Part Of The Problem - Dave Smith - A History Of The 21st Century
Aired: 2022-04-15
Duration: 01:03:58


=== Roll Back The State (12:47) ===

[00:00:00]  Fill her up.
[00:00:02]  You're listening to the Gash Digital Network.
[00:00:08]  We need to roll back the state.
[00:00:10]  We spy on all of our own citizens.
[00:00:12]  Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
[00:00:16]  If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
[00:00:22]  Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
[00:00:26]  You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
[00:00:30]  Here's your host, Dave Smith.
[00:00:33]  What's up, everybody?
[00:00:34]  Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
[00:00:37]  I'm Dave Smith, your host.
[00:00:40]  And thank you guys very much for listening or watching or however consuming this.
[00:00:46]  I am writing solo today.
[00:00:47]  Robbie the Fire Bernstein has got a show tonight, and I couldn't record earlier in the day, so it's just me.
[00:00:55]  And I was thinking, I had something in mind for this episode.
[00:00:58]  But oh, I should say first, before we start, of course, me and Robbie the Fire Bernstein will both be doing a stand-up comedy show in Reno the Thursday before the national convention, which is the, let me check the date on that.
[00:01:13]  We'll put the link in the episode description again.
[00:01:16]  That will be the 26th, May 26th in Reno at the Alpine.
[00:01:22]  Me and Robbie the Fire Bernstein were doing a live stand-up comedy show and then a live episode of Part of the Problem the Thursday before the National Libertarian Party convention.
[00:01:33]  That's going to be a lot of fun.
[00:01:36]  Evidently, tickets are selling very fast for this.
[00:01:39]  So both shows are going to sell out.
[00:01:43]  But I just, I want all of our people who are going to be out there to make sure you guys can come out.
[00:01:48]  So go grab those tickets now.
[00:01:49]  I'll post the links.
[00:01:52]  I was a little taken aback by how quickly these tickets have been selling because usually they don't sell so fast so far out.
[00:02:00]  I haven't even tweeted or posted the link yet and we're moving them.
[00:02:05]  So go grab them now if you want to.
[00:02:07]  Okay, so what I was thinking for this episode was, as some of you guys may know, I've been going around the country and I've been speaking at a lot of these Libertarian Party state conventions.
[00:02:18]  And so I thought I would just kind of give you guys the podcast version of what my speech has been at these different events.
[00:02:29]  And as you guys know, if you listen to this show, you probably know me.
[00:02:34]  The speech has evolved a lot.
[00:02:35]  Like I'm not really like a very like, I'm not like a stick to the notes type of guy.
[00:02:39]  I go up there and kind of just talk.
[00:02:41]  I have an idea of what I want to talk about.
[00:02:43]  So the speech has kind of evolved and changed.
[00:02:45]  If you've seen me at any one of these state conventions, it's probably a little bit different than at the next one.
[00:02:50]  But more or less, I thought I would just give it to you guys now in a podcast form.
[00:02:57]  A few people have sent me like the video versions of the speeches that I gave.
[00:03:04]  And I was thinking about maybe posting that to like the YouTube channel or something.
[00:03:10]  But then I was like, no, let me just do it as a podcast.
[00:03:12]  I don't know.
[00:03:13]  I think that would be more fun.
[00:03:14]  And as just as the speech has been evolving, as I've been giving it at all these different state LP conventions, it'll, I'm sure, evolve a little bit and be a little bit different if I'm doing it in a podcast format.
[00:03:28]  So this is basically what I've been telling the LP state conventions.
[00:03:33]  It's kind of my bird's eye view of why I'm a libertarian and or not so much why I'm a libertarian, but why I'm a member of the Libertarian Party and why I think that, you know,
[00:03:48]  what I think is happening in the country right now, which is, I think, as you guys know, if you listen to the show, I think it's important as often as we can to get a good grasp on the kind of meta narrative of what's going on in this country.
[00:04:04]  It's, there's, I mean, I've felt this way for, I've felt this way since basically we've been doing the show, so back into the Obama years.
[00:04:15]  But certainly through the Trump years and really through 2020 to, you know, present date through Trump's last year and Joe Biden's years, that there's always so much happening that we're and like really crazy things happening that you almost have to really focus on like what just happened.
[00:04:34]  This is so crazy, what just happened.
[00:04:36]  And it's easy to lose sight of the big picture.
[00:04:40]  And so I think it's important to, when you can, try to see how the latest crazy thing fits into this bigger picture.
[00:04:48]  So, okay.
[00:04:50]  So what I've been telling people at these Libertarian Party state conventions is that I'm really excited about what I think the Libertarian Party can do in the near future.
[00:05:02]  And I know there's a lot of people out there who will, and justifiably so, will say, look, the Libertarian Party has never really achieved a tremendous amount of success.
