James Smith critiques the Libertarian Party's internal shifts and challenges narratives linking Asian American violence to Trump, citing specific cases like the Atlanta shooter to argue media fabricates racial motives while ignoring policing failures. He condemns hate crime legislation as flawed and accuses the Biden administration of hiding migrant detention conditions to avoid progressive backlash, claiming current policies subsidize amnesty and a police state. Ultimately, Smith concludes that ending the war on drugs and dismantling the welfare state are the only viable solutions to resolve these systemic contradictions without relying on government overreach. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Libertarian Party Evolution00:14:13
Fill her up!
You are listening to the Gas 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, James Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am the Libertarian Tupac, the most consistent motherfucker you know, and he is the king of the caulks.
Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
Monday episode.
What's up, brother?
I got the right day.
How are you living?
I'm particularly fired up.
I heard your speech out in Jersey all about unifying the party.
It's got me motivated.
Well, good, good.
I'm glad it did.
Yeah, it was a great time.
Me and Rob went to the New Jersey State Libertarian Convention just the other day.
And yeah, it was a lot of fun.
Met some really great people.
Scott Horton gave a fantastic speech.
I gave a speech as well.
Some have described it as fantastic.
Are they up online?
It was great.
Yeah.
Yeah, they're all up online.
They're up at the New Jersey State Libertarian Party's Facebook page, I know.
I don't know where else they might be.
I think, actually, I think someone posted it on YouTube as well.
So yeah, if you're interested, you can go find that.
And yeah, Scott gave a talk about basically like a synopsis of his book.
And he gave a talk about all the origins of the terror wars and basically from Carter through present day and just really fantastic, chock full of great information, as tends to be the case when Scott Horton speaks.
And I gave a talk on just libertarianism and the crises that the country is facing at the moment.
And then as you mentioned, I talked a bit about libertarian unity.
And, you know, maybe I'll start off a little bit just talking about that and the state of the Libertarian Party.
Because obviously, as people listening know, I've gotten very involved with the Libertarian Party over the last few years.
I really think that it is the vehicle with the most potential to help get a libertarian movement energized in this country, which desperately needs it right now.
And I've been particularly involved with the Mises Caucus.
And the Libertarian Party has several different caucuses.
There's basically like three big ones, and the Mises Caucus is one of them.
And this experiment of the Mises Caucus, which was started by the great Michael Heiss, who is, in my opinion, the most important libertarian activist in the world right now.
He started this thing from nothing and has built it up into a force in the party.
And so a lot of people were really motivated to jump into this fight because of the origins really started in the 2016 presidential election.
This was when a lot of people, myself included, started looking at the Libertarian Party.
And more or less, my thoughts on the Libertarian Party then and now were basically this.
When Ron Paul was running for president in 2008 and in 2012, this is what got a lot of people excited about libertarianism.
And this is how I found this whole philosophy that has now shaped my entire life.
And people used to ask Ron Paul all the time, oftentimes snarky reporters would ask Ron Paul, well, why aren't you running as a libertarian?
Like, you're not a Republican in the sense that George W. Bush is a Republican, right?
And you're really a libertarian.
So why are you running as a Republican?
And Ron Paul, I think, fairly would claim to be the most conservative member, which I think is, you know, I mean, it all depends on how you define these things.
But he would say, like, look, if you look at everything that I stand for, it's basically the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.
So what's more conservative than that in America?
What could be more conservative than saying, I support our founding documents, right?
And of course, he would accurately point out that he has voted against more spending and waste in government than any other Republican ever.
So isn't he the most conservative?
Now, of course, other people can define conservative as wanting to bomb the crap out of Iran.
And then I guess he's not.
But that, to me, seemed like a reasonable definition.
But the answer he would give of why he wasn't in the Libertarian Party was simply that they had rigged all the rules against third parties.
And he'd be like, that's just, that's the way it is.
And I remember hearing Ron Paul say this in 2008.
And that was just, that was it for me.
I was like, yeah, he's right.
Why join another party if the rules are rigged against you?
You'd have to join either the Republicans or the Democrats.
And then you can get on the debate stage, and then you can talk to the American people.
But, you know, we're now in 2021.
It's not 2008 anymore.
Things have changed drastically.
I mean, the internet compared to today was kind of in its infancy in 2008.
Social media was in its infancy.
There was, if you were looking for a podcast that had triple the size of the biggest show on cable news, that didn't exist in 2008.
There was no, you needed the corporate press coverage.
You needed the debate stages.
You needed all these things.
It made sense at the time.
In 2016, when Ron Paul had retired and Rand Paul's presidential campaign, let's just say, didn't work out for a lot of reasons that we could get into some other time.
What you were left with was Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the two campaigns with the highest negatives in the history of polling negatives of candidates.
And then you had this third party that's just sitting there that bears the name libertarian, that has ballot access in all 50 states.
And all of the sudden, you realize, like, you know, at least I did, and I think a lot of other people did, that we'd look at this thing and go, oh, you know, maybe we were too quick to dismiss the idea that a third party could be the vehicle that spreads liberty.
And at the same time, as I was alluding to a second ago, the landscape changed.
And now all of a sudden, you know, okay, well, maybe Gary Johnson wasn't allowed on, Gary Johnson was the candidate in 2016.
Maybe he wasn't allowed on the debate stages, but he was on Rogan's podcast.
He could get on like all these huge shows.
And so he could speak to the American people right there, which is all this has all been about to me, conveying this message to the American people, speaking to the remnant.
