Scott Horton and James Smith analyze the midterm elections as a rejection of statist policies, noting Terry McAuliffe's defeat stemmed from backlash against lockdowns rather than partisanship. They argue libertarians offer superior solutions to government overreach compared to Republicans, urging a unified front to "flood the zone" with truth via alternative media. The discussion highlights how cultural consensus overrides legal mandates, critiques the hypocrisy of both left and right regarding police and war, and promotes the Libertarian Institute's fundraising drive to amplify these liberty-focused voices against corporate welfare and foreign policy failures. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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The Return of Dr Pepper00:10:51
Hey guys, today's show is brought to you by the Soho Forum, the great debate series run by the incomparable Gene Epstein, my uh my economics guru.
And uh, Monday, November 15th, he's got another debate coming up.
Of course, this is the debate series where our guest for the show, Scott Horton, debated Bill Crystal.
The next one is a debate between Stefan Kinsilla, who has also been on the show.
I love that guy, absolute brilliant libertarian theorist.
And he is debating Richard Epstein, the resolution.
All patent and copyright law should be abolished.
Of course, Stefan Kinsilla will be taking the affirmative.
Epstein will be taking the negative.
This is happening at 21 Clinton Street, New York, New York.
Doors open at 5:30.
For all information, go to thesohoforum.org and you can get the rest of the information.
Make sure you support that wonderful debate series run by the great Gene Epstein, thesohoforum.org.
All right, let's get back into the show.
Fill her up.
You're 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.
All right, what's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I have returning once again my favorite guest, the great Scott Horton, author of Fool's Errand, author of Enough Already, the host of the Scott Horton Show, the directing editor at antiwar.com, and the co-founder of the Libertarian Institute, and also the co-host of the brand new show, The End of the Empire, with Pete Quinones, which you can catch on YouTube, which is great.
It's my new favorite podcast.
And yeah, you know, I just want to have Scott in again today because I'm leaving for Scott's hometown of, well, not his hometown, but his home state of Texas in a couple of days.
And Scott's coming up here to my home state, but not town of Syracuse, New York.
So we're going to high-five each other in the middle of the air across the country.
But I just, yeah, that would be pretty awesome, but I think risky.
The logistics of it probably wouldn't work out.
But yeah, so I will be in Houston, Texas at Skank Fest the day after tomorrow, or when you hear this, tomorrow.
And we're doing a part of the problem pay-per-view event.
Me and Robbie the Fire Burnstein.
This is a one-time only thing.
It won't be available anywhere else, but you can get it at momenthouse.com/slash SkankFest.
So please go check that out.
I promise you, we got something really cool planned, a live show there.
So check that out for sure.
But I was just thinking today, because we always talk about wars when I have you on the show, but I just wanted to have you on and talk like Liberty stuff in general and kind of the state of the world.
And I have a feeling you'll force me into talking about wars at some point too, but we could do all of that.
So how are you, brother?
I'm doing great.
Thanks for having me back, Dave.
Oh, well, thank you.
I just saw, literally just got an advanced screening of your Scott's coming for my job now.
And he did a comedy routine roasting everybody at Tom Woods 2000th event, which I believe should be out very soon for the public.
And it was great, man.
I really enjoyed that.
What a fun time.
I'm Sam.
I'm glad you liked it.
Yeah, I wasn't sure.
I was pretty sure that people applauded and stuff, but it's kind of hard to remember.
The wife said everybody liked it.
So I'm like, okay, I guess everybody liked it.
But then that was three weeks ago or something.
They made me wait forever to see it.
So I've been really anticipating getting my eyes on it.
So it's good to see it and see that.
Yeah, they did laugh.
So that's good.
And then you're my friend, the professional comedian.
So then what you say counts for a lot too.
So that's really good that you liked it.
So yeah, it doesn't matter what the people think.
I will tell you.
I don't believe in this democracy nonsense.
I'm the expert here.
That's right.
Well, you know, Robbie, I already liked Robbie, but then I met him in person.
He was in Lockhart hanging out.
And him and his buddy helped me with this buddy's name.
I forgot.
Adam?
Is that who you're talking about?
Yeah, Adam.
Adam Nutter.
Yeah.
Another very funny comedian.
Yeah.
So about a week before that, I read my kind of rough draft to them.
And, you know, that first, the opening line, that was Adams.
So I thank him for that.
And then, uh, and then Robbie was very helpful and constructive and, you know, don't do this and fix that.
And your punchline's great right there and whatever kind of thing and help me out with it and all that.
So that was really great hanging out with him.
So, and I'm sorry that I'm going to miss you guys in Houston.
I was planning on going to this because I heard that there was something Skank Fest in Houston and I was going to go to it.
And then you're telling me that's it's this weekend.
Yeah.
This weekend, I'm in Syracuse with Spike Cohen and I forget who else giving speeches at a Libertarian Party event at Syracuse.
The, I forgot what it was called.
The Empire State, something about the Empire State Libertarian Party thing.
Yeah.
Well, that's great.
Yeah.
No, that's that's cool.
Say what's up to Spike for me.
And yeah, no, Rob's really good at that shit.
He's really good at like wordsmithing jokes.
Rob is, for all the people who come out to our live shows, they'll tell you, Rob is actually an excellent comedian.
And I know for you would, you would think the guy isn't talented at anything.
But if you listen to his stand-up, he's actually really, it turns out he's really good.
No, Rob is, Rob is fucking really funny.
And he's too.
And do you know who was the third guy with him?
I didn't catch the guy's name, man.
I'm not sure.
But he was great too, man.
You could ask Robbie who that was.
But he was really good, dude.
He was as good as Robbie was.
This was down.
And the crowd was laughing.
You know, this was at Thaddeus Russell's event.
Exactly.
Yeah.
The thing in Lockhart, where after the big event, we all went to a bar downtown, such as it is in Lockhart, you know.
And they had a set in the kind of backyard kind of area there.
And it was great.
It was packed like, you know, 75 people or something like that.
And everybody was having a great time.
Everybody's laughing their ass off.
Well, Tom, it worked well.
The Tom Woods event was pretty incredible.
He had like 3,000 people there or something like that.
And it was like fucking huge.
It was really cool to see.
Again, I wish I could have been there, but as people know, I had a bunch of stuff going on over the last month.
But it was so cool for Tom for his big event that so many people came out.
There was such an outpouring of support.
And that's very, very cool.
I was, it really made me happy to see.
And just the energy there you could see on the video was fucking awesome.
No, the whole thing, it really was great.
And, you know, I spent this whole year doing a bunch of speeches.
You know, I did that in 2018 after the first book came out, but this year it's been something else.
And I've met so many great people.
And this was just like that, only all combined into one or something.
That was just incredible.
You know, it's as you mentioned that, though, it's interesting to me because I was thinking about this earlier today, but it's like there really is.
I remember around 2016 when Rand Paul fell on his face.
I'm listening.
I'm just grabbing a Dr. Pepper here.
Yeah, yeah.
Grab a Dr. Pepper.
By the way, I should make Scott grab a Dr. Pepper before the show every time because this always happens.
Luckily, Scott's with Dr. Pepper close by.
But so I remember in 2016.
And by the way, I don't even want to, again, I don't mean to like take shots at Rand Paul because he's the best senator and he's been really great on a lot of things.
But, you know, his presidential campaign was awful and he didn't do a good job at that.
But so in 2016, when he ran and people remember, it was like 2014, 2015, maybe, when Time magazine named him the most interesting man in America or whatever.
And he was at one point polling in first place.
Way, way early in the race.
It was way early.
It was like it was before Jeb, I think, even entered the race.
And I think it was before he even officially announced.
It was like a poll of like, who do you think should be, you know, the president?
But there was still this hope that like the Ron Paul movement was going to continue.
And then it just tanked.
And there was the rise of Trump and the populist right and the alt-right and the nationalist movement and all this shit.
And I remember in those days, it was kind of like to me, like the dark days of libertarianism.
Now, I know for people who are older than me and been in the movement longer than me, like yourself, the dark days of like before the Ron Paul 2008, you know, thing were way less libertarians than that.
But for me, I came in in 2007, the Ron Paul Giuliani moment.
All I knew was the revolution.
That was it.
There was all this energy.
And then that was like gone.
And I remember seeing like back then, all the YouTube comments online, like anything political.
It was like we owned the world online.
Like if you watched any political video and then you scrolled down to the YouTube comments, this was kind of a new thing.
It'd all be like, end the Fed, Ron Paul 2012, all this stuff.
And then it all went to like this like, build the wall, Pepe something, you know, deport them all and, you know, Muslim ban and all this.
And it was like our whole, we lost all the juice.
And as this was happening, I started blowing up and getting like a bigger and bigger show.
So it was like I was doing better as the movement was falling as shit.
And I remember thinking to myself, I used to talk about this on the show.
I'd be like, stay the course.
This thing's going to come back around.
We're going to have another run.
And I knew we would.
And I knew we would because I knew that everything we had prescribed was being ignored.
And this was all going to fail.
And then when it failed, we'd be like, see, this is why you need to listen to us.
And I knew, and now I really do feel like between like a lot of different things, but like with Young Americans for Liberty, with the stuff that the Mises caucus is doing, with the stuff that Tom's doing and you're doing and Michael Malice is doing and all these people, I'm like, oh yeah, no, I see it now.
I see that it's like we're coming into another kind of like liberty movement, especially after all of the COVID shit.
And for you personally, you've been at this game for a long time now and you kind of got like real like street cred in the anti-war movement and the liberty movement.
But it does seem like there's been something different for you over the last few years.
Midterm Election Chaos00:06:16
I mean, especially since you wrote Fool's Errand, but now really with enough already coming out, where you went from kind of being this guy who was like, you know, like known a little bit in the scene to having, it seems to me to be a much, a much wider audience, a much like bigger kind of following and much more.
It was cool to see you get introduced in this crowd of thousands of people just like losing their shit for you.
So like, am I, I'm not wrong about that, right?
Like something's kind of picked up for you.
Well, yeah, it's it's the books and it's, you know, you and Tom having me on your show regularly, I think, too, because we're in the same medium and you guys have these huge audiences.
And so that's what I was trying to get at.
I was trying to get, I was kidding.
Yeah.
No, I mean, that, that absolutely is part of it, you know?
And Tom's been very supportive.
And of course, you have too.
And then, you know, I guess people like what they hear.
I mean, I got to tell you, that book enough already is everything that pisses me off about the last 40 years.
And I didn't forget anything.
It's in there.
You know what I mean?
It's all in there.
So I think when people read it, they get that.
They're like, wow, this is, you know, and just like I told you before a long time ago, everybody already knows all this stuff.
All I'm doing is putting it in the correct focus for you.
But, you know, for example, Ronald Reagan backed Saddam Hussein against Iran.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
In fact, Ronald Reagan sold missiles to Iran that they used against Iraq.
Everybody actually even knows that too.
But I'm telling you why it matters, what happened before it and what happened after it and why that led to the next thing.
And that's all it is.
But I get it right.
And you usually don't have access to that.
Yeah, no, but you're right.
Everyone does.
You remember the joke?
What's his name?
Oh, shit, what's his fucking name?
The black comedian who wrote for Richard Pryor, who just died, about Paul Mooney.
You remember Paul Mooney?
He had the joke where he was like, he did it on Chappelle show, but it was a stand-up joke that he did.
But he goes, they asked him, how does George W. Bush know for sure that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction?
And he goes, he has the receipts.
Yep.
It was a great, just like just like a fucking, you know, like, you know, alluding to the fact that, yeah, whatever weapons he has, he was fucking sold by his dad or by his fucking dad's president.
That was a Bill Hicks joke from Iraq War One.
And he's a thief.
He looked at the receipt.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Mooney stole that from Bill or he was updating it.
It was the same war again.
So you kind of can't blame him.
But he said, what time is the bank open?
Eight?
We're going in at nine.
You know, we're doing, we got this.
Yes.
Well, it's cool.
His stuff on Iraq War One from it's, I forget if it's relentless or dangerous, um, is really good stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I we're already getting into war stuff.
And whatever, we can talk about whatever, but I did want to, you know, I, I, there was a big election day just less than 24 hours ago that kind of is still concluding, I guess.
And I, I did think this was a really interesting one.
Um, and this is like an off-year mid-midterm election, you know, not even a real midterm election, but kind of the first year after, you know, the presidential election.
But I did find, I did think this was a pretty meaningful one.
And part of it's because the country is, you know, in a very crazy place and that there is, you know, this kind of unbelievable story that's being written in real time about the United States of America and how there's this huge rejection of the establishment.
And so we vote Trump in.
I say we implied, I didn't fucking vote anyone in, but, you know, that Trump gets voted in.
And then the chaos of COVID and the media circus and Trump himself just being a buffoon.
And so it's like, all right, whatever.
We go back to the establishment guy, Joe Biden.
And then after a year at Joe Biden, it's like, well, where are the voters?
And this was, you know, look, it's, it's not a midterm election where you have like a huge amount of data, but it was pretty, it was pretty crazy.
What a rejection of the establishment and particularly the Democrats, of course, because they're the ones in control that yesterday was.
And so the biggest race that was that was fun, I got to say, was in Virginia there, where Terry McCullough was soundly defeated.
And look, Terry McCullough getting beat is always a good day.
I mean, even if like Satan himself beats him, you could still enjoy him losing to us.
For people who don't know, he's like one of the Clinton top guys.
He was a fundraiser.
That was his job was he was the top fundraiser for the DNC and then he became the chair of the Democratic National Committee, but he was like a financial operative for the party was the entire role.
