Scott Horton critiques Kamala Harris's prosecutorial record, citing cases like Kevin Cooper and Daniel Larson to argue she is ill-suited for VP. He condemns the Democratic Party's identity politics, contrasting it with Ron Paul's consistent opposition to state overreach while highlighting how corporate media ignores unifying police violence stories in Arizona. The discussion emphasizes that true libertarianism must address the military-industrial complex and Federal Reserve rather than pandering to cultural wars or hypothetical neutrality, urging a focus on real-world crises over divisive identity narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Fill her up.
You are listening to the Gash Digital Network.
Rolling Back The State00:09:31
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
Hey, what's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
Very excited to have one of my favorite people in the world as the guest for today's show.
Of course, the great Scott Horton, author of The Great Ron Paul, author of Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, the host of the Scott Horton Show and anti-war radio.
And of course, he's also, he also runs the Libertarian Institute, which is a wonderful organization with a lot of really great people that put out just a ton of really great work.
And Scott usually is on the show to discuss foreign policy matters.
That is kind of his area of expertise, but he's great on everything.
And so I wanted to talk to Scott about Joe Biden's VP pick.
I did, I thought he was going to end up going with Susan Rice.
And so I thought we'd be having a different conversation all about war crimes and treason.
But instead, we're just going to have a nice conversation about destroying the lives of poor black people.
You know, it's as close as you can get without quite being treason.
So I wanted to say, and we could talk a lot about this.
I'm interested to get your takes.
My first thought about the Kamala Harris pick as Joe Biden's VP was that, well, I guess number one, I would say that Joe Biden, his VP pick matters a lot, a lot more than your average presidential campaigns.
And I remember back in 2008 when I had just first been introduced to libertarian ideas, and people said this about John McCain because John McCain was older and they were like, you know, his VP pick really matters because like he could die while he's in office.
That's not that crazy.
And I think that's a reasonable position.
John McCain's VP pick matters a lot more than Barack Obama's VP pick matters.
And they would hit him with that.
Like, how could you pick Sarah Palin?
This dummy is, she can't be the president.
And I was like, you know, that's a reasonable critique.
Well, same with Joe Biden, and even more so because he's older than McCain was and he's older than McCain was at the time.
And then the other thought I had was just that, you know, much like with Mitt Romney running in 2012, when you have these Republicans who are furious about Obamacare and you have the Tea Party movement, and this is the number one issue.
And then what do they do?
They put up the guy who owns the Affordable Care Act, who implemented it in Massachusetts.
And here in 2020, what are the Democrats really exercised about right now?
Well, they're out in the streets about police brutality.
And so, of course, they put up the author of the 94 crime bill as their president, and they put up a cop as the VP.
It's just, man, they just don't care at all what the people are telling them they want.
Yeah, absolutely not.
In fact, you know, in the New York Times coverage of it, they said, well, she was the safe pick.
The Democratic strategists, like, she didn't have any strong negatives.
There was nothing really going against her.
And so the first rule of picking the VP candidate should be do no harm and she will do no harm.
Like they have no idea that she's radioactive, you know, among the left-wing base because they don't give a damn about the left-wing base.
They figure they completely own them anyway.
And hey, she's a black woman.
And so that ought to be a good enough sop for you.
And that's their whole attitude.
And they may be right that really, you know, the Bernieites might complain that she's a cop and whatever, but for them, that's good.
You know, thank goodness that she'll be credible to the police, who are an important constituency out there, you know, them and their unions.
And what will the militarists think?
You know, how can they trust her if she's bad on the police state from their point of view here?
She wants to roll back the police state here.
She might want to roll it back abroad.
So I think, you know, probably everything that she has done in her career that would make the likes of you or me or, you know, libertarians or the people on the left, the dissenters on the left hate her, are all the things that are actually what make her the strongest candidate, you know, that make her a reliable person from the point of view of those with power.
Well, there's no question she was beloved by the establishment.
They really tried to push her quite hard in the presidential race.
I mean, she was like, if you listen to any of the BS corporate press cable news shows, with the exception of Fox News, they were just, I mean, praising her from the very beginning.
She was like the presumptive nominee before there had even been a poll taken.
And if you listen to any of the or read anything in the major newspapers after that first debate, they all told you that she was dominant and that she won and that she was the clear frontrunner.
The issue was that nobody liked her, that nobody liked her.
And she has this mix of standing for nothing and being incredibly unlikable.
She's really Hillary Clinton-esque in that regard, bursts out laughing at her own words that aren't even jokes.
Like it's just a very strange demeanor.
And then, of course, she was nuked by Tulsi Gabbard.
And that was pretty much the end of her presidential run.
Yep.
And yeah, Tulsi Gabbard made the shortest work of her that, you know, you call yourself a progressive prosecutor, but I'm not seeing that.
And just a couple of examples, and there are many examples.
And I actually did some work this morning, you know, for you to make sure I was ready for this.
And we can talk all about it.
But just what Tulsi Gabbard brought up was you invoke technicalities to keep an innocent man on death row.
And the crowd was like, dead silence.
Just like, okay, what do you got now?
Oh, yeah.
Well, you love Bashar al-Assad.
That didn't work.
But she didn't even respond.
She didn't even respond with that.
She had nothing.
She just went, well, I'm proud of the job I did.
Yeah, the Assad response was later.
The next day, she's like, okay, I talked to my people and they said, you love a sod.
Right, right.
So who cares if I kept an innocent man on death row?
You love Assad.
And locking up people for smoking weed.
You know, I was talking with Eric Garris today and he was, you know, involved with and paying very close attention to the whole movement in the mid-1990s to legalize medical pot in California.
It's the first state that legalized medical pot.
And when they did, she was one of the ones who did everything she could to make it essentially moot and make it impossible to implement and continue to harass people and authorize, you know, drug raids on them as though it hadn't been legalized and all that stuff.
She was absolutely horrible on pot up until she ran for president.
That was only then did she say, oh, yeah, no, we ought to legalize it.
And that was the other thing that Gabbard hit her on was you locked up 1,500 people for smoking weed, locked them in jail for weed.
But then when you were asked if you smoke weed, you laughed about it.
And again, the audience was just like, that's pretty bad.
Like maybe there was a previous time where people would have thought that was funny and trivial and, you know, something like that.
But yeah, no, it's not.
And, you know, the thing about maybe weed itself is trivial, but then that's the point, right?
You're talking about taking people away from their families, away from their jobs, away from their stable situations and locking them in a cage over completely trivial possession of a plant.
So that doesn't make the issue trivial.
That makes it the most important thing in the world.
And because pot smoking is so widespread, that means that they can just use it as a pretext to harass people all the time.
You know, virtually, you know, in a city, everybody's within nose shot of the smell of weed, a pretext to kick in any door or open any trunk or harass anybody walking on a sidewalk.
And it's very hard.
It's very hard to even measure the actual damage that's done in like the ripple effects.
I mean, like, you know, like how many people have lost their job because they were arrested, were a no-show, no-call the next day, and now this has a big effect on their lives.
How many people got probation and then got busted for like some, you know, minor little thing, like having a drink or leaving the state or something like that?
And then, you know, they go to jail for that.
So not technically for pot, but it's really all about for pot.
But I really think even more so that like what me and you, like bleeding heart libertarians like us, what we really care about is, you know, like liberty and we hate injustice.
And so you're like a human being is thrown in a cage over having a harmless little plant that like that's what really exercises us.
But I think the real reason, which also exercises me, but the real reason why I think that resonated so much is because we live in this populist moment, both populist right and populist left.
And there's really something about pointing out that you fucking elite, you elitists, you force these rules on other people, but you laugh at the idea of these rules being enforced on you.
Death Penalty Technicalities00:05:38
I think it's the same thing as when people see Fauci at the baseball game sitting in the stands next to people without a mask on.