And so people started looking at this and going, oh, okay, well, maybe there's really something to this.
And in this moment, the Libertarian Party decided to run Gary Johnson along with Bill Weld, who, you know, there were, now Gary Johnson was a good libertarian, but he was just utterly unprepared for the moment.
And Bill Weld was just not a libertarian.
He was a war hawk, Raytheon lobbyist who ended up supporting Hillary Clinton.
And this made a lot of libertarians furious, a whole lot of other things as well, but this really made them furious.
And this was around the time of the origin of the Mises Caucus.
And the idea was to say, look, we want to bring the liberty movement into the Libertarian Party and actually stand for true libertarianism, Austrian economics, anti-intervention, like the real hardcore libertarian shit.
And it started as a very small thing.
And Michael Heiss built it up.
And he recruited myself and Tom Woods and Scott Horton and all of these other figures in the liberty movement to say, yeah, let's focus our energy here on the Libertarian Party.
And right around the same time, the former chair of the party, Nick Sarwak, really attacked the Mises Caucus and then started going out of his way to attack everybody at the Mises Institute, Tom Woods, Ron Paul, myself, a whole lot of other people.
And he became almost like the symbol of what the Mises Caucus was fighting against, was fighting against this type of leadership in the Libertarian Party.
Well, since then to now, I've gotten more and more active in the party and really been pushing it harder and harder.
And I'm speaking at conventions now and having events and all of this stuff.
And the Mises Caucus has just been working their asses off, just working their asses off and growing and recruiting and fundraising and helping candidates on every level.
And of course, obviously, we don't need to relive all of it, but in the 2020 campaign, me and you, Rob, had some differences of opinion with the way the campaign was run.
And after it, in the aftermath, we really doubled down on our efforts in the Libertarian Party.
Now, the other day, there were some state conventions, and the Mises Caucus just had an incredible amount of success, just an incredible amount of success, to the point that Nick Sarwak, who was the chair of the National Party, you guys might remember him from, I did a Soho Forum debate with him and then debated him on the podcast.
And since those debates and since the Mises Caucus influence has been growing, he hasn't won anything in the party.
He didn't stand again for reelection and he went and ran for a position in New Hampshire.
And he ran and his opponent had to pull out or his opponent was ineligible or something like that.
I think the rules are you have to be a lifetime member for a certain amount of years and he had only been for not as long or whatever.
So he ran against none of the above for a small local, you know, like or a state position.
And he lost to none of the above.
It's just, I just mentioned it to demonstrate how much our influence has grown in the party.
And on the other hand, you know, like what you were mentioning when I've been talking about all this unity stuff, is that for a while I think the Mises caucus was just getting viciously attacked and fighting back against the people who are attacking us.
But as I've gotten more involved in the party, I've realized that there are just so many good people in the party.
And so it's fine to defend ourselves against those people, but we are winning those battles.
And what I'm more focused on now is trying to work with all of the other really good people in the party.
So that's kind of the spirit of unity.
And I even said something nice about Nick Sarwak on Twitter the other day, and he responded back with something kind of shitty, but whatever.
Who cares?
It's irrelevant.
He lost, and we had huge wins.
And I think that, you know, basically the only reason I mentioned this at all on the show is because there were a lot of people.
A lot of people joined the Libertarian Party along with me.
And we're all kind of doing this together.
And a lot of other people said, well, I'm not going to join as long as that Sarwak guy is there.
So now I'm holding you to it.
Now's your time to join because we, you know, won that battle.
And so that's, I use this purely as a recruiting tool.
I can't enforce this, but if you said that you would join the party once we got rid of this guy, well, now you have to join the party.
Again, I can't enforce it, but morally, I'm going to hold you to that.
You join the party now.
And I'm telling you, over the next year, some just incredible things are going to happen in the Libertarian Party.
I'm so excited about them.
And it's really right now all centered around Angela McArle becoming the national chair.
She is just fantastic, just a great libertarian.
I was listening to her speech the other day.
She's everything you would want the libertarian chair to be.
Just smart, really knows her stuff, is fearless, demonstrates courage, just everything you would want a great libertarian to be.
So I'm like enthusiastically supporting her.
And anyway, so yeah, my speech the other day was just all about how, you know, we're living through a moment where the government has gone completely totalitarian.
And we need as many good libertarians to get together and really fight against this shit.
Because we've got like, you know, a nation on a goddamn suicide mission right now.
And we've got a lot of the answers to try to correct course.
So anyway, the Libertarian Party is, this is where it's at.
There's still some people there who are working against us, but overwhelmingly, the shake-up of the Libertarian Party to make it something just incredible and meaningful and impactful is going better than any of us could have possibly predicted it would.
So get on board with it now so you can be a part of all the fun shit that's going to happen over the next year.
Stay Protected Outdoors00:02:14
And I think Rob got some sandwiches or something.
I don't know.
I'm snacking.
It's Elster Kans.
I had some fun in the corner.
Yeah, there you go.
There you go.
Yeah, it was a fun group.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
All right.
The Truth About Hate Crimes00:15:29
So anyway, let's talk about some news of the day.
So one thing that's kind of been on my mind that I've been seeing everywhere that this story is real, or this, I don't know, it's not one individual story, but this narrative has been very widely discussed.
And that is the rise in violence toward Asian Americans.
Pretty much everywhere, anywhere you look or read or surf the web.
This is a big thread that's going on right now.
Violence against Asian Americans.
