James Smith of "Part of the Problem" argues that the Black Lives Matter movement is a totalitarian, Marxist-led agenda violating private property rights. He critiques Libertarian nominee Joe Jorgensen for advocating "active anti-racism," labeling it ideologically inconsistent with non-aggression principles. While acknowledging valid grievances against police brutality and the welfare state, Smith rejects the movement's focus on microaggressions over material suffering, describing its cult-like demands for conformity as antithetical to libertarianism. Ultimately, he urges libertarians to avoid aligning with this group despite shared opposition to government overreach. [Automatically generated summary]
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Why Support Libertarians Now00:06:08
Fill her up!
You are listening to the Gash Digital Network.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
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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.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
Tears your host, James Smith.
Hey, what's going on, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am flying solo for this episode.
Let me just apologize in advance if you hear any noise coming through.
There is quite a storm going on outside.
I believe it's tropical storm winds or something.
But anyway, yeah, hope none of that's coming through on the microphone.
So I'm alone for this episode.
It's going to be another ranty one, just like my last solo episode, which got a lot of positive and some negative feedback.
And I have a feeling I might get some of the same for this episode.
So I want to talk to libertarians.
Libertarians, we got to sit down.
We got to have a conversation.
And it's going to be a one-way conversation.
I can't hear you, but you can hear me.
So I just did, I recorded the first part of a two-part episode that I'm going to be doing with Pete Quinones from the Libertarian Institute.
We recorded the first part of the episode on his podcast, Free Man Beyond the Wall, and we're going to do part two here on Part of the Problem.
I think that episode will be for Monday.
And it's a deep dive into the Marxist roots of Black Lives Matter.
And I'm careful.
I suggest Pete already put up part one.
That episode's out there.
So I recommend people go check that out.
I try to be careful to not paint with too broad of a brush.
I don't want to give the impression to people that every single person in the Black Lives Matter movement is a Marxist, or even that a majority of the people who are out marching in the streets have even ever read Marx or really know anything about him.
My guess would be that they're not and they don't and they haven't.
But a whole lot of the leaders of Black Lives Matter are, as they would put it, quote, trained Marxists.
And that is something that's worth really being aware of and thinking about quite a bit, especially when a whole lot of libertarians are supporting Black Lives Matter.
I mean, marching with them, tweeting out, you know, support, things like this.
That's important and probably not a great idea, seeing as how what Marxists stand for is the antithesis of what libertarians stand for.
So it would seem like maybe not the best idea to support their movement.
I got asked recently, the other day on Twitter, someone asked me, what even makes you a libertarian anymore?
And I don't know exactly where this came from, but they said, you know, I've been watching your stuff.
What even makes you a libertarian anymore?
And the answer is pretty simple.
I'm a libertarian because I believe in private property rights and the non-aggression principle.
And I still believe that as much as I ever have.
And that's why I'm a libertarian.
I'm a libertarian because I believe in property rights.
I believe in people's ownership of themselves and the products of their labor.
And when I say the products of their labor, I mean, if you go into a voluntary agreement with someone, you get what you voluntarily agreed to.
Not that you own everything that your work produces, particularly if somebody else has, you know, supplied you with the means of production, the capital, and whatever.
But I believe in the non-aggression principle.
I believe that it is immoral to initiate violence against peaceful people.
And that's what makes me a libertarian.
And so that's the answer to that.
That's where I come from.
That's my point of view on all of these things.
And a lot of libertarians out there seem to have a lot of other ideas of what makes you a libertarian.
So maybe by your definition, I'm not one, but that's what I mean when I say I'm a libertarian.
And that's what Murray Rothbard and the people at the Mises Institute and Ron Paul and all these guys, that's what they meant by the term.
And that's what I mean by it.
So there is a humongous movement going on in the country right now.
And it's something that nobody who's talking about politics or just the state of our society can ignore.
And it's, you know, this Black Lives Matter movement.
It's not just the people out in the streets protesting.
It's much bigger than that.
And everybody knows that.
It's something that is in people's personal lives.
It's something that is testing friendships.
It's something that you can't get away from on social media.
It's something that every major corporation is dealing with, that all of Hollywood is dealing with.
This is a huge deal.
And none of us know exactly where this is going to go, but it's something big.
And I got to say, I don't like it.
The Totalitarian Feminist Agenda00:03:04
I don't think it's good.
It is a would-be totalitarian movement in many ways.
And I think a lot of people know what I'm talking about.
It is a movement that seeks to control everything, everything about you.
It seeks to control, it wants to control how you speak, how you think, how you interact with other people.
