Dave Smith and Robbie Bernstein dissect Garrett Foster's death in Austin, contrasting Libertarian claims of him pushing a wheelchair with photos showing him holding an AK-47. They critique the "cultural Marxist" lens framing all Black Lives Matter protesters as oppressed victims, arguing this justifies violence like looting and car blocking. The hosts condemn targeting random white individuals as a losing strategy that alienates allies, emphasizing that while opposing state overreach is vital, condoning mob behavior or weaponizing historical atrocities undermines genuine reform and public safety. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Garrett Foster's Tragic Self-Defense00:14:41
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You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
Here's your host, Dave Smith.
Hey, what's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Heart of the Problem.
Of course, I am the most consistent motherfucker you know, Dave Smith, and I'm joined by the king of the caulks, Robbie the Fire.
Bernstein, how are you, sir?
I'm doing well.
How about you, Davey Smith?
Doing well, doing well.
Although our topic for today's show is a sad and kind of disturbing story.
And so I wanted to talk about this guy who was killed in Austin, Texas at one of these Black Lives Matter events.
I don't know what to say.
If I call it a protest, that just doesn't seem exactly accurate.
If I call it a riot, people give me shit for that.
I don't know exactly what you would call this, but he was shot and killed by a driver who had some type of confrontation with the crowd.
Again, it seems to me that a lot of this stuff is not exactly clear what happened.
There is some videotape of the event, and there's been some pictures and stuff like that.
But then there's also been conflicting reports about what exactly happened.
The guy who was killed apparently was a libertarian and a member of the Libertarian Party.
At least that's what's being claimed by the Libertarian Party and by a few different news sources.
You never know with these things, you know, like more information, I'm sure, will come out.
The police apprehended the driver and another person who evidently fired some bullets, I don't know, at the car or in the air or what.
They've released both of them and they said that the driver is cooperating.
We'll see if charges end up being filed or not.
That seems to, you know, be what that's that's the state of things right now.
Again, like I said, these things can change.
It does seem that this guy who died, what's his name?
Garrett Foster, that he had an AK on him and approached the car with the gun.
There is a photo of him with the gun in his hands right at the car.
A lot of people have been pointing this out, but in the photo, you know, because it's some people are claiming he pointed the gun at the car and other people are pointing out that the angle looks like he's kind of pointing it down at the ground in a kind of ready position, but not technically pointing it right at the guy.
I, you know, I don't know how important of a distinction that is.
It's somewhat important.
But this has led to a real split in the libertarian world of how libertarians see this event and what their feelings are about it.
And that to me is, you know, a very interesting kind of split and dynamic that this split within the libertarian world, which is something that I've, you know, been more and more aware of over the last couple years.
And really, then over the last couple of months, I've really noticed it even more dramatically.
So there's a lot to talk about there with the actual incident itself.
And then why it is that people who are libertarians and ostensibly have many very similar views about politics, why some of them are kind of divided into these completely different camps where some people are like, okay, he was clearly a hero.
The Libertarian Party, the official Twitter page, posted a thing.
where they said their quote was, we bow our heads at the passing of libertarian Garrett Foster.
At the time of the shooting, Mr. Foster was pushing his fiancé through an intersection in her wheelchair.
Not true.
Which does not seem to be the case.
So it seems very strange that the Libertarian Party would say that when it's like, well, wait, what evidence are you going off that at the time of the shooting, he was pushing her?
Because we see the image of him right at the car with his gun in his hands.
And that seems to be when he got shot.
Again, I'm open to being wrong about some of this stuff.
I've said in general, I think people should, you know, kind of reserve judgment on these situations until you find out some more details.
And then Spike Cohen, who will be coming on our show very soon, who's the vice presidential nominee, he said that Garrett Foster died a hero.
Okay, let me ask you, Rob, what are your thoughts from what you've seen about this incident?
All right.
So I've watched everything that's available and I still think we need more information.
But my opinion is that everybody, and I mean everybody in this incident is at fault.
And the people that are the most at fault is government because they're maintaining public roads without rules and law and order.
And these kind of events are predictable.
I would say, to me, this is similar to if you ran a like cruise line and it was overtaken by pirates and you didn't turn to people and say, hey, my cruise ship's been overtaken by pirates.
It's not safe to be on the cruise ship.
If government's lost control over the public square, then they need to make an announcement and go, hey, guys, no one can be out on the streets right now.
We've got people walking around in the middle of the streets with guns that are ready for violence.
And so you have to, like, in other words, every public or private, every private business would figure out some sort of a structure for who can be where.
Can you have a gun or not have a gun?
What's considered like, if this was my road, hey, you guys got to be on the fucking sidewalker.
I'm sorry.
You can't just walk through traffic.
You can't just take this over.
It's the government playing this quasi-area of saying, hey, we're going to be in charge and we're going to create laws.
And then all of a sudden, you know, tough situations come around and they go, oh, we're just going to sit back and let this play.
Well, if you're just going to sit back and let things play out, then what happened is 100% predictable.
So the most at fault party here is government.
Now, here's where these other people are at fault.
I saw an interview with this kid where he's talking about going out with his gun.
And dude, I wouldn't, if I had like a little kid, you got a little kid.
You're not taking out your little kid protesting.
If you've got a person that you got to be taking care of, you're a fucking hero.
Stay home.
That is your contribution to humanity.
That you're a good enough guy.
That you've got a girlfriend that needs you.
You should not be out protesting.
That's like having a small child.
Why are you putting yourself in harm's way?
You're home doing the Lord's work.
Great.
You're making a great contribution to humanity.
Why are you going out looking for trouble?