And pretty much the narrative from the establishment is that obviously this is all Donald Trump's fault, of course, because everything has to be.
And yeah, this seems to be something that people are talking about a lot.
I'm sure you've seen a bit of this, Rob.
Well, apparently there's scattered incidents, which I can't speak to because I can't tell to what extent they're just trying to report on something that isn't a major issue.
So I don't know.
But the big one that was in the news last week was there was an incident in Atlanta where a kid basically keeps going to the, you know, the handy places, getting the massage parlors, and he can't resist the Asians.
So he decides he has to go kill them.
He needs to rid the earth of the Asian prostitutes who are working at these handy, you know, these fine organizations giving out hand jobs.
I've been referred to as the handy places before.
Sounds like where you'd get a plumber or something like that.
But I don't think that's what you're talking about.
Maybe they should rebrand.
They're just as much that as they are, you know, massage parlors or whatever.
So anyways, kid, he can't handle the Asian temptation.
So he decides he's going to go in there.
And as a good Christian man, he's going to rid the earth of these prostitutes.
And then, you know, they take him in for, you know, they arrest him and he says that he wants to get rid of prostitutes.
And six out of the eight were Asians, the other two were not.
And now they're just reporting about how this is a clear incident of, you know, Asian violence.
It's got nothing to do.
They're not even talking about the hookering.
Yeah, right.
Which is it seems in many of these cases that the kind of race-obsessed hucksters are just trying their absolute best to make this a racial narrative when it doesn't seem clear that that's what's going on here.
And it's, you know, I think sometimes there's some kind of dishonest people involved in these.
And then there's an audience of sometimes not dishonest people, but people who have, I think, too much of a simplistic worldview where you'll be like, well, look, but we're against it.
This is bad.
This is awful what happened.
So let's be against it.
And if we're against it by saying it's racist, then fine.
You know, like at least we're not, I don't know, at least we're calling attention to the issue.
But much like I've been saying for the last year with the Black Lives Matter Protests, you know, if you're going to label, you know, events as racist attacks, you really should have some evidence that this actually had something to do with race.
Because if not, and you're putting all of your focus and attention on the racial aspect of it, and if that's wrong, then you're not going to properly understand what's going on, and then you're going to have a far smaller chance of actually solving the problem.
So, as I've said before, I mean, I think, you know, what happened to George Floyd was just terrible, and I think what happened to Breonna Taylor was just terrible.
But in neither incident have I seen one shred of evidence that race had anything to do with it.
Again, as I've said before, I'm open to the evidence, still open to the evidence.
I've been saying this for a year.
Nobody has sent me one shred of evidence that suggests that either of them had anything to do with race.
Aggressive policing, the war on drugs, perhaps no-knock raids, you know, over just being poor.
Yeah, right, possibly.
But that's very different than, you know, a racial incident.
And the truth is that you can like, you know, Duncan Lemp was murdered by the police, I think, right around the same time as Breonna Taylor.
And, you know, in a very similar type thing, right?
And so it's not as if there's like evidence like, oh, they don't do this to white people.
They only do this to black people.
It seems to me like the center of the problem is, you know, the police state in this country.
And so that, again, it's just like, if you're not going to address that and you get distracted by all this other narrative, then that's just not going to help.
Now, if it is true that there is a trend of targeting, of targeting Asian people in this country, then that would be worth discussing.
But it's so hard with the kind of dishonest, race-obsessed press keeps pushing this narrative.
And you're like, wait, but what's actually going on here?
I understand that you want this narrative that Donald Trump called it the Wuhan virus.
And that's why, you know, that's why all these people are going out now, a year later, and assaulting Asians or something like that.
But that doesn't seem even remotely accurate.
So if this is just for political expediency, then we're not going to solve any of the real problem that's going on.
Does that seem reasonable?
Yeah.
All right.
I think, also, I don't know.
Aside from the Atlanta incident, have you seen real cases of an uptick, I guess, in crime against Asians?
Well, look, I mean, is it really going on nationwide?
Is there scattered incidents?
Because.
Well, listen, this is there does seem to be somewhat of an uptick in violence against Asians, although violent crime has gone up all around.
And from what I've been able to see, trying to just look at the data, it seems that there is an uptick in violence against Asians particularly, but that the demographic who are committing the crimes are, let's say, not white male Trump supporters.
Okay.
And so it seems like this could be a matter of, there could be other factors involved here, like the fact that there's a lot of Asian store owners in high crime areas that are, you know, becoming victims of crimes.
And perhaps the fact that they're not part of the racial demographic of that group is leading toward them, of those neighborhoods.
Maybe that is leading toward them being targeted.
I don't know.
But so I got this New York Times article.
By the way, if that's true, so then suppressing Trump supporters or calling them domestic terrorism or trying to police the internet to make sure that Trump supporters aren't sharing information probably won't do anything to affect the violence against Asian Americans.
Probably not.
Yes, that probably won't solve the problem.
Well, here, I got this New York Times article because they've been writing a bunch about this as well as just about every other major news outlet.
And the title is Asian Americans Are Being Attacked.
Why are hate crime charges so rare?
So, and then the subtitle is, several recent attacks have not been charged as hate crimes, fueling protest and outrage amongst many Asian Americans.
So this is- Is there any reason for a hate crime?
I mean, to have that delegation whatsoever.
Like, if you punch me in the face because I'm Jewish, you punch me in the face.
That's the crime.
