Keith Knight and Dave Smith dissect pandemic authoritarianism, arguing that lockdowns and forced masks validate state violence rather than security. They critique cultural Marxism, police brutality against innocents, and the absurdity of comparing Kentucky fires to Syria. Knight asserts immigration vanishes with privatized property, condemns government overreach in social issues like abortion and sex ed, and advocates exposing state illegitimacy through literature instead of retaliatory wars. Ultimately, the episode champions libertarian non-aggression principles as the only moral framework against coercive state power. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Government Overreach and Libertarianism00:10:12
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
Hey, what's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
Hope you're all doing well.
I got a great guest with us tonight.
It is Keith Knight.
He's the host of the Don't Tread on Anyone show, which is really phenomenal.
I was always kind of peripherally aware of you, Keith, but I just recently started, like, I found some of your stuff on YouTube and I was just like binging on it.
It's really, really great stuff.
So I'm so glad you would join us on the show.
Appreciate you having me on, Dave.
Thanks.
Yeah.
So anyway, people, I highly recommend go check it out.
A lot of really great stuff there.
So you're on ANCAP like myself, and you're very, very sound on the philosophy.
I started, I texted Pete Quinones when I found your stuff.
I was like, you know this Keith Knight guy?
He's great.
And he was like, yeah, I've had him on my show a bunch of times.
He's phenomenal.
And I was like, oh, I guess I'm the asshole.
I mean, maybe I should have known more about you before this.
But so let me ask you, because obviously, like, you know, we've been talking a lot about the situation with everything that's going on.
I want to, I thought it would be fun to talk more just kind of philosophical stuff on the show today, but it's kind of crazy for me to not start by asking you, what's your take on the whole pandemic government response?
What are your thoughts as an ANCAP watching this whole crazy thing unfold?
It's so difficult to really have a developed opinion on a virus when you haven't really done the research to know what it takes.
So the question that I would ask myself is, if there is a pandemic, what sort of society would I want to live in?
One where there's a state constantly coercively stopping people from making voluntary exchanges and constantly innovating.
Yes, you can innovate once this committee gives you the green light.
Well, of course, everything is going to be harder than it otherwise would be.
Every time you have an idea for a part of the problem show, you just have to get an exception from a committee.
This way, dangerous ideas don't go around and kill tons of people.
So we're just regulating them.
We're not trying to violently dominate you or anything.
Well, of course, you're going to get much less output than you otherwise would.
You'll get much less people trying to innovate.
If there's such a high ladder to sort of join the club or to try and get your foot in the door of how to innovate, you're going to get less productivity than you otherwise would.
Now, even in totalitarian societies like China, I mean, they had this terrible outbreak with all their government regulation.
So long story short, the existence of a state, I don't think, justifies or the existence of a virus rather doesn't justify a state any more than very bad things are happening.
Therefore, the Koch brothers have the right to coercively dominate millions of strangers, take 25% of their income annually because bad things are happening.
Well, that's the ultimate status non-sequitur.
Something bad exists.
Therefore, this group called the government group gets to violently dominate the rest of us.
So it's really hard to have a take on something specific.
Of course, you know, the certificate of need laws that I remember hearing about those decades ago and just being shocked.
Literally, you have to get the permission of potential competitors as to whether or not you can build a facility.
So what is the default position?
The state owns all land.
And sometimes if you work really, really hard, you can build a hospital to help people.
Well, of course, you're going to have a shortage that way.
Every time the state gets involved, every time violence is introduced, you get much less wealth.
And if you have a virus, you want to live in a wealthy society where you're free to trade and pursue ideas.
So that is my general take as an ANCAP on the situation.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's spot on.
And I particularly like that point about China being such an authoritarian state.
And really, not only did it not prevent this from happening, it created the whole problem.
I mean, look, it seems right now.
I mean, I guess this is not exactly a certainty, but it seems like the most likely origin of the coronavirus was a Chinese state-run lab.
And it seems to me like it wasn't intentional.
I don't see any evidence that the Chinese actually intentionally let this virus out, but it seems a lot more likely than people eating bat soup at this point, that it actually came out of a Chinese lab where they had these bats.
It was the only place in Wuhan where you could find these bats, and that they just didn't have very good protections and they weren't following like procedure or didn't have good procedures.
And so the government is really what caused this.
And then when the doctors were blowing the whistle on it, they were silenced by the Chinese government.
So not only did having this authoritarian government not prevent the situation or help alleviate the situation, it actually caused this entire global pandemic.
And that is really, that to me is a pretty devastating blow to the idea that, well, authoritarianism, because we can force quarantines on everybody is the way to go.
And then, of course, the fact that they can't even force quarantines, even here, even with all this stuff that's been rolled out, if you were to actually force quarantines, people would be starving to death.
People would be going crazy.
There'd be riots in the streets.
So they're like, okay, well, no, we'll let you go for a jog.
We'll let you go for a bike ride.
Of course, we have to let you go to the supermarket because otherwise people aren't going to be able to eat.
And the supermarket is like the worst place you could go if there's a viral outbreak.
It's where everyone in your neighborhood has gone into this small enclosed area is touching everything.
I mean, who the hell knows?
So I like what you said.
And I would just add that to it.
But it does, it seems to me, do you have a feeling?
Because this is one of the things I've been kind of battling with in my own mind and talking about on the show a lot is that there were so many people, of course, I'm sure you saw this, right when the virus broke out, they said, you know, saying, this is the death of libertarianism.
And this is proof that you can't have libertarianism.
Because I mean, look, Trump's moving ships around and the national defense authorization or whatever, the Production Act and all this stuff and forced quarantine.
So obviously it's the death of libertarianism.
Do you get a sense yet whether you think this is going to be bad or good for the liberty movement?
I think really looking at a long view of history that acceptance to tyranny has sort of been the norm since like ancient Egypt.
It's kind of like, well, real genuine libertarianism, self-ownership, private property and the right to freely exchange good you justly acquired.
That's so new that, I mean, we've made it so far throughout all this other stuff, throughout a world war, a second world war, cold war, the welfare state, that I don't see this dying out.
And of course, these motherfuckers would never give us the benefit of the doubt if it was the other way.
