Eric Brakey argues that excessive government size and mass surveillance necessitate a state rollback, highlighting how the Trump administration exposed a "deep state" framing him for treason while Biden serves as a rubber stamp for trillions in spending. He critiques establishment divide-and-conquer tactics using cultural issues to obscure inflation and Middle East wars, detailing his 2018 congressional sabotage by neoconservative super PACs. Brakey outlines Young Americans for Liberty's strategic shift to state legislatures via "Operation Win at the Door," aiming to nullify federal overreach through local laws like the Defend the Guard Act, asserting this approach effectively surrounds the enemy where direct assaults fail. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Roll Back The State00:15:02
Fill her up.
You're listening to the Gash Digital Network.
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, Dave Smith.
Hey, what's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
Very happy to be joined today by Eric Brakey, former state senator in Maine, who some of you guys may know from our recent debates on the Lions of Liberty podcast.
We did one on the flagship Lions of Liberty and then one on Electric Liberty Land, which was more of a panel with Dave Rubin there as well.
But I wanted to get Eric on because there's so much we agree on.
And we were just sitting there debating LP versus Republican Party.
So I invited him on and he was good enough to join.
Thank you for joining.
Hey, Dave, it's a real pleasure.
Been a long time listener.
And I got to say, you know, your analysis of the whole kind of the Russia gate, everything going on last year was actually, I never admitted it publicly, but it was a big part of my messaging on my congressional campaign.
So you had some of the best analysis on that whole issue when the mainstream media got it all wrong.
Well, look at that.
Now it's been admitted publicly.
Dave Smith in the ear of would-be congressman.
Very good.
Well, yeah, I mean, it really is.
It was quite something.
And it's unbelievable how all the COVID stuff has almost made everything before it seem a little bit more insignificant.
But when you actually sit back and think about it, you're like, wow.
I mean, even for libertarians like us, who were always, you know, up in arms about the national security apparatus and the spying on American citizens, but even for Ron Paul guys like us, to imagine that there would be this coordinated effort to turn the spying apparatus on not only one of the candidates for the major parties,
but the sitting president of the United States of America and try to frame him for treason is really, that's something that would have been even wild for us to imagine.
You know, I think that's in many ways, I think, the greatest accomplishment of, you know, the greatest accomplishment of the Trump era is that his just simple presence in the White House forced these unelected deep state, whatever you want to call it, to show their hand.
And now you've got more Americans kind of seeing the system for how it actually functions and not the schoolhouse rock version of what we're told.
Yeah.
You know, it's like in boxing or kickboxing, a lot of times they use a lot of feints, like really high level boxers and kickboxers.
They don't just throw punches and kicks.
They're constantly faking, you know?
And the idea is that you're trying to lure out your opponent, like you're trying to get them to bite on something and expose themselves.
And whether intentionally or unintentionally, and I think mostly unintentionally, Trump's mere presence triggered this hysteria from all of from the deep state and from the corporate press and from just everybody, but both, not even just on the left side, I mean, establishment Republicans, that it was, it really revealed their agenda in a lot of ways.
And I agree with you.
I think that's really valuable.
We probably don't exactly know yet how valuable that that will be.
Once it's out of the box, you can't put it really back in.
Once it's seen, it can't be unseen.
There's so many people, millions of people who don't necessarily have, I think, the right policy prescriptions, the right answer to these problems.
But because of this very weird four-year period we've been through, people are seeing the problems for the first time.
Yeah.
And I think that in many ways, if it wasn't for how crazy the last four years were, I don't see how Joe Biden becomes president.
In the same way that it was like Bush had to be that bad for Obama to become president and Obama had to be that bad for Trump to become president.
And now you've got just like this bumbling 80-year-old.
I mean, he's just Joe Biden is, forget like our libertarian perspective on things or just objectively, he is so 80.
Like you just, you look at him in these press conferences and you're like, man, that is an 80-year-old up there pretending to be president.
And he's not even like an 80-year-old who you're like, oh, but he's a really sharp 80.
Like he's just regular old 80.
And it's unbelievable.
Like I think there's real value in this too.
It's a very the emperor has no clothes type of situation where he's confused.
He can't remember names and people are supposed to look at this and have some type of faith and trust in the institutions.
I mean, how could you?
Well, I think it kind of really kind of is the culmination of, I think, something people have been saying for a long time, this idea that the president is just a figurehead, kind of a, you know, a rubber stamp for what the unelected bureaucracy wants to do already.
But at least past presidents like pre-Trump, you know, gave the illusion that there was some like independent decision making there.
But now it's just clear this guy isn't capable of independent decision making.
He's not, he's mentally not totally there.
So it's just more clear than ever that he's he's simply his function is to be a rubber stamp for other people's agendas.
He's not the one in charge.
Yeah.
And what and what the agenda seems to be is more of the same with, I guess, bigger spending bills than ever.
$2 trillion.
You know, I remember, what was it?
Tea Party wave.
We were all upset about $800 billion bank bailouts.
And this was now it seems so quaint to look back and, oh, those days when we were only spending $800 billion to bail out, you know, Wall Street.
Now we're, now we're in the trillions.
Does it seem like it, you know, there's, I'm of two minds about this type of stuff, right?
So if you look at the kind of the state of the country and the resistance movements, the kind of populist left, the populist right, the amount of people who are just fed up by the system, there are some positives.
And certainly on the right half of America, I'm sure me and you would both agree that it is really great, a really great development that the right wing in America has pretty much rejected the Bush doctrine.
And they don't seem to believe that we need to go fight wars throughout the Middle East to spread American democracy or any of this stuff.
There's much more.
And again, I think we agree on this, that Donald Trump, another one of the best things he did is he gave right wingers permission.
I really think that started with Ron Paul.
But Donald Trump on a much larger scale gave right wingers permission to be against the war and not feel like some pinko lefty.
Like, no, you're a real right winger being against the war.
And so there's something certainly that that's good about that.
But I also look back at, you know, we had a time where there was like a Tea Party movement and then shortly after there, an Occupy Wall Street movement.
And there was some real interest in big government, big spending, you know, corruption within the financial system with the bankers being bailed out.
And it seems like that's all off the table now and people are fighting over these kind of these cultural issues and these other things, but it's just kind of been accepted by everyone that it's like, oh, I mean, what is it?
I think the government was projected to spend $5 trillion this year before this $2 trillion stimulus package.
This is insanity.
