Michael Malice critiques mainstream libertarians for supporting government mandates like vaccines and lockdowns, arguing that privatized borders align better with anarchist principles than state-enforced ones. He challenges the Cato Institute and Reason magazine for betraying liberty through vaccine passports and defending the Charlottesville crowd, labeling them "factory libertarians" who prioritize institutional status over genuine freedom. Malice contends that classism now outweighs race as a critical issue, urging the movement to reject progressive narratives while aggressively marketing true libertarian ideas against the rising threat of authoritarian overreach. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Rolling Back The State00:15:19
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 Gash Digital Network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem, the people's favorite episodes, which are always these crossovers.
So I welcome back author, podcaster, troll, and just personality, extraordinaire.
And of course, the author of the anarchist handbook, which is still just destroying it out there.
And the guy who's always pushing buttons and having a lot of fun, the great Michael Malis.
This reminds us a little clip of some Indian guru or something where he goes, democracy is government by the people, of the people, and for the people, but the people are retarded.
So I'm not a surprise on the people's choice.
There you go.
Everyone needs to go look at that clip because it's absolutely hilarious.
It's this very elderly, like Indian, I think he's Indian man, just looking very wise and saying that phrase.
It was a great, glorious clip and pretty much sums up everything we've been talking about for years in one little wise clip.
Yeah, pretty fantastic.
That was my favorite part of the interview.
It cut the tape.
That's it.
We got it already.
We don't even need the episode.
It's all downhill.
So I, all right.
So I've had this idea of like wanting to do an episode with you for a while planned, and I'm going to push it back again because there's just other stuff that I want to talk about.
But I will hint a little bit that I wanted to talk about do an episode on the anarchist handbook and what your favorite chapters were, what kind of you got from that.
I read the David Friedman chapter and I kept messing up the audio file.
So I read it multiple times.
I'm very familiar with it.
So we're going to talk about that in a crossover episode coming.
Well, let me just make an announcement.
Well, that's go ahead.
Sure.
I literally was about to ask you just about the status.
So go ahead.
Right.
So after we finish recording this right now, I am heading into the gas chamber at the studio and I am going to be recording the introductions to all the different chapters.
The book is done, audio book, except for one chapter, which is coming imminently.
So I'm going to be doing that big reveal.
By the time this drops, people will know who's reading what chapter.
I'm really, really pleased with the cast I assembled.
And something else I'm really pleased about, which I did not expect at all, and I don't think anyone expected really, is that this is going to be the go-to book on anarchism for a very long time to come.
I did not see that coming.
No, listen, as we've said a couple of times before, it's really, it's been my biggest white pill of the year so far.
And I'm just blown away by it.
I thought when you first told me that you were going to do this, I thought like, what a cool little project.
Yes.
Right.
While we're waiting on, you know, the white pill.
Like, that's so cool that you'll put this out.
And neat, you know, it'll get in the hands of a few people and they can read all these great anarchist thinkers.
I never would have imagined that it would have become what it has.
And it really is something to sit back and be like, wait, so like there is a book, not like libertarian leaning or critical of some of these things, like a flat out, balls out anarchist handbook that is being like one of the most successful books in the last few months.
It's just, it's incredible.
I can't wait to see what this means in the future.
Like how many minds are sparked by this.
It's going to be at least a decade before we really see like how many people draw their intellectual like turning point back to this book.
And I'm really honored to be on the audiobook.
And I'm really giddy that a lot of the ANCAPs are reading Bakunin and Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman and people like that.
And because they previously, I think many of them see them through the eyes of Antifa.
And now they're like, oh, these guys, even where I disagree, I could certainly easily see myself having a conversation with this person and hashing these issues out.
Like they're, when they're right, they're really right on ANCAP terms that ANCAPs would absolutely agree with.
And I think that's the reaction I've been getting from all the ANCAPs.
Like they're shocked at that Bakunin essay, especially because Bakunin, people who don't know, he was the big rival to Marx to be the head, so to speak, of international, that wasn't a Hopper reference, the head of international communism.
So you would think, okay, this guy's trying to be king communism.
You know, he's clearly going to be the devil.
Then you read it, you're like, oh, this, this is pretty on the level.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I know it's something that's frustrating that when you hear it coming from our camp, from our people, which I'm sure you see on Twitter all the time, where someone will be a left anarchist or a left libertarian or something, they'll be like, well, that's a contradiction in terms.
You can't even be that.
And you're like, all right, I actually think you don't know too much about the history of these terms.
You think that this is some wild new contradiction.
I mean, let's like, just to be fair, we stole this term from them.
And there was a lot of like intellectual groundwork that was laid and some really good stuff.
I also think that it's one of the things that's powerful about the way that you come at your worldview is that you really are.
And this is, I think, part of the benefit of your whole like anarchist without adjectives approach, where you can speak to a really wide range of people and not immediately be seen as coming from the enemy camp.
This is why you can speak to Michael Knowles or someone like that.
And it's kind of like, okay, well, it's not as if you're coming out here as you're the enemy.
It's just, oh, these are interesting new ideas to play with.
And it's a great way to reach people.
Have you?
Speaking of the enemy camp, I know we're totally completely sidetracking the topic of the show, but I'm kind of stunned how far reason has fallen.
No, no, Michael.
Michael, this is the topic of conversation.
Oh, okay.
This is the topic.
This is, I had, I just couldn't.
Listen, there were two things particular.
Look, sometimes it's like, I want to have this conversation with you about theory and about the anarchist handbook and all of this other stuff, but there's sometimes stuff is happening right in front of us.
And I'm like, if I'm going to have a conversation with Michael Malice, I can't not talk about this.
So there's two things particular.
It was the Cato guy on MSNBC and the reason article.
So I wanted, I wanted to talk about both of these.
And this is why this was a perfect segue into it, where you just naturally went there without knowing, which is, by the way, how we always do these crossovers.
The other one doesn't know what we're going to talk about.
But it is interesting that there is this, I've never seen a bigger disconnect between the kind of beltway libertarian types.
And I don't even mean to say that with any like, you know, obviously that's not a term that they would like for themselves.
So whatever you want to call them, the kind of reason Cato group versus the broader liberty movement versus the broader kind of our world.
Here's a nice way: fix it versus destroy it, right?
Like they would agree we're crazy because we want to destroy a good thing.
America is a great country.
How are you saying you got to destroy it when we're the best country on earth?
That doesn't make sense.
That's their argument.
That's not a crazy argument.
So it's like we need to fix it.
Right.
Yeah.
But I don't know if I like, I don't necessarily disagree with that in theory.
I mean, I think as Rothbard used to say, I think our goal is to save the country.
Like, I want to destroy the system, if you will, that like the state and the state apparatus and the, you know, that entire cathedral or whatever you want to call it.
But that's because I love the country.
And I think that that is killing the country.
So, in other words, you don't want to destroy a parasite because you hate the host.
You want to destroy the parasite in order to save the host because you care about the host.
Sure.
So, any go ahead.
No, what you're saying?
No, I was disagreeing with you.
I think, but I do want to destroy the country.
And I'm glad someone is going to pull that as a clip because I do think a national divorce is necessary.
I don't think this is the kind of thing where you could take a scalpel out and remove, you know, whatever you want to call it.
And I certainly don't think this is a major disagreement that you're ever, it's not possible to have answers coming out of Washington.
Now, they could easily say true, but we have to deal with the situation as it is at hand.
You can't pretend Washington doesn't exist.
