James Smith and Tupac Dave Smith argue that big government and big tech collude to silence conservatives, citing Parler's collapse alongside Gab and Twitter as a historic antitrust case. They condemn Joe Biden's proposal for minority-owned business aid as racist identitarianism that pits groups against one another, while attributing 2020 civil unrest primarily to lockdowns rather than George Floyd's death. The hosts warn that establishment figures will use the Capitol insurrection to purge Trump supporters from media and government, urging libertarians to reject cancel culture before the state weaponizes it against them. Ultimately, they assert that achieving a freer world requires revolutionary action despite increasing censorship. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Print Postage On Demand00:01:43
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The Monopoly Myth Explained00:08:36
All right, let's start today's 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 as the world crumbles into chaos.
We are here to do not much about it, but you know, talk about it a little bit, I suppose.
I am the libertarian Tupac Dave Smith.
He is the king of the cocks, Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
What is up, my brother?
I'm excited to talk about it.
Yeah, there you go.
There is a lot of shit going on.
It's crazy times.
It's funny.
One of the things that I always admired about principled men is that in times of chaos, in times of hysteria, they're able to stay true to their principles.
I was talking about recently, I can't remember.
Was this on, I can't remember if it was on our show or on Malice's show, but in one of the crossover shows, Harry Brown, who's a great libertarian who's gone now, but he wrote on September 12th, 2001, this piece on 9-11.
And it was, I mean, I said this on Malice's show.
I think besides the Declaration of Independence, maybe the greatest piece of American writing I've ever seen in my life, because it was on September 12th.
If you can try to imagine, and he basically wrote this piece that was like, what did you think was going to happen?
What did you think?
We can just bomb Muslim countries with carte blanche and just never face any consequences.
Did you expect we wouldn't work up any hatred toward us?
Did you think we can just dominate an entire region and that they're not going to try to get us back?
And just the amount of courage that that took the day after 9-11, when the only thing you're allowed to say is, you know, like how great America is and how terrible the Muslims are and all that.
Like, it was just so great.
And I just look around and I go, man, I wish there were more people and particularly more libertarians who had that type of courage, you know, to like stand up to something and go, okay, whoa, whoa, you know, hold your horses.
Let's not get hysterical.
Let's actually analyze this.
And it's amazing that how much they get angry at anyone who even attempts to do that, even just a little bit.
Like, okay, hold on.
Let's actually think about what's going on here and be fair about this.
Even just asking questions about it, people get like furious.
Well, what do you mean?
How could you possibly ask that?
I tweeted something the other day that was basically saying, why do we know it's a given that if Trump is out, things will get better?
Maybe Trump being in was calming a lot of his people.
Maybe him being in there made them feel like, well, at least we got our guy in there fighting for us.
And now that he's gone, it'll actually be more chaotic.
Maybe that's something we should think about.
And that's all I said was maybe that's something we should think about.
And people were fucking getting furious at me for it.
Oh, yeah, fucking what a dumb take that is.
And you're like, it's not even really a take.
It's really just raising a question that I think is an important question that is not so straightforward to answer.
Anyway, there's a lot of fucking interesting shit going on.
The hysteria, the hypocrisy, it's all over the place.
I don't even know what to start with, Rob.
Where do you think we go first?
I think the parlor thing is fascinating.
And if you look back, I think it was even our last episode, I was saying, hey, we got a free market and you've got competitors like Parler.
And the more they push Trump, the more they're making a conservative market.
And if there was one thing I really didn't even see coming, I thought they would remove certain individuals from platforms under the basis of, hey, they're going to get together.
They're going to cause violence.
I did not see them taking down entire platforms.
This is a game changer.
And to give the full picture of just how much of a game changer this is.
So a year ago, it was conceivable a program like this could get pulled down from YouTube.
And YouTube, it's a platform.
We're there.
We can make money.
We're not able to monetize.
That sucks, right?
We could get pulled down at any moment.
That sucks too.
Now you got to start wondering, hey, are they going to take down Gas Digital?
Like the same as you could just be taken down because you're on their platform.
Now, I don't know the infrastructure of the web, but apparently the entire web is basically a publishing platform where you're at their mercy.
It's not just your YouTube channel.
Even if you've got your own website, your own everything, it's up to them whether or not they want to let you be on the internet.
That's crazy talk.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
This is, I got to say, and I want to almost choose my words carefully here when I say this.
This is the strongest case for antitrust action, I believe, in American history.
If you actually look back, and by the way, the Mises Institute has done like phenomenal work on this, particularly Tom DeLorenzo, who's gone through the history of antitrust legislation.
And it's almost all bullshit.
Almost all of it is the idea of free market monopolies or anything like that or these companies colluding together.
It basically is never the way they tell you it was.
If you actually go back and look at the details, and one of the things Tom DeLorenzo does, which is really incredible, is that he's like, well, you can find all of this information.
So let's go back and look at it.
And the truth is that almost every time there's these companies that they're claiming were monopolies or monopolistic or any of that shit, whether it's Standard Oil or the American Tobacco Company or like go through any of them.
And you look at them and they go, well, yeah, I mean, Standard Oil.
And I don't have all the numbers right in front of me right now, but Standard Oil, like, you know, I think they started in like the 1860s, 1870s or something like that.
And then like by the 1890s, they've got like 90 something percent of the market.
But it's a market that they basically created, you know, like oil refining.