[00:05:15]  Third parties in America don't typically, you know, do very well or make a lot of noise or really move the needle.
[00:05:22]  And that's all true.
[00:05:24]  But also typically, the United States of America doesn't do what it's been doing over the last couple of years.
[00:05:33]  At this point in time in this country, all bets are off.
[00:05:37]  And I think that a third party has a tremendous opportunity right now.
[00:05:42]  And the Libertarian Party really does have, as much as there are some that, you know, there's that meme where it's like, I forget exactly what it is, but it'll be like libertarian ideas and it's like some like wolf.
[00:05:57]  And then it's like the Libertarian Party and it's like some little beat up dog or something like that.
[00:06:03]  And there's some truth to that, right?
[00:06:04]  We've all, obviously, I've been very critical of things in the Libertarian Party where I think they haven't done a very good job or certain factions or certain individuals who have, you know, had power in the Libertarian Party.
[00:06:16]  But the truth is that the Libertarian Party is not just a third party.
[00:06:21]  It's a third party with the name Libertarian, which to me means something.
[00:06:28]  And this is the party of Ron Paul and Harry Brown and just a whole lot of really great people who really believe in what I consider to be the most beautiful, the most beautiful political philosophy in the history of humanity, that of liberty.
[00:06:47]  And so, you know, there's like a grand tradition in this party and more so just in the movement, but a lot of that in the party as well.
[00:06:57]  But that is not the reason why I'm so excited about what the party can do.
[00:07:03]  As proud as I am to be a member of the party that once ran Ron Paul for president, once ran Harry Brown for president, that's not really why we have a big opportunity.
[00:07:13]  The reason why we have a big opportunity right now is because every major institution in the United States of America has been completely discredited.
[00:07:25]  And this is pretty exciting in a way, because these institutions are really bad.
[00:07:32]  And so it's kind of good that people don't trust them anymore.
[00:07:36]  And this isn't just something that, you know, like I have a gut feeling about.
[00:07:40]  This is borne out by statistics.
[00:07:44]  I mean, you can see this.
[00:07:45]  And it's not even just like in the realm of the political.
[00:07:48]  It's not just that like, you know, CNN has like these horrific ratings or that no one watches MSNBC or that, you know, the subscriptions to all these major newspapers are plummeting.
[00:08:00]  It's also things like, you know, network TV shows don't get the ratings that they used to get.
[00:08:07]  And the Oscars don't get the ratings.
[00:08:10]  I mean, they have to, Will Smith has to slap the shit out of Chris Rock in order for any of us to care about the Oscars, you know, and like the just all these things, all of the cultural institutions, their support has evaporated.
[00:08:24]  And at the same time as that's happening, there's all of these alternative platforms that have become enormous.
[00:08:31]  You know, it's like the fact that I can look right now, I can speak to like a huge audience.
[00:08:41]  That wasn't something that somebody who was anti-government and anti-corporate media and anti-you know, big banks and anti-Federal Reserve and all this stuff, anti-police state.
[00:08:53]  That wasn't an option for us, just as little as like, you know, 10 years ago.
[00:09:00]  I mean, the internet existed and podcasts existed, but it wasn't like this huge industry.
[00:09:06]  We have that now.
[00:09:07]  And that's 10 years ago.
[00:09:08]  Forget 20 or 30 years ago.
[00:09:10]  It was just the idea was, it was basically magic, the idea that you could just do this.
[00:09:16]  And then the fact that I can go on shows like Rogan and Tim Poole and, you know, it's, this is a whole new world.
[00:09:24]  I can go on Joe Rogan's show, which is what, like 20 times bigger than some CNN show, 20 times the audience.
[00:09:33]  And I can just talk for three hours about all of this stuff.
[00:09:36]  This is something that even in like the Ron Paul presidential campaigns, there was nothing like this.
[00:09:42]  And I, you know, I understand that 2012 is a long time ago to some people, but you know, when you're a little bit older, it's, you know, 10 years ago isn't that long ago.
[00:09:52]  And this just wasn't a thing.
[00:09:54]  Didn't there was nothing like that.
[00:09:56]  And so while their credibility is evaporating, there's all these alternatives that are rising up.
[00:10:04]  And this is, you know, is very interesting and exciting.
[00:10:08]  It's a huge opportunity.
[00:10:10]  If you don't see that as an opportunity, then I don't know, you know, we're not looking at the same thing.
[00:10:16]  And that kind of leads to the question: why is that?
[00:10:24]  Like, why is it that the country is in the position it's in right now?
[00:10:30]  Why is it that trust in all of the major institutions has completely evaporated?
[00:10:36]  And I think that the reason is actually pretty simple.
[00:10:41]  Even though there's a lot of complexity to what happened, the basic reason for why the, you know, political class, I mean, you ever see like the approval ratings of Congress or something like that, compare them to like in the 80s or 90s, it's plummeted.