It's like, you know, after these world wars have happened two times, we really need to rethink government.
I mean, after all the murder, oh, genocide, democide, oh, they're killing their own citizens on top of war.
Wow.
But we really got to rethink this thing.
Oh, malinvestment by the Federal Reserve is creating another recession.
Well, gosh, we really can't have any more status around.
But when the slightest thing happens that it is pinned on libertarianism, well, this whole thing needs to be done away with.
And of course, like you said, so what you were getting at earlier, this is from a paper from South China University, and it made a couple points that this disease came from, or this virus, came from the horseshoe bat, the closest colony of which is 900 kilometers away from the wet markets, which it's being pinned on.
Closer to the wet markets, a few hundred yards, is a bioweapons lab where they were studying.
Out of all the animals, you guessed it, the horseshoe bat.
And then only about seven kilometers away from that.
Again, this is according to South China University.
This is not, you know, Alex Jones.
This was cited on Tucker Carlson's show.
This is where it came out of.
So, no, I don't see libertarianism dying because of this.
I think if we really bring it to the forefront, you know, these things are going to happen, whether there's tyranny, slavery, fascism, syndicalism, communism, free market anarchism.
It's going to happen.
Which society would you rather live under?
And look at all the innovations that we have because of competition.
They're sort of softening the blow.
The fact that computers are privatized creates a profit incentive and competition to make them more affordable to millions of people who can work at home, who otherwise would have been employed.
So that's something that's better.
The fact that we have Grubhub, the fact that we have grocery delivery services makes this, it softens the blow a little bit from there.
I don't see libertarianism totally dying out, even though if it takes a blow, it took a big blow after 9-11.
It took a big hit in 2008 when all of the fucking morons of the planet gathered around to say, including Alan Greenspan, well, you know, I was really into that objectivism thing, but I guess there's a flaw in the free market.
When, of course, the Federal Reserve that he was controlling created the bubble in the first place, along with Fannie and Freddie and the Community Reinvestment Act.
So short term, yes, it's a pretty big blow to the head, but I still think we're great long term because we have the solid foundation.
Yeah, no, I tend to agree with you.
And I'm optimistic that perhaps coming out of this, the overreach of the government is more on display on many different levels.
First, the fact that, you know, obviously they put tens of millions of people out of work, the bailing out of big corporations and the big banks.
I mean, I think in this populist moment that we live in, this is not going to be popular to just see.
Exposing State Evil Through Reality00:05:39
We're going to see exacerbating inequality.
I mean, that's going to really come out of this, which of course the left hates for their own reasons and has pretty bad solutions for.
But one way or the other, it's going to be pretty obvious that a big part of this is because government bailed out the big corporations and also because they shut down so many smaller, mid-sized and small businesses.
But I also, what I've been wondering about a little bit more lately is just the naked authoritarianism that's on display.
I don't know if you've seen, I've seen videos now of stuff.
I saw a father who was arrested for having a catch with his daughter in the park.
And they said they weren't social distancing, even though they seem to be well more than six feet away from anybody else.
But they put this guy in cuffs.
They hauled him away in front of his daughter for the crime of having a catch with his daughter.
Now, you don't have to be a completely pure ANCAP to think that might be a little bit excessive.
And by the way, the guy ended up being, so I found this out because the police department made a public apology over it.
And then I found out that the guy turned out to be a former trooper.
So that's why they apologized because they ended up fucking around and arresting an ex-cop.
And they were like, oh, shoot, we don't mean to do this to ex-cops.
You know, like, that's not right.
If it was a plumber, no one, they wouldn't have apologized for it.
But I saw that.
I don't know if you saw there was this video of a guy in Philly getting dragged off a bus, literally dragged off by cops because he didn't have a mask on, which, by the way, was what the CDC was recommending up until a week and a half ago.
They were telling people don't wear masks.
Then all of a sudden they flip it and they're like, yeah, now we recommend you wear masks.
And now they're dragging people off of a bus for the crime of not having a mask on.
I got to hope, even if people are concerned about the virus, even if you should be concerned about the virus, I got a hope that there will be some percentage of the population who will see this really naked authoritarianism, really tyrannical behavior by the cops and be like, yeah, I don't, I don't think we want this in our country.
I hope so.
That is the great thing about video and really making something real to the average person.
Because if I were to explain to the average person the non-aggression principle, they can kind of see it.
Well, how about if I show you the Eric Garner footage?
Does that sort of bring it to light more?
One of the big things for me was watching Waco Rules of Engagement.
I didn't even know what Waco was.
It was some sort of standoff that ended with people dead.
Very abstract, very out of focus.
But when you see it there, and every single excuse, they resisted.
Everything from, you know, they were cooking crystal meth to Janet Reno saying babies were being beaten.
When you see it happen, it's like, oh my God, what I just witnessed was murder.
In your mind, you can say, in war, there is collateral damage.
Well, then you see the Chelsea Manning video and you're like, oh my God, if any other person or group did this, I'd say that that was murder because that's literally what it is.
When you see someone getting kidnapped for a victimless crime, just because the person was ordered to, oh, that's my job.
Well, let's just use that excuse right up to them.
Well, I was hired to be a drug dealer, so don't arrest me, officer.
I'm just doing my job.
That's irrelevant.
You're engaging in an immoral behavior that's right in your face when it's something just so blatant, when it's the father, you know, having a cash with his daughter.
I didn't see that one personally, but I, you know, seeing videos of abortions taking place.
I mean, I think like abortion and circumcision were two things that I believed in for like two weeks and then just stopped.
I mean, just making it real to the average person instead of bringing it to the abstract, saying, This is what's happening.
Do you support this?
And you support killing them if they resist this, right?
You're going to murder these people.
Really?
That's that's morally justified.
So, um, yeah, I think that is some good that can come out of this, sort of exposing the evil for what it is, because it's been happening since, I don't know, since they lied about the sinking of the main or even earlier, Lincoln's troops in the Civil War, what they did to southern states.
I mean, it was like, what, 5% of the population died?
So, sort of bringing this to the forefront, that's sort of a silver lining.
I still wish it never happened and we could all just convince people logically on principle.