And they, and then when the antitrust legislation, I think it was right after the turn of the century, when they actually started getting sued under the Sherman Antitrust Act, by the time, you know, because it takes years for the fucking government legal system to work, by the time they actually go to trial, they've lost like a huge share of the market because they fucking competition opened up and people started coming in.
And they had plans.
I mean, a lot of times when they you look back at this stuff, what they'll do is they'll show you like the writings of, you know, JP Morgan or the writings of John D. Rockefeller or someone like that.
And they're like, yeah, no, they had plans to collude with other, you know, companies and undercut everybody else's prices to take control of the market.
And then once they did that, they could raise prices, but they're never actually able to do it because once they start raising prices, it just opens the door for new entrepreneurs to come in.
And so it's every single time it would fail.
And what Tom DiLorenzo goes through and shows you is that all those quote monopolistic companies, if you actually look at their prices, they were all undercutting all of their competitors.
So the idea that someone becomes a monopoly, then drives up all of their prices.
This was always an academic exercise.
Never really happened in the market.
The market was always able to account for it.
And the truth is that market competition is always what effectively broke up monopolies, not government action.
Like IBM was accused of being a monopoly or monopolistic at one point.
The government isn't what stopped them.
It was fucking some fucking brilliant hippie named fucking Bill Gates.
He's the guy who stopped them.
And then Bill Gates was accused of having a fucking monopoly with the fucking Windows shit.
And it wasn't fucking the government that stopped Microsoft.
Market Forces Break Up Giants00:08:43
It was Apple's resurgence.
That's what stopped.
You know what I mean?
And so it's always basically been bullshit.
This situation's a little bit different.
This situation, it's hard to ignore.
And I got to say, if like one of the things that drove me crazy about the Joe Jorgensen campaign, I mean, there's several, but one of the things that really drove me crazy, and me and you talked about this throughout her campaign, was that she would give a speech that was basically just libertarian talking points.
And not necessarily that me and you would disagree with them, you know, but she would give a speech that you could have given in 1996.
Literally with every single line of it could have been said in 1996.
No, like no change is necessary.
And that just like on a human level, when you're living through the year that was 2020, you're like, how are you not like making this specific about what people are going through right now?
This seems like just like an exercise in abstractions rather than actually talking to, hey, all this real world shit, which obviously, if you're a libertarian, that's the whole point of our game.
It's not just that we have this kind of great philosophy.
It's that we have this great philosophy that actually solves real problems for real people.
That's the point of it.
If we didn't have that second part, then this is all just stupid and a waste of time.
And I just feel like with everything, basically, and I've had this attitude since, you know, 2016, especially since Trump won, that, but then particularly in 2020 and now into 2021, that you're like, you got to be paying attention to what's actually going on right now, not just like married to your dogma.
That's easy to just be married to your talking points.
And then you're Joe Jorgensen, who just gets up there and goes, government is too big, too intrusive, and too involved in your personal life.
You're like, okay, yes, it is, but like, can there be a little something about, you know, the craziest year that anyone's ever lived through?
Maybe we could address that.
And I got to say, looking at this situation and particularly the steps that were just taken with Parler, you're like, holy shit, this is something that by every inch of my philosophy and my dogma, which I'm certainly guilty of, you know, clinging to at times, like this should not be the case, but this isn't like all of those other examples that I'm using.
It's just not like them.
This is something different.
This is the strongest argument for monopolistic practices, I believe, in the history of the country, where you have not only do you have these like three or four big firms that are colluding to silence voices that they don't like.
But now, when somebody else comes along and goes, well, we don't want to silence those voices, they are all going to collude to shut down that company's ability to compete.
Now, I'm not suggesting that government, you know, that some type of government intervention here is going to be the solution.
I'm very skeptical of that.
I'm just acknowledging that this is something different.
And this is, and for people to just like, you know, dismiss these concerns, I think is like incredibly short-sighted.
So, just on that note, of, hey, do we, are we looking for government intervention here?
I don't know if this is true, but I read, I think it was, I think it might have been Parler or the, what's the other one, Gab?
So I'm not sure which one this is true for, but not only were they all dropped at exactly the same time, which means that, like you said, the three of them are colluding, their lawyers dropped them as well.
That's crazy.
So, in other words, your legal team that you would have in place to go fight this for you says, we're not representing you anymore, which sounds to me like that's more than just the threat of these tech companies.
This is a government move.
I mean, I don't know quite the relationship between the tech companies and government, but if you don't think that this isn't coming from the Democratic Party cracking down and this claim, and this is an important point: the claim that they made was that there were violent things said on Parler that Parler didn't remove.
Go look at Twitter today.
How many violent claims are on Twitter?
How many death threats exist on Twitter?
Twitter's not being pulled down because of random users making claims.
It's not happening.
Well, right.
So, and this is, by the way, kind of covers ground of the impeachment/slash 25th Amendment talks coming from Nancy Pelosi and all this stuff.
It's the same thing as with Twitter and social media.
Like they'll say something like they go, okay, well, we, you know, direct incitement to violence is what we're trying to, you know, deal with here.
That's what that, that's the charges are that the impeachment charge, the article of impeachment that Nancy Pelosi wants to push is incitement of insurrection and all of this stuff.
And, you know, the issue that you have with that is that this becomes, you know, it's kind of like hate speech.
How exactly do you apply this?
Now, you could think of an example of something that is clearly hate speech, right?
But then you go like, okay, but are we applying this equally across the board?
Like, what exactly is the threshold?
It all becomes very vague in practice.