It's, you know, I see it, and I think, and I think we're on the same page on this, is I, you know, I think it's a classic divide and conquer strategy in that the uh the Washington establishment spending stealing trillions of dollars from us, taking our sons and daughters and throwing them into a third decade of wars without clear missions in the Middle East.
And, you know, the people had been, there had been been this, you know, since the Ron Paul era and the Occupy Wall Street era, there had been this kind of growing resistance effort against this.
And they distract us by they get it, they get us fighting again over these these inane culture war issues.
Now, now, I mean, even just what, the other week we were like debating gay marriage again.
Like, you know, why?
Like, why?
What is this, you know, in the grand scheme of things when we've got the biggest kind of plundering of the American people that we've ever seen in American history, why are we debating gay marriage again?
It's, you know, and even the fact, you know, I think it's no coincidence that Joe Biden chose to bomb Syria while the kind of the confirmation hearings were going on for his Department of Health and Human Services secretary, you know, a transgender woman.
Now, people can feel how they want to feel about trans issues, but frankly, I think that the trans movement should feel taken advantage of because Joe Biden is specifically dangling them out there to provide cover for his continuation of the wars in the Middle East.
Yeah, and it's always the, you know, when him and Obama, I think he was the one who led it, right?
When he came out for gay marriage, it was right before their reelection campaign when it was clear that they weren't going to end the wars or clean up Wall Street or any of this other stuff.
It's all, this is always what it's used for.
And it's sad because it's so effective.
I mean, they really, it's a, and I get it, you know, like I'm, I'm guilty of it sometimes too, where you do, there's something on a very base human level.
The culture stuff is just more triggering.
Like it's just easier, you know, if you're scrolling through Facebook or Twitter or something like that, and you see these wild cultural fights, it's just more engaging than a talk about budgets, you know, because that stuff's just kind of boring, but it's really so important.
I mean, and that's to me, I think the libertarians, whether we use the GOP or the Libertarian Party, it's really incumbent on libertarians to find a way to insert issues of like interest rates and budgets into the conversation.
Because even though it might sound really boring, they're actually directly responsible for so much of the chaos and the collapse of the country.
And if people don't want to pay attention to them, then we're just doomed to spiral out of control.
Right.
The cultural issues in some ways feels much more kind of immediate and right in front of us than, you know, for the for the regular person than the Federal Reserve, you know, manipulating interest rates and printing trillions of dollars out of thin air.
In fact, that's the way the system is designed.
They make it deliberately opaque so that the regular person, I mean, even, you know, you look at the fact that revenues used to be generated primarily by taxation.
Well, regular people could get upset about that.
You see the chunk being taken out of your paycheck.
But more and more as they rely on just the printing presses, it's harder for the average person to point a finger on what's going on to the point where we just accept that inflation is a part of the game and part of the system.
And that's why we need to raise the minimum wage every couple of years without really asking the underlying question.
Why is the dollar becoming less and less valuable?
Yeah, it's really amazing.
And I think that just about like anybody who's over 30, 35, you know, can really feel this in their bones.
I mean, I was just having a conversation recently with my father-in-law about this about like what.
You know, how much, you know, you think of the value of money and you still kind of remember, like, I still remember like 90s money.
And like in the 90s, if somebody got a job for like 70K a year, you were like, whew, you're killing it, man.
You just got a great job.
Like, that's it.
You're, you're made.
You got this great job.
I mean, nowadays, if you're making 70K a year and you got two kids, you're barely getting by.
And $100,000 a year was supposed to be like you're wealthy.
You know, I mean, depending on where you are today, if you got a family, you live in a city or in a suburb outside of a big city, again, I mean, you're making your payments, I guess, but you're far from doing well.
And people do see this all around them.
But like you said, it's very hard to connect the dots to like, oh, this is because we printed a trillion dollars five years ago.
That's why the prices are so high.
I will say, though, I'm excited because I feel like we're arriving at a moment where, you know, this fiat currency system has been used to control us for so long.
I mean, I always think, where are the borders of the American empire?
The borders of the American Empire end where, you know, dollars stop being used as a form of currency.
But we're gotten to the point where even Ben Shapiro, I don't know if you saw it, Ben Shapiro did this great analysis on Bitcoin and fiat currency and the Federal Reserve kind of devout.
And I'm just, you know, remembering, I'm remembering the Ron Paul days.
I would never have predicted that Ben Shapiro would be a voice against the Federal Reserve.
So this kind of conversation in its own right is kind of going mainstream because people are talking and looking at things like Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.
So I'm excited where we might go.
I think we could be seeing potentially in our lifetimes the end of the dollar standard.
Well, it's funny because a lot of us Ron Paul guys, you know, and I know I've had this experience just because I talk to a lot of people outside of libertarian circles and I talk to a decent amount of people in like the cable news world and stuff like that.
And it used to be, you know, Ron Paul would be saying, look, this system is unsustainable and it's going to spin out of control.
And you could kind of understand that intellectually.
And I'd be like, man, his argument has convinced me.
This is real.
But then when you take it to normies, they'd kind of be like, that seems a little hyperbolic.
And then even you're kind of like, yeah, maybe.
I mean, maybe it is.
But now looking at it, it seems nothing short of prophetic.
I mean, like the idea that you go like, yeah, this thing is spinning out of control.
No one can really argue with you on that.
We all know it is.
There's just different arguments about why.
And of course, the mainstream narrative at this point, it's kind of like when after the 2008 collapse and the mainstream response was like greed got out of control.
Prophetic Greed Arguments00:02:32
Like they have nothing.
So it's basically like, well, Trump people decided to get greedy, you know, all of a sudden.
There was no greed before then.
Well, there was greed, but greed took a spike around 2005, 2006.
And then the greed bubble had to collapse, you know, something like that.
Like the bankers just weren't that greedy in, you know, like the 80s and 90s, but then it really started building up.
But now it's like, yeah, the country is spinning out of control.
And the answer is like Russia or Trump or racists or something like that.
But I think most people know, no, there's something more profound going on than that.
It's not just that the country got really racist all of a sudden.
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Left Movement Hijacked00:15:15
You know, it's interesting.
I was rereading.
I'm sure you've read it, Dave Ron Paul's The Revolution.
Actually, I sat down with Ron recently and he told me that that book might be going out of print in the near future.
So any of your listeners who haven't read it, get a copy now because that's like our communist manifesto.
It's the libertarian manifesto.
