Michael Malice and James Smith honor economist Walter Williams before dissecting the "red pill" versus "blue pill" divide in libertarianism, contrasting figures like Gary Johnson with Jimmy Dore. They critique the Libertarian Party's pandemic messaging for validating mandates and analyze Governor Newsom's intrusive rules targeting specific communities. The discussion exposes the crisis of legitimacy following Donald Trump's refusal to concede despite receiving over 70 million votes, arguing that minarchism is a utopian fantasy. Ultimately, Malice asserts that true libertarians must reject seeking seats at the table to instead dismantle the totalitarian "cathedral" of power. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Heaven For Your Feet00:01:47
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Red-Pilled Leftist Narratives00:08:39
All right, let's start the show.
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 Gas Digital Network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
It is your favorite part of the quarantine.
The crossover continues.
I am here with Michael the machine, Malice.
How are you, sir?
I am doing great, and I am going to change my mic.
This mic doesn't do it automatically.
Okay, now it's changed.
Now it's changed.
Much better.
Mike on the mic.
All right.
So I did, I just want to say up top before we start today's show, just briefly, wanted to say I was very saddened to hear about the passing of Walter Williams this morning, who is truly like a hero to me, had a huge impact on me.
Brilliant, brilliant thinker, an economist, also really, if not technically, but truly a historian, and was, in effect, at least taught me a lot about history.
And one of the just most genuine, brave people I ever read or listened to.
And he, it was cool seeing how many people were like posting about it and stuff and how many people he touched and affected.
So anyway, rest in peace to Walter Williams.
And yeah, he's the reason a whole lot of people are red-pilled today.
And he's also very amiable and like had a very positive kind of affect about him and was friendly.
Yes.
I think a lot of people liked.
He was friendly, but also viciously unapologetic.
Yeah.
And yeah, yeah, exactly.
And I love that.
It's a great quality to have.
We could all learn a lot from him.
And he's also like, he's the reason Eric July is a libertarian.
And he's the reason like a lot of really, you know, influential people found the light.
So anyway, what I wanted to talk to you about today was pills because we always talk pills on this show.
Oxycotton after a few whiskeys.
Oxycotton.
Did you say oxycontin?
You're such a dad now.
You don't even know how to say it.
Isn't that it?
It's OxyContin.
That's what I said.
I thought you said OxyContin.
All right, I said it wrong.
Anyway, you start the show, talk at Walter Williams, and go straight to cotton.
I see how it works with the you people.
All right.
Well, I didn't want to talk about OxyCotton.
I wanted to talk about the red pill versus the blue pill to start off with.
This is something I've been thinking about lately.
And I saw this.
Someone made a YouTube video that was really great.
And I feel bad because I can't give them credit because I watched it.
You know, like I watched it on my phone on a train and I watched it.
You know, like when you're in Twitter and you click on a YouTube video, so then it's not in your history.
And I was like, oh shit, it was in some thread somewhere.
So I couldn't find it again.
But this guy, you probably know who you are if you're listening.
He made this great video about blue pill versus red pill, the libertarians and what the difference between them is.
I'm in pain hearing.
I'm sure it's the video is excellent, but just hearing it, you're going to be like nails on a chalkboard with the blue pill perspective.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But no, I know, but it's, it was a really great video.
It featured you in it.
And so it had this part of this clip that I thought was so interesting.
I'll get to that in a second.
But the basic idea, right?
And I know you've, you've talked about this a lot, but the idea, the red pill comes from The Matrix, right?
Which is a really, I think, fucking brilliant movie.
Kind of a, it was kind of an awful, like it was a dumb movie and a brilliant movie all in one, but some of the points that it makes are really, really profound.
And the idea of the red pill in the movie is basically that you can choose knowledge or to remain in the darkness.
Someone kind of has to offer you this choice, but you can choose to take the red pill.
And what the red pill will reveal to you is that everything is bullshit.
Everything is this whole thing, everything you perceive to be reality is bullshit.
And it's bullshit to enslave you.
It's not bullshit to help you.
This is bullshit to enslave you.
And the idea of the red pill as we talk about it is the idea of realizing that the entire meta narrative that is constructed around you is bullshit and it's bullshit to enslave you.
It's not bullshit to help you.
It's bullshit to keep other people in power, you know, to your disadvantage.
And that's kind of more or less the idea of it.
Is that fair?
I just tried to look up his video.
I couldn't find it.
So I apologize for the guy.
I thought we could give him a shout out.
So number one, number two is the way I define it in my book is that to red pill someone is to demonstrate that what is presented as fact by the corporate press and entertainment industries is only a shadow of what is real.
And that this supposed reality is in fact a carefully constructed narrative intentionally designed to keep some very unpleasant people in power and to keep everyone else tame and submissive.
So I think the intentionality, which you obviously mentioned, is very key because I think like boomer cons, who are like the bane of my existence, they pat themselves on the back on Twitter by being like, oh my God, oh my gosh, these journalists are so stupid.
How could they be making these stupid mistakes?
And it's like, you are so removed from what is going on here that the light from where you are will take a trillion years to reach the earth.
Yeah.
It's, it's complete.
And then they laugh.
And here's the thing.
Like, here's the exchange, right?
It's like, hey, here's the deal.
You get to call me stupid and I get to be Stalin.
Who's winning here?
Like, I will control every aspect of your life.
I will.
train your children to hate and despise you and sacrifice you to me.
But on the other hand, you get to call me dumb on Twitter.
So I guess you got me.
Yeah.
So there was one that I remember I saw Bob Murphy give a speech.