But then going out looking for trouble, having a gun, being out in the middle of the street, taking over streets and then pointing the gun at people.
And then it sounds like, you know, maybe he fired, somebody else fired.
You tell me he's pointing the gun down.
It doesn't matter.
The thing's up and he's got a hand on the trigger.
So he's at fault.
He's out looking for trouble.
He found trouble.
And then the people in the car who seemingly turned into traffic, it seemed like they aggressively turned into traffic.
It seemed like they were looking for trouble too.
I don't think they should be off the hook.
I think that they should be kept in custody.
I want to find out what were they doing that they turned aggressively into that street.
It seems to me like they were looking for trouble.
They found trouble.
They ended up shooting a guy.
You shouldn't get off for that.
And then the last thing I want to know is there was, I think there was cop camera footage of the cop watching the guy turn in.
How does a guy turn into protesters without you immediately turning on your cop lights?
If what I saw was a dash cam from a cop car, which I think it was.
So I just want to recap.
Government is at fault.
You can't tell us that you guys are going to create laws and that you're going to run the show and that we're going to give you money to maintain, you know, the public road.
We pay for the public roads.
We pay for you to protect the public roads.
We've got an entire judicial system.
Let's create laws by which there isn't some gray area where people can walk in the middle of the street during hours that they're not supposed to be there with guns in their hands and you can have this kind of chaos because it's predictable.
I can predict it.
I can tell you that this is going to continue to happen if you've got people who are just like, this will happen.
See, you've got to maintain the public square or you got to say, hey, we can't maintain it.
And then we'll get together and we'll figure out how to fucking do it.
But then from there, literally everybody's at fault here.
There's nobody who like, you went out looking for trouble, you found it, you got shot.
That fucking sucks, but that was predictable.
I could have told you that you were going out looking for trouble.
And then whoever turned the car into that street, it didn't look like they were just turning into traffic because that's where they had to make a turn.
I get like maybe you've been driving around all day and you're like, fuck these protesters who are blocking streets, but I don't know that that's like an entirely off the hook type situation.
Yeah, okay.
So I don't know about that either.
I just don't know.
It was unclear to me in the video that I saw whether the driver was actually being aggressive, whether he was trying to go into the crowd.
Was he trying to just get through?
Did he think maybe he'd be able to, you know, get through the crowd?
I don't know.
It's a tragic situation.
It's tragic that it worked out this way.
You know, and I must admit that the part that you said there about having a wife and a baby and keeping them safe, I mean, look, that really does resonate with me.
And that is perhaps my own bias, whether fairly or whether that's fair or not.
I mean, I'll just be honest about that.
I had somebody tweeted at me earlier and said, who was defending Garrett Foster and saying that the driver was aggressive.
And he said, what would, you know, what would you do if you were with your wife in a situation like that?
And of course, that was my answer.
I mean, I would never.
And I hate to break the kind of Michael Malice rule or whatever where you're asking what I would do in that situation.
And my answer is I wouldn't be in that situation.
But that really is the answer in this case.
There's no other way to describe that.
Look, this is my own bias as a husband and a father that I have like my number one job in life far beyond anything that has to do with my career or libertarianism or comedy, anything like that, is to protect my girls.
And that is my job to keep them safe and alive, number one.
And then number two, give them the best life that I can.
And I would never, I mean, never bring my wife to a situation like that and absolutely never confront someone armed with my wife there if there was any way to avoid that situation.
I mean, just, you know, like, I don't know.
So I would never do that.
And so that might be part of my bias that my first thought in these type of events is like, what are you doing bringing the women in your life to this type of situation that you know can be so dangerous?
And you watched the video of him being interviewed when he's wearing a mask.
So there's the video of him.
It seems to almost certainly be him.
The video of him.
And he's basically saying they're asking him why he's out here with his AK-47.
And he says, you know, something about, well, the cops won't let us protest.
So, I got to exercise my rights and blah, blah, blah.
And they ask him if he's going to use it.
And he says, well, you know, if I pointed it at a cop, that would just be suicide.
And if I point it at one of these people who are our enemies, they're too much of a pussy to do anything about it, which is kind of, you know, in hindsight, a really kind of sad.
I don't want to put words in his mouth.
I think you got to go re-watch the video.
And I only watched it once, so this might not be a totally accurate interpretation, but it kind of seemed to me like a guy was saying, come get some.
I'm coming out here with my gun.
Come get some.
You know what I mean?
He was going out there.
He didn't exactly say that, but it's not the furthest thing from that for sure.
Anyway, you know, there's a lot of people on all sides of the, I'm specifically talking about the libertarian world because this is a guy who identified as a libertarian allegedly and is a member of the LP allegedly.
I mean, I only say allegedly because I don't actually have like concrete proof that this is the case, but I'll take it since it's been reported that way, I'll assume that's the truth.
And it's interesting that there are these people on both sides.
And I've seen a lot of people being shitty on both sides of this on social media.
Now, of course, part of that is just that it's social media and people are shitty on social media.
It's just, it's an unfortunate reality.
But, and I'm sure I've been guilty of that a time or two in my life.
But that's it.
Social media seems to bring out the inner cunt in a lot of us.
And that's just, you know, it's kind of a cesspool at times.
But I see people, you know, someone said to me, because I said basically, I responded to the Libertarian Party tweet, and I said, you know, I said, this is absolutely tragic, but it seems pretty unclear exactly what happened.
I see a lot of the pro-BLM people saying he died a hero and the anti-BLM people saying he got what he deserved.
This all seems childish.
None of us know what happened.
You know, kind of like, let's wait and see.
This is clearly a tragedy.
Let's actually get some evidence here.
