Michael Malice and James Smith dissect the weaponization of WWII as America's empire origin story, challenging the narrative that the war solely saved Jews or justified atomic bombings on civilians. They critique Yaron Brook's weak arguments against anarchism and the Libertarian Party's leadership failures, praising Tom Woods for opposing lockdowns while noting how younger dissidents adopt neo-Nazi views to fight the establishment. Ultimately, they argue that questioning historical facts invites hostility, urging libertarians to bypass major party games and directly address voter needs amidst the current political climate. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Heshi Socks Sponsorship00:01:59
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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.
Austrian Economics Logic00:15:05
Here's your host, James Smith.
What's up, everybody?
And welcome to a very special episode of Part of the Problem as I am joined by the great Michael Malice.
You know, 2020 will go down in history for many things: a pandemic, lockdowns, riots, Donald Trump being cheated out of an election.
But more than anything else, it will be remembered as the year that Michael Malice and Dave Smith put out regular content together.
And this is our last crossover episode of 2020.
I might cry at some point during this.
The second half of the episode is just a speech with thank yous that I'm going to be reading.
But before then, we'll get into it a little bit.
I know this is an emotional moment for all of us.
Michael, how are you doing?
Thank you, Senator Romney for standing up to President Trump and I also want to thank Senator Romney again.
It's just Romney is all I thank the entire speech.
Oh, if I just committed to that and did a half hour.
Governor Romney.
I want to thank Governor Romney.
Before that, I'd like to thank Citizen Romney, which is where it all started.
And his dad, Governor Romney.
Oh, that's right.
Yeah.
I never talked.
He was a little radical, his dad.
He was a little out there.
Mittens settled in, was more of an establishment figure.
The old senior Romney would really fight the establishment.
Not really my, not my cup of tea.
2024 is going to be Utah's year.
There we go.
It might be.
Who the hell knows what's happening?
It's not impossible.
It really isn't.
You are looking, you are looking fresh today, my friend.
So as we were talking before we started taping, there's a story with the haircut today, and it's this.
I was on Lex Friedman's podcast over the weekend.
Oh, nice.
I loved your last appearance.
This was the longest show he's done.
So it went four and a half hours, which is no mean feat.
Before and Lex, like me, is a good Russian Jewish kid.
He's from Ukraine as well.
And I thought, all right, let me do something special for his show.
So he's always in the same look.
He's got a black suit, black tie, and a white shirt.
And I'm like, all right, let's play with this.
So I took my Tulsi suit, which is white, had a white tie and a black suit.
So it's very kind of Wild West.
And I got my hair cut like him.
Well, the thing is, when you get your hair cut like him, I end up looking like Gertrude Stein.
And if those who don't know who she is, she was this 1930s, 20s lesbian from France, who is a mother of modernism.
I swear to God, he put them side by side.
It looks just like her.
And my hairdresser yelled at me for 20 minutes saying things like, how do you even ask for something like this?
It's just totally tasteless.
Looks like fresh off the boat.
Looks like his wife cut his hair.
It looks like it costs $5.
So I just went back today just to get it fixed.
So that's why it's so extremely short.
But you'll see that during the thumbnail of the Lex episode, which is dropping imminently.
That's why I look like Gertrude Stein.
I'm excited.
I'm excited to watch that.
I wasn't really familiar with him.
I'd seen him on a couple different things.
And then your episode was the first time I watched a full episode of his.
And I've watched several since then.
He's great.
I really, and he blew up.
Like sometimes it's the weird thing about the internet.
Like back in the day, if someone was huge, you could never not know who they are.
But now with the internet, you'll find someone and be like, oh, I found this new guy.
What does he have?
20 million subscribers.
Oh, I guess I'm not the first.
Well, he's bros with Elon.
And what you might have seen interesting from another episode of his is he had Yaron Brooke on the show.
And Lex is not a particularly politically involved person.
That's not his core competency.
His background is doing AI for MIT.
So he's really off the charts, brilliant.
And he was just based on my conversation with him.
And then he's watched my live streams and things like that, pressing Yaron Brooke about anarchism.
And if you see this clip, it's been following on Twitter.
It is, or you could just look at the podcast.
It is so bad because the answers that you have to give if you're a member of the Ayn Rand Institute to critique anarchism are the answers Rand gave back in the day because she hated Murray Rothbard.
And they're so, even if they were intellectually sound, it's been 50 years.
You should be able to add something to them other than her like rhetorical question of, well, what if the thing is, rhetorical questions are never a sign of intelligence or almost never.
It's always a sign of like, well, I can't think of an answer.
Therefore, none exists.
It's like that, that is the stupidest position to take.
It's like, well, what if you're a member of one defense agency and I'm a number another and your defense agent shows at my door?
Civil war.
And it's like, but that's not at all what would happen.
We know that now.
Yeah.
And of course.
Look at Julian Assassin.
I'm sorry, just finished my thought.
Look at Julian Assange.
He was on British soil for years and they wouldn't go into that house.
Well, it's so there's, and this is what Yaron does all the time, which is just, it really drives me crazy, is he's got these incredibly weak arguments against anarcho-capitalism, anarchism.
He's also got just kind of attacks that he launches against Ron Paul and the Mises Institute.
Oh, does he?
I didn't know this.
Oh, yes.
Yes, absolutely.
And then what he says, and this is straight up what he says, is that he won't talk to any of those people because they're horrible people.
So he will launch attacks against them and then also say, and I will never debate a single one of them.
He wouldn't dare come on this podcast.
I've invited him on before.
He won't come on any, he's not going to have the, and it's just because he knows it's not like like he's a smarter guy than I am, but he just knows his argument is bullshit.
And it's only takes, I mean, if he were to actually argue this with a well-versed anarchist, he'll get taken apart or even me.
Yeah, that's it.
Or if like the Wellver's anarchists can't show up, maybe they have a health crisis, they get COVID or something like that, and I sub in, even I could probably pull off a win.