[00:10:59]  The viewership of major media, the corporate press plummeted.
[00:11:03]  The subscriptions of the newspapers plummeted.
[00:11:07]  The amount of people who watch the Oscars or whatever, all of this shit, everything that has to do with the establishment, their support has evaporated.
[00:11:15]  And the reason for that is that the 21st century has been an unmitigated disaster for the United States of America.
[00:11:26]  Now, with some exceptions, I mean, I don't mean, you know, there are things in the private sector, in the free market that have been successful, right?
[00:11:35]  Like there are technology has gotten a lot better.
[00:11:37]  That's part of that equation I was talking about before.
[00:11:40]  And, you know, there's things that like have continued to improve.
[00:11:45]  But in general, if you look at what the elite class, what the ruling elite class, what the political class, what the media class has given the United States of America in this new century, still 22 years old, it's all just been a disaster.
[00:12:04]  I mean, what have the American people been handed?
[00:12:08]  We got, you know, 9-11, the worst, you know, the wars on terror, the financial crisis, the Obama administration.
[00:12:24]  What do I even need to say there?
[00:12:26]  And I'll get into more of it, but Donald Trump, you know, as kind of like the big middle finger to everyone, and the rise of the COVID regime.
[00:12:39]  And now in Joe Biden.
[00:12:41]  This is what has happened.
[00:12:43]  And I think most people, you know, know this.

=== Trump As A Middle Finger (02:33) ===

[00:12:48]  There's like no arguing it.
[00:12:49]  I mean, you may have like a left-wing interpretation of what's happened or a right-wing interpretation or a different one like we do, but nobody is really arguing that any of this has been a success.
[00:13:01]  I mean, look, in the 90s, which I remember fairly well, the idea that the United States of America was in serious trouble, like that this country was on the brink of some type of like really bad situation was laughable.
[00:13:20]  And right now, I don't think anyone could deny that.
[00:13:24]  I don't think anyone could deny it from any political ideology.
[00:13:29]  Even like the most hardcore centrists think the country is spinning out of control.
[00:13:33]  You know, they're the ones actually, I think, the most concerned.
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=== The Year 2000 Bubble (09:48) ===

[00:15:22]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:15:25]  So, and again, I'm not trying to like, you know, paint the past with like a rosy, you know, lens or something like that.
[00:15:32]  I mean, the 90s had a lot of problems, but man, those problems seem like nothing compared to today.
[00:15:38]  So, basically, what happened in the 21st century?
[00:15:43]  What happened that gave us this?
[00:15:48]  Well, let's start in the year 2000.
[00:15:51]  So, in the year 2000, George W. Bush is elected president.
[00:15:59]  That's right.
[00:16:00]  George H.W. Bush is the CIA man, former vice president and president.
[00:16:06]  His son and the dumbest of his sons gets elected president.
[00:16:14]  And under somewhat shady circumstances, like a whole bunch of Jews in Florida vote for Pat Buchanan.
[00:16:20]  It was very close.
[00:16:21]  Who knows what really happened there?
[00:16:23]  But he gets in.
[00:16:26]  And one of the big things that kind of is forgotten about this time in 2000, and I know there's like a lot of young people who listen to this show.
[00:16:39]  And I, you know, I think for some of those people, this is kind of an ancient history.
[00:16:44]  But for me, for someone who's my age, this is, you know, not that I'm old or anything, but I'm, you know, 38.
[00:16:51]  I'm going to be 39 soon.
[00:16:53]  This is, you know, not that long ago.
[00:16:56]  I remember it well.
[00:16:57]  But so George W. Bush campaigned in 1999 and in the year 2000.
[00:17:04]  He campaigned on a humble foreign policy.
[00:17:08]  This is true, as crazy as it sounds.
[00:17:11]  He said in the campaign multiple times that his big thing was that the military should never be used for nation building.
[00:17:20]  It should only be used for defense of our country.
[00:17:26]  And he railed against the big government policies of Bill Clinton.
[00:17:33]  And there was also a lot of stuff about like restoring morality to the White House.
[00:17:38]  Like, you know, no, I won't be getting blowjobs from interns type shit.
[00:17:42]  But he really ran on kind of at least somewhat sane, you know, like he ran a somewhat sane campaign in terms of like what he was promising.
[00:17:55]  It was like, hey, I'm not going to get my dick sucked and cheat on my wife.
[00:17:59]  And, you know, government's too big.
[00:18:02]  We should bring fiscal sanity back and we shouldn't be the policeman of the world.
[00:18:06]  We should really just be defending our country.
[00:18:08]  We shouldn't do nation building and stuff like this.
[00:18:11]  And so anyway, he won.
[00:18:13]  You know, it was very close election, which who knows if he won, but he got in.
[00:18:17]  And immediately in the year 2000, he had a big problem, which was that there was this bubble bursting.
