russians roll into the Baltic states, the American people don't know where Tallinn is.
[01:37:27]  They've never heard of it.
[01:37:28]  They have no idea where the Baltic states are or why they should care.
[01:37:32]  And the idea that we would be, that our government would be willing to risk a nuclear war or any kind of war at all with a power like Russia over these countries that are 1,200 miles to the east of Germany, that countries that the American people mostly have never heard of and could never find on a map.
[01:37:54]  It's just absolutely intolerable.
[01:37:56]  And now is our chance.
[01:37:58]  Now should be our chance.
[01:37:59]  You know, I'm writing a book right now, time to end the war on terrorism.
[01:38:02]  And I really hope that by the time it comes out, the whole thing is just stupid and obsolete because everybody already agrees and the war on terrorism is over and it was the virus, nothing I said, that finally got it done.
[01:38:14]  Yeah, well, I mean, I guess we can hope, although it does feel like maybe we should be cautiously optimistic about the idea of that happening.
[01:38:22]  Let me ask you just what your thoughts are on, because we, I mean, we touched on this briefly before, but what do you think?
[01:38:29]  You know, I've been saying for a while on the podcast that I think Donald Trump is basically a shoe-in to be re-elected.
[01:38:37]  I've been saying this before the coronavirus, but I always kind of had this asterisk of barring some type of economic collapse because that happens.
[01:38:46]  And, you know, then it's kind of anybody's game.
[01:38:49]  And Donald Trump has been running on his great economy.
[01:38:52]  Now, this situation, you go, man, he seems pretty vulnerable to me.
[01:38:57]  If it was just, oh, excuse me.
[01:39:00]  If it was just Alexa, turn off.
[01:39:04]  Sorry, my mother-in-law's Alexa.
[01:39:06]  You got one of those things in your house.
[01:39:07]  Are you nuts?
[01:39:08]  Yeah, I know.
[01:39:08]  They're all, by the way, this is the worst conversation we could be having right now in front of this thing.
[01:39:14]  But it's all going on your permanent record, Smith.
[01:39:17]  Well, it's all, I'm already putting it up online.
[01:39:19]  So we're all, let's get real.
[01:39:20]  Me and you are asking for it already.
[01:39:22]  But so what do you think?
[01:39:23]  I mean, but I do tend to agree with you.
[01:39:24]  I just don't think Biden could win anything.
[01:39:27]  But what do you think?
[01:39:28]  Do you see Donald Trump getting re-elected?
[01:39:31]  Assuming we have elections and things like that.
[01:39:33]  How do you see this?
[01:39:34]  It's hard to say, man.
[01:39:34]  I mean, honestly, you're right.
[01:39:36]  He has run this whole time on, hey, everybody, the bubble hasn't popped yet.
[01:39:41]  Well, now it has.
[01:39:43]  And what else does he have to brag about?
[01:39:45]  He hasn't ended any of the wars he said he was going to end.
[01:39:48]  Although I will give him credit.
[01:39:49]  It looks like he is trying to end the war in Afghanistan.
[01:39:52]  But he left a loophole big enough there.
[01:39:53]  They're not supposed to be gone until another 13 months from now.
[01:39:58]  And that's plenty of time for those decisions to be reversed.
[01:40:03]  And like I say, maybe the virus will speed up the timeline on that.
[01:40:07]  But, you know, otherwise, whatever promises he has kept have been bad ones, like, you know, disrupting trade between the U.S. and China and Mexico and Europe and the rest of these kinds of things.
[01:40:20]  I don't think he has much of a record to run on.
[01:40:23]  And, you know, obviously the huge variable here is how many people die this summer, you know, this spring and summer and into the fall of this virus.
[01:40:32]  If it turns out that our hospitals are able to handle it without breaking down and that the numbers of deaths stay in the thousands and not tens of thousands or worse, then I think it'll probably be all right.
[01:40:46]  If we're talking about tens of thousands or even more, you know, 100,000 or more dead, like in some of the worst projections, it's going to be chaos and it's going to be blamed on him.
[01:40:56]  It's good to be the king, except in bad times when everything is your fault.
[01:41:00]  And yet the Democrats just got no talent, Dave.