And so, this becomes a question: like, okay, to what extent when you're fighting within the system, are you validating that system?
And it's a very tricky, sophisticated conversation.
And, you know, I don't think that there's necessarily right or wrong.
There's certainly plausible reasons for both sides.
Yeah, I think one of the big, yeah, you know, I was, I was filling in for Tom Woods the other day.
I think you did fill an episode for him.
No, I didn't.
Oh, you didn't?
I thought you were going to.
Oh, whatever.
Anyway, no verified people.
Yeah, that was a rule.
Yeah.
Anyway, Tom is doing much better.
For, I know a lot of people were concerned, but when he was, when he was sick, I did an episode filling in.
I interviewed Jeff Dice.
And the way he put it, which I thought was a really interesting way to put it, it was almost like a different way to view the red pill, blue pill distinction amongst libertarians and the beltway versus outside of the distinction, is that he said that there are so many people in that kind of orbit, in the Reason Cato orbit, who essentially share the same desired outcomes with the statists.
They just want to achieve them through libertarian means.
Yes.
And so they desire progressive ends through libertarian means.
And then there are people like us who are like, wait, no, I don't share your goal at all.
I'm not trying to achieve a society of equity through libertarian means.
I reject equity.
I don't want it.
I don't think it's a desired outcome.
And I see this specifically with the COVID stuff, where there's a lot of libertarians in that world who are basically like, well, look, we want everyone to be vaccinated, masked up, and socially distancing and all of this stuff.
But we'd kind of rather it not be government mandates that are leading to all of that.
We'd like voluntarily for people to choose to do what the government wants us to do.
And that is not my attitude at all about this.
Like, I don't want human beings to be deemed non-essential and staying at home.
I don't want their faces to be covered.
And I don't want anybody to be forced into making a medical decision that they don't want to make.
So like, I just, I do not share the same desired outcomes as you or the cathedral.
I have a whole different.
So it's not like, and if you do share the same.
And can I say one thing?
I think this is an important distinction.
I don't want people to be vaccinated.
I want them to be healthy and safe and alive.
So they are making this big intellectual leap that, yes, there's absolutely correlation between vaccination and health, but to have them be an equivalence, that is something I reject entirely.
Yes, 100%.
And, you know, it's interesting because back, you know, when I was on Rogan last time, we had that clip went viral, which, you know, had very little to do with me, but it went and Fauci condemned Rogan and Joe Biden condemned Rogan.
It went like all the way up to the top because he was basically, I mean, what he said, I think that they objected to was that he was like, oh, if you're like a young, healthy person, would I recommend you get the vaccine?
No, I'd probably just recommend you be really healthy and exercise a lot and really have a strong immune system.
Now that we've gotten a lot more data in, It's certainly debatable which one is going to give you more protection against like severe illness or death from the virus.
I mean, look, I don't know exactly what they're saying the protection that you get from the vaccines are at this point now with this whole Delta variant out there, but there's like a 99 point something high survival rate for young healthy people already.
So if you're telling me getting in really good shape, having a good diet, getting vitamin D, exercising, all these things, this probably puts you at like 99.999 survival rate.
Can the vaccine really do any better than that?
I mean, he's got a really strong argument.
But let's talk about a broader point, which is there is a lot of talk about slippery slope when it comes to things like racism.
I just had Arthur Herman on my show.
It's airing next week.
He had a book called The Viking Heart.
And one of the things he and I discussed, and I know Glenn Greenwell discussed this as well, is the really profoundly either dishonest or stupid idea that all politics in the world have to be viewed through an American lens.
So that Duterte, the head of the Philippines, who's clearly a strong man, is the Trump of the Philippines, and Bolsonaro is the Trump of Brazil and all this other stuff.
And, you know, anyone who has even a modicum of honesty looking at international politics goes, it's really not the same.
People who are going to say that Hitler and Stalin are interchangeable, there's certainly huge overlaps in how they govern.
But for me and you, at least, it's a matter of life and death.
Now, that doesn't say that we're in a position to say this one's better than the other, but there's certainly differences that would have matched certain people.
So the Venn diagram is not just two circles over each other.
And I bring this up because there's many, when people talk about Trump's a fascist, Trump's a Nazi, all this other stuff, even though his daughter converted to Judaism, they will do the same mistake because there are parties in Europe, which do have, I wouldn't say neo-Nazi, but certainly post-Nazi roots, where many of these countries are occupied by the Nazis or Mussolini or whatever, or Franco to some extent, though he's not technically a fascist, and be like, they harken back to that.
They go, you know what?
You know, Mussolini had some good ideas.
So there is room in that space to be like, look, this has either Nazi or fascist elements, and it's not the same as in America.
So just because they're wrong about Trump doesn't mean they're also wrong about, let's suppose, the Sweden Democrats or the Jobic Party in Hungary.
But there's no concern about the slippery slope of socialism for people who ostensibly declare themselves to be libertarian.
What socialism does as its starting point is we are going to have a plan, and it's a given that literally everybody's on board with this plan.
And that once everybody's on board with this plan, presto changeo, it's going to work.
And when the plans inevitably don't work, it's the people who are defiant whose fault it is that it didn't work.
Very famously, this was the case in the Soviet Union.
They had something called the wreckers, right?
They would have these projects, these dams or factories.
The factories would go to crap because of communist economics and the information problem that needs to discuss and so on and so forth.
And then it's like, why isn't it working?
We know communism is true.
We know Marxism is scientific.
Well, it must be sabotage.
And then it became a job of ferreting out these records and destroying their lives and torturing them and making them say, who are you plotting for to do this, right?
This vaccine is exactly the same thing in concept, even if it were true that it's a good idea.
The Wreckers Precedent00:06:33
Because what the president is saying is we are going to have this program and literally everyone, including children, have to sign up.
And if you are not signing up to this program, this is an existential threat to the lives of billions of people.
So we have absolutely a right to do whatever it takes to make sure you fall in line, right?
So to have this precedent laid out in current year, one would think that libertarians or people who identify as libertarians with a knowledge of history would be like, wait, We've done this dance before and it leads to dangerous ideas.
So I can, as a libertarian, I could say vaccines are a great thing.
You should all get it.
But we really need to be careful of what precedent this is setting, because then the next time it's going to be like climate change or white supremacy or whatever the time, and they'll pivot very easily.
And this isn't just some weird conspiracy theory, which means basically spoiler alert, because as I talk about this repeatedly, World War I, Woodrow Wilson, they take over the entire economy.
This was their dress rehearsal.
So it ends up what he's out of office 1920.
13 years later, FDR is in office and FDR can say with a straight face, this Great Depression is a bigger threat to America than Kaiser Wilhelm ever was.
It's absolutely true.
So if we did it before 13 years ago and we got through it, there's nothing wrong with doing it again.
And that logic is very, very sound.
And there's none of that from this crowd at all.
So you can easily have their position on mass and vaccines, but there's none of this hand-wringing, which you and I certainly share about like, what is this going to mean in two or three or four years?
Yeah.
And you would think in the wake of what has to be the greatest crackdown on basic liberties and the greatest expansion of the government, that how could anyone, even the most milquetoast libertarian, not look at this and say, yeah, this is what I'm against.
I'm not coming in here to then be the mouthpiece for this whole establishment push toward more of this.
And I see a lot of this.
Like, look, even if you are the most milquetoast libertarian, who me, right?
Mitt Romney guy.