Yeah.
But you read it and it's and it's just amazing.
I mean, it reads like prophecy for everything we've been through these last these last 13 years, from the wars to the monetary policy.
And it really kind of does make you appreciate just kind of in the moment and time where Ron Paul was, how powerful kind of the understanding of the principles of liberty and Austrian economics are that he could totally predict the next 20 years what was going to happen.
Yeah.
And one of the things that drives me crazy about right-wingers who dismiss libertarians is that it's like, you know, and look, I do to some degree, I get it, you know, and they'll be like, oh, these Lulberts and some libertarians don't help us with that image, you know?
And so I understand where there's some beltway types and some left libertarians who really just like, I mean, their messaging is almost as if it's designed to discredit the movement.
But you look at them and you're like, hey, look, at least give us credit where due.
Even if you don't buy into the whole libertarian, you know, platform or you, well, I think there is a role for the government here or there.
Okay.
But let's not pretend like we are the joke.
We are the serious people who told you while you guys were supporting George W. Bush that these wars were a disaster, that this was going to destroy the country.
We're the guys who warned you about this spying apparatus that your guy kind of started building.
And I mean, obviously, Obama has a lot of blame for it too, but they really started it with the wireless warrants and warrantless wiretaps and all that stuff.
And this is what got turned on your guy, Donald Trump.
So, you know, a little bit of respect to the libertarians who were right about the most important issues.
Yeah, it feels like we're kind of perpetually stuck being like Cassandra from Greek mythology.
We can predict everything that's going to happen.
No one believes us until it happens.
And then you think, okay, well, now do we have credibility for the future events?
Like, well, you were right in the past, but this time it's totally different.
And the lessons are never learned.
Yeah, yeah, which is, you know, which is always like where we end up.
I remember actually Essie Cup saying this to me at one point in one of her panels.
I think it was about dealing with ISIS or something like that.
And she goes, and I made this whole argument about how ISIS got built up and how we never should have intervened.
And she goes, okay, granted, you're right about all of that.
But now we have ISIS and we got to go intervene to go stop ISIS.
So it's like, even granted that you're right about everything.
And it's like, well, if I'm right about everything that happened up to now, how about I get to make this call?
Right.
How about like you guys who were wrong about everything?
Why do we have to keep listening to you?
And then, of course, they were wrong about that one too.
I get that it was a total mistake to give weapons and arms to that radical Islamic group to take out the last radical Islamic group that we supported before.
But this time it's going to be totally different.
We got these great moderate rebels here.
Yeah, right.
We'll take out the last ones and everything's going to turn out great.
So what do you do?
So let's talk about your story a little bit for those people who don't know, because I'd imagine there's some people listening who know, like, you know, have seen the debate that we had, which by the way, I've gotten an overwhelmingly great response to.
I hope you have as well.
But it's the only debate I've ever done.
Almost every debate I've ever done, people walk away with a consensus of we feel like this guy won or this guy won.
And the overwhelming consensus from our debates was people going like, I thought you guys both made really good points.
And it was kind of whoever was speaking last.
I was on that guy's side.
And so I'm really glad people enjoyed that.
But just for people who don't know, so you were, you worked on the Ron Paul 2012 campaign.
You were the state organizer.
Is that the or director?
So Maine.
Yeah.
So I got started off just kind of as a grassroots guy.
Found kind of the Ron Paul movement during the Tea Party wave.
Just started volunteering with local groups and ended up getting a job on the Ron Paul campaign, became a field organizer and then became the state director for Maine, which was one of the few states that we won in 2012.
Some might remember there was a huge showdown at the RNC in Tampa when they kicked out the Ron Paul delegates.
I was one of the national delegates who was kicked out of the convention in 2012.
And that led to whole kind of riots on the floor.
People from delegates from other states, Iowa, Minnesota, Nevada, people leaving Chan.
As Maine goes, so goes the nation.
But after that, I ran for state senate and served, defeated a 36-year Democrat incumbent, served two terms, ran for U.S. Senate and for Congress.
And now I'm working with Young Americans for Liberty.
So that's the very short version of things.
And so because it really was a pretty fascinating and infuriating story, but when you ran for U.S. Senate, you were doing great and you looked like you were on your way.
And then John Bolton, what did he pour half a million dollars into some super PAC to try to smear you?
Well, it was actually, so the U.S. Senate campaign, it was actually during my congressional campaign for U.S. Senate.
Oh, that was a congressional campaign.
Yeah, I was U.S. Senate.
I ran in 2018.
I was actually the Republican nominee in Maine, but I was going up against very popular incumbent Namangus King, who's kind of like the worst fusion of everything.
He's like for big government at home, big government abroad, but did pretty well against him, all things considered.
But it was for a much more winnable race, the second district of Maine, which is a District Trump one both in 16 and 2020.
I was kind of the frontrunner coming off of the U.S. Senate campaign, frontrunner for the nomination.
I had a lot of grassroots support and conservative groups supporting me from Freedom Works to many others.
We were in a good strong position.
And then in the last, yeah, in the last like three weeks, we get half a million dumped on us, not promoting any of the other two hacks who are running in the primary, but just attacking me.
And ironically, they used statements I made when I was the state chair for Rand Paul in 2016 in the Republican primaries.
They used those statements defending Rand against Trump to say I was a never Trumper who didn't support Donald Trump enough, which is ironic, I think, because I was running on at least the expressed foreign policy of Donald Trump, not always the realized policy of Donald Trump of ending the wars.
And for that, the neoconservatives who really are the never Trumpers, they called me a never Trumper and got an establishment.
But there's something really fascinating and almost a little bit encouraging while simultaneously discouraging about all of that, but that even the neocons know that the way to attack.
So clearly they don't want you in there because they know you're a Ron Paulian libertarian anti-war guy who's going to be against the whole national security apparatus.
I've been a pain in their ass for the last 10 years and they just in the heart of it.
But they know better.
They know enough about the tone of the country to know that they're not going to run attacks against you like weak on foreign policy, doesn't want to support the troops.
Like this is what they would have used to attack you, say, 10 years earlier.
However, they knew now that the way to attack you was to paint you as what they are, essentially.
Oh, he's a never Trumper.
He's just one of these guys almost with a wink of like, you know, he's probably for the establishment if he's a never Trumper.