And so, look, Donald Trump, and look, we were criticizing him for this on the last episode.
There is no question that if what Donald Trump was telling his supporters is true, then that could lead to what we saw at the Capitol building.
And in fact, from my perspective, and I think a lot of people's perspective, if you're being honest, if what he was saying is true, it would almost justify, not even almost, it would justify.
I mean, if the government was stealing an election away from the rightly elected president and giving it to someone else and it's this huge conspiracy, well, then, okay, then they're not the ones trying to install a dictator.
The state is installing a dictator, right?
So it's not that there's nothing to that.
It's just that then you go, well, okay, so if this standard is, because Donald Trump didn't say violently storm the Capitol, you know, he didn't like directly tell them to do this.
He kind of, you know, I mean, he said the word peaceful, but he did say, let's go to the Capitol building and let our voices be heard or something like that.
You know, there's, there's enough of a slippery area there where it's hard to exactly say what's what.
But if you're going to say that, hey, he said something that ended up leading to violence.
And so that's that.
It's like, okay, but then what else do we consider incitements to violence?
I mean, how about framing the president for treason for three years?
Is that not?
I mean, if the president was guilty of colluding with a hostile foreign power, that might make it justified to use some violence too.
And actually, there was quite a bit of violence in that name.
How about someone like AOC or something like that saying that cops are out here, you know, gunning down black people for sport?
I mean, that certainly led to a lot of the Black Lives Matter Antifa violence over the summer, but I didn't see anybody connecting those dots.
And none of us were even really calling for them to connect those dots.
You know, like, okay, yes, you're saying something that I disagree with.
And yeah, there are some other people being violent, but it's not as if you're directly calling them to be violent.
And that is a very slippery slope to start going down.
And so, of course, you see that this is, it's so, you know, like this principle is not being applied consistently across the political spectrum.
It's very, there's a very different spectrum from, or a very different standard, I should say, for different sides here.
So that's where this starts to get creepy.
But yeah, I don't know.
Look, from the libertarian position, I just think you can't ignore like what's really going on here, which is that like, yeah, these big tech companies have an enormous amount of power.
I mean, really power that is very different from anything else, I think, in history that you could compare from some even big, very powerful companies.
This is a whole different level.
This is a whole different thing here.
And I mean, I suppose you could argue that like the big oil companies, you know, in, you know, after the Industrial Revolution, it's like, well, the whole society is run on oil.
Why Harry's Razor Wins00:02:35
But it was never really a threat that like individuals who had the wrong political beliefs weren't going to get oil.
You know what I mean?
Like that was never like a real threat.
This is different.
And the truth is that you're looking at companies right now, big tech, they are absolutely in bed with big government.
It's not as if they're separate.
They love big government and they're working with, as you pointed out, with big government to achieve the same ends.
And these are people now who can silence the president.
They can silence huge newspapers.
They can, I mean, this is, this is like a very creepy level.
And then they can take out their competition.
This has to be grappled with.
All right, guys, let's take a quick second.
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Exposing Tech Platform Lies00:15:39
On the silencing side, imagine going back to the founding of this country and the writing the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution or any of that other stuff.
When they invented freedom of speech, the fact that that can lead to an insurrection is kind of the point.
Like if someone were to stand there and go, hey, if there's freedom of speech, people might be able to, that's the whole point is that if you're tyrannical, people will have the ability to call you out, assemble, and overthrow it.
That's why it's there.
That is the point of it.
Like, I'm saying that's the ultimate end of this thing is that you can criticize government.
That's why it exists.
That's why we have guns on the same note.
And so the idea that, hey, people might be able to over like, no, that's the point.
That's why it's there.
And no, you're absolutely right.
And also, I would think that any fucking, not even just libertarians, particularly libertarians, but any just like decent, you know, thoughtful person would realize that if you're going to say the standard is like, well, Donald Trump accused them of lying or stealing the election, and therefore that was kind of justifying violence.
You're like, oh, okay, but what if I accuse them of lying us into the war in Iraq?
Like, if I just talk about that, am I guilty now if someone goes and tries to do something violent about that?
It's like, I don't know.
I'm just telling the truth.
So, like, I'm not telling anybody to go violently, you know, when you say taxation is theft, does that mean I can go kill a cop today?
I didn't say that.
Yeah.
Right, exactly.
Like, we're not advocating any type of violence.
We're just telling the truth.
So now your whole argument is going to hinge on, but Donald Trump wasn't telling the truth.
It's like, okay, but as I was arguing with David Cross at the Paley Center, who determines what's the truth and what's a lie?
I mean, like, okay, so now, like, you know, there certainly would have been a time where people would have said, no, they're not lying us into the war in Iraq.
You know, they, so, so, would that have been considered a lie at the time, even though it's not?
Like, this is you get into a very dangerous ground on very thin ice very quickly.
And I just don't see how anyone could look at this and not be creeped the fuck out.
And by the way, speaking to being creeped the fuck out, this is the Democrats being in power and actually exerting power.
Like, I mean, Trump didn't try and de-platform entire networks of Democrats to ensure that he can remain in charge.
And the way that you do that is to say, well, they're dangerous.
They can't be there.
They're, you know, over, they might get violent.
They might all these claims, which could have easily been made, as you pointed out, with the protests and riots.
Trump wouldn't even thought to do that.
And this is like day one for Democrats.
This is day one.
Biden's not even in office and going for it.
Yeah.