It wants to control the economy, the police, the presidency.
It wants to control movies and television shows and syrup companies.
I mean, there's really, it's really quite astounding how all-encompassing this agenda is.
And on the surface, it's, you know, it's kind of like when feminists would, you know, like third wave radical feminists will have this whole like vast, you know, list of ideas and their agenda, you know?
And it's like, there's a patriarchy theory and there's a wage gap and there's a rape culture and yada yada yada, like all these different things that we have to tackle.
And then if you start picking apart any of them, they retreat back to this like, well, we're just for equality of the sexes, which no one is really against.
I mean, I shouldn't say no one, but the vast majority of people are already sold on that.
They retreat back to this thing.
And with the Black Lives Matter thing, it's like they retreat back to like, oh, well, we just don't like killer cops or we don't want to be, you know, oppressed by the police.
Or wasn't it wrong what happened to George Floyd?
And it's like, yeah, pretty much everybody agrees with that.
But then there's this other thing that we see.
And like with feminism, they would say, oh, well, if you believe in the equality of the sexes, then you should be a feminist.
But then if you talk to any feminists or you're involved in any meeting or organization or anything like that, and you were to say like, well, I don't really believe in the patriarchy.
I don't think that's a real thing.
You're hounded out of there.
You have to agree with patriarchy theory in order to be a part of it.
But you're like, oh, I thought this was just about being against or believing in equality of the sexes.
It's like, oh, no, no, no.
There's actually a lot more to it.
And I think anybody who's really paying attention to this movement, this Black Lives Matter movement, realizes there's a lot more to this than just being against what happened to George Floyd.
Like a lot more.
Like you have to accept like 95 other instructions in order to not be labeled racist or whatever.
And so it's not fair to just retreat to this like, we're against the police brutality or we're against what happened to George Floyd.
That's just not the reality of the situation.
I think anyone paying attention knows this.
They know there's a much deeper agenda to all of this.
Beyond Anti-Police Brutality00:06:02
Also, you know, I should say, just because you agree.
So this is the point that I was making with Michael Malice on the last episode.
And it's a point that I made on Pete Quinones' podcast on the first part of the two-part series that we're doing.
That just because you, even if you agree with a stated grievance, it doesn't mean you have to get on board with a movement at all.
I mean, like, you know, I like, I thought the Treaty of Versailles was terrible.
It doesn't mean I'm getting on board with the Nazis.
I thought the war in Iraq was terrible.
It doesn't mean I have to support Saddam Hussein's Bathist Sunni party.
You know what I mean?
Like just because you think one group has a legitimate grievance, that doesn't mean I have to now support their agenda.
It's we can walk and chew gum.
I can say, yeah, the cops are fucked up and also Marxists are fucked up and I don't want to be a part of either.
And that's, I don't know, that seems fairly obvious to me.
Okay, for the fucking like idiots who are going to like mischaracterize what I'm saying, I didn't say Black Lives Matter are Nazis.
No, I'm saying they're communists.
But so, you know, just as bad, if not worse.
But again, I'm speaking tongue-in-cheek when I say that.
I'm not saying they're like, you know, as bad as fucking Stalin or something like that.
I'm just making the point that just because you agree with one of these stated grievances of a group does not mean you have to get on board with their whole, you know, like agenda.
All right, guys, let's take a quick second.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
One thing that's pretty clear, I think, if you look through anything, if you look through any of what's happening with this movement, is that, you know, like libertarians might want to notice, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of respect for property rights, which is kind of what libertarianism is all about.
That's our whole thing, is that like we're for property rights, aka civilized behavior.
Like, you, and this is why we oppose the cops.
We oppose the cops because, well, I mean, in the first place, they're funded by taxpayer money.
They're funded by money that was stolen from people who were threatened with jail time if they didn't give the money up.
So the money is extorted that pays their salary.
They're a forced monopoly.
So people aren't allowed to set up competing police agencies.
And then the thing that really makes us against the cops is that they go around violating people's property rights all the time.
They stop you in your car.
They harass you.
They take you, throw you in jail.
They enforce all of these bullshit rules.
And they can basically, you know, steal from people.
I mean, look at civil asset forfeiture.
They can steal from people.
They can harass people.
And in some extreme cases, they can even kill people.
The ultimate property rights violation to take your life from you.
And quite often they do it with impunity.
And that's why we're against them.
That's why libertarians oppose the police and particularly the worst abuses of the police state.
But if we're for property rights, I mean, look around at all of this movement and how much do they really respect property rights?