And you're like, motherfucker, you're asking everyone else to sacrifice.
And what you're just not, but you're above it.
And that really, particularly in 2020 or in 2019, whenever this was with Tulsi Gabbard, that really gets people furious.
And that was the end.
That was the end of her presidential run.
Yeah.
And by the way, so here's the thing about this whole progressive prosecutor label.
That's actually a thing.
And there was a guy who was elected to the DA in Dallas County, I'm going to say six years ago or something.
And the first thing he did was crack open all their murder convictions and double check if they really believed in them or not and start going to judges and saying, we want these people released.
We don't stand by these convictions anymore.
And reviewing drug cases.
There was one where all these Mexican laborers had been rounded up and the cocaine evidence against them was just sheetrock.
It was the gypsum powder from the inside of sheetrock that they'd used to lock all of these guys in jail on sentences for decades.
And so this new prosecutor came in and said, well, damn every other prosecutor before me.
I don't care about them or their honor or their reputation or this crap.
We're going right for the truth here and opened up the vault, they called it.
There's another prosecutor I read about in Nashville or somewhere.
I'm sorry.
Anyway, immediately going to review murder cases, reviewing drug convictions, reviewing people being treated unfairly and see what we can do right.
That's prosecutors doing that.
Okay.
So that's really a thing, right?
It'd be like if Dave Smith won for DA.
Well, there's this new breed of libertarian prosecutor, and that would mean something.
Kamala Harris couldn't just say, yeah, I'm one of the new breed of libertarian prosecutors.
No, you're not.
You're just a cop.
That's all you are.
You're a prosecutor.
That's it.
Nothing progressive about it as far as reform on behalf of the little guy.
And, you know, her record, you could read all about her record as a prosecutor.
And the only thing they can say about her is that there was a gang member that killed a cop and she refused to seek the death penalty in that one case.
And that made the cops mad at her that she didn't seek the death penalty.
And Diane Feinstein denounced her for not seeking the death penalty, of course.
Disgusting Diane Feinstein, who's really not even a human being, but just a representative of her husband's military industrial complex corporate welfare firm.
But anyway, they ought to make her wear a jacket, you know, Bloom Enterprises, whatever.
But anyway, so that's the one thing that they can say about her in praise of her to try to spin her as a progressive, whatever the hell as one of this group of progressive, this new breed of progressive prosecutor, whatever, which she just absolutely is not.
And all of the rest of her record, check this, when a federal, pardon me, a state court in California ruled that the death penalty is unconstitutional on the basis that the whole process is so disorganized and screwed up.
You got people who are sitting on death rows since 1978, which just goes to show that the government program of implementation of the death penalty in California is just too organized to possibly be truly constitutional and legal.
And so overturned this guy's death penalty case, but it was going to set a precedent.
It was going to essentially, it was a specific ruling, but it was going to essentially open the floodgates and outlaw the death penalty in California.
She appealed it.
She was the attorney general.
She appealed it and she won.
And so there's still a death penalty in California to this day because of her.
And there's a guy who was, according to essentially the entire consensus, was falsely accused of raping his stepdaughter, who was a notorious liar, et cetera.
And the judge in the case had remanded it to arbitration, which essentially means let this guy go without admitting fault, but go ahead and get to discharging him now.
And she appealed it based on the fact that when he represented himself, he didn't file the exact right Form 531B by the certain deadline.
And he's still sitting in a cage right now.
A guy who is widely acknowledged to be completely innocent is still sitting in the cage because she won on the technicality that he didn't file his paperwork at the right time.
That guy, his name was, what is it?
I want to say Graham Green, but that's the CIA guy.
What was his name?
George Gage, George Gage was that one.
And then the most famous one is Kevin Cooper.
And this was the case of the guy who had escaped from jail or the penitentiary, even I think, and was hiding out in this vacant home while just a few miles away, somebody came and butchered a family of four and they just pinned it on him.
But it was obviously just a coincidence that he was nearby and clearly didn't do it.
And there's all this exculpatory evidence.
And the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department just framed this black guy for it because they hated his guts.
He had escaped from their jail and whatever.
So this was their vengeance.
They put it on him.
And everybody knew he's innocent.
And she refused to get his DNA tested.
They had to get, you know, her cooperation to get the DNA tested.
And she dragged her feet and dragged her feet and refused to do it.
And then the guy's still in jail.
Only after she started running for president did she say that she endorsed, now that it was no longer her choice to do it, did she say that she wanted to see DNA tests?
Framing An Innocent Man00:02:07
And then Gavin Newsome, the governor, said, okay, he did too.
And so they got the DNA test.
But geez, they're just taking forever, Dave.
It's been 18 months and nobody knows what the DNA tests say.
And this guy is still sitting in the pen for a quadruple murder that he didn't commit, that everybody knows he didn't commit.
And Kamala Harris knows he didn't commit.
And he's on death row.
He's, you know, he's not going to be executed.
Eventually, he'll get out, but he could have been out a long time ago.
And she kept him in there on a technicality.
Again, that, you know, the paperwork wasn't filed in the right way.
So she doesn't have to follow through with the way that they do it.
All right, guys, let's take a quick second.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
There was another one where the oh, I'm sorry.
Here it was.
Was a guy, get this.
You know, war on drugs, war on guns, it's the exact same thing.
Anybody on the right who thinks the war on drugs is any smarter than the war on guns, or anybody on the left who thinks the war on guns is any smarter than the war on drugs?
People are crazy.
Okay.
So this guy, Daniel Larson, doing 28 years to life, Dave, for possession of a concealed weapon.
That's it.
War On Drugs And Guns00:15:25
He had a gun on him.
Now, I don't know the law in California, but I know that when Gator, the skater, raped and brutally murdered that young girl in 1991 and dumped her body in the desert, they gave him 30 years to life and he's about to get paroled.
This guy's doing 28 years to life.
The penalty that Gator got for raping and murdering somebody, Mark Rogowski, I don't give him the respect of the name Gator anymore.
This guy's got the same sentence for having a gun.
And she tried to say, yeah, but, and, and, oh, and then it turned out he didn't even have the gun.
He was framed too.
He was totally innocent of that ridiculous charge, which is a non-crime offense in the first place.
Innocent.
She tried to say, no, judge, he filed the paperwork past the deadline.
He didn't fill out the right form in the right way.
And in that case, they ruled against her.
But otherwise, this guy would be doing life for having a gun on his person in the state of California.
And maybe, as you said, maybe he was on probation for a previous pot bust or some stupid crap is what put him in this position.
I don't know the exact details.
And these just go on and the New York Times, when they did their write-up of her criminal justice thing, they got plenty of quotes from the police union people saying, we always loved Kamala Harris.
This new Kamala Harris that talks bad about us all the time, we don't even know who she is.
What happened to the old, real Kamala Harris that we all know and love?
says the head of the California police union.
Yeah.
Well, I'm sure he'll have her back real quick if she gets into the into the White House.
So that's, you know, a little bit of a glimpse into just the pure evil prosecutor that Kamala Harris was.
And then, of course, she became a United States Senator.
And as a senator, she's pretty much been, I mean, look, she's about as bad as you can be.
She's got all of the typical horrible qualities of a Democrat, like, you know, terrible on budgets and all types of things like that.
She's been terrible on war.
She's supported all of the wars.
I mean, she takes this new line of, like she took at the debates, even running for president.
You know, it's like, like none of them really defend the wars anymore.
They just say, we have to leave in a responsible way or something like that.
So, you know, I was, well, you know, I do want to leave Afghanistan, but we have to do it in a responsible way, which basically means we're never going to leave Afghanistan.
The responsible way would be the responsible way we leave, you know, South Korea or something like that.
Never.
And she's been awful on that.