But there will be a benefit to, well, what do you think about this?
Is this morally justified?
Who's in the right?
Who's in the wrong?
Would you support it if the Russian government did this or the Chinese government?
Do they somehow have different standards?
So, yeah, that's a good point.
I think there could be a silver lining just really showing the state for what it is.
Yeah, and I just think because in America, and this might be like one of, in a way, like our kind of our last hopes, that in America, there is this kind of vague belief that we're supposed to be free.
And maybe people haven't really thought through what exactly freedom means.
And they probably, they certainly don't have like our strict conception of what freedom means.
Like, they're like, well, yeah, you got to pay taxes and stuff like this, but we're free.
And yeah, weed's illegal or whatever, but we're free.
You know, like there's this kind of abstract feeling that this is the land of the free and the home of the brave and all that.
And it's tough when it's a guy, you know, not wearing a mask or having a catch or something like that, where you'd have to go, okay, so you have to acknowledge now that there is really no freedom here if you can't do that.
Okay, I understand you can say, well, we believe in economic restrictions, but not personal.
Stripping Competing Allegiances Away00:13:19
Well, this is, you know, this is just having a catch with your daughter.
So I would hope that maybe there'll be some people who disagree with that.
I also, I agree with you completely on the circumcision and abortion.
I might have, I probably believed in them just without really thinking about it much for a while.
I kind of bought into the kind of, you know, well, that's what, you know, that's what Jews do.
And I mean, I'm Jewish and that's been like, yeah, I'm circumcised.
Yeah, that's what we do.
But it don't, it was almost like if you actually make someone question that and think about it, it doesn't take too long before you realize like this is indefensible.
Like there's just no, like, what is the logic behind defending that?
I mean, they'll, and then they'll stretch to things like, well, it can reduce your chance for cancer in the tip of your penis.
And you're like, well, yeah, I mean, if I lop off like a woman's breasts, it reduces her chance of breast cancer, but that's not really a good justification for doing it to somebody.
And abortion too.
I didn't know you were more on the pro-life side, but I've really come around on that to where I just go, I think this, I think the idea that we just accept killing babies in utero is just morally outrageous.
And particularly, I advise people who aren't familiar to like look into the actual procedure, which I shouldn't even call it procedure.
But if you look into what's actually done, it's way more brutal than you could imagine.
Yeah, I think it was the videos from live action, which is terrible on so many other issues, but they're terrific on this issue.
Really bringing doctors out and giving what they experienced when they performed abortions.
And also just the logic of, again, very out of sight, out of mind, clump of cells.
Well, the fact that a life is much smaller than we like to think it is, well, size doesn't really matter.
What if you have a giant stone versus a little human going to Stonehenge?
That little human is still very valuable.
It has what you could say inherent value in the sense of you still don't have the right to kill it or initiate unjustified violence against it.
I mean, and of course, they'd love to bring up the extreme cases, which even if you justify extreme cases, that doesn't address the vast majority of the other ones.
It's tricky when it comes to how would you enforce such a thing, but you could still hold the general principle and say, I want zero abortions to exist in society.
So I advocate a libertarian society where there's more access to birth control, more access to condoms.
You don't have governments teaching, having tranny story hour with the kids, talking to them about sex at such an early age, making them more curious than they otherwise would be and engaging in the activity more irresponsibly, creating, you know, what Hans Hoppe correctly addresses as a low time or a high time preference in the populace, which you otherwise wouldn't have.
It's not about saving for the future, creating and innovating.
It's much more about exploiting what currently exists right in the now and not living for the future.
It's not really addressing family.
I don't have a church.
My adherence is sort of to the state and maybe the boss that I go to work for.
So a lot of these factors contribute to the existence of like, what, 60 million abortions since like 1980?
Something mild like that.
And then Roe, the woman who started it, she's now pro-life.
Yeah, she was a pro-life advocate.
She was totally taken advantage of too, for all the people who claim to care about like exploiting women.
I mean, she was totally exploited for the pro-abortion, you know, politics of all of it.
And yeah, I agree.
And then people talk about, you know, like how we don't have enough of a, you know, a replacement rate or whatever.
We're not reproducing enough.
And then you go, like, well, I mean, maybe if we weren't killing all these babies all this year, we'd certainly be doing better in that department.
So, yeah, I agree with you.
And I also agree about the pushing of the cultural degeneracy, which is something that I've been, I've gotten shit from other libertarians for talking about, but it's like, it's not, you know, a lot of libertarians have this kind of like, oh, well, you're judging people's lifestyles.
And, you know, as long as they're not violating the non-aggression principle or something like that, you're like, it's not as if this is a market phenomenon.
I mean, this is obviously pushed by the biggest statists in our society.
And I just always, my concern is that if libertarians aren't willing to talk about these cultural issues, that we're just not going to have any influence on anybody because this is what people care about.
Now, maybe that's wrong to some degree.
It certainly is wrong that people put such a priority on the cultural issues and don't care about other things that are very, very important.
But, you know, you'll see, you know, the battles over like the statues being taken down generates way more interest than talk about monetary policy.
And you can kind of understand why.
You know, it's like, it's because this is people's lives.
This is what matters to them.
It's their families.
Their tradition.
It's their sense of identity, what they belong to on both sides.
There were very good people on both sides of that issue is what I'm trying to say.
But it's like, if we have to be willing to like get, you know, roll up our sleeves and you can't always be floating above it.
Like, well, we have nothing to say about culture.
Just let the market decide.
It's like, well, okay, the market is not being allowed to decide.
And I can certainly have, I can participate in the market and say, okay, well, here's my take on all of this.
Yeah, I think promoting degeneracy and the, you know, celebrating the destruction of the family unit is not very good.
I think that's okay.
Yeah, the state definitely loves to sort of smash any competing authority or any competing allegiance that one may have.
So even if it's to the Mormon church or to the family, someone who's told to steal for the state or murder for the state, cage people for victimless crimes, they might have something in their head that says, you know, but I was always raised to not do this to people, to not harm others.
My religion teaches me this.
You know, this community that I belong to, this AA group tells me to do A, B, and C.