I mean, first off, a whole bunch of their organizers are avowed, trained Marxists.
So, I mean, I don't know if there's an ideology that's more hostile to private property rights than Marxism.
Probably not.
And it kind of seems to show in a lot of their actions.
This is why from the most outrageous violations of like, you know, the assaulting people and looting and, you know, fucking just burning down, you know, seizing other people's property, which has been done all over the place, most notably in Seattle and New York.
And even down to the lesser things, like just the fact that when you go, like, like if you go through New York City, my home city, if you go through there after all the protests have happened, one of the things that you notice, aside from the fucking boarded up stores, because everybody's freaking terrified, is that there's spray paint everywhere, like everywhere.
There's just every building is covered in spray paint in downtown New York right now.
And I understand that that's not like the worst aggression that you could think of.
There's been far worse associated with the cops and with the riots.
But there is something symbolic about that.
There is something symbolic about like we do not respect the fact that this is your property and not ours.
Racist Behavior vs Racism00:09:46
We just feel completely entitled to fucking mark up somebody else's business or house or whatever.
And that's all, you know, it's all over the place.
And so I would urge libertarians to hesitate to get on board with this stuff.
So I'm literally planning on talking about this stuff in the podcast.
And I was kind of getting my thoughts together and what I wanted to say.
And I look on Twitter, and I guess someone, people were like tagged me in it, and someone posted it on Facebook to me.
And I see Joe Jorgensen, who is, of course, the nominee for president on the LP, on the Libertarian Party ticket.
And this is what she tweets out.
She tweets, it's not enough to be passively not racist.
We must be actively anti-racist.
Hashtag Black Lives Matter.
Hashtag vote gold.
So that is Joe Jorgensen, who, you know, however any of us might feel about this, is kind of the standard bearer of libertarianism right now in the eyes of a lot of people.
And that's her take.
Let me read that one more time and actually let it sink in.
Okay.
It's not enough to be passively not racist.
We must be actively anti-racist.
Hashtag Black Lives Matter, hashtag vote gold.
I responded to this.
Michael Malice, of course, just did a better response than I could.
He's really good at Twitter.
But he responded back and he said, the Libertarian Party, the party of we and must, which doesn't seem like the most libertarian thing to say.
There's two things that stand out to me about this.
Let me say three things that stand out to me.
Because the first thing is just that it's so much cringe.
It's just so cringy, this like pandering nonsense.
Like, what does this even fucking mean?
It's the vaguest, nothing.
So I tweeted back at her and I said, what does this even mean?
It sounds like something Bank of America would tweet.
And that's, you know, it really does.
It sounds like something a big corporation would say.
They love this shit, this wokeism bullshit.
Which, by the way, it gets like, it's not the entirety of the left that's caught up in this woke bullshit.
That is one, you know, like segment of the left.
And they're the worst.
They're just the worst.
I mean, like, I have a lot more respect for other, you know, strands of lefties, you know, like Ben Burgess, who's who's been on the show several times, who we've debated about different things, but he's not one of those woke leftists.
He's like an economic democratic socialist.
Like, you know, he wants to see businesses collectively owned.
And okay, I disagree with that.
I don't think it's good economics, but it's not this.
It's a different thing.
It's a different strand or whatever.
You know, Jimmy Dore is like, he's not a leftist for those reasons.
He's like hates wars and corporate bailouts and stuff like that.
It's not this thing.
But to play to that, so number one, my first thing is that it's incredibly cringy.
Then of course, it's just wrong.
It's like flat out wrong.
Like not morally correct, not libertarian.
It's not what libertarians should be saying.
And number three is that it's stupid.
It's really, really stupid strategically.
So let me just focus on for a second, number two, why this is wrong.
So to say it's not enough to be passively not racist, we must be actively anti-racist.
For a libertarian to say that, well, okay, so as I've said many times before on the podcast, one of the reasons I really hate the term racist.
And I hate it because it's so intentionally vague as to be completely useless.
It means nothing.
And that's why it can mean anything in the hands of a different person.
Anybody can mean anything by the term racist.
And I'm sure that a lot of you people listening and watching have dealt with this before, where someone can be accused of being racist and good luck proving that they're not, because what the fuck does that word even mean?
Like racist can cover everything from fucking like slavery to saying, you know, colored people instead of people of color, right?
They're all like, don't you think there's a problem with a word that encompasses all of that?
So it wants you to a libertarian where the line is drawn where we always draw a line is initiating violence, right?
So anything over here on this side of initiating violence where you are initiating violence, if that falls into racist, yeah, that's really, really bad.