This is over a decade ago.
It was like the first time I ever saw him.
I think the first time I ever met him in person.
And he gave a speech in one of the way he said it, which was really getting at the same thing.
Forgive me if I don't get this exactly right.
It was over a decade ago, but he basically said that there'll be these libertarians who go, you know, the government subsidizes tobacco and then they tax cigarettes.
So how stupid is the government?
And he goes, no, they get contributions from the tobacco industry and then they get revenue from cigarette sales.
They're not stupid.
You're stupid.
They're stupid.
They're thinking they're stupid.
That's the whole point.
It's like, they're not stupid.
This is a scheme.
Oh, yeah.
What these idiots, you know what I mean?
It's like, do they not even know that the Federal Reserve creates bubbles?
And you're like, yeah, but it also creates hundreds of billions of dollars in profits for big banks.
So who's so this is the point that you've made before and that I'm getting at that you can be a libertarian, a very good libertarian and be completely blue-pilled.
And many times, not always, but many times a blue-pilled libertarian is worse than someone who's red-pilled, but holds some anti-liberty positions.
You can much easier talk to a red-pilled Marxist.
Many of these Antifa, these Emma Goldman types, which I like not ironically, Van Jones is a great example of this.
Van Jones was a literal commie.
And a lot of times he's on CNN and he will be giving the still the commie roots come out, the unorthodox leftist perspective where he's attacking corporate power within Democratic Party when he's saying you can't say Obama was elected president twice and now all of a sudden we're all racist and that's why Trump's president.
That narrative doesn't and he gets a lot of heat for that.
So he's a great example of what you're talking about, like somewhat red-pilled leftist.
Decoding Corporate Gaslighting00:02:36
Well, another great example is Jimmy Dore, who, you know, I did his show and he was on my show this year.
And you talked to Jimmy Dore and look, he might be a leftist, but he is red-pilled as shit on the warfare state, on corporate, on corporatism in general.
So you talk to him right away and you're like, and one of the first things I said when we were, he were talking about what the government should do.
And I go, I was like, well, Jimmy, as you know, the government is run by blood-soaked monsters who will slaughter children to maintain or expand power.
And he's like, look, absolutely.
That is the truth.
Now, Gary Johnson, on the other hand, called Hillary Clinton a fine public servant.
Now, who can you have more of a conversation with out of those two people?
I might agree with Gary Johnson on politics more than I do with Jimmy Dore on certain policy issues, but like, who can you have a really more honest, meaningful conversation with?
Someone who realizes the nature of the warfare state or somebody who thinks its biggest proponent is just like a really wonderful public servant.
She works for you.
All right, guys, let's take a quick second.
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Liberty Versus Unintended Consequences00:10:07
This past year, we have seen a systemic attack on the burning down and shuttering of small businesses that would have been inconceivable in 2019.
And the entire time, this was being cheered on by and urged as mandatory by corporate America.
So this is one great example where the hard left analysis of corporate American artworks is right on the money.
They, I mean, when they're literally being burnt down, all the news reports are saying, well, it's mostly peaceful.
Yeah, if my fire only burned down 93% of my store, I mean, it's just like planting seeds.
They'll just grow back.
Well, and it's also, it's a great point that you're making.
And it's one of the biggest things that is underreported about this year is that really what this year has been in effect, whether or not it's planned this way, but this year has been an assault on the middle class and a huge benefit to the corporate elite.
I mean, these guys have had like the big banks are doing phenomenal.
They got trillions in zero interest loans.
Big corporations all over the place got bailouts, airlines, a whole bunch of different companies got big bailouts.
Amazon stock is through the roof.
Social media stocks are doing great.
All these guys are doing phenomenal, but the small businesses have been absolutely decimated.
When I was on Ari Shafir, on Mutual Friend of Ours, on his podcast, and he was just telling me one story, just one anecdotal story.
Yeah, well, okay, you know, let's just say he's one of us.
You know what I mean?
He's one of us.
He might be three of us with that thing.
Yeah, I know.
It's like an aunt eater.
It really, it's rough.
But so he was just telling one anecdotal story, but he's just this bike store that where he got his bike from.
And that was like a couple blocks from him and he knew the guy who owned it.
And the guy got looted and he didn't have insurance.
And so he's just got ruined, just absolutely ruined.
Now, that doesn't happen to a big corporation.
Like even if Bank of America gets a brick through the window, Bank of America's got their insurance taken care of.
And also, you know, like that's Dave.
No, no, let me interject.
They don't have to have insurance because they have lobbyists.
Right.
So if things go bad for them and they didn't see it coming, all they have to do is call their man in Washington and he's going to call Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer.
And Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer are going to say, oh, we can't have this giant company go under.
Look how many jobs they provide.
Here's free money.
So they don't even need to have insurance.
Their insurance is their lobbyists and their corporate power and their access to lawmakers.
Yeah.
And of course, on top of that, they are literally insured by the federal government with the FDIC.
And of course, they get the easy money from the Fed.
So, yeah, I mean, it's like they don't have to worry about this.
And so that gives you a whole new cynical perspective on why these big corporations might be just fine with the looting and the destruction of property.
Now, one of the, and there are some, I'll say, libertarians who I really like, who I do think are hopelessly blue pilled.
And so, anyway, in this video, there was a clip of you, and it was a moment that I completely forgot about, but was one of my favorite moments in cable news ever.
And it was when you, not the thing about the son of the teacher, that was right.
I thought you were going to say, I saw that one going viral again.
Yeah, I don't know what inspired that to just all of a sudden start getting shared.