And someone said to me something along the lines of they go, like, I don't see what's tragic here.
It was legit self-defense.
And it's like, that's really like binary thinking.
I mean, just even if something is legitimately self-defense, even if you could argue the driver of the car acted in self-defense, which is quite possible, still tragic.
It's still a person's dead, and there's people probably who love him who are, you know, like just ruined over this.
And it's like something can be self-defense and still be a tragic situation.
I mean, even from the perspective of someone who acts in self-defense, to have to kill somebody is horrible.
It's like a horrible thing.
Reagan, Fuentes, and Libertarian Bias00:07:44
So I just see all types of on all sides of this people breaking down into their camps.
So I'm somewhat critical of both, of both.
Do we know anything about the people in the car?
It'd be somewhat fun or funny.
I mean, in a horrible way, if they're both black.
I don't think so, but I don't know for sure.
But I do think that There's something interesting about the split.
And it seems to me, like the split within the libertarian world, it's like kind of this, it's like almost like a top and bottom alignment against the middle, in a sense.
So when I say that, what I mean is that it seems like the people who are that jump right on the side of Black Lives Matter, and in this case, this guy are kind of like the, you know, it's like the high-ranking people in the LP, the presidential candidates and vice presidential candidates, the official Libertarian Party Twitter, like all the high-level libertarians, you know, like when I say high-level, I mean the ones with, you know, these kind of positions within the party.
They're all on the Black Lives Matter train, you know, whether it's all the tweets we've been talking about for the last couple weeks or just siding with them.
We must be anti-racist.
Black Lives Matter is great.
And this guy died a hero and he was just crossing.
You know, it's like, and the need to paint these pictures of things that almost certainly are not true.
You know, he was a hero.
Somehow he was just, you know, like trying to wheel his disabled girlfriend around, but also he was protecting everybody and he dies this hero.
And then there's like, so it's like the top people there.
And then it's like the bottom, like the loser brigade types who also jump on that same bandwagon.
And then there's kind of all the rest of us who are somewhere in the middle there who seem to be rejecting this whole worldview.
And I really do think a lot of this comes down to what your own bias is going in, what your own kind of worldview going into this thing is.
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All right, let's get back in the show.
So I, um, and this just stuck out to me.
Um, again, just a random, you know, Twitter interaction, but it was something that I, I was, it kind of, it just resonated with me.
But so I, I tweeted at fucking Nick Fuentes the other day, uh, who's a like a right-wing, the America first guy.
He was a popular YouTuber who got kicked off YouTube.
I've had him on the show a couple times.
We had nice conversations, debated a little bit the first time he was on the show, and then we just kind of talked about online censorship the second time he was on the show.
And he said something, the thing that just drives me fucking crazy, that a lot of the kind of, you see this a lot with kind of populist right-wing guys where they'll say that the status quo is libertarian or something like that.
And he said something about how Ronald Reagan was a libertarian and then how terrible he was and how we should, you know, the Republican Party should move away from the legacy of Reagan.
Obviously, I agree very much with the second part, but I think the first part is, you know, absurd on its face.
And I tweeted back at him and I was like, Ronald Reagan was like a big government FDR Democrat.
You know, he was a drug warrior, a cold warrior, and all this stuff.
And then something like, I agree, he's horrible, though.
And, you know, whatever, Fuentes liked the tweet and we, you know, we see things differently, but at least we agree that Reagan sucks.
I hate him for better reasons than Fuentes does, but whatever, you know, I'll let that slide.
But so then someone, a libertarian, commented underneath it.
And to me, I know this is just one random comment on Twitter, but it's very revealing to me.
And they said, they go, Ronald Reagan is all of the things you described, and I still hate Nick Fuentes 10 times more.
And I just thought that was a very interesting comment for a libertarian to make.
And you see this same dynamic in a lot of the libertarians who come after me for having Fuentes on the show and being like too cordial with him or something like that.
It's like, you hate him more than you hate Ronald Reagan.
And that's a pretty tough position to be in for a libertarian because what we're supposed to hate, right, is like the initiation of violence, the state, all types of government policies.
But what Nick Fuentes is guilty of, and I don't know, I haven't seen all his fucking videos, but as many people have told me, he said some wildly offensive things on his videos.
And like, okay, I can't really, you know, confirm or deny that because I haven't seen a lot of his stuff from what I've seen.
There's some offensive shit and some entertaining stuff.
He's just flinting.
Yeah, he's fun.
He's just flinting out.
But, you know, I think he's like a smart, funny guy who definitely holds some views that I think are wrong.
But, you know, it's interesting to say, like, that, like, let's say the worst of it's true and he's like a horrible racist or something like that, which I'm not saying.
I'm just saying, assuming even if that's true.
I mean, Ronald Reagan shipped cocaine into the country and then locked up people for dealing it.
You know, he was involved in like funding bin Laden and drastically growing the size and scope of government.
And my whole point to libertarians has always been like, you can be against racism if you want to, but don't we have to have some order of priorities of what's more fucked up?
And to me, like you should hate that 100 trillion times more than you hate someone saying something offensive.
That's just always been my position.
But there's something about the worldview that I've noticed that many libertarians have where they can very comfortably say, no, I hate that more.
I hate racism more than I hate statism.
And I think that's a big problem for libertarians, particularly because, you know, I mean, like, I just think there's so many fucked up things that the government does that for us to even get into policing thought and people thinking the wrong things is just a disastrous path to go down.
And truthfully speaking, almost everyone's guilty of some type of thought crime if you really want to play that game.
Institutional Racism vs Statism00:10:43
But I think a lot of it comes down to, and I don't use the term cultural Marxism a lot.