[00:18:24]  It's what was known as the dot-com bubble of the 90s, because the truth is that even as I was looking back at it, the 90s weren't quite as good as they felt.
[00:18:34]  And actually, there was a whole lot of problems.
[00:18:37]  And so the dot-com bubble was bursting right on George W. Bush's watch.
[00:18:43]  And, you know, if George W. Bush had been Smarter or better, or had ever read a book, or knew anything, or had some integrity or anything, maybe he would have been strong enough as a leader to say, Well, yes, this bubble is bursting, but this is because of malinvestment under Bill Clinton, and we're going to have to feel this pain now.
[00:19:06]  But that's because things weren't actually as good as they seemed under him.
[00:19:09]  But, you know, obviously, none of that was going to happen.
[00:19:12]  So, the response to this threat was to lower interest rates.
[00:19:20]  And the Fed fund rate was brought way down.
[00:19:23]  I think it was brought down to like 2% or something like that.
[00:19:25]  You can double-check me on all these numbers because I don't usually when I give this speech, I look them up right before, but it's something like that.
[00:19:31]  The Fed fund rate down to 2%, which today might sound like very high interest rates, but at the time was like really, really low.
[00:19:39]  Just for some perspective, only 20 years earlier in 1980 to rein in the inflation of the 70s, the Fed fund rate was at 20%.
[00:19:50]  So, 2% was like, these are low interest rates, very low interest rates.
[00:19:57]  And this really did work temporarily.
[00:20:02]  Like this, this really smoothed out the bubble bursting.
[00:20:06]  And, you know, in fact, at the time, people were like just celebrating Alan Greenspan, the Fed chairman at the time, as like this genius.
[00:20:16]  Because look, he just figured out how to smooth out the bubble.
[00:20:19]  But there really wasn't that much pain.
[00:20:21]  Because, you know, of course, if you lower interest rates, it makes money much cheaper.
[00:20:25]  People start borrowing and, you know, for projects that they wouldn't normally have.
[00:20:30]  If it was, you know, if you're getting loaned money and it's 10%, you know, you may not start a big project, but if it's only 2%, you'll start this big project.
[00:20:40]  You'll expand.
[00:20:41]  Of course, the rates are a little bit higher.
[00:20:42]  This is the Fed fund rate, which means it's what banks get the money at, but that's the idea that interest rates were brought really low.
[00:20:48]  And this kind of at least was perceived to smooth out the crash, the bubble bursting from the dot-com bubble.
[00:20:59]  And so everyone was celebrating that.
[00:21:01]  You know, 2000 was a little bit of a like, you know, not a great economic year, but it wasn't the disaster that a lot of people thought it would be.
[00:21:08]  And then in 2001, the country changed because 9-11 happened.
[00:21:14]  And, you know, these pissed off Muslims, you know, hijacked some planes and flew them into the Twin Towers and into the Pentagon.
[00:21:26]  And it changed the country.
[00:21:29]  And the American people were told, of course, that this was because they're insane.
[00:21:35]  They hate us just for being so great.
[00:21:37]  That was actually what the official administration line was.
[00:21:40]  It wasn't anything about what we had been doing over there.
[00:21:44]  It was just that we're so damn free.
[00:21:46]  And they hate that.
[00:21:48]  They really hate that.
[00:21:49]  It's just horrible.
[00:21:51]  Like they're just there, you know, it's as if some, you know, they Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and all them were just over there like reading the Bill of Rights, just like, what the fuck?
[00:22:03]  A Fifth Amendment?
[00:22:05]  They have the right to not incriminate themselves.
[00:22:08]  And they just got their plans and came over here and attacked us.
[00:22:11]  And so in response to this, George W. Bush launched the war on terror.
[00:22:18]  And then they brought rates even lower because they, you know, George W. Bush, of course, first off, they were concerned about the economic, you know, damage of 9-11 and of the fear of terrorism and stuff like that.
[00:22:31]  And also because the Bush administration in late 2001 decided Very intentionally, not to trap or kill Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and Tora Bora, but to let him escape into Pakistan and instead to fight a regime change war against the Taliban.
[00:22:53]  Because, you know, regime change wars in Afghanistan, they always work.
[00:22:56]  So that was the decision of the Bush administration.
[00:22:59]  So we launched this big war that everyone knows is going to be a very expensive big war, but there was no war tax.
[00:23:06]  There was no, you know, there were no tax increases of any kind.
[00:23:09]  So it was all deficit finance.
[00:23:11]  But the thing about financing debt, you want interest rates to be low.
[00:23:15]  So they kept interest rates very low.
[00:23:17]  And then in 2003, we launched the war in Iraq, a regime change war against Saddam Hussein.
[00:23:23]  So now we got two wars going.
[00:23:26]  And of course, government spending through the roof.