She was awful on the whole Russia Gate hoax stuff.
She was a big proponent of all of that.
She was awful on that.
She tried to make the thing with Kavanaugh her moment to shine.
And she brought up a whole bunch of those accusations, which have all since collapsed that were absolutely just, you know, absurd.
The idea that he was like satanically, ritualistically gang raping people in college dorms and no one ever heard of it.
And then I think that woman even admitted it was a lie afterward.
So, you know, all this craziness.
What else about her senator?
Am I missing anything or is that cover?
She's going to speak at APAC at least once, I think twice.
Now, recently, she's made some noises like, geez, I wish you guys wouldn't annex the West Bank.
But that's, you know, right in line with the Democratic Party mainstream line right there is that we want to keep this annexation of the West Bank de facto and not de jure because you're blowing our cover, dude, is the only thing they're saying there.
So she's known always by the Palestinian activists as progressive, except for Palestine.
And, you know, Black Lives Matter is good on Palestine.
The Black Lives Matter organization is like, this is apartheid.
And Kamala Harris's position is, what's a Palestinian?
I don't know what you're talking about.
Yeah.
She refuses to say, okay, yes, it's true.
There's this occupation going on.
Yes, it's true.
These people have no rights.
Yes, it's true.
The PA is not a government.
They're the trustees in an Israeli prison.
These people have no civil rights, no civil liberties whatsoever.
They got spies everywhere.
They got, you know, 2G cellular phone service.
They got, they're, they're in a, in the West Bank, they're in a minimum security prison.
In Gaza, a maximum security prison, you know, or, you know, open air, you know, New York, escape from New York, prison by the sea there in Gaza.
But she doesn't have anything to say about that, you know?
And think of that too.
That's like Barack Obama supporting the Libyan Klan, killing all the blacks in the civil war in Libya or helping put Nazis in power in Ukraine.
Andre Perubi was a speaker of the House for five years or something after the coup there.
And then all the Nazi-infested armed forces of Ukraine raging war in the East and all of that.
Like, I don't know, man.
I'm about as wide as could be, I guess, but I couldn't imagine doing something like that.
To have people, you know, the first black president and the second black female senator and all this support these kinds of policies, which are just so absolutely against.
I mean, look, even if you think Kamala Harris is the most cynical politician in the world, like still, she had to have grown up with some kind of reverence for the civil rights movement of the 60s, if not of today, right?
Something, but you know, the anti-apartheid movement of the 80s.
That was a big deal in the 1980s to end apartheid.
It's absolutely unacceptable, the regime in South Africa.
Well, what makes Israel any better other than they got a powerful lobby in DC that a powerful Democratic politician dare not cross?
End of argument.
Yeah.
It's really crazy, too, with Kamala Harris and Barack Obama, the examples you just used, how they will use this idea of racism whenever it's politically convenient for them to kind of lecture their opponents or lecture the American people about how like your attitudes just aren't quite enlightened enough.
And, you know, there's this really major issue of like some, I don't know, unconscious bias or something like that.
You know, like they'll really, you know, wax poetic about all that stuff.
Yet they will, you know, in the case of Barack Obama, side with like a regime that's just slaughtering black people, enslaving black people.
And Kamala Harris will, and then Kamala Harris, quite literally enslaving black people in California.
I mean, and that's, it's just really something.
And it's kind of eye-opening about how that whole, you know, narrative of using the idea of racism, it gets used very intentionally and conveniently to kind of box people in.
Like, oh, and it's an escape hatch, right?
It's, you know, either we can abolish qualified immunity and we can subject police officers to the same law as everybody else, or we can get rid of the syrup bottle and, you know, make this all about your corrupt emotions.
George W. Bush did this too.
He put out a thing about, what, four or five weeks ago saying, when will white Americans ever heal the racism in their hearts?
Well, this is the guy who gave tanks to 10,000 police departments, gave them machine guns, gave them training at Fort Bragg with our special operations forces.
And he wants to say the problem, Dave, is that you're a bigot.
Says George W. Bush, the guy who's soaking in the blood of a million dead Arabs, make that too.
Oh, and posh tunes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, it's really, it's, it's really something.
And the way, and then, of course, these labels, they, they make it like this, they really help to foster and create this culture of like, you know, and of course, playing on decent people's emotions that like, yeah, well, we want to be against racism.
I mean, I've seen a, you know, a whole bunch of movies where the racist is some really, you know, irredeemable, horrible guy.
And I've seen, you know, poor black people who have a worse go of it in life than I do.
So I'm against racist.
And then it's like, who do they call racist?
Well, it's like, okay, it's always like Ron Paul or Pat Buchanan or like anyone who opposes the wars ends up being labeled as racist.
And then even Tulsi Gabbard, they tried to dig into like, you know, her father's pretty weird with the gays.
I don't know.
She might have a problem with the gay.
Like, as if any of you guys actually care about racism or homophobia, it's just very conveniently like, well, anybody who's like against the empire.
Oh, yeah, that's, well, that guy must just be obviously a closet racist.
Even if there's no trace of anything racist in anything they've ever said, very conveniently, because that label just really works, you know, for the statists.
Yeah, Rice did this great during Iraq War II.
She goes, look, a lot of people say that we shouldn't do this because Arabs aren't ready for democracy.
Well, that's like saying that Rosa Park should have to stay at the back of the bus and all that.
So now it's the civil rights movement.
That's what George Bush's war in Iraq is.
It's exporting all what MLK would have done, you know, regime change in Mesopotamia to help teach the good people about democracy, of course.
And it really does.
It plays on decent people's emotions because like your average, you know, like decent person out there who doesn't pay close attention to all this stuff, they're very easy.
Like, whoa, I don't want to be the guy who's saying Rosa Park should be at the back of the bus.
Like, yeah, maybe these people should be liberated.
I mean, it really is effective.
It wouldn't, it would not have gone on this long if there wasn't utility to it.
But I wonder, you know, how there's a real weird.
So me and you were talking on the phone, I think, a few weeks ago, and we were like kind of joking about this.
But Biden basically, you know, in the most naked, the worst version of identity politics.
And by the way, I don't use that term a lot in a negative way, like some people do.
They rail against identity politics.
I personally believe that there are good versions of identity politics.
Like Maj Ture has that organization, Black Guns Matter.
I think that's identity politics, but it's like a wonderful version of identity politics.
Okay, you want to talk to black people about why gun control has always been racist and how, you know, like peaceful black people arming themselves a good, okay, I think that's great.
But the worst form of identity politics is like Joe Biden being like, I'm going to pick a black woman as my vice president.
And me and you were joking on the phone about it.
You go, that's actually the shittiest thing you could do to your vice president.
If you wanted to be, you know, to help your vice president, you would say, like, even if you wanted to pick a black woman, you'd say, I'm going to find the absolute best person for the job.
And then pick a black woman and say she was the best person for the job.
You don't start off by saying, I'm not looking for the best person.
I'm looking for the best black woman.
And this one is the best one I could find.
It's just like, it's absurd.
But it's obviously trying to somehow bridge this gap, which like, okay, so obviously the left wing choice for president was Bernie Sanders.
The centrist, you know, neoliberal progressive establishment choice was Joe Biden.
And so you want to kind of, you know, in some way throw something to this, like, I don't know, some identitarian bone to whoever you perceive to care about this on the left wing.
And it's just, it's interesting.
You have this dynamic where the Democrats like to rant and rail about old, rich white guys and all of this stuff.
And yet they chose as their candidate, this old, rich white guy in Joe Biden.
So now they're going to pick, now he'll say, well, look, I picked a black female vice president.
Now we have all these narratives about, you know, history and all this stuff and what a, you know, like historical moment shattering the glass ceiling, blah, all this stuff.
I just wonder what real evidence there is that this will help in any way.