Then you're dealing with like slavery and fucking, you know, whatever, genocide or hate crimes.
Like I mean, real, like the idea of hate crimes, like beating the shit out of somebody because he's black in the wrong neighborhood or because he's white in the wrong neighborhood.
That's really, really evil stuff.
But all the stuff over here that's not initiating violence but could be called racist, well, I mean, you may not like it.
You might criticize it.
You may say, I don't think you should be that way.
I mean, I can certainly think of examples of a racist behavior that I would find, you know, repugnant.
I don't know, like just if you were to just say, like, I don't, I don't want, if you were like, hey, I'm having a party, come on over.
And you were like, okay, I'm going to bring my friends.
And I go, sure, great.
And then I found out one of them was black.
And I was like, I don't want that black guy in my fucking house.
I'd be like, that's pretty shitty.
But you know what?
Actually, libertarians would defend your right to do that.
We may not agree with you, but you know, it's your house.
It's your party.
You do have a right to do what you want to do.
Again, it's fine to call that behavior out.
It's fine to say whatever.
But libertarians, you know, that's actually within your rights to do.
And we'll defend your right to do it, even if we don't agree with you.
That is, by the way, the libertarian position.
So, okay.
And then you have over here, further on the other side than that, these like leftist thought crimes that we don't even consider wrong.
Like, I mean, you could like these days, it's like, I don't know, just not apologizing for your whiteness is considered racist or something, or white silence is violence, just this whole range of bullshit that we're just like, yeah, that's just retarded and isn't racist at all.
And just because you're calling it racist is bullshit.
So libertarians, at least from my understanding, my, you know, view of what libertarianism is, is not really like, if you want to blast racist behavior, okay, there might be some behavior that's racist that we feel is wrong, but there's other behavior that's labeled as racist, which probably isn't wrong.
Oh, and by the way, no one judges other races when they commit that behavior.
Like nobody, you know, has a problem with that.
But this is what's so crazy about Joe Jorgensen's tweet.
And believe me, I understand that probably my guess is that this was just mindless and just kind of pandering and she's not really thinking it through.
But so this is not only is she condemning racism, which might be a little bit shaky on libertarian grounds, because it's like, what are we talking about here if we're just talking about someone's personal preferences?
I don't know.
Libertarians, like, do we really have time?
Even if you have a certain feeling about someone's personal preferences, like you don't like them, you know, somebody doesn't want to date outside of their race or doesn't want to hang out with people outside of their race.
I mean, you might have your feelings about it, but honestly, there's so much violence out there in the world.
You know, we live under the largest government in the history of the world.
We have violent crime in our streets, you know, rising at pretty alarming rates in parts of the country.
You know, we have, you know, the Fed and the debt and the wars and just all of these other issues.
Are we really getting around?
Like, should it even be on our radar if someone has some personal preferences, but isn't initiating violence against someone that we don't like?
Probably not.
But Joe Jorgensen is going much further than that.
Joe Jorgensen is saying it's not enough to be not racist.
So even if you're not racist, that's a problem.
It's not enough, to quote her again, to be passively not racist.
We must be actively anti-racist.
We must.
Like, excuse me, but no, we fucking mustn't.
No, there is no obligation.
So you're saying if there's like a good person out there who's not racist, doesn't treat minorities shitty, is perfectly like just a genuinely lovely person and treats everyone in their life good, they're still a bad person.
That's still not enough.
This is like, I'm sorry, this is like left-wing, the ideological bullshit.
And when there's this like wannabe totalitarian movement going on, to have the libertarian nominee like sucking up to them is just insane.
It's fucking insane.
Libertarian Nominee Sucking Up00:09:40
And what exactly does it, by the way, it's intentionally vague, which is why Bank of America would tweet something like this out because they never fucking, it requires them to do nothing or give up any of their wealth or power.
They just say these things.
What the fuck?
What does it mean?
What does it mean to be racist?
What does it mean to be anti-racist?
Please, Joe Jorgensen, elaborate on this.
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And then, okay, so moving on to the third part, why this is stupid.
Why this is just so stupid.
Just awful politics, awful strategy.
Because you are, of all the different groups of people, right?
Like if you kind of slice up the different groups within the left and the right and the center and libertarians, all of this, right?
You know, you have like, say, within the Republicans, and obviously I won't hit every group, but within the Republicans or the right wing of the country, maybe you have like some neocons, and then you have some kind of like, you know, center-right, you know, moderates.
you have some like nationalists maybe you have some like hard right kind of you know uh more hardcore nationalists you have some libertarians and within the libertarians you have like anarcho-capitalists um on the left you have or the democrats in the left you have like the the neoliberals um you have kind of like the uh um the the center left moderates uh then you have like democratic socialists uh you have uh you know whatever,
some other group, maybe all the way to the hardcore, like anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists and things like that.