Doesn't matter why you can punch someone in the face because you wanted to punch them in the face because you thought their face looked stupid.
You thought they looked Jewish.
They said something.
It doesn't matter.
The crime is the crime.
I don't get why.
Yes, I think I could sum up your point by saying hate crime laws are stupid.
But more than stupid, I actually think, and I think as a libertarian and as a just thinking person, I think there's something profoundly wrong with the idea of hate crime legislation and that there really is something embedded in the idea of a hate crime carrying some type of extra weight than a normal crime that really misses the point and speaks to one of the biggest problems in our society,
which has been a central theme of mine for just years on this show, one of the most central themes that we have just a profoundly toxic problem with priorities of moral outrage in this country.
And I said, I forget what show I was on the other day.
Maybe it was on Reed Coverdale's show, or maybe it was on Liberty Lockdown.
It was on one of those shows, I think.
Or maybe, yeah, I can't even remember.
I do too many of these goddamn shows.
But I said, you know, I just gave the example.
I go, well, look, if Joe Biden were to bomb a third world country tomorrow and kill 100 innocent people, whatever the country would be, pick a country that he wants to bomb.
Maybe Iran or Syria or Iraq or Yemen or who the hell knows.
So he bombs one of these countries, kills 100 innocent people.
And the same day, Joe Biden said in a press conference, I believe trans women are not women.
We all know what the story of the day would be, where all of the outrage would go.
This is the hundred innocent people who died would be like a footnote.
You know, there'd be an article here or there about it, but it wouldn't really be what people are talking about.
But we would obsess back and forth over the trans stuff, you know?
And feel however you do about that issue.
If you're a libertarian, you have to recognize that's kind of a problem where our priorities lie.
That you can feel that trans women are women or you can feel that they're not, but the fact that one person has an opinion on it should not be more of an outrage than 100 innocent people dying.
And I think it'd be hard for anyone to argue with me that that wouldn't be more of the story of the day if both those things happened on the same day.
So the problem, the real fundamental problem with hate crime laws is that they start from a philosophical framework that believes that a racist murderer is worse than a murderer.
And I think to most rational people, there should be something a little bit off about that.
Because like being a racist is, let's say, bad, okay?
Being a murderer is like evil.
And it's almost like, you know what I mean?
Like the idea that you'd be like, this guy was a murderer, plus he was a jerk about it.
Like, why are we even talking about that he was a jerk about it?
We are so far beyond that.
You know what I mean?
And like you said, I mean, if somebody punched you in the face because you were Jewish, or if they punched you in the face because they just didn't like your face, or because they didn't like your shirt, or because whatever, they didn't like your politics or they didn't like it.
All of these to me are the exact same crime.
The exact same level of immorality.
I just don't see how you could, you know, successfully argue against that.
So it's almost like you're hijacking murder crimes as a way to push your agenda for general fairness or that we feel like every, but murder is really important.
So maybe there's other avenues that you can use for that.
And like you were saying, if we just speak to the principle of let's not have crimes, like crime is the issue or violence is the issue, we might actually be able to do a better job of working against it.
Yes.
And oftentimes, right.
So that what I first mentioned was kind of like the philosophical issue with it.
But I think what you're getting at is more of just the practical issue is that now it allows people to kind of grift off of this race-obsessed shit and distract from what the real issue is.
Also, the truth is that so many times these things become like it's, you know, when a violent crime is being committed, odds are you're not saying nice things to that person.
You know what I mean?
And so now if you're not saying nice things to those person, but you mention their race, we're making this some other crime.
And now we're going to paint the narrative that what's going on here is racism and that's the root of the problem.
And it's not always clear that that is what's happening.
You know what I mean?
Like I've seen just as, you know, growing up in Brooklyn, I've seen people get assaulted before and their race get brought up while they were being assaulted.
Like, you know, I've seen a group of black kids beating up a white kid and scream like white boy while they're beating him up.
And I've seen vice versa.
And I've seen, you know what I mean?
Like, and, you know, it's not clear exactly that racism was the root of the problem.
There were other problems that happened that led to this violent attack.
And ultimately, the problem is that it was a violent attack.
They assaulted somebody.
But the truth is, once you're in a fight or once you're beating somebody up, yeah, you're probably not saying, hey, great shirt.
You know, like you're saying something angry, hateful, right?
So it's just, it's very easy for people to then manipulate this and you kind of miss the whole point of what's going on.
But just to get back to this New York Times article, I'll read the title one more time.
And I'm not going to read through the whole thing.
You guys feel free to go read it on your own if you want.
But so they say Asian Americans are being attacked.
Why are hate crime charges so rare?
Okay.
So now this is already being presented in a way, right?
So forget the fact that hate crimes, the idea are stupid, the idea of charging someone with a hate crime.
You should charge them with the attack.
That's the crime.
And there's also, by the way, one more thought that I didn't, one more point that I didn't add into this is the other thing that's dangerous about hate crime charges is that you are veering into the world, at least in a philosophical sense, of thought crime.
And okay, you can even say that, well, It was obviously a violent crime that was committed, but you're charging them with the violent crime plus the thought crime.
That's really what you're doing with the hate crime.
You're saying you're guilty of an assault plus thinking mean things while you assaulted him.
And there's something about that that I find very creepy.
But so if you put a title this way, Asian Americans are being attacked, why are hate crime charges so rare?
Well, what does that already, what does this allow the wheels to turn and start to think?
What are they pushing you toward here?
Huh, there are these hate crimes and they're not being charged as hate crimes.