Now, I don't, I said this a few podcasts ago.
I really don't believe, I mean, I don't know exactly, but I don't think America's like that horribly racist, sexist of a country.
I think if the right black woman leader came along, it's quite possible that she could rally up a lot of support.
I mean, people, Obama got more votes than anyone's ever gotten for president.
Hillary Clinton, as awful as she was, she got 65 million people to vote for her.
It's not as if the country seems to hate black people or hate women on the level that they could never win.
But where is there evidence that there's this thirst for, well, we don't care who they are.
They just need to be a black woman.
I mean, even amongst the Democrats, I mean, obviously, the Republicans reject that type of ideology, but even amongst the Democrats.
It's not like they were deciding between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders.
They didn't want any of these other people.
It's not like there was this huge swelling of ground support to pick Kamala Harris.
So that's just liberal thinking, man.
You know, the leftists have these memes about, you know, abolish prisons.
And then the liberals go, more women prison wardens.
You know, they have like the clap in there, like, fucking end the wars.
More women bomber pilots.
Yeah, you know, throws it more gender.
Gender marine snipers, you know, and this is equality.
This is what a liberal thinks.
This is what they think.
You know, we'll give them, we'll give them Kamala Harris.
You know, that's them being as smart as they can be, Dave.
You know, that's, you know, that's their sop.
Look to the left.
There's these different kinds of, you know, everybody, and I'm sure I'm as guilty of this as anyone, or maybe not as guilty, but I'm sure I'm guilty of this too.
But we all kind of use broad brushes to think of groups of people in collectivist ways.
And it's not the most accurate thing to do.
But, you know, it's a lot of people certainly on the right will tend to think of the left as this thing and vice versa.
And it's obviously there's different groups and different sects.
And it doesn't make sense to look at them all in the same.
And even not just the liberals, but the left, even within the left, there are very different groups.
And there are some like that I really respect and admire a lot more than others.
So like, for instance, the Jimmy Doerr wing, for lack of better, you know, term, like the kind of principled anti-war, anti-corporate bailout, anti-police state leftists who also, yes, they want Medicare for all and these other things, but they do have, you know, I think they're bad on economics, but they do have a lot of things to admire about them.
And there's a lot of serious people there.
And there's even, there's even like some Democratic socialists.
I mean, I like Ben Burgess, who I had on the show a few times, and he's against the wars and against the drug war and things like that.
And yeah, I think that his economics are really bad, but he wants people to live better lives and he does care about people.
He's just, you know, wants like worker co-op businesses.
Hijacking The Progressive Movement00:09:49
And I think it would be a disaster.
But then there are these groups.
There is kind of the social justice warrior leftist type who aren't nearly as intelligent as the guys I just named.
They don't really care to read any of this stuff.
And they do really just care about this identity politics stuff.
And then there's the progressive establishment that loves that group.
And the reason they love that group is because they're so easy to buy off.
Like JP Morgan Chase can just make a commercial about diversity and that group feels like they've won something.
And JP Morgan Chase is like, oh shit, we don't have to give up our control.
And the gender and sexuality and identity left can always be used against the economic left who actually have some banking regulations they're trying to pass or whatever it is that might actually matter.
And, you know, there's a great example of this that's going on this week.
If you go look at Glenn Greenwald's Twitter feed, you can read all about it.
And Matt Taibbi wrote an article about it.
And it's, I'm sorry, I forget what town this is.
It's somewhere in the east, is the mayor of this town is the first openly gay mayor of this town.
And he's now caught up in the most half-assed sex scandal that when he was 25 and was a professor at this college, he was dating and having sex with 21-year-olds who were not in his class and whose grades did not depend on his favor in any way.
And who, in some cases, the victims only found out that the guy was a teacher at their school after the fact.
Or then years later, he became the mayor.
And now they go, oh, now he's the mayor.
So now when I screwed him back then, there was this weird power differential.
And this is the thing.
And so it's the leftist identity politics people are taking on this mayor who, what's he in the middle of?
Oh, he's running in the primaries against a military industrial complex, big pharma, corporatist, right-wing Democrat, the kind that every identity politics leftist ought to want to see crucified.
And instead, they're crucifying their own guy and who fits all of their intersectionality things.
I mean, I guess he's white, but otherwise, like he's supposed to fit in enough of the victim groups to be one of their heroes, you know?
But in this case, you have grown adults who are not victims saying that essentially after the fact, they felt uncomfortable when years later the guy became mayor or whatever the crap their argument is.
And Matt Taibbi is hilarious about this.
He says, they make the anti, these, these new leftists make the junior anti-sex league look like Led Zeppelin.
You know, they're like, they're worse than Jerry Falwell or worse than Ralph Reed or any of the Puritan right, the anti-twisted system from the Reagan era.
Because, I mean, in this case, we're talking about grown adult gay men.
Like these guys' constituency should be right.
And the right Greenwald is on a tear on this on Twitter, fighting with all of these people and talking about like, how dare they appoint themselves the policemen of these people's relationships and all of this stuff.
And just whatever left used to mean about, you know, liberalism having anything to do with live and let live or anything like that.
It's like, do you support gay rights because gay people have rights?
No, just because this is my issue to beat you over the head with.
There's no such thing as rights.
You know, there's nothing, there's no principle at play.
It's just this is an issue that they'll take or leave.
And if they have to, you know, completely, you know, make a scapegoat out of a guy and turn on a guy, then him being part of their in-group was no protection.
Right.
It's like the CIA and Carter Page.
Sorry, pal.
Yeah, well, what's really interesting, right, is if you, if you read, like Rothbard's got a great book on this, it's here somewhere behind me, The Progressive Era, which was put out after his death.
It's like a collection of a whole bunch of essays that him just breaking down the whole progressive era, the original progressive era in this country in the early 1900s.
And what he talks about is how basically there was this kind of, you know, somewhat organic movement of left-wing people who wanted more government intervention to control for, you know, like the excesses of capitalism.
And well, there's some people who are so rich and some people have, you know, so little and the government could straighten this out.
And then basically there was a right-wing hijacking of the progressive movement where they kind of had all the banks, the big bankers and the big industry people come in and say, oh, yeah, no, we can give you a managed economy in the name of fairness and we'll manage the economy.
And this is basically what we live in, the aftermath of, like, this is the 20th century is basically the post-progressive era century.
And now it's almost the same dynamic where you have some people on the left, like the original kind of social justice movement that was kind of like, well, look, there are these ways that black people are treated unfairly and women are treated unfairly and we're against racism and sexism and this.
And then you have like the big banks come in and go like, oh yeah, no, totally.
We're totally against that.
That issue is really, really important.
And so we're going to put a new black president of our bank up or we're going to put a new this, whatever, you know, like we'll have some woman be in here.
And then, and see, we're just with you, lefties, right?
Aren't you friends of the big banks now?
And it really is effective.
And that it goes because, of course, you know, if you have someone like Bernie Sanders running on we should break up the big banks, big bankers might be a little intimidated by that message.
But if you have someone running on like, you know, women are underrepresented, they'll go, okay, well, I'll take that over breaking up the big bank.
Now, of course, by the way, libertarians have the correct answer, which is that the market would break up these banks if the government just wouldn't bail them out.
But all of that aside, it is, this is like a real kind of check for a lot of people on the left, throwing Kamala Harris at them.
It's like, listen, how stupid are you?
Like, seriously, how fucking stupid are you?
Like, you care about issues affecting black people.
Does it really help you if the color of the skin of the person fucking over your community matches yours?
Or do you care about the issues that are asked?
That might even make it worse.
You know, it might make them more effective at it.
You know, oh, oh, no question.
And this goes back to, I think it's Jan in New York, George Carlin from 1992, right after the bid on the Gulf War.
He does the bid about what we all have in common, you know?