And then you have the woke social justice warrior crowd.
Okay.
Of all of the groups that I just listed, just strategically, not saying how you feel morally about any of them, the worst group to reach out to is the woke crowd.
Like strategically, it's the worst decision for libertarians to make.
It will yield the least results out of any of those groups, out of any of those groups, any other one of those groups, libertarians could have a really reasonable pitch to give to them.
I mean, I'll go through these different groups and I'll give the pitch.
That's a pretty good pitch to them, right?
So if you were talking to a Bernie Sanders supporter or a Tulsi Gabbard supporter, let's say, well, okay, so Tulsi Gabbard's easy, right?
You'd be like, hey, listen, Tulsi Gabbard said the most important issue is war and peace.
That's what her campaign was all about.
What's more important than whether or not we go and get our troops slaughtered in another one of these wars while they're slaughtering a whole bunch of poor suckers in the other countries who, you know, it's just the most evil thing you could imagine.
Well, guess what?
Your choices are two Warhawks or Joe Jorgensen.
That's a really strong pitch.
Maybe like, hey, look what the Democratic Party did to your candidates.
Despicable.
They called her a Russian asset just for not being a blood-soaked monster.
She gets torn and the nerve of someone like Hillary Clinton who votes for these wars.
Now, one of the people that she sent off into this stupid war, who was willing to actually do the fighting while Hillary Clinton's sitting in some mansion plotting this shit out, one of the people who actually did the fighting, who served honorably, she comes back and says, we have to not fight another one of these wars.
And Hillary Clinton slanders her.
That's what your party put up with, your party's previous nominee.
That's what they did to your candidate.
So why don't you send a message that the war and peace issue is non-negotiable and so much so that you'll come over here and support Joe Jorgensen.
Okay, likewise for Bernie Sanders.
It'd be like, look at what the Democratic Party did to you guys.
And you could say this to any Democratic socialist, like the economic lefties, the Ben Burgesses of the world, someone like that, right?
Your pitch would be, well, look, look at what your party did to Bernie Sanders.
Look at what they did to him in 2016 and again in 2020.
Okay.
This guy had an energetic movement.
He was inspiring people and they cheated in every way they could.
They rigged the system against him.
They pulled out all the tricks.
They called you guys Nazis.
They did all of this shit.
Look, libertarians, we may not agree with you on everything.
That's for sure.
But if you want to send a message to the Democratic Party, you could send a message to them.
And the message would be, hey, on the issue of war and peace, on the issue of corporate welfare, on the issue of criminal justice, on the issue, these are non-negotiables.
We stand so much for them that we'll go over with these people who we economically completely disagree with.
Okay.
Now, again, I'm not saying you're going to pull everyone over with this, but there's, you know, if you want to try, you might be able to pull over a few people.
On the right wing, obviously, you know, to any Republican who claims to be for small government or anything like that, you can talk about the debt.
You can talk about, you know, Trump's spending.
You can talk about like the culture wars and how we need to defuse the situation.
And even to the more hardcore nationalists, you can talk about how well we have to dismantle the managerial state if you're ever going to get back to a situation where you don't have this international kind of cabal that's running everything.
Certainly to the more hardcore right-wing nationalists, they're very skeptical of our relationship with Israel.
You can promote the idea that we don't want to fight wars that Israel kind of wants us to.
And you can talk about how you have the right to whatever, the freedom of association.
There's a whole bunch of different issues that you can try to pitch people on.
You can try.
Now, I'm not saying you're going to convert everybody, but there is one group that you goddamn sure will not convert anybody from.
And that is the woke social justice warrior crowd.
You're not getting anyone from that group.
These motherfuckers are trying to cancel Noam Chomsky and J.K. Rawlings.
You really think they're coming over to the Libertarian Party?
Have you lost your mind?
There's nothing, this is, they are members, you know, I've said before, it's like they're members of a religion, and that is way too insulting to religion and to religious people.
They're a cult.
This is a fucking cult, a straight-up cult where you have to disown your friends and family if they're not also a part of the cult.
Like if they don't get on board with the anti-racism fucking, you know, pledge, then they're out too, because they're basically a Klansman, right?
And everybody's seen this.
Everyone's seen this with their woke left-wing friend on Facebook, right?