Those are all competing authorities that the state totally hates because as it is by definition, it attempts to be the monopoly on violence.
They call all the shots in society.
They have the final word.
So whenever they can sort of promote a degeneracy of parents or idiots, you know, anyone who believes in some sort of secession or state's rights, you know, is pretty much a neo-Confederate Nazi.
When everything you could criticize a state for doing applies 50-fold to the government.
Oh, well, what if there's a state and they just like have slavery?
The government can bring back slavery.
And to trick you, motherfuckers, all they have to do is call it a draft or conscription.
So again, it's about stripping away people's any competing allegiance.
They're like the psycho-jealous boyfriend that has to go around.
Oh, what the fuck is going on over there?
I don't think this involves me.
I need to regulate this issue.
I'm spying on every single one of you because I'm such a psycho that I need to collect all your phones and I need to read all your emails or I'm just going to have them just in case you're up to no good.
If anyone did that to their spouse, they'd be like, oh my God, psycho tyrant.
But when the state does it, it's like, oh, well, thank God for James Clapper or else bad things might happen.
It's completely ridiculous.
Yeah, no, 100%.
James Clapper is still out there walking free.
Perjury is okay if you're involved with the deep state while you're doing it.
So I'm curious because I literally, you know, I've like discovered you recently and been watching a lot of your stuff.
What's your like libertarian origin story?
How did you, who were like your big influences?
How did you get into this crazy world that we both reside in?
It was so slow that it's really hard to pick a moment.
I think I would always go up to my grandparents' house in Sedona, Arizona, and, you know, there's nothing to do but talk there.
And I think I was from like, you know, 12 or 13 years old.
They would always talk about politics.
And I was actively like supporting Barack Obama, like always reading the stuff, going to the website.
I went to D.C. and I held up a picture, Obama claims nomination.
At the time, I, you know, gun to my head, if you would have asked me, what is the state and what makes it a unique institution?
I think I would have just said, you know, it's a mechanism of achieving a desire.
It's like, should you use a hammer or a screwdriver?
Well, it depends on what you want to do.
Sometimes you use government, sometimes you use the market, whatever works.
And it was so gradual.
I think I started watching Glenn Beck because I had heard that there's a guy who just, he just cries and says that, you know, Obama's black and that's why he's bad.
Other than that, they've never criticized Democrats historically.
There's only been one and it's the black guy.
So I go, I got to see this Klansman in action.
And then comparing everything Beck said to Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann was really big at the time, Beck was just making much more sense than those people compared to him.
So I then think I saw the state as more of a necessary evil that should only be there to decide things that, look, look, we give it a shot on our own.
If we can't do it, well, then the state arises.
And I think it was reading, oh, I had a, I wanted to do a history lesson or a history paper at school, and I bought The Revolution by Ron Paul, thinking it was a history book.
And that's not what it's about at all.
It's a case for libertarianism.
And I didn't even notice until I was at the end.
And I said, oh, those are really interesting arguments.
I think the thing that really made it clear to me was people like Larkin Rose and Stefan Molyneux really saying, what is it about government that makes it a unique institution?
Because even calling it a monopoly doesn't really justly get at the root of it.
Say, you have a monopoly on your house.
You make all the rules.
If you say no guns, you know, everyone has to, no one can talk about these topics.
You're not regulating.
That's not a crime against free speech if it's your property.
You start selling stuff out of it.
It's a business.
Still, you have a monopoly on that.
And it really got me that what makes government a unique institution is it initiates violence against people on property they haven't acquired through homesteading original appropriation Appropriation or voluntary exchange.
So it's not the size of apartment complex versus country.
It's really the means of acquiring contracts with individuals.
Have I contracted with you?
Well, then you have no right to take, you know, 20% of what I earn because I came out of my mother on this geographical area, even if a microscopic amount goes towards helping other people.
So I also just started holding the state to the same standards I'd hold anyone else to.
So if you want to say, well, for God's sakes, we need protection.
So we need government police.
Okay, so any security firm has the right to tax people so long as they provide security in exchange.
It's like, well, goddammit, that can't be justified.
Everyone can take whatever they want so long as they sometimes protect.
I just stand outside my neighbor's house with my gun for five hours a day, shoot anyone who might intrude, and then go up to them and collect my fee, even if they never ask for it.
So, all right, so we can't do police.
What about courts?
We need courts.
Well, just because we also need food, water, and shelter doesn't mean they should be violently produced by a monopoly.
So we definitely need courts.
Well, if you want things to be arbitrated fairly, do you want a coercively funded monopoly or voluntarily funded competition?
Which is going to yield you a better result?
And also, which one is moral?
Anyone has the right to force people to fund them so long as they sometimes arbitrate decisions.
And again, everything you say, anything you can criticize about private business and markets and competition applies 50-fold to the state.
What if there's a private corporation and they are just unproductive and lazy and don't give you what you asked for?
You mean like every government program that has existed?
What if there's a welfare program by the government and it doesn't solve poverty?
Oh, could you ever imagine that?
What if there's a drug war and drugs don't go away?
What if there's an attempt to stop terrorists from invading Kuwait by starving half a million Iraqis to death, but it accidentally creates more terrorists that we end up having to deal with in the future?
Well, what happens then?
What happens if there's a government who says we need an education and ends up cranking out retards by the ton who vote for Bernie and Trump and Bush and Obama and that motherfucker Clinton?
I mean, at no point, if the private sector ever did what the state did, people would just fucking flip out.
Voluntary Co-ops vs Forced Power00:15:35
It really does.
It's like if you had started, like if none of that stuff had happened and you had said to some statist, you had been like, okay, what would have to happen for you to say, like, yeah, I don't know about that, that this is the way we should be organizing society.
Maybe we shouldn't have a coercive monopoly on the initiation of violence.
And you go like, okay, let me just run a crazy hypothetical around you.
Like, what if they went on a worldwide mass murder campaign and slaughtered 65 million people?
Is that enough?
Like, would that be enough?
And that is a funny thing that it's just, it's like a psychological phenomenon that people tend to accept what is as reality.
And I'm sure that this served a really important purpose for human beings to survive.
You know what I mean?
Like, well, yeah, you have to kind of be flexible.