Why Charges Are Rare00:08:33
Like, what's going on here?
Why are they so rare?
Several recent attacks have not been charged as hate crimes, fueling protest and outrage amongst many Asian Americans.
Now, again, this is all trickery of words.
Outrage by many Asian Americans.
Well, what does that even mean?
Many?
How many are outraged about this?
It's not like there's some data point here that says the majority of Asian Americans are outraged about this, or even that a large number.
But you can just say many, you know?
And we know this in kind of like the cancel culture world.
There's that people are outraged, are they?
You know, if you do a show for 400 people and 396 of them are just laughing their ass off and four of them are offended, they can write, people are offended.
But what is that actually?
I'm just saying it's just like, it's not necessarily the most accurate representation, necessarily.
It might be.
But of course, now you start going in this direction, right?
Well, there are these racist attacks and they're not being charged as hate crimes.
And Asian Americans are being targeted.
And oh, by the way, they're outraged about this because they're not being charged as hate crimes.
But look, these hate crime laws are on the books.
Prosecutors are incentivized to prosecute these crimes, right?
They want to rack up their own record and get more people in jail.
So what's another explanation for why they're not being charged as hate crimes?
There's no evidence.
That's the other thing.
So here we go, right?
So reading from the article, on a cold evening last month, a Chinese man was walking home near Manhattan's Chinatown when a stranger suddenly ran up behind him and plunged a knife into his back.
So horrible story.
You know, this random guy just stabs this Chinese guy.
For many Asian Americans, the stabbing was horrifying, but not surprising.
It was widely seen as just the latest example of racially targeted violence against Asians during the pandemic.
But the perpetrator, a 23-year-old man from Yemen, okay, had not said a word to the victim before the attack investigators said.
Prosecutors determined they lacked enough evidence to prove a racist motive.
So just even when you start getting into some of the details of this story, and that's just one right there, it's like they start with, oh, the Asian community is outraged that these hate crimes aren't being charged.
This has been, you know, there's been increased violence against Asians during the pandemic, kind of implying that because people are mad about COVID coming from China and wink wink, because Donald Trump is such a jerk, people are committing violent crimes against Asians.
Except that what you see here is that some crazy Yemeni dude just stabbed a guy and no one had any clue what his motivation here was.
So there's just, again, it's like, like I was saying with the Black Lives Matter stuff, if we want to be serious adults about this and decent people who obviously recognize that's really awful that some random innocent guy got stabbed.
But there's no evidence at all in this case that suggests that him being Asian had anything to do with it.
It seems kind of like a crazy person stabbed a person.
This is just one example, but it's being cited in this article here.
And so now they're going to be outrage against the cops that they're not charging them with the hate crime.
And they're like, what can we go off here?
There's no clear racial motivation at all.
And so the issue becomes, and I really don't know what the answer to this is, right?
Is it true that crime against Asians has increased because people are angry about COVID coming from China?
That's possible.
I'm not dismissing that.
But it's also possible that crime in general has gone up over the last year.
In fact, it's a fact that crime has gone up very high, particularly in cities across the country over the last year.
And that lots of factors are a part of that.
There's many different factors that go into that.
There's the lockdowns and the economy.
There's the police and the protests and the riots and all types of different things that have been factors on the general crime level.
And so it's not, again, it's like if you're just taking a case like this, well, this doesn't suggest any evidence at all that this had anything to do with them being Asian.
And then you take a case like the one that you just brought up in Atlanta before, the one that got a lot of national attention.
There's no evidence at all that this was like targeted against Asians.
It seemed to be targeted against prostitution or massages with happy endings or whatever.
Again, to the point that we made before about hate crimes, it's all just as bad.
It's not that one is better or worse than the other one.
It's just that you want to understand what's actually happening in reality if you want to have any chance of improving the situation.
I make a great funeral.
It's a tragedy.
She had soft, delicate hands, and there were 10 years more hand jobs left in those hands.
That's what he took from society.
Oh, shit.
But I just hate, I really do.
I hate the kind of like race-obsessed reporters who play off this shit and try to paint narratives.
And then, of course, like there's several more levels.
Like, it's not, first off, it would have to be clear that people are attacking Asian people because they're Asian.
And then it would have to be made clear that they were attacking them because they're Asian because they're angry about COVID, you know, coming from China.
And then it would have to be made clear that they're doing that and more likely to do that because Trump called it the Wuhan virus rather than the coronavirus.
And that is such a stretch.
I mean, like, it'd be so hard to actually, you know, have any evidence to point to that direct line.
You know what I mean?
And, but of course, they just jump to it.
Like, so many people just jump to it like it's a given, but it's not at all a given.
And particularly, like, are we supposed to say because some Christian who was like a sex addict and was fear?
I mean, this sounds like a crazy person, right?
That's what it sounds like.
It doesn't sound to me like this.
Like, think about how crazy of a person you'd have to be to go kill a bunch of happy-ending massage parlor workers because you, you know, you think that they're tempting you and they're, you know, blasphemous against Christ or whatever, his own, you know, that you're, this is a crazy person.
So you're telling me that that person, if Donald Trump had just said COVID instead of Wuhan, that that would have been enough to like pull him off the, I mean, like when you actually start thinking about it, this is like beyond absurd.
And yet it's being presented by the supposed adults in the room as like a very plausible, if not damn near obvious, explanation for what's happening.
And I'm sorry, I do not believe that this Yemeni man in Chinatown stabbed someone because of what Trump said last year.