Even if you are, even if you're like the most, the most moderate reason magazine, you know, libertarian, not at all a radical in your own world, you would see things like, okay, when Paul Ryan proposes, you know, we're going to balance the budget in 50 years by just slowing down the rate of growth, that the corporate press's response to that is like, you're literally killing grandma.
You know, like that's how they deal with even any hint of moving toward your worldview.
So if that by the way, that's a hint, not even for cutting spending, but slowing down the rate of growth.
It's not cutting.
Yes, you're a murderer if you want to not grow the government as fast as we want to grow it, right?
So why would you in this world, like, why would you ever have to assume the narrative of these people who are clearly your enemy too?
They, they, they view you as a murderer if you, because you, any libertarian has to be a little bit more radical than Paul Ryan was on on the budget, right?
So when you, and you see this like to see, so the, and we'll get to the reason piece in a second, but the, the Cato guy who, um, let me see, I don't know, I didn't know the guy, but let me just grab his name so I at least give people the opportunity to go look at it.
So he was a, he's a Cato adjunct scholar, whatever, you know, that means a college professor.
And he went on MSNBC to argue that libertarians, in fact, do support vaccine mandates.
And that, yes, this was his argument.
His name is Ilya Saman.
Okay.
I might be mispronouncing that.
He's a Cato Institute adjunct.
Can I say one more thing?
Because I saw you got before you go on.
I saw you get into with Alex.
I don't know how to pronounce his last name, so I don't disrespect him, like Naratosh.
I'm sorry.
He's from Cato.
And it's amazing how these types feel like they're in a position to decree the official libertarian position on X, Y, and Z, right?
And this is a very common perspective among people who have respectability in institutions because they are now in an official position.
Trust the experts.
If I want to know, and it's not a crazy position to have.
If I say to you, Dave, if I want to know what the legal status of X, Y, and Z is, I'm going to ask this Harvard law professor.
That's not a crazy position at all.
So it makes sense for them to be like, okay, if I want to know the official libertarian position, I'm going to talk to someone from Cato or this college professor.
But that is also kind of missing a larger point.
But go ahead, please.
Well, yeah, but so no, to your point, because I think that's that's really worth bringing up.
Right.
So this guy basically, when I was on the reason interview, I said that I don't support open borders.
And that, but I would support all of these other libertarian positions that would probably make the immigration system much better, namely repealing, you know, abolishing the war on drugs, chopping up the welfare state, abolishing public schools.
I think that if you do all that, the problems associated with immigration are at least like 80 to 90% removed.
And then you're just dealing with like little things around the edges.
So he on Twitter said that I'm not a libertarian because of this position.
Now, again, this becomes this Scotsman, like, they all want to be Bill and F. Buckley.
More power to you.
If you want to be Billy enough Buckley, more power to you.
Well, exactly.
I'm trying not to be.
But to your point, you know, you go like, okay, well, people have these titles.
You know, he is the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute or whatever.
And it's like, okay, you have that.
But if you're talking about the movement, the libertarian movement, well, then I'm sorry, but motherfucker, I'm the authority a lot more than you are when it comes to that.
So actually, when it comes to this, this movement of liberty people, I can decide what represents them a lot more with a lot more legitimacy than you can.
And the other thing about, and I'll just kind of briefly get on.
But just briefly, in their worldview, you have no legitimacy because you have no institutional support, which is therefore your views are crazy and have them in vetted.
And if you're popular without institutional support, then you are by definition to them a demagogue.
Try Super Plants00:02:03
Yes.
No, I think that's absolutely right.
But again, to say our position would be that if you're talking about what this group of people, what ideas they represent, well, then you have way more authority than some guy with 6,000 followers who happens to have a position at the Cato Institute.
Like, cause who cares about that?
Because that is also the market deciding, which they're supposedly in favor of.
That's right.
And in the truest, best sense of democracy, the democracy of the marketplace, where it is truly that people are voting with their, you know, like who they want to listen to, who they want to read, who they want to like follow.
In all of that sense, we're much more legitimately representatives of this movement than these guys are.
All right, guys, let's take a quick second and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Fume.
Fume is the natural inhaler that makes it easy to get the benefits of super plants on the go.
Fume is a Canadian-made wooden inhaler with no electronics, just cores filled only with the benefits of super plants, no chemicals added.
Fume is a natural and portable tool for allergy relief, relaxation, and a great nicotine replacement tool with its pocket fit.
I love it for that.
I've been using the Conquer Cores.
It's really helped me cut down on the vaping.
If you're a vapor or a smoker, try this.
For me, it worked better than the gums or the patches because it simulates the hand-to-mouth addiction.
It just feels right.
And I really enjoy it.
I highly recommend people check it out.
They have a variety of blends.
You can check out all the benefits at breathefume.com.
Use the promo code problem10 for 10% off your order today.
This is a really cool tool.
It's healthy.
It's beneficial.
I highly recommend it.
Breathefume.com.
That's B-R-E-A-T-H-E-F-U-M.com slash problem and use the promo code problem 10.
That'll get you 10% off and you can breathe in the benefits of the world's super plants today.
All right, let's get back into the show.
Library Property Debate00:12:46
Anyway, with the open borders thing, you know, and I'm thinking of maybe doing like a debate with someone on this topic.
I actually, I challenged him to a debate, but he didn't.
He didn't respond to me.
But I was like, but I said to him, I was like, well, if you say this position makes me not a libertarian, let's debate that.
Well, he's lying.
And here's why he's lying.
Because Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand, neither of them were, Ayn Rand did not identify as libertarian, of course.
Neither of them were open borders.
And the idea that you could have a black and white issue when the state is clearly involved, the idea that when I cross the border, I'm certainly having access to governments and government services and I'm paying taxes and so on and so forth to claim that I am for open borders in a libertarian system where there's no welfare state, there's no voting, where I have to get a job, I have to pay my rent.
In that case, citizenship is almost superfluous, right?
I'm not for open borders when I can cross, have kids, and that kid can vote and they can vote themselves welfare, whatever they want.
Well, yes, no, right.
So I agree with all of that.
But the truth is that I was at one point, I would have described myself as an open borders libertarian years ago.
And I was convinced by reading Rothbard and Hoppe and Lou Rockwell and Ron Paul and a bunch of other libertarians.
So it's not as if I'm coming at this from a non-libertarian point of view.
It is actually the libertarian argument.
And I would say that to your point, really, I don't think open borders would accurately describe an anarchist society.
I mean, an anarchist society would be completely privatized borders, which could be as open or as closed as the property owners wanted them to be.
Now, when you talk about government open borders.
You know what?
Can I interrupt?
I think I have the perfect way to put a toaster in these people's bathtubs.
I think the correct position is I'm pro-borders and pro-immigrant.
Yeah, well, that is, I think that is a fair way to put it.
Now, I am certainly not, which a bunch of them just assume, even though I've never said anything like this.
I'm not.
Gillespie asked me in the interview, which, you know, it is quite to his credit.
He was just asking.
He wasn't like saying you are.
But he goes, so do you think that in some way, like Mexican people aren't like as, you know, like, can't adapt to freedom in the same way or that they're like somehow like, you know, like worse than the people that we have here?
And I said to him, I went and was like, no, not at all.
I'd rather have Mexican immigrants running the system than white, you know, New York Times Art Board.
Yes.
I said then, I think what I said is like Ivy League college students.
I'd much rather have that.
So it's not anything like that.
To me, the libertarian position does get pretty murky when you're talking about government commons.