Well, he was a financial operative, but he also did manage Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign or chaired her campaign or something like that.
So he was like, going back to the older days, I guess.
But he also, he chaired Bill Clinton's 94 or no, excuse me.
96, his reelection campaign, or he was whatever.
I don't know if he was the campaign manager, but he was like one of the top- And he'd been the governor once before and then had been unelected and was now trying to come back.
Is that yes, that's right.
And that's another thing that's kind of interesting is like the old people trying to kind of come back in politics now and all of this.
But he was, he's running against a guy who was pretty much an unknown.
Virginia is a state that went for Biden pretty hard for Biden.
He had way more money than his opponent in the campaign.
He had, he got the endorsements of, you know, Barack Obama and Michelle Obama and, you know, Biden and like all the fucking, you know, the, the, a bunch of unions were throwing their support behind him.
Bill Crystal.
That's right.
Oh, yeah.
I did think about you when what's her name?
Ruben, that god-awful woman, Jennifer Rubin, said, this is big.
Everyone was dunking on her on Twitter.
They go, this is, this is really big.
I mean, he even got a right-winger like Bill Crystal.
Questioning Election Results00:11:18
It's about how out of touch with the country some of these people are.
In fact, McAuliffe in a speech said, I got the endorsement of the leading conservative in America, Bill Crystal.
The crowd was just like, who?
The who?
I mean, what?
What decade are you living in that you think that still means anything?
You know, Bill Crystal, the guy who just got slaughtered at the Soho Forum, that guy?
But what really became the defining issue in this campaign was for whatever reason, McCulloughs are so stupid, decided to make it all about what role parents have in deciding what their kids get taught at school.
And because, of course, this has been a major theme in America where there's been, and I don't know how many of these videos you've seen, but there's been local school board meetings all across the country where parents are furious.
And they're furious for two main reasons.
Number one, that kids are being forced to wear masks during school and socially distance and stuff like this and the remote learning, all the COVID restrictions, which are pretty goddamn insane.
And number two, what they call critical race theory, which I don't even, you know, I don't know if that's completely accurate, but basically more accurate, just the woke shit that's being pushed down kids' throats in school, which is being taught this kind of like race essentialism, this obsession with like gender identity and pronouns and all of this.
I mean, I got, I know my wife's nephew who goes to school in a fairly red district, not super red, but fairly red district.
And his algebra teacher, he's 14, he's a freshman in high school.
His algebra teacher started their first day of class by going around the room and asking everyone what their gender pronoun is, what they identify as.
And like, there's a lot of parents out there who's like, hey, what the, hey, teach algebra, motherfucker.
Like, what are you talking about?
And so they're coming to the school board meetings furious.
And the federal government is insinuating that they're terrorists.
I mean, I'm not exaggerating.
Like, literally, they're going like, well, we have a real problem with these angry parents that might border on domestic terrorism.
And so then Terry McCullough comes out and says, well, you know, parents really shouldn't be deciding what kids get taught at school.
And this just led to a huge backlash that cost, I think alone cost him the governorship.
Yeah.
Well, listen, I mean, the way I learned about liberalism from my liberal democratic government teacher in junior college was that freedom really is just the right to participate in the system, you know?
Right.
But no, you don't have a right to not be told what to do, you know, like, but you can run for something and you can influence it.
But there is essentially no limit to civil authority and their control.
And it's, well, it's as bad as what the right wing was before them, at least, you know, it's not liberty.
And, you know, there was one time a quote, I never could find this again.
My bet somebody could find it somewhere where Hillary Clinton stipulated, I think this is in like 2007.
Hey, you call me a progressive, which she's not.
She's to the right of the progressives for sure.
She says, call me a progressive because I don't like that word liberal because that's based on the root word liberty.
And I just don't believe in that.
And I think that what we need is a system of control where everybody does what I say and blah, blah, blah.
She's, that was what she said.
And that was why she liked the word progressive better because it didn't imply that anything is up to anybody but her, you know?
And the original progressives did not care for liberty too much.
Sure.
I mean, that may have been part of why they chose that term too.
I'm not sure.
But, you know, I mean, liberal did originally belong to somebody else.
So that much is true.
But yeah, I mean, honestly, I don't know what is really going on in the government schools.
I know there's a lot of hype on all sides.
I know the woke stuff is everywhere.
So if it's in schools here and there or everywhere, I guess I wouldn't be surprised at the backlash from all of that.
But I think that, you know, the other half of it, what you said is the most important thing here is all the COVID lockdowns and restrictions.
And I saw, and I'm really not an expert on electoral politics, but I did see some exit poll returns last night from Virginia that said that the COVID restrictions were high on the list of the people's priorities there.
And the so-called racist topics in schools was one of them too.
And I think, as you're saying, the guy himself made such a polarizing statement on the matter that no matter who you are, if you vote a Democrat your whole life and the guy just says, yeah, it isn't up to me what I inculcate your child with.
And that's not going to go over well, you know, over with anyone and clearly didn't hear.
But I think it looks this is in no way a random sample, but I got regular, plenty of friends who are just regular people, not political people at all, but real people from the real world who are not political and don't vote, always hated Republicans, always hated Democrats, never, you know, whatever.
They pulled a lever for Republicans this time and in the last election a year ago or whatever it was, you know, whatever is up for Congress or whenever it was, and in the 2020 election, pull the entire lever, vote solid Republican because of one thing and one thing only, COVID lockdowns.
You know, any and all of that, it's got to go.
And we're, you know, you're keeping count.
I saw you say on TV the other day, 19 months into this thing now, right?
Where people are just, they're just over it.
And the message always is, too, that, by the way, this is never going to end.
And so people are, they're being pushed in in reaction to that.
It's, you know, it's inescapable.
And the people, the, the, um, You know, the absolutely, you know, sealed bubble in which the major media and the liberal elites operate, where they only hear each other talk and have no idea how much people hate them or why.
You know, they look at Trump still as this crazy aberration that happened because of Russian intervention or whatever.
Otherwise, the American people would have been happy to elect Clintons and Bushes from now into eternity.
You know, everybody knows that.
Chelsea Clinton for 2030 or 2028, right?
Or, you know, George P. Bush, run him next, you know, make him a senator.
And it was just that evil Putin.
He disrupted everything, but everyone was content before that.
And the proof of that is that Biden got in there by the skin of his teeth, probably seemingly, you know, I don't know, looks like maybe.
And so instead of that being the last gasp of the establishment, that people essentially defaulted to this old standby because they had essentially no choice after they were just exhausted by the antics of the Trump years.
And, you know, I was wrong on your show.
I'm sure I must have told you and everybody else that Trump's going to win.
I just knew he was going to win up until very near the end.
And then it was a friend of mine said to me, you know, everyone I know is just exhausted and are not voting for him again, no matter how much they hate Joe Biden.
They just want some lower, instead of orange alert, let's go back to yellow, you know, for a little while kind of thing.
But, but that's no redemption for the establishment.
I mean, they don't even know that they needed redeeming.
They're acting like everything is fine.
Everything was fine.
The aberration is fixed and now everything's back to normal again.
They don't even know they're supposed to be sorry for screwing up everything.
And so then, yeah, they're shocked that they're, you know, suffering a repudiation like this, you know.
And I saw where you were tweeting about, oh, it's okay to question ballot counts now because the Republicans are pulling up.
Well, it is.
That is abounds, you know.
Well, I just, I just find it funny that, I mean, so much of this stuff is just, it's comical in a kind of tragic way.
But so that, you know, questioning the results of the 2020 election is like this, the highest level of blasphemy.
I mean, to the level that you are destroying democracy and some type of evil traitor to even question that, even though, however you feel about the 2020 election, of all the elections to question, it's the easiest one.
I mean, we overhauled the way we do voting in 2020.
Like there had never been.
They didn't frame the president for treason with the Kremlin.
So how far will they go?
Pretty far.
Well, right.
So that only that, you know, shoot him in Dallas, but dang, man.
I mean, I'm not, there have been presidents before, mostly Republican presidents, but presidents where the media was very hostile to the president.
But this was a president where the media was, I mean, not only did they aid in framing him for treason, but they obsessively every day.
I mean, they'd have medical experts on to question whether he was insane or not, you know, and like do all of these things.
Like it was just, so there's all of that.
You have kind of like in a way that never happened in my life before, where it's everything from like the deep state to Hollywood and academia and the corporate press and both political parties are all just trying to ruin this guy.
There's he was he was impeached twice.
I guess once was after the election, but he was impeached, the special prosecutor.
And then during his election, during his reelection year, the Democratic governor shut down the world, you know, and then they overhauled the way you do voting.
Like, no, we're not doing voting the way we've always done it.
We're doing it in a whole different way.
So, you know, after you, and then he's winning the night of, and overnight, he loses.
Now, I'm not even saying the voting isn't legitimate.
I don't freaking know, but you could see with all of that leading up to it, where like some Trump supporters might be like, this feels a little bit fishy, but you question that and you're, you cannot question the results of an election.
But the funny thing is that questioning the results of election is like what Democrats always do.
Aside from that one example, I mean, in the year 2000, and they were probably right in the year 2000, but in the year 2000, the entire time they were like, George W. Bush was never really elected.
Al Gore was.
By the way, I do, I think they were right about the year 2000, but all that aside, but 2016, I mean, come on.
They were the sorest of losers.
It was Putin who did it.
Hillary Clinton didn't lose and won the popular vote and all of this.
Before they said it, you know, Ohio was stolen too.
Yeah, 2004.
Value-Based Matching Solution00:02:03
This is always their game.
And then, of course, Stacey Abrams is out there still claiming she was elected.
So it's like completely fine.
And it's just funny once they lose an election.
You know, you can already see, oh, right, again, well, I don't know what happened where there's some fishy ballots or something.
All of a sudden, it's fine.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Let me say real quick that there was a thing by Matt Taibbi that he put out today.
New Jersey Policy Rejection00:15:36
He said he's working on a longer piece about it, but here's sort of a blog entry length piece where he brought up some specifics that were going on in Virginia where this school district in this very important county had paid $500,000 to this company to come in and teach woke stuff to the faculty.
Right.
It was obviously this major grift.
And it was, you know, it was like financial professionals who caught onto it first.
And then the anti-wokist reactionaries caught onto it second, right?
It was, you know, people were like, hey, what is this fraud going on?
Was how it caught and came to attention.
And there were a couple other anecdotes like that whereas specific controversies here where I think also on the pronoun stuff where was it in Virginia where there was alleged that there was a rape in the bathroom by a trans boy in the girl's bathroom and they covered it up and that kind of thing.
And then they, and I shouldn't even be bringing this stuff up because I don't know the details of any of these things, but I believe these were the controversies at play.
So it singularized the overall topics.
It wasn't just like when woke stuff.
It was in these particular instances, this woke stuff has gone way too far.
One case of personal violence, at least one.
And then this case of massive financial grifting, you know, and boondoggling on the on the government, you know, tax money level as well.
So I think that probably had a lot to do with, but you know what?
I mean, not that that's contradictory in any way.
It's just supplementary to the same point that, you know, why should anybody have to put up with this stuff?
It comes with these kind of corruptions on the face of it.
And, you know, I try to stay out of the culture war stuff mostly because I'm really just an anti-war guy, man.
I really just want to get everybody on board for the same message against the wars, no matter who you are, no matter what you believe about any of this stuff.
But I do think that the answer to the culture war for me is not to take sides in it as much as just to say, abolish all government schools immediately.
The market will take care of it.
And for people who are genuinely concerned about, yeah, but what about poor people?
By all means, create a nonprofit organization and educate them.
Raise some money.
Shame Michael Dell into giving you a million dollars and go teach some kids to read, have at it.
And why in the world, like if we just got here, we might wonder, well, how come education is the thing that socialized out of everything else?
How come it's not the grocery stores?
How come it's not the shoe stores?
Or how come it's not whatever?
I don't know.
The nightclubs.
You know, this is the thing that we let the government run it.
But there's no obvious reason why that should be the case at all.
And in my lifetime, I went to very decent government schools and learned a lot there.
And I also went to a private high school, which was run by hippies in a little house.
And man, boy, did I learn a lot there.
Wasn't that, that was the kind of advantage that I got.
I'm always talking about my anarcho-communist high school history teacher who taught me all about the CIA and the Federal Reserve and stuff.
You know, that's the kind of thing where you're never going to get a special opportunity like that, you know, without the market, you know, providing it.
The government schools are never going to do better than that.
I mean, it's not necessarily all the sausage mill of the Pink Floyd video.
That's an old reference, but it's, but it's pretty close.
You know, it's pretty, it's just, it's too many kids getting educated at once for it to really be personal and really very good.
Yeah, but they're now is I do think like really, look, man, like I'm with you in general.
And I've talked about this quite a bit that I do think like my major message on the culture war is literally is usually that it's like, look, this is a manufactured distraction.
And I stand by all of that.
I mean, I think to me, it's just so obvious that it's like, you know, there's a reason why the dying establishment.
And when I say the dying establishment, I don't mean just the politicians, but the entire apparatus, the corporate press, the huge, you know, crony corporations.
All of them have, you know, they dove onto the woke stuff.
This is all they want to talk about.
Because of course, this is what they want to talk about.
Because we're not talking about that.
You got to be talking about what they're doing.
What they're doing is so egregious.
It's destroying the greatest country in the history of the world.
That's a pretty big deal.
So we don't want to talk about that.
We want to talk about like impure thoughts in a white person's head or, oh my God, did you not, are you not attracted to a transgender?
Than you're a bigot or whatever, you know, the dumb shit is.