So it at least shows something that they knew that was the angle to go at you.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it's, it certainly, it is, I mean, this is why I'm ultimately, I know this is part of what we debated about why I'm ultimately encouraged by the potential that exists within the Republican base is, you know, I think the Republican base is a little aimless right now.
I don't think, I don't think it really knows what it's for, but it knows what it's against.
And it's against right now, a lot of the things that we're against.
And so that's where I think the opportunity is.
And I know, you know, I'm not like on their defense.
I'm not trying to defend Trump or trying to say Trump was the ideal of what we should aspire to.
I think Trump was in a lot of ways a colossal failure, but I mean, I don't know, even, but also kind of, I don't know.
The bar is set so low by past presidents, it's easy to sail over it, even for Trump.
But ultimately, the recognition that the deep state is a problem, the wars are a problem, the military-industrial complex, the establishment, the corporate press.
I mean, I think this is fertile ground right now for the liberty message where we can provide an intellectual framework for not only why these institutions are corrupt and need to be combated, but also for the alternative framework on what a free society could look like.
Yeah, well, I certainly agree with you that we don't have an option.
I mean, the situation is desperate enough that if there are tens of millions of people who not only are skeptical of the corporate press, skeptical of the warfare state, skeptical of the whole establishment, the whole swamp, as they call it, and also see the sitting president as illegitimate, whether rightfully or not, they believe that this election was fraudulent and stolen from Trump.
And I think guys like me and you probably don't even care as much about that because we're kind of like, I don't really believe in the idea.
Right.
I don't believe in the idea that the majority of the vote bestows some legitimacy on anybody.
But still, I agree with you that there's opportunity there.
And we would be insane and suicidal to not try to see if maybe there's some people that we can reach on that side.
I also, though, I do think that there is opportunity, maybe not quite as much, but there is opportunity amongst some on the left who are really disgusted about what the left has become, how the movement has been hijacked and the issues that they used to care about.
Just, you know, when you see things like even Bernie Sanders, who is just, you know, in my opinion, a fraud and a hack and, you know, has terrible economics and all the rest of it.
But the fact is that Bernie Sanders was talking about issues of substance, whether we agree with them or not.
I mean, Bernie Sanders would be talking about, you know, healthcare, the war.
And when he would bash Biden, you know, he would say, well, look, he voted for the war in Iraq.
I voted against it.
And he doesn't want to give people health care.
And I do.
And he would talk about, you know, income inequality, which might be slightly different than the way me or you would put it.
But we certainly would acknowledge that this whole game is rigged in favor of the super rich.
And so, and there were a lot of Democrats who flocked to that, like, oh, a message about these kind of populist issues.
And instead, what they get is like, you know, a campaign against Mr. Potato Head or Aunt Jemima or something like that.
And so I think perhaps there's, you know, look, we got to, we got to try to appeal to as many people as can be woken up.
Right.
You know, it's like the Occupy Wall Street days.
You know, I used to say that like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street were more similar than people wanted to recognize.
They were, they were movements on the left and the right reacting to the same underlying problems.
But the problem was that Occupy Wall Street would look at the problems we were facing as a society and say it's the big corporation's fault.
The Tea Party would look at the problems we were facing and say it's big government's fault.
But they were both had half the picture.
The problem was big corporations and big government in bed with each other screwing over the rest of us.
And we, I don't know, we're starting to get more and more to recognizing that.
And now we're talking about Mr. Potato Head and we're talking about, you know, you know, these, these, these cultural issues, which look, I get, you know, for someone who is, for someone who is kind of living some of these kind of cultural issues, for someone who's, you know, a trans person and this is like their life that they're dealing with on a daily basis.
I get how that can be the most important issue for them.
And I think that it needs to be respected and acknowledged and we should take that seriously.
But I also think that we need to not let the kind of the establishment use these as distractions, you know, look at what's going on with our hand over here while we pick your pocket and send your kids off to war.
Yeah, I mean, so I shared this thing the other day on Twitter, which was like, I don't know if you saw this, but it was like a little press release with a transgender person who works for Raytheon.
And Raytheon put it out.
And the trans person was like, I identify as they, them, and I'm working to make my work environment a more inclusive, you know, place and blah, blah, blah.
And it was put out by Raytheon.
And so I shared this.
And I got to say, and so this is, I'm criticizing like the right half as much as the left half of the country that falls for this shit.
It's like, I saw like some people, and you know, Twitter's a cesspool, it happens, but I saw like a few of these people who are almost like they're making fun of the person.
And they're like, oh, yeah, this is so ridiculous.
These delusional people who they them is a plural.
Why would we even call them that?
And I'm like, no, You're completely missing the point of this.
The point, I'm not mocking this trans person.
I'm mocking Raytheon, who thinks that they can use this trans person to just to be like, oh, we're a really inclusive environment as we buy off politicians and build bombs for them to drop on people.
Like trans people can contribute to mass murder now too.
Yeah, like that's great.
What an inclusive society.
Yeah, like that's the joke, not the person.
I'm not trying to mock this person.
Like, I don't even know.
I don't, look, I understand that like the, you know, like one person might have an argument that like this is biological and this is something in the brain and you are actually born into a gender that you're not.
Someone else might have an argument that it's like, I don't think any of that's real.
And I think that this is a person who's suffered trauma and is mentally ill or something like that.
Either way, I don't see why you'd want to mock the person.
You know what I mean?
Like if either one of those things are true.
But the point is that the bomb makers are using this to get you to fight over this conversation, which ultimately, like you said, might really matter that person, but to the people being bombed, which maybe we should be a little more concerned with, let's focus on what they're distracting us from.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, it's this is this is exactly the divide and conquer strategy that we're facing right now.
Mocking Trauma Victims00:03:46
As long as as long as they can keep us pitted against each other, you know, left versus right fighting over these kind of these, you know, these marginal issues.
And not to say that they're, again, they're not to say that they're not important to the people who kind of are living these issues on a day-to-day basis.
But, you know, when we're at, we got, I don't even know how many countries we have troops in now.
You know, in 2008, it was 130.
I'm sure it's even more than that.
We don't even get to ask questions about these things these days.
And these are just distractions to keep us from asking those questions.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's, it's, it's like the, you know, you see like the Republicans will, you know, what it was it, um, what's his name?
One of the high-ranking house guys the other day was reading the Dr. Seuss book or whatever.
Like they'll stand up.
They'll stand up and fight for Dr. Seuss or whatever, but none of them even really seem to want to ask, you know, any of these questions.