Okay.
The idea that this is land, wealth, resources that's been expropriated from the domestic population, the idea that the commons should be open to anyone does not really follow from libertarian principles.
I mean, truthfully, what we believe is that those resources should be returned to the people who they were stolen from.
It does not follow that then, therefore, if the government has a public park or a public school and some homeless person wants to come do drugs in them, that they have to go, well, it's open to everybody because it's like, no, that's not actually the logical libertarian conclusion.
To me, like what Rothbard's fundamental insight, or perhaps it wasn't originally Rothbard's insight, but the centerpiece of Rothbardian libertarianism was basically that the government doing something, whether democratically elected or not, does not change the moral character, characteristic of the action.
So you could have a blue uniform and a badge on.
That doesn't change the morality of your relationship with someone else.
If it would be evil for a private person to do it, it would also be evil for a public person to do it.
But when it comes to immigration, you're in a whole different territory.
We would not find it evil for a private person to say, you're not welcome on my property.
That's a completely legitimate thing to do.
Now, when the government does it, of course, it's not the same thing.
Their property was not obtained through a just acquisition of property.
You have lots of problems there, but that exists with open or closed borders.
Anyway, maybe I'll do a whole lot of things.
Can I say one more thing?
Here's the question I just thought of.
Okay.
And I'm going to get like into the Talmud.
When I was a kid, my dad, for some fuck the reason, forced me to study the Talmud, which is written in Aramaic, which is an ancient form of Hebrew.
And you basically have to have one page down before you get to the next page.
So I spent like weeks on this one damn page and I will never be able to forget it.
So what the Talmud does, people don't know, besides teaching people that we should kill Christian children and drink their blood, is all the rules that apply to Judaism, they go through them with a fine-toothed comb and be like, okay, what does this mean in practice?
One of the big issues is on Passover, you're not allowed to have bread in your house.
It's like, okay, if you see a mouse with a crust of bread running into the wall, does it still count?
What if you see a white mouse running into the wall with a crust of bread and then a black mouse has a crust of bread running out of the house?
Does that count?
So they really are splitting hairs.
And one example, the page I had to memorize is you can't steal.
Okay, fine.
If you're walking along the street and you see something that's big and cheap, just laying on the ground on the sidewalk, like pomegranates, are you allowed to take it?
Is that stealing?
What if it's something small and expensive, like sesame seeds, which were expensive at the time?
Is that stealing?
So these are actually really good questions.
And this kind of speaks to why Judaism and law became so interrelated.
But let's talk about out of immigration, the tragedy comments.
Let's talk about parks.
You and I, everyone listening to this, I'm sure would agree.
If there's a river in Central Park, you can drink from it, right?
It's not, it's fine.
Okay, am I allowed to take a bush from a public park and put it in my house or on my lawn?
I don't know.
I would have to sit down and think about this argument, right?
Because, and I don't know what they would say.
It's not intuitive from property or libertarian premises what the answer would be there in either case.
On one case, okay, it's the homesteading argument.
On the other case, well, you're clearly damaging something that was meant for everybody.
On the third case, like, I don't care what it was meant for.
You know, if I get extra income tax back, a refund that I shouldn't have got it, I'm not going to be like, you made a mistake.
I'm going to take what I can get back from the state.
So I don't know how I would answer this.
No, there's certainly an argument there.
There's certainly an argument.
Now, I'm just going to say one thing.
To claim that this is a black and white issue and that unless you say about the bushes, you're not a libertarian, that is absurd to me.
Yes, I agree.
And I'll also say that, first off, I supported Jacob Hornberger, his run for president in 2020 on the Libertarian Party ticket.
And he, who finished in second place and didn't get the nomination, but he was a complete open borders guy.
I would never say like Brian Kaplan isn't a libertarian because he's open borders.
I see there being solid arguments on that side.
I just was more persuaded by the other arguments, but I notice a lot of those types say you're not a libertarian and never even address the other arguments.
And the argument that the argument that Lou Rockwell and late Rothbard and Hans Hermann Hoppe essentially made is that they said that in your example in the park that no, the park shouldn't be treated as unowned.
So it's not homesteading properties in the same way that if I were to take your wallet and run down the street, it's not like everyone now has a claim to your wallet.
We don't look at your wallet as unowned.
We look at it as rightfully owned by you.
And what should be done is to the best of our abilities to return it to you.
So in other words, we want to privatize all of these, these, you know, these national parks, but in the same sense that if you were for private, let's say a town was taxed and then they built a park and you said, okay, we're going to privatize it by letting, let's say this is in Washington state.
So we're going to privatize it by letting some New York corporation own all of it.
We would both say like, wait, wait, wait, no, That's not the right form of privatizing it.
It's not just because it's private.
Now it's better.
This should in some way be returned.
Maybe shares are owned by the community that was taxed to pay for it because we recognize that, no, there was a rightful owner originally.
On top of that, I also think it is reasonable in this world of competing bad options, right?
Which is what you have when you have a state.
Trade-offs, yes.
Trade-offs, yes.
What you can say is that as long as the state does run something, I'd rather they run it in a way that somewhat simulates what private ownership would look like rather than run it in this kind of communist, you know, like every, it's everybody.
So look, if you have a public library and somebody is in there, just, you know, a crazy person is screaming at the top of their lungs and pulling their pants down, are you okay with them being removed?
And like the answer to me is obviously yes.
I don't have a problem with that.
Now, if you want to just on some really simpleton 101 libertarian argument, say like, well, that is a peaceful person and he has the right to freedom of speech.
And now you're sending a man with a gun to remove him from that building.
It's like, yeah, okay, I get your point.
But here in reality, these people have already been taxed, have been robbed to pay for this library.
Now none of the taxpayers can enjoy it if this person is there.
It'd be better if this was privatized.
It'd be better if it was never built on taxpayer dollars to begin with.
But while they're there, I'm actually, if this was a private library, they would surely kick this guy out and we'd have no problem with it.
Now, you can believe that and also believe that they don't have a right to arrest that guy and throw him in a cage.
They don't have a right to beat the crap out of him.
So I can say I'm not for open borders and still say, hey, I don't want the constitutional free zones and, you know, on either side of the border.
I don't want to see mass deportations.
I don't want to see ICE raids.
I don't want to see any of those things.
Those I think are incompatible with libertarianism.
But just the idea that everyone has to be let in, I don't see that as like a straight line from libertarian theory.
Let me make two points.
First of all, today is the 60th anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall.
It started 60 years ago today.
And one of the reasons they built the Berlin Wall, and I talk about this a lot in my forthcoming book, The White Pill, is because of immigration.
Because a lot of doctors and engineers and highly educated, highly skilled people who were living in East Berlin were like, why am I putting up with this crap when I can cross the street, make 10 times the money for me and my family while providing objectively extremely useful service and getting my fair wages for it?
And I don't have to worry about my phone being tapped.
So this brain drain, this also happened with Britain in the US.
You had all these kind of high performing, the kind of people you want in a society.
They were crossing the pond to the US because they're like, why am I paying 90% of my money in taxes when I could be healing lives and not dealing with the government bureaucracy here in the UK?
It makes no sense to me.
So that is one.
Another thing is, like the library thing just made me ask of like a question, like, okay, if you lose a book from the library, right?
You have to pay the fee and then it's kind of a wash.
Well, what if there's this happened actually in real life?