But when it comes to indoctrinating kids with this stuff, which they really are doing in a grotesque way, that is one issue where, like, it might be, you know, intended as a distraction, but I understand the fury in some of these parents, you know, minds where it's like, you know, goddamn.
I mean, that's worth this one.
Yeah, that's that's a thing where it's like, it's kind of worth dying over.
Like, you're going to, you know, and it's funny because even what Terry McCullough said was like this, like, well, you know, the government gets to decide what your kids are educated.
And the truth is, like, from the statist perspective, you're not supposed to say that, but that's always how it's been.
You know what I mean?
That's not a new thing.
It's just that this is such an egregious, you know, like ideology to most people that they're like, well, no, you're not going to indoctrinate my kids in this.
And the masking kids up at school thing really is just really disturbing to me.
And so that was the other thing that Taibbi mentioned where in this important county, I guess, Loudoun County, they kept the schools closed.
They still haven't opened the kindergartens in the, you know, through third grade or whatever it is.
And so this is a major part of it, too.
It's not just wearing a mask.
They're still keeping the kids at home.
And the moms and dads, you know, these are professional people with degrees who want to go out and do their careers.
And they're stuck at home watching their kid when that's supposed to be the government's job for some reason, Dave.
I'm not sure.
It's supposed to be somebody else's job while they're out producing things in the daytime, damn it.
And the, but the school is like, yeah, but we cannot work and stay paid anyway.
And so why should we work?
And then the answer is because you're going to get a bunch of Republicans elected.
Yeah, right.
Well, the other answer.
So the other big whether that'll make any difference is another question, I guess.
But by the way, so there was a bunch of other races, but the other big one that was, you know, probably the biggest takeaway was the one in New Jersey here, and where Governor Murphy was running against like a complete unknown guy.
And in New Jersey, there are something in the neighborhood of a million more registered Democrats than Republicans.
It's a very blue state, very blue state.
A state that no one was ever thinking, you know, like no one was ever thinking maybe Trump could pull New Jersey.
New Jersey ain't going for no Republican, you know?
And Murphy was, you know, up big in the polls.
And this was a razor-thin race to the point that they're saying Murphy won now, but it's not even clear 24 hours later whether or not Murphy won.
There might be a recount.
We don't know.
It was under 1% that he's up by right now.
It's very, very close.
And you think about that.
I mean, to have basically a tie in a state where there's a million more registered Democrats than Republicans really says something.
And this is all over.
I mean, there's some of the school stuff, but much more, this is just about the COVID restrictions here in New Jersey.
And so I don't know.
Anyway, to me, the kind of my bigger takeaway from all of this is that you're like, well, okay, so there's this huge, the Democrats got hammered in this election, and it was largely a rejection of government policies in public schools, government curriculum in public schools, and government restrictions due to COVID.
And if you're a libertarian looking at that, you know, there's something to take away from that and go, hey, wow, it does seem like there was a big rejection of these statist policies that a lot, there's a huge constituency who really is against this.
And that's something that libertarians might want to really pay attention to because you know what?
We're actually a hell of a lot better than the Republicans on all of these issues.
And unlike them, we actually kind of have some actual answers for these problems.
So that was something that was kind of encouraging to me and like a real lesson and a takeaway from all of this.
Well, listen, I'm sorry to short circuit your conclusion there, but to go back one step to a supporting point that I should have said before was in 2020.
Remember the mystery of increased, speaking of wokeism, you know, crossed with COVIDism, the increased black and Hispanic support for Donald Trump and the Republicans.
And this is a mystery.
And on the face of things, it should be because the media says he's the Klan.
So why would more blacks and Mexicans vote for Mr. Klansman, the president?
And the answer is the COVID restrictions.
And then the real answer is that if Donald Trump had had a coherent message on, I'm going to liberate you from this stuff and I'm going to make these Democrat governors let up just once this reelection is over and all that.
That might have been the difference in actually securing his reelection.
Instead, his message was mixed at best.
He was, you know, half the time leading as, no, I'm the one who locked everybody down because that's how far-sighted I am and this kind of thing.
So it was hard for him to, you know, turn that right around at the end and all of that.
But, but that was, you know, even though that was not the narrative of the candidate, it was still the impression of the overall population, not maybe that the Republicans are here to save you, but at least that the Democrats are clearly worse on this, even though the overall effect on the economy and the country still dragged him down.
He bared, you know, ultimate responsibility.
It's good to be king until everything goes bad and then it's all your fault, even when it's not your fault.
But it was at the same time, it was clear it was the Democrats doing it.
And so people, that was the explanation.
That was just like my buddy swinging a hammer for a living.
That's why he pulled the Republican lever.
You know, he knows the Republicans represent big business interests, not little guys.
But whatever, man, they're going to lift up the COVID restrictions and let me go back to work.
I'll have to settle for that then, right?
I mean, give me a break.
So that was the answer anyway.
So, but then to your conclusion, that, yeah, now is a great anti-government moment.
I mean, look at these people.
Look at all that they have wrought and all that they have ruined.
I mean, they just, and with this cast of characters, it's perfect too, right?
Like the Clinton family and the Bush family, what a bunch of horrible, mediocre people.
And then their wingmen are John McCain and Joe Biden, these even more mediocre kind of third-rate, corrupt scumbags.
You know, the guy from the Keating Five, that McCain?
And you know what I mean?
And Joe Biden, the senator from MasterCard, that guy who made it illegal to discharge your credit card debt under bankruptcy and make you pay your bankruptcy, your credit card companies before you pay your mortgage when you declare bankruptcy.
You lose your house before MasterCard doesn't get theirs.
As Joe Biden wrote that, that's who these people are.
They're disposable, right?
They clearly have demonstrated that their worth is, you know, in 30 years of trying since the end of the Cold War, not just this century, but the last decade of the century before that, from the time, never even mine, before the Cold War, but just from the time of H.W. Bush and all the way through.
Look at what a lousy job the centrist establishment has done.
And if you say that, well, we tried electing a guy who wasn't from a good enough college and that didn't work out.
Well, you might be right, but that was Donald Trump.
And he's a very particular individual, you know, if not in jail.
And so it could have been someone else and it could have been better.
It could have been Ron Paul.
I mean, look, in 2008, George W. Bush was still in the chair.
So, Ron Paul, this is the problem that Bernie Sanders had on the left side running against Barack Obama's legacy in 2016.
Like, how bad is he supposed to throw the current Democrat sitting in the chair under the bus in order to say he's going to do even better than that?
You know what I mean?
Well, here, Ron Paul is saying, without ever mentioning W. Bush in that way, because that's not how he handled it, but running against everything George Bush ever stood for and saying, you know, especially all these wars are wrong.
And I told you all along and we shouldn't do it and all of this stuff.
And that's a major hill decline.
And then frankly, I think I, you know, I'd have to like really count up the numbers and all that.
I'm not a specialist on this, Dave, but I think there's a reasonable claim that they stole the nomination from him in 2012.
At least he had a reasonable shot at getting that nomination.
If they hadn't screwed him in Iowa and in Nevada and the other things, there's a whole book about it.
And I think there's much to the idea that he would have at least been the nominee.
But, you know, at that point, he was facing a very popular incumbent president in the height of a bubble on the upward swing of a bubble, not right after a crash.
So it would have been really tough for him to get elected.
But anyway, I'm sure.
Yeah, but if he was the nominee, he could have tied Obama into all types of pretzels, which would have been really interesting to see.
And it would have, even more important than whether he could get elected, I think would have been like, oh, the impact that would have had, man.
God damn, that just would have been something big.
Everyone in the country would have had to hear from this guy and had to face it head on, which is something that a lot of people don't realize is still just so many people have not had to do.
Had to really hear the argument the way it's supposed to be.
You know, there's so many times people inaugurated Romney.
Yeah.
Well, you know, but so many people in this country, they've heard the anti-left wing argument, but it comes with all this right-wing baggage, or they've heard the anti-right-wing argument that comes with all this left-wing baggage.
But there's still so many people, and I really do think this is one of the things, and I actually think this is what leads to a lot of the kind of internal bickering and questioning within the kind of our movement, is that we, I think a lot of libertarians and people who used to be libertarians, maybe even in a phase after libertarian, whatever you would call that, and they kind of live in this world, in our own echo chamber.
And that's the way the world is today.
People live in their echo chamber.
You know, you have everything's run on social media by algorithms.
So the people you interact with are who you see more and you see more of your stuff and they show you stuff that they think you'll like and you're not necessarily seeing the stuff that other people see.
And so you're in your own little world.
And you're like, well, everyone's already heard about this.
This is obvious.
Like everyone's heard about the non-aggression principle.
Echo Chamber Realities00:10:15
Everyone's heard about libertarianism and the business cycle theory.
Like everyone knows that.
But I think one of the things I benefit from is that I've never really operated in the libertarian world.
I mean, I do a show, like I sit here and I'm friends with you and Tom and like other libertarians, but I operate in the stand-up comedy world and in New York and New Jersey and like in just completely outside of this bubble world.
And the truth is that no one's ever heard of this shit.
Like no one has even heard these ideas.
I mean, like if you stop a random person on the street and ask them about libertarianism or Ron Paul or the Federal Reserve or the war in Yemen or the war in Somalia or any of these other things that we care so much about, they have no idea what the fuck you're talking about because no one's ever told them about this ever.
And if it wasn't for Ron Paul running, no one had ever told me about this.
No one probably ever would have.
If they want to be like, oh, I'm against the woke social justice people, the thing they've heard of is maybe Ben Shapiro or maybe, you know what I mean?
It's like, maybe, well, my other option is to be like a Zionist who's against that shit or something, you know, like, and so they haven't heard this at all.
And so that's why I do think, particularly now, man, like I, I just think that it's like, to me, one of the, the moment, like one of the things that I took away from, from the election the other night was that it's like, yeah, God damn, man, this is just such a great moment.
We have none of us are as good as Ron Paul, but man, we have an even better moment than Ron Paul had coming off the financial crash and the war in Iraq and that stuff.
This is, if you want a moment where you're going to talk about how the government is the problem and that they are the cause of all of these issues in our lives, this is the best time to really let people know this shit and to fucking spread this message.
I know there are some people out there who like will question whether how much value there is in this.
But I think in what the Libertarian Institute has been doing, what the Mises Institute's been doing, what the Ron Paul campaigns did, what the Mises caucus has been doing, what me and you are all about doing, man, I just think this is like the best time ever to try to let people know that it's like, yeah, no, there's this whole other way that you can look at these things and see what's actually causing all these problems.
And it's a generational thing, right?
I mean, I saw Maj Torrey tweet it out.
He said, all I want to do is this freedom and liberty shit, right?
Like, he's just got that energy, man.
Like, he's just getting started.
You know, let's do this more.
And you got, look, you know, young people are old enough now to learn about things that they didn't know before.
You know, it's a, it's a whole new thing.
And, and I know just to back up your point there, you know, people say the most hyperbolic stuff to me about how meaningful my stuff is to them, the books and the show and whatever when I go and do these speeches.
But the point really being just that there's that voice in the wilderness quality to it, right?
That they didn't know this stuff until they heard me put it together.
And now they know it's true.
And so now they're one of us kind of thing.
It's like a life-changing thing, you know?
And for me, I mean, that's my experience too.
I know that you're a Ron Paul moment, a 2007 guy.
I had my Ron Paul moment in 1997.
And I knew about Harry Brown before that.
And I had read Gary Allen, who was a Bircher, but he was really a libertarian, pretended to be a right-winger.
So he had, you know, and Ed Griffin, he was a right-wing Bircher, but he was pure Mises and Rothbard on gold and how all of that worked 100%.
You know, his economics were completely sound and all that.
So even, you know, as very conservative.
So all that stuff was very meaningful to me.
I mean, I remember reading Jekyll Island in like 96 and going, oh my God, if only I could somehow make everybody read this, then everything would be different and change and, you know, whatever.
Stuff that matters.
It matters.
I saw Harry Brown out there in 1996 and in 2000 and just representing this stuff well, right?
Just representing well.
And then Ron Paul got re-elected in 96.
And that means the Ron Paul show is on C-SPAN 2 every night, you know, or twice a week or something from 1997 on, you know, and everything, you know, every one of those speeches that he gave from the House floor, like all that stuff is so meaningful.
And you can find almost all of it in the Ron, the Ron Paul archive at lewrockwell.com.
Goes way, way back.
I'm not sure anymore how far back it goes.
But I wonder how the Wayback Machine treats those House websites.
Because man, there were some great speeches going back to the 90s.
Anyway, sorry, I'm on a Ron Paul love tangent.
But just the point is that, yeah, no, people, and especially, man, you know, and this is, again, just speaking for myself, but and projecting that onto other people that, well, I didn't want to be a right-winger, but I'm not a hippie and I'm not a liberal.
And I disagree with these leftists on lots of things.
I actually agree with them about how much they hate Republicans and, you know, all these things about the right that they hate, like half of them were in agreement on those things.
And I've always felt even since I was like in high school, you know, as a Carlinian before I was even a Hicksian or a Harry Brownian or a Ron Paulian.
So I always kind of had disdain from both sides.
Carlin, very young, gave me permission to not believe in either.
You don't have to pick from one of the two, you know, the fake opposites or however real opposites they are.
But it was nice to have someone say, like, hey, you know how you don't really want to be a socialist and you don't really want to be a conservative?
Well, check out this.
Not only is it, you know, an alternative to those things that you reject, but if you look carefully, it makes sense.
And we're actually good on all of this stuff.
That boom and bust cycle that destroys the economy every decade or so without fail.
We know the real cause and can tell you how to stop it.