[01:41:06]  Who are they going to run?
[01:41:07]  Marco Rubio?

=== Primary Election Mossad Trap (14:47) ===

[01:41:08]  They don't have anybody.
[01:41:09]  They're going to have to start getting Republicans to lead their ticket.
[01:41:15]  And even then, the Republicans don't have any talent either.
[01:41:18]  They just tried to run Bill Weld against him.
[01:41:20]  You know, the establishment guys did.
[01:41:23]  On the Democrat side, they got Sanders, the old coot who the young people like, but who the establishment absolutely hates and who the baby boom generation just won't support.
[01:41:33]  They're terrified of him for whatever different reasons too.
[01:41:36]  And then everybody else is an absolute bum.
[01:41:40]  Joe Biden's completely losing his mind.
[01:41:42]  Again, I reiterate, I don't think there's a snowball's chance in hell they're going to run him in the general election in November.
[01:41:49]  He'll be out by then.
[01:41:50]  He will have to quit by then.
[01:41:51]  It's only March right now.
[01:41:53]  There's no way he's going to make it.
[01:41:55]  But then who else they got?
[01:41:57]  Bloomberg is 5'2 ⁇ .
[01:41:58]  He looks like a troll and he's Jewish.
[01:42:01]  And he even has the name Berg in his name.
[01:42:03]  I'm not saying I'm anti-Semitic.
[01:42:05]  I'm just saying the American people overall are not going to vote for a guy named Bloomberg.
[01:42:11]  And he's not even like.
[01:42:11]  Even if he was tall, dark, and handsome, which he ain't.
[01:42:14]  No, it's not even just that.
[01:42:15]  He might as well be named Puckabee.
[01:42:17]  I've talked about this before the show.
[01:42:18]  It's not even just like, oh, do you think you could get like a Jewish guy like Michael Bloomberg in?
[01:42:24]  It's like a Jew who's short and effeminate from New York, a billionaire, like literally everything against him that could be going for it.
[01:42:34]  And then on top of that.
[01:42:34]  And he's so ugly.
[01:42:36]  I mean, he was ugly when he was 19.
[01:42:38]  He's never been handsome a day in his life.
[01:42:40]  He's hideous.
[01:42:41]  And on top of that, he's also, just in case all that stuff wasn't enough, he can never, ever.
[01:42:50]  I mean, you might think Joe Biden has some trouble getting the left half of the Democratic base on board with him.
[01:42:57]  But the idea that Republican racist Michael Bloomberg, you know how you want to control crime is you got to throw these blacks up against a wall and go through their pockets.
[01:43:08]  Like he's on record saying that.
[01:43:10]  And now you think you're going to get the woke PC portion of the Democratic Party to vote for that guy?
[01:43:18]  I mean, there's just no chance.
[01:43:21]  He's got everything.
[01:43:22]  He's got something for everyone to hate.
[01:43:24]  Billionaire for those who hate billionaires, Jew for those who hate Jew, you know, Republican for those who hate Republican.
[01:43:31]  Like he's, he's got it all.
[01:43:32]  So I don't even think he's a possibility.
[01:43:35]  I don't think it could be anyone who was in the primary race because Bernie Sanders is going to have beaten all of them besides Joe Biden.
[01:43:43]  So then I don't think they can do that.
[01:43:45]  I think they'd have to go either, either our girl Hill Dog will have to come back and make another dance because she would do it.
[01:43:54]  I could see them trying Warren because they believe that she can try to appeal to the left and stuff.
[01:43:58]  They're wrong on that now.
[01:44:00]  Warren lost all her lefty credibility when she didn't get out and endorse Bernie Sanders.
[01:44:05]  She would have been better off.
[01:44:06]  She would have been better off as a tool for the establishment to get out and endorse Bernie Sanders.
[01:44:11]  I think they were just too scared to let her do it.
[01:44:14]  But then she could have at least said, she's like, look, see, I'm an honest progressive, you know, but she proved to anybody.
[01:44:19]  And I've talked to a lot of like real left-wingers.
[01:44:21]  They knew they actually knew this before any of this stuff.
[01:44:24]  They knew they couldn't trust her to their credit.
[01:44:26]  They knew they couldn't trust Elizabeth Warren.