I just don't believe that.
And it seems that the corporate press is getting more and more desperate in their attempts to paint, you know, anything that's happening today as the fault of Trump.
So Biden gave a speech about this recently and basically agreed with the whole thing.
You know, the problem is really that we just have to demonstrate sensitivity from a presidential level.
I'm sorry.
I don't believe that people are out there committing murders and horrific crimes because of something the last president said a year ago.
I just, I don't believe that.
Or to be fair, he didn't say, I mean, I guess he keeps saying it, but I just don't believe that there's a connection there.
Again, like I said with the Black Lives Matter stuff, I really am not just saying this.
I'm open to evidence.
If someone sends me evidence, then I would gladly, you know, take a look at it.
Coastal Glasses Future00:02:32
But I haven't seen any so far.
And so I'm not just going to go along with this narrative because it is politically expedient for Democrats.
Sorry.
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Border Policy Choices00:15:47
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Anyway, let's change gears a little bit.
Speaking of a narrative that is not so politically expedient for Democrats, remember when Donald Trump was such a monster because he had kids in cages, Rob, you familiar?
It was a few years ago.
Remember?
Donald Trump had kids in cages, and this was like the worst thing in the world.
And by the way, it is pretty bad.
But it looks like Joe Biden has not freed the children.
I know you've been keeping up with this story a little bit.
Why hasn't he freed the children, Rob?
Well, because it's a disaster on the border.
They've got more people trying to cross in than ever.
He changed some of the policies that I guess Trump had in place.
I think the biggest one is like where you declare amnesty and that whether or not you have to do it in your home country, among some other things.
And now he's got more kids than he can deal with.
And because we don't live in a free country, he's trying to keep the press out because he doesn't want any bad press or any of the pictures about how they're mistreating kids because they want to pretend like there's infinite resources.
We can afford to take care of any available problem.
And so obviously we can be humanitarians in every single circumstance that could ever possibly arise.
Walla land.
Yeah, it's really something to see, you know, the kind of immediate change.
It's really, you know, it's like the immediate change from campaign into, you know, administration.
And how now all of a sudden it's like, well, so many lines that came out of the Trump administration are now coming out of the Biden administration about this whole thing.
But the one that really stuck out to me, and you actually sent me the video of it, was Biden's border security guy, you know, being asked, well, why can't the press come in and see?
Why can't we see?
And he goes, we're in the middle of a pandemic.
We're in the middle of a pandemic.
I mean, we have cameras in pretty much everywhere, yet cameras just can't come into these border facilities because, I mean, so, you know, COVID, COVID.
I thought it was really amazing how much they will just use COVID as an excuse for what is obviously just covering up, you know, what is a scandal from the administration.
I also love the, we're trying to do everything we can to make access available, which means we're trying to clean up the mess so that no one sees the mess.
Yep, that's exactly right.
That is exactly what is really.
Start shipping the kids down to Gitmo, keep five behind, put them up with a nice TV and a couch and go, look, we got nice TVs and couches for these kids.
Yeah.
I mean, it really is just, it's awful and it's, it's really heartbreaking.
The pictures that came out that I guess were from Project Veritas got some pictures from some of the facilities out.
And it's just, I mean, if you can imagine, right?
Like try to imagine, you know, kids being detained in these, you know, in these jails.
And now, plus with the COVID shit, so they got them all masked up and plastic, you know, walled in.
And they got, you know, it's just, it's awful.
It's like, what an awful situation for children to be in.
But it really just isn't clear that there's that there's an easy solution for this.
And for all of the groundstanding of the Democrats, I've yet to hear anybody come up and say, this is what we need to do.
And you can say it's easy to just say release the kids, but the problem with releasing kids is like, release them to who?
In whose custody?
A lot of these kids are not accompanied by their parents.
In fact, the number of unaccompanied children has been skyrocketing.
So you need to know where to really, you can't just release children into the into the streets.
You know what I mean?
Like you have to have some type of plan for this.
And the more that you, you know, if you just grant them all amnesty or citizenship or something like that, you're going to get a lot more kids coming.
And as bad as being held in the facilities is, the journey from their country to here is probably far worse.
You don't exactly want to incentivize more kids to come unaccompanied on that journey.
I think government's playing a losing game where they're trying to protect us from the harshness of our reality.
And if they didn't do that, people would actually make changes in their lives, take personal responsibility.
And even in this case, people might more see the privilege that they have of being able to live in this country and even just having the economic opportunities that these other people don't.
But as you've said before, a lot of this has to do with drug laws or other policies that our government has.
And if they stop protecting us from the harsh reality of, you know, what that's caused to people in these countries, maybe we'll actually make the necessary changes as opposed to just pretending.
That's what they're really trying to do.
They just want to pretend like everything's under control and it's completely fine.
And they'll let the mess escalate as much as it can and hope that if it, you know, when the cards come down, it's a big enough problem that they can either print us out of it or, you know what I mean?
The government's in the game of really big messes because if there's really big messes, then there's panic and they can either just send the military out and go, well, we got to prevent, you know, all this panic or they can, you know what I mean?
But that's not, that's not, no one's winning.
This isn't a winning strategy to pretend like things are fine.
And that, and this is such a transparent version of that where Biden literally does not want the pictures to come out where people can see, no, this is a harsh situation.
We actually do need to make some decisions here because this is not a working, you know, this does, this doesn't work.