The war on drugs, we're here to explain how even meth abuse is not worse than the way we try to fight it in this country.
And hell, people, there's only widespread meth use because cocaine is illegal and artificially expensive.
And that's where all that comes from in the first place.
Anyway, all of these things, man, those are the obvious ones.
Obviously, anti-imperialism, bank bailouts and all that.
I mean, the first time that you heard a hardcore ideological free market capitalist railing against bankers and saying he wants to see them hang and saying how much he hates the government for the cardinal sin of bailing out a banker when all good free market capitalists know that bankers are supposed to fail when it's time for them to fail and when they make bad bets.
And that's how capitalism works.
And any real free market guy would sacrifice any bank on the altar of profit and loss, man.
It has to be that way.
And the first time I hear when I was a kid, the first time I heard non-leftists attacking imperialism, it was the Birchers before I revved Buchanan or Raimondo.
It was the Birchers were attacking imperialism as necessarily undermining the American Republic, whether as a deliberate conspiracy or not.
And then hearing Ron Paul, essentially, he's got his own Ron Paul doctrine.
If you haven't heard the Damik Adams interview with Jeff Dice, it's so good on the Ron Paul doctrine.
I haven't caught that one yet, but I love both those guys.
They're my favorite guys ever.
And they both worked for Ron at the same time at the turn of the century.
They were his guys.
So it was just the best conversation, the Ron Paul doctrine.
He's his own special thing.
But again, a guy who's a conservative Republican from Texas on the surface of it, who's got purist, completely thought through anti-imperialism to the nth degree for you.
And when you hear that, you know, quote unquote, against interest, when capitalists are supposed to just like war and not mind bank bailouts.
Yeah, they're supposed to like breakers and the all that stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So so the things that are on the face of it ironic turn out to not be ironic at all.
They turn out to be the entire point.
You know what I mean?
It turns out to be that's what it's all about.
And so, You know, I think it's important that especially young people, but also people who are just tired of believing what they used to believe and are looking around.
They can tell the wreckage of what they believed in is at their feet now.
So they're looking around.
And so, yeah, there has to be standard bearers.
That's just how it is, you know.
And yeah, I think you're a great one for it.
I mean, obviously, you are.
And look at Tom Woods, you know, at that, you know, back to the crowd at that thing where people are dying to find someone who will just treat them fairly and tell them the truth.
Yeah.
You know, and I think there it's, it's like, look, to me, I look at it like this: where there are the value in introducing these ideas to more people.
And I think it's just without question.
I mean, I know for a fact because I've been doing this.
And it's not like I'm doing this on like such a huge level.
Like, I've gotten on some real big shows before and I got a little bit of a nice following.
But, you know, there are people out there with way bigger followings than I have and way bigger, you know, like I got like 150,000 Twitter followers, something like that.
There are people out there with like millions of followers and shit.
Tragedy of a Fallen Nation00:06:55
And so there's all these, you know, could we reach way more people?
But I know even from what I have that there's so many people.
I can't go anywhere to a show without a whole bunch of people being like, dude, you literally introduced all this shit to me.
And now I like totally get it.
And thank you.
And it's not like anything, none of it's really my original ideas.
I'm just like, hey, read this guy, read that guy.
Like, I'm lucky enough to have read the right guys.
And now let me tell you two.
And then they do, and they're like, oh my God, this is incredible.
Or just even if they don't read it, just like convince them on the argument of it.
And, you know, sure, like, you know, some people say, okay, well, Ron Paul did that for a lot of people.
And things are still going pretty bad.
The government just got worse and worse and worse, you know?
And it's like, yeah, but the truth is that that was just the start.
And we just need to do more and more of that.
And it's not, this isn't like there's a reason why the regime relies so heavily on propaganda because it's not as if they can just do whatever they want to.
You know, like, you know, wait, wait, stop on that point about, yeah, you know, before Ron Paul's revolution of 2007 and eight, libertarians didn't have a voice in the debate at all.
Yeah.
There was no Kennedy show where she interviews at least one libertarian every night of the week.
There's no, you know, Judge Napolitana was on there, but he wasn't allowed to say the L-word or talk about it.
He didn't have his own show.
He was just the legal expert on Fox.
You know, he would stand against the Patriot Act, but that was the extent of the room that he had.
And that was it.
We weren't on TV.
We didn't get to talk.
There's no libertarians on the Sunday morning news shows.
Ron Paul didn't get invited on the Sunday morning news shows as a congressman with very strong opinions about some of these crucial topics.
Was never a welcome guest on there.
And even our most straight-laced type, you know, foreign policy experts like Ivan Eland or somebody like that, who, you know, and I mean that with all due respect him, but like is the kind of guy who could, you know, sure go on C-SPAN or go on CNN or MSNBC and say something slightly controversial against the consensus.
No way.
We had no place in it at all.
And so when you say that was just the start, that's exactly right, Dave.
I mean, again, you know, you had your Ron Paul moment with a lot of other people in 2007.
When I had my Ron Paul moment in 1997, I was alone in my apartment watching Ron Paul on C-SPAN in the middle of the night give a speech to an empty house.
And I was probably the only man in the country being impressed in that moment.
There wasn't a whole lot of us sharing that thing together.
It was just mine.
And he was accusing Bush Sr. Of selling chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein, or at least giving him the money to buy chemical weapons from the Europeans.
And I'm, and it says, R, Texas.
And I'm like, whoa, cool.
Who's this guy?
So, yeah, so Republican from Texas accusing the fucking Texan governor, Republican, of the father.
Accusing the father.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Who is in a way, like nominally a Texan.
You know, he came down from Maine and made good as an oil man for a while and had connections in Houston and all that.
So he senior was an important part of Texas politics at that time for sure.
And so, yeah, for Ron to say that was like, wow, oh my goodness.
You know what I mean?
You know, Trafficant would say good stuff, but he looked like a kook and talked like a kook.
Ron's no kook.
Ron's a doctor.
Ron gets up there and just gets it right.
You know what I mean?
He was so good.
But anyway, point being that there was at the start of the Ron Paul revolution, there was one guy in every neighborhood who was like, yes.
But now there's 10 guys in every neighborhood or more.
Now libertarianism is a thing because of him, because Ron Paul became a worldwide phenomenon.
That's why there's what we now call the liberty movement because it's bigger than just the libertarians.
We're just the core of it.
But it's this, you know, broader momentum in society that rejects the last 30 years consensus.
Hallelujah.
You know, and it's too bad that it, as you said, it turned out it took fruition or kind of came to shape to support Trump.
All that anti-establishment energy came together to support Trump in 2016 because Rand Paul wasn't ready to catch the ball, unfortunately.
And maybe that can change in the future.
But to the point that you're making here about, look, I mean, why do we all do shows?
Everybody does shows.
And it's because we know that we don't have enough people's ear yet.
And we're convinced that if we did, that we'd be making much greater headway.
And just be perfectly frank to you.
And I mean, we've already talked about this, but into your audience, the reason that I'm pushing so hard for you to run for president as the LP candidate in two years is because I think that the other guys suck so bad and that you, my friend, are so talented that what's going to happen is you are going to have in a way that previous LP candidates just have never been able to do in any recent time, you are going to have a major say in the campaign of 2024.
And you're going to be able to speak for us in a way that Ron Paul did in the Republican Party primaries.
You're going to be able to do that from the LP presidential candidate, you know, nominee position in a way where they have to respond to you.
Kamala Harris shows up at the town hall and the question is, yeah, but this comedian guy says XYZ, what about that?
It makes a lot of sense to us.
And where, and they won't be able to escape it.
That the narrative of what is important in the year 2024 is set by us, not by them.
And I mean, just look at the fact that Joe Rogan's numbers beat CNN.
No, listen, dude, not just beat them.
It's not the same as what it was.
Not just alternative media.
We don't even need mainstream media anymore.
Well, I'm sorry, Scott, because I just, I got to say, not just beat them.
I mean, lap them.
I mean, dude, CNN, the CNN the other day, I just saw one day's ratings come out.
I think Glenn Greenwald was posting this data, but they had a day the other day where there was not one show that broke 800,000 views on CNN all day.
All day.
Rogan doesn't get under 8 million in an episode.
So you're talking about they didn't have one show that was 800,000 and he's got 8 million.
Not only is it, you know, it's not that he's bigger than CNN.
He is, you know, 10 times bigger than their biggest show.
Yeah, and look, and there's all multiple ecosystems of independent media in which you don't have to be exactly like them to be welcome to do your rounds on those other shows, too.
Letting People Out of Lies00:16:34
And I just know this is going to be great.
And with the energy of the look, when I mentioned you're running, not to spoil my hilarious stand-up routine, but when I mentioned you're running and my hilarious stand-up routine, man, the crowd was like, damn right.
And they're all down.
All of them.
Well, listen, there's no, it's going to be awesome, dude.
It's a comment on the tragedy of how far this nation has fallen that it would even be thought that I would be the guy for this.
And there should be someone better.
But the truth is, who, you know, all I want is like someone who would be able to get on all those shows and just say this shit the way it's supposed to be said.
But, you know, and I guess maybe I am the guy to do that if nobody else is going to step up and do it.
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You know, to the point I was making before that there's a reason why, look, we all know how this shit works, right?
Like it's not, this is like basic Rothbardian shit.
That it's not as if the great progressive myth is that like if something happened, well, then that's because the people demanded that it happen.
You know, like if they're it like, so in other words, if you were arguing like, oh, we don't really need OSHA, but we don't really need the EPA or something like that, the answer from the progressives is always like, well, we had a time without OSHA and the EPA.
And then things were so bad that people demanded OSHA and the EPA, you know?
But if Rothbard would point out, if you actually look back at it, that's not at all what happened.
But how did they do it?
They got away with it.
They created this horrible job.
What happened is that special interests lobbied the government to create this thing.
It's not as if there was some big uprising from the people.
I mean, there's a few exceptions to that.
I suppose the Civil Rights Act, Civil Rights Movement or something like that, there were a few examples where people really did rise up and were like, no, fuck this.
We don't want.
But in general, that's not how regulation gets, you know, it's like there was some fucking like, you know, mass protest of people, we need Dodd-Frank or something.
You know what I mean?
Like, it's that's just special interest.
Think of an example.
But so like mothers against drunk driving.
Yeah.
There's, there's not many, though, that actually make a difference.
No, you know, not many in terms of legislation.
Not many.
Um, and so the lobbyists lobby for this, and then they launch propaganda campaigns to convince the people to go for it.
So in other words, right, like you saw, like even as you were talking in your debate with Bill Crystal when you were shredding that fat pig up, he, you were talking about how, look, you got these think tanks who are funded by weapons manufacturers, right?
And they lobby for wars, but they don't just lobby for wars and then fight the wars.
There's a step in there.
They lobby for wars, then they propagandize the people, then they fight for wars.
So there's something about that middle step that's kind of interesting, right?
Like it's not just like they just go like, oh, 9-11 happened and bombs start dropping in Iraq.
They spend a full year plus propagandizing people that Iraq has these weapons and they're involved with Osama bin Laden and the next mushroom cloud could be over Iowa, you know, or whatever the fucking dumb shit they were saying was, you know, like all you guys, what you guys got a Walmart, they might come for your Walmart, you know, like there's whatever the fucking shit was because they have to actually, they know that they have to convince people to go along with this.
And so there is real value in convincing people that the propaganda is all bullshit and that they don't have to go along with all of this.
And if you look, we all know, right?
It's like there's all these different like kind of circular forces.
Like lobbyists affect government, but culture affects politics.
So they know that they have to kind of keep this whole circle going.
So the fucking special interests influence the government and then the government's like, shit, we got to fucking, you know, propagandize the people so that there's not too much pushback against this.
Because look, like, wouldn't they, if they, if the government could, let's say they could get away with whatever they wanted to, hypothetically speaking, government could just do whatever they wanted to.
Do you think they would do what they're doing right now or a little more?
We know they'd do, they'd do more, right?
So we know that you're totally right.
And so that's why they lie all day.
Exactly.
They wouldn't, exactly.
They wouldn't, that's the perfect way to put it.
They wouldn't lie if they didn't think they needed to, if they didn't know that the culture influences politics to some degree.
Now, I don't agree with Breitbart completely where he's like, all politics is downstream from culture.
That's not true.
Culture's downstream from politics too.
It's circular.
But they wouldn't lie.
Joe Biden would just go, aha, fuck you.
You're screwed.
I work for the credit card companies and the banks.
I don't care about you.
But why doesn't he say that?
Because they need you to believe this shit.
So our job is to get in there and make sure that people don't believe this shit.
Because that's the only game.
If you really believe in liberty, that's the only game you can play.
You really can't play the game where it's like, look, and I shouldn't say that.
It's not that you can't ever play the game where you're like, hey, let's run a libertarian for office that they can actually win.
Not me running for president, a libertarian running for office that they could actually win.
That's fine.
Go do that.
And if you can, that's great.
And there have been examples of that working out really good.
And I support that.
I support Young Americans for Liberty.
I support the Mises caucus, who's really focused on local elections and all that stuff.
Libertarians, the Libertarian Party had some good local election victories the other day.
That's awesome.
But if you're talking about on a grand scale of like the federal government, the most tyrannical government in the world right now, on a global scale at least, well, we're not really going to be able to go in there.
You could try the Koch brothers strategy going in and just fucking spending billions and lobbying the shit out of everyone.
I'm sure some good shit happens, but that's what you get.
Yeah, you get corrupted.
You're more likely to get corrupted than you are to fucking corrupt them, if you know what I mean.
But what you can do, especially now with the internet and how popular these alternative platforms are, is you can undermine the fuck out of their propaganda until they cancel you off every goddamn platform.