And what's it going to look like going forward in Biden's presidency where you have these big tech companies not at odds with the president of the United States, but doing his bidding, but rather working with them.
And you're going to see this.
And so I like my take, and this is why I do think that Curtis Yarbin's term, the cathedral, is such a useful term, because I think libertarians have to wake up to what it is we're dealing with here.
And it's not as simple as you have the government workers and then the private sector workers, or it's just the state versus everyone else.
There is this cathedral that is all of the institutions that go into supporting the state that either directly or indirectly receive funding, receive support from the government, and vice versa, either fund or support the government in exchange for that.
And in that is like the corporate press, academia, you know, all the whole kind of thing, and also big tech companies.
I mean, this is like, you know, there's the big tech companies were all in the tank for Joe Biden and did everything they could to get him elected and quite possibly made the difference.
I mean, you know, like that's that's it.
I mean, these companies could easily decide who's going to win elections and who's going to lose elections.
I mean, and the truth is they haven't even gone full force yet.
We're just seeing it now.
Like really, I mean, it's been something that's kind of been, you know, a boiling frog for a little while.
Like they're making it warmer and warmer.
But you saw this.
Look, I did, I predicted that Donald Trump would get banned of all these things.
I said there's no way they're going to let this guy leave the White House and keep his Twitter account.
There's just no way.
And of course, that's exactly what happened.
And they may have used this, you know, this incident as the excuse, but this was always going to happen.
They weren't just going to give him their platforms to let him fucking undermine the government.
But so there you go.
He's kicked off because he was going to use his platform to undermine the government.
Now, feel however you feel about Donald Trump, I'm not fan.
But you have the most famous human being who's ever existed on planet Earth, and he is going to use his voice to undermine the government.
And so big tech kicks him off.
Now, how are you as somebody who's not a fan of the government supposed to feel about this?
It's not straightforward.
It's a very difficult situation.
But if they really were to go full force, you know, I mean, how if they were just straight up like, if Google was like, we're only running negative stories about somebody, you cannot search information on the anti-war candidate or if, you know, and Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and they all go along with them.
In terms of pure censorship, this is not far off from that.
Parlor is a platform for free speech.
They apparently even will report people if they think there's real violence to the like real threats of violence to the authorities.
They try and police for violence.
So the fact that they're claiming that this is a platform that would lead to violence is just as ridiculous of a claim as what you're saying.
Hey, a Google search coming back with this information college to violence.
This is, I think, the largest power grab or move towards censorship we have yet to see.
This is, we're in a different field right now.
They also, one of the payment processors, Stripe, said they'd stop doing the payout processing for Trump donations.
That's crazy too.
We're in a different, we've just extended the battlefield here to payment processing, potentially banks, your law firms.
And we're not talking about the Nazi Party of America.
You know what I mean?
Like, even if this was straight up, hey, we're not me and everybody would be like, hey, we're supposed to be free speech here.
We're talking about the fucking conservative party.
That's 50% of the country.
These are supposed to be people that have enough power that this shit doesn't happen to them.
This is crazy.
Yeah, yeah, no, completely agreed.
And it's yeah, it's really hard to overstate like how much of a different world we're going.
Shift the whole fucking game.
It used to be whether or not you could be on YouTube, which was the YouTube platform.
Now the conversation is whether or not you can be on the fucking internet.
And I think the one thing lacking from this conversation, I don't know the technicals on the infrastructure of the internet.
And I still believe in the free market.
And there's enough demand for conservative shit and Trump that I don't think they're going to figure out how to squash it, which might mean we all need new internet.
Like we need new internet browsers.
We got to switch our phones.
I don't know what that looks like from here.
And I don't think it's like they're going to be able to manage the infrastructure.
Like I never thought of the internet as being anything other than just open.
I didn't realize that it was like a mall building where if you're not going through Amazon, Google, or Apple, you're not there.
I didn't, I didn't realize that it was like, you know, like a bigger version of YouTube where you have to actually go through them just to be there.
That's that that's weird to me and not something I fully understand.
Yeah, it's really, it's, it, it is fucking creepy to realize how much they can actually like lock this thing down.
Um, so many people thought, uh, just like you're saying, when the internet first really blew up and then when social media first blew up, it's like, well, this is it now.
Now free speech is completely impossible to regulate.
There's no more gatekeepers.
And they have really cracked that code.
And it makes you realize that they understand a little bit more than the message that's put out there.
Like they understand that it's not just about getting Trump out.
That actually they realize there's tens of millions of people who support this kind of, you know, drain the swamp, fuck the whole system thing, and that they got to control those people and they got to find a way.
And the other thing that's going on here is that everybody who's not a left winger is bleeding followers on these sites, myself included.
I've lost like a few thousand followers just over the last few days.
And all types of people, like, you know, like all the Fox News hosts and all the right-wing news guys and like all these different, like basically everyone who's not a left-winger.
Thomas Massey was talking about how he's down a few thousand followers.
Everyone, no one really knows why.
Like, what the fuck's going on here?
What is this?
Are you saying people are people just leaving Twitter?
And then Twitter put out an official statement.
Like they were like, oh, yeah, you know, just like periodically, we'll check to verify people's information.
And if they don't verify their information, then that'll unfollow you.
But as soon as they verify their information, you'll be right back.
And we do this all the time.
And you're like, no, this doesn't happen all the time.
I never lose followers.
I always gain followers.
I never lose followers.
Like that just doesn't happen.
And so it's something's going on.
And they're at the very least not being open about it.