And then the MSNBC types who used to kind of pretend to care about this stuff under George W. Bush, they've all, I mean, they're just saluting it.
They're all very happy that Biden was bombing Syria and I guess bombing it more enthusiastically than Trump did.
And so that's why they're pleased with him.
Yeah, he may be dropping real bombs, but at least he's not dropping Twitter bombs.
That's what we really care about.
Yeah, that's right.
That does seem to be the attitude.
You know, I think that there's been a transformation.
You know, I like to look back at history and kind of, you know, there's the old saying, history repeats itself.
It's not always identical, but it tends to rhyme at least.
But I look back at like the transformation of Rome from a republic to an empire.
And I think that, you know, some of the lessons we can learn from that is when Rome became an empire, Caesar didn't abolish the Senate.
The Senate was a useful tool to give the people some kind of illusion that they had some kind of, you know, a vote and a say in the major decisions that were made.
And that's kind of what the whole kind of function of our elected apparatus in Washington, D.C. serves today.
We vote on people.
They go and argue about things, but the things they argue about don't really matter.
But we feel that there's a fight going on and we have a say in things.
But really, what do they spend most of their time doing?
They argue about Dr. Seuss and the name post offices.
Wow, the Federal Reserve prints trillions of dollars.
The mass murder campaigns across the world continue and no one even raises a question.
So it's, you know, I think, you know, I was listening to Justin Amash.
He was on, I don't remember what podcast he was on.
Michael Malice?
Oh, yeah, it was on Michael Malice.
But he, and I know people had, you know, I respect Justin Amash.
I think that I've disagreed with some of his decisions in the recent years, but someone who put himself on the line for like 10 years out in the gladiatorial arena of Congress, you know, fighting for liberty issues.
I've got tremendous respect for him, even if we disagree on some strategy points.
But he pointed out that, you know, Congress is just theater.
And I would say that, you know, frankly, the average state representative these days probably has more policymaking power in our country than the average congressman who, you know, unless you get Nancy Pelosi's sign-off on things, you can't even sponsor an amendment on a bill.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I remember when Rand Paul first went to the Senate and he had this, I think it was in like his first year there, where he had the read the bill amendment that was just an amendment that said that Congress has to read every bill before they vote on it.
They should five day or one day for every 20 pages of a bill.
Yeah.
Quit Smoking With Fume00:02:17
And he and it failed.
It got no support.
Like just how cartoonish is this that someone would come out and say, I think before we write something into law, we should know what we're writing into law.
And they were like, all right, this guy's a little goofy.
Like, what's he coming in here with these crazy highfalutin ideas?
Like, we're going to read these things.
That would bring this whole thing down tomorrow.
We can't do that.
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Federal Power Limits00:16:04
Hey, so since you brought up Justin Amash, I wanted to ask you, because I know that you, you know, you were endorsed by Rand Paul and that you worked for his campaign in 2016.
What do you, because from my perspective, I think that both Justin Amash and Rand Paul kind of screwed up the Trump moment.
And I have tremendous respect for both of those guys.
I'm not trying to just trash either of them, but I think that Justin Amash went way too anti-Trump, not on the substance of, you know, things that there were great reasons to oppose Donald Trump, but I thought it was crazy that he sided with the deep state as they were launching these ridiculous attacks against Donald Trump.
And I don't even care.
I mean, I don't, I could, I, I disagree with him.
I don't think Trump did obstruct justice.
I don't think as the Mueller report didn't even say that he obstructed justice.
And by the way, Mueller, when testifying to Congress, if people remember, after the break in his second round, specifically corrected the record to say that, no, we are not, the report did not find that Donald Trump committed crimes because he's the president.
We wouldn't have necessarily proceeded with an indictment, but we would have put it in the report if he had.
So they weren't even saying he obstructed justice.
I don't believe he obstructed justice.
But regardless of that, if somebody's framed by the deep state for treason and then obstructed justice, I just don't think the story there is this guy obstructed justice.
And so I thought it was a really bad battle for Justin Amash to pick, and he kind of blew his credibility on that fight.
But on the other side, you have Rand Paul endorsing the biggest government president in our history, who's, you know, I guess he'll be topped this year by Joe Biden, but at least at the time he was.
And it did seem to me that he kind of threw away some of that Ron Paul credibility where, you know, Ron Paul, I mean, just absolutely never would have endorsed Donald Trump.
I mean, he didn't, but even if he was in Congress still, we all know he wouldn't have.
Yeah.
And I think you have a point there.
I think Rand probably saw his role in this Trump administration, this Trump era, to try to be the angel on Trump's shoulder, trying to pull him in the right direction.
And arguably, I mean, there's a case to be made that we didn't go to war with Iran because of Rand Paul's influence.
I mean, we'll never really know.
I mean, unless we can jump into an alternate timeline and see what would have happened.
But I think Rand really, I mean, you know, the problem with Trump was that he had no clear ideology.
He had a couple talking points that weren't really thought through.
He had some good instincts occasionally on foreign policy, but then he surrounded himself with all the same Bush administration officials who were going to be the devils on his shoulder, pushing him to more, pulling him towards more and more war.
So I think that Rand probably saw his role as trying to counterbalance that.
And I think he had some effect there.
But certainly I can see that how that would have a demoralizing effect on the movement because he was not, you know, he certainly was not doing what Ron Paul would have done.
And in some ways, I think it's unfair to compare Rand to his father.
I know he's always going to live under his father's shadow, but Rand is not Ron.
They have different strategies and different approaches.
And I think that they're both valuable and serve their purpose.
But Ron was more interested in building the movement and setting the example with a very clear message on what liberty is and always being kind of the true North.
Whereas Rand is always, I think Rand is kind of more focused on this era.
I don't know, harm reduction, trying to make things not catastrophic, trying to prevent the next war rather than kind of delivering the clear message to people that would inspire us to keep going forward.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I guess I just have to come to terms with that because you're right.
And that's the reality of the situation.
And it's still a lot better to have Rand Paul in the Senate than to not have Rand Paul in the Senate.
So that's, you know, whoever would replace him would definitely be a lot worse, a lot worse than he is.
So tell me a little bit about what you're doing with Young Americans for Liberty.
I honestly, I don't know much about the organization.
I know I've met like some of the some of the members at shows and stuff like that.
But so what are you doing there now?
And what's the mission?
Well, first of all, we should get you to come to our convention.