And then, you know, then you might be done.
I totally agree with you.
I mean, that's what my show's been about for 20 years.
Yeah.
Is 23 years or 20 something years?
Yeah.
Is yeah, just telling me why that ain't true.
You don't have to believe that.
That was the brilliant invention of the Ron Paul campaign.
It was like, oh, that stuff?
Well, I don't believe it.
And that was enough, right?
Millions of people like, oh, you don't believe it?
Oh, well, good.
Then we don't have to either.
Cause here we were under all this pressure.
We thought we had to believe it.
But if you're saying we don't anymore, then thanks.
And that was it.
He's given a permission slip out from under the Bush consensus.
You know, you don't have to go along with this if you don't feel like it.
And people are like, great.
They were just waiting for someone on the right to tell them so.
That's all.
And someone liked them enough to tell them.
And then, yeah, and they're looking for the truth.
And this is always what I figured too, exactly like you're saying now from even the time I was in high school was one, like you're saying, they lied to us all day because they have to.
And two, people believe any damn lie.
So then three, it ought to be able to, it ought to be easy to teach them the truth because the truth is actually true.
So then, and you're like letting them out of believing in a lie, which seems like a benefit, you know, kind of thing.
So that's not always true because a lot of times it's easier to keep believing lies than believe you've been duped.
So that can be embarrassing, you know, but sure.
But for the most part, I mean, what happens is time goes by and people feel less married to those opinions that they used to feel so strongly about and they find themselves willing to question things.
And, you know, seeds that have been planted start sprouting.
And, you know, I don't know.
I mean, the bottom line is in terms of like why our country is so screwed up is just not enough Americans understand this stuff, agree with this stuff.
We'll draw a line and say, no, we're not going to let you do the things that you want to do.
I mean, government employees are not going to let you guys do the crazy things that you want to do to us because liberty comes first.
And it's been too low of a priority for too many Americans for a long time.
But I think I agree with you that we're making great progress.
And as far as all the sectarianism, there's just no reason to be sectarian at all.
There's now there are enough libertarians to do all these things.
And there's no way.
Look, if I had my way and I could like command all the libertarians as my zombie army, I would just tell them, look, we're going to all focus on Yemen until that thing is done.
That's what matters the most to me.
Right.
But you know what?
I don't have magic powers over the libertarian zombie army.
They're going to do what the hell they want.
They're libertarians, for Christ's sake.
The whole thing of it is individualism.
You can't tell them what to do.
You can encourage them to do what they're doing harder and better and make sure that it's that more and more people know about it and that they have more and more effect and luck out there accomplishing their great goals.
But other than that, what are you going to do?
But I think it's okay, especially when, you know, there are so many people who can join the Republican Liberty Caucus or can join the Free State Project or can join the Mises Caucus and the Libertarian Party or can, you know, for that matter, I've said this before too, join the Democrats or whatever, you know, left-leaning parties.
Try to make them less worse if you can.
There's, there are great ways, especially for people who were like raised this way and know a lot about it and all that.
There are a lot of great ways to attack the left from the left, from being a libertarian in the Democratic Party.
Wait a minute.
Aren't we the people who believe that the CIA are evil guys who torture people to death?
Aren't we the guys who oppose imperialism?
And aren't we the guys who were great on all these things?
Yeah.
Or you want to be like that again?
You care about equality and stuff like that.
And you're like, well, look, who's in bed with the billionaires and who's really controlling this whole apparatus and all of that?
That.
I mean, what's, you know, what, what is, what contributes to the worst kind of income inequality more than this entire crony cartelized system.
So my wife met a guy the other day at a business who he's one of our guys now because of Eric July.
And I think he heard Eric's music first.
Yeah.
And then learned about libertarianism through that.
And now he's all about Tom Woods and Dave Smith and Scott Horden and the whole crew, you know?
And, you know, music obviously is huge.
Like if I had any talent whatsoever, I'd have, I'd have done a lot better just being a punk rocker and getting people feeling this way.
No, but that's the best way that really got Eric to hard, you know?
That's the best thing about Eric July is he's actually really good.
It's not just that he's got great like politics and shit and he's good on philosophy and shit.
It's that he's actually a really talented musician.
And that helps so much because it's like, yeah, dude, just do that shit.
And then people fall in love with the music.
And then they want to know the guy.
They want to know the mind that made that great music.
So they fucking jump on board.
Yeah.
And listen, I heard speaking of Jeff Dice interviewing Damik Adams.
I heard Jeff Dice interviewing Joe Salerno.
Holy crap, this guy's a brilliant genius.
And Dice is saying, okay, so explain to me the history of thinking on these topics.
And Salerno's like, sure, that's easy.
And what?
And he just talks for two hours or something and explains just, it's incredible.
It's magnificent.
Like, somebody going to tell that guy he's not doing it right.
He's pissing up a rope and he ought to be doing this, that, or some other strategy instead?
Or Salerno found his place in the market where he has a comparative advantage and he's holding down Austrian school economics over at the Mises Institute where it matters the most, you know?
So, and that goes for everybody.
You know what I mean?
So it's funny, as you said, I've been a Libertarian Party guy.
I joined the Libertarian Party to support the new effort to make it the kind of thing we can all be proud of.
And I stayed away because I'm like, yeah, I'll keep it arm's length and I'll just sit here behind my microphone and do my little thing.
But this is something I think enough people are all doing it together now.
I think it's going to make a difference.
It's going to make the Libertarian Party something really badass.
It's going to LP the kind of thing that is the perfect vehicle to support your run in a couple of years and really take this thing back up to the level of the Ron Paul Revolution.
I think it's going to be incredible, dude.
I really do.
Well, you might be right.
We'll see.
And, you know, if people, if people really want me to do it, then I'm going to need, you know, listen, I'm, I'm down to do it, but I need to know from the people, not from you, Scott.
I already know you.
I'll support you, Dave.
But I know that, but I need to, for the people listening, it's like, you guys, if you guys really want me to fucking do this and go talk that liberty shit the way I do it, you know, and really take this to the fucking world, then, you know, really let me know that you got to be behind me on this and then I'll do it.
But I'll say this to the point you were making before that I think is kind of interesting is that I have the same thing, right?
And I think we all do.
Like we all have this impulse to be like, well, look, if I could just centrally command everyone who agrees with me and say, we're all going to do this one thing, we could damn sure get one thing done.
And then you pick what's the most important thing, what's the most important act.
But then, of course, you have to realize in a certain sense, well, deal with reality.
You don't have that control and you don't want to have that control because that's everything we're against.
But then you also realize there's this other thing that's like the beauty of the marketplace and the beauty of the division of labor and specialization and all of that stuff.
And that maybe it's actually better.
It's actually way, perhaps, maybe not, but maybe it's way better that there isn't someone who has all of this centralized control over that.
And then I remember, I think I might have mentioned this to you before, but I remember I was in a, I think it was in, it was in like a Facebook chat group that I had with Reed Coverdale and Jeremy Todd, who I love those guys.
And, oh, and I think David Feight was in that group at that point too.
And who I ended up blocking him on Twitter because he came at me a weird way.
Maybe I shouldn't.
Maybe I overreacted.
Maybe I'll unblock him.
Anyway, but the point is that I think it was the three of us and they were talking about how they were excited, something about Tulsi Gabbard had said something like with a libertarian or something.
Or I think maybe they had just found that Tulsi Gabbard went to the Ron Paul like Institute thing, which was a few years old.
It was something like that.
And they were like, dude, if we could just get Tulsi Gabbard over to be a libertarian, like we could just get like, you know, her to understand libertarianism, she could come over and be the libertarian person.
And I was saying to them, I was like, look, guys, do we really, is that really the goal?
Tangling with Trump Would Be Fun00:09:11
That what do we want to get Tulsi Gabbard a copy of For a New Liberty?
And then we got to like start getting her caught up on everything about libertarianism and like that.
I mean, maybe, maybe that would be the best thing.
And like, you know, okay, Tulsi Gabbard, let me explain the business cycle.
Okay, Tulsi.
Okay.
So value is subjective.
Like, do you understand this?
And, you know, like, let me like really take you through all of this.
It's like, or maybe she should just be the best Democrat.
You know what I mean?
Like, maybe that's like, maybe someone needs to be the best Democrat, right?
Like, they can't all be terrible Democrats, but there's got to be someone who's the best Democrat.
And maybe Tucker Carlson doesn't need to be great on trade or immigration or whatever the issue is.
Maybe he just needs to be the best right-winger.
And maybe like that.
And maybe all of these people need to kind of be in the spot that they're in.
And then that's what's going to give us the best chance of like having a big enough mass movement that you can actually pull all of these people in.
And even if that way, because, you know, if Tulsi Gabbard does, you know, fucking sit down and memorize human action and become a fucking, you know, like a gold bug or something or whatever, then okay, so she's over here with us.
And then some left winger looks at her and goes, what?
This bitch is crazy.
I don't know what you're talking about.
But as long as she's terrible on everything else except regime change wars on behalf of terrorists, then at least when I talk about regime change wars on behalf of terrorists, maybe some left winger could go, that is kind of like what Tulsi Gabbard was saying.
I mean, he does make a good point on that.
So it's hard.
Part of the flaw of central planning, as we all know, is like the, it's just a different version of the calculate, the price calculation problem, right?
Like it's like, so I don't actually know what all the calculations are.
Like we may think the best thing is for us to all be against the war in Yemen, but perhaps it's not.
Perhaps it's actually that there's, well, I don't exactly know what the value of this person being over there doing that thing is.
So I think that, you know, would I really be stupid enough?
Look, I'm all in on the Libertarian Party.
I really think right now is the moment for the Libertarian Party.
And I understand why Rothbard and Ron Paul left the Libertarian Party when they did.
I think that made sense at that moment.
I would have done the same thing at that moment.
I would have gone, you know what?
It doesn't matter.
All the rules are stacked against the third parties and you can't get on TV.
And what the hell else?
What other game is there in town except TV?
So of course you got to go be a Republican.
I would have done the same thing.
I'm glad Ron Paul ran as a Republican in 2008 and 2012.
But right now, I think it's different.
I think TV isn't as important and there's all these alternative platforms.
So now I think is the time to go third party.
But what an asshole I would be if I was talking to Dan McKnight and he's like, hey, we got this defend the guard, you know, thing going on with all these Republicans.
And I went, no, you need to work with the Libertarian Party because the Republican Party is a bad party.
And blah, blah, blah.
Come on, shut the fuck up.
Like, yeah, no, this is great.
Do what you're doing.
You're doing exactly what you should be doing, damn McKnight.
Like, keep doing this.
You know what I mean?
So, like, even again, where people disagree with some strategies, all the sectarianism of everybody condemning each other and condemning each other's groups for not agreeing and doing the right thing.
All that is just crazy, man.
I bite my tongue.
You know, I do slip up and get into fights sometimes, but I bite my tongue far more often than not because I would rather fight against the government.
Like, I really, I mean, you know, there's a lot of libertarian topics that I just don't address at all.
I mean, my show is almost entirely about foreign policy.
The other day I interviewed Ryan McMacken about central banking and the boom and bust cycle.
Occasionally, I'll have someone on like an activist about the cops, but that's it.
Otherwise, we just talk about the wars.
There's a lot of things that are going unaddressed that I just got to leave that to everybody else.
You know, because there are not enough people doing what I'm doing.
Kyle Anzalon's out there and a few others.
But yeah, I mean, our enemy in the Pentagon, Michelle Florinay, calls it full spectrum dominance, right?
Or you mentioned Breitbart there.
I think was he the one who coined the term flood the zone with, you know, every bit of what we can do just all day long, put out things all day long, attacking our enemies and making our case all day long and from all directions and never stop.
And, you know, whatever the subject matter is, just hit it from a libertarian angle where that's, you know, again, like I'm talking about for my hope for 2024 that the message will be loud enough and unavoidable enough that it will end up becoming the dominant force.
Once they can't avoid it in terms of how loud it is, they're going to have to really grapple with the arguments and they're not going to be able to.
It's really going to be great, you know, because we're good on everything and they all suck on just about everything.
So it'll be really interesting to see if it's Donald Trump running against you.
But I'm not so sure of that.
I guess my bet is on him for now as the nominee, but I don't really know.
But either way, you know, I think, you know, I agree with you.
Like the more, in fact, even in my silly like fantasy there about making every libertarian all care about Yemen until we solve it, even then I was going to release them all right after that.
You know what I mean?
Like everybody's got to get back to doing whatever they're doing, even if I could somehow make them care about my thing the most.
But is that any way to run a libertarian movement with like some sergeant making everybody march around in different directions and all that?
That ain't never going to happen.
You know, the best we can do is do our best, inspire people to do their best of the thing that they're, you know, best at.
And then if people agree with us that now's the time to join the LP and join the Mises caucus and help this effort, if they think that that sounds right and smart, then that's what they'll do.
Dude, I would love that hard, you know?
As you say it, like I'm just thinking, and by the way, this is just off the cuff and it's late night and I've had a couple of whiskeys or whatever, but it's just so the idea of tangling with Trump in any way would be so fun.
I don't care what anyone says.
Like, I don't think he's not the one that even like, I mean, the other ones are just simple and easy, but tangling with Trump would be so fun because I would just, this is the thing, right?
Yeah, I always, this is why I do good at these things because I follow the Hortonian rule.
You attack the left from the left, the right from the right.
You attack the paleo from the paleo.
You attack the progressive from the progressive.
And I would just attack the Trump from the Trumpian.
And I would love to just do that.
I would just love to do it.