Well, look, it's by the way, you know, the other argument, and this is why it's so disappointing because they come from people who make very good arguments in other areas and are very smart people.
But I remember David Friedman, which I believe he was repeating from his father, made this argument attacking Austrian economists.
And the attack was basically over, so Austrian economists basically believe that there are a priori truths that you can deduce logically that are kind of the foundation of economics.
And that you can, while you can prove these things empirically, empiricism isn't where you go to figure out these laws.
You have to think about these things like from an a priori starting point.
Whereas other schools of economics believe in pure empiricism.
You test things out and you see what works.
So if you have, let's say, a minimum wage increase, well, what you do is you go and you try to look at what effect this had on jobs, account for other factors and see, did more jobs or less jobs get created?
Whereas the Austrian economists more tend to say, well, wait, we can think about this and we can understand from just pure logic that if you have a higher minimum wage, you're going to have less jobs created than you otherwise would have.
Or any or any higher price.
Right.
Yes.
Otherwise, just raise the prices infinitely and then you'll have.
And so anyway, but so what David Friedman said, and I remember he said this in a debate with Bob Murphy, I believe.
And he said that, and this it really reminds me of the objectivist criticism of anarchism, which is the Randian criticism, which is he said, well, listen, if two economists are having a disagreement, they can look to the data.
But if two Austrian economists are having a disagreement, all they can do is fight.
They have to go to war with each other because you're over here with your logical starting point and you're over here with your logical starting point.
And all that's left is go to war.
And you're like, wait, well, okay, so you're Mr. Empiricist.
When has that ever happened?
Like Austrian economists have been disagreeing for a long time.
And I've never seen two of them just like fucking take their jackets off and start throwing down.
Like, what are you talking about?
No, and empirically, they, and we've seen this, they will sit down and actually hear each other out.
Yeah.
And like, it doesn't get heated.
It gets heated like in an intellectual sense, but it's more in an entertaining, I'm addressing your points as opposed to the science is settled.
Right.
And of course, the other flip side to that is that you go like, oh, so all of you traditional economists, you're just data driven.
So I guess you must all come to the same conclusions all the time, right?
Oh, wait, no, you still all interpret the data in a million different ways.
And of course, really, the only way you can approach things is to start with a foundation of logic.
I mean, you can certainly use empirical evidence to like see, you know, kind of figure out whether you were right or to figure out whether or not something, you know, there might be something else that you need to look at.
But if you're not working with logic and as Bob Murphy pointed out, this was always one of my favorite things that really solidified me on Austrian economics was that he was like, but everybody's starting with like a priori logical assertions.
Everybody.
I mean, like even the scientific method, it's not as if like we just found the scientific method carved in stone somewhere and we're like, this is the method and everything derived from that.
It's that we think about this and we're like, okay, well, this seems like a logical way to come up with a hypothesis, test it against reality, and then draw conclusions from that.
Even that is in the realm of logic and philosophy.
It's not, it's not like there's no empirically testing the scientific method itself.
And let's, and I don't know that he's saying this, but let's also address the absurdity of trying to apply the scientific method to something like the minimum wage, where there's hundreds of factors happening simultaneously, including things like the weather, including things like other taxes.
So to think you could just reduce this to one factor, I think even most economists would be like, okay, this is where it gets extremely tricky because it's such a dynamic industry.
And this is why everybody can draw their own conclusion.
And this is why progressive economists can argue that the minimum wage increases jobs.
And then, you know, other free market economists can argue the opposite because there are so many factors that you can kind of draw whatever conclusion you want within reason.
And they can say with a straight face, well, because we sarcastically say, well, why don't we make the minimum wage like 2000?
Where does it stop?
And they'll say, we'll cross that bridge when we've come to it.
We obviously haven't.
I'm being empirical.
You're just being hyperbolic.
And that makes a certain kind of sense.
What I hate about the criticism of anarchism is that it's, and I know you're wrong.
Well, that bothers me.
But it's almost like a, there's something about kind of like a bully mentality that people get when you propose something new and different, where they're almost like, you get this all the time, just as an anarchist, where the, what people, it's not even a legitimate criticism of anarchism.
It's just like, oh, yeah, that'll never happen.
Could never happen.
The state will always be here.
Just kind of these things where it's almost like, dude, you're like, it's just an insult without actually kind of like, it's like, well, this is wildly unpopular and most people don't think like this.
So you must be wrong.
And people always have a bias toward the status quo.
But they're not wrong to do that because we're not all dying.
So they're right to have that bias.
Sure.
Well, and also, look, it makes sense in some ways to have a bias toward the status quo because look, that does exist.
We're talking about what does exist versus some abstraction in your mind.
Like, okay, I'm going to go with the things I see and feel.
And like you said, and everybody's not dying.
So, okay, compared to other things, this seems to be working pretty well.
So, no, it does make sense.
But this is also why when people wonder, well, how the hell did slavery persist for so long?
And how did all these crazy things, you know, just go on and on?
It's because that's what it was.
Because it's the right thing to do.
Because we lost our way.
Okay.
Wait, no, can I say something?
Because when you said bullying mentality, this is one of the criticisms of anarchism that drives me personally up the wall.
I'm 4'11, right?
And they'll always say, oh, I can't believe you for anarchism.
If anarchism happened, you'd be the first one who would get the crap kicked out of you.
And this is empirically false.
And we can look at it right now.
Small dudes, there is no social space to physically assault them.
I can go up to Lewis, punch him in the face.
And if he tried to retaliate, it would get broken up and he'd go to jail.
If he swung on me, he'd be in real trouble.
And if you look at any situation, little guys can get away with running their mouths and getting in a big dude's face because that big guy is not in a space socially to retaliate.
So even on those terms, it really drives me crazy when they're like, well, you'd be the first one to be your ass kicked.
That's not how it is in real life.
You know, it's really, that's a really interesting point.