We're doing, we're going to be in Florida this August.
I'll get you details on that.
Sure, absolutely.
But would love to have you there.
But so Young Americans for Liberty started as students for Ron Paul back in 2008, became Young Americans for Liberty.
We've got 500 chapters on college campuses across the country.
For a long time, we were just a campus organization doing activism on college campuses, and that was great.
But in 2016, there was kind of a decision at Young Americans for Liberty to kind of take the model of what I had done getting elected to the state Senate and say, we've got all these great, we've got this army of liberty activists.
That's always been the strength of our movement, but we didn't have a clear application for this kind of this for this liberty army.
You know, we throw people into federal races all the time.
We run people for Congress and U.S. Senate and president.
We've thrown so much grassroots energy and money.
And we ultimately, other than like Amash and Massey and Rand Paul, we never really had much to show for it.
So Young Americans for Liberty decided in 2016, you know, we've had success going after the state legislatures.
Let's go after the state legislatures.
And I'll tell you, when I was in the state Senate, there were maybe like, if you're being really generous, maybe 10 Ron Paul style Liberty legislators in state capitals across the country.
Since we've been doing this thing called Operation Win at the Door, taking our campus activists, deploying them into state legislative races, knocking doors and moving the needle to get people elected, we now have 178 Ron Paul style liberty legislators across the country, including in New Hampshire, where now liberty legislators are the majority of the Republicans in the House, where Republicans have a majority.
So they're the majority of the majority.
We're going to start to see some very interesting things out of New Hampshire.
Looks like New Hampshire might become the first right-to-work state in New England.
They're going to be fighting.
They're fighting to end the lockdown orders.
Some interesting things.
Now, I will say this is a long-term strategy.
It's an idea that's still in its infancy, but I think it's come a long way.
And as we continue pushing, I think that frankly, going after the state legislatures is a much more productive use of our energy and our financial resources than going after Congress.
Again, Congress has become just a sideshow.
They don't actually have any power.
Whereas in the state legislatures, we can start to really nullify the cathedral.
We can pass things like the Defend the Guard Act and say we're not sending our National Guard into a third decade of war in Afghanistan unless Congress actually declares war and makes it official.
We'll see some interesting things.
Yeah, no, I really like the defend the guard stuff.
I think that's like got a lot of potential to it.
If nothing else, then to really, you know, just realize that there are these other weapons that can be used.
And I probably, if you had asked me before last year, I probably would have said, well, but like the overwhelming amount of tyranny comes from the federal government, not the states.
But after this last year, that's a pretty tough argument to keep going.
And yeah, you see that state governments were the weapon of choice for this, the most totalitarian domestic policies that I've ever seen.
You know, and the great thing is, I mean, if you're someone who is inclined to run for office, which I know most liberty-minded people, our instinct is to run for the hills, not run for office.
But if you are someone inclined to run for office, it makes so much more sense.
For a state, I mean, I was nobody when I ran for the state senate.
Nobody knew who I was.
I just had the grassroots support from the Ron Paul movement, but I just went out and I knocked on doors.
And in a state legislative district, in some states, now some states like Texas and California, the districts are bigger than congressional districts, but in a lot of states like Maine and New Hampshire, Wyoming, these other small states, you can literally knock on every door in your district, develop personal relationships with your constituents, and you can defeat the establishment's money machine just by, you know, through hard work.
And if we replicate that across the country, as we're doing here, you start to take over these state capitals, not only can you fight back against state tyranny, which we're seeing has been devastating this past year, but you can fight back against federal tyranny as well from the state capitals, as Tom Woods outlined in his book, Nullification.
Yeah, that's certainly, again, like I said, it's like we can't leave any weapon out of our utility belt in this fight.
And that would really be great to see.
And you could argue certainly that I know Michael Bolton gave this great speech on the Contra Cruz years back now.
I guess it was in 2017.
But he was basically saying that if you look at the decriminalization of marijuana throughout the country, and if you look at sanctuary cities and put aside however you feel about sanctuary cities, it's not like making a moral judgment on whether you agree with sanctuary cities or don't.
But the point is that they're there and the people aren't being deported and they are in violation of federal law and they're doing it successfully on a state level.
And the same with decriminalizing mushrooms.
I mean, decriminalizing mushrooms or decriminalizing marijuana.
Mushrooms is happening now, thanks to one of our liberty legislators in Iowa.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So you look at this now, the federal government, it's a very interesting situation, which we really should try to study and learn the lessons of that you have the federal government, the most powerful government in human history, saying, well, marijuana is a Schedule I substance that can get you this many decades in prison if you have enough of it.
And then you have in lots of states, but in California, for example, you have these pot dispensaries where they are sitting on enough marijuana to put them in jail for life.
I mean, like the federal government theoretically could just go in there and arrest people and put them in jail for life, but they're not because they went through their state governments and said, nope, we're in opposition to that.
And so there's at least something there where you go, okay, there's some real potential to fight off the federal government in this kind of incremental way.
Now, and it's always dangerous, of course, to be the first state to do any of this because they could always decide to make an example out of you so that other states don't follow suit.
But if we, if we build these coalitions, these liberty legislator coalitions across the country, and we have the activist base also there to hold them accountable and kind of keep them honest, we can start to collectively shrug off these federal tyrannies, just like we did with medical cannabis.
I think that medical cannabis and now adult use cannabis are a great example of how nullification can work for any issue.
I see in many state legislatures, people are doing this with the Second Amendment issues with a bill called the Second Amendment Preservation Act.
It's basically saying, yeah, we're not going to recognize your federal gun control laws.
If, you know, frankly, if we make our, if guns are made in our state, sold in our state and used in our state, there's no way you can justify that as interstate commerce.
So we're just ignoring what you say.
Yeah.
And I would just say to like right-wingers who sometimes can hear these conversations and be like, okay, but what are you talking about pot and sanctuary cities?
I mean, these are things I'm against anyway.
Like, I don't want these.
But just, you know, think about it, use a little bit of imagination and be like, well, hey, the federal government's also the ones telling you you can't have prayer in school.
And they're also the ones who are floating out these ideas about taking your guns and all this stuff.
So maybe you do want to have a little bit more local control.
I loved the idea that Jeff Dice said, that he said the type of resistance you want.
And I don't think he wasn't specifically talking about the Capitol riot thing.
This was before that.
But like the type of resistance you want isn't like something like that that's just going to get turned against you and used as an excuse to crack down.