I don't like it.
Scott Horton actually convinced me a few years ago to not use the term.
And I was arguing that it was a good term.
And he basically had a better argument and just convinced me because that's what I do when I'm presented with superior arguments.
I adopt them.
And basically his argument was that it's this word that no one actually identifies as a cultural Marxist.
And a lot of people take it to mean different things.
And then there's like this implication that the Frankfurt School has taken over the entire United States of America, which there's really not that much evidence that it's true.
And so, anyway, I kind of dropped the term.
But the useful part of that idea, right?
And if you're not familiar, the idea was basically that there were these group of Marxists who basically decided that economic Marxism, the classical Marxist revolution, was not going to happen until they had what I believe they called the long march through the institutions and kind of blended, changed the culture to be something that was suitable for the Marxist revolution, and then it could happen.
And the idea of what it's kind of turned into is this cultural view that's almost the cultural equivalent of the economic Marxism.
So the original Marxist doctrine would be something along the lines of all of history can be reduced to class struggles.
There's the exploited class and the exploiting class, the bourgeois, the proletariat, right?
Everything they have is because they've exploited the workers.
The workers are exploited.
Eventually, the workers of the world have to unite and take over and live in a communist utopia.
That's obviously a very quick version, but more or less, broad strokes purposes.
And what the cultural view of it is.
And again, I want to be clear about this.
I don't think that the Frankfurt school is the reason why we live in the culture we live in today.
I think there are one small influence on the broader culture that we live in today.
But there is, you know, whether it's intersectionality or just kind of social justice leftist stuff or the cultural Marxist, whatever you want to call it, there is this very, very dominant view today that is very similar to the Marxist understanding of classes that are now applied to race, sex, sexual orientation, things like that, where every,
and you since everybody listening knows this, you know this brand of leftist who views the world this way, where everything is reduced to whites are the oppressor, blacks are the oppressed.
Men are the oppressor, women are the oppressed.
Straight people are the oppressors, gays are oppressed, cis are the oppressors, trans are oppressed.
You know, it's really all that.
It's that every struggle, every conflict can be reduced to this dynamic.
And this is really pervasive in our culture, like everywhere.
And this is part of the reason why you can say, you know, very harsh things about white people, and that's not considered racist.
But if you say very harsh things about black people, that is considered racist, which of course, it all becomes kind of contradictory because that in itself is kind of racist, right?
To have different standards for different races, but that's considered fine.
And if I say that, what I just said, that that itself is racist, there'll be a whole bunch of people in the comments who go, oh, he doesn't understand racism.
He doesn't understand racism.
But really, it's that I don't, I reject this cultural Marxist view, for lack of better term.
I don't see things that way.
I think it's incredibly reductive and simplistic and just flat out not real for the vast majority of situations.
That there's a million different categories we can chop people up into.
Actually, probably more than that, probably nearly infinite categories.
Here's the most simple one.
A guy gives you a job.
Some guy has a really good idea and he goes out and he creates that business.
And are you exploited when he goes around and says, hey, look, imagine an inventor, invent something from fucking, imagine the guy who invented the wheel.
Let's go with that.
Some dude invents the wheel and he creates the wheel factory and he's pushing fucking wheels out there.
And sure, they're competitors because we don't believe in IP or you don't.
And, you know, people are ripping off his wheel design.
But he's still, he had first market, he had first mover advantage.
People like the structure on his wheel.
He's figured out the smoothness of this thing.
And so he invents the wheel.
He creates, he's got some capital.
He creates the wheel factor and he starts hiring people to like a minute ago.
I didn't have a fucking job.
There was nothing for me to do.
I had nothing to do.
This guy invents something that the world wants and he's willing to hire me so that I can work on this product and now have money that I wouldn't otherwise have.
That's that's being exploited.
Who was exploited there?
What was the exploitation?
That guy only has what he has because he exploited me.
No, he fucking invented something.
He created it.
He provided you with an opportunity.
I mean, that's to me a much more accurate description of what happened there.
Right.
So I just don't have this kind of worldview where I force everything back into this.
Well, which class are you in and which aren't you?
And look, I really do think that whether it's conscious or it's just that the culture is so dominated by this stuff that if you're outside of this worldview, you're labeled as the bad guy.
And this kind of pushes some of the weaker people, some of the people who are afraid to offend into this box where they don't want to be labeled these bad words.
I think that, but this is why, okay, this is why the libertarian party, right, they will tweet things about systemic racism and they'll say the war on drugs or some other policy.
Well, this is institutional racism.
But you will never hear them say that affirmative action is institutional racism, even though it is a far more blatant version of institutional racism than the war on drugs is.
I mean, the war on drugs, you have to go to like an argument like, well, it disproportionately affects, you know, but it's not like written into the law, like drugs are illegal for black people.
You know, it's not like that clear, but you will never hear one of these people say that affirmative action is institutional racism, even though, but like it clearly is.
There's no like coherent argument as to how that's not racist.
But again, it's just because that does not fit into the worldview where this is the oppressor group and this is the oppressed group.
And a lot of times, if you don't fit into that view, you end up just being called all of the names.
And that, and I, you know, I think I've come to realize this more and more.
I think a lot of people who are caught in that worldview really mean it when they're saying it.
Like they're like, no, you are a racist.
You are a racist.
But what they mean by that is not the same thing as what people outside of that worldview mean by that.
Like you have some negative view of someone based off their race.
They mean you are not believing that this group is oppressed and this group is the oppressor.
So we almost need like a new language that both people can agree on.
And it's like people that have these ideas of systemic racism, let's just call them dumbasses and we can be in the non-dumbass group.