I'll tell you what inspired someone tweeted out, goes, if you're having rough, if you're having a rough time and things look bad, always remember Michael Malice went there.
That's so great.
Okay, so that is a great one.
If you don't know what we're referring to, go find it.
That was a moment on Kennedy.
This was a moment on Stossel, which was a great libertarian show that introduced a lot of people to some really important ideas.
And I've always really liked John Stossel.
What's funny about that?
I'll tell you what's funny because he was like the third or fourth guest I had on Your Welcome when I moved to Gas Digital from Compound Media.
And I did a John Stossel impression to John Stossel.
And I said, Well, you think that the private sector can do better than the government?
Schooling?
And he's like, Let me think about that.
Yeah.
Publishing?
Publishing, sure.
Fashion.
He's like, Yeah.
I go, Well, if the private sector can do better than the government, why do we need government at all?
And doing John Stossel to John Stossel was one of the highlights of my podcasting career, which isn't saying much because it's all garbage.
Well, you know, there's bright spots.
Look at the garbage dump.
Every third or fourth week, you put on a pretty entertainer show.
You mean like Tom Tom this week?
Yeah.
That's right.
There we go.
So, so, no, but the moment was, and I've completely forgotten about this.
And he didn't even have the audio clip of it.
He just played like the video, but I remembered the moment.
But it was when you were on Stossel and John Stossel said to you something along the lines of, and this was blue-pilled versus red-pilled to me in a nutshell.
Stossel said it was during 2016, during the Republican primary.
And Stossel said something along the lines to you of he goes like, he was like, well, I mean, they're all bad, but I mean, Bush is better than Trump.
I mean, you know, at least he cut taxes in his state and he's not a protectionist.
And the look on your face is just this pure, like, I don't even know how to like shock.
It's, it is shock and awe, no pun intended, that you're like, and you go, there is nothing worse that the government can do than start a war.
And then Stossel kind of seems to go like, hmm.
Like, it's almost like in Stossel's mind, he has to go, yeah, that could have unintended consequences on the marketplace.
And you're like, right, and the slaughtering of children, like that's a pretty bad part of a war, also.
But that kind of is the like, like that's an example.
And I remember John Stossel, and this pissed a lot of libertarians off, and he did not get it.
But when the Edward Snowden revelations first came out, John Stossel said, I don't really see why this is such a big deal.
I mean, I'm not a terrorist.
So I don't know.
No, you're joking.
You're joking.
No, no, this is what he said.
I have to believe because I love John Stossel that you are somehow misremembering.
I need this.
Dave, I need this.
This is my blue pill.
This is my blue pill.
Dave is mixing him up.
You're thinking about somebody else.
And I'm going to enforce this red pill.
No, Like a dog taking medicine.
I'm just going to hold your mouth shut until you swallow it.
This is what John Stosl is.
KGB.
It's the American KGB.
But here is the essence of what the blue pill is, right?
Is that even if you could believe, right?
You could believe in a lot of different ways.
You could believe that liberty is moral.
There you go.
Oh, it's a big one.
That's a big pill.
Take a tall glass of water with that one.
So you could believe that you could believe that free markets are far more efficient than government central planning and all of these things and be a libertarian.
But if you generally believe that the corporate press is trying to deliver honest news to you, and they may get it wrong sometimes, and they have their own bias.
So they don't exactly always guard against their bias, but they're trying to do honest journalism.
And if you believe the CIA is really just in the business of preventing terrorism and presidents get in there and they really mean well, but sometimes, you know, all of these policies have the best of intentions, but sometimes they go awry.
That is truly blue pilled.
And so what John Stossel was basically saying there was that I accept as a given that, of course, they're spying on people to prevent terrorism.
And so what's really the problem if they read my emails or they look at my metadata?
I mean, I don't know.
I'm not a terrorist.
And the essence of being red-pilled is understanding that this is not what they claim it is, that actually they are doing all of these things for very nefarious reasons.
And this is, you know, this is where you get comments like Gary Johnson that Hillary Clinton's a wonderful public servant.
I had dinner once.
This is one of those moments where you're just like, when you realize how removed you are from normalcy, he was a former spook.
I think it was CIA, maybe it's FBI, but I'm 99% sure it was CIA.
And, you know, he quit the organization because he said it was corrupt.
And his conclusion is like it needed systemic reform.
And I was asking him about how it operates and things like that.
And he's like, one example is by law, it's illegal for me as a CIA operative to like spy on my ex-girlfriend.
But what they do, he says, this is him talking.
This is, he goes, so what we do is I'd call my contact in France and say, hey, can you do surveillance on this person?
And then they get back to me.
So I'm not spying on her, but this is perfectly allowed.
And he's like, you saw this kind of thing all the time.
And it's like, this, you know, this needs to change.
And I'm sitting there.
And as someone who's like of Soviet descent, I was just like, I absolutely, well, I can't say what I thought the consequences for this should be, but the idea that the consequence is like, you know, you should be fired or like be reprimanded is so removed from what I think should happen to people like this.
I don't even know where to start to tell you because there's no possibility that you're doing something like this.
First of all, it's depraved to use your power to spy on your ex.
Blue-Chewed Libertarian Confusion00:15:52
Okay.
Then, so you can't even pretend you're doing the wrong.
Like if I was at your house and I was just like started reading your, like opening up, like opening up envelopes and like reading letters to you and we're pals, that's really bad.
But if like, if there's like a vault and like I call Lewis and I'm like, hey, do you know the number to Dave's vault?