The resistance you want to see is like, just start teaching prayer in school again.
Just do it.
If you're in like a rural red district where everybody's like a Christian anyway, and everyone agrees that they want this, just start doing it and dare the federal government to actually come in and shut it down, you know?
And then if they do, you can go like, yeah, okay, you guys came, you shut it down.
And then when they leave, just start teaching it again.
Just do it.
Right.
Well, and it's, it's like when the, whatever we want to call it, the people storming the Capitol in Washington, D.C. You know, I came out.
I came out against it shortly afterwards and I had many people say, what are you talking about?
This is terrible what they're doing to us.
We need to stand up and fight back.
And I'm thinking, you know, you can make all the moral justifications for it.
And you might even be right that this is a criminal enterprise in Washington, D.C. They're trampling our rights.
They're stealing the election.
They're, you know, if there is, if there is any place to justify using kind of like force to go up against, you can justify it against Washington, D.C.
But strategically, it's stupid because you're going to get crushed.
It is, and you're handing them a narrative to destroy you.
But going after the state capitals, you know, it's kind of an old principle in the art of war.
You know, sometimes the direct assault doesn't work.
Sometimes you need to take the indirect path.
You need to surround the enemy.
You need to cut off their supply lines.
And that's what we can do with the state capitals and nullification.
It was a weird time when that when the Capitol storming or riot or whatever you want to call it.
I call it one of those two things.
I refuse to call it an insurrection because this is just like too freaking goofy for me to sit here and pretend that there was an insurrection, especially amongst the people who are on CNN and the New York Times and the Democrats and Republicans who are like, it was a coup attempt.
It's like, first off, you guys are experts in coup attempts.
Okay.
So you know what a coup attempt is and what isn't one.
But it was a weird time where it was kind of like the there, it was so polarizing right after that.
And you were demanded from each side to say, either you have to say this was an insurrection or you have to say, you know, the vote was stolen and all of this stuff.
And, you know, like that Donald Trump's the rightful president.
And it was, it was a weird time to be like, okay, look, I'm just not going to say either one of those things.
I just, I have not seen enough evidence presented to me to conclusively say that this vote was stolen from Donald Trump.
I mean, again, I'm agnostic on the issue.
I don't know.
I don't trust anything the government tells me, maybe, but I need to see some evidence if I'm going to believe that.
And I'm certainly not going to say it was an insurrection.
But yeah, to your point, it was undeniably stupid.
I mean, like conclusively, we've seen what came from it.
It did not do anything to stop Joe Biden from being sworn in.
It gave the perfect excuse and cover to your enemies to crack down on you.
And yeah, I mean, look, you know, the example I was thinking of when you were mentioning this was Erwin Schiff, who if people don't know who he is, he's Peter Schiff's father, who's really a hero, just an incredibly, you know, smart guy who fought against the income tax.
Questioning The Empire00:10:27
And he wrote all these books about how the income tax is illegitimate.
And he had different arguments for it, that it's not, you know, the laws on the books don't actually give them the right to tax regular working people, that the amendment wasn't ratified in the proper way and all these different things.
And I think he's right about all of it.
I mean, I don't know exactly, but I think he's right about all of it.
And who cares?
Because just for moral reasons, it's completely illegitimate to steal people's money.
But he fought it, never paid his taxes and advised other people not to.
And he died in jail.
Like they, whether you believe he's right or wrong, we can also deal with reality.
And the reality is that if you pursue that path, this is no joke.
This is not a game and you might just die in jail.
And I think Erwin Schiff would have done a lot more good for the world and for himself and his family by not being in jail and getting to see his grandkids.
You know, something you said in the last, I don't know what you want to call it a debate, but the last discussion we had, the one with Dave Rubin, you said, you know, you don't want to be a threat to the establishment because you know who's a threat to the establishment?
Julian Assange.
That's what they do to people who are genuine threats.
And that kind of, you know, it really kind of sticks with you.
These are the enemies we're up against.
Do we believe that we are up against actual evil or not?
Do we believe that, you know, we see that they are happy to murder people across the world by the millions?
And we think that, you know, oh, they won't do that to us because we're Americans.
You know, these are artificial distinctions that they don't, they don't really believe.
They don't believe in America.
They believe in power.
And we're just their tax cattle and our children are just their toy soldiers to throw off into wars.
So if we really believe that these are vicious, evil institutions and evil people running them, then we need to be smart in how we how we develop our strategy to fight back.
A direct assault like people tried to do, like whether, whether it's a forceful assault like people tried to do on election day, or even just kind of going, you know, after these federal races for Congress for U.S. Senate, you know, there are opportunities to win.
You know, there's a guy, liberty legislator.
People should look at Anthony Sabatini, who's running for Congress in Florida.
He's got a really good chance and someone to watch.
And I'd love to see him there.
But at the same time, if we really want to, if we, if we really want to win, we need to, we got to cut, you know, a direct assault on the cathedral, heavily fortified enemy.
That's never going to work.
We got to, we got to surround them, cut off the supply lines, go after the states.
Yeah, it's, it also, when you start to think about things that way, it makes you, you know, question how many libertarians, how many people in the liberty movement are just playing pretend and how many of them are serious about this.
Because you start to realize that it's like, look, and by the way, I'm not saying like, oh, you need to be ready to sacrifice yourself.
I'm not.
I mean, I'll tell you straight up, like, like my first loyalty is to my family.
And that's my job is to be around for them.
It's not to sacrifice myself on a cross for all of you good people listening to the show.
I love you all, but not as much as I love my wife and daughter.
So I'm going to try to stick around for them.
But you see so many people in the liberty movement getting caught up in these like silly squabbles and being outraged about who said an offensive thing or something like that.
And you're like, guys, our enemy here will all agree, right?
Our enemy are willing to slaughter children.
Like, okay, maybe it's in other countries, not in our country, unless it's at Waco, where they're willing to do it in our country, or unless it's like, you know, wherever.
You can think of lots of different examples, right?
They're willing to slaughter children and they make billions and billions of dollars off doing it.
So what do you think people who slaughter children and make billions of dollars will do when you threaten the billions of dollars that they're making?
My guess would be just about anything.
My guess would be anything they can think of.
And I do, I got to say, I wonder quite often how many people who actually rose up to some of these powerful positions, you know, we look at them from the outside and go, oh, they sold out or they just didn't follow through or they just didn't do this or that.