[01:44:27]  If they could, she would have endorsed Sanders back in 2016.
[01:44:31]  And she didn't have the courage to do that then.
[01:44:34]  But right now, think about even beyond 2016, because you can say, now it was always stacked against him, but it was inevitable that Bernie Sanders was never going to win the primary in 2016.
[01:44:42]  But in 2020, Bernie Sanders had a real shot, like a real deal shot.
[01:44:47]  He was the favorite before Super Tuesday on everybody's scorecard.
[01:44:51]  And so Elizabeth Warren, well, look, I mean, at least the closest shot that he ever had.
[01:44:56]  He had much more of a shot than he did in 2016, this cycle going in.
[01:45:00]  And Elizabeth Warren could have said, look, like if she was, if she cared about her principles at all, she could have said, well, look, I really care about universal health care.
[01:45:08]  I really care about abolishing student loan debt and making public school tuition free, you know, the whole Bernie Sanders agenda and go, this is the best chance we have to actually get somebody in the White House who believes in that.
[01:45:18]  So I'm going out and throwing support in for her.
[01:45:20]  And instead, she spent that month attacking Bernie Sanders.
[01:45:24]  Not only did she not get out and endorse him, but spent the month saying he's a sexist and he's, you know, all this, this other, you know, crap.
[01:45:31]  She also abandoned her entire economic program for feminism and wokeness.
[01:45:36]  And I'm going to make nobody a nine-year-old transgender person to decide who's my secretary of housing and urban development or whatever.
[01:45:46]  She tweeted out.
[01:45:47]  I've mentioned this on the show several times, but she tweeted at one point, which is so goddamn funny.
[01:45:51]  It's just like the perfect wokeism, you know, like take.
[01:45:54]  She tweeted that black transgender women are the backbone of this country.
[01:46:01]  You're just like, what the fuck are you even saying?
[01:46:04]  Like, what is even coming at you?
[01:46:06]  Even black transgendered women don't think that.
[01:46:09]  Nobody thinks that.
[01:46:10]  Even, yeah, the black transgendered women.
[01:46:12]  Okay, so there's like 17 of them and about 12 of them were like, don't fucking pander to me like that.
[01:46:19]  You know what I mean?
[01:46:19]  Like there's you've got five people left who you've actually, no, but the truth is it's not even about appealing to them.
[01:46:24]  It's about appealing to fucking white upper middle class liberal women who go, yeah, black, like it has nothing to do with black people or transgender.
[01:46:32]  It's never been about them.
[01:46:34]  It's always about white liberals.
[01:46:35]  So back to the to the race, though.
[01:46:37]  I mean, I think, I guess my take is that it would be hard for them to steal it from Sanders at this point.
[01:46:43]  If Biden is forced to drop out, which I'm betting you, you know, everything I got that Biden is going to not make it, the pressure is going to be on them to go ahead and let it be Sanders.
[01:46:54]  He's clearly the second runner-up in the race here.
[01:46:57]  He's been in the race all along.
[01:46:59]  On the other hand, boy, are they dead set against it?
[01:47:03]  So it would be over their dead body, but they just have no choice but to go ahead and give it to him.
[01:47:09]  Otherwise, I guess my bet is on somebody like Gavin Newsome, somebody who didn't even run in the primary, but they say, look, we're just going to get our most handsome Democratic governor that we can.
[01:47:19]  And after all, he's been a leader in a crisis right now.
[01:47:24]  He's raised his profile up.
[01:47:26]  People have asked me about Cuomo, but again, to channel the American people's racism, not my own, he's got a vowel at the end of his name.
[01:47:34]  And if he was, you know, a Catholic, you know, an Irish Catholic like Kennedy, maybe.
[01:47:40]  But an Italian, and again, short and ugly and not really like a charismatic, handsome type of alpha dog, it's just never going to work.
[01:47:50]  It's just never going to work.
[01:47:51]  Kennedy was handsome.
[01:47:53]  That's how he won is the ladies all swoon for him, this kind of thing.
[01:47:56]  Oh, and plus, the mob, the Italian mob stole it for him in Illinois and the Texas mob stole it for him.
[01:48:02]  You know, Lyndon Johnson's mob stole Texas for him is the only way that he's won.