And Lewis is like, of course, you know, I got sticky fingers.
And then I'm opening it up.
There's no possibility, I think, that I am doing something excusable or acceptable.
Yeah.
So, when someone, and Rand talks about this, she goes, if someone knowingly and consciously does evil, she talks about black and white versus gray, you know, like how principles are black and white, but everyone is a little bit of gray.
But she goes, if someone knowingly and consciously does evil, they're as they're as black as it gets.
Like, it's just, and I completely, completely agree with her.
Oh, absolutely.
100%.
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I remember hearing Buck Sexton, who I like very much.
I enjoy.
I know you've had him on and stuff.
And I you like Buck Sexton?
Love some good Buck Sexton.
So, but I've, you know, like I've done shows with him before.
He's a really nice guy, really funny guy and very smart.
But I remember he said, now he's an ex-CIA guy.
And one of the things he said that was really, so he was very good at breaking down the bullshit of Russia gate and the abusive powers of the FBI and the CIA in the process of creating that bullshit.
And I remember listening to him once.
I listened to him a few different times comment on it.
And one time he commented on it.
And so I agreed with everything he said.
Literally everything was spot on.
And then the final thing he said was he goes, you know, the worst part about all of this is that this is going to seriously undermine the credibility of these institutions.
And I remember thinking, it was so interesting that I agreed with 100% of what he was saying.
And my conclusion is the precise opposite, that actually that is the only silver lining in all of this.
It is absolutely the best part of all of this that this could undermine credibility in these institutions.
Now, that comment isn't about the red pill, blue pill thing.
But one big indication of the difference between a blue pill libertarian and a red pill libertarian is if they ever talk about it being a problem that institutions credit.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yes.
Yes.
That is a real sign that they are just taking the whole cathedral at its word, that of course it would be a bad thing if this whole thing was undermined.
And, you know, like I said, and I don't mean to pick on him because I actually, I like Justin Amash very much.
I really do.
I like him.
I think he's one of the best congressmen in the history of the country, which, okay, that's not saying much, but he's a good congressman, about as good as you can be.
And I actually, me and him messaged back and forth recently.
We were very friendly and he said some really nice things.
And I really like the guy.
But listening to him out there talking about how dangerous it is that Donald Trump is undermining people's confidence in who actually got elected just to me reeks of the smell of a blue pill.
The blue pill has an odor.
The red pill is odorless.
Let's talk another one.
This just happened in the last 24 hours as we record.
And this is something I'm very hopeful about and I thought was absolutely impossible.
One things I talk about in my book and I've mentioned in the past is my opinion, the way gay rights got over wasn't a lot of this activism.
It was just people coming out.
I call it like the ambassador program.
It's really, really hard to be that level of homophobic to the point of like, this should be like a felony if it's someone's uncle or your coworker or your neighbor.
And you could still be like, you could still be homophobic in the sense that I think it's wrong.
I think it's immoral.
I think it's gross.
But you look at the guy, you're like, okay, the idea that I wish harm on this person, it gets harder and harder.
Same thing with racism or sexism.
Like once you start meeting any counterfactuals, you could still be maybe prejudice.
But in terms of like having this blanket contempt for population, it's like, wait a minute, this is the guy down the street.
He's a jerk, but I'm a jerk.
Like, I mean, I'm not really going to just condemn him and his whole family and wish harm on them.
And the opposite of that is the cops.
So conservatives, when you bring up the cops, like bring up minorities for progressives, like they can't wait to take that bullet and be like, oh yeah, this is my chance to defend this group.
They could do no wrong.
Well, sure, they do wrong sometimes.
Why are you bringing it up?
It's out of proportion, blah, blah, blah.
And there was a bar on Staten Island and they were like a speakeasy, you know, during this.
They had a sting and they arrested the owner for trespassing in his own bar.
The cops did.
And obviously everything is marginal.
It's not binary.
Like, just like when you're buying a car, like everyone will buy a car for a dollar.
Fewer people buy for $1,000.
Fewer at 10.
At a certain point, only one guy is going to buy it.
It's going to take a lot for people who are conservatives to be like, oh, I was wrong about the cops.
But things like this, you don't have to have me and you with our anti-cop propaganda.
You could look at this video and be like, I want you to tell me that these are all good cops doing the right thing.
And it is very hard for a lot of these boomer cops to look at this footage and be like, okay, I have no problem with this.
And I'm cheering them on.
It's very, very hard for them.
You know, it's been one of the things that's been discussed in libertarian, broader libertarian spaces and in the conspiracy theory world, like on Alex Jones type, you know, shows and things like that for a long time.
I mean, going back, you know, as far as I was paying attention to it, back to like 2008, 2009.
One of the things that people talked about, the real hardcore Alex Jones fans who really believed like we were moving toward a one world government and that there were FEMA camps being set up for American citizens to be thrown into.
One of the questions I'd be asked a lot was they would go like, is there any point where the cops wouldn't follow these orders?
What if the military was ordered to occupy American cities and start rounding people up?
Would they do it?
Would any of them say, no, I took an oath to the Constitution?
And this year, we've had a lot of, you know, it's almost been a little bit of a trial run.
And there have, by the way, to give credit, there have been some bright spots.
There were, I think, five or six different sheriff departments in New York who said, we will not enforce Cuomo's Thanksgiving rules.
Like, no, I'm sorry.
I am not enforcing how far away from you your grandmother is in your home.
I'm not doing that.
And that's really something.
I don't mean to downplay that.
But overall, in 2020, what we have seen is that cops really will enforce quite a bit.