And, well, these are the situations.
So it's very, people just go, well, the status quo is what it is.
So when you propose something like anarchy, people go, but this is insane.
I mean, how could this possibly work?
That, you know, crazy things could happen.
And it's not even that crazy things couldn't happen.
It's just that maybe, you know, world wars and starving children by the millions and like all of these things are actually crazy too.
And that not doing that with a little bit of craziness might be better.
But it's really unbelievable how much people just accept, you know, well, that's the world wars.
They gave me some loose justification about how we had to do it.
We had to liberate the German people by dropping firebombs on Berlin or something like that.
You know, it's really, people cling to their narratives.
I didn't know that Stephan Molyneux had a big influence on you.
Be careful.
Don't refer to him as great.
I've learned that the hard way.
You do not want to call Stefan Molyneux great.
You will have some angry Facebook, Twitter people after you.
Do you still keep up with politics?
Because I know there's a big split amongst ANCAPs where some people are like, I just fucking ignore the circus altogether.
Me personally, I'm on the other side of it.
I'm like obsessed with the circus and I talk about it for a living all the time.
But do you like keep up with politics?
Like, were you following this whole primary election?
Oh, my God.
The Democrats just chose a dementia patient after saying that Trump was a racist, sexist installed by Putin.
How could you not love this fucking brainwreck?
Yeah, yeah, I definitely keep up with politics.
One, because maybe I sort of like the gossip just a little bit because, you know, it's not life-changing.
You know, whether or not Stormy Daniels is telling the truth, it's not going to really tug at my heartstrings.
So I think I pay attention there, but also because that's what people are interested in.
So I like to talk to them on principle when they say, oh, this guy, Trump.
I mean, I've disagreed with other presidents, but Donald Trump.
And I go, isn't that interesting?
Every one of you is always like, oh, we can't have the private sector running things because then we'd be at the mercy of private tyrants.
It's like, well, you just admitted Trump was less of a danger to you when he was predatory private sector billionaire.
Now he's president.
Now he's serving you.
Now he's terrified you'll vote him out.
The exact opposite of that Noam Chomsky piece of shit worldview is reality.
Well, there's private tyrannies too.
No, not even close.
Private tyranny is a terrible thing that you can really fight against because there's no recognized legitimacy to initiate violence.
Once Trump is commander in chief calling out executive orders, Walmart can't make an executive order against my life.
No one recognizes their right to do so.
That's why it's going to be so hard for Walmart, so long as we don't recognize them as an authority, to start to start wars or to cage millions of people for victimless crimes.
Or how about this?
How about the fact that people will, I just saw, God, who was it?
I think it was David Cole, who was like, these idiot Ron Paul supporters who believe the government spraying chemicals in the sky.
I go, first of all, do you know that the government openly sprayed chemicals called Agent Orange on the Vietnamese?
Do you know what Operation Low Air coverage was, where they were just spraying Americans outside of wartime?
How about Operation Do?
These are called the Cold War experiments where they openly do this.
So again, you have a lot of this fighting, but only by staying sort of up to date, you can enter the conversation.
Because if everyone's talking about coronavirus and you're just like, let me tell you about John Locke's second treatise.
What?
Who?
I don't know what that is.
So in order for us to really stay relevant, and look, I'd much rather be hated than ignored because we've been ignored for so long that it's like, all right, at least they know that we exist and we're here.
Because I mean, until like, you know, what did Walter Block say there were 15 ANCAPs in the 60s?
So from 6000 BC or whenever Aristotle was writing to 1960, we had like 15 ANCAPs in the land of the free.
And now there's thousands?
I mean, we're getting up there in the long history of things.
That's why I'm more optimistic than anything because you have to look at it comparatively.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And just the fact that people like me and you can have these conversations across the country now and speak to an audience about these ideas.
And it's certainly a weapon that we didn't have before.
And it does, yeah, look, the thing you were saying about, and this is what you come across with the left all the time, is that the idea that, well, libertarians care about governmental tyranny, but they don't care about private tyranny or they don't care about corporate power and things like that.
And the truth is, you can find thousands of examples of corporations wielding power over people.
It's just every single time it's through going through the state.
I mean, that's their weapon of choice.
And truthfully, besides that, I mean, you know, corporations do kind of suck at times.
I mean, we've all been on like a customer service line that you're like, this is bullshit.
And we've all gotten a product that wasn't as good as we wanted it.
But to even put that in the same ballpark as the state who's, you know, just in the examples we used earlier today from this week are dragging people off of buses for not having a mask on.
It's just, it's so obviously if you want to have a state that's going, like if you're concerned, because this is what the leftist Noam Chomsky thing would be, or even like Richard Wolf or like some of these like kind of Marxist, more openly Marxist people, where they'll say, well, the problem is this kind of power dynamic between, you know, employer, employee, corporation versus, you know, like consumer, like all these different, you know, imbalances.
And you're like, yeah, but by the very nature of a state, if it's going to regulate a corporation, it has to be more powerful than it.
I mean, you couldn't, if you had a state that was less powerful than a corporation, well, then how would it be able to control the power of the corporation?
So by like inherently, you have to create a bigger power structure, a bigger hierarchy.
So you guys should, they should all be voluntarists based on their own worldview and then just try to encourage people to like have worker-owned co-ops or something like that, which I don't think me or you would have any problem with if you just wanted to like suggest it.
It's like, hey, let people go out there.
Maybe people are happier to work in worker co-ops.
I'm sure there are some people who are happier.
I highly doubt that they'll ever convince a majority of people voluntarily to be in a worker co-op because honestly, who the hell wants to, most people want to do their job and go home and not be like, oh, now we got to go to a meeting and decide how all our resources are going to be allocated and everything like that.
I mean, I just don't think it's that desirable or efficient of a model, but hey, do it voluntarily.
And none of us have any problem with that.
So anyway, yeah, it's frustrating dealing with those lefties.
But have you, do you like engage like in your in your personal life or in your public life with like arguing with left-wing people or right-wing people for that matter?
Do you try, have you found certain tactics that are better at like persuading people?
Yeah, I think it's definitely about planting a seed and it's also about knowing the psychology.