[01:48:07]  But he also, on top of that, I mean, like, look, the mafia absolutely stole it from him.
[01:48:12]  The being handsome was a big thing.
[01:48:13]  And also, I mean, to Kennedy's credit, he was a very talented politician.
[01:48:18]  I mean, he could give a really good speech and he was charming.
[01:48:21]  And they just don't have anyone like that.
[01:48:24]  The last guy they had was Obama.
[01:48:25]  I mean, Obama was the last guy.
[01:48:27]  They had real.
[01:48:28]  Look, the two Democratic presidents of my lifetime were real legit talents.
[01:48:34]  I'm not like saying anything good about them, but Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were like unbelievable political talents.
[01:48:41]  You can't deny that.
[01:48:42]  They could work a room.
[01:48:44]  They could like, you know, like you see Obama give a speech.
[01:48:47]  You ever see Bill Clinton deal with a heckler?
[01:48:48]  Like not Bill Clinton now.
[01:48:50]  He did too many drugs and he didn't teach well.
[01:48:52]  But like Bill Clinton in his prime, he was just incredibly, like he was really good at what he did.
[01:48:58]  They got no one like that.
[01:48:59]  And so, yeah, I mean, maybe, maybe Trump will do it or your boy Jacob Hornberger will come in and win the day.
[01:49:08]  I guess we'll see.
[01:49:09]  But yeah, you know, and Trump, after all, is the incumbent.
[01:49:13]  And in our lifetimes, the only one-term president we've had since, I mean, when I was a boy, it was, you know, I was born during Ford and lived through Carter.
[01:49:23]  But ever since then, every president has done two terms except George H.W. Bush.
[01:49:28]  And that was because he was seen as, man, it's been 12 years of the Republicans now.
[01:49:32]  It's time for a swing the other way.
[01:49:34]  And as you just said, he was up against an incredibly talented Bill Clinton.
[01:49:39]  And Ross Perler took him by surprise.
[01:49:41]  And Ross Perot came in and kind of mucked it up.
[01:49:43]  Yeah, and Ross Perot split the vote bad against the Republicans at the time.
[01:49:46]  Absolutely.
[01:49:48]  And again, in 96, too.
[01:49:50]  Yeah.
[01:49:50]  But he just beaming.
[01:49:52]  He made a big huge advantage.
[01:49:53]  But also, George H.W. made the Cardinal Sin, the huge mistake.
[01:49:57]  He ended his war, which is a terrible decision.
[01:49:59]  You don't do that.
[01:50:00]  You don't end a war.
[01:50:01]  What's wrong with you?
[01:50:02]  You're just in midstream.
[01:50:03]  You got to stay in the middle of the stream so that nobody wants you to change horses.
[01:50:07]  That was the lesson his son learned.
[01:50:09]  I want to make sure I'm in the middle of a war during my reelection.
[01:50:12]  And it worked, of course.
[01:50:13]  Yeah.
[01:50:14]  Yeah, it sure did.
[01:50:15]  Well, he also ran against John Kerry.
[01:50:17]  That helps too.
[01:50:17]  That's right.
[01:50:18]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:50:20]  And, you know, this is what's funny about them nominating Biden is they're going, they're sticking with this conventional wisdom that you got to run the centrist to win those swing voters.
[01:50:31]  The winger, you always run if you're a Republican to the right, if you're a Democrat to the left in the primaries, but then you run to the center in the general.
[01:50:41]  Everybody knows that.
[01:50:42]  Even though, well, let's see.
[01:50:44]  Al Gore lost and John Kerry lost and Hillary Clinton lost to Barack Obama in the primary, which Obama was a centrist, but he was dressed up like a winger.
[01:50:55]  So he split the difference perfect there.
[01:50:58]  And then Hillary lost again to Donald Trump of all people.
[01:51:02]  She lost.
[01:51:04]  And then they look at the current scenario and instead of saying, man, we should elect the quirky, bald old Jew from Brooklyn who actually has a little bit of charisma and people come and rally behind, who, in his case, being Jewish is a real benefit because he's not a billionaire, like you say, in all this, but it's what makes him seem an outsider, right?