[00:23:32]  It was in everybody's, in all of the kind of political class's best interest to keep interest rates very low, which did actually continue to push back the pain.
[00:23:44]  Because in a low interest rate environment, at least at that time, it, you know, it stopped the economy from being horrible.
[00:23:53]  And this is another thing that they all bragged about.
[00:23:55]  Like early in the first decade of the 21st century, this was something that everyone was patting themselves on the back for.
[00:24:03]  That, look, I mean, the economy, we survived this bubble popping, and now we survived 9-11 and these wars, and we're not really feeling it.
[00:24:12]  So that's pretty cool.
[00:24:15]  But there were some other consequences.
[00:24:20]  And one of them was that, you know, when interest rates are low, a lot of people got pulled into the housing market.
[00:24:27]  Because of course, if any of you know, if you've ever been in the market for buying a house, you know, the interest rate's a pretty big deal.
[00:24:33]  If you can get a low interest rate, you might be able to buy a house you couldn't get if the interest rates were higher.
[00:24:40]  That means a lot for what your monthly payments are going to be.
[00:24:43]  And back then, they had these crazy adjustable rate mortgages where you could get in at a really low rate.
[00:24:49]  So you can get in there.
[00:24:50]  I'm like, oh my God, your monthly payments aren't really going to be that much.
[00:24:53]  And also, housing prices are going up every year, 10%, 12%.
[00:24:58]  You're making money.
[00:24:59]  So even if you can't afford the monthly payments at some point, you just sell the house and then you keep the profit of what it went up over those years.
[00:25:07]  You keep it four years or something like that.
[00:25:09]  It was going up 10% every year.

=== Quit Naturally With Fume (03:11) ===

[00:25:10]  You go, you make a killing.
[00:25:12]  This is great.
[00:25:13]  And they were bragging about this, openly bragging about it, openly bragging about how, you know, record high home sales and record high auto sales too.
[00:25:22]  They were all in 2001 and 2002, the Bush administration was bragging about record high home sales and record high auto sales.
[00:25:30]  All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Fume.
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=== The Bursting Housing Market (03:37) ===

[00:28:22]  But as the years went on, the wars got really bad.
[00:28:27]  And, you know, a lot of people noticed that, particularly people who were like, you know, in the military or had family who are in the military, but Afghanistan became the debacle that anyone could have predicted it would.
[00:28:39]  And Iraq went way worse than all of the rosy predictions.
[00:28:46]  I mean, when they first launched the war in Iraq, they said that, you know, we were going to be greeted as liberators and that the war would be paid for in oil and that it would be a cake walk.
[00:28:57]  These are all quotes from the neocons and top members of the George W. Bush cabinet.
[00:29:04]  This is what they said.
[00:29:05]  This is going to be an easy war.
[00:29:07]  And the war itself, the war against Saddam Hussein's government was easy.
[00:29:11]  They went in, it was a few weeks and they just toppled Baghdad and eventually found Saddam Hussein.
[00:29:16]  And it was, you know, but what they didn't count on is that we weren't greeted as liberators.
[00:29:21]  So we beat Saddam Hussein's government, but then we had to fight the insurgency.
[00:29:26]  That was a whole different story.
[00:29:29]  So anyway, so the wars are going bad.
[00:29:32]  And then toward the end of George W. Bush's administration, the bubble finally burst.
[00:29:40]  And it wasn't just the bubble, it was the dot-com bubble, which had then been fueled into the housing market bubble.
[00:29:47]  And the whole thing just collapsed when interest rates had to finally go up.
[00:29:53]  And all of a sudden, housing prices at the same time fell.
[00:29:57]  And so all of these people, it was like a giant game of musical chairs and all the chairs just got taken out.
[00:30:03]  You thought you were playing this fun game.
[00:30:04]  And then all of a sudden, everyone's just falling down.
[00:30:09]  All of these people who are buying houses that they normally wouldn't have bought if they hadn't been sucked into it in this low interest rate environment.
[00:30:17]  All of a sudden, the rates went up and everyone had to feel the pain right away.
[00:30:20]  So at the end, we're eight years into the 21st century.
[00:30:26]  And now America has had the worst terrorist attack on its home soil in American history.
[00:30:33]  They've had two disastrous wars.
[00:30:36]  And now you get the worst economic and financial crash since the Great Depression.
[00:30:44]  So according to the Federal Reserve, between the years 2007 and 2010, 40% of Americans' wealth evaporated.
[00:30:59]  It's 40% of the median American net worth evaporated.
[00:31:07]  So right there, if you want to understand what's going on with the country today, why is this thing so unstable?
[00:31:15]  Why are we at each other's throats?
[00:31:18]  Why has everything devolved?
[00:31:21]  Why have political tribalism become so like just vicious?
[00:31:29]  This is where you need to start.
[00:31:33]  At the bare minimum, this is where you need to start those years.