Or even just you guys trading insults back and forth.
But I would just, but I wouldn't even, listen, I wouldn't even just go trading insults because that's kind of his turf.
I would go like the opposite way where I would be like, I'd be like, Mr. President, you are tremendous and you built great big buildings and you're the great Donald Trump and you stood up against the satanic Democrats who just wanted to shut down the economy in order to ruin your presidency after they framed you for treason.
But sir, you signed the emergency declaration that gave them all cover for that.
And you bragged about the lockdowns at first.
So why would you help the Democrats who are trying to tank you?
And they just like attack them from all these ends.
Sir, you were so great to appoint, you know, Douglas McGregor.
And he didn't do that.
I'm an inch and a half taller than you, Smith.
I don't care about you.
And I'd be like, sir, you've been hunching over for quite a while.
You were an inch and a half taller than me.
But anyway, it would just be fun to fucking tangle with that guy.
But even be laughy, like, it was so great that you put McGregor in there.
Oh, yeah.
In 2020, after you had already lost the election.
But why not in 2016 when you could have done, you know, anyway, it would just be fun to like mess with that guy.
But anyway, listen, this is all, you know, a little bit out there for now still.
But I will say that I think everyone, and I do, I really believe this.
And I don't think that the thing is that even all of the guys who are outside of the Libertarian Party or outside of the Mises caucus and all that, I actually think they're in many ways probably doing great shit too.
Even some of the ones who come at me, and maybe this is a flaw in me, but, you know, it's a flaw and a positive quality depending on the day.
But people who come at me, I go back at them very hard.
And I do get sucked into that stuff too.
But even some of the kind of like more woke libertarian types.
It's like, hey, man, if you can go convince some woke progressives to be a little bit more libertarian and a little bit less authoritarian, fuck, maybe you could convince someone I can't.
I mean, probably not that many, but maybe there's some who you can go convince.
And even the crazy right-wingers, you know, who are at least a little bit more libertarian, you're like, hey, if you could go convince some of those right-wingers to be a little bit less authoritarian, more libertarian, there's some value in that.
Vaccinated Adults vs Kids00:04:41
And so all of these things, it's like, you know, I look around and you go, look, man, like all of these things, I think we're going to need them all.
And it's not just, you know, none of us should ever.
And this is maybe a flaw of the human psyche that we're always kind of looking for like the guy who's going to like do all this shit.
But the truth is we need all of them.
Like we need, we need Justin Amash and we need Spike Cohen and we need fucking Scott Horton and we need the Libertarian Institute and we need the Mises Institute and we need, you know, we need all of these different forces and we need Thomas Massey and Rand Paul and like all these guys.
We need everyone.
Like you said, flood the zone.
We need everyone because culture can have a real impact on politics.
And if there's enough, I'll tell you, if you don't believe culture can have an impact on politics and not just even on politics, but that it can nullify politics in a way.
I'll tell you, you know, as I think, was I saying this to you?
I don't know if this was on the show or just when we were talking, but I've been basically spending my time over the last, you know, two months between the upper west side of Manhattan and this little red town, you know?
And both of them are in blue states.
It's not like they're both the laws about COVID are exactly the same.
But you hang out here in this little red town and no one wears masks.
I take my daughter to the playground.
It's just everyone's acting like it's.
Wait, what's written about it?
The Bricks?
No, no, that's it's a red town.
There's Trump signs up all over the place.
I'm saying, that's what I mean.
So, no, I'm saying like it's, it's a town that's picturing this little red town.
I'm like, well, I guess they do need a lot of red bricks up there in the North.
No, some of them, but no, I just mean that it's like a town where like you see a bunch of Trump signs all over the place.
I got you.
Yeah, yeah.
So it's a, so, but I'll go to the playground with with my daughter and it's no different than 2019.
You know what I mean?
It's everyone's just hanging out, parents, all of us kind of bullshitting.
Well, the kids are running around, all having fun.
They're chalking up on the floor and going down slides and we're catching them.
And everyone's just, I go to the Upper West Side and it's like, I'm not exaggerating you, Scott.
You got three-year-olds in masks.
Yeah.
Well, their parents aren't in masks.
I saw a lot of that when I was in New York for the debate.
Because they've bought into the propaganda so much that they go, well, I'm vaccinated, but my three-year-old isn't.
So my three-year-olds got to wear a mask, which by the way, on a completely unrelated note, just makes my blood boil.
That you wouldn't, even if you believed that fucking utter nonsense, that even you as a vaccinated adult are more protected than a three-year-old or anything like that, that you wouldn't, if your kid has to cover their face and wear a mask, that you wouldn't just out of solidarity with your kid, be like, I'm going to do it too.
Like, I can even get past the like masking your kid, but to go like, no, I'm going to breathe fresh air, but you got to fucking wear it.
But literally, and they give, and they'd give me dirty looks, like be like, you're really bringing your, your three-year-old here without a mask on her.
And I, I mean, I, you know, I didn't hold back.
I'd give them looks right back.
I'd be like, yeah, weirdo, you go home.
We're outside and they're children.
And I promise you, you're vaccinated.
Anyone, man.
Dude, and anyone who's wearing a mask at this point outside is vaccinated.
Like there's no, like there's no one who's that concerned who hasn't.
It's so weird.
But anyway.
No, man, I got a friend in moving back to Texas who says everywhere he goes, people wear a sticker, like I voted sticker that says, I've been vaccinated.
And they all, like as a consensus, the whole town has a consensus, they all wear masks when they're alone driving their car.
It is so.
You're a kook if you don't.
It is the most profoundly hilarious thing ever that the groups are, the people who are vaccinated and swear they believe in the vaccine are more afraid of COVID than the people who are not vaccinated.
Like it's just, there's something so it's, it's, I think, almost too absurd for me to write into a comedy sketch because it's just too much.
It's like you wouldn't, like if you were selling this to a publishing company, they'd be like, no, this is like not, it's too, it's too ridiculous of a story.
Soviet Union Parenting Roots00:14:09
Anyway, but the point that I'm making is that like that, that has nothing to do with the different laws in where I am now to where I was there.
It's just the culture.
The culture is very important.
And so that's really, I mean, that's like what we're all in the business of doing is like unplugging people from the Matrix and letting them know that there's a whole, there's a whole other option that you're not even considering.
And people really are like with all the fucking, you know, the intellectual dark web and all this other shit and the fucking alternative media.
It's like everyone's looking for we all know this is the matrix and this is bullshit.
So how do we unplug from this?
What's the answer?
But the problem is, just like you said, it's like that there isn't, it's like what they need is that Ron Paul shit, that truth serum.
But instead, what they're getting is some Ben Shapiro Zionism or something where he's like, yeah, actually, there's not 72 genders.
There's only two genders, but we have to support Israel.
And blah, blah, blah.
And you're like, wait, why do those two things have to go together?
Why can't it be like, although, you know, I'll give the guy credit that apparently a lot of people, you know, find him to be a useful stepping stone from whatever reality they were living in into ours.
So he makes.
I mean, I never listened to the guy, so I don't know, but evidently he makes some, you know, logical economic points and that kind of thing.
And, you know, I get a good friend of mine that he's a libertarian because he listened to Rush Limbaugh all the time.
And at first, he got really inculcated into Republican and conservative politics and how horrible the liberals were.
Over not very much time at all, he realized that Rush was a hypocrite half the time.
And everything he accused the liberals of, the conservatives were also guilty of.
And so not much longer, he became a libertarian and was as anti-conservative as he was anti-liberal.
Even though, you know, he had learned so much from Rush in the first place.
He also learned how bullshit Rush was from Rush.
Well, you know, Gene Epstein, our good friend Gene Epstein, the great Gene Epstein, who I love and has really been somebody who I've learned a ton from and my economics guru.
And of course, runs the Soho Forum and put together the whole debate with you and Bill Christie.
Absolutely.
Great guy.
But he, and he did an episode on Tom Wood's show that was all about this, but it was Noam Chomsky who led him toward libertarianism because he basically found Noam Chomsky.
He was like a fucking like a 60s, you know, new left kind of, you know, parents were Marxists and shit like that, or his mom was like a commie.
And then he was all about Noam Chomsky and, you know, a way against the Vietnam War and everything.
And then he started learning economics.
And that was it.
He was like, well, I already got the Chomsky shit down and now I know economics.
So where does that put me?
So that's, you know, now I'm a libertarian.
Anti-imperialist.
Yep.
Yeah, exactly.
So he was like that.
So you, you do never know where it's going to come from because like a lot of these people do have at least one really good thing to offer.
You know, I saw Barry Weiss when she was on CNN recently.
I was covering this piece and she just destroyed Brian Stelter.
I mean, she just like was tearing him apart about how crazy, you know, like the corporate press was.
And she was like, come on, like there's the world is insane when you can't even say that the Hunter Biden story is a story without the entire corporate press turning on you.
And the world is insane when if you mention the lab leak hypothesis, they call you racist at the New York Times.
She's like, this is insane.
You guys are all idiots, you know, like without saying it like that.
And she was completely right in what she was saying.
She's terrible on a whole bunch of other issues.
Terrible.
Yeah, Stelter isn't the man to say to her, didn't you make your whole career getting Palestinians fired from colleges where they would be the correct response to her?
But my point is like, yeah, she's terrible on that.
But it's the point you were making about Rush Limbaugh.
Like someone could see her and be like, man, she's so right about that.
But then when they hear about her getting anyone who questions Zionism fired, be like, oh, but you're kind of a hypocrite on that.
I thought you were against cancel culture.
So at least there is, you know, who knows?
People come in in weird ways, you know?
That's right.
And every day they do.
Look, man, at that Ron Paul, I mean, the Tom Woods event there, as you said, there were like 2,500, 3,000 people there.
When I got off the stage at the intermission, the first guy to shake my hand was a Marine said he quit the Marines because of me.
Yeah.
Like, I don't know if his friend gave him the book on tape or however it worked, you know, exactly that he found this stuff.
It may have been he heard me on Tom's show or something, whatever it was.
But man, I get a lot of those.
A lot of guys who quit the military.
I got people who were going to join the military and then they heard, you know, me on Tom's show or me on your show or read my book or some kind of thing and then ended up not joining, or you know, all kinds of things like that.
You know, the stuff's very meaningful to people when they, because, you know, it is like a voice in the wilderness kind of thing.
Um, I'm probably repeating myself from, I forgot if it was your show last time or a different show I did, maybe my show I did with Pete, where I mentioned there's an interview of Bill Hicks on the show Raw Time.
That was an old access channel show in Austin, Texas.
And he talks about why he likes alternative media, whatever it is, because it's somebody who's not necessarily earning a paycheck for it or whatever, but they just think that they're doing the right thing, trying to say what they think is the truth.
Because he's talking about how frustrating it is to turn on the TV news.
And this is recorded like 93, so the internet's going to be born, you know, in a in six weeks if he could live, which he didn't, right?
But he's saying it's so frustrating when the message on TV is such bullshit.
And you know, it's bullshit, but there are no cracks in it.
And it just is a deluge of this stuff.
And you start to feel like you're the one who's crazy.
And that ain't fair.
And that sucks.
And that's part of why he wanted to be a comedian in the first place.
So he could get up there and tell people, not only that, he could just get up there and tell the truth the way he saw it, but he could set an example for other people that they could do that too.
You know, and that was always really important to me that, like, actually, I took Bill Hicks that way, in fact.
And apparently, that was exactly the way he was meant to be taken.
That you can get up there and you can say why you think it's bullshit.
You're right.
It's bullshit.
You know, you're not the crazy one.
They're the crazy ones.
And you got to have somebody out there to, you know, and this has always been, you know, I've never had like grandiose ideas that I can change the course of history kind of thing or anything like that.
But I'll have to settle for being a place where people can find the truth if they're looking for it.
And then you never know what happens from that.
You know what I mean?
I guess maybe I could try to.
Well, and there's something interesting, like when you said that about changing like one person's life, you know, and I've had this experience a lot too.
I've had a lot of people tell me, and some of it is exactly what you just said, the military people from introducing them to you or just talking about the stuff the way I do that.
They're like, hey, look, I was a very capable person who was working in the military or within the military industrial complex.
And I am no longer doing that.
And I'm leaving that.
You know, and like there's these different people who are just like, you kind of maybe, maybe you can't save the world, but maybe you saved one person.
And then you might ask yourself, well, what's the difference between saving one person and saving the world?
You know, which is kind of like a deep question in a way.
And really, what's the difference?
It's just between saving one person and saving the world.
Well, the difference is just that it's like, you know, expanded.
It's multiplied, you know, like that, but multiplied by 8 billion or whatever the world population is or something like that.
Okay.
So it's just a fraction of that.
But that still is, it's really the same thing in effect, just on a much, much smaller level.
And so there's something interesting about that, that it's like, okay, well, you kind of did just save the world, at least to that person.
At least, look, I don't want to define victory down.
You know, it'd be better if we could just have our way.
You know, I don't want to like encourage people to settle for less and maybe I could work harder and try to achieve more.
I'm sure that is true.
But, you know, at the end of the day, though, I think Ron Paul is right that what his advice to me was, and maybe he was just saying this to me because I was already a radio show host when I was asking him this.
And so, what he told me was, you just keep teaching people about liberty and don't worry about what happens after that.
You know what I mean?
It's not your job.
Well, I should say the setup to the question was, how screwed are we?
Right.
If there's only one Ron Paul and there only ever will be, then like, how much trouble are we in?
And whatever are we going to do, you know, kind of thing.
And then he said, well, don't worry about that.
You just keep doing the right thing and keep teaching people about liberty.