At the very least, the best solution to this is to really fucking expose what it is that they're doing and talk about it and criticize them.
I don't know.
I don't know.
And I will tell you, I am, I'm pretty skeptical over whether government could do anything to solve this problem at all because the main issue here is that they're all colluding together, right?
Like they're working with the government, the government.
If the government gets in the business of regulating what these social media companies can do, they're just going to, they're just going to fucking make it even worse.
I want the story on how these meetings actually take place because somebody is sitting down with the CEO of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and I guess that law firm and going, Hey, guys, here's what we're going to do.
That meeting happens in some capacity.
Like, who's running that meeting where you're telling Jeff Bezos what he's got to fucking do?
Like, who's giving marching orders to the biggest CEOs in the world or at least sitting down and being like, All right, guys, how do you all want to handle this?
Because this all happened at the same time.
So they're doing it together.
But like, do they actually have a conversation?
I would love to, if someone were to crack that story, that's a fascinating tale.
Well, it does.
It's funny because it really does like, you know, when Alex Jones got booted off everything all at once, that really, that was the moment.
And it's funny because people, you know, like the slippery slope argument, the idea that like, oh, if we let this go, this can lead down this path is not always true.
You know, like sometimes for whatever reason, people stop at a certain point.
Just because you start embarking on a path doesn't mean you're going to keep going 20 miles down it.
Sometimes you just go a mile and you plant and you plant yourself right there.
But at this point, you know, in hindsight, when people talked about the slippery slope of Alex Jones being kicked off all of these things, I mean, they were absolutely right.
Look at it.
Look how far it's gone already.
And it is, you'd be crazy to not be a little bit concerned about this.
You know, you'd be crazy to not go like, wow, if they can do this, what's the next step?
I mean, like to actually fucking kick off the sitting president of the United States of America, to say that this guy can fucking launch a nuclear attack, but he can't communicate directly with his people on Twitter is just fucking insane.
Like, who would have ever thought, you know, that this is how this is how this whole social media thing would unfold?
It's fuck.
It's a mind fuck.
All right.
Let's fucking talk a little bit about Nancy Pelosi.
So this is another thing that's just, you know, kind of like it exposes that this is all about what your perspective is, you know, and how you, what angle you look at things from, because I see a lot of people out there who are like, well, you know, Donald Trump, you know, whatever, incited an insurrection or, you know, what they're all claiming.
And I will say this, by the way, I should, I should make a fucking correction because I was a little bit maybe on, maybe I downplayed too much what happened at the Capitol because it has come out now since then that there were a few people who were armed who were in there.
And there were a few people who had like those zip ties and things and stuff.
And like, look, probably for the most part, most of the people in there just got caught up in the moment and were taking selfies and thought this was hilarious and all of that.
But it is quite possible that there were a few people in there who were like really like looking for pence or really looking to do something that they didn't end up doing.
That is, that's no joke.
I think there was a little bit more violence than the coverage I initially saw.
And it's still unclear if those were very sporadic or if there was real, because I saw some people just walking into the building and then I saw some footage of what looked like forced entry.
I saw one picture of an office destroyed, but is that a single office?
So it's really hard to tell just how violent what went down was.
In terms of those zip ties, and I haven't seen that much of it, except that I heard that there were two people now arrested for having the zip ties, and they both have military experience.
My guess is, or at least if I was their lawyer in court, you know, you used to have some people who are military and just really into military gear and coming prepared.
It's very likely they had that shit so that if they had to run in with, you know, Antifa people, they were just being prepared or they just wanted to have it with them.
It's really hard to say that they had intentionally planned on taking hostages and brought this stuff for that reason.
But honestly, who the fuck knows?
That's all I'm saying.
Is that it is it is possible that that was like, you know, I'll tell you the better takeaway.
Apparently, we do have the technology to do a roundup after the events.
Like I had been saying at all these protests, it's not that hard.
If violence goes down and you want to crack down and say, hey, we're not going to have it, you can do it.
And you're seeing firsthand they're banning.
It's scary shit going on.
People have been pulled off flights.
I think people are now on the no-fly list.
People are being rounded up.
And it seems like whoever, we're at level one of, oh, this was the guy on the desk.
This was the guy holding the podium.
We're taking these people.
I feel like if they choose to expand the circle of who they want to round up, they will have no problem finding those people.
Yeah.
No, I think I okay.
So I completely agree with your point.
It does expose that like they can do this.
And they could have done this for all of the riots this summer.
Chose not to, weren't that interested in doing it, quite possibly because it was those riots were serving their purposes, and this one was not.
Those riots were an attack on people, who the fuck cares about people.
This riot was an attack on government, the ruling class.
You're not allowed to do that.
Also, those riots serve to like divide people amongst each other.
It was just all, it was pretty good for the ruling elite.
The Double Standard of Justice00:14:57
So they didn't really give a shit.
This one, they don't like so much.
But the other point you made that, and this is kind of to my point, of what drives me crazy about what you know are known as the blue pill libertarians or the beltway libertarian types.
That they, and this is why I started by mentioning the Harry Brown article on September 12th, 2001.
It's like there's just no courage, no willingness to go against the cathedral narrative at all.
So you don't even see, you would think, right?
I would expect out of a libertarian to at least criticize the no-fly list thing.
Like, what the fuck is that?
So you're telling me, okay, like these people have been seen at the Capitol building, and now the government is going to decide that they're not allowed to travel.
Excuse me?