There were Nathaniel Brandon, who was Ayn Rand's protege, he was looking for a copy of Anthem when it was hard, or no, excuse me, or we the, I think it was Anthem or We the Living, and it was impossible to find back then.
So he saw it in a library and he just kept it.
And Rand said, well, I give you an official papal dispensation for it.
So the question is, well, is it ethical if there's a rare book at a library for you to just pay the fee, which is effectively the price and keep it?
Is it worse if you take it not for personal use, but to flip it on eBay?
Off the top of my head, I don't know.
But to say that this is an obvious question to me, I don't think that's accurate.
Yeah, and then you get into an area which is a little bit aside from that, but I completely agree with you.
I mean, there's arguments on all sides and it's not that clear-cut.
But then you also get into the bigger argument, which is like, well, what is look, if we're all together on what the end goal should be, that this should all be privatized and we should live in a free society, then what is the best thing to get us on that path?
Like, how do we, what's the best way to start moving toward that path?
And also there, there's room for debate.
But what's interesting, what I find kind of fascinating is that, so a guy like that Alex guy who claims that I'm not a libertarian, and this is why I, when I challenged him to a debate, I was like, well, let's look, we could debate the whole immigration thing, but let's specifically debate that.
Why this issue to you makes me not a libertarian?
Because this is a guy who enthusiastically supported Gary Johnson and Bill Weld.
And so I'm going like, okay, well, here's a guy in Bill Weld who like supported the Bush-Cheney foreign policy, was a lobbyist for Raytheon, completely, but was a big supporter of Hillary Clinton, like all these.
Heroin And Illegal Drugs00:14:44
So that's running against her.
Yes, yes.
Through the Libertarian Party, vote to Hillary Clinton, at least as best he could.
So all of that is not enough of a violation to be like, you're out.
But this one issue is, and I find that interesting because it's very revealing about like where your priorities are and where they're not.
All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is One Farm.
One Farm produces plant-based products with organic ingredients sourced directly from the farmers that grew them, including CBD products made with organic hemp grown in Bowler, Colorado.
This CBD is full spectrum, so it contains THC as well as other cannabinoids.
All their products are third-party tested.
They combine high-quality CBD with other powerful botanicals like turmeric, chaga, maca to make some of the most effective products on the market.
Turmeric relief cream with 425 milligrams of CBD.
It works great for joint pain and sore muscles.
They have daily eight mushroom immunity boost, gives any coffee a nice mocha flavor while supporting your immune system.
The CBD also helps smooth out the caffeine jitters.
CBD oils come in cinnamon, peppermint, natural, and lemon.
They make their flavoring in-house.
They have some of the best tasting CBD on the market.
They also have CBD available in soft gels.
Check them out.
They're a great company.
You can check them out at onefarm.com.
And this month only, if you use the promo code P-O-T-P, you'll get 30% off all orders.
That's onefarm.com, promo code P-O-T-P for 30% off this month only.
Check them out.
Let's get back on the show.
I, you know, I've heard a bunch of libertarians who will say, like, you know, if I'm like, because I'm flipping out about like all the COVID tyranny, and they're like, well, but you're not for open borders.
So you're okay with the government stopping people from traveling.
And you're like, okay, all the arguments I just made aside, like, do you not see a difference in scale and kind between nations having borders around them?
Okay, maybe you're against that, sure, but that's kind of the state of the world.
And all of the sudden now, the government's saying you can't go to a baseball game without this, this passport, you know, like floating ideas about all of international training, intranational travel.
So like, come on, like, let's be real people here.
This is like when I would argue with people about.
And one more thing, let me point out historically, before they took over, the Bolsheviks were flipping their shit about the czar having internal passports.
And then this was regarded as a huge element of hypocrisy when Lenin instituted them, or it was Stalin.
I don't remember what point.
But this was regarded for decades during the Cold War as proof of the demented totalitarianism of the Soviet system.
Yes.
No, that's a very important historical point.
And so, but I also, I remember like during the kind of COVID lockdowns, like during the height of the real hardcore lockdowns in America, where I would get these kind of like more beltway libertarian types who would be arguing with me where I'd be like, well, the government has just made it illegal for someone to go to work.
I mean, this is like the craziest crackdown in basic liberty of my lifetime.
And they'd be like, well, it's already illegal for someone to do heroin and they get thrown in jail.
And I'd be like, look, yes.
And that's wrong.
That's wrong.
However, can we just remove ourselves from theoretical libertarian autism for a second?
By definition, you can't.
But let's two circles that are exactly on top of each other.
That is, that is true.
But you go, let's pretend for a second that you were a regular person.
Yeah, neurotypical.
Yeah.
Yes.
Let's, let's just pretend that you were a human and you were looking at things in the world of human beings and how human beings live.
Most people see doing heroin as a very fringe, very destructive, very, you know, like outside the norm thing that they're very comfortable with being criminalized.
You're not productive.
You're not producing anything.
That is not how most people view going to work.
There's a lot more people who go to work than do heroin.
There's, it's, it's, it has a completely different cultural norm attached to it.
It's more morally defensible.
Yeah.
So this is a different type of thing for the government to make illegal.
Now, listen, I will grant you that on libertarian moral principles, neither should be illegal.
Like you, you own your, you have a right to do both.
You own your own body and you ought to be able to do either of these things.
But to not recognize that this is like drastically different is so bananas to me.
Well, even if you just want to be like the greater good for the greater number, okay, how many people have jobs and how many people are heroin addicts?
Not just users, but addicts.
It's, I mean, how many orders of magnitude difference is that going to be?
Yes, yes.
And that, so we should recognize when this is on such a such a larger scale.
So anyway, back to this, this Cato guy was.
Can I ask one more thing?
Like from their perspective, I do my best to try to understand their perspective.
I don't understand from their perspective what the biggest threat to liberty is if it isn't the government.
Yeah.
Like, well, is it Isaac racism?
I think possibly.
I think to a lot of them, that's what they think.
I mean, like a lot of them really do seem, you know, I saw people, I guess it was the anniversary of Charlottesville the other day.
Yes, three years ago.
I was there.
Yeah.
And I saw a bunch of people.
That's right.
You were leading the chant, but it was the counter chant.
Michael was leading the, we will replace you.
By the way, for everyone at home, Dave is currently wearing a Moses sweatshirt.
You can't see it because of the mic, but it says Moses.
It is.
Let my people go.
That was the chant.
40 more years.
40 more years.
But at the end of this, I'm going to have to explain the difference between the Moses Institute and the Moses Caucus.
They're aligned, but they're different organizations.
Anyway, don't they take it?
But they all answered Israel.
They sure do.
So I saw that there's like some libertarians on there, the very woke libertarians talking about like, this was the day that I realized there was this split, this libertarian to alt-right pipeline.
And I saw other libertarians defending these people down in Charlottesville and all this.
And the reality of the situation is that no one was exactly, libertarians weren't really defending the people in Charlottesville.
We were pointing out that this threat is absurdly overblown and is only being used because it suits the corporate press, the corporate press's interests.
The idea that the threat of fascism was coming from a couple hundred people in Charlottesville chanting about Jews was always so ridiculous.
And today, as you see the Biden administration turning the war on terrorism inward and bringing in the Chinese social credit system that they're calling vaccine passports and all of this stuff, lockdowns and corporate bailouts, you're like, the idea that you're still talking about this group of people from 2017 who have precisely as much power as they had then, which is zero, probably less influence now than they had then.
The idea that you're even talking about this is absurd to a lot of us.