I mean, they are going, they will enforce arresting someone for being at a religious service.
They will come and harass people because there were rumors that your kid was on a play date.
I mean, and that in itself is quite a red pill.
And it's also one of the reasons why I was so furious about the fucking rioting that went on all summer long, because it's like right in the middle of this moment when right-wingers are getting red-pilled on the cops.
These fucking riots are like the worst thing that can happen for that progression.
Because then right-wingers look at riots, and all it takes is like one riot to look at that and go, like, yep, exactly.
That's why I support the cops.
Let me get right back into my comfortable blue-pilled space.
Because, yeah, of course, what else?
What the hell is if they're between us and that, then I take them.
And they're right to say that.
That's the choice.
Understandably.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So anyway, I think that the, you know, and as I was saying before with about Jimmy Doerr, like to me, the most important one, if there was one area to be red-pilled on, would be on the warfare state.
And that goes hand in hand with the media, being red-pilled on the fact that the fucking media will sell mass murder campaigns and that private companies are raking in billions of dollars of profits for this.
And the result of this is, you know, the worst thing in the world, you know, human beings being slaughtered.
I was going to say, I think we're in a good position in this regard.
In 2016, no one, including his supporters, had any idea what a Trump administration would look like.
No clue.
The left was had all these scenarios.
The right had all these scenarios.
I remember sitting down with Molly Hemingway, and I was wrong, but because she was like worried about it, I go, don't you think he's going to be like Governor Schwarzenegger?
Like, I can see that happening very easily.
He's running his mouth and he just governs us as kind of like lefty Republican.
And it's just, he's like a disaster.
She's like, yeah, you know, we've had that kind of thing before.
Everyone knows what a Biden administration is going to look like.
But that also means that the opposition is getting their ducks in a row before he's even sworn in, which we did not have with Obama because Obama had enormous public support.
He had enormous institutional support.
He was new.
He was young.
He was trying to say we're going to do things differently.
The system, in his defense, the system itself doesn't really allow much innovation because you still have to deal with the Congress where everyone's been there for decades.
You still got to deal with the House and whatever with his supermajorities.
But I've already started tweeting.
Biden wants to kill your children because when the war starts, and the next one I have queued up, and this is one that's, but when you say something that's very disturbing, it puts them on their heels.
And if you're talking about war, I want them to be on their heels as much as possible.
This has to be nipped in the bud.
Joe Biden buried his sons and now he's comfortable burying yours.
So it's a very low blow.
And I don't give a damn because as a New Yorker, I'm the target.
Way we go in the Middle East and have this adventurism.
We know what happens.
Ron Paul said this to Giuliani's face.
There's going to be blowback.
It's going to cause.
I don't, you don't get to go to another country, kill people, and have them be like, well, they are the good guys.
So, you know, what am I?
Some people are going to, some people are going to do something to quote Ilhan Omar.
So, and here's the other thing that I find really sick.
Let's take him at face value and assume that he genuinely thinks that voting for the Iraq war was a mistake.
He's like, man, I really made that wrong call.
Right.
And I know people.
I don't want to.
It's possible.
He did kill his son.
Yeah.
I mean, his son died because of fucking cancer that he got over in the Iraq war, which is like a well-documented thing.
He literally is responsible for Bo's death.
A good son.
Yeah.
But here's the other thing.
You would think if that's the case, like if you're an alcoholic, I'm going to take steps to make sure that this doesn't happen again.
Like if I'm a cook and my chicken got someone sick, it's like, all right, we got to look at this process because there's no way this can happen again.
But if you look at his staffing decisions, he's not staffing in that regard.
So this is all crocodile tears and he needs to be hit as hard, as quickly as possible on this issue.
And he's going to fold like a slinky.
Yes.
No, look, who's the example that I use most of the time is Walter Jones, who's passed away now, but he was a congressman who voted for the war in Iraq and truly regretted it, truly regretted it.
And he every day would send letters to family members of soldiers who were killed or wounded in that war.
And he subsequently voted against every single military intervention after that.
That's kind of the type of sign that someone actually regrets.
Like if you do that, now I can start taking you seriously.
Or even look at someone like Tucker Carlson, who supported the war in Iraq, went there, I believe in like 2004, turned on the whole thing and has subsequently railed against every single military campaign afterward.
People like that, I can start to believe.
When you see Joe Biden stacking his cabinet with the same old war hawks, I don't buy for a second that that isn't the direction that his administration is going to go, or at least would like to go.
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Back to the red pill, blue-pilled thing.
It makes me wonder a lot of these like, you know, blue-pilled libertarians who voted for Biden because they thought Trump was so bad.
You're like, how do you feel when you see him stacking his cabinet with all of these warhawks?
Do you feel like, well, at least he's not as racist, even though he wrote the crime bill and is a racist and has said just as many racist fucking things?
Like, do you, do you, but is that okay?
Does that make you feel better?
You know, the red-pilled versus blue-pilled libertarians, I think, was a big dividing line in how Donald Trump was perceived by people in this space, because the blue-pilled libertarians just right away saw like, oh, he's horrible and he's unpresidential.
Undermining The Personal Responsibility Message00:15:32
And we've been told by the whole, you know, cathedral that that's not what you're supposed to be as a president.
And look, and they'd obsessively point out to you that he, like, he's anti-libertarian on this policy, this policy, that policy, as if you're like, yeah, of course.
Obviously, we all know he's not a libertarian.