And he invoked, I'm pretty sure he invoked the memory of the fall of the Soviet Union and said, we didn't think that the Soviet Union was about to fall.
And then it did.
Evaporated right before our eyes.
And it was, you know, and almost entirely peacefully as well.
And, you know, you never could have believed such a thing or predicted such a thing would happen in that way.
And it did.
And at the end of the day, as he put it, the people, even in the Soviet Union, the people get the government that they demand.
If they demand an end to it, you know, again, I don't think, by the way, that that's a confirmation of what you're criticizing earlier about everything is this way because everybody wanted it to be this way, but it's how much they're willing to put up with before they're going to be able to get it.
That's more growing.
That's exactly want to make sure I was clear about that.
But that is what he meant.
That like at the end of the day, even in the Soviet Union, when the people said nyet means nyet, that was it.
And the whole thing fell down.
And so, you know, it's a little bit true.
It doesn't have to be this way.
Then you just keep making that point until enough people agree with you that things change.
And I think there's a little bit more, you know, there's multiple levels to it, right?
Because even within the Soviet Union, it's not just a matter, it's that, look, there was a certain point where the empire was so overextended that it started to collapse under its own weight.
And once that happened, then the test became, well, what are the people really committed to?
And if the people were so committed to continuing the Soviet Union, then it probably could have continued, but they weren't.
And they actually, and this is something that Rothbard talks about in his somewhat controversial piece, Nations by Consent, which he wrote later in the 90s, but where he goes, but it was actually the lasting nationalism within the people that started to break it off.
That is hard as all of the Soviet leaders had worked to stomp out the sense of like, you're a Ukrainian or an Estonian or all this, they still had a lot of that identity to them.
And they still, there were still a lot of religious people around as hard as they tried to kind of, you know, squash that out.
And so all of those things kind of rose back up to the surface.
And it's interesting.
That's a real interesting thing in America right now.
It's like Jeff Dice was talking about this the other day.
He was talking about when you see like college football and how many people identify, you know, as like, we're Alabama or we're Texas.
We're that, you know, and there's kind of like, well, there are still all these other, you know, kind of, even if they are collectivists, not as super collectivists as we are the United States of America Empire.
It's kind of at least whittling it down.
And so that's all of these things are part of it.
And like, that's what Ron Paul always kind of said was that it's like, it's not that us speaking to the remnant or introducing more people these ideas are going to have some type of, you know, confrontation with the federal government and take them down.
It's that this system is doomed to fail.
There will be a transition.
No empires last forever.
Ours certainly seems like it's in, if not a death spiral, in a transition phase at the very least.
And so there's an opportunity coming up.
And certainly to me, there seems to be a big opportunity, you know, with this, this, this next phase.
And so that's, you know, that's where we are.
And it's so obvious too that, you know, not only is everything wrong, but it's clear, and not just from the libertarian point of view, but from any American's point of view, what it is that's wrong.
And you can just go right down the list.
It's the wars.
It's the lockdowns.
It's bailouts for bankers who do not deserve them.
If anybody deserves welfare, it's not Wall Street bankers.
Anyone in America who's not a Wall Street banker could tell you that.
And then the same thing with, you know, you made the great point on the Kennedy show last night where you threw the war on guns right in with the war on drugs.
And how many people are sitting in the penitentiary just for having a gun?
It's an atrocity.
All of this stuff.
You know, this is, you know, we talk about all the woke stuff, but, you know, the real greatest cause of racial tension in this country is not woke propaganda from the universities.
It's black, you know, victims of the police, the government's drug wars, essentially, you know, blaming larger white society for the thing continued to rampage on them.
And, you know, I don't know if you saw where in Minneapolis it was.
Blue Block Sunglasses Promo00:02:58
Yeah, I wanted to.
This was the other thing I was going to say to you about talking about the election recap.
Yeah, So what happened was Zay Jelani had a tweet where it was, you know, the white parts of town voted to disband the police and replace them with the, you know, social workers, I guess, or whatever the plan was, something like that.
And then, but it was the poor black part of town that voted strongly against that and, you know, voted to keep the police force.
But the thing is, I don't think that's a vote for SWAT raids in the middle of the night against holding contraband.
You know what I mean?
People want to be protected from armed robbery and from violent crime, gang warfare, and this kind of thing to say when they're told your choice is either to have a security force or to have no security force.
Well, they choose to keep the security force when social workers aren't going to cut it at the end of the day.
But that doesn't mean that we don't have a severe problem of police abuse and accountability for cops who go too far.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
So just imagine, right?
It's almost how it is like to me.
Like it's like if you were to say, I'm not great at these fucking analogies, but hear me out.
Let me try to spin a metaphor.
Defunded Police and Crime00:15:02
Okay, let's say there's like a wife who's being abused by her husband.
Her husband's just beating the shit out of her every day, but it's also a very high crime neighborhood and he's a big, tough dude.
And every night there's people breaking in trying to kill the wife.
But this fucking tough husband is fucking, he's going to fuck.
He's got guns and he's fucking huge and he's like, you come in here, I'll fucking kill you.
So they all run away.
But every night they're coming back trying to kill her.
And then they go, hey, wife, you have a vote.
Do you want your husband to leave or stay?
And it's like, well, leave is certain death in this crazy fucking environment that I'm in.
But that's not an endorsement of him beating the shit out of her every night, right?
Like that's just, so this is the point I was trying to make on Kennedy the other night where I was like, well, look, and this is what's so wrong with the whole police debate.
And first off, this reform was so stupid.
It's like, God damn it, if only libertarians had their fucking ideas on the table.
The reform was that, okay, so instead of the police force, we're going to call it the justice-y socially fucking inclusive force or whatever the fucking term was.
And instead of reporting to the mayor, they're going to report to the fucking, you know, whatever it was.
It was, they're going to report to city councilors or something like that.
And instead of this, it was like, but there was no change.
They weren't going to like repeal the war on drugs.
They weren't going to change any of the laws.
They weren't doing any of the things that actually matter.
And like what we all know is that, and this is what I said on Kennedy the other day was I said, it was like, look, the only legitimate role for law enforcement is to protect people and property.
And if they do more than that, they're tyrannical.
And if they do less than that, then chaos ensues.
And so there'll be these like debates, and I've had them with Republicans and Democratic strategists on the cable news circuit where they'll be like, you know, this is a, so the, the left comes out and says, defund the police.
And then as soon as they're pushed on that, they don't mean it like we mean it.
They don't mean what we mean, which is privatize the police.
Let people hire their own security.
Let people protect their own lives and have, you know, whatever, you know, have gun rights and all of this shit to protect themselves.
What they mean is, you know, no more police.
If you, if you get murdered, well, you just got to take that.
And then when they're pushed on it, they go, well, we don't really mean defund the police.
We just mean kind of like, you know, I don't know.
They don't know if he's such dicks.
I don't know.
Just stop being such fucking, stop being so racist.
And then the right wing goes, well, defund the police leads to fucking crazy violence.
And then they'll be like, well, look at this one area.
They defunded the police and crime went through the roof.
But if you actually look at that area, they didn't defund the police.
They cut the budget by like 3% and crime went up.
But then you look at some other area where funding for the police went up and crime went up.
And you're like, oh, wait, actually, it has nothing to do with the police budget, whether crime went up or not.
Crime went up across the country over the last crime.
It's just the murder rate.
And in fact, I just interviewed a guy about this and I asked him, well, so it seems obvious.
It's one of two answers, right?
Either armed robberies went up or like domestic violence abuse went up.
And this is all like guys killing their girlfriends and wives and stuff.
So which is it?
We don't know yet.
The statistics aren't that fine yet.
All we know is kind of raw numbers.
Well, but even then.
You know what you just said, that if you try to correlate it with police funding, there's no correlation.
No correlation with propaganda by the police.
Exactly.
Complete propaganda.
But then they'll show these things, right?
Where they'll be like, but even aside from that, just the murder rate going up, there'll be these things where they're like, Well, crime is soaring in San Francisco or whatever.
And they're like, Because that's because they defunded their police.
But then when you look into the fine print, you're like, oh, no, no, no.
It's not just that they defunded their police.
They literally made stealing legal and said that you can steal whatever.
It's like, it's like $900 or less.
And if you steal it, you'll get a summons, but you won't be arrested.
So now everyone who's desperate or just shitty or is just like, you know, a fucked up person is like, well, whatever.
I'm going to get a fucking summons.
I don't care.
I'm not showing up for court.
I'm going to go grab me a fucking TV and I'm going to go grab me whatever I can get out of CBS or whatever, all these stores.
And then, but by the way, if you're the fucking store who protects your property, you'll be charged.
You'll still be charged.
So they've basically created, it's almost like they're, it's like if they wrote the rules to create crime, that's what they've done.
And then they go, well, you know what the problem here is?
They defunded the police.
But really, you're like, dude, so you're telling me that that retarded law, like this, this insane idea that you'd go, yeah, you can steal stuff and people can't protect their own property.
That's the cops will enforce you from protecting your property, but they won't enforce this guy for fucking stealing.
That law has anything to do with whether local police departments need fucking SWAT gear and fucking armored vehicles.
Dude, the town I'm in right now, it's really, it's so funny, dude.
This town, there's no crime.
There's no crime where I live.
Like I, I have the ring alarm system and like they tell you on the app, they show you what's going on with all the security systems, you know, like everyone who has it.
And like the crime will literally, what comes up on crime report is like, there's like, there'll be like, there's, there's a family of ducks crossing the road.
So everyone be careful when you're driving down Route 35.
Like there might be some ducks out there.
Make sure you don't run over any ducks.
There's nothing, right?
But our local police department has an armored vehicle and they don't know what to do with it.
Dude, during the lockdowns, they would literally, when there was, you know, they were doing these things where there were kids' birthday parties.
So they'd drive by, you know, so they could like see their friends, the saddest thing ever.
They drive by and their friends will all be like, hey, and they'll like have balloons out.
And they're like, happy birthday, Ryan, you know, blah, blah, blah.
The armored vehicle would just follow them because they got nothing to do with it.
They got nothing to do with it.
So you just call up the cops and you're like, hey, we're having a birthday party.
And they're like, we'll come.
Okay, we'll come.
We'll bring our fucking $10,000 armored vehicle.
We got nothing.
I don't know.
Like, what else are we going to do?
So cutting that budget has nothing to do with any of this.
And cutting SWAT raids, that has nothing to do with whether you're going to legalize stealing from Walmart.
There's nothing to do with it.
And seriously, you know, back to our larger theme here.
Now is the time for American conservatives to hear this and learn it and learn it.
You know, this war on drugs is bankrupt and wrong.
And yeah, drug abuse is bad.
Drug wars are worse.
And there are way better ways for our society to handle this.
And I mean, just look at the absurdity right now where you got people making billions of dollars running the pot industry.
Big business in pot.
But you also have people doing life in prison for selling pots.
Yeah, it's a life in the same state.
Yeah, probably.
Yeah.
Still, no, they don't even get clemency.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, but the fact that that's even happening in the same country at all.
It's just, this is crazy.
It can't work.
And, You know, remember Gary Johnson, not to pick on the guy, but in the CNN town hall, the lady said to him, Look, my daughter died of heroin overdose, and I guess you guys want to legalize pot, whatever, that's fine.
But man, I know you're not saying you want to make heroin legal.
And Gary Johnson, to his credit, made the case for legalizing heroin.
You got to understand, lady, you know, black markets lead to all these problems and all this stuff.
And then he backed down and said, no, but of course, I'll stop at pot.
I wouldn't, you know, want to say that.
When what he could have said was, like, listen, and she's the one who made it personal about her daughter.
So it's like, okay, to talk about it in that context.
They're like, look, heroin was illegal when your daughter died and it didn't stop it.
There's no real reason to think other than just TV says so, that if it was just more illegal somehow, that she'd be alive right now.
I mean, that's just not, you got to get over that mindset.
There's just no real reason to believe that that's the case.
And the reality is there's always been heroin supply in every major city in this country for since people started using heroin 150 years ago or whatever it was.
And if there was a dry summer in Minneapolis one summer, it was fine again that winter.
You know, I mean, there's, you can't get rid of this stuff.
And the economics, as he explained, the economics of prohibition are self-defeating in a circle.
You know, the more you clamp down on supply, the more, in other words, raise the risk of doing the supplying.
The higher you drive up the price, the more you lure new people into that market, even at the heightened risk.
They'll come in at the higher price.
And so the supply stays the same or even increases or whatever.
It's a self-defeating thing.
It doesn't work.
The best thing to do would be, and this is just off the top of my head, and it's obviously better than any of the current regime for the worst kind of drugs like heroin would be you let people buy it at Walmart, make sure it's, you know, or at Walgreens, I mean to say, or, you know, CVS pharmacy, where they know that it's 100% pure stuff.
It's not spiked with Chinese fentanyl or whatever.
So they're not going to drop dead.
They know how to dose it.
And then at the same time, you know, you staple a flyer to it that, like, look, man, when you hit rock bottom and you're tired of living like this, give us a call.
We'll come and scoop you up and put you in rehab and take care of you.
And everybody knows, again, the great Bill Hicks in 1989, right?
32 years ago, insane man said, you know, why do we have a drug czar in this country?
And if we do have a drug czar, why is he a cop?
Why isn't he a guy in recovery who's had an alcohol or drug problem, who understands it and can help treat people?
We all already know that, Dave.
Whoever helps anyone get sober?
Somebody else who's gotten sober.
That's who does it.
That they help each other, man.
That's how it goes.
That should be the way that we treat drugs.