So if you can't distinguish between that and defending their ideas, I don't know what to tell you.
And also telling a Jew to his face that no, you're wrong.
This is a big threat and this is anti-Semitism.
It's like, who has more skin in the game if things go south when we're getting the crystal knock route?
Like really, who is really going to be more of a concern?
William Weld or Dave Smithovitz, whatever your full name was.
Let's be honest here.
So the idea that this is hand waving away of anti-Semitism or these concerns, I think is also, it does speak to this kind of progressive mythos where, you know, what Thomas Soule calls the vision of the anointed, there's a meme.
It's like, by the power of white woman, I'm offended on your behalf.
It's I'm going to insinuate myself on behalf of this group, which I regard as marginalized, even in the face of someone who was a representative of that group.
I'm thinking of right now of Maj when Maj Tour got kicked out of the Libertarian Party or forced to leave.
I don't remember, I don't want to.
He wasn't kicked out of the party, but they took away like a keynote speaking position from him.
But he had consequences for how he spoke, whatever.
It's like, you are quite literally silencing a black libertarian and then hand-wringing about this white supremacy issue in your midst.
It's like, isn't white supremacy when white people sit down and say, shut up and go home to like people who are people of color as opposed to, and I don't think the progressives are wrong.
I think they're completely right when they say, if you want to fight racism, there's a time to sit down and be quiet and listen to people's concerns.
I'm not a black person.
I've never been to ghetto.
It's really easy for me to hand wave away, but I learned a lot more by speaking to people from these kind of ethnicities or socioeconomic positions and be like, you know what?
Like this doesn't sound completely crazy what you're complaining about.
Even if I disagree, you're not a complete loon, but the loons on TV serve a purpose because they serve for the agenda of the cathedral.
And look, I would never, if there was something that, you know, and I mean, I'm sure there are things that me and Maj would disagree about.
I honestly don't know exactly what they are, but I'm sure, you know, like none of us agree 100% with each other.
And I'm sure there'd be issues that, you know, like, oh, I think I see it this way, he sees it this way.
And I have no, anyone is, of course, completely well within their rights.
And it's completely reasonable to say, hey, I disagree with so-and-so on this, or I think he's wrong about this.
But it is pretty funny to see, you know, the Libertarian Party and the Libertarian movement in general will have to acknowledge that you'll be like, well, we don't, there are certain demographics that we haven't been very successful at reaching and at spreading our ideas to.
And then you have a guy like Maj who is going in and doing that, who is literally going into the hood and teaching all of these people about like gun rights, about like the history of gun control and how it's used to control people and very often for directly racist reasons.
And he also teaches de-escalation of conflict.
Yes.
It's extremely crucial in these kind of environments.
And very, and very crucial to a libertarian society.
You know, like that's like kind of the whole idea right there, right?
Is peaceful solutions rather than violent conflict.
And then to see these like upper middle class white woke libertarians, their beef with him is that like he said something that offended their sensibilities.
He was like wrong.
That's your issue?
Like, I mean, come on, man, like sit down and take a breath and examine the dynamic of what's really going on here.
And Jim Goad, who, you know, I talk about him in the new right, he makes the point that historically racism and classism are really the same thing in America and it's much more of a classist thing.
And all the racist stereotypes towards poor Southern blacks overnight became the same stereotypes to poor Southern whites.
They're subhuman, they're illiterate, they have sex with their cousins, they eat this crappy food, they don't know how to talk, they're morons.
Ha ha ha, look at them when they're suffering.
And, you know, it's the same thing with this, with this Mod stuff.
It's like, I don't like how he talks.
It's too straight.
You know, he needs to urbane and refined.
It's like, I'm sorry, but you can't send like Cato adjunct scholars to inner Philadelphia where he took me and my buddies and he was making sure it was safe for us at that cheek steak house.
You have to reach people on their turf and how and their vernacular, as opposed to just pronouncing on the top of Mount Zion, as you and I would like to do.
Yes, no, I agree with you.
And it's a great view from that mountain.
But yes, I completely agree.
And I do, I find all of that to be very interesting.
I will also just add that I think the argument that it's not nearly that class issues are more important than race issues has never been stronger than in current times today.
Because there certainly were times like if you looked at, say, you know, in the Jim Crow South or something like that, even more successful black people, you were still fundamentally going to be viewed as black, even if you were more successful.
That would still be a thing.
Whereas today in America, I mean, look, if you are middle class or above and a, you know, not white person, not to say that there's nothing, but there's really not like giant hurdles in your way.
In fact, there's a lot of stuff that a lot of policies that are going to make things easier.
There's a lot of social pressures where people will kind of bend over backward to try to get you, you know, like seen as like, oh, look, I'm friends with this guy, or he's going to be right on the front of our brochure for our company or all of this stuff.
It's really the ones at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder who are screwed over and actually are not helped by any of these policies.
Like these policies basically make it so that like an upper middle class, like what affirmative action has basically done is that an upper middle class black kid who does well in school can now go to any Ivy League he wants to.
Instead of just going to like a really good school, he can go to any of the best schools.
So congratulations, the guy who didn't really need help has now been given a bit of help.
But this does nothing for the black kid in the hood who's still completely screwed over.
Like it does nothing.
And we know that the script has been flipped because in the 1920s during the Harlem Renaissance, there were a few novels.
Nella Larson had one called Passing.
Jesse Redmond Fawcett had one called Plum Bun.
And the plot of these novels were girls who are mulattoes or light-skinned and they were passing as white and the kind of psychological pressure on them and what this did for them ethically and morally, right?
Are you is should you pass as white and have all the advantages that that comes with it, but at the same time, what does that do for your family and your community?
Are you basically spitting in their face?
At the same time, it's like, why be a martyr and be oppressed if you have the option not to?
So it's a tricky situation.
So there was at the time there was enormous incentive for people of color to pass as white.
Now, as Elizabeth Warren demonstrates, as many, many such cases, there's an enormous incentive people to pass as non-white.
The incentives are almost entirely in the opposite direction.
So it very clearly becomes now a classist issue as opposed to racist issue.
Yeah, 100%.
100% right.
Camilla Harris is only there because of her ethnicity.
Oh, no, no question about that.
Explicitly.
Yes, yes.
No, I mean, Biden announced way before he picked her that he'd be picking a woman of color.
I mean, this is why she's there.
And her track record was of a loser.
If you, this is why I hope she becomes president.
People don't appreciate if you can't get black people to vote for you in the Democratic primary, you're really bad at being a politician as a black woman.
Yes, no, oh, no question.
All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is YoDelta Yo Kratom.
Of course, you know them.
They're the best supporters of my style of comedy and our podcast network.
Well, they just launched YoDelta.
Sanctions In Perpetuity00:07:33
That's right.
We got a new Delta 8 sponsor with everything you need to enjoy a nice high summer.
This is for people over the age of 21 and living in the majority of states where this is legal.
It's time to stock up and enjoy a summer of Delta 8.
Delta 8 is something found naturally in weed that can legally be shipped nationwide, and it does get you high.
Yo Delta is potent.
And if you're living in a state where weed is illegal and it's difficult to get, just go to yo delta.com for high quality lab-tested Delta 8 gummies and vapes that will get you high.
That's yo delta.com.
The promo code is gas.
That'll get you 25% off your entire order.
One more time, yoDelta.com, promo code gas for 25% off.
All right, let's get back on the show.
Anyway, so the two things I to get back to, so this is one of the things that I thought was interesting about that Alex guy saying, I'm not a libertarian or whatever.