But the red-pilled libertarians, like myself, who didn't ever support Donald Trump, enjoyed a lot of the moment of Donald Trump, enjoyed the fact that he was just dunking on the corporate press every day, that he was exposing the deep state, that he was undermining trust in all of these institutions.
I thought this was wonderful.
I think I understand what's going on.
And I'm going to, I think it's a little bit of evolutionary psychology going on.
Here's their choices.
Under the status quo, under the cathedral, there's an episode of The Simpsons when Homer became the voice of Poochie, right?
You have Itchy and Scratchy, which are the cat and mouse.
They always fight.
And they added Poochie to the cartoon and Homer's his voice.
And they're having a meeting of all the writers and Homer comes in and he goes, here's what I think we should have.
Like, if Poochie's not there, the other character should be like, where's Poochie?
And he just goes to this list.
And the guy who's running the show is like, great, great.
Leave that on the floor and like, get out.
And we'll look at it later.
He's like, over here, good.
He's like, yeah, yeah, that's great.
Just goodbye.
For them, they would rather be that person in the cathedral, which is you have the Republican establishment, the Mitch McConnell's, and then you have the Democrats at Chuck Schumer's, but also like Stephen Colbert and Bill Maher.
And every so often they'll trot out a libertarian from like Reason or Cato, and he'll get up with his piece of paper.
And he was like, here's what I think.
Blah, Gold standard.
Open borders.
Great, great.
Cool, cool.
Leave the piece of it.
And they're going to, so they will give you the appearance of saying your piece.
You're not going to do anything.
You will have no power, but you will be heard in a sense that you'll give it a platform for five minutes.
Then they could go back to cutting their deals, right?
So in that scenario, they have a measure of credibility and they're on the stage to some extent, but they have no power.
The alternative, like the red-pilled world, no one's listening to them.
No one is talking to them.
Not the hard left, not the Republicans, not the new right, not the red-pilled libertarians.
No one cares at all about Joe Jorgensen and what she has to say.
Nobody other than themselves.
And that's why hashtag let her speak is like, you don't, if you have to ask to be let to speak, there's your problem.
The way to do it is to, and I'm using this word force loosely, is to be enough of a presence that they have no option, but to have you up on that stage.
So that is the two scenarios.
You guys want to be poochy?
Go ahead.
The rest of us want to, you know, burn down the itchy and scratchy factory.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, that's a, that's a really perfect way to put it.
It's, you know, there's Rothbard, you know, talked about this quite a bit.
And it's the reason why the Mises Institute is in Auburn.
And Jeff Dice talked about this a lot.
He goes, if you want to have a libertarian institute, it should not be in Washington, D.C. or in New York.
Like, just get out of there.
What do you need to be there?
You don't need to be at their parties.
You don't need to be making friends with these people.
You're here to bring this thing down.
You're not there to try to get in.
And as you said, get a seat at the table, which is not even a seat at the table.
It's a seat at the kids' table.
And, you know, it couldn't be less than useless to occupy.
And here's an, I remember I was a Cato intern in 97.
And this is right after Republicans took over Congress for the first time in 40 years, in 94.
And there was a lot of hope that they were really going to take an axe to the federal government.
And there was lots of reasons to believe it.
You know, this was a major change of 40 years.
They were talking the talk.
They were forcing budget concessions, certainly from what the projections had been earlier.
And they had something called the Cato Handbook for Congress, right?
And what Cato did, it was like a phone book kind of thing, spiral bound.
I still have mine, I think.
They went through and they said, here are like relatively painless cuts that you can make to the budget immediately that you should be able to get through just with your votes and blah, blah, blah, blah.
Like, so like, we'll do the work for you.
And David Bose, who's executive vice president of Cato, now I think that was his title at the time.
You can look this up.
The interview is still on the internet.
He gave an interview and he said, We regard this as like pornography for Republican staffers, meaning they look at it, they read it, they get excited, but it's never going to happen.
And in retrospect, I'm thinking, by your own admission, your strategy is something that will never happen.
How is that at all strategic?
Like for me, for I think almost to be pedantic, the definition of the word strategy is: what is the conceivable path, if not to victory, but to improvement?
To something.
To something.
If it's like, I'm going to do, expend a lot of energy.
And it was, I'm sure it was very smart, very well done.
They put a lot of effort into it.
But it's like, and now just take it and put in the garbage.
I still can't wrap my head around the thought process that did that other than, you know, and this is not nothing.
You can point to your donors and say, okay, this is what we're doing with your money.
Yeah.
You know, there were when you get into this mentality, there were two tweets that I saw recently that I thought were that really stuck out to me.
And one of them was by the Libertarian Party.
I was very critical of them for this.
So they had a tweet and they said something along the lines of it started, it started good.
The first two sentences were good.
The first two sentences were something like, no, no government can tell you that you're not essential.
They don't have to be a government can tell you, you know, you shouldn't, you know, shut down your business or something like that.
However, wearing masks and social distancing, avoiding crowds are all very good ideas.
And I was like, just, God, this is an awful message.
Here's the thing there were some.
You all here read it?
Yes, please.
You are essential.
No virus can change that.
And no government has the right to tell you otherwise while you're threatening your ability to earn a living, while threatening your ability to earn a living or live your life.
Also, it's a really good idea to wear a mask, avoid crowds, and consider others during a pandemic.
Now, I just, so I was, I did get some pushback from people when I was critical of this.
And they're like, but what's the problem with that message?
I mean, that's the libertarian thing, right?
Like, we don't want the government to force you to do it, but you know, we think you should voluntarily do it.
And it's still a pretty good thing.
It's about personal responsibility, but not being forced by the government.