Or at least a doctor, you know, at least at the very least, like a fucking doctor is like, look, I understand this problem and this is how you cure it.
You know, in fact, you know, Ron Paul in 08, he was asked, I think it was an interview with this New Hampshire newspaper.
I wish I could find this.
It was the best Ron Paul interview ever.
It was this New Hampshire newspaper where they asked him about this and they want a moral condemnation.
And he's like, look, I'm a doctor.
You know, to me, this is a physiological issue with people, you know, and there are people who, you know, for whatever different reasons have drug problems, but we can fix that.
There are ways to tackle that.
Just, you know, treating them like decent people, treating it like a health issue.
And that's it.
And then he says, just think of all the AIDS that's been spread because it's a crime even to give away clean needles to drug addicts in so many places.
And so people, they do drugs, you know, in an underground type environment where they're sharing needles and spreading AIDS, which for many years was a death sentence.
And people died horrible deaths.
And Ron Pauls is talking about it like a doctor and a libertarian.
They're like, man, it doesn't have to be this way.
Why are we doing this?
And I know that conservatives need jerk against that.
People might say that that's not a great argument for winning over conservatives to our cause or whatever.
Well, they're going to have to get it right now.
That's the whole point of not being right wingers.
We are libertarians.
We're not right-wingers.
We're good on everything, not just some things.
And so that's the whole point of doing this is to win more and more people over to change people's hearts and minds so they understand this stuff.
And there is even like a right-wing argument about it.
It's like, look, man, if you want to live in a society, I understand.
You want to live in a society where there's less broken families and there's less drug addicts in public and there's less all of this stuff, you know?
But it's like, what's actually going to lead to that?
And creating giant black markets is not the answer to that.
You're just destroying, you're just destroying more conservative values than you're upholding.
I remember this one Ron Paul, you know, interview and God damn, I can't remember what this was, but I swear to God, this happened.
But it was an interview with Ron Paul.
I hope I can, maybe I can remember and find it, but where they were asking him, they were kind of pressing him where they're like, it was like a conservative who was like, oh, so you're just soft on drugs and, you know, you don't really like care about like how awful this problem is.
And he was like, no, he goes, I have been highly critical.
And he goes on to blast.
He goes, doctors who are way too loose prescribing opioids.
And he goes, I think there's absolutely no reason.
I think they're giving these things out way too easily for people who don't really need them.
And he was saying this back, I believe this was, this might have been like early 2000s.
And because it was, it was, I had found him and this was an old interview, like older than his presidential runs.
And he was completely right about that.
And that practice has completely changed.
Like, you know, nowadays, when I, I remember when I was a teenager, like, if you got whatever, you got your fucking cavity drilled.
They were like, take some oxies.
Like, no one fucking cares.
Yeah, now it's clamped down the other way.
Now people who are desperate can't get pain medicine.
Now they're, yes, now they're almost a little bit too crazy, but I know, but I knew that they were so loose with it back in the day.
And that's like what he was talking about.
And so it's like, yeah, dude, there's like, there's a lot of these things are very like complex.
It's like there's people who get hooked on pain kills, pain pills, and then they fucking can't get the pain pills anymore.
And so then they go to the fucking black market and end up dying on heroin.
But a lot of those people who fucking die on heroin, it was not because they fucking, you know, it was because that was all they could get at that point.
And a lot of people die on the fentanyl shit, which is coming over through the fucking black market.
And look, there are a lot of people who have real problems with chronic pain.
And so what are they supposed to do?
I saw someone say like, you wouldn't say, you know, if I have leukemia that I'm like dependent on chemotherapy, just being treated with it, you know, yeah, I'm dependent on opioids.
That's because of the problems that I have.
And, you know, I know a guy who, you know, I think he had a lot of problems, but many of them were from motorcycle accidents that he'd been in.
Chronic Pain and Addiction00:03:11
Like his elbows had been, both of them, I think, had been shattered and still had like glass and gravel in them somewhere and some kind of thing.
And that was just some of his problems.
And so he was just a pill popper.
He was addicted to pills and there was, and he was always going to be, you know, because it was, that was his only option, essentially.
But that made him a criminal because there was no legal avenue for him to just get all the Percocet he needed or whatever it was.
Dude, he had to go and eventually got murdered.
Or at least his brother, I mean, he officially died of an overdose, but his brother told me that he believed that he was killed.
And it was because he was hanging around with scumbags because he had to be hanging around with scumbags in order to buy his pills on the black market because that's who sells pills on the black market.
It's drug dealers.
And so that's not just like buying pop from a friend.
Now it's like a little bit riskier business than that.
Yeah.
So dude, I had his apartment and now he's not alive anymore.
Dude, I had back in whatever was 2018, maybe 2019.
So I had fucked up.
I had a pinched nerve and what do they call it?
A fucking disc.
Like, I guess I still have it fucking, but it got fixed up a little bit.
But like not herniated, but a fucking whatever the thing.
It's not herniated.
It was a fucking, but there's another term for it, but the discs all fucked up.
And it was pinching a nerve.
So I had a pinched nerve in my fucking right shoulder.
And it was, dude, goddamn.
I mean, I know I was fucking bitching about it on the show for a while.
And people were like, Dave, stop bitching and stuff.
But I'm telling you, the pain was unreal for a while.
And it was constant.
Anyway, I got on steroids and some physical therapy and shit.
And it got a lot better.
So it's been fine since then, although it's still a fucking thing.
Anyway, point is it was nobody's business, but yours and your doctor's.
But it wasn't the doctor.
Well, let me tell you something.
It wasn't the doctor.
It's the doctor.
You and your drug dealer, I meant exactly.
My doctor.
So, so the doctor fucking wouldn't give me shit for it.
And I remember, you know, I just got, you know, from my other doctor, got some, some great, real strong fucking, you know, advice.
And it was like, dude, that feeling of being in pain constantly.
And then you take a fucking some advice.
And then you're just like, oh my God, it's gone.
And that relief.
And I remember thinking to myself, man, I understand.
Cause it's not, it wasn't like that serious of a thing.
And I was able to like fix it ultimately.
But like, I go, man, I can't imagine what people who really have fucked up shit.
Like, how much it's like that, that feeling of just being like, dude, at least the pain's gone now.
Like, it's, and, and you could understand how people who have chronic-new, if it was a brand new idea, just think about how crazy it would be that you would have not just whatever prescription laws and stuff, but that you would launch a war on drugs of prohibition against people taking the wrong kind or too many painkillers or buying their painkillers from unauthorized.
Supporting the Police State00:07:47
The whole thing, the fact that our society hasn't completely given up on this yet.
Anyway, back to the topic of the whole show.
The time is ripe for this.
You know what?
The war on every one of these different drugs has already failed completely.
And, you know, and then and the rest of the topics too.
Again, the economy, the boom and the bust, the welfare for big corporations, the corruption of Wall Street in the military industrial complex, the failed, nothing but failed wars overseas and the threat of nuclear war with the buildups of Cold War against Russia and China completely unnecessarily.
And the entire COVID regime, man.
The police regime.
I mean, I think, yeah, it's going to be a good couple of years for the conservative right and for the libertarians in reaction to the COVID stuff for sure.
But then, you know, maybe we can get them to put down those thin blue line flags and really, you know, influence the right.
Hopefully, we can influence the leftist.
Well, Pete, I'll say this, and we got to wrap up here because we've been going for a good amount.
But, you know, Pete Quinones, who we love, he writes over for you at the Libertarian Institute.
And he wrote this piece the other day about how basically the left have become the supporters of the police state, whether or not they would say it that way.
But in insisting on all of these mandates, really, they are the ones who are cheering on the police state.
And, you know, I had made this point when I was doing a response video to this Hassan Piker guy who did a video shitting on me.
And I did a video shitting back on him.
He's a dummy, but it got a whole bunch of fucking views.
It was like one of my most downloaded episodes ever.
But where he was, you know, basically like, he's like some commie lefty type who's arguing for the vaccine passports.
And I was like, well, does it, you know, my thing was like, well, if you're supposed to be this like radical socialist revolutionary, like, what are you doing on the side of big pharmaceutical companies and the police state?
Because that's who you're on the side of.
You're literally supporting the big pharma companies and who's going to enforce it.
Well, the police are.
And so this is this new thing where even some of these leftists and certainly all the liberals are supporting the police state now.
And man, if they're, you know, the one good thing about the right wing is that they're reactionary against the liberals and the leftists.
So you're like, hey, maybe we can, you know, try to tell them and say, those guys are the ones supporting the police state now.
So do you, what do you want to be so profitable, right?
They're messaging us all so confused, right?
Because the leftists are the ones shouting defund the police at the same time they're the ones supporting it all.
And so then the right-wingers are waving their thin blue line flag at the same time that they're condemning all the lockdowns and all the restrictions on their freedom.
None of these people can get their shit together, Dave.
It's up to you, buddy.
You have to lead the way, man.
Well, yes, with you whispering in my ear, I suppose.
Well, not so much whispering, but yes, I'll be there, bud.
All right, brother.
Well, I appreciate this.
I really enjoyed this episode.
And we only talked about war minimally.
And so it was fun.
It was fun to talk about a lot of this other stuff.
All right, man.
Well, thank you very much, Scott.
Of course, people can go listen to your show.
You got like, what is it?
Over 5,000 interviews.
5,620-something now, I think.
Yeah, the Scott Horton show.
Of course, everyone should go to anti-war.com every day.
That's you want to be on top of shit and you want to really know what's going on in the world, go there.
It's a very, it's a site that has an unbelievable amount of information and it's kind of laid out.
So like whatever area or topic you want to see, you can get to it pretty quickly and know what's going on.
So if you want to educate yourself on foreign policy, go to antiwar.com.
And the Libertarian Institute, I believe, is still in the middle of their big fundraising drive, right?
That's true.
That's right.
And in fact, we're doing pretty good.
We're over halfway to our goal of 60,000 and we've got matching funds right now.
And in fact, we had two different guys offered matching funds.
So the first guy's about run out, but we have one more guy that's also promised.
I believe it was up to $20,000 worth of matching funds.
So if we can get everybody to use that up for whatever they donate, I guess it's over $100 that he'll match.
And so if everybody does that, that'll put us over the top and we should be good for at least till next spring and hopefully longer than that.
And I gave everybody a raise right away as soon as we started this thing.
We've got a great group of guys over there and girls too, great writers and great podcasters and all that stuff.
Guys can mean guys or girls.
Yeah, that's fine.
That's a fine term.
That's a gender neutral term, I believe.
But listen, I will say, you know, particularly if you're swayed by what we've been talking about on the show and how important it is to like fucking educate people and get this fucking message out there and introduce people to these ideas, there is no better organization that you can give money to than the Libertarian Institute.
So please, if you can, I think you would really encourage people to try to go give money to them because they do really, really incredible work.
And of course, Scott's got all their books right over his right shoulder there.
Scott, yeah, yeah, a bunch of great stuff.
I love it all.
Everything the Libertarian Institute produced.
We were talking about No Quarters the last time you were on the show.
It was fucking great.
Will Gregg's book, just incredible.
Yep.
Keith Knight is putting out a book, The Voluntariist Handbook.
Awesome books.
I love Keith Knight.
He's great.
Oh, he's so good.
Yeah, he's so good.
And that's a collection of, I don't know, 50 essays or something all about, you know, libertarian anarchism.
And then we got a book by Brad Hoff, and I forgot his co-author's name, but both real experts on the war in Syria.
And Richard Booth is working on a book about the Oklahoma City bombing, which is going to be the fool's errand of the Oklahoma bombing, man.
It's going to be awesome.
And we already have the best archive anywhere in the world of documents and primary sources on the truth behind that thing.
And Pete's putting out a documentary.
I'm not exactly sure if that's going to be a Libertarian Institute production or not, but I think it probably has something to do with it or another.
I'm literally trying to look up in my bookshelf right now and see if I got every fucking one up here somewhere.
But I know I do, but I can't fucking find them.
But all of them.
And like I said, one more Will Grigg book coming.
And yeah, if anybody wants to know, you know, you hear me talk about these wars.
You want to know everything I know about these wars.
It's all in Enough Already.
So that'll catch you up.
Yeah, that's the thing.
That's that's the thing to go read right there, enough already.
I mean, if you just want to fucking specialize in Afghanistan, go read Fool's Eren.
But if you want to understand the entire war on terror, go fucking read enough already.
The UPS man came the other day, and I can't believe it.
For whatever reason, I ordered 300 books to give out for the, you know, for kickbacks for the donations and that kind of thing.
And they brought me little bitty boxes this big, 60 little bitty boxes of five each.
Whatever.
Anyway, the UPS guy, he's a nice guy.
He's like, so what book is this?
I said, well, it's my book, Enough Already, Time the End of War, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
He says, that sounds like a pretty good idea to me.
And I said, you know, you look like a man who's been to Afghanistan and back.
And he goes, yeah, that's right.
And so I gave him a copy of the book and he said he couldn't wait to read it and had plenty of negative things to say about the wars and how glad he was that he stayed out of the worst of it and how bad he regretted that his friends are dead because of it.
Friday UPS Delivery Surprise00:00:40
And like, yeah, man, it's back to the time is right thing.
That like, you know, people are about ready to hear this message and these messages, you know, the way we do.
So yeah, anyway, I'll leave that at that, I guess.
Yeah, no, that's that's uh that's good to hear and terrible to hear, but good to hear.
Yep.
Um, all right.
Well, thank you to all you guys for listening.
And don't forget the live pay-per-view part of the problem, momenthouse.com/slash skankfest.
That's going down Friday during the day.
I forget the time exactly, but Friday during the day, come check that out.