That does seem fairly simple.
That might be the most straightforward way to deal with it.
But I really do believe that this is a big part of what influences the split between libertarians.
It's the ones who are in this worldview and the ones who reject it.
And this is why when something like Black Lives Matter happens, the response of people who are caught up in this intersectional cultural Marxist type shit, they're like, well, of course we have to be on the side of Black Lives Matter because they're the oppressed ones.
And so we have to find out like what, okay.
And of course, you can find a libertarian justification for why to be on the side of Black Lives Matter.
The cops are out of control and they're just protesting that or whatever.
But you can also find a very easy libertarian justification to be concerned about the people who are being abused, the property damage, the assaults, the riots, all of this stuff, right?
And yet you never really see, unless I drag it out of them, the high up, you know, libertarian people with important positions in the party standing up for any of them.
And you never see the like loser brigade types, you know, standing up for any of them.
That's just unimportant because it doesn't fit into this whole worldview of the exploited and the exploiters.
But we don't look at things that way.
We look at things on a much deeper, more nuanced level where you go like, okay, there are probably a million factors that have exploited to some degree or another some of, you know, some of the people in the group of Black Lives Matter.
And for sure, some of them are bad.
You know, some of them might be the police state and some of them might be government licensing laws and some of them might be the welfare state.
And there might be a million, you know, a million, but a lot of things that are like state actions that are like legitimately fucked up that we want to get rid of.
But we can also see that that doesn't give you an excuse to fucking go loot a store because that person, it does not have this collective guilt of they're in the exploiting class.
That person is just some business owner who, as you said, is like providing opportunities for other people and working in their community voluntarily.
You don't get to do that.
I can be against that instance of violence and exploitation and also still be against the police state.
Like these things are not in conflict.
But what you will see from the people who buy into this kind of, you know, Marxist view of the culture is that they have to bend over backward and deny reality.
You know, they're largely peaceful, the protests.
Like, well, okay, but, you know, cities are burning.
So that part isn't so peaceful.
And then they'll have to say things like, he was a hero or he was just pushing his disabled girlfriend across the street.
When this is not reality.
Why Invest in Gold and Crypto00:02:26
There's no evidence to suggest this.
And we don't have to do that.
So if you look at just the conversation we had in the first few minutes of this show, we can go, okay, well, here's all the nuance of this situation.
Here's why some people are feeling this way and some people are feeling this way.
Now, it's not, I really don't think that a lot of people on our side of things are saying that there are no legitimate grievances that people marching in Black Lives Matter have.
I've certainly never said that.
You've never said that.
In fact, we pointed out what many of the legitimate grievances are.
But we're not so caught up in this worldview that we can't say, hey, you're not the only ones with legitimate grievances here.
And you don't get to create more legitimate grievances for innocent people.
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Stopping Cars Before Fascism Wins00:15:36
So one of the dynamics that's been going on now and has been building and building over the last couple of months is this thing of, which has always been kind of an Antifa Black Lives Matter thing, but this thing of protesting in the streets where they stop cars.
And that is, I'm sorry, that is an act of aggression.
You don't have a right to do that.
You can't just fucking detain somebody, in effect, kidnap them for a brief period in time and terrorize them.
That is, now, I'm not speaking again about this specific instance.
I don't know what happened there, but we've all seen dozens of videos of motorists just being terrorized.
You know, a group of people just standing in front of them surrounding the car.
If you try to move forward at all, they start pounding on your car.
I've seen people dragged out of cars and assaulted.
I've seen their cars, you know, like windows smashed in and shit like that.
I've seen it done when people have their families in their cars.
Now, this is fucking terrible.
And it's very easy for a libertarian to see this and be like, this is an outrage, right?
Like, but if you're just in this worldview where the ones marching are the oppressed and therefore the righteous group, you have to find a way to kind of brush all of this shit aside.
And we don't really believe in doing that.
So when you see a situation like this story from the other day, people like us start going like, okay, well, I want to know exactly what the details of the situation were.
Like, I don't know what was going through this guy's mind.
I don't know.
Maybe he did want to agitate the crowd.
Maybe he was looking for a confrontation.
I don't know.
But if all I know about a story is that a guy is his car is surrounded by a mob and a dude approaches with an AK-47 in his hands and he ends up shooting that guy.
I can certainly understand where it is possible that this guy feared for his life.
I'm not saying that is the case, but it's certainly possible.
And I don't think it makes sense for the Libertarian Party or people who are running on the Libertarian Party to jump right into this and say, well, we know what the answer here is.
The guy in the car has to be the bad guy.
To me, that's bullshit.
You know, it's you really do see this a lot.
And I'll say to both sides, I've seen shitty behavior.
I mean, I've seen a few people who have tweeted really nasty things about this guy who just died.
And it's like, this is, you know, don't do that.
Just don't do that.
Try not to be so fucking shitty.
The man is dead.
This is a sad situation.
Don't fucking, you know, like, I don't know.
I've seen people say, like, I saw one or two like racist comments about him because his girlfriend was black or whatever.
And that shit's just terrible.
That's fucking, you know, grow up and stop being such a shithead.
Don't fucking tweet shit like that.
But then I also see on the other side, people just doing this fucking terrible thing where they just fucking call.
I mean, someone, I saw someone said something along the lines of they were like, they were like, I don't know what to say.
Don't protest in the street.
Don't stop cars and none of this will happen.
And someone replied to them, they go, hey, look, everybody, I found a fascist.
And you're like, does that really make you a fascist?
And it reminds me, I saw one of these guys from the Loser Brigade debating Eric July on his show or calling in and arguing with him a little bit.