A lot of this work has been done by professor at ASU Robert C. Aldini, where he talks about how sort of when you really push someone, they're much more likely to get defensive.
Why is this person being so pushy?
They must really have something in it for them.
So when you sort of passively bring something up, I just have a few things that while I've thought about the state have really stuck with me.
And I've asked people, so you're a leftist.
All right.
Would you say you could believe in equality if you believe a majority of 535 people have the right to coercively dominate 330 million Americans?
Does that sound equal to you?
If one person has the right to make an executive order that millions of strangers have to abide by or they'll be caged, does that sound equal?
I mean, does that sort of draw anything?
If monopolies are bad, why do you support this monopoly, having a monopoly on AR-15s of all things?
I mean, gosh, it's like one thing if it's like candles or production of pot roasts, but it's AR-15s.
These things, this is how you can control a ton of people.
So I think it's really about bringing up something that gets at the heart of it.
I've realized that those are much more productive.
And also just coming across as a kind person will really doesn't mean you are one.
It means you come across.
It really, you know, makes someone think.
I had someone the other day say, you know, God, this, I didn't know you were a libertarian.
It's like, I've heard so many of these people lately, and I just, I don't know.
In other words, what he was saying was he was shocked that average people sort of like him that are productive, you know, non-trash can throwers into a building or wanting to riot for more free shit.
Apparently, the globalists have done a great job of pinning what an anarchist really is.
When I think of, you know, Rothbard, Hoppe, Lou Rockwell, the average person thinks of Antifa, the, you know, the destruction of property they associate with the private property ethic and self-ownership.
That's how much these fuckers have a hold on the American mind.
But yeah, it's usually just passively.
I'll bring up something.
I just hold the state to the same standards I hold anyone else to.
So anything that you want to do voluntarily, if you believe in, you know, getting health care for everyone and having people chip in, please do.
Please set an example and get people that health care.
Just don't initiate violence for the same reason I don't have the right to initiate violence against you, nor do you have the right to initiate it against me or anyone else.
If Walmart can't do it, government can't do it.
So I just hold things consistently.
Having that kind of approach, I think, really gets to people.
Whereas, I mean, this Trayvon Martin story that Joel Gilbert recently made a documentary called the Trayvon Hoax.
So after years of research, something that the left pretended to care about is completely wrong, every aspect of it.
And I got in a fight with someone about that just because it's such a lie, every aspect of it.
The guy was on Tom Woods' show, actually, to talk about his documentary.
And I'm like, does that bother you that this whole thing was a lie and you idiots fell for it, just like Covington, just like Jesse Smollett, just like, you know, both sides had good people on it?
Are you ever going to stop falling for this?
That was a time where I totally unproductively initiated a fight and I think made myself look bad and made people more hesitant to libertarianism.
So if I ever start one, I go, is this really productive?
You know, do I want to talk about how funny it is that they said Trump is Hitler and with hundreds of millions of dollars, they're running a dementia patient against him.
You know what?
I think I'm going to talk about self-ownership, how the draft is slavery, and how, you know, Catholic churches don't have the right to force you to go to their schools.
So neither should governments.
I mean, I'd much rather talk about that.
It's hard, though, to not get sucked into some of these culture wars.
I mean, it certainly is.
And especially with stuff like with how much, you know, the Trayvon Martin was a great example.
And there's lots of other ones where there's just emotions are so high that people are really willing to, you know, just believe whatever, you know, they just, if something confirms their bias, they're like, I'm going to go right along with that.
The Covington Catholic kids was the one I really couldn't shut up about because I was just so appalled.
I was so appalled that they were doing that to children who were literally completely innocent.
I mean, like as innocent as you could be.
And that they would, that these fucking, these evil people in the media would be putting up the picture of this 15-year-old and making him like America's most wanted racist bigot.
Look at this horrible person who literally did nothing wrong.
He literally sat there, got screamed like, you know, epithets at him by these black nationalists.
Then this fucking crazy Native American started drumming in his face and he smiled.
He sat there.
He didn't do anything.
He didn't curse back.
He didn't throw a punch.
He didn't do anything you wouldn't want to do.
Like if that was my kid, I'd be like proud of the way he handled that situation.
And then just to, you know, to see him, I mean, like, think about how crazy, you know, for me or you, if all of a sudden CNN was putting our face up and was like, this guy is evil and Twitter blue check marks were like threatening to beat us up and stuff, that would probably be a lot for us to handle.
For some teenager who's not, has never chosen to put himself in the public.
Like he's not like a podcaster or a YouTube guy.
He's just some person who's literally just a kid who was on a freaking field trip, you know?
And then to put him up there, I just, I was so upset about that because I just, I was appalled by how evil that is.
So that one I couldn't, I couldn't find a way to let go.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And some of them, it's just a matter of how long is it productive to stay on this?
And sometimes I'll just preface it with, look, I'd love to have this conversation about, you know, that fire and fury image that ABC said was a war in Syria where a bunch of Kurds were getting killed.
And I go, I'm happy to talk about Syrian withdrawal and how there was, you know, pumping up the muscle in Syria, a CIA document going back 20 years proving that this had all been planned with the Oded Yannan plan for Israel in the 1980s.
But hey, before we go into any of that, I still am going to believe in the non-aggression principle.
I still think it's held important.
It should be held of high importance.
So let's get into it.
And then, of course, you can really go into it still with the, you know, hey, this marriage is really bad.
There are a lot of divorces, but the state doesn't have the right to prearrange marriages.
So yeah, you can still talk about an issue without it leading to aha.
And therefore, the state should control everyone.
So it's always being able to go back to the fundamental ideas.
Public Schools and Border Control00:07:23
But you see the constant pushing of cultural Marxism of creating the enemy of, oh, look at this smug white kid who Trump just empowers with that hat.
He just walks up to the Native American and puts his face while the poor native is just, oh, as if the natives haven't been through enough.
He's just trying to play a drum and the white supremacist goes up and terrorizes him.
Thank God for that fucking video.
Thank God someone said, hey, that fire looks like this thing in Kentucky that we were at a long time ago.
Let's play these side to some Assad.
Is Assad from Kentucky?