And I think the thing that's scary to the Biden administration about this is that as I was making this point a couple episodes ago, but that you have, you know, what are dubbed the useful idiots, right, in many cases are true believers.
And so you have all of these people, right, who were whipped up into a frenzy about Donald Trump's immigration policies and kids in cages and all this stuff, you know?
And a lot of them really believe that stuff.
And understandably, you know, it's horrible that any child would be in, you know, a prison, essentially.
And so, you know, a lot of these people are very upset over that.
And it's not so easy to just get them all to turn that off.
I mean, a certain amount of them will be.
They can be propagandized into like, you know, only hating the other side.
But I think that Biden is pretty concerned that if these images came out, like, yeah, a lot of his more progressive base, which he's already shaky with.
I mean, most of those progressives only supported Joe Biden because they hated Donald Trump so much.
And Trump's gone.
They can keep mentioning him, but he's gone.
He's not even on Twitter anymore.
You know, they don't have him to kick around the way they used to.
And so now I think they're pretty concerned that if these if these images come out, you know, it's a Yeah, they might go, wow, this is incredibly immoral.
Maybe we actually need to make the societal investment in a wall so that people don't try and cross in here because look at the immorality it's causing.
Or stated differently, how do we just let these people in?
Well, then we got to get rid of government benefits for the people that live here because we can't both have government benefits and infinite people coming into the country.
So we put it back to you, poor people of America.
Do you want to be immoral and not let people come here and have free and equal opportunity?
Or do you want to give up your benefits so that we can do that?
And now you're going to have to compete with them.
These are choices that people have to make.
I prefer just the open borders, no benefit thing.
You know, I'm confident of my skill set and I think labor creates more opportunity, but that's not the decision other people want to make.
Right.
Well, it does.
It seems like with the current immigration system, we really almost have the worst of all worlds.
Like just on a humanitarian level and on a practical level, you know, like if theoretically, like you had just, you know, a completely controlled immigration system or highly restricted or limited immigration system, like if there were walls and, you know what I mean?
Like there were, it's just something that would actually crack down on there was no illegal immigration.
It was just not possible, you know, like Israel has or something like that, you know, like where it's like, oh, these are these big walls.
You're not getting in there.
Like illegal immigrants are not getting into Israel, you know?
And if you had that type of situation in America, there's problems associated with it.
Don't get me wrong.
I mean, I'm an anarchist.
I don't believe in government doing anything.
And it's wrong that if somebody wanted to invite their cousin to come live with them from another country, they wouldn't be able to do it.
Or if there was somebody, you know, it would certainly have economic negative effects that labor couldn't move as freely, you know, and stuff like that.
But, you know, you wouldn't have this.
You wouldn't have fucking people being rounded up and held in these facilities.
You wouldn't have people making this like incredibly dangerous journey and dying and being assaulted and raped on the way and all of this stuff.
You know, it seems like this is worse on just that humanitarian level.
And it seems like you get this thing where you have like the worst of both worlds under the current system, where you have this incredibly, you know, it's like we subsidize immigration through amnesty and welfare and pathway to citizenship.
And then we have to also subsidize the war against immigration and build up this huge, you know, like police state.
You have to rob, you know, all the eminent domain violations on the border.
And then you have to like have all of these like constitutional violations in the in the border zone, you know, which extends like crazy far into America, where they basically just repeal the constitution in these areas and kind of create this little mini show me your papers state.
So you have this incredibly, what we have right now is this incredibly like aggressive, tyrannical border patrol that still doesn't stop illegal immigrants from getting into the country.
Like, what, who is that working for?
Like you make all of these sacrifices, you know what I mean?
And like morally, economically, in terms of your liberties, you make all of these sacrifices and you still have people flooding into the country at record numbers over the last decade or whatever.
It's like, so what, what is this?
It's not even like, oh, man, we're creating this humanitarian nightmare, but at least it's preventing this other humanitarian nightmare or something like that.
It doesn't even prevent anything.
It's just this whole system is it just seems like the worst of all worlds.
And how can the Democrats possibly pretend like they aren't motivating it when they call them, they call the kids that come in dreamers?
So like, you know, welcome.
You guys are a dreamer.
We like what you're doing.
You're wishing to live a better life.
And they just gave, I think, 2 million of them a pathway to citizenship.
So if you're, if you're a kid, a little Mexican kid, you're seven years old, that's got to be the bravest thing you can do is pick up and go become a dreamer and possibly live a better life in America.
And this has been the argument from a lot of the right-wing border hawk types, the Pat Buchanans of the world.
There's been their argument for a long time that the amnesty encourages more immigrants to come, which does make sense and does seem to be the case.
And this was their big criticism of Ronald Reagan's amnesty, that once you do that, then you're going to get millions more coming in.
And so to give, you know, to give 2 million dreamers, the dreamers of, you know, of course, kind of propagandistic term, but the dreamers are the kids who basically came, you know, into the country as children.
Could be from, could be a baby, could be, they were 17 years old, but they came here as children.
And I got to say, I mean, I'm kind of like, like, I certainly, I don't want to deport dreamers.
I don't know.
It's like if somebody came here at two years old and has grown up here their entire life, I think it's pretty fucked up.
Well, here's another tough thing.
Force them back to their country.
But if you do this, you do have to accept that this is going to send like a wink and a nod to a lot of people that if you can get your kids here, they're going to be in.
And then you incentivize sending a lot more kids here.
And for obvious humanitarian reasons, I don't want to see that.