Like, if you're not on board with every inch of the platform, you're basically a fucking Klansman Nazi who, by the way, were the same thing in their minds.
Like they're all just bad white racist people.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
All right.
Majority Privilege Explained00:15:09
So this is not going to happen.
You know, it's really, like I said, it's not fair to compare them to a religion.
It's really not.
They are a fucking cult.
Even like born-again Christians, right?
Like they're, what are they guilty of?
Like they talk about Jesus too much or something?
Like it might like annoy you.
You might be rolling your eyes like, oh man, they keep talking about how Christian they are, but they're not cutting people out of their life for not also being born again.
At least I've never heard of that and I've known several.
So I just think this is stupid.
It's wrong and it's cringe.
And I'm not going to not call this shit out.
I just can't.
I mean, I wouldn't do it anyway, but I particularly feel an obligation because I've like sent people into the Libertarian Party.
And yes, okay, Joe Jorgensen is probably better than Donald Trump and Joe Biden, or she is better than them.
But it's like this stuff is, look, Joe Jorgensen's not going to be president in 2020, right?
That's like that's not what the LP is useful for.
We're not doing something because we feel like, oh, we're going to get into the White House and we're going to roll back all of these laws or something like that.
None of that's ever going to happen, but it could be an opportunity to shoot to get a decent percentage to kind of break up the monotonous thinking and to kind of like, you know, spread the message of liberty to a lot of people and wake people up.
And the way to do that is not to fucking bow down to the mob.
The way to do that is to stand up to the mob and show them that there's a different answer.
And it's fine if you want to like suggest your policies that you think could help black people or said, like, fine, I don't have a problem with that.
But that's different than saying that, like, obviously, right?
The fucking the whole point of waking people up is to show that there's another way.
There's another way.
And when you see everyone around, like, what is what characterizes this whole movement is like what I was saying, like this white silence is violence, this idea that you have to be on board with the program.
And that's not conducive to liberty at all.
And of course, like, you know, the other, look, like the other major problem, right, that libertarians have, and this is, this is a real issue that libertarians are going to have to deal with when they talk about race, is that there are, look, there are grievances that black people have that are legitimate.
I mean, I think I'd be the first to say that.
And I think there are government policies that have really fucked over the black community.
Obviously, I mean, it doesn't take that much to, you know, put yourself in the shoes of a black person who would say, hey, yeah, this is pretty fucked up.
And obviously, I mean, I know this gets talked about all the time by left-wingers to the point where people are just rolling their eyes at it.
But it's like, yeah, there were a few hundred years of slavery and then 100 years of segregation and that shit is kind of fucked up and profoundly fucked up.
And you could understand where people would be like, yeah, like they'd be like, fuck this system.
The system has been shitty to us.
I completely get that.
Completely legitimate grievance.
I also think that obviously, as I think most libertarians do, that the rise of the welfare state and the rise of the war on drugs has just been a disaster for the black community, an absolute disaster.
And it's tragic.
It's really, really horrible.
I mean, to subsidize not working and not being with the father of your children is just what a horrific thing to do to a group of people.
And of course, this also had an effect on white families.
And, you know, it's horrible.
It's just, it's awful.
And the war on drugs has been terrible, not only because it locks people up who never should have been thrown in a fucking cage, that no one who's not a violent criminal should ever be thrown in a cage.
It's a horrible, horribly inhumane thing to do to somebody.
But I think even the worst effect of it is just that it creates this black markets where gangs can thrive and it produces a ton of gang violence, just like prohibition on alcohol did.
And it's awful.
And I think these are all legitimate grievances.
However, if you're talking about 2020 America, all of these things, whether it's the welfare state or the war on drugs or any of that, you know, they're not actually just laws for black people.
They're laws for white people as well.
And there's nothing at least explicitly racist in the laws.
Now, you can argue that they've had a disproportionate effect on black people.
It's like, okay, that is true.
But things just get a little bit complicated.
Like, why is that exactly?
You know, it's like, okay, if we're all living under these laws, why did they happen to affect this community in that way or whatever?
I mean, in the same way that like, you know, the like mafia that rose up, you know, like in Prohibition and there were these violent gangs, it would be questionable to say that prohibition was an anti-Italian law because alcohol was prohibited everywhere to every group, or at least the production of alcohol or whatever.
So, you know, okay, you can say it has a disproportionate impact on this group, but then, you know, freedom and other things might also have disproportionate effects on different groups and disparities don't equate to discrimination.
That's something that libertarians kind of believe in and something that I don't think the left-wing protesters believe.
So you can be against all of these policies.