[01:51:25]  It makes him a little bit different than the typical establishment.
[01:51:29]  It's his, like Obama, his blackness that makes him unique and seem like an outsider.
[01:51:36]  Him being a winger is his strength.
[01:51:38]  And what do the Democrats do?
[01:51:40]  They nominate Joe Biden, the guy who is indistinguishable from George W. Bush.
[01:51:46]  You could just as easily say he's a liberal Republican as he is a conservative Democrat and who is from the era, you know, going back, he's been in the Senate.
[01:51:55]  He was in the Senate for 40 years and was bad on everything.
[01:51:59]  You know, there's a book, Yesterday's Man, by Bronco Marchteach, who I just interviewed, about, man, Biden teamed up with Strom Thurman to attack Ronald Reagan for eight years for being soft on crime and being soft on drugs and not getting his act together enough.
[01:52:17]  He spent the whole 1980s and 90s.
[01:52:20]  He's the guy that wrote the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act that was after Oklahoma that ended up being the germ of the Patriot Act, which he also helped to shepherd through the Senate along with Iraq War II and the rest of this stuff.
[01:52:36]  I mean, he is just absolutely not just a centrist, but he is a senator who was in on every single bit of this stuff.
[01:52:46]  You can find a centrist, you know, governor who none of this stuff is his fault, maybe, you know, but they're completely nuts.
[01:52:54]  Even if he was in his right mind, they're completely nuts to have nominated him.
[01:52:58]  He's the reason that Donald Trump is the president right now.
[01:53:01]  Donald Trump was elected as a repudiation of every single policy that Joe Biden ever supported.
[01:53:08]  And then that's who they're going to run against him?
[01:53:11]  They're just nuts.
[01:53:12]  And this can't be emphasized enough, even though it's so stupid, people already forgot about it because it was never important, really.
[01:53:21]  But RussiaGate, they spent three years falsely accusing Donald Trump of high treason with the Kremlin.
[01:53:31]  I mean, I'm sorry.
[01:53:32]  I'd like to see Donald Trump prosecuted for war crimes and sentenced to life in the supermax with Ted Kaczynski.
[01:53:40]  I don't give a damn what happens to Donald Trump.
[01:53:42]  He is absolutely a guilty war criminal.
[01:53:44]  But you know what?
[01:53:45]  I kind of think he deserves a second term just because of that.
[01:53:49]  How dare they?
[01:53:50]  How dare they?
[01:53:50]  And you know what?
[01:53:52]  I supported the impeachment and imprisonment of Bill Clinton, too, mostly for Waco and for war crimes against the people of Iraq in the 1990s.
[01:54:01]  I hate Bill Clinton.
[01:54:02]  I hate Bill Clinton as much as I hate George Bush, way more than Barack Obama.
[01:54:06]  You can tell I'm a nonpartisan type.
[01:54:08]  I just despise Bill Clinton.
[01:54:10]  But, you know, well, I know somebody who knows a lot of things.
[01:54:15]  And this person has a pretty compelling theory that I'm not sure I buy this, but for hypothetical argument's sake here, this person has a very compelling theory that Monica Lewinsky was sent by the Israeli Mossad to entrap Bill Clinton to destroy his attempt to force the Israelis to get the hell out of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and let there be a Palestinian state.
[01:54:37]  Her stepfather was Mossad, was tied directly to Mossad.
[01:54:41]  And that the idea was she was a swallow.
[01:54:44]  She was sent there to entrap Bill.
[01:54:46]  Now, her blabbing her gums to Linda Tripp and all that and getting caught is sort of separate, but he didn't need to be caught for them to blackmail him.
[01:54:58]  And they could have got him caught anyway if they needed him compromised that bad.
[01:55:02]  But that's what he was impeached over.
[01:55:03]  And I have to say, as much as I would like to personally throw Bill Clinton on the pyre, whether he's already dead or not, I don't know.
[01:55:14]  I kind of think he should have got a third term.
[01:55:17]  If that was really the Israeli Mossad that entrapped him, even though he did fall for it, he didn't have to fall for it.
[01:55:23]  Sure.
[01:55:24]  He could have told her, put your skirt back down, young lady, and get the hell out of here.
[01:55:27]  He didn't do that.