But he's as the preface to that, as a setup to that, he talks about the media and how all the media talks about is all of our differences, whether it's race or sex or money or region or whatever it is.
And he goes down the whole giant Carlinian list of things that they will use to always divide us so that they can keep going to the bank, to keep us fighting amongst ourselves so that they can keep going to the bank.
That's what it's all about.
And people should always suspect that.
And that's where, you know, I'll agree with an actual Marxist, if they're an actual Marxist, that politics is about power and control of resources and wealth.
Okay.
This isn't a game about whatever you think it is.
Okay.
This is about who owns that mountain and what's inside of it.
And that is decided by politics and power and it's economics that matter the most.
And look at the bohemians.
You just mentioned the banks.
I mean, everyone immediately think Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, these monsters.
They're too big to fail.
We all know they secretly rule the world.
Essentially, those banks own the plurality of the stocks of the biggest corporations that own the media, et cetera, et cetera.
It's not all, you know, a Freemason conspiracy.
It's just business, man.
But that's the core of it.
And of course, funnel, you know, fueled by a license to print money granted by the Federal Reserve.
And so whether you're a right-winger or a left-winger or a libertarian or whether you're white, black, or Hispanic or Asian or whatever, this is the game, man.
It is an economic war of the 1% of the 1% against all of the rest of us.
And so, of course, that's why they want to talk about everything except that.
Because think of the amount of advantage and actual privilege, you know, government-granted rent-seeking privilege that they have to lose here.
And just the military industrial complex, just the NDAA budget is $750 billion a year, Dave.
You throw in the VA and you throw in the care and feeding of the nuclear weapons.
It's a solid trillion dollars a year.
That's the biggest honeypot in the history of the world.
And that's just the military state.
The whole federal budget is like $4.5 trillion, $5 trillion.
Who knows what it's going to be this year?
The national debt's at $27 trillion at this point.
So this is what really matters.
But just like with anything, just like with the wars, if you want to really complain about the wars, you kind of got to know about it.
And learning about how markets work and regulations work and what exactly is Glass Steagle and do we need it or do we not?
And all of these different things.
It's difficult, complicated stuff.
Spending Trillions On Wars00:02:32
But hey, that former TV star said something with a bad word in it or insulted a homosexual person or whatever.
That's easy to get upset about.
You could spend all afternoon on that without learning a thing other than here's something to be outraged about.
And every day, and this is why I quit Twitter.
I just can't stand it anymore.
Not that it worked on me, but I just can't even stand being exposed to every day on the left and the right.
There's the two minutes hate of the day, the moral outrage of the day that you get to point at the other people and say they're bad.
And I'm on team good against the bad guys.
Hate, enemy, traitor.
We'd have won the war by now if it wasn't for you.
And then back to your desk, you know, and it's just, it's a nightmare, man.
And it works.
It's so well.
I wish George Carlin was here to see this now, man.
You know, I think 2008 was bad.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
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Smoke CBD With Promo Code00:15:27
And then meanwhile, what you have is a situation where both the left and the right get fucked over by the center, as always.
That's what always ends up happening.
And so you have to.
And then they hate each other more.
Right, right.
And there's a point.
And look, even when there's, there's a reason.
I've been talking about this for months now, but there is a reason why someone like George Floyd's death gets, you know, like that is picked up by every corporate news outlet.
And they'll, they'll really, they like that when they can, and it's not like that, that's not an important story.
It's just that it's useful for them to be like, Look, white cop kills black guy, and then they can run with that narrative.
But something like, uh, this guy, um, who just was his name in Arizona, who the body cam was just released.
Um, did you see this one where the cops come and they go out of the way of the people?
And he came out with it.
Uh, I'm blinking on his freaking name right now.
I'm sorry, I don't remember his name.
But uh, but this guy was in Arizona, and there was a noise complaint.
Basically, one of his neighbors called the cops on him for he was with his girlfriend playing video games, being a little too loud at like two in the morning or something like that.
Um, so you know, not being a great neighbor, and that's that's basically the crime that this guy committed.
And so, he calls the cops on him.
The cops come, they fucking they knock on the door.
Let me say, real quick here: the guy, the caller was clear to the dispatcher that he was BS and that there was any kind of danger or threat.
And the dispatcher was not confused.
And the dispatcher let both cops know that this is a bullshit call and that there's no real danger.
So, so they called him and they said, Yeah, yeah, so they called him and they said he called in a noise complaint and they go, Sir, do you believe the situation is violent?
And the guy goes, He goes, Well, if I say it's violent, will that get you guys here a little bit faster?
Yeah, okay, it's violent.
So, it was it was obvious.
And on the and on the body cam, you have the cops saying to each other that didn't you hear that this is a bullshit call?
Yeah, I did.
I don't know the exact words.
So, now but the cops themselves on the scene acknowledge to each other that they had been informed by the dispatcher that this is not a real call, this is a bullshit noise complaint.
So, and then just like you said, what do they do?
They ring the doorbell and then they both stand away from the people.
So, he can't see them.
So, now this guy, from his perspective, has someone banging on his door at two in the morning.
Um, maybe he heard or maybe he didn't hear them announce themselves as cops, but even so, it's not as if someone who's coming to rob you is above saying they're a cop.
And then it's a very shady move to say cops and move away.
So, he comes to the door with a handgun and then the cops start, you know, uh, screaming hands, hands, hands at him, which is like the most unclear command in the world.
Uh, and then they start, so he drops the gun, turns around, gets on his knees, and the cop shoots him in the back and kills him.
It's just horrific.
Now, this story will not get the same type of national news coverage that George Floyd did.
And the reason is because it's not that that story would make you like would not make people as angry as the George Floyd story.
It's that that story will kind of bring people more together and say, like, well, there are these Black Lives Matter, you know, protesters out there go, oh shit, you know, they do this to white people too.
Oh, shit, you know what?
They do it to white people actually more often, maybe not disproportionately, but it happens to white people all the time.
Um, so okay, now it's kind of all of us against the cops.
And then they know what happens where, you know, Portland may not be the very best example because there's been a lot of riots and stuff there, too, but there's also been huge peaceful protests and they never cease mocking them for being white.
Oh, yeah, sure.
The whitest town in America is so concerned about black people.
Well, maybe they are.
And maybe in the poor black part of Seattle or Portland or wherever, maybe the white people of those cities actually know for a fact of the way black people are treated and are sticking up for them.
But instead, it's simply a matter of ridicule that, like, you know, sure, solidarity between different oppressed people.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, but that also, and I mean, and it's just as disgusting on the other side.
And you see the Black Lives Matter leaders when one of these white guys gets shot and they're like, oh, I guess you're getting a little taste of it now, too, or something like that.
It's like, yeah, it's like, you know, it's just insane.
It's like, this is the obvious issue here is to just be against cops killing people no matter who it is if they don't deserve it.
You were one of the ones telling me about, I had not looked into this, man, but someone's telling me about Eamon Bundy.
That was you, right?
Told me Eamon Bundy endorsed Black Lives Matter.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know exactly what it was.
Was it an endorsement or something like that?
But yeah, he pasted up.
Like, what was their reaction to that?
Yeah, no, I don't know.
I don't know what their reaction was, but he basically came out and was like, Yeah, the cops are out of control for X, Y, and Z.
I don't know if it was like a full endorsement of Black Lives Matter.
It might have been, but he certainly liked it.
We need to work that out.
Maybe, I mean, maybe they're, I should have him on the show and try to talk about that.
You know, I argued on Twitter back a few years ago when Black, it must have been around the time of Mike Brown and the origin of Black Lives Matter, right around that time.
And I was arguing with this lady, and I was saying, listen, you know, whenever it, you know, there's an important example of white people getting gunned down by the cops unjustly, you guys ought to support them.