What?
Have they been convicted in a court of law?
Okay, no, then they're an American who has inalienable rights.
I'm sorry.
That is a creepy fucking path.
And even good liberals and leftists were on the right side of this when George W. Bush first instituted those no-fly lists.
Like, this is ripe for abuse.
And I'm sorry.
I don't care how horrible something you think someone did was until they are convicted in a court of law, they are innocent Americans with rights.
And I'm sorry, libertarians, but like, what?
You can't stand up for that.
Like, what good are you?
What good are you as a libertarian if you don't simply take the position that all people have natural rights and they have the right to due process?
You know, libertarians, it's so funny.
Like, we'd be willing to stand up for Anwar Alaki.
You know, we'd be willing to stand up for people who had pledged their loyalty to Al-Qaeda.
And I still stand by that.
It's like, no, you know what?
He was an American citizen.
And that means he gets to go to court.
He gets a lawyer in a suit and a tie.
They get to appear in front of a judge in a robe and a jury of his peers.
That's that.
And until that happens, then he's got his rights.
And I'll die on that hill.
Americans deserve rights.
And same with these people.
I'm sorry.
Like, you don't know what the details are.
Oh, they were seen there.
Were they in the Capitol building?
Did they do anything in the Capitol building?
Were they just at the rally?
Who exactly is being put on this list?
And there's no due process.
You're just on the no-fly list.
That's it.
You can't travel anymore.
Come on, man.
That's like that.
That shit is insane.
Anyway, so yeah, you see that these, a lot of these types of things are there.
There's a real double standard.
And there's a real question of, well, how do you, you know, like, what do you consider inciting violence?
What do you consider, you know, an attempted coup to be?
Because that's what everybody's calling this thing.
It was an attempted coup, right?
And an attempted insurrection.
They wanted to install a dictator.
It's like, well, I mean, Nancy Pelosi also just went and tried to invoke the 25th Amendment.
Now she's talking about introducing articles of impeachment over this shit.
Couldn't you also consider that kind of an attempted coup?
I mean, certainly the deep state attempted a coup against Donald Trump, you know, fucking right away in 2017.
So it's just like, all right, are we going to apply these same rules to that side?
Of course not.
I also just like the idea of like inciting violence.
It's like, well, how about any fucking anyone who's like promoting war propaganda?
Isn't that inciting violence?
Was it fucking, how about, you know, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, fucking MSNBC, like all these networks, weren't they inciting violence when they were pushing for Trump to bomb Syria?
How about that?
Is that that violence never seems to like that doesn't matter, right?
Because it's coming from government channels.
So we're never like concerned about that, that incitement of violence.
Did you see that a lot of people were having fun with this on Twitter, that George W. Bush came out and condemned the, you know, Trump's incitement of violence?
Nice.
You're like, you imagine George W. Bush being like, yeah, man, you can't just incite violence based off lies.
I mean, you occupied a government building.
There's one thing George W. Bush hates.
It's fucking violent occupations based on lies.
You know, like fucking, it's just what a cartoon fucking world.
Logic is dead, my friend.
All right.
The impeachment thing doesn't even make sense.
First thing, I like this.
I tweeted this that it's kind of like in Dumb and Dumber.
Like, you can't impeach the already impeached.
You've already, you know, like, what are you doing?
The guy's leaving.
It doesn't even get, it can't get through the Senate until after he's already leaving.
What is the point?
You have other things to work on.
This is no longer important.
You won.
It just doesn't even make sense to me.
It's purely symbolic, but it does go to it's like there are these people, right?
And as I said earlier, there are some people who recognize there's more to it than this, but there are so many people who just really want to believe that Trump is the problem.
And if Trump's gone, we solve the problem, you know?
I think a much more accurate, much more thoughtful take is that Trump was a result of the problem.
And therefore, just getting rid of Trump is not doing anything to deal with the real problem.
And the real problem is that the system is so corrupt and has failed so many people that people are so angry that they're just furious at this establishment who has sold out the country.
If you look at it that way, then you realize getting rid of Trump does nothing.
In fact, it might even get worse.
But if you look at it as Donald Trump just whipped up all this anger, you know, then it's like, oh, they just want to get rid of him.
But it's all crazy.
The idea that like, oh, he's going to do so much damage in the next few days after he's completely bended the knee.
He's basically just like completely, you know, bended the knee to the whole thing.
Like, oh, yeah, I'm sorry.
Those people should be prosecuted, blah, blah, blah, thrown his own people under the bus, accepted that Joe Biden's going to be president.
There's literally nothing to be scared of.
I don't think in any capacity the country is currently racist, but you go four years of a bad economy and watching them give handouts to specifically minorities and specifically helping out only groups and really going, hey, you guys are white.
So you got to be in the poor group now.
And we're only helping out these people.
Just wait and see how that plays out for you.
If you does not sound like a winning strategy, it's less racist.
Did you see Joe Biden's speech that he gave?
And he said this point blank, right?
He said that, you know, it's like the president-elect, you know, like office of the president-elect.
And he gives these like speeches every now and then.
And he said that the focus is going to be on helping businesses that are black-owned, Latino-owned, and women-owned businesses.
I mean, it's so right on.
Just help people.
I mean, firstly, we're not supposed to be doing government handouts, but how about we're going to help people?
We're going to help everybody.
Well, I also dividing everyone.
Well, if you couldn't you just in the interest of saving time and being straightforward, he could just be non-white male owned businesses.