You know, it's really crazy about that.
Amongst rats in rat communities.
You mean Lewis's people?
Yes.
No, I'm talking about Lewis fistfights.
Amongst rats, amongst actual rats, they have this thing.
They've like observed it where bigger rats, they like wrestle around and play.
And if the bigger ones don't allow the little ones to win sometimes, they ostracize that rat and like literally will cut him off from the rest of it.
So this is so built into us, these like social mechanisms that this spawns across different species in the animal kingdom.
Like it's really, it's really interesting.
And there's really something to that.
The other thing about like one of the things about people's bias towards the status quo is that they tend to look at the wildest possibilities of what could come with an alternative proposal and take for granted the wild things that actually already exist within the system.
So what's always stuck out to me, and I bet me and you have mentioned this before, but when objectivists, they'll always say, okay, well, if you like one of their big things, which Ayn Ran sloppily, uncharacteristically for her, but sloppily just dismisses is like, well, what if there's disputes between these different defense protection agencies, which unquestionably is an issue.
I mean, like that is something that would have to be, but the issue there, right, is short of arguing for one world government, which I don't think too many objectivists want to argue for, you still have that problem with governments.
And in the fucking 20th century, we had two world wars.
And that's not all of it.
That's just picking two, but they were two really big ones.
And we just take that.
Soviet Union Tyranny00:15:22
There's a quote of Trump during one of the speeches where he used to sound like nightshade where Trump was saying, two world wars, beautiful world wars.
And it sounds like it's Photoshopped or whatever.
It's actually a quote.
So if you guys are listening, go Google beautiful world wars.
What was the context?
There were just talks like the veterans thing, you know, and tearing down things.
He goes, two world wars, beautiful world wars.
And you're like, okay, he really is completely insane.
Yeah.
Sorry to interrupt.
Go ahead.
No, that is, that is Trump.
Trump to me, did you watch The Office?
Of course.
Yeah.
Okay.
So I don't know if you ever saw this episode.
It wasn't one of their like bad seasons, but it was after Michael Scott left.
But there's a when what's his name?
Oh, fuck.
I can't remember the guy's character, the character's name.
The guy from the blacklist comes in and he's the CEO for a while.
Okay, I forgot.
Yeah.
He's he's like the new CEO and he comes in and Kevin, who's like the big fat office dumb guy, and he's talking about, he's like, I want ideas for how we can shake up the company.
And Kevin starts talking about the vending machine and how he's like, the cookies should be in the middle.
He goes, they always put the highest seller at A1, but it should be right in the middle because that's where your eyes go.
And he's like, ah, okay, I see what you're saying.
So you're talking about restocking inventory and removing.
And like he thinks there's like this deep meaning to it.
And then he starts like going around.
He's really inspired by it.
And it's like at the end of the episode that he realizes that it's like, oh, you were just talking about cookies.
There was nothing more.
Like to me, that's Trump.
Everyone like projects their thing onto him and all of this.
And then at the end of it, you realize you're like, oh, he, he was just what we always knew he was.
There was no more to it than that.
He wasn't a crypto Nazi.
He wasn't a fucking, you know, he wasn't like the savior of the working class.
He wasn't playing 4D chess.
He was just that guy who thinks he's a winner and you're a loser.
And everyone who supports him is tremendous.
And everyone who doesn't support him is a loser.
And I am so glad he's going out like a total bitch.
Because one of the things I always preach, preach on Twitter is to be as thin-skinned as possible, not to put up with people's crap.
And he is going out swinging like such an ass, gasolining everything.
And I'm completely for it.
All of Washington has moved on.
And he's like, screw you.
I'm still the president.
I'm going to still see as much damage as possible.
And again, it's like, it's the same dynamic I was talking about.
Still, you have these people projecting onto him, right?
So the right hard Trump supporters are like, I have seen the other day.
We still got a case and it's still going to come down to the House of Representatives.
And then it'll get thrown to the Supreme Court.
And then we'll still come in and all this evidence.
Trump's been collecting the evidence, but it hasn't been released yet.
And everybody on the left is like, he's going to declare martial law and he's going to make himself dictator for life.
And really, what's the reality of it?
He's just going out like a bitch.
He's going to whine and complain and then leave.
And then Joe Biden will be in there on January 20th.
It's just the whole thing.
And of course, what he always does is he'll throw right back in their face what they do to him, but he does it in a more exaggerated way.
So in the same sense that the fake news accusation started from CNN, everyone forgets this now, but it started from the corporate press complaining about internet news that was fake news to them.
And then Trump reappropriated it, threw it right back into their face, and it took life.
And the same thing is happening here.
Trump is in a very poetically just fashion telling the party of Hillary Clinton and Stacey Abrams, oh, hey, we're playing the game of not accepting election results.
I am going to, in a bigger, more spectacular way than you ever did, not accept these election results.
And this is it, this is the game they wanted to play.
And I got to say, it's kind of enjoyable to watch it get thrown back in their face.
Yeah, of course it is enjoyable.
And what's really amazing is, I don't know if you've been watching, I have had historically very little hope for conservatives.
And one of the things that I am, because I think all human beings, it's very hard to change their perspective on certain core values of theirs, right?
It would take, I mean, for us to have to sign on you and I, for like, this war needs to be fought, you're really going to have to sit us down and be like, oh my God.
Like if even if Pearl Harbor, like we would be like, can we do just Japan?
And or like, is it maybe just Germany?
Like we'd be dragging our feet because it's like the costs are huge.
Was it our fault?
Blowback, blah, blah, blah.
To have conservatives question their loyalty to the police, that is happening extremely quickly with all these videos.
And I am shocked because look at it a parallel way.
So much of progressivism is based on advocating for minorities against historical injustices and contemporary injustices.
And they do it a lot of times.
They were the first ones there and they were doing it correctly.
And you'll see videos of people who are people of color acting in horrible ways.