Sneaking in, we could just say, you're breaking the law.
Now, we can choose to have laws or not law.
You know what I mean?
The point of laws is you can rewrite them.
But I guess the condition, not the society that you and I go for, but the framework of democracy is that we're going to decide on having certain laws and then we're going to enforce those laws.
If you break a law, that's the outset of you being here is that you're, so then you're not willing to contribute to that system.
You're going to take from that system and go, I don't believe in the construct of this, right?
I'm taking from it.
I'm breaking the law.
It's not, it shouldn't be any different than stealing.
You can, you can choose, right, to have a law of theft or not have a law of theft.
You can choose to have a law of sneaking in, not sneaking in.
You can choose to have a law about not breaking your nose.
But if a group of people are getting together and saying, I'm saying for the society construct to work.
So in this case, when a person's sneaking in, they're breaking the law.
And people, let's say, in states such as Texas go, I don't agree with it.
I think it's unfair for those people to then be given the right to vote.
Well, it's funny.
It's a funny thing, right?
Like there's something really just hilarious about the aspect where you'll have these like politicians who write these laws.
The law is on the book that this is illegal.
And then when there's a citizen who goes, I want you to enforce that law, they're like, you racist.
Whatever a monster would want us to enforce the laws that we can have it either way.
So you can say that it's not a law and it's not a value of society.
And then that's the way that you do it.
You know what I mean?
You can't have it both ways.
And so I would think the tough decision to then be made would go, listen, we're all in agreement.
We kind of morally don't want to throw these people out.
Maybe we do need to have a second class citizenship in this country where these people will not be able to vote.
Their kids won't be able to vote.
They can live here and pay taxes.
And what's interesting is there's still a choice there that those people can choose.
You know what?
That's not better for me than going to Mexico or voting.
Or they might choose, hey, actually, I prefer to live here as a second class citizen.
The problem, this goes back to what I was saying before of people like to live in this dream world where there are no consequences is that everyone doesn't like the idea of a second class citizen.
Like that seems immoral.
How do I have a second class citizen?
That's not right.
So I'm like this person's worse than I am.
Well, what's the alternative?
The alternative is you're basically stealing from people in Texas who don't want to live in that construct where this person gets to vote.
Yeah.
Just getting back to what I'm saying of you have to actually start looking at some of the consequences of these things and deciding to make the decisions.
Well, I had this, not exactly a debate, but this is last year at some point, I had Jen, the libertarian on the show.
And she was basically, if I remember correctly, I don't want to misrepresent what she said.
whatever, because I just don't remember that well.
Real Life Libertarianism00:04:26
But I've heard this from a lot of libertarians where they'll basically say, well, I'm for open borders, but not for citizenship, right?
And I think part of that is because they see the problems of open borders with just automatic citizenship, right?
And they see the problems with open borders mixed with voting and welfare and all of these things.
So they'll take that position to kind of solve the contradiction internally.
And my follow-up to that always was because, you know, it's like my big thing with libertarianism in general, and I think this is where libertarians sometimes get goofy and make themselves irrelevant, is when you're just living in your head and not applying it to real life.
And that's what's important is what can be applied to real life.
That's all that really matters.
Everything else is just a waste of time.
So what I'd ask, and my follow-up to that is I go, oh, okay.
So now how do you enforce that?
So if you're saying like, oh, we want to have open borders, but they can't vote.
Okay.
How?
So you're for strict voter ID in all elections.
And you have to be for some type of ID that can't be easily forged, right?
Because like the current system that we have in so many, as we were covering a few episodes ago, the Democrats proposed voting overhaul is like basically no restrictions on any of that or no, you know, no enforcement of the restrictions.
I guess you have to say, yes, I'm a citizen or something like that, but there's no enforcement of it.
So it's like that's now you have this whole problem.
Like, how are you going to, how are you going to actually enforce that they're not voting, they're not on welfare, all of these things.
Because now the problem, right, in this libertarian worldview where you want to be kind of perfect and libertarian and consistent, which I understand.
It's what we all want.
But now you go, but now you're almost requiring by your own proposal a state that's going to enforce these distinctions.
So how are we going to enforce that welfare isn't being received or that voting isn't being, votes aren't being casted, you know?
And so it's just not as simple in real life as it is often presented.
It's just, there's a lot more, there's a lot more complicated moving pieces, I think, involved.
And the other thing that's, I think, you know, a really complicated part of it is the cultural aspects, which many times I think people underestimate and that you go like, so, you know, there are, despite how far America has come on the kind of racial front, there are still so many racial tensions.
And you have this thing where like there's a whole apparatus of the kind of progressive establishment that exists, as we've been talking about this episode, to stoke racial tensions, you know?
So you're going to have, you know, you're going to have a ton of that.
You're going to have reactionary right-winger types.
It's like, I don't know.
Paint me a picture under today's like American society, the way it is with the welfare state and with voting and with all of these things, where just we have open borders and this doesn't result in just, you know, like a nightmare.
And I don't see it, you know, and you can have as many like flowcharts or libertarian equations on a piece of paper that say it'll improve the economy, but we're dealing with human beings here.
And I just, I don't see this working out well, which is why my approach has always been, you know, it's like, hey, here's what we need to do to solve the immigration problem is end the war on drugs and end the welfare state.
That's like the best thing we could do to actually try to move us away from this current situation where we have the worst of all worlds and move us towards something that is better than that.
So anyway, I still push that.
All right, we got to wrap up.
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