I mean, these are the same weapons.
So, I mean, thank God for these little things that this would just be in the mind of everyone.
Trayvon's just walking home, boom, killed for no reason.
That would still be in there.
And it's all about creating that enemy.
You have like the classical Marxism of bourgeoisie versus proletariat.
Bourgeoisie is this big, evil thing.
Only a big, violent government dictatorship by the proletariat can address this evil problem.
Well, they just switched it to the culture.
There's so much racism.
There are employers that are so sexist, they pay men 20 cents extra every single hour so they don't have to be around women.
They kind of like money, but not as much as they hate women.
That's how bad the problem is.
Only a gigantic government filled with Kamala Harris's and can actually solve this issue.
We need trillions more.
Raise taxes.
So, I mean, just the Marxism on both ends, both economic and cultural, is so important that absolutely I think we need to be in the culture.
But as far as the most productive conversations I've had, have sort of just been throwing, you know, the one-liners out there that I think really get at the heart of why I am an anarchist.
Yeah, no, that makes sense to me.
I'm curious where you, because you mentioned, you know, obviously like you really, much like myself, but you really live in this philosophy and have thought this through a lot.
And you mentioned earlier that Larkin Rose and Stephan Molyneux were both big influences on you.
So just on the libertarian philosophy stuff, obviously those guys have diverged a bit from where they used to be.
And I think, I think I've seen Larkin Rose be pretty critical of Stephan Molyneux with his immigration stuff.
And I was curious what you thought about all of that and like where you stand on.
Obviously, in libertarianism, even amongst pure, really good libertarians, this has been one of the issues that's really divided some people.
Obviously, Murray Rothbard changed his mind on immigration later in his life.
Hoppe and Lou Rockwell and guys like that are much more supportive of border restrictions.
Do you have a strong opinion on immigration or do you find yourself in the Larkin Rose or Stephan Molyneux camp on that issue?
It's so difficult to really go into one when you realize that the state is, I know I sound like the broken record pinning this on the state, but really, if there wasn't public property, contradiction in terms, belongs to everyone, yet the state has a monopoly on it, then this literally would not be an issue.
Who should be allowed to go into malls?
That's never debated because they're private.
Who should be allowed to get apartments and not?
It's like any consenting adult.
It doesn't matter.
When things are privatized, the immigration issue ceases to exist, which is what Hans always says.
Now, it's so difficult to say who owns what when trillions are stolen every year.
Who gets to call the shots?
Usually it's the owner, anyone who acquires it through contract, voluntary exchange, or original appropriation or homesteading.
But with this violent state intervening, it's like it's so difficult to come down on one side or another.
I don't think I would feel morally justified using violence to stop someone at the border.
But the fact that it's public property is not an end-all justification because so many hospitals and malls and public schools.
Okay, let's just take public schools or private.
Should anyone be able to go on there for any time and do anything that they want?
I've used the example before.
Yeah.
The homeless problem.
I mean, there's so many, there's so many public buildings that it's like, all right, can we apply the same logic to them if you believe in any sort of exclusion?
So again, it's so difficult to come up with a solution and something that the state is totally the primary issue with.
Right.
And that the fact that, and this is what I, I've used this example before when I've argued with some of the open borders libertarian types.
And that's the example that I go to all the time is public schools.
And I say, okay, like we can all be together that public schools shouldn't exist.
We absolutely think they should all be privatized.
I hate the government indoctrinating our children.
I think it's one of the worst things that the government does.
And it's one of the ways in which they're able to do all the other terrible things they do because they have this control over the brains of young people.
And anyway, I couldn't think of anything more evil to be done to my child than for her to be brainwashed, which is essentially what they're doing.
I mean, I guess you can think of more evil things, but it's up there.
But I say, okay, so we're all against public schools.
But let's just say there's, you know, some guy, like a meth addict, wants to go do meth in a public school.
If we don't have the choice of abolishing public schools and we have the choice of either they don't let him in or they do let him in, can we have a preference on that?
You know, I mean, because what that does, and the point of that analogy is not to say that this is the exact same thing as immigration.
The point is to get at the underlying principles of when you say, well, we have freedom of movement, and you know, it's just a guy crossing an imaginary line, and you don't want the government telling him he can't go there.
Well, okay, all those principles are technically at work with the meth addict going into a public school.
They're walking over there saying, Hey, this is just an imaginary line, right?
And I have freedom of movement.
And why should anyone from the government initiate violence?
But the point is just that it's a lot more complicated than just saying the borders should be open.
And if the government does control the borders and keep them open, that's also kind of a problem.
So I kind of tend to agree with you that there's really no good libertarian solution once the government has a monopoly on the borders.
But I definitely think that there is that libertarians should recognize that there is something going on here when you see how so many of the Democrats make this the number one issue.
They're not appalled at Trump bombing third world countries, but they are appalled at him trying or pretending to try, I don't really know, to clamp down on the border at all.
And you're like, I don't know.
They're also at the same time pushing the idea that voter ID laws are like horribly bigoted and racist, and this demographic who they're bringing over tends to vote for them about 80% of the time.
It seems like maybe they have an ulterior motive here, which is to, you know, bring in new voters.
And I think libertarians shouldn't be behind that if the party of naked big government, they're both big government parties, but the one who's nakedly, like we're for big government, is trying to stuff the ballot boxes.
That seems like a recipe for not Rothbardistan.
Controlling Minds Like Mao Did00:06:22
I don't know.
Yeah, well, this is again the ultimate social problem.
I want to do X with a certain thing.
You want to do Y with it.
I want this person to work on my fields picking cotton.
He wants to go do something else.
Who gets to decide?
Well, you get to decide because you have a better claim to others because it's your body.
You have a better claim to it.
And any property you justly acquire.
So that is the libertarian solution to all of these things.
So it's not like, well, we're just on the sidelines and we just pin everything on the state no matter what.
We literally have a foundational explanation for why there is such an issue in the first place.
Some people want them here, others don't.
How do we decide?
Well, only if there's private property and voluntary exchange can a just decision be reached in the first place.
Just make anything else public, and then you'll see automatically, you know, should the military go in this place or should they not?