Like that, that just saves you time rather than listing off everyone else.
But the thing that stands out to me, I mean, number one, the thing that stands out to me is you go, this is just like, it's the most blatantly racist statement you could imagine.
It is so much more racist than anything Donald Trump has ever said.
And this is the other thing that I know some of those fucking blue pill libertarians like giving me shit about because I'll call this out too.
But it's like, yeah, look, I don't like racial identitarianism, but I'm sorry.
There is never, you don't ever have an example of Donald Trump standing up there and saying, we are going to use these government funds to help white people.
We're not interested in helping minorities.
This is who we want to help.
But that's what Joe Biden just did.
So the first thing that I think about it is just like, you go like, my God, the blatant racism, the blatant, like unbelievable racial identitarianism that we would actually, you know, decide who we want to help based on the color of their skin.
And this is for government programs after the government has caused all of this damage.
So, oh, all of you, you know, white guys who own small businesses that we've destroyed, sorry, you don't get help because we want to remake society in a way that says you guys should take a step back.
So number one, it's just the racism of it.
But the second part is kind of at, you know, getting to what you were just touching on, which is like, so are you just trying everything you can to create a more racist society?
Because my God, if you wanted to make racism a bigger problem in society, I don't know if there's anything better you could do.
There's anything better you could do than what you just, you know.
I mean, you're making it a reality of, look, the minorities took this from you.
It's not currently true.
You're going to make that a reality and you're making it, hey, I have to belong to a group.
I have to unite with my group and I have to go try and take resources from the other group.
That's exactly what we're trying not to live with.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
They are pushing people into racial identitarianism because we are sitting here saying we are against your identity.
We're against your racial group.
So what are you going to do?
You're probably going to look for someone who's for your group.
I mean, that's just what makes sense.
And this is in large part what's been going on for a while, but this was just such a blatant example of it.
And particularly at a time where the government has fucked over so many people.
It's going to be Latinos and whites against gays, Jews, blacks.
And yeah, I don't know where the Asians are going to.
I feel like we might recruit the Asians.
I'm no longer on the Jewish team.
I'm on white Latino team.
Hopefully I'll find a Latin.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, you could ride that beanie.
That beanie helps a little bit.
You can pull it off with the goatee, the beanie.
I see where you're going.
Oh, no.
Oh, man.
So you're saying it's one team has blacks and one team has Jews?
I hope we're not playing football.
For the most part, I think the message that's getting lost in all of this.
And I remember talking about this back at when the riots first broke out over the summer in Minnesota and then when they spread across the country.
But we talked about the fact that, look, this is obviously a result of the lockdowns.
You know what I mean?
Like you could say, oh, George Floyd was like the straw that broke the camel's back, but you go, okay, but really, like, how likely is that?
Like, just compare that hypothesis to the hypothesis that this was a result of the lockdowns.
And you go, okay, there's been videos of cops, you know, abusing black people, white people, all types of people for so long.
Videos like this always come out.
And there's never been these huge, this large of a reaction to it.
And it happened to come right after the first ever three month lockdown, you know, right, right on the heels of taking away people's jobs, their, you know, their entertainment, their sports, their movies, their friends' house, everything, keeping them inside in their home, scared, paranoid, worried about a germ, worried about their economic future.
And then all this energy busts out.
It's like, come on, those things are related.
Clearly, one followed right on the heels of the other.
But I also got to say that I think that's true with this capital thing too.
Like you can't completely remove this from the year that was 2020 and what the government did to these people.
Now, that being said, and this is the point I made on the live stream that night, that being said, if you're going around assaulting innocent people, terrorizing businesses, destroying property, then that's unacceptable and that should be condemned, no question.
But if we're talking about kind of the bigger picture of what's leading to all of this, I don't care what the people holler as they're out there rioting.
We can soberly sit back and assess this and say, this is not unrelated to the lockdowns.
This whole last year going so crazy is not, you cannot be separated from what the government did to the people.
And so I think somewhere in there is where libertarians have to find their message that it's like, look, the fucking, all of this shit, this intense culture war, all of these like riots and the violence, this is all a result of what the government has done to people.
And that's what we need to fucking attack.
We need to really hope to God that a lot of people are fucking over this and are just exhausted by it and just don't want to do this anymore.
Don't you just not want to live in this culture war anymore?
This shit is getting to a crazy fucking level.
And what people need to realize is that this is all fucking instigated by the government.
They're fucking, this is what they are doing to innocent people, people who just want to fucking live their lives.
It's a goddamn tragedy.
Oh, Robbie Burns, Robbie Burns.
Fucking weird world that we're living in.
So, yeah, what you think they're going to go ahead with this fucking impeachment and actually put on some little show for the last few days that Trump's been there?
It's so stupid.
There's so many other things for them to work on.
Why just move the fuck on?
But yeah, Nancy's out for Nancy's out for blood.
She has too much fun with this.
This is her favorite thing, Trump evil.
We need to get back at him.
We got to make a statement that you're not allowed to incite violence like this.
Get to parade on the media for weeks about what he did and how bad it was for our country.
The optics of this are going to love every second of it.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
Well, it's, it's exactly right.
And so this is really, and you see it like happening in real time.
It's almost like the excitement.
They're so thrilled that this incident at the fucking Capitol happened.
Just so thrilled because now they get to just come out and say, Yeah, we told you so.
And this is everything that this is why all the people who want it who supported Trump have to be held to account.