And he said at one point, he called someone fascist and Eric asked him to define fascism.
And he really struggled to do it, which, you know, and eventually he said something like, it's authoritarianism, which is like not exactly a great definition of fascism.
But it's like, well, then why aren't you just calling them an authoritarian?
I mean, there's been, you know, no shortage of authoritarian regimes around the world.
You know, the communists were all authoritarian.
Some of them still are.
They're not fascists.
And there's all types of, you know, like my point is like, why aren't you like, when someone, if you're calling someone authoritarian, right?
And that's what you mean.
Why are you calling them fascist?
Why aren't you calling them like, I don't know, Saudi or something like that?
You know, like, why, why are you picking this one name?
And we all fucking know why, okay?
We all know why the term fascist gets gets used so much and why the term Nazi gets used so much.
Like, it's like fascism just become just means something I don't like or something kind of authoritarian that I don't like.
Racist basically becomes Nazi, you know?
And why is it?
Why are you invoking that?
It's because of the fucking genocide of the Nazis.
That's what you're invoking.
You're invoking all of the emotion, all of the fucking energy of these fucking, this Nazi regime in Germany in the fucking, you know, 30s and 40s who fucking killed millions of people.
And I cannot explain to people how profoundly offensive I think that that is.
And this is the flip side to like the whole fucking brigade of people who like come, you know, call Tom Woods and myself like Nazi sympathizers.
He goes, okay, so you're offended by someone.
You know, you're offended by some guest I've had on the show or what he's said or something like that.
Okay, I'm offended by that.
I find that profoundly offensive that you would use, you would weaponize the fucking slaughter of real people, my family members, for some cheap political points as a cheap little attack on your enemy.
I find that every bit as disgusting as I find somebody who made some racist comment online.
And in fact, in most cases, I find it far more disgusting than those people.
So that's like, you know, there's offensive shit all around.
Now, I'm not going to lose my mind about it and be like, oh my God, you should be canceled or something like that.
But if we're in the realm of talking about what's shitty on the internet, I find that to be pretty shitty too.
So I don't know, man.
It's all just kind of sad.
Like this situation is fucking tragic.
The fact that libertarians are so divided about these issues when there seem to be some really important issues that work together on, it's just, it's a bad situation.
And I don't think it does any favors for the L people, the LP people who are running for Joe and Spike for them to insert themselves into this and clearly take one side when they don't know what the fuck they're talking about.
And they're kind of have to invent things that there's no evidence to support.
I'm like, what's the point?
You're going to turn off a whole lot of people who don't exist in this fucking worldview.
And it's a worldview that I don't think is correct to begin with.
And it's, I think it's just bad politics and wrong.
I'm distracted by the stupid shit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And look, man, there is a lot of this.
Like, look, again, like, I agree with what you said before.
I don't think that the driver of this car should be off the hook exactly.
I mean, it's like, okay, he's cooperating with authorities.
Okay.
I think they should investigate this and they should go by what they, you know, what they can find.
But I do think it is reasonable to say, more than reasonable, like extremely reasonable to say, hey, like, you guys got to stop blocking traffic.
This is a horribly dangerous game.
This is going to end in more and more violence.
And if you're not looking for more and more violence, stop doing this.
This doesn't do anything.
You're not pro this does nothing to the police who you're mad at.
This fucking, you know, are just decent people.
Block cops when they're trying to run weekend errands.
Like at least otherwise just normal people that want to get to work.
Bob, I was thinking about that the other day.
I was looking at Seattle.
The cops must love this shit because of all the overtime pay.
This is probably the best thing that ever happened.
I mean, now it's turning a little more violent and they're starting to get injured.
So, you know, maybe it's not worth the risk as much.
But I bet prior to that, they're like, this is great.
Are you kidding me?
I get to go out all weekend.
I stand on the street corner, watch these people be a bunch of freaks.
And, you know, I get to club everyone every once in a while, maybe host one.
I'd get paid for all this double time.
Yeah.
Well, there might be some of that.
And it's certainly not doing anything to roll back their power.
It's certainly not doing anything to like, there's no, there's nothing just about just stopping random people.
And I guess this is really kind of the meat of what I think is so wrong about that worldview where you're like, well, the white people are the oppressors and the black people are the oppressed.
And you see this, it's pervasive.
It's not, I was talking about in the libertarian world, but this is really pervasive on the left in general and throughout the Black Lives Matter movement.
And this is why people feel justified to stop people in their cars.
It's why they feel justified to smash windows.
It's why they feel justified to assault people.
It's because like, well, we're not really just protesting the police.
We're protesting white people.
Now, they may call it white superiority or, you know, white supremacy or, you know, a white supremacist society or whatever.
But it's really just like, okay, well, you're, I mean, I've listened to people give the justifications for looting.
And it's like, well, these are, this is all part of the system.
These are white-owned stores that tear people down.
I heard one, this one woman who was arguing that, and then they confronted her and they said, well, what about the stores that are minority owned?
Which already, you know, as a libertarian, you should have a little bit of a problem with that.
Like, oh, that's, it's okay to fucking, you know, you know, bash white people's store windows in, but not black people or something.
But, but the woman said with no hesitation, she said, yeah, but did those black people really own the stores?
Who'd they get the loans from?
Where'd the bankers come from?
So see, even that is all part of white supremacy.
So when the enemy isn't the police or the state and it's just white people, then you end up justifying a lot of this shit where there's just like some white dude who's fucking, you know, innocent in all of this.
And that is something I can't get on board with.
There was to your point that you were saying before about the stuff in Seattle, there was a tweet about this the other day that I shared that I just really couldn't, I actually couldn't.