And then I contrasted that with a different tweet written by one, Michael Malice.
And your tweet, which I retweeted because it was fantastic.
Oh, yeah.
He's a real douche, but he's bright and he's really good on Twitter.
But yeah, douche.
You don't want to grab a beer with him.
But your tweet was the one about being locked in your home.
Do you remember what you said?
No.
You said, being locked in your home.
I fucking, I should have this in front of me, but it was something along the lines of being locked in your home is not the beginning of a discussion.
Oh, it's a declaration.
Yeah, yeah.
Being told I intend to keep you a captive in your own home is not the beginning of discussion.
It's a declaration of war.
Yes.
Now that is the difference between the way a blue-pilled libertarian and a red-pilled libertarian thinks.
I'm not saying that maybe it's not a good idea to wear a mask.
I think wearing a mask in certain situations is a good idea.
I think if you're around someone who's been exposed and you're inside and you're around them for more than 15 minutes to a half hour, something like that, yeah, that's probably a good idea to have a mask on.
And that's it.
Maybe social distancing in certain situations is a good idea.
I'm not saying it's not.
The point is that the government is literally instituting totalitarianism.
They are telling you who you can have in your home, whether you can go to work, what they, I'm not exaggerating.
Governor Newsom's guidelines had instructions about how one of your family members can use the bathroom, what music you can play.
No, it's like the music can't be too loud.
Yes.
I mean, this is really the government in 2020 instituted totalitarian rules like they never have before.
How come when governor, sorry, I got, how come when Governor Newsom says you can't play loud music, no one's calling him out for being racist?
Because I know that's what he means.
You get Lewis on that phone.
He's talking about you, Lewis.
This is clearly an attack on the Puerto Rican community who only know loud music.
Loud music is their form of parenting.
They don't have parents.
They just have loud music.
And you're going to take that from them?
Okay.
Good luck.
Good luck, Gavin.
So I interrupted your tear.
So, but so like this is going on.
And when you're fighting back and then undermining your own message by kind of going, well, you know, some of it is a really good idea, though.
And then the obvious like conclusion from that is like, well, if it's a good idea, I mean, maybe we just mandate it.
I mean, this is a, you know, a matter of life and death.
So why?
It's like, no, your role here is to fight for liberty.
And you need a message that points out how truly awful these government policies are.
And don't give them the benefit of the doubt that, I mean, of course, all of these things really do help, but blah, blah, blah.
And then it's just like just no understanding of how to message, like how to actually say something that someone might hear and go, fuck yeah, that's right.
Good for them for having some courage.
This is marketing 101.
You have to have a competitive advantage, right?
So if the Democrats are going to be arguing for diversity, right?
The Republicans to say we also have diversity.
Well, then that's a wash.
You have to compete with them on some metric.
So if these other people are saying, you should do X and you say, I also think you should do X. Why am I going with you when they've got the numbers?
It makes no sense as a strategy, even if you're doing the right thing.
Yeah, that's right.
And it's very, you know, it's.
And here's my other tweet.
Greg Gutfeld read this on Fox.
Oh, yeah, I saw this.
Read it.
It was, tyranny is when the population is imprisoned.
Liberty is when the politicians are.
Matt Walsh, who's from the Daily Wire, I believe still, hardcore social conservative.
He's talking about sending governors to get Mono.
So that is how, in my opinion, you should be moving in the national conversation, as opposed to, we're all in this together.
Well, then why am I voting third party?
What are you bringing to the table?
Yeah, no, that's exactly right.
And if you're going to go down the path of being like, like, if you're going to say, well, wearing, wearing masks is a really good idea, you know?
So you're saying, well, wearing masks will really help mitigate the virus.
All right.
But then maybe we should mandate that.
Yeah.
You know, it's like, why, why, if you're giving them that.
I heard, I heard one libertarian who said something where they go like, look, like, I, I think like the lockdowns shouldn't be forced, but like you literally, you really can kill your grandmother if you don't abide by them.
So it's like a good idea to do it voluntarily.
You're like, oh, well, if all that's true, wouldn't the average person look at that and say, yeah, then let's just force them?
Know, like, shouldn't condom use among high-risk populations be the law?
We're talking about death.
I mean, not anymore because AIDS has been largely mitigated, but back in the day.
I was also very critical of a different Libertarian Party tweet on Thanksgiving.
I don't know if you saw that, but they tweeted out a thing about how their Thanksgiving message was that the original Thanksgiving was a celebration of undocumented workers or undocumented immigrants coming to America.
And you're just like, dude, I was like, the government is banning Thanksgiving.
Do you really need to search for what the libertarian message is here?
Isn't the message then that those undocumented immigrants are going to slaughter your people and destroy your culture?
Yes.
I mean, and take it as their own.
If you were making an open borders argument, there couldn't be a worse example.
There couldn't be words.
The Central and South Americans.
That's the worst example.
Where they have disease and they're slaughtered.
But that's the worst one.
Yes.
But that one's pretty bad.
But if you look around at like, you know, the pilgrims coming over to the Native Americans and you go, so what are the Native Americans doing now?
You're like, they're on reservations.
Their culture has been destroyed.
Their land's been taken.
Their people were killed.
They could have used some border patrol.
Yeah.
Possibly.
Anyway, so it's just, it is very hard watching the LP message is, I mean, it's funny at times, but it's pretty frustrating.
Wait, let me ask you this.
Someone put in my locals group that you intend to take over the libertarian.
You made a declaration that you're going to take over the Libertarian Party.
Yes.
Well, I mean, was that what did you just joke?