And I think there are legitimate gripes that the black community has.
And for sure, with like the George Floyd thing, look, there's a legitimate gripe there, no question.
But there's also legitimate gripes that white people have.
And one of the legitimate gripes that white people have is that there are explicitly racist laws against white people.
Like there are.
And I never hear the libertarians really standing up against any of that.
And that's like what you should really be against because, you know, you're a libertarian.
And this is actually in the law.
Now, there's also a culture, which everybody is aware of, of just, you know, fucking making it completely acceptable to demonize white people.
And I think that's wrong.
And I think that's also a legitimate gripe that white people have.
And that's just, I mean, look, even when Nick Sarwak, Nick Sarwak just tweeted at me, by the way, I just saw on my phone down there, something dumb, that Nick Sarwalk, you know, type of thing that he would tweet at me.
But, you know, anyway, but even when he was on my podcast, if you guys remember on the show, he said something about something about, you know, racism.
And I said, well, what about anti-white racism?
And he said, well, I don't know what you're talking about.
I don't know what anti-white racism is.
And then I played him like a clip of Joe Biden saying something about white people.
And I was like, do you think that's racist?
He goes, well, I don't know if it's racist.
And I go, well, let me put it this way.
How about we replace the word white with black?
And now tell me if this is racist.
And it was like a quote about how like this is the, you know, white people used to do this.
This is the culture.
This is the white man's culture.
And I go, if you said something that black people did and then you said, this is the black man's culture, really?
Is that that wouldn't be racist?
And he finally had to admit that, yeah, of course he would consider that racist.
So even Nick Sarwak, your libertarian champion, anti-racist, you know, even he had to admit, of course, of course there's this culture of just, you know, making it completely acceptable.
And that's bullshit.
And, you know, there's a legitimate grievance with that.
Now, that doesn't mean that overall that's as fucked up as what's going on in a lot of black communities.
Like there is, as I was talking about in the last episode, there are these pockets of America, what are known as the hood, where there are like really fucked up conditions.
I mean, like high crime, children out of wedlock, just a lot of just like really fucking awful conditions.
And it's tragic.
It really is just horrible.
And like the kids who are born into that have like fucking no shot.
And it's a goddamn, it's just a goddamn tragedy.
No one seems to meaningfully address that.
It's like no one fucking really cares.
Even a movement that's labeled Black Lives Matter doesn't seem to really care about any of that shit.
And I really, like, you know, for as much as I get labeled by the fucking Sarwaks and the loser brigade of the world is like, I'm a fucking bigot or something like that.
The truth is I'm really not.
And the truth is that I really fucking, as people who listen to this show know, man, like I actually, I'm a libertarian for, you know, like Scott Horton says, Scott Horton's great line.
I'm a libertarian because I love liberty and I hate injustice.
And I really do.
And that's why I'd always, even when I had my CNN gig or when I'm on Fox News, I always bring up the war in Yemen.
It's not because that's particularly relevant or that's going to get a whole lot of attention on me or this is like my fast track to get somewhere.
It's just that I think it's really fucking horrible what we're doing to the people in Yemen.
Like it's fucking awful.
It's a goddamn tragedy.
And I feel, you know, like it's the same reason why I care about what's going on in these fucking neighborhoods.
Like I don't have to fucking go there.
My kid doesn't have to live there, but it's a goddamn tragedy.
It's horrible.
And it's much worse for them than it is for, you know, white people being demonized in the culture.
But that doesn't mean that's not a legitimate grievance too.
And the problem with those kids who are trapped in that situation is that it's very complicated as to what exactly is oppressing them.
And it's not like for the kid, it was the example I used with Michael Malice.
I said you drive through Camden and it's just like a goddamn, it's a fucking, it's like a war-torn fucking country.
It's like, it's not America.
Like it is, but it's not.
And you drop and you drive through and there's like some fucking four-year-old with no shoes walking around at three in the morning in front of a boarded up house.
I mean, literally, like that's what you see.
And it's, it's just horrible.
But it's not exactly clear what is oppressing that kid.
You can say, oh, it's the cops and it's the welfare state, but it's actually a lot more than that.
And a lot of it is the community doing it to itself.
Now, I think what the answer to this ultimately is, is, you know, we should end all those government policies.
Libertarians should fight for that and the welfare state and the war on drugs, all of that shit.
But that's not the solution itself.
Then there's going to have to be some cultural solution after that.
There's going to have to be like some encouragement to fucking get your shit together.
And my guess is it's probably not going to come from white people.
It's going to have to be from within that community.