You know, like when I was saying a couple episodes ago about how you should always try to take the other person's argument and see if you can, you know, steel man their position.
This is like one that I fail my own test of.
Like I just cannot steel man this position.
But so there's this woman who tweeted out.
I guess she was at one of these protests and she was blocking the cars and she tweeted out the video of her doing it with it.
And she said, tonight, or this one was in DC.
My bad, I thought it was in Seattle, but I guess this was in DC.
So she said, tonight, we had a protest where we blocked off streets in Georgetown.
The police presence was heavy.
As we blocked off streets, we demanded that people turn around.
This was a minor inconvenience for this affluent white neighborhood.
So that's her starting point that, well, we're demanding you turn around.
And really, this is just a minor inconvenience.
And I mean, you're white, so who cares?
You know, what's what I'm completely justified in this.
Now, she says, this is her tweet.
This is her description of the story of what happened.
Okay.
As we blocked the streets, certain drivers got annoyed.
Shocking, right?
And attempted to maneuver their way around us.
This particular white woman tried to cut through a gas station.
Me and a couple other protesters, a couple other protesters stood in front of her car and demanded she turned around.
Instead, she steps on the gas.
Now, that is her story.
And she thinks she's the good guy in that story.
She explicitly says that the woman tried to avoid them, tried to turn through a gas station to get away from them.
And they run over to her and demand she turn around.
And she's like, no.
And except on the gas, no one was injured or went to the hospital and this thing.
She just like, you know, like moved the car forward.
And eventually the cops came over.
They're all pounding.
They're jumping on her car.
They're pounding on her car.
And I just don't know in what world do you think you're the good guy in that situation?
Now, you know, fortunately, no one was seriously hurt in this situation.
But if you're going to continue to do this, people are going to get seriously hurt.
And the difference in this story, right, is that this one was in Austin.
It wasn't in D.C.
It was in Austin, where people might have guns on them.
Okay.
Even though Austin's a liberal city, it's in Texas and people might have guns.
And so, you know, blocking some random white person's car really gets at the cops for murdering George Floyd.
But that's the point is that it's not about the cops.
It's white people.
It's all of them.
These are, Rob, these are affluent white people.
Fuck them.
You know, that's kind of the mentality.
You really, I hate when people make reactionary claims.
And I'm not saying that people should, you know, bond together and react against this, but just from their perspective, if you're really going to try and pick on the bigger team and go, how dare you?
Like, I don't know who's giving you benefits all these years?
Who are you really trying to pick a fight with?
It just, you know, at some point in white, what do I mean?
I mean, all right, you've got whites are still the majority in this country.
And now you're trying to go and they've somewhat tried to create a favorable environment and, you know, do what they can, maybe not all the way up to standards, but they've done social programs in which people that have less than them were trying to be included within the society.
And your typical white person, you go talk to your typical white person.
They're not really big fans of poor and they're looking to help people out.
Even on the more conservative side, maybe they don't like want social programming, but they're not like, hey, let's exploit the poor people or let's make sure that they have to remain poor.
That's not really their outlook.
Maybe they're more about personal responsibility and they think that there's other ways that other groups of people can uplift themselves and find a good life.
But for the most part, people are not like, you know, spending their time and days thinking, how can I make sure that America is a bad experience for black people?
If anything, you look at the history over the last 20, 30 years and most of the conversation is kind of about, hey, what can we do to help the disenfranchised in this country?
And now, after 30 years of, let's say, making an effort and maybe not up to standard, maybe there's some flaws here.
You're starting to shame them and go, you guys are a bunch of fucking racists and we're going to take violent actions against you.
Like, why are you poking at that bear?
It just doesn't even, it seems like a losing strategy.
And if you get that 100% reaction, which is not going to happen because everyone's, you know, a bunch of fucking pussies.
And I'm not advocating for this of like, well, you've seen a little bit, I guess, in the, you know, conservatism or maybe white nationalism, but the, well, then fuck you.
You know what?
It just, this is a losing fight.
You guys are trying to like not just don't, yeah.
No, look, I agree.
Shitty People on the Road00:07:06
It's, it's not just a losing fight, but it's a fight that is going to result in disaster.
Like how big that disaster is going to be, I don't know, but it's going to be bad.
You cannot, I mean, this is the thing, right, about this kind of this, again, for lack of a better term, the cultural Marxist mindset.
And you understand, I explained before what I mean by that, but the mindset where it's like the, there's one class of people that are the exploiters.
There's another class of people that are the exploited.
And there's no real like reason.
There's no real argument for why they're the exploited.
It's not like, oh, I can point particularly to where this person exploited someone else.
It's just you're collectively guilty and we're collectively righteous.
It leads to an outrageous sense of entitlement.
Like this, this woman here who's just like, well, I have the right to stand in the middle of the street and turn your cars around.
And people are not going to respond well to that.
More and more people are going to go, no, fuck you.
This is probably some woman coming home from work on her way home.
It's like, I'm not turning my goddamn car around.
I got to get home.
I have a life to live.
You know what the attitude is like if you, I don't know if you've had this situation, but you got like a girlfriend and her prior relationship was shitty.
And so she does something shitty in your relationship.
And she's like, well, the last relationship was really shitty.
So I'm entitled to act.
It's like, no, I have nothing to do with that other person.
You and I are here right now.
Let's create fair standards.
And that's kind of what we're advocating of, let's look at power structures and let's create environments in which everyone can, you know, do well here.
And they're like, well, no, I'm entitled because of prior, well, that's not going to get us anywhere.
No one's entitled to be shitty.
Let's have a look at that.