I don't like, what did you mean by that?
No, I'm sorry.
Was that a joke?
No, but I mean, that's your joking face.
I don't, I like, now you're triggering my autism.
I, the, the Mises caucus plan is to become the dominant force.
Oh, okay.
That's what you mean.
Okay.
And that's, yeah, that's, that's more or less what I mean by that.
Okay.
We're, we're going to be the dominant force in the party and we're going to control, uh, you know, do our best to control the messaging, the candidates, and things like that.
It's a libertarian takeover of the libertarian party.
Oh, that's wonderful.
Okay.
And we got some exciting plans, some tricks up our sleeves.
Oh, I'll talk to you about it at a later time.
Okay.
I don't, I don't like tricks.
You don't.
Now you're triggering.
I got you for a second.
You're like, wait a minute.
Wait.
We're both just triggering each other's autism in this episode.
It's a lot of fun.
It's a good, it's a good time.
Anyway, I do think I am really excited about the prospects of the manner in which Donald Trump is leaving the White House.
And we, I really do think, are entering a new time where there's never been anything quite like this before in the history of this country, where you have a president who got 70 plus million votes, is flat out saying on his way out, I was robbed.
This was massive fraud.
This guy, Joe Biden, is not the true legitimate president.
I don't think Donald Trump is ever going to concede.
I don't think he's going to be at the inauguration.
He will leave.
He's not going to not leave the White House.
But what you're going to be left there with is a situation where tens of millions of Americans not only don't like the president, do not believe that he is actually their president.
We've had that for four years.
Utopian Checks On Federal Power00:03:43
Hashtag not my president.
Sure, sure, but not quite to the same level.
Right.
Right.
Because right now.
Yeah, I agree with you.
Obama wasn't saying it.
There's a difference.
Yes.
And I'm agreeing with you.
Obama wasn't saying not my president.
Yeah.
Sure, sure.
But even Hillary Clinton, who did insist that it was stolen from her, she conceded.
She called Donald Trump.
She said, you know, you're the president now.
You beat me in this.
On some level, she conceded.
She did not do what Donald Trump is doing, you know, which is a really different thing.
And I got to say, and maybe this goes to the red pill, blue-pilled thing.
I don't understand how any red-pilled libertarian could not see it as a good thing that a bunch of people don't believe the system is legitimate.
Isn't that our entire point that the system is illegitimate?
I think they're, no, I don't think they think that.
They think the system is corrupt and fixable.
And it's like, when has it not been corrupt?
Like, if something's been rotten for 200 years, at a certain point, you're, you know, this is the Rothbard point.
It's like, what's utopian?
Like anarchism or your belief after 200 and plus years of data that this constitution, which is written by politicians, interpreted by politicians, is going to restrain politicians and their power.
Which of these is more utopian?
Like we have the receipts.
I actually think that, and I've said this before, but I think that I think minarchism is perhaps the most utopian philosophy that's out there.
It might be more utopian than true communism.
It rivals communism in terms of how utopian it is.
The idea that there will be a government, we will have a power structure called the government that has a legal monopoly on the legal right to initiate violence against people, yet it will control its own power and remain small.
What could be more utopian than that?
It's also this idea.
There's someone on my Twitter yesterday who was like, you know, anyone who, any of these governors or mayors who violate these stay-at-home laws should be kicked out of office immediately.
And I don't disagree, but it's like, by whom?
Like, who is enforcing these checks that you want to have happen?
Then they're like, well, you know, this is what happens.
We keep voting in the same people.
New York City has term limits.
And now our mayor is a Sandinista.
So term limits is a great example.
This was a strategy.
Let's try this out, see if it works.
It was new.
It was untested.
It went wide.
And it turns out it did not actually have the effect that we thought.
But it was a change in policy as opposed to, well, if we keep sending Congress a handbook for 30 years, at some point they're going to listen to us and cut the budget.
That's right.
Here's how bad the idea of writing in checks and balances for government works in reality.
Okay.
So one of the checks on the power of the federal government under the Constitution was that the states appoint the senators.
Yes.
So that's something that actually checks the power of the federal government and gives more power to the state governments.
So what'd they do?
No, we're not going to do that anymore.
They literally just changed the rule.
So if they want, if they want to take more power and something is actually an effective check, they'll simply change the rule and go, nope, now we're voting for them.
Yeah, it's almost embarrassing to see.
Why Compliance Proposals Fail00:01:19
Here's the other thing.
The argument is if everyone just listened to the Constitution as it's written, then we wouldn't be in this mess.
And it's like, well, in that case, what do you need the Constitution for?
If me and you and all agree that the only thing we're going to have is a night watchman state, of what relevance is what this piece of paper 20 years ago.
We can make that agreement today, right now, and that paper adds nothing.
It's completely superfluous.
So even your best argument for the Constitution is, well, if we all agreed to it, it would work.
Well, that's the case for anything.
If we all agreed to a commune, it would work on a small scale.
No, someone, I was arguing with someone on Twitter the other day about lockdowns, and they said, well, the lockdowns would have worked if people complied with them.
And you're like, yeah, but if you have a proposal that only works with 100% compliance, which you're never going to get, then that's a pretty shitty proposal.
Yeah.
I mean, like, okay.
So, what is what's going to make people comply if they didn't the first time?
Why is it going to be better off around going around the second time?
All right.
We are just about, I think, at the end of our time for this episode.
I think we got it.
A few little technical glitches, but we banged it out.
I always enjoy talking with you, my brother.
And I look forward to being on your show in a couple of weeks.