So then this Cato guy who works at the same organization that he does, I'm sure he would not say is not a libertarian, goes on MSNBC.
And this is what's so disgusting about it to me is that he's clearly brought on MSNBC so that they can run the title.
Look, even libertarians agree that the government should mandate vaccines.
And he goes on there and goes, well, yes.
And basically uses this kind of like bullshit, consequentialist, with a little twist of false choice argument that, well, you know, it's really just to get one shot once is really a very minimal, you know, like violation of liberty.
And that's certainly much less of a violation of liberty than lockdowns.
So I guess we would, I would say that it's a fair trade-off and all this and that.
And it's like, dude, to go on to a network that is so explicitly an enemy of what you believe in and to go on there and use that as an opportunity to just hand them a talking point, which is, by the way, completely false.
I mean, the idea that like, well, we're forced vaccinations because it's better than lockdowns.
And he even said at one point, it's better than mask mandates.
And you're like, yeah, yeah, but the CDC is still saying that vaccinated people need to wear masks.
Well, what about this?
That would be like the argument that's saying it's better to have a draft of only males than a draft of men and women.
That's true.
That's completely irrelevant in terms of relativity policy.
Well, or as they say, which is another example, which is used quite often, is that it's better to have sanctions than war.
You know, it's like, well, it's better to just impoverish a third world country than it is to start bombing them.
And it's like, well, number one, it's better to do neither.
And there's no reason why we'd need to do one over the other.
And number two, well, what does this leave?
Usually you have like, this is what they were saying during the 90s when they had these sanctions against Iraq.
And then what happened?
We still had to fight the whole war anyway.
And we're still there to this day.
So not only is it not a false choice, one actually fuels the other because once you start intervening in this way, then you're much more likely.
First, you've set the precedent that you can intervene this way.
You've gotten popular support for it.
And now, of course, with in the sanctions example, you're much more likely to like really, you know, drum up hatred in the country that you're impoverishing against you.
And so the conflict is more likely.
But the idea that like, oh yeah, we'll just get everybody having these vaccine passports and then what?
Free society?
You think it's more now the government has a record of everybody who complies and everybody who doesn't?
And there's one very, very important metrics by which sanctions are worse than war.
Okay.
These people do not think in terms of strategy or a motivation or what gets people to the vote.
Like, for example, I had a tweet earlier this week that I said Governor Cuomo being forced out of office is going to be bad news for Gavin Newsom.
And of course, the simpletons are like, they've done dude with each other.
Well, they do have something to do with each other because the person who wins the election isn't who gets more votes.
It's who gets more turnout.
And when you have turnout being historically low as recall elections tend to be, and you have one for, so if I have 10 people who want to recall him and 100 people who wanted to stay, and those 100 people stay at home and those 10 go to the polls, those 10 are going to win.
So turnout is in effect, almost a more important metric.
Obviously, they're not as complicated than who has more numbers in terms of a random poll.
Sanctions are something else that's similar to this.
North Korea is an example here.
If we had a war with North Korea, God forbid, everyone would be talking about it every minute of every day.
And this would be a crisis issue, right?
And understandably, it was a nightmare, nightmare scenario.
When we put sanctions on them, as we have, the people in North Korea starve.
They don't have electricity.
They don't have food.
But since it's sanctions, no one gives a crap.
And this can go on in perpetuity.
So yes, sanctions are better than war, but there's one very specific metric which they hand wave away, but which sanctions can be indefinite and cause indefinite suffering.
And there's no mechanism for that suffering to be alleviated.
Yeah.
And, you know, there's, first of all, it was one of the one of the main grievances that Osama bin Laden stated in his declaration of war against the United States of America was the sanction and bombing campaign of Iraq during the 90s.
Now, again, you can wave that away, like Osama's a very bad guy, whatever, okay.
But when you see things like, I remember saying this on SE Cup show once when I was able to bring this up, when I was trying to make the argument, basically I was on a roundtable and the whole argument was, it was after one of the minor terrorist attacks over here, some ISIS-inspired guy like plowed a car into someone else or something like that.
And she was like, look, isn't this proof that we got to keep fighting them over there?
So we don't fight them over here.
And I'm going around and the whole table are doing and they're arguing with me these things like literally like, so what you're saying is do nothing.
I mean, we have to do something.
And I'm trying to make the argument to them.
I go, I go, okay, but how do you feel right now?
What do you mean?
You mean we have to do something like we got to go kill some people over there, right?
Because they killed some people over here.
So we got to go kill some people over there, right?
You know that impulse?
Maybe that's how they feel too.
Like maybe that impulse of like, yeah, we can't do nothing, right?
And I said, I said to them, I go, look, if I'm right and this is all blowback, or that's the major driving force, then you have to admit that your solution is only going to make this worse.
And since we've been fighting them over there, we've had to fight them a whole lot more, right?
And now it's a cycle that can never be broken.
And I brought up, I said, when Madeline Albright was asked on 60 Minutes about this, that they said, now it's a UN study.
Maybe the UN was wrong.
Maybe it wasn't 500,000.
Maybe it was only 100,000.
You know, maybe they were off by a factor of five.
But nonetheless, she didn't argue with the numbers.
They said that these sanctions have killed 500,000 children that have died from starvation.
Children?
Children.
500,000 children is what the UN study said.
Again, it's a UN study.
Who the hell knows?
But that they died from starvation or malnutrition due to the full blockade around Iraq in the 90s.
And she said, and she goes to her and she goes, you know, that's more children than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And you got to ask yourself, is the price worth it?
And without hesitation, Madeline Albright says, we believe the price is worth it.
She has to say that, though.
Well, of course.
Yeah.
Of course.
Even psychologically, you can't say, oops, I killed half a million people.
No, that's right.
But she could have argued the numbers or she could have like said something else.
You know, she could have.
Or it would have been more if we didn't go in.
It would have been a million.
Yeah.
But I just, but I just looked at SE Cup and I said, we have to start thinking about how we would feel if those were our children that she was talking about.
And I don't know about you.
And, you know, you don't even have to finish the thought, but you're like, well, what would you be willing to do if those were your children who she's talking about?
Yep, I think it was worth it to starve.
Applying Libertarian Philosophy00:10:07
So, there's just that kind of, you know, that's a whole nother issue that I also think applies to a lot of these government mandates of like, what is this going to stir up in people who don't wish to be forced into this situation?
So, that was that was one.
Now, the other one that I want to talk about, I know we're coming up against time, but I'll ask you about this is the other one was you tweeted to Reason to delete their account.
It was over an article that they ran.
And the tweet was, whew, this is a rough one.
Whether or not YouTube should have suspended Rand Paul, his criticism of cloth masks was stronger than the evidence justifies.
Where do you even start?
Here's where you start.
Okay.
Social media is a level playing field.
My account and your account, well, not your account because you're not verified.
I'm not joking because there is a caste system on Twitter.
When you are, you have the same possibility to make your voice heard as the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, as the president, as everyone you want.
They do have a caste system verified, unverified, and Twitter does play into that.
And here's why I bring that up.
I'm not being facetious.
If someone has a tweet and I reply as a verified person, Twitter has my replies at the top of the stack.
Yes.
That's an enormous advantage for having that badge.
And that's why people correctly are often enraged that these blue checks have disproportionate impact in part of the conversation.