And I just wonder, who knows what type of pressure is put on them?
What type of threats are made and things like that?
It's just, you know, something we don't know, but it's kind of worth thinking about.
Yeah.
What kind of blackmail?
What kind of threats?
What, you know, nobody wants to get JFK'd.
Yeah, that's for sure.
And, you know, there was both with Obama, he got a whole bunch of pressure put on him to expand the war in Afghanistan and expand the theater of the wars in general.
I know that Donald Trump went in there and was talking about pulling all the troops out.
And then he had that meeting at Camp David with all of the military and CIA people.
And he came out of there and he was like, you know, we're going to be sending some more troops into Afghanistan.
Again, I'm not, you know, I'm not saying I know what happened there, but it is, it is a wonder.
It is something you wonder about.
You know, I remember when Trump left office, I was very disappointed in him not issuing pardons to Snowden and Assange.
And it was actually a cool moment.
I tweeted, but I called it a final act of cowardice.
And Edward Snowden even retweeted it.
So that was a cool moment.
But also looking back on it, I wonder a little bit, you know, it is easy for me to say, I mean, who knows what kind of threats are against him.
I mean, and especially when he wouldn't have the protection of being the president.
I mean, we're already seeing the lengths they want to go to drum him out of society.
Who knows kind of what behind the door threats were made against him?
I don't think it justifies not issuing the pardons.
I think he had an opportunity.
He had an opportunity to really, you know, both strike back at our shared enemies in the deep state and to and to, you know, save the lives of some true genuine heroes.
And he didn't do it.
Did you see when Glenn Greenwald was on Tucker Carlson and there was like a point in it where he just dropped any pretense that he was talking to Tucker Carlson or his audience and was just talking directly to Donald Trump.
And he's like, he's like, Mr. President, this will piss off Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and the deep state who framed you so much.
Like it was just like the way if you could grab Trump's ear, how you would try to like persuade him.
I think that was like a pretty good angle.
Like that's if I and so many progressives were just angry that he would have the gall to go on Tucker Carlson.
Yeah, no, they're all they're all pissed off at him about that.
They've, he's been getting it a lot lately.
He's, you know, they jump on these things like he said something or he retweeted something about how the rise in the number of transgender people might indicate that a lot of gay and lesbian people are being pushed into being transgender when it's just acceptable.
You know, like there's no, you can just be a gay or a lesbian.
You don't have to be like, you don't have to go through the surgery and stuff.
And, you know, it's like, I don't even know.
Like, I don't have an opinion on that one way or the other, but like he's.
a gay dude who's like, you know, he has a right to like make that argument if he wants to.
Even if he wasn't a gay dude, he has a right to make that argument if he wants to.
But you see like how outraged they all are and how much they all want to cancel him.
And whether even half the people who want to cancel him realize it or not, the reason why they all hate Glenn Greenwald is because he reminds them of how distracted by nonsense they're all getting because he's an honest lefty journalist who focuses on what really matters.
And when you're sitting there focusing on syrup bottles and bathrooms, you look like an idiot when some guy is sitting there focusing on what really matters.
And so they just want him to go away.
They just don't want him to be there.
It was the same thing, I think, with the canceling of Tulsi in the debate.
They called her, she was homophobic because she was against gay marriage, actually in the same timeframe that Hillary Clinton was against gay marriage.
But so we all know that this was not the real litmus test.
It wasn't because she was against gay marriage.
It was that this was an argument they could use against her when it was really about the empire.
They're not arguing that Hillary Clinton was against gay marriage because Hillary Clinton's for the empire.
Well, by the way, this was the point that everyone completely butchers and misconstrues that Rothbard made about David Duke, that when David Duke was running for governor, they're like, oh, he used to be in the Klan.
And Rothbard was like, yeah, but Robert Byrd used to be in the Klan, but no one has a problem with that guy.
So it's not really that.
You're using this issue, which in this case might be a legitimate disqualifying issue, but then it should be for all of the former Klansmen, not just for one of them.
But the issue is that like, no matter what other issues you have, no matter what else you stand for, if you are against the empire, you need to be smeared.
And that's not to say that everyone who's against the empire doesn't deserve to be smeared or that some of them aren't bad people, but that is their issue.
That is their, this is what I would always try to like, like hammer home about Donald Trump, that whatever someone like, some left-winger might have a legitimate critique of Donald Trump or might have something he said that you're like, yeah, that was a really awful thing to say.
But just understand that's not why the CIA hates him.
They don't hate him because he said something mean about Mexicans.
Like that's not how the CIA operates.
They hate him because he is not.
Right.
Right.
They hate him because he had the nerve to question the whole empire thing.
And that's, that's what you're not allowed to do.
Yeah.
It's, it's odd.
I think that we're, we're probably the first empire in the history of the world that's ashamed to admit that we're an empire.
Yeah, it's, it really is true.
It's, it's a unique empire in that sense.
We're a dishonest empire.
Yeah.
We're probably not the worst empire in the history of the world, but we are the most hypocritical.
Yeah, that's true.
CIA Hates Questioners00:01:30
No, it's a really good point.
Like the, you know, the British were never like, I don't know, we're never like, we're bringing freedom to India or something like that.
Like they'd just be like, yeah.
They're upfront about we're the British Empire.
Yeah.
That's what we're here to do.
We're here to take your shit and make you like us.
Whereas we're just like, no, well, we just care about stability in the region or something like that.
That's why we're bombing you and destabilizing the region.
And then we're like, I can't believe they're not thanking us for all of those freedom bombs that we dropped on them.
They're fighting back.
Didn't they see the LGBT stickers on them?
Yeah.
Well, maybe.
You know, that is the real problem is that we didn't have enough of those stickers on the bombs under Trump, but Obama's going to clean this all right up.
All right.
All right, well, look, we're over time, but I really appreciate you coming on.
This was a great conversation.
For people who want to follow you, where can they see your stuff and support Young Americans for Liberty?
Yeah, you can follow me on Twitter with Senator Brakey, and you can follow Young Americans for Liberty on Twitter as well.
It's YA Liberty.
And Dave, it's been a real pleasure.
Been a listener for many years, and it's an honor to be on the program with you.
Thanks for having me.
Well, thank you for coming on.
I really enjoyed our debates on Lines of Liberty and the panel discussions and stuff.
And even though we have some slight disagreements about what political party to be a part of, I really benefited a lot from it, and I think people really enjoyed it as well.