And I do think that there is, you know, all those people who were talking about the kind of truth and reconciliation type shit.
Accountability for Trump Supporters00:06:59
I think there's going to be a real effort to go after the people who helped Donald Trump, supported Donald Trump, the Republicans who were with him.
There's going to be like massive purges, not just on social media, although that'll be a big part of it.
But I think there's going to be massive purges all throughout government, media, just polite society.
I really do think, you know, fuck all that unity talk from Joe Biden.
I think they're out for blood.
Well, he's worse than that because he's going to say that this is all in the name of unity.
We have to heal the country.
And so we have to remove the divisive elements of racism.
And they're going to declare all of this to be them purging racism, purging the threat of violence, making this America whole again.
That's propaganda for you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But it is you realize that this is not that Donald Trump needs to be destroyed for these people to be satisfied.
And I think a lot of Trump supporters and stuff too, not just him.
But Donald Trump needs to be destroyed.
And I would, I'd be concerned if I were him because he's about to lose his power and now he's lost his platforms.
And I think it's going to be open season on Donald Trump.
I think they're going to come after him with everything they have.
So that'll be something to watch.
I mean, look, I don't really care about what fucking happens to Trump.
That guy's got enough fucking blood on his hands.
Like whatever.
I mean, I think it should happen for the right reasons.
As I've said a million times, I'd like to see him tried for war crimes, you know, and convicted and put in prison for the rest of his life.
I think he could share a cell with George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
That would be just fine by me.
But they're not going to get him for any of those reasons because they just want to ramp up that war machine, if anything.
But they're going to go after him.
He committed the ultimate crime, not our ultimate crime of killing innocent women and children.
They don't care about that, but he committed the ultimate crime of going against the establishment.
The only thing that's bad about that is, let's say the worst thing you really do to Trump is you get his kids on something that's illegal, and all of a sudden, you know, the Trump juniors are spending time in jail or they're, you know, they can't do business here, whatever the hell it is.
But whatever they do to him, it's like that, the old joke that what's his name, Bill Hicks had about they show you the other angle on the JFK tapes.
I mean, this is their opportunity to go, hey, you come in here as an outsider.
You might have your good four years, but look what happens afterwards.
So it's not, and you can see already where you can just see the, and this is like the thing that's so fucking crazy to me.
And I've been saying this for years now, but to libertarians who celebrate cancel culture and celebrate deplatforming and all this shit.
And, you know, it's, oh, it's a private company and this is the market at work getting rid of horrible people or whatever.
I go, they really do.
They remind me, there was a Karl Marx line.
I don't have it in front of me.
I'll probably butcher it, but he said something about, Karl Marx said something about how the capitalist will sell them the rope to hang them with.
Which is nice if you want to hang yourself, you know, what are you going to spend all day looking for a rope?
You end up just trying to smash a rock against your head.
You can't find one.
You're trying to think of a creative way to do it.
But there is something to that that was a really like astute observation.
Hold on, let me hear.
Brian found me the fucking quote.
It's the capitalist will sell us the rope with which we will hang him.
That's the Karl Marx line.
And there's something about that that is a really astute observation, right?
Like that capitalists, and you see this all the time, right?
Where capitalists will support the government, which will make it impossible for them to do business at some point.
But, you know, in the short run, it'll get them some like profit or something like that, right?
And I just was like, I said the same thing.
I was like, are libertarians really going to celebrate, you know, are we really going to sell the rope to the fucking big government types who will obviously use this against us?
And so now you see with the Trump thing, what they come out of this with prepared, because I think for the most part, most good libertarians looked at the Donald Trump rise to the presidency and said, well, hey, wouldn't it be great if someday there was a great leader who could rise up the way Donald Trump did?
Like someone who was real, you know, could speak directly to the people using social media, could criticize the government and the media and the warfare state and all this stuff, but really not just be a fucking, you know, narcissist, bloviating, ignoramus like Donald Trump and actually be like a great leader.
And now you almost see, you see the blueprint that now that the president, after the president's been set, it's always easier to do it again when you don't have to do it for the first time.
And so what could they do right now?
Somebody start came up there, started really criticizing the government.
They could say, oh, he's inciting insurrection.
Banned.
Banned off social media before the campaign even got started, you know?
And that's a real fucking threat.
And that's something we really got to grapple with.
You know, I think one of the major differences between libertarians like myself, who came in from the Ron Paul movement and some of the more Beltway type libertarians is that we came in looking for like they look for respectability and influence in Washington.
And we look for a revolution because that's what we think the country needs.
And like, I don't care about being respectable amongst the corporate press types.
I don't, I don't look for approval from the cathedral.
I care about living in a freer world and whatever it takes to get there.
And I, more and more, I'm like, whatever it takes to get there, I will be on board with.
Like, I don't care if it's the perfect libertarian solution to get us to a more libertarian world.
I want to do anything possible to get us to that world.
And I'll be honest, I don't know exactly what the solution for all this stuff is, but this is creepy as fuck.
And this is really a whole new, we're now in a whole new world that it's, I think, going to be a lot harder going forward for shows like us, for people who are out there trying to like spread this message and being very critical of the status quo.
Think this is, I think we all got to buckle up and figure out how to navigate these waters because it's some pretty crazy shit going on.
All right, that's our show for today.
Thank you, everybody.
Go follow Robbie the Fire on Twitter for as long as we're all allowed to be on Twitter and go check out his other podcast, Run Your Mouth.
And we will be back with a brand new episode on Wednesday.