My point is, if that's the case, and this is your chance to really have your voice heard equally to the Washington Post and New York Times and all the other prominent formers of public opinion, why aren't you swinging for the fences?
This is where it doesn't matter how many subscribers you have, you can really have an opportunity to punch enormously above your weight.
And they do not think in those terms.
They think in corporate terms of, I don't want to upset anyone.
I just want to present.
It's like a buffet, right?
So you have the Republican meal or the conservative meal, let's be accurate here.
You have the left of center, the progressive meal, and then you have the libertarian meal.
And it's like their mentality seems to be, I'm going to cook the best dish I can.
I will leave it up to the people at the buffet.
And if they don't like my dish, I've done what I could.
Yeah.
Meanwhile, that is completely deranged because anyone who has worked in business understands that no matter how good your product is, you need advertising and marketing.
And it's also enormously useful if you have a highly motivated consumer base.
Apple does this masterfully, right?
It's not just I'm an Apple consumer of Apple products.
I'm an Apple acolyte.
I proselytize their products and promote it.
And Supreme, the clothing line.
People line outside the door to buy Supreme clothing.
It matters a lot to them.
So this is a real opportunity for people who despise both political parties.
This is what they say all the time.
David Bose had that chart about how of the four quadrants, the biggest quadrupeds libertarian.
If you're going to take on the powerhouses, not only do you need people to agree with you, you need them motivated and excited because there is a cost.
I'm just going to finish.
There's a cost that's coming in at the bronze level, right?
So you really have to be like, okay, we're starting in third, but now is a chance for us to go after those big guys and get people excited.
And if you look at their engagement, which is a mixed view of how successful you're on social media, their engagement is almost nothing.
There's no excitement for their posts.
Yeah.
No, you're 100% right.
Hoppa had a line about this that I can't remember exactly what he said, but I think what he would say is that you're almost coming at this from a position that you're assuming that their goal is what your goal is or what my goal is.
Like if your goal is to live in a freer society, then this is an insane path to take.
But if your goal was, say, to be like a state libertarian advisor or to have some role within the cathedral, then their path makes a lot more sense.
Now, I'm not saying those are what their motives are.
I'm just saying that what they're doing makes a lot more sense if that was your motivation.
I'll say it.
I'll say that they're more concerned with status than with liberty.
And I don't think that that's an irrational perspective.
I don't think that's crazy.
You see this a lot, right?
Where there will be these type of libertarians.
And what infuriates me is that then I'll hear these right-wingers criticize libertarians.
And I think it's really.
I'm sorry I have to interrupt you because something just clicked is important.
What he's doing to this Alex guy is just a really limpristed way of asserting dominance because he's saying he's in a position to adjudicate over you.
And it automatically, if he's in that position, he's up here and you're down here.
No, that's exactly right.
That's exactly right.
But what's what happens so much?
And like I was saying, like these right-wingers will say, well, here's the problem with libertarians.
And even though it bugs me so much, I'm like, look, these guys are almost proving you right by how they're acting is that they want to kind of have this thing of being like, well, look, I'm the rebel.
I'm disagreeing.
I see things a whole different way, but without any of the risk that comes along with that.
So what they'll do is, yes.
So they'll do these things, like they'll apply this libertarian philosophy when it's in a way that will get you patted on the head by the entire establishment, not when it'll get you in a lot of heat.
So I'll see this a lot where, you know, there'll be like libertarians who are like, okay, DeSantis has no right to tell private companies that they can't discriminate based on vaccine status or to tell private companies that they can't have mask mandates or something like that.
And you're like, okay, yes, but you can apply libertarian philosophy to that.
And sure, that you can say he doesn't have a right to force these private businesses to do that.
But in the context of 2020 and 2021, when there are lockdowns, tens of millions of Americans deemed non-essential, corporate bailouts, vaccine passports, all of this stuff, for you to pick this time to apply libertarian philosophy to this group seems awfully convenient that this is the way to do it where you won't ruffle any feather in the same way that you could be like, well,
we're against the people in Charlottesville because they are collectivists and we're individualists.
Like, okay, but isn't if you really cared about liberty and you really had perspective on these things, wouldn't that be the opportunity to point out that like, you know, who's really the fascists?
They're in Washington, D.C. right now, not in Charlottesville.
And five minutes ago, you guys said that it's better to get vaccines than lockdowns.
So you're perfectly willing to sacrifice libertarian principles in a constrained context.
So yeah, you can say, yes, in a libertarian society, this is wrong, but wouldn't you rather see someone fighting back using their same tool?
If it's a wash, if they're both using techniques that you and I would agree are illegitimate and wrong, is it wrong to be like, let them fight?
As opposed to, I want to disarm this guy and let this guy have the weapons too?
Sure.
Yeah.
I mean, if you're already willing to compromise on these principles, then why not compromise to actually fight?
So again, like, should YouTube have kicked Rampaul off?
Maybe not, but he did overstate his case.
Here, if you actually want to follow the science, and I said this on my last podcast, Ram Paul did overstate his case a little bit.
He said cloth masks don't work.
And that is overstating the case a little bit.
But you know what else is overstating the case?
Saying they do.
And who's been saying that?
That is not backed up by the science to just simply assert that cloth masks work.
And the entire cathedral is.
I'll say this.
And then you can have the last word and we could wrap on that.
But I'll tell you, it's something that I notice a lot.
Like I really don't listen to that many podcasts these days.
I'm just, I'm busy and my wife's pregnant and I got a kid and I got a career.
And it's hard to listen to everything you want to.
And I saw, I'm only about halfway through, but I saw you had Curtis Yarvin on the show.
And so right away, when I see that, I'm like, well, I got to listen to this one.
And so there's something, you know, now I probably agree with the Cato and Reason guys, probably more on policy than I agree with Curtis Yarvin.
But you know what?
When I see Michael Malice is talking to Curtis Yarvin, I'm like, well, I got to listen to this podcast.
And there's just something about that that I think almost separates where we are coming from from where these guys are, where I'm like, this is just going to be a more interesting, a more thoughtful conversation, not worrying about saying the wrong thing, but rather having a real honest, you know, like communication.
And I just, I don't know, there's something about that where they take that, I think, to be like, well, see, you're some far right-winger.
No, not a true libertarian.
Because they're factory libertarians.
They punch their clock, they go into the office, they do their work, they punch the clock and they leave.
My work here is done.
So there's no concept of really how to live these values and also how to spread and encourage people to live these values and get enthusiastic about these values.
Because again, it's not the numbers, it's the turnout.
And they do not, maybe they don't think in terms of those terms because they don't have the capacity to get generate turnout.
Like this, you would think this would be a very fair critique of the Joe Jorgensen campaign.
This is a problem for us.
How do we get a nobody?
And that's no disrespect to her.
I hadn't heard of her.
I'm sure she hadn't heard of me, whatever.
But okay, this is going to be a hurdle for anyone of a fringe party.
How do you get people to invest in someone they've never heard of before?
Donald Trump had a huge advantage in that he had name brand recognition for better or for worse.
This is the case with many people, many such cases.
This is why like the kids of presidents become politicians, because it's like, I know that name brand, but they, for people who love the market so much, they don't think in terms of marketing at all.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, absolutely.
All right.
Look, we'll, we'll wrap on that.
Always, always a pleasure to talk with you, sir.
And I look forward to the next one.
Next one, barring something really that I can't help talking about.
We'll do an episode on the anarchist handbook.
And it should, and the timing should work out because it'll hopefully be close to when the audio book is coming out.