And even if you feel like you're not being supported, be the bigger man and come out and set the example.
You know, I was saying that to Sean King when the second Waco massacre, when the cops murdered all those bikers at that bar.
And I said, look, this is a perfect opportunity for you guys to come forward and say, see, this is what we're talking about.
Not ha ha, it happened to you, but this is what we're complaining about.
And look how they get away with it too.
And all of those things.
And this young woman, she said to me, No, look, they hate us.
And she posted a sign, and it was Eamon Bundy and his guys.
And they had a sign that had BLM and a circle and a line through it.
And I said, Oh, young lady, I'm so sorry.
This is an honest misunderstanding.
And these guys are not out protesting against you.
That stands for Bureau of Land Management.
It's the federal cops.
And you mistakenly think that because these people are white, they have power.
They don't.
They are on the shit end of power, just like you.
And the fact that they're not wise enough to come and rally to your defense is their problem.
You be wise enough to rally to their side.
They're being treated unfairly.
Look at this, you know.
And she stopped answering me, unfortunately, you know, end of the conversation there.
But, but overall, you know, the Branch Davidians famously, back then, anyway, Dave, had put a sign out the third floor window written on a bed sheet.
I said, Rodney King, we understand.
And also, God help us, we want the press.
But yeah, sorry.
But anyway, you know, their point was like, hey, we don't have to all be the same to see what each other are going through here.
And what is the difference between what the LAPD did to King and what the ATF did to the Branch Davidians?
And this is lawless, unaccountable police-state action.
It's absolutely intolerable in anything calling itself a free society.
Shouldn't have to be this way.
And the idea that you would have, I've always known Dave, you know, in a horrible, like Cassandra kind of way.
I've always known since like nine, since I was in high school, since like sophomore and junior year in high school, something.
I always saw how important it was that we have this realignment where it's the left and the right, the people of the country, the real left and the right, united against the state in, you know, around a libertarian center, united against the centralization of power in DC, the militarization of the police, all of the corruption in Wall Street and big business, the foreign wars in the empire.
And my right-wing militia friends hated all of that stuff.
And my left-wing Earth-first, you know, black block friends I was running around with back then at Free Radio Austin and all that stuff.
Well, and all the hippies I went to high school with, all my hippie teachers, they all hated that stuff.
And then, but I also knew that George Carlin was right, that it works.
That's what he says in that bit.
He goes, happens to work.
It happens to work.
And that was it.
So now what do we have?
We have right-wing three percenters and Black Lives Matter protesters facing off against each other in Louisville when they're supposed to be marching arm in arm together against the cops.
And here I am living in the future that I predicted 25 years ago going, yep, I'm just, I wish I knew what to do about it to get people to understand.
But that's the tragic situation that we're in, right?
Is that you always feel this way?
And I, you know, this is, this has happened over and over again.
But I remember, you know, just in the last couple months feeling this, and I've talked about it quite a bit on the show.
But so you see, you know, this kind of thing where for months, the right-wingers are actually getting red pilled on the cops because they're furious about the lockdown and they're seeing, you know, people thrown in jail for trying to reopen their store just so they can like pay their bills and stuff.
And the cops are enforcing all of these wildly unconstitutional mandates from, you know, fiat mandates from the governors.
And they're getting pretty pissed off about it.
And then you got this video of a cop putting his knee on this guy's neck for nine minutes till he dies while he's screaming for his mother.
And, you know, people are like, holy shit, that's our, and I could tell, like, basically when the first rock started going through windows and the first looting and arson and, you know, assaults started in the mob riots.
You go, yeah, there it is.
There that all goes.
Any hope of this being anything that where the left and right would realize, oh, yeah, but we have the same enemy and it's the state.
We don't have to agree on everything.
We do not have to have the same policy on transgender bathrooms, but we can see that our enemy is both for both of us is the state.
And then literally it's like the first rock goes through a window and you go, oh yeah, no, that's all over.
That's all over because now all you're going to see is fucking right.
You know, all right-wingers are going to see and understandably is mob violence.
And they'll go, well, Jesus Christ.
I mean, this is why we were pro-cop to begin with.
Because if it's not for cops, this is what we're dealing with.
And then, of course, the left-wingers will go, oh, well, you care about a broken window more than you care about that George Floyd guy getting killed.
And then we're right back to conversations about syrup bottles and Kamala Harris.
And we're screwed.
That's exactly the deal, man.
Happens to get away with it every time.
Yep.
That's goddamn it.
Well, that's the tragic existence that we go through.
Okay, so I do, I have to, speaking of Twitter, which you hate, I just have to.
I can't not comment on Joe Jorgensen.
And I don't want to put you in a weird position.
I don't care.
Go ahead.
Well, I was saying.
I'm not in any position.
This is going to be completely literally the phoniest thing I've ever said in my life is to go, you don't have to say anything, Scott.
You can just sit there and listen to me say this.
And then I know that you're going to comment on this because I know who you are.
So listen, let me just say this, because I've been very hard on Joe Jorgensen over a few different messaging blunders.
I was pretty hard on her for her dumbass anti-racism Black Lives Matter tweet.
I was pretty hard on her for citing that woman who got fired for saying all lives matter.
And both of them, I just thought, were like outrageously tone deaf and stupid and counterproductive.
And like, okay, yes, you can argue your way around the like, well, being, you know, like Spike did when he was on the show.
He's like, well, what being anti-racist really means is being a libertarian.
And when we say Black Lives Matter, we're not talking about the Marxist organization.
We're not talking about the violence in the streets.
We're only talking about the peaceful people who, you know, are protesting, who say Black Lives Matter.
It's like, oh, okay, fine.
But that's pretty unclear when you just put that out there and don't, you know, make this, don't like put any libertarian, you know, kind of message in there.
You just say that.
It's like, well, I don't know.
Saying you can't just be not racist.
Have to be anti-racist means a lot different to the person who just went red white fragility than to Ron Paul or something like that.
So, anyway, okay, that was stupid.
The All Lives Matter thing was really tone deaf and stupid because people across the board are terrified of these woke mobs who are trying to ruin people's lives over simple little, you know, infractions like saying all lives matter, which is not something I say, but also not something that I think should ruin a person publicly.
But this one is like damn near unforgivable to me.
And it's really, it's really pushing me to say, I just don't.
I almost just want to wash my hands of the situation and be out of it.
And I know there are people who say I'm overreacting, and I don't think I am.
They say that people have said to me, they go, well, Dave, you're just, you're getting upset about a few messaging errors, but look at how great she is on these three policies.
And I think what people don't realize is that messaging is the whole fucking thing.
That's the whole exercise here.
There is no policy.
Joe Jorgensen is not going to be president of the United States of America.
And that's great that she's talking about some good policies, but the whole exercise here is in messaging.
That's what it's all about.
And Joe Jorgensen, who says she hates identity politics, tweets out, or whoever's running her Twitter tweets, I'm glad that Joe Biden has brought another woman into the race.
The vice presidency shouldn't be a boys club.
When I think about the millions of girls and young women across America, I think they deserve a voice this year.
Stop this top job in the country.
You know.
I'm so glad I talked over half of that.
Oh.
Sorry, go ahead.
Well, listen.
I mean, holy fucking shit.
Holy shit.
So here's the thing.
It's the worst form of identity politics.
Literally the absolute worst form of it.
That, oh, yes, you picked this horrible person, but you know, she is a woman.
So it's nice that you picked a woman.
I mean, it's like if some like Asian person said, like, wait, wait, wait.
Is that the part I talked over?
Does it even say that?
That, like, yes, she is a bad person, however, no, no.
She goes on and no, she just listened and don't talk over this one more time.
I'm glad that Joe Biden has brought another woman into the race.
The vice presidency shouldn't be a boys club.