And the more extreme of them will just find some rationalization, like, oh, this is what happens when you don't have money in the inner city, right?
So you would think that conservatives in some ways would see these videos and be like, oh, just one bad apple.
I cannot believe to what extent conservatives are willing to be like, yeah, I was totally wrong on these fuckers.
Like these are the villains.
I've seen a lot of that.
And I can't help but wonder where would we, where we would be at if it weren't for such long sustained riots over the summers.
Right.
Because that seemed to me to break it up for a while.
And then once those were got, like, they fell back into back the blue.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
Understandably, yeah.
And yeah, understandably.
And you wonder, and now they do seem to be coming back.
It was really when the lockdowns went into their second round where they started coming back to being red pilled.
And, you know, Yeah, I wonder about these things a lot because, you know, sometimes you'll see like whatever it is that, you know, like the, maybe the easiest example is just that, like, you know, Bush is spending through the roof, then Obama comes in and he's spending even more.
And then you see all these Republicans getting really good on being fiscally responsible.
But you realize even then, you know, all it takes is a Republican to come back in and spend, and you guys will shut up again.
So you might seem like an ally.
Yes, it happened.
So you might seem like an ally during the Obama years, but you're not really, because if it's your guy, you'll look the other way.
And likewise, with the wars, I noticed a lot of these people, you know, some I believe to be very sincere, like Tucker Carlson, but a lot of the Sean Hannity's, Laura Ingrams, these people all of a sudden, now that Trump's saying we're against the wars, we're against the wars and we don't want to fight these wars forever.
Why can't we just bring our troops home and all of this?
But, you know, if you have a long enough memory, you're kind of, and I've always just kind of wondered, particularly my biggest fear with Donald Trump being president, which thank God didn't come true.
I mean, I guess there's a few days left, but I'm going to count my blessings early.
My biggest fear was a 9-11 style attack during Trump's presidency because I think that Donald Trump, had there been a terrorist attack, would have had to show he has the biggest nuts on the planet.
And like he's the, he is the type of guy who would just like start going to his generals and being like, so what about the H-bombs?
Like, do we pull them out?
And I wonder sometimes about those guys.
Because anyway, let me just feed your point because we have, we know for a fact that before he was president, like people have business meetings with him and he'd have found some rando blog and he'd be like, this blog is saying this about me.
Can you believe it?
And they're like, this is a blog with 30 readers.
Like, what are you?
He's like, blah, blah, blah.
So like he's like, you can't, you have to strike back twice as hard.
He says explicitly.
His actions show this.
So yeah, if we were hit, he would psychologically be like, we have to hit them back.
And it's not wrong to be like, we have to establish that if you hit us, we will retaliate in such disproportionate fury.
He said this about Kim Jong-un.
He said, fury and fire, the likes of which the world has never seen.
Yeah.
So, I mean, he's hinting at something because the world's seen a lot of fury and fire.
So if it's like the world's never seen, that's got to be something pretty impressive.
And so you just have to always kind of wonder with people, even the right-wingers getting red-pilled on the cops.
You're like, what would it take for you to snap right back into your original position?
Because a lot of times, even when you're making progress, it is easy for people to snap right back into where they were.
So again, even particularly with the wars, which is where I think the right wing has made the most progress over the last, you know, really, I mean, it's really, I think, kind of started with the Ron Paul.
It's clearly started with Ron Paul.
You validated within Republicanism.
That's right.
Because he's not a squish.
He was clearly a hardcore person.
So if the hardcore person is saying it's okay to be anti-war, you don't have to feel like a pussy, which Republicans are worried about.
And not just.
Right.
No, you're absolutely right.
But not just a pussy, but a lefty.
Yeah.
You don't have to feel like a pinko.
It doesn't have to be Michael Moore.
It doesn't have to be someone who hates America, you know, from their perspective.
Right.
And probably just from reality.
But it doesn't have to be, you could be the squariest, square country doctor, most clearly conservative person you've ever seen in your life.
Like when Ron Paul tells you, I've never tried a drug in my life, you absolutely know it's true.
No one's going like, I think he smoked a joint in college.
No, Ron Paul really never smoked a joint in his entire life.
Like he's never, and he is, and he goes, and I'm as bleeding heart against the wars as anyone could possibly be.
It unlocked like a possibility for right-wingers to keep their identity and still be anti-war.
And then Trump just barreled through the door.
But I wonder what it would take to get them right back in that camp.
So I, by the way, I tweeted this the other day, which I thought was one.
You know, I'm not as good as Michael Malice on.
Verified.
Well, that's true.
But I kind of like that.
That's how I keep, you know, how I keep my ear to the street.
You verified people.
You're out there.
Yeah.
Well, that is, that's a big part of it, too.
But people like you, your, you know, your Twitter experience, you're messaging back and forth with Jeb Bush.
I'm out there in the hood.
You're jealous.
What are you more jealous about that I hop on my shower than I that idea with Jeb Bush?
I'm gonna need some time to get back.
I'm gonna need some time to get back.
Which is Dave Smith.
I'm gonna tweet that out right now.
But this is, it's interesting because you mentioned this.
You just, you, or you kind of alluded to this talking about World War II and what it would take to get us into World War II.
So I had a tweet that triggered leftists and boomer cons.
And I always love when I can do that.
That's like the Michael Malice formula that the best, the best tweets trigger those two groups of people in my experience.
But I said, I said, here's how brainwashed people are by statism.
World War II is the biggest mass murder campaign of innocent civilians in human history, yet questioning whether it was a good idea is seen as a crazy position.
Thank God for public schools.
So that was my tweet.
And I got a whole bunch of lefties calling me a Holocaust denier, which is nowhere in that tweet.
And then a whole bunch of boomer cons calling me like the blame America first crowd.
But I just think that it really is something that I didn't.
I didn't, by the way, I didn't even take a position.
I didn't say anything about it.
I just said something that is a demonstrable fact.