[00:31:36]  I mean, just imagine, right?
[00:31:39]  This isn't just like this happened to a few people or it happened in this one area.
[00:31:43]  The median American net worth declined by 40% in a few short years.
[00:31:50]  So imagine, you know, you're like a family of five and all of a sudden 40% of your net worth is gone.

=== Obama's Phony Recovery (15:10) ===

[00:32:00]  That'll change things quite a bit.
[00:32:03]  And the country was so furious with this.
[00:32:07]  I mean, it was like so, you know, just it's eight years later after Bill Clinton's peace and prosperity.
[00:32:13]  And okay, fine, Bill Clinton didn't really give us peace and prosperity, but compared to this, he did.
[00:32:18]  And the country's just like, can't believe how bad things have gotten.
[00:32:23]  So what they do is they elect the most anti-George W. Bush president they could think of.
[00:32:30]  And who was that?
[00:32:32]  It was Barack Hussein Obama, the progressive constitutional lawyer, junior senator.
[00:32:41]  Like they went from George H.W. Bush's, you know, conservative, you know, son to junior senator named Barack Hussein Obama, who's like the most progressive at the time.
[00:32:59]  That was his voting record was deemed like the most progressive member of the Senate and who's a constitutional lawyer, a community organizer, just the exact opposite in terms of optics.
[00:33:13]  And Barack Obama promised the country that he was going to, you know, he was going to restore habeas corpus and he was going to end Guantanamo Bay and he was going to end the war in Iraq and he was going to balance the budget and he was going to restore civil liberties across the board and just all of this.
[00:33:35]  Like we're going to go back to being a proud country.
[00:33:38]  We're going to go back to, we're going to repeal the Bush years and we're going to go back to being like a successful, proud country.
[00:33:44]  So Obama gets in.
[00:33:47]  And then Obama, largely, I think, because he got completely rolled by his own military and deep state and all of that, but he continues all of the Bush policies.
[00:33:58]  I mean, like immediately in 2009, like once he's in there, he's talking about, you know, he's continuing and expanding the craziest of the Bush war on terror policies, you know, talking about indefinite detention and like all this stuff, doesn't end any of the wars that he claimed he was going to.
[00:34:20]  And then in fact, over the course of his administration, adds, not only continues Iraq and Afghanistan, but adds Libya, adds Syria, ultimately adds Yemen, Continues all the military you know actions in Somalia and all of this stuff.
[00:34:36]  So the wars continue, the uh.
[00:34:38]  Guantanamo Bay, still open to this day, doesn't get closed.
[00:34:41]  None of the stuff, none of the due process gets restored and, in fact, builds up the largest spying apparatus in the history of the world.
[00:34:50]  But the, the.
[00:34:51]  From the very beginning, what Obama really had to deal with was what I just mentioned, this economy that became the major story of the, of the election.
[00:35:01]  It wasn't at first.
[00:35:02]  At first, it was the war in Iraq being such a disaster, but after the crash, that was what everyone had to talk about.
[00:35:08]  So that's what he had to grapple with.
[00:35:09]  Coming in, he was inheriting this god-awful economy, the worst economy we had had in probably, probably since the Great Depression um, in in terms of, like the, how steep the recession was.
[00:35:21]  And so the Obama um, what was hailed as the Obama recovery through Obama's administration, um is uh, basically what they did was they brought interest rates even lower.
[00:35:34]  So these low interest rates we were talking about before, that caused all of the, this bubble, to form.
[00:35:39]  Well, they said, forget that.
[00:35:40]  We're bringing them to zero, we're bringing the FED fund rate to zero and we're going to keep it there for years and also we're going to jack up uh, uh government spending.
[00:35:50]  So you had um, the uh, historically low, uh interest rates and historically high government spending the lowest interest rates ever and the highest government spending ever and the result of this was the Obama recovery, what they call the Obama recovery.
[00:36:12]  So if you remember 40 of the, the media net worth evaporates um, but now you have this Obama recovery and you know you can kind of make it look nice on charts when you have zero percent interest rates and record high government spending.
[00:36:28]  Um, you know you say oh, look at the job numbers, look at the stock market, look at this, and that you can.
[00:36:34]  You know you can look at different like statistics.
[00:36:38]  But what it left us with was a situation where you know, if you ever go look um at the at the map, like if you look at a map of the richest counties in America go go, look at them, go look at where they are.
[00:36:52]  They're all like right outside Washington Dc and right outside New York City.
[00:36:58]  It's all basically the suburbs of Dc and the suburbs of New York City.
[00:37:02]  These are the richest counties in America and that that's.
[00:37:06]  That is not capitalism, you know it's not because there's like these big factories in Washington Dc and New York City.
[00:37:13]  Oh, they're just producing so much stuff and that's why these people are so rich, because they're making all their money on the free market or something.
[00:37:19]  You know it's the.