When I think about the millions of girls and young women across America, I think they deserve a voice this year when it comes to the top job in the country.
That's libertarianism for you.
Oh, yeah, sure, you've ruined the lives of thousands of people.
Sure, you support wars and debt and locking up poor single black moms for the crime of truancy.
But, you know, you have a vagina.
So that part's pretty cool.
I mean, come on, man.
Pandering To Both Sides00:08:57
Like, how can, and here's the thing that's infuriating to me, right?
I accepted a while ago that Joe Jorgensen and Spike Cohen are going to pander, I would say, but fish for support amongst the left more than the right.
Okay, now I don't think this is the best strategy.
I don't think this is the best strategy to spread libertarian ideas, but okay, maybe I'm wrong.
When Spike Cohen was on the show, he goes, Look, Dave, I know we're borrowing the language of Black Lives Matter, but look, I went to this Black Lives Matter rally and a lot of the people there wanted to support us and this one chapter endorsed us.
So, okay, so maybe I'm wrong.
I hope I'm wrong.
And you're able to convince a lot of them to come over.
But what you're doing here is like, okay, if you want to attack the left from the left, then obviously what you would say to them is that Kamala Harris is terrible for your views.
You guys were right when you were upset about the police state and cracking down on nonviolent crimes and this, that, and the other.
You're right about them.
No, this is attacking them from the left.
It's just patting them on the head.
So instead, you're not only patting them on the head, but as we said before, you're patting on the head the worst element of the left, the dumb social justice, identitarian left, which is not even the left that we want to talk to.
The left you should be talking to are the people who are against everything Kamala Harris.
As we already talked about, the ones who are the real hardcore social justice identitarians, they're not impressed by Kamala Harris's identity.
There's too much bad stuff about her, but we're impressed.
Right.
Right.
I mean, it's like, and I'm sorry.
I do feel like almost for the sake of the liberty movement, for the sake of the good name of libertarianism, some of our, you know, voices like who are in positions like I am need to almost distance themselves from this train wreck of message.
I mean, here's the thing about it.
You're right about how stupid that is.
And this does go to her executive, you know, authority if she's supposed to be running for president, but she's never been on Twitter in her life.
These tweets are not put out by George Orgenson.
And I don't know about the most recent one, but the one before all of the, you know, we're not anti-racist enough, everybody, or whatever, all of that stuff.
When I asked her about that, she didn't even know that it had happened.
She only found out after the fact.
It's not like they consult her and say, we're going to put this tweet out.
Is that okay?
And what it is instead, in fact, I was told about that one, that the guy that ran the Twitter account was like, man, I don't want to put this out.
And then they said, dude, it comes straight out of her speech that was written not by her, but by her speechwriter.
So her speechwriter has decided that this is what we're saying.
So tweet that out.
And that was where it came from.
I don't know any of these people's names.
Just to be clear about this, I'm like not even really an unofficial advisor.
I would have said that, but I haven't talked to her in forever.
And, you know, they're not listening to me about anything, Dave.
So I had sent them some emails and stuff, but that was about the extent of it.
I was supposed to go and meet her the other night when she was in town, but she was too busy doing other stuff and whatever.
So that never happened.
But I did send her a message about, you know, in reaction to this Kamala Harris thing that, look, you have to take over your own Twitter account.
She's supposed to be an executive.
So the fact that it's not her is only a half excuse because she's supposed to be the boss and making sure if people are going to be tweeting out stuff that makes her look stupid, then she should have already solved that problem by getting rid of them and or just taking over the account herself or whatever it is.
So now we have, you know, prominent people like yourself in arguments on Twitter with her ghost writers and stuff.
So making stupid statements and then getting them amplified and making it into a controversy when, you know, I told her all along the whole point of what we're doing here is that we're above the culture war.
We're not just not part of it.
We're nine miles in the sky looking down on a stupid culture war with contempt and resentment.
We're the solution to it.
The right and left don't have to hate each other if we're free.
Okay.
And that is what we're going to do.
The reason the right and left hate each other so much is the power that they're exercising over each other.
The power is the problem.
Freedom is the solution.
Red, white, and blue and the Declaration of Independence and what we can all agree on here.
That's it.
Live and let live.
That's the American way.
That's the solution to all of our problems, et cetera, et cetera.
So that doesn't mean pandering to the left or pandering to the right.
It's just like the parable of Ron and Rand.
Ron Paul's so damn good on everything that people of every single political description you could possibly think of found things to like about him and rallied to him.
Rand went around trying to pander to every different group on his little checklist and was rejected by all of them because, hey, he couldn't say anything too good, or that was going to piss off the other people he was trying to pander to.
So he's trying to give everybody a little bit of something and he ends up getting nothing, nothing from nobody at all.
And so, you know, that's the real danger in that.
But then, so Ron is the example of what to do instead, is go out there and give them hell and let people see that, you know what?
She just satisfied my four biggest issues.
I like that.
You know, you don't have to, you know, and look, all libertarians have been good on the drug war since 1970.
All of us, with no exceptions at all.
Okay.
So we're not moving to the left.
We're not trying to get on that bandwagon with them.
We're explaining the same thing we've been explaining this whole time.
Drug war is way worse than you can.
And without being a dick about it, you know, without saying, hey, I told you so just because this is why we've been so against this for so long because we know it will lead to these outcomes.
But why portray it like, hey, we've decided to be anti-war now.
We've decided to be pro-gay marriage.
We've always been good on these things.
Here's the best argument for these positions that these other people could learn a bit from.
And so, and I think, you know, she certainly agrees with me about that in principle, but it hasn't translated into her taking her Twitter account away from these leftists.
But that's not, but it's also like that.
Look, I get, I'm not saying that you're making an excuse for it, but that's not, it's not an excuse.
It's like, Joe Devinson, you need, you need to pretend that you're running for president of the United States of America.
It is not too big of an ask that you run your own Twitter account.
Twitter, if you haven't noticed, is a pretty big deal today.
It's like a big part of how Trump got elected.
And it's a big way that you can kind of reach your audience directly and saying things like this.
I mean, my God, first of all, to have anything positive to say about Kamala Harris being chosen is just outrageous.
And then, my God, to start saying that this is good because the girls of this country can look up to Kamala Harris.
That somehow that, no, I mean, dude, you have a daughter.
I have a daughter.
Like, I want my daughter to have good role models in her life.
I could care fucking less if the vice president or president is a man or a woman.
There's no, that's not how libertarians look at the role of government, that they're to be role models.
These are, this is everything you don't want to be.
I mean, like, I almost look at it the opposite way.
I don't want a woman in there as head criminal.
So my daughter can just associate that with some evil men and not identify with them at all.
But I just, I got to say, and this has always been my attitude.
And ironically, by these leftists, this is what they consider to be like racist or problematic about me is that I just kind of, I just look at all of this stuff and I try to be consistent across the board.
And if someone, let's say like some alt-right guy, like Richard Spencer or someone like that, said like, you know, like Dick Cheney gets elected and he goes like, well, you know, he's horrible on all these policies, but at least he's a white man.
I'm really happy to see a white man.
I would just have nothing but contempt and like I would just mock him for what a stupid, like evil, unprincipled take that is.
But the truth is, even Richard Spencer wouldn't fucking take that position because you're being more identitarian than even these clowns over here are being and saying, yeah, well, she's a woman.
So that's pretty cool.
Like, what?
Should some Asian feel better about Kim Jong-un being the ruler of North Korea?
As well, I mean, it's nice to see an Asian up there, you know what I mean?
His sister has a lot of power, that's good for feminism, yeah, yeah, right.
America In A Real Crisis00:10:06
Isn't this?
Oh, by the way, no joke, that is what the corporate press was saying when they had the Olympics over there, and they say her, and they'd be like, Well, I mean, it is kind of cool that they have a woman in such a powerful position.