It is the biggest mass murder, mass slaughter of innocent civilians in the history of humanity.
You can't argue that.
It's just a factual statement.
And that you should be allowed to question that.
And as soon as I question that, all of these people are working hard to go, well, what do you mean by that?
Are you saying Hitler should have been allowed to kill the Jews?
But you know what?
Also, it's funny when people say we had to have entered World War II or else the Holocaust would have happened.
And it's like, wait, wait, wait, what?
That's literally, they will say that with a straight face.
And it's like, no, no, no.
Don't you understand?
Well, I said one guy.
I had one guy say to me, it's so funny because you literally, it's like exactly what you would predict, as if it's like you have the programming for an NPC character.
Said, if the U.S. had not got involved in World War II, Germany and Russia would have dominated Europe, leading to the deaths of tens of millions of people.
So I replied back to that.
I said, so you're telling me had we not gotten into World War II, Hitler and Stalin would have killed millions and dominated Europe.
Well, good thing we avoided all that.
Is that something?
Isn't it like an amazing thing that you go like, yeah, dude?
Well, look what would have happened.
Hitler and Stalin would have killed a lot of people.
I mentioned this in Ego and Hubris, which is going for like $200 now on eBay in my biography.
My first moment like this was I was in second grade and Lisa Rosenbaum, this is Yeshiva, got up and we had to read an essay.
Yeah.
And the conclusion of the essay was, when you share, you always get more.
And I started laughing and then I looked around the room and no one else was laughing.
And I'm like, oh my God.
Like it was one of those real, like, like they live moments where I'm like, this, and I was like, I'm smiling and nodding.
I'm like, I, I, I need to leave the earth.
It was such a jarring moment for me.
Yeah.
Well, that's right.
But it shows you how a lot of that, right, in the connection between your example of sharing, you always get more and this is that people are attached to a narrative that feels good.
Right.
And they do not want to abandon this narrative that feels good.
Yeah.
If it wasn't for the cops, there would be rioting and businesses would be burnt down wantonly.
Right.
Well, right, exactly.
You know, it's, it's, it's really that.
And to say, like, to me, if you look at, and you have a, I think probably a, a unique perspective that very few people have on World War II for being a Russian Jew.
Yeah.
So you're somebody who suffered, whose family suffered directly under the tyranny of the Soviet Union, but at the same time can also be kind of like happy that the guy hell bent on exterminating you was not the victor in the war.
You know what I mean?
Well, I was born in Lvov, which is where Mises was born as well.
And Masak, the guy who masochism is named after.
And I didn't realize this until doing reading recently that Lvov was, since it's Western Ukraine, it's one of those cities that just goes back and forth between different empires over the years.
The Germans came, they got it, and they, it was a complete bloodbath.
Like they fucked, and I'm like, I found out like, how did my grandparents survive?
Like they like rounded up the Jews, the Russians did, and they got them on trains east to like Kazakhstan or something to like save some of them.
But they knew the Germans are coming and they're coming to exterminate.
Like this was known at the time.
My grandfather fought for the Russian army.
And I think he was stationed by Japan or whatever it was.
So yeah, it is a kind of, it's, but the point is, I'm going there this summer, hopefully, if I'll be allowed with my buddy Chris Williamson, who's also a podcaster.
Nazi Empire Villainy00:13:31
And I'm going to go.
I haven't been there since I left at age two to see that hometown.
And there is like a Holocaust memorial thing there.
And it's going to be really, I don't know how I'm going to react, but it's not going to be fun to be like, this is, I'd like walking, like, you know, that's the thing about like someone like whistling past your graveyard, your graveyard, whatever.
It's just going to be like very spooky because, I mean, it's like a flip of a coin and I wouldn't be here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And a flip of the other coin, it would be Stalin who got us, you know?
Yeah, no, absolutely.
But that's the thing that I just find so like crazy about there's something about World War II.
And in general, as I've found out, you know, like the Holocaust really has this power that almost nothing else has.
I mean, if I've, as I've tweeted many times, questioning Americans' involvement in World War I, which is much more cut and dry and easy to argue against.
That doesn't really bother anybody.
It just doesn't really piss people off in the same way.
You could, you can go out and say, we never should have fought Vietnam.
Nobody is even like, you know, really giving you pushback on that.
I mean, maybe a few, but it's not like, but World War II is still this really truly a third rail that people don't like to talk about.
And for many reasons that make sense and other reasons that I think are more nefarious.
You know, so like part of it is because the Nazis really were, the Nazis really were every bit as evil as they are cracked up to be.
Do you know what's like, I read a book about this called Beyond Belief by Deborah Lipstadt, which is about the Western press during the rise of World War II.
And it's really just, I recommend this book to everyone, highest possible recommendation, because they're all in Plato's cave because they're in America.
They get reports from Germany.
They're like, this has to be exaggerated.
This is ridiculous.
Like, yeah, okay, this is happening.
Like old men are getting beat up on the streets and no one's doing anything.
I mean, come on.
Maybe there's just one case, but systemically, why would they want, how does this benefit them?
And there was one part where they're like questioning like a lot of aspects of the Holocaust.
They're like, okay, this is being blown out of proportion.
So what they did is they took all these journalists and made them, I think it was Eisenhower, visit the camps as they were being liberated.
So they'd be eyewitnesses.
And you see the reports in the press, which you would never see like before or since where they're like, we were completely wrong.
Anything that you thought was this bad, it was actually worse.
And just to have them be like, yep, okay, there's no kind of covering their ass.
They were like, holy crap, I want to kill myself after what I've seen.
This is just insane.
It's such a good book.
Well, so what happens, right, is that you have, so it's like the Nazis really were.
I mean, the Nazis were actually probably substantially worse than how they're understood today.
Even though they're like the comic book villain at this point, it's like, oh, if you know, like, the action, and I, you know, like that, this is my family history.
Like it's, it is really, really that bad or worse than what you could imagine.