[00:37:20]  The thing is that this is where the politically connected live and this is where the Wall Street connected live.
[00:37:26]  So that's what you have there, the low interest rates and the high government spending.
[00:37:30]  The high government spending leads to all the politically connected people making tons of money.
[00:37:34]  The low interest rate leads to all the speculators in Wall Street making tons of money.
[00:37:38]  So while they pretend there's this recovery, the recovery is really happening for the politically Connected and the Wall Street connected.
[00:37:46]  But that's not really happening in the Rust Belt.
[00:37:48]  That's not really happening like in all of these other areas that have been completely devastated.
[00:37:53]  And this whole time, the entire corporate press is celebrating the Obama recovery.
[00:38:00]  That, you know, is you still see to this day, right?
[00:38:03]  What is a scandal-free administration?
[00:38:05]  That was Obama.
[00:38:07]  So the entire corporate press is just like repeating this guy's talking points, and the country is suffering.
[00:38:14]  So by the time 2016 comes, America was ready for the biggest middle finger they could give Barack Obama.
[00:38:23]  And this now, of course, the way that they spin this is that it's like because the country was so racist.
[00:38:29]  But in order for that to be true, they would have had to, they got racist in those years because actually when Barack Obama came in to office, he had incredibly high approval ratings.
[00:38:43]  When Obama first won the presidency in 2008, in the beginning of 2009, he had over 70% approval rating, which is like really hard to imagine a president having an approval rating like that today.
[00:38:56]  You know, try to think of that.
[00:38:58]  Imagine Donald Trump or Joe Biden having over 70%.
[00:39:02]  You know, if those guys get 45%, it's like, ooh, they're doing good.
[00:39:06]  Joe Biden would kill for 45% right now.
[00:39:10]  And so that's, you know, and George W. Bush had the highest approval ratings ever after 9-11.
[00:39:16]  After 9-11, everyone just wanted to support the president.
[00:39:18]  Fuck, we're a country.
[00:39:19]  We're at war.
[00:39:20]  We were attacked.
[00:39:21]  He's our guy.
[00:39:22]  So he leaves, he starts with record high approval ratings, leaves, they're in the gutter.
[00:39:27]  Obama starts with crazy high approval ratings, leaves way lower than they were when he first started.
[00:39:33]  And the truth is that, you know, what was just not working for the Americans was they were being handed nothing but disaster, and they knew this.
[00:39:44]  And so they were ready to give the biggest middle finger to the whole establishment that they could.
[00:39:50]  And then entered the biggest middle finger that you could think of.
[00:39:55]  Big orange cartoon character, Donald Trump.
[00:40:00]  Who, you know, if you strip away all of the, you know, Trumpness and the tweets and kind of like the things that the media would jump on and they would tell everybody how awful he is because of this one thing.
[00:40:14]  Well, here's this one thing he said.
[00:40:15]  Well, he said this thing about Mexicans being rapists or he said this thing about something else or whatever.
[00:40:20]  But the essence of Donald Trump's pitch to the American people in 2016 was what?
[00:40:29]  It was make America great again.
[00:40:34]  It was the idea that like we are not doing good and we used to be doing really good.
[00:40:40]  And under my leadership, we're going to do really good again.
[00:40:45]  We used to be great.
[00:40:46]  We're not great anymore.
[00:40:47]  I'm going to make you great again.
[00:40:48]  We're going to bring back our jobs.
[00:40:50]  We're not, you know, we're not having, you know, being flooded with immigrants and I'm not concerned with them.
[00:40:55]  I'm not fighting other wars overseas because I'm concerned with them.
[00:40:59]  I'm not like defending NATO because I'm concerned with them.
[00:41:02]  I'm concerned with you.
[00:41:04]  You need to win.
[00:41:05]  We've been losing.
[00:41:06]  You know, everything he said, like fit right into this.
[00:41:08]  It was all, we had very stupid people in charge.
[00:41:10]  They're very stupid.
[00:41:11]  They don't know how to make a deal.
[00:41:12]  I know how to make a deal.
[00:41:14]  And also, you know, he just fucking made all of these people furious, all of the people who had failed the American people for now 16 years, at least.
[00:41:26]  But just to focus on the 21st century.
[00:41:30]  And so Donald Trump wins.
[00:41:32]  And now Donald Trump is president.
[00:41:34]  And Donald Trump is the big middle finger to the entire establishment.
[00:41:40]  And just to keep in mind, he didn't just run against Obama.
[00:41:44]  He ran against Obama and George W. Bush and the corporate press.
[00:41:49]  You know, he was out there saying, I mean, he said every fucking awful thing you could say about Obama.
[00:41:54]  In fact, I mean, he dropped it by the campaign, but he was for a while before that going off about Obama not being an American and being born in Kenya or some shit like that.