Especially when you're so sloppy in who you blame for it.
When you're just, because what you end up doing, and in your example, too, right, is you're blaming someone who's not responsible for that.
And so that's not going to work out well before that person's like, no, fuck you.
I didn't do anything.
And I'm not turning my goddamn car around.
You don't get to just walk in the middle of the street and tell people to turn their car around.
And for, you know, like for libertarians who hate the state and they hate the authority and how the state will just say, well, we decided on regulation X.
And so you have to do all of this compliance before you can open your business.
And we'll be the first to be there.
Like, fuck you.
You don't rule over that person.
You don't have a right to just tell them they can't open their business over this.
I don't understand why it's so hard for a libertarian to look at someone just standing in the street and demanding you turn your car around on property that's not theirs and go, fuck you.
You don't get to do that.
You have no authority over this person.
This goes back to the cops of maintaining the public square is that they should be on television, radio, and everywhere and saying this, this is completely unacceptable.
And if you're doing it, we like, we're not encouraging anybody to hit you, but if it happens, don't for one second play the victim.
We're telling you that this is unacceptable behavior.
We're not allowing for it.
You're not allowed to do it.
We're going to arrest you if we see you doing it.
And if you get hit, you're assuming, you know, there was, you ever watch the show Trigger Happy TV?
It was early in Comedy Central.
Holy shit, was that show funny?
It was just sounds familiar.
Why can't I remember?
You know what?
The most famous bit which you remember is he had the giant cell phone and he'd go like into public and he'd just be yelling on it.
He did this great sketch once where he got into the road as a snail and he's just crawling across at the slowest possible pace and just, you know, cars are honking and cars are all right.
So he does it once, whatever.
It's fucking funny.
Imagine if people were doing that all the time just to be just because it's fucking hilarious.
They're just blocking traffic and fucking snail suits.
At some point, someone might go, listen, you're not allowed to just be in the street in snail suits.
And if people hit you, I'm letting you know that while in the past that might have been seen as people hitting a civilian, you're being an idiot and you're in traffic in a snail suit.
I'm on the side of humor.
And I would still go, yeah, if government said, if you're in a fucking snail suit, because it's happening all the time, we're going to hit you.
It's reasonable to hit people in snail suits.
It's the same thing here.
It's really up to government to go, you're not allowed to block traffic.
And if you are blocking traffic, we're taking it as an act of violence.
And people in their car want to be safe.
And so they're free to ram through.
That's the end of it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I agree.
I just, I do think it's whether it's government or just people or someone else.
This has got to be like met with a thing where it's like, guys, take this shit off the roads.
You don't, you don't have a right to be there.
And you don't have a right to like detain people in their cars and to terrorize them.
And I can only imagine in a lot of situations like this, where you're like, you don't know what it's like to be, like if you're in your car and you're stopped by this mob and you've seen videos all over the fucking country of people just being like brutally assaulted and dragged out of their cars and fucked up in these mob riots.
And you got to go in there assuming that this might happen to you.
And then, you know, again, I don't know what happened in this situation, but then if someone walks over with a gun in their hand, whether they're pointing it at the ground or pointing it at you, I mean, that can change in a split second.
I can understand that the possibility of fearing for your life.
People are going to need like those Mad Max cars with the spoky wheels coming out and metal graights in front with spears.
Maybe that's maybe that's the situation.
It's going to get ugly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I just, you know, it's kind of interesting to see how this all goes.
And I guess my what I think kind of sucks about it is that there's a like the way I look at it, honestly, I think is this.
Obviously, there are shitty people out there of all political stripes.
And, you know, there's, there's people who say shitty things online.
And then there's a lot of people who aren't really shitty people, but still kind of say shitty things online that they shouldn't say.
And then there are genuinely shitty people, you know.
But a lot of from how I see it is that a lot of people who are more in our camp, who don't see things in terms of oppressor versus oppressed throughout, you know, racial groups or gender groups or sexual orientations or whatever, we can look at something and say, okay, what the cops did to George Floyd was fucked up.
In general, how the cops treat people is fucked up.
This is a legitimate grievance.
This is not an appropriate reaction to a legitimate grievance when we're talking about the violence and the property destruction and things like that.
And we can look at something and say, okay, like I completely understand why people are furious about fucking just driving down a street doing nothing to anybody.
And all of a sudden you're like swarmed by all these people.
Again, not talking about this example, just in general.
But I'll say that I think if the LP is going to take this approach of saying, nope, we're with Black Lives Matter.
Anything that happens in this situation, we always side with that group because they are the righteous group and everybody else, their concerns are kind of secondary to me.
I just think they're going to turn a whole lot of people off.
And then they don't get to kind of hear the really great part of Joe Jorgensen's message, which is like, bring the troops home, government accountability and corporate welfare and the war on drugs, all that shit, which I think a lot of those people would actually be very open to.
And that's a shame.
When Driving Down a Street00:00:55
I'm sorry, what were you?
No, I agree 100%.
No, I just think it'd be funny to get a giant bowling pin costume and start sitting next to the people who are blocking traffic.
Just make them a little bit like, dude, you know.
Then you really couldn't like say anything against the car who drove him over.
You'd be like, dude, they were, they were asking for it.
That's the that would be the most like uh classic example if she was asking for it, where you'd actually be like, I, you know, what I'm gonna have to side with you on that one.
They dressed as bowling pins, and this guy he picked up a spare.
Now, I'll be honest, he did not have to come back around and try to hit those other two pins.
But I mean, you know, again, it was a pretty hilarious thing to do.
But if it like you hit them, and then there was like one person on the end that just like wobbled a little bit and then fell down.