I sometimes think it would be just to assist other countries when they're experiencing tyranny.
That in no way means I support giving money to this mass murdering military.
All of literally every war has been based on a lie.
I made a presentation about this called America's Foreign Policy Deception, lies, omissions, and criminality.
So I could sort of see that.
So, how do we decide when the military goes in?
Anything voluntarily, fund it voluntarily, don't kill civilians, or anything that a private organization would be held to, I'd say, is the way to go about it.
Yeah, no, I agree with you on that.
There's been a lot of anger toward China over this whole coronavirus thing.
And I got to say, I think rightfully so, at least to the Chinese government.
I've mentioned this a few times on the podcast, but Lou Rockwell had a great piece a couple weeks ago now, where I forget the title of it, but he was basically just saying that the Chinese people aren't your enemy and that the Chinese people are like some really great people.
And a lot of them really tried to do the right thing, including those doctors who were silenced by the Chinese government.
But the Chinese government is the enemy of all of humanity.
I mean, they are really, really an evil, evil government.
I mean, I, you know, I'm someone who believes that all governments are inherently evil, but that one is really a particularly bad one, even amongst like even amongst organized crime families.
They're a particularly nasty organized, you know, mafia or whatever.
And someone asked me recently on the last show I was doing in AMA, and I thought this was an interesting question.
Is he said, what would be the appropriate response if we found out that the Chinese intentionally did this?
So it wasn't an accident.
This was an intentional biological warfare.
And they spread this virus throughout the world, throughout Europe, throughout America, Middle East.
I mean, it's all over the place.
If we found out that, let's say, what do you think the libertarian response should be?
If we found out that a legitimate act of war like that, what do you think we could do?
Because I kind of struggled with it.
And my response, just to give it to you quickly, was more or less that I go like, well, look, morally speaking, it doesn't justify slaughtering innocent Chinese people.
And practically speaking, we got a lot of H-bombs between the two of us.
So I don't know exactly how a war with these two countries could be fought where it wouldn't be worse than better.
But I was open to the idea of like, hey, look, if there was anything that you could do to the people who are actually responsible, you'd have every right to kill them, basically.
So I'm curious what you think.
Well, and this is something that people like Yaron Brooke have trouble understanding.
When I hate a politician, it doesn't mean I'm okay with murdering the citizenry that politician claims the right to rule over.
I am anti-Saddam.
Saddam was a politician, a socialist.
I'm against him.
Doesn't mean I supported the Iraq war or any other war that's been based on lies.
I hate Maduro more than anything, but I don't necessarily believe the American military should go in there just because I know what they've done.
I know what they cover up.
I know when there's a whistleblower who says, look at these atrocities, the whistleblower goes to jail and the murderers, you know, get these medals, you know, ever since the days of, you know, what, ah, I can't think of the name.
But as far as, look, this is one of the big problems that you have with a state is that there's a general understanding between governments that we're never going to expose the truth of the other one's tyranny at the root.
We're always going to pick on little trivial examples.
Trump is a sexist.
Obama, you know, isn't, gave money to Iran.
Oh, that's real bad.
Bush pronounced it nuclear.
Ha ha.
They're never really getting at the bottom line: violence is immoral even when governments do it.
The best thing that Trump could do is say, here's my message to the Chinese people.
No one has a right to initiate violence, even if they're a member of CCP.
This government is so immoral for reasons A, B, C. Look, I have the documents to prove it.
Here's Chairman Mao.
How can you protect a country when your agricultural revolution killed tens of millions of them?
It's like it's not just about guns.
That's why Mao Say Tongues quotations from Mao is the second most popular book on the planet.
Because in order to get the ideas into people to brainwash them, they had to distribute literature to control their minds.
It's not just about the guns.
Because if all you have is guns, how do we know to take orders from Mao or President Xi rather than some other guy?
It's about controlling the minds of the populace.
So the best thing that we could really do is explain to them that the state is illegitimate and the state that caused this, if they did cause this intentionally, that that state needs to not be recognized as legitimate anymore.
But that would undermine the U.S. government because the same principles apply fundamentally.
So I would say, yeah, drop some copies of Free to Choose an Anatomy of the State all over Beijing.
But as far as, you know, let's just take it into the private sector.
Person X intentionally poisoned 500 people.
Would I feel justified in assassinating that person?
Brainwashing Tactics in Literature00:02:25
Of course I would.
They're a mass murderer.
They're worse than Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer.
Yeah, it's okay to kill them.
But if government does that, government often represents the people.
So when the U.S. government kills them, they're going to say, look at these evil imperialists in the U.S. Look at what Mao was warning us about, the U.S. imperialists.
They're coming here.
Let's go fight them.
So again, you have this game theory of if they do it to us, then we will do it to them.
It's about getting at the ideas and not recognizing authority in the first place.
Yeah, no, amen to that.
I could not agree more.
All right.
Well, we got to wrap up, but I really enjoyed this.
We're going to have to do this again real soon.
Let all my listeners know and viewers know where they can find you, like your Twitter handle, your YouTube page, all that good stuff.
So on YouTube, I am Keith Knight, Don't Tread on Anyone.
I don't ask for money.
I don't do ads.
What I do ask is that people subscribe, get a BitChute account and subscribe to me there.
We can call that all the donations that I'll ever ask for, just because I really want to have a backup in case I'm taken down on YouTube.
And I just ask people to spread the videos.
I have a playlist.
I'm at like 470 videos.
So my playlist is best of Keith Knight, Don't Tread on Anyone.
You could find it.
And that's a good 18-video introductory introduction into what I've accumulated over the years.
So thank you so much for having me on.
And by the way, two things getting me through this quarantine are Legion of Skanks highlights.
You guys did.
You guys did one talking about Sesame Street.
It was one of the funniest things.
Oh, yeah.
I forgot about that one.
It's that and Jim Florentine's terrorizing telemarketers.
That has been getting me through this fucking virus like no other.
Well, that's very nice to hear.
And I really did enjoy this discussion.
It's cool.
It's like getting back to my roots a little bit to just really talk about this ANCAP philosophy, which is really the stuff that got me into all of this political commentary to begin with, is that I really care about these ideas.