[01:55:28]  He took advantage.
[01:55:29]  But you know what?
[01:55:30]  The Israeli Mossad entrapped him.
[01:55:32]  I say, let him do three terms.
[01:55:34]  Screw the 22nd Amendment.
[01:55:36]  You don't get to entrap presidents.
[01:55:38]  You don't get to falsely accuse them, especially a foreign power like Israel intervening in our process like that.
[01:55:45]  And the Democrats and the CIA and the FBI counterintelligence division falsely accusing Donald Trump of high treason.
[01:55:52]  I don't know.
[01:55:53]  That sounds like a free second term to me.
[01:55:55]  Yeah, no, I agree.

=== Libertarian Institute Foreign Policy (02:21) ===

[01:55:56]  And I think that everybody, everybody who was pushing the Russia hoax all deserves to just literally be Siberia.
[01:56:07]  Like you all need to get the hell out of the country and never come back.
[01:56:09]  Everyone's leaders of it.
[01:56:10]  Absolutely.
[01:56:11]  And even the journalists who just pushed it, knowing what they were doing.
[01:56:15]  I mean, you literally, like, you, it's the most nationalistic I ever feel because I'm, you know, it's weird to feel this way when you're an anarchist, but you're like, this is the president of the United States of America.
[01:56:25]  And yes, by the way, he's a war criminal and he should also be hung publicly after being tried for war crimes, but that's the president of the United States.
[01:56:32]  You don't just get to frame him and lie to the American people.
[01:56:35]  And so, yeah, I agree with you.
[01:56:36]  Listen, we're with the Kremlin of all things.
[01:56:39]  Yeah, really.
[01:56:40]  No?
[01:56:40]  Yeah.
[01:56:41]  Yeah, no.
[01:56:41]  That's not okay.
[01:56:43]  All right.
[01:56:43]  Well, listen, let's wrap up there because I want to get the episode over to my people so they can get it posted.
[01:56:48]  But, dude, it's always the best chatting with you.
[01:56:50]  And I love, you know, usually we just talk about foreign policy, but you're great on everything.
[01:56:54]  So it's great to talk about all this other stuff.
[01:56:56]  Scott, stay healthy, stay safe.
[01:56:59]  And we'll talk again soon.
[01:57:02]  I got nothing but time these days.
[01:57:03]  So we'll do another one.
[01:57:04]  We'll do another one soon.
[01:57:06]  Great.
[01:57:06]  Thanks.
[01:57:08]  Of course, everybody, go pick up Fool's Erand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, The Great Ron Paul, Coming to Palestine, which is available.
[01:57:17]  You can grab that over at the Institute, right?
[01:57:18]  Libertarian Institute.
[01:57:19]  Yeah, that's Sheldon Richmond's great book on Palestine.
[01:57:22]  Anybody wants to know the libertarian take on Israel-Palestine?
[01:57:26]  Coming to Palestine by Sheldon Richmond.
[01:57:28]  That's all you need to know, man.
[01:57:29]  It's got you right there.
[01:57:31]  And of course, the Scott Horton show.
[01:57:33]  I mean, there's just thousands of interviews.
[01:57:35]  You want to really understand foreign policy.
[01:57:37]  Start diving into those.
[01:57:39]  If you're at home right now, 5,000, 5,000 interviews.
[01:57:43]  If you're at home right now and you're like, hey, you know what?
[01:57:45]  I can't go to work.
[01:57:46]  I got some free time.
[01:57:47]  You want to really come out of this understanding what's going on with the military-industrial complex, the warfare state right now?
[01:57:54]  Start binging on some of the Scott Horton show interviews because they're just incredible and just amazing.
[01:58:01]  So interviews with some of just the best people out there.
[01:58:04]  And I love them.
[01:58:04]  It's like my favorite thing to listen to.
[01:58:06]  Antiwar.com, of course, as well to read.
[01:58:09]  And the Libertarian Institute.
[01:58:10]  The Libertarian Institute.org, of course.
[01:58:13]  All right, brother.
[01:58:14]  Good to talk to you, man.
[01:58:15]  We'll talk soon.
[01:58:16]  Thanks, sir.
[01:58:17]  All right.