But the the what human beings tend to do then is to go, okay, well, if this is the villain, then the people fighting the villain are by default the heroes.
These are the good guys.
But the problem with that is that now you're dealing with Stalin and Churchill, who if you take Hitler out of the mix, are the two biggest villains of that time period.
I mean, you know, I guess they might kneel over to Mao Seitong after that.
But you know what I mean?
Like, and these, and FDR is no hero himself.
So it's just like, you know, he wouldn't stand for the national anthem.
FDR wouldn't?
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I know.
And there's, he kept making excuses about police brutality, but I think there was something else.
There was something else going on there.
But so it's just, but it's also just interesting that there are these things that, so once you kind of establish, okay, the Nazis are the villains, the great villains, then you never have to discuss any of these other things that are like real moral questions.
Like, yeah, okay, but how about targeting civilians?
Like, as bad as the Nazis are, it's they're bad because they're targeting civilians.
So does this really justify you to now like target civilians in your war against the Nazis?
Does this justify dropping atomic bombs on cities full of people after the Nazis have already been defeated?
And that's a much harder thing to get to.
And then, of course, there's also the problem that you end up turning over half of Europe to Stalin, which is, you know, if it is marginally better than turning it over to Hitler, it's marginally better for some groups and worse for other groups, but it sure ain't good.
Yeah, I had this Twitter poll.
I said, would you define Hiroshima Nagasaki as terrorism?
And a lot of the arguments were, no, it was necessary.
I'm like, yeah, because terrorism is a word that feels bad.
And doing it was the right thing.
Therefore, it's not terrorism.
That is just emotionally cromulant, but it's not how these words mean.
It could be terrorism, but this is justified because terrorism might be better than absolute war.
And it might even be better in terms of the Japanese population.
You could easily make the argument, if we just nuke these two cities, that's a net gain of saving Japanese civilian lives.
But I mean, then it becomes like the trolley problem.
Well, right.
And the truth is that we don't know.
And nobody knows.
I mean, the only way to know for sure would be like to have a time machine go back and not do it and compare the difference between doing it and doing it.
Like you don't know exactly what this would have, you know, like led to.
But what's interesting is to see the emotional response of people who go, look, we're talking about dropping nuclear bombs on cities.
And you're just going to say it was necessary.
Like not even like, well, look, it could have been worse if it wasn't.
No, you have to take it as a given, as a guarantee that the outcome of not dropping nukes on innocent civilians is worse than dropping nukes on innocent civilians.
Because like that outcome's pretty bad.
So I'm not saying it's not possible that it could be worse than that, but that's a pretty high bar to set to go has to be worse than this, has to be worse on a human level than dropping nukes on cities of innocent people.
And that is like, I think the onus is on you if you're for the nuking of civilians.
And of course, terrorism, I mean, is just the definition of terrorism seems to, in application, it seems to just be, is it being done by the powerful or the powerless?
No, targeting civilians.
Yeah.
Right.
I mean, when the powerless do it, it's terrorism.
When the powerful do it, it's, you know, collateral damage or whatever, you know, some military kinetic action or something like that, whatever you want to call it.
But it really, if nothing else, I think it's really interesting that while, you know, to connect it back to what we were saying, that someone might criticize anarchism and say, well, but this could lead to like a violent dispute between two defense agencies.
But then you go like, okay, well, the most violent dispute of all time was between all of these states.
And I'm not even allowed to question whether maybe this could have been handled in a more peaceful way without being called like whatever all the names in the book.
It's just kind of interesting to see.
On top of that, there's other narratives about World War II that are just completely made up that really have lasted in people's minds, like the fact that we fought the war to save the Jews.
This is people think this?
Oh, yeah, this is something that you hear.
I got several tweets to people say that the war was fought.
We had to fight the war to end the Holocaust, which was not, it was not anyone's goal.
It was not the stated goal.
No one pretended this was the goal.
It's just something that was made up years later when people started realizing how horrible the Holocaust actually was.
And also we beat those guys who did the Holocaust.
So let's just kind of mush that all together and be like, yeah, we fought the war to end the Holocaust.
Yeah, the book talks about that as well.
There was some big conference when this was starting to happen.
And, you know, the international Jews were like, guys, this is really, really bad.
And they just had some conference.
They issued a paper and they were like, what are you going to do?
We're talking about genociding millions of people.
And the response was basically, not incorrectly, we declared war.
Like, what else do you want us to do?
Like, we are declaring war.
We're doing everything in our power to kill these Nazis and take them over.
What do you want us to declare double war?
Like, what are we, what are we supposed to do?
Jewish bankers are impatient.
Declare more war.
Usury.
I also saw some of that.
It also triggered some people on that end where I got, you go, you get some of those, like the fucking Jew-obsessed people who came out after me.
At one point, I said, I said that Woodrow Wilson was the worst president ever because it was all his fault, basically, which I stand by.
I think it's all Woodrow Wilson's fault.
Everything, literally everything is Woodrow Wilson's fault.
And they go, they go, yeah, but whose fault was it really?
I was like, what do you mean?
Woodrow Wilson.
And he goes, and then someone goes, I don't know, the central bankers.
And a guy goes, you're getting closer.
And I was like, but Woodrow Wilson created the central bank.
And he goes, he goes, yeah, because the Jews made him do it.
And you're like, okay, so what are we doing here?
It always has to come back to the Jews.
Like, even if you want to say that, like, there's some blame that should be shared by those particular Jewish bankers who were like, okay, but none for Woodrow Wilson?
Like, none for the elected president who signed the Federal Reserve Inc. orders.
Right.
It's a funny question.
What do you want literally the president to do?
Not follow orders.
What is he going to quit and lose his pension, which he didn't have at the time?
You're like, well, wouldn't you, you're going to have to like at least take some of the blame.
No, I mean, oh, but this happens to me also.
The group that is most obsessed with the Holocaust is the anti-Semites.