But it's certainly not going to be just making excuses for them and never calling them out for bad behavior.
That's not going to be what fucking solves it.
So anyway, you know, it's anyway, the whole thing is fucking horrible and fucked up.
But just pandering to this fucking movement, which doesn't do anything for those people, it's literally just a movement to help upper middle class black people.
And I just, maybe it's my take, but like, and this is what bothers me about so much of the focus.
Like the focus is not on, holy shit, that fucking four-year-old doesn't have any shoes and is fucking a mess and doesn't have a fucking father.
And his mother's a drug addict and he's been abused and he's fucking going to grow up to be just like in this awful, like living a hell, like a fucking hell on earth.
That I would literally, I mean, I would, I would, I would, to say I would die to make sure my daughter doesn't live that way is a, is a vast understatement.
I would be tortured, you know, I would be dismembered to make sure my daughter doesn't live a life like that.
And this kid is going to live a life like that.
And it's fucking horrible.
It's like just the worst thing in the world.
And then these movements, what they focus on is like Aunt Jemima or, you know, like somebody saying a racist thing or, you know, like a cultural appropriation, these things that are just bullshit.
Like, I don't care.
I don't fucking care.
I care about that kid.
I don't care about the struggles of being misgendered or the struggles of fucking, you know, whatever, any of these dumb microaggression shit.
I don't care about that.
It doesn't mean, like, I don't know.
It's just like, that's how I feel.
Like, if you're like a black kid who's trapped in that nightmare in the hood, I fucking, like, my heart bleeds for you.
If you're an upper middle class black kid in America, cry me a river.
I just, I don't care that much.
It's just not that bad.
It's not that big of a deal.
It's like you, you can say everyone has white privilege.
It's like, eh, you know, there is probably such thing as majority privilege to some degree.
It's a little bit easier when there's more people who look like you.
You know, being a minority is inherently a little bit tougher than being in the micro in the majority.
If I move, you know, to Japan tomorrow and it's like 95% Japanese and my daughter's got to be like the only white kid in the class.
It's like, yeah, it's a little bit tougher to be different than everybody else.
But if she moved to a society where it's all, you know, the other people are Japanese and she looks a little bit different and they have affirmative action programs that if she, you know, if she does nearly as good as the next kid, she's going to get bumped up and, you know, get the job and everybody kind of kisses her ass.
And there's also like athletes and singers and all these different entertainers that look just like her.
And it's about as inclusive as any society has ever been.
I don't know.
I mean, I'm not saying there's no struggle there.
It might be something that I care about as her father, but like I don't expect activists to be lining up in the streets over it.
I just don't, especially when we have this like real shit to actually think about.
I don't know.
It just doesn't do it for me.
It's not like, I don't, I just don't really, I don't think it's like the biggest concern.
And you have to at some point be able to say to something, like, that's just not that big of a deal.
And that's how I feel about like, like, you know, like if one of Obama's daughters was like, oh, this one time someone treated me kind of shitty because I was black or something.
Liberty Means Living Your Life00:02:10
It's like, yeah, well, what are you going to do?
Life's not perfect.
Everyone's been treated shitty for one reason or another.
You have a really great life.
You grew up in the White House.
You're a multi-millionaire.
You're going to get into whatever college you want to go to.
You're going to make millions of dollars in your life.
You're going to live the life of the ruling elite at Crimea River.
I don't know what to tell you.
I mean, there's like, there's a fat kid with a mole on his face who I feel a lot worse for than for you.
That's just, that's my honest take on it.
And I just, I guess, like, really, at the end of this, what it all comes back to is that, like, libertarians got to grow a pair.
Just got to grow a pair and be willing to say something that might get you in trouble, that might be like an uncomfortable truth.
Because otherwise, if we're not, then what's the point of us?
What is the point of us?
And when you look around, if there's a fucking movement that like has like totalitarian impulses that has a bunch of Marxist organizers and we have to now, basically they're demanding conformity and we're saying, okay, where can I conform?
What the fuck?
What does that have to do with liberty?
The whole point of liberty is that you have the right to live your life how you want to and that other people can't enforce their way of life on you.
I don't know, man.
I just, I see, I see that as I understand it's just one stupid tweet that Joe Jorgensen sent out, but I see it as a real problem.
I see it like it indicates something more profound.
And that is like, what is your willingness to actually stand up for something you believe in and actually try to change the course of history?
Because that's the job.
That's the calling that you have right now by running for president.
And it's one that you took voluntarily, that you campaigned for, and now you have it.
So I don't know.
Find the whole thing pretty fucking disappointing.