I mean, yeah, if you can get past the death camps, uh, the fact that it's a woman there is pretty neat, you know.
So, I just poor female military dictators.
That's right.
So, you're exactly.
So, if you're going to try, you're literally being the worst of the liberals.
You're not even taking the side of the redeemable qualities of the left.
I don't know what to tell you, Dave.
I mean, the reality is, I think she's a great lady.
She's she's a kind of a longtime libertarian party activist type.
I don't really know, uh, but I suspect that she just has not spent the last 20 and 30 years hating all of this stuff the way the rest of us have.
It's kind of there's um, you know, there's there's a kind of uh, well, you know, there's all different sort of kinds of libertarians or whatever.
And there's a certain kind of libertarian that likes to talk about sort of a hypothetical imaginary America where we have much lower taxes and a much smaller government and no drug war and things are better.
Um, but they don't ever really go beyond that.
And they don't really say they don't, they're not really you know worried about the United States of America the way everybody else is.
They're kind of living in a it's almost like a historian who just specializes in Victorian England or whatever, where it's just it's a narrow view and it doesn't say doesn't really address that in 2020 in America right now, we're in a real crisis.
Yeah, people are really afraid, and it's like 90-something percent now say that they fear that America is on the wrong track.
You know, that they know that it ain't right, they know that we've been at war for 20 years and haven't won anything.
They know that the national debt is somewhere way, way higher than it's supposed to be.
And what are we ever going to do about that?
And they know that you know they have a crisis in policing, they know that they have a crisis in confidence in the legitimacy of power.
They know that this whole virus was completely mishandled.
I mean, they can see even if they don't, you know, even if they don't know the details of every like argument, they, you know, they know they're like, wait, so we have an actual pandemic where like 150,000 people have died and you guys are trying to score cheap political points off each other and brag about who's winning.
You can just see, you're like, this isn't leadership.
This is like a completely corrupt, broken system.
And as Pat Buchanan used to say, it's like the very basic things about government.
Like we can't win our wars, balance our budgets, protect our borders was another big one.
He said, but it's like these very basic things that you'd be like, well, a government, I mean, by the nature of a government, just a functioning government should be able to do that.
And we don't do any of it.
They're not even close, you know?
Which is fine because screw them.
I don't want them doing anything.
But the point being that everybody feels this way right now, right?
You can't afford health care for your people.
You can't afford education for your people.
You know, like this is supposed to be some kind of luxury first world problem that people want to send their kid to college and not just high school, but they can't because they're essentially selling their kid into debt slavery that they can never declare bankruptcy out from under.
You know, on down the list, people are really worried from coast to coast in all persuasions about what is going to happen, whether it's Trump, whether it's Biden or whatever it is.
There's this profound anxiety.
You know, Ice Cube put out a song, thought he was all completely washed up and gone.
He put out a song a couple years ago called Everything's Corrupt.
And it was about how everything's corrupt.
And he's just right.
And that's how people feel about kind of everything.
So what we need then is a libertarian who really understands that, how people feel, how upset they are, how divided from each other they are, and understands.
You know, the list of priorities of the American people, our worst emergencies, and what it is that people are most worried about.
What are the worst things our government is doing?
And what can we do to stop them?
So to me, this is the perfect opportunity for Joe Jorgensen and Spike Cohen to come in and be superheroes and to lead the charge in a full Ron Paul revolution style fashion that, you know, we are absolutely sick of it and we don't have to take this anymore and let's fight.
You know, the real problem here is the military industrial complex, the Federal Reserve System and their crony banks, the big pharmaceutical companies and their patents on their medicines, the insurance cartels who outlaw competition, the hospital companies that outlaw competition, the federal subsidies for the student loans that drive up the prices through the roof,
the coups and the drug wars in Latin America that drive waves of immigrants north from their failed states that America failed for them.
And on and on and on and on.
Here's what we're going to stop doing.
Here's what we're going to grind to a halt that are all the things that are ruining our country because it doesn't have to be this way.
It just doesn't.
And picture it.
This is what it would be like with no income tax, no fine on earning money and success in the marketplace.
This is what it would look like to not have SWAT teams doing Navy SEAL night raids in poor people's homes in the name of drug contraband.
This is what it'll look like to watch Citigroup burn when they fail and watch all of their good assets get bought up in bankruptcy court at auction from them making bad loans that they can't keep up with.
And this is what it'll look like when liberty reigns in America and everything is okay.
And all of the crises that our government has created have been thwarted.
That shouldn't be that hard, man, in the year 2020.
But if the only libertarian arguments you ever really made were just sort of kind of hypothetical ones about a hypothetical future America, say, for example, a Swiss foreign policy.
And I don't know if this is exactly her line, but her campaign has told her to keep saying this.
We need a Swiss foreign policy of armed neutrality.
But the thing is, Swiss foreign policy is not really a cliche like it used to be of their neutrality.
I mean, that was a big deal back after the Second World War and whatever.
But if you say something about Switzerland, people just think of a knife or a watch or a secret bank account or something.
They don't think that that means peace.
It's not a synonym for peace in a way that it was.
No, and people don't want to be Switzerland.
Nobody wants to be Switzerland.
Right.
And that's America.
Right.
This is the USA.
And so, and the thing is that we are the world empire right now.
America is the dominant force on the planet.
So if you're going to say, okay, find armed neutrality like Switzerland, well, what does that look like when we pull, you have to finish the sentence.
We're going to pull our troops out of Europe and Asia and the Middle East, and we're going to leave Latin America the hell alone.
We're going to sink 90% of our Navy and what's left is going to float offshore pointing out.
And then we're going to be a limited republic instead of a world empire.
And we're going to slash the budget and it'll be great.
You got to say something.
You can't say that.
That's a pretty good message.
Only us.
I mean, okay, that's a pretty good message you just put out there.
But you know what's an equally good one?
I'm glad that Joe Biden has brought another woman into the race.
No, I'm just kidding.
I'm not going to read it again.
Not going to make you go through it.
Listen, I know we need a Ron Paul.
I've met Ron Paul.
I've read Ron Paul.
Joe Jorgensen is no Ron Paul.
It's true.
That's unfortunate.
All right, listen.
I got to wrap up there.
Wait, let me say one thing.
Let me say one thing.
I'm about to mail you this today.
Yes.
I'm so excited.
It's so good.
It's Sheldon Richmond's new book.
He's my partner, the executive editor at the Libertarian Institute, libertarianinstitute.org/slash books for the book.
And you can see here, it's about 300 pages.
It is 72, I think, essays about libertarianism from the great Sheldon Richmond.
And this is explicitly an argument to the left and from the left for libertarianism.
The title, let me explain this because it might sound like a little bit of a commie title to people who don't understand.
Are you familiar with William Graham Sumner, who was the great writer from about 120 years ago?
And he was the guy who wrote this essay.
You'll love this essay if you've never read it.
You may have.
It's called The Conquest of the United States by Spain.
And it's about how, it's about how, yeah, America won the war against Spain, but we turned ourselves into Spain, an evil, corrupt, you know, blood-soaked, theft-driven empire, which is what we were never supposed to be.
So it's a conquest of America by Spain.
That's who William Graham Sumner is.
Great guy.
But anyway, so he had written a book called What Social Classes Owe to Each Other.
And so then Sheldon's book then is a takeoff on that.
And of course, you know the answer.
What do social animals owe each other?
Non-aggression.
That's it.
That's wonderful.
We owe each other.
But then this is the explanation for all of your leftist friends why any good leftist, good liberal, good progressive, good Marxist who cares about people ought to be a libertarian because we're the ones who've got what you want as opposed to those who make their wild claims and fail to fulfill them.
All right.
Well, I'm very excited to read it.
And I'd love to have Sheldon on after I read it so we can talk about it.