So I was talking to something about masks, I think it was, or COVID, I remember what it was.
And someone came at me about like, oh, blah, blah, blah, the Holocaust.
And I replied like, blah, blah, blah.
And someone came at me to go, oh, like you tribesmen won't shut up about this.
It's been 80 years.
I'm like, he brought it up.
Like, what are you talking about?
It was just amazing.
Of course, I blocked him immediately.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, that's it.
You've blocked far more for far less.
So I don't know.
That's correct.
But I mean, this is this, this is not someone who I could have a reasonable discussion with.
Yeah.
No, of course not.
It is, I mean, look, there are the other thing about World War II.
And I actually, I think this is part of why some people on the other end of it kind of snap back against it or are happy to, you know, I think Mulbug said this.
I think it was on your stream.
Or no, you know what?
It might have been on someone else's.
Okay.
It might, maybe it was on Thad's, but he was basically saying that what one of the major forces that drives the younger dissident right-wingers into the kind of neo-Nazi space is that they just want to be the opposite of what this establishment is.
And so if you're saying they were the great villain, then okay, I'm with them against you.
You know what I mean?
You can't tell me how to feel.
Right, right.
Although, and Mulbug made the point that I think was a very accurate point that he goes, but you realize if you do that, you're still playing within their game.
It's a BoomerCon thing.
You're acting like the Boomer Cons.
Yes, you're still.
I'm going to call him Bruce Jenner.
It's like, okay, you won.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You've still, you've still let them choose the parameters for you and what your options are.
And you're working within self-marginalized.
Right, right, exactly.
But there is no question that, look, World War II was, is, is literally the American Empire's origin story.
I mean, World War I was.
Well, well, yes, but World War II is the origin story of the American Empire dominating.
So there's no time before the end of World War II where you could clear cut say that the superpower in the world is the United States of America.
It was, we were certainly in the game after World War I, but it wasn't clear cut at all.
But there was no question after World War II.
I mean, Russia was number two and they had been absolutely destroyed.
I mean, we took some damage, but nothing like what Russia took.
And we had the nuke and they didn't.
And the British Empire is over and it's the American Empire time.
So like with any empire, you have to protect your origin story ferociously and not allow anybody to challenge that.
And that's why this gets used all of the time.
I mean, World War II is invoked every time they want to sell a new war.
Every time, you know, Saddam Hussein is the next Hitler.
Hey, I don't think we should overthrow Assad.
They go, well, you're Chamberlain.
That's who you are.
You know what I mean?
Like it's always invoked.
And so I understand where people who resent that have this need to like be like, well, I want to tear down your entire origin story.
I want to say that whole thing was bullshit to begin with.
The problem with that is that, you know, history isn't there to just serve whatever is a good narrative.
And it's not a binary.
Tom Met Instagram00:10:07
Yeah, that's right.
These were actual people existed who did actual things.
And it's a lot more complicated than just like, what, what would really work for my argument right now looking back at it.
And the truth is that Hitler was every bit as bad as people say he is.
The Holocaust happened.
And also Stalin was a monster.
Also Churchill was a monster.
And FDR wouldn't stand for the national anthem.
I think the left libertarians have gotten to you.
What's this all of a sudden attacking Hitler?
This is very out of character for you, Dave.
I just, whatever.
I was just thinking of other topics we could talk about, you know, like things like, so the Holocaust is real.
And I just wanted to say I think it was really bad.
And racism sucks.
Yeah.
It's like you shouldn't do that.
And if I could go back in time and talk to the Germans in the 40s, I just said, hey, hey, don't you holocaust those Jews.
You don't do that, man.
That's not cool.
Okay.
Joe Jorgensen.
Joe Jorgensen, 2024.
There we go.
Second time's the charm.
Third time's the.
It's really kind of amazing how, because if we are going to talk about 2020, how for a long time, the right, meaning like, and by that specifically in this context, I mean conservatives, really took it as a given that they'd be like the sub.
Like they're going to get their ass handed to them and they're going to whine about it and it's not fair.
And they're, but what do you expect?
Because the liberals have all the advantages, blah, blah, blah.
And then Trump comes in, grabs his balls and wins.
And all of a sudden, and Kavanaugh was another one and Nicholas Sandman, where they're like, oh, we could actually win and we can win being badasses about it instead of like kind of squeaking through a victory, right?
Although I guess 2020 was kind of squeaking through in one sense.
But it's amazing now that the LP has taken on this mantle of righteous loserhood, where Joe Jorgensen lost like, what, 75% of Garrett Johnson's vote from last time.
They're like, this is great.
It's the second biggest vote total ever.
It's like, so if I was your investor and I took you from a million dollars to $150,000, that's not great.
It's not like, look, you've got $250,000.
It's like, but I had a million.
Yeah.
The whole point is building a third party, not imploding a third party.
And it's actually worse even than the numbers indicate because voter turnout was so much higher this election.
So it's a much bigger loss than even those numbers indicate.
But dude, I mean, the LP is like the thing is, and there's a lot of really good people in the Libertarian Party.
Like there really are.
There's great people there.
And I think, I actually think the majority of them are good people.
But the national leadership is, dude, I look on Twitter and they'll tweet once every four days.
Like, I'm sorry, that's just inexcusable.
This is, you're sitting here complaining about how you're not included in their game.
They don't even have us at the debate.
And it's like, this is something you could have been complaining about in 1980.
And now here you have this new technology where you can speak to millions of people.
Like you could directly, you don't need their game at all.
You have this amazing message that has the answers for so many of the problems that are facing this country right now.
And you, you know, yeah, we'll throw a thing out every few days.
I mean, you should be, you should be just constantly throwing bombs at the two major parties.
I mean, is there, has there ever been a better time?
Like you're sitting here as Congress is debating over whether we should give the peasants this amount of crumbs or this amount of crumbs plus one is literally the debate that's raging on right now.
Should we give them $600 or $2,000 while we still don't allow them to work?
And you can't come in and like find, oh, gee, I wonder what our message there should be.
Oh, okay.
Here's what I'll give you.
I'll give you your life back.
Like, that's what we would give you.
I mean, like, it's just this thing, it writes itself and they'll just be silent for days at a time.
I think their Instagram, they like barely use.
It's just, it's hard.
It's hard to watch them and almost not go down a conspiratorial rabbit hole where it's like, so are you, is your plan to lose?
Like, do you not want to win?
I am shocked and stunned by, and this is showing my age, but this is one of the benefits of being in your late 50s.
I am shocked and stunned by how many of these kids who are coming up in libertarianism have their crap together and aren't complete tools and really are like, if you were associated with this person, there wouldn't be a social cost if they showed up at your party.
And that is for better or worse, how ideas spread, because first you got to have the freaks.
Rothbard and Rand were not.
Socially well adjusted, no matter how much we adore them.
Um, and it's like, if you're going to a party at Marie Rothbart's house, you're going to expect a certain type of personality to be there and you know this perfectly well.
It's not an odd against Rothbart.
He was Rand.
Certainly you're showing up at her house.
This isn't exactly going to be like.
It's going to be very creepy, very fast and I hate the word creepy, but i'll have to use it.
And now all these kids who are coming up.
I'm just so proud of them and it's really um um, encouraging and surprising.
Um, and but that's the thing.
If you're the LP, pick one of them, give them no money, make them an intern.
You do our instagram.
They'd be ecstatic.
And you know what else?
They'd be ecstatic.
Now they've got a resume builder.
That's just cannot be beat.
I am doing the social media for a major political party in America.
How many doors would that open?
And, by the way, if you are in these circles and I throw you a follow on twitter or instagram and you don't get excited, I will unfollow you because you should be ecstatic that I did such a kindness for you.
That just happened and I was pissed and i'm still pissed.
Wait, what's your measure of someone not getting ecstatic?
They don't acknowledge it at all.
Oh okay, if it slipped between the cracks, sorry kids.
But what if uh, they acknowledged it and you just didn't see?
No I, because you're not.
I'll check the profile.
Yeah, but you're not on Facebook.
And i've seen on facebook people freaking out like, oh my god, Michael Malice just followed me.
Oh, so what if they do that?
And then they didn't tweet about it and then you ended up unfollowing that person.
You broke their heart.
That's a shame.
That's a good point Dave, and I blocked them.
So now they're gonna be confused.
Why I block?
I didn't block, I like that you.
Just you thought about it, couldn't think of a counter and then just went, well, that's the collateral damage.
We're just gonna have to.
I mean, what am I gonna do?
Stop blocking people for not showing me gratitude for following them?
What are you gonna do?
Yeah, you're right.
It was like I was talking to uh, Dick Cheney about what if one of your bombs falls on an innocent civilian.
But if you not bomb people yeah, I mean, i've never really thought about that before, but i've, it's not.
I'm not gonna stop bombing people.
That's kind of my whole thing.
It's not even innocent people, it's like high quality people that you want around you.
Well, it is what it is.
But I, I capricious god of liberty I, I will say that I thought that to your point about, like the, the impressive young libertarians that are out there.
I remember thinking um and I think it was just my own impatience, but it was after the Ron Paul, You know, movement kind of ended when he left politics.
And I was like, I can't believe there were these crowds, 10,000 people coming to see him.
Where's the next leader?
Like, where is this guy?
How did this not inspire this next wave of people?
And now I'm like slowly starting to see those people.
And they all say that's their origin story.
It sure ain't Tom Woods.
Yeah.
Well, you know, Tom, Tom was past the baton.
And Tom, you know, he's Tom's.
Tom, by the way, honestly, in all seriousness, I know we kid around, but Tom, I, that, that was one of my like takeaways from fucking 2020 was just how goddamn proud I am of Tom Woods.
And I've always been so proud of him.
Like I'm just, he's always been like my guy, like the guy I look up to, you know?
I'm going to validate this for you because I was there when you met him and you were spurting out so hard the way you should if I follow you on Twitter.
No, I don't care when I met Tom.
And the dinner, when we had the dinner after the debate.
Well, oh, you know what?
That wasn't the first time I met Tom, but it was the first time I ever went out to dinner.
Yeah.
I believe.
So it was like, I had never like really hung with him like that, but I had, I had met him before.
It was the first time I met you.
Yeah.
Was that that?
But yeah, but I was still like just so, but yeah, I mean, he had a huge, huge impact on me way before I like knew him and we were friends.
But what he did this year, it's like I saw so many other libertarians who, and this is not talking about the younger people, I'm talking about the established libertarians who were really afraid to go after the lockdowns.
They didn't want to be labeled as COVID deniers.
They didn't want to, you know, it's very easy, as Tom's written beautifully about before, it's very easy to be opposed to the awful thing the government's doing after it's all over.
You know, it's really easy.
It's really, really hard to do it right when it's happening.
And Tom was just ferocious this whole year long.
And he was the guy who would come with the receipts, like, okay, the lockdowns are bullshit.
This is insane.
And let me break it down perfectly for you.
And he just fucking crushed 2020.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's absolutely amazing.
And I can't wait to tell you what I'm going to do for his 2000th episode.
Oh, okay.
I can't wait.
Ferocious Crossover Episodes00:00:49
All right.
Well, I do.
I got to wrap up there.
This was our last crossover of the year, but earlier next year, we're going to start on Monday, next week with you on your welcome.
That's right.
So that's our new year's gift for you guys.
The crossovers will continue into 2021 until I'll make this vow right now.
The Cuomo vow.
Until there's no new cases of COVID, you do not lose your crossover episodes.
Until there's not one.
If I find one case of COVID in Central Africa, we're going to keep doing crossovers for you guys.
And thank you so much to everyone who's listened to us through these crossover episodes since March.
I know me and you both enjoy them and I know the people enjoy them too.