[00:42:02]  But he was brutal, just brutalized the Obama administration, brutalized Hillary Clinton, you know, for her role in the Obama administration and just in the establishment in general.
[00:42:14]  You know, Hillary Clinton, of course, had been not only the secretary of state, but a senator through this whole 21st century.
[00:42:20]  I mean, she was right at the seat of power the whole time.
[00:42:22]  So he was brutalizing them, but then he also brutalized the George W. Bush administration, said the war in Iraq was stupid and that George W. Bush lied us into that war, like didn't mince words at all about that.
[00:42:33]  And then also brutalized the corporate press.
[00:42:35]  They're the enemy of the people.
[00:42:37]  They're fake news and they're lying to you and all this stuff, you know?
[00:42:41]  And so that was, you know, the American response to the first 16 years of the 21st century.
[00:42:51]  And in many ways, if this had been, you know, if sane people were in charge of this country, this would have been a big moment to take a step back and go like, whoa, what's going on here?
[00:43:04]  We are really being rejected.
[00:43:05]  I mean, we just spent the last, you know, nine months telling you this guy is unacceptable and he can't possibly win.
[00:43:11]  And then he won and he has like real enthusiastic support and all of this.
[00:43:16]  But none of that happened.
[00:43:18]  Instead, they just all decided to turn against him.
[00:43:23]  And the whole deep state turned against Donald Trump, the corporate press, the whole political class.
[00:43:28]  They framed him for treason with Russia.
[00:43:31]  They did everything they could to just get in the guy's way.
[00:43:34]  And then on top of that, it turned out that all of that was really just bluster.
[00:43:38]  You know, all of this like, I'm going to bring your jobs back and I'm going to do this and that.
[00:43:41]  And he had no clue what he was going to do.
[00:43:43]  And, you know, yes, people, again, people can look to, okay, there were these like numbers that look good.
[00:43:50]  Oh, look, you know, record low unemployment or something like that.
[00:43:54]  But it was really all just built around the fact that he jacked government spending from even Obama levels up.
[00:44:00]  It was the same thing.
[00:44:01]  It was really just a continuation of the Obama foreign policy, excuse me, economic policy.
[00:44:07]  Then those areas in the Rust Belt that, you know, there were like hundreds of counties that went for Obama that then also went for Donald Trump.
[00:44:14]  The media, I don't know, they all became racist at some point around 2014 or something like that.
[00:44:21]  But those same guys, you know, they, they rejected the Obama recovery because they were like, there is no recovery here for me.
[00:44:28]  And then Donald Trump comes in and promises them the world.
[00:44:30]  And they, you know, all of those towns are still just as fucking, you know, were still demolished under Trump.
[00:44:40]  But at least we were far removed from the last bust.
[00:44:43]  And we had been building up the, you know, the phony kind of recovery a bit.
[00:44:48]  And maybe things got like a little bit better for some people.
[00:44:52]  All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Yo Kratom.
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[00:45:46]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:45:49]  But all of the powerful people continued to get rich off of this rig system and all of the wars continued and all of the worst stuff of the Obama administration continued.
[00:45:59]  You can debate how much of that you blame Trump for, how much of it you blame the whole system turning against him, whatever.
[00:46:06]  That's kind of beside the point.
[00:46:09]  The major point is that in 2020, in the final year of Donald Trump's presidency, in the final year of the big repudiation to Donald Trump, excuse me, in the final year of the big repudiation to the entire establishment, the biggest middle finger were so furious with how this 21st century has gone that we will let this guy get in there because he pisses all of you off and he says he's going to fucking fix all this shit.
[00:46:38]  And in his final year, you have the rise of the COVID regime, where this upper respiratory virus that I guess came from a lab in Wuhan that was funded by the American government.
[00:46:52]  This comes to America.
[00:46:54]  And 2020, the final year of the big fuck you establishment for what you've given us in the 21st century.
[00:47:03]  And he's going to fix all this shit.
[00:47:04]  His final year in office is the worst year in modern American history.

=== The Discredited Establishment (14:53) ===

[00:47:10]  And that's not an exaggeration, even slightly.
[00:47:14]  Now, again, you can argue whether you blame Trump or you blame the Democratic governors or what.
[00:47:19]  I personally think there's a lot of blame to go around.
[00:47:21]  Donald Trump is the one who invoked the national emergency and he's the one who invoked the National Defense Production Act or whatever it's called.
[00:47:37]  I'm blanking on the fucking name of it, but he's the one who pretty much set it into motion, gave cover for all the governors.
[00:47:42]  And by the way, it's not just Democratic governors.
[00:47:44]  I mean, there's like two Republican governors who weren't terrible on this whole thing, too.
[00:47:49]  So it's most Republican and Democratic governors locked down their states, deemed people non-essential.
[00:47:55]  I mean, it was just the worst year in modern American history for most people.
[00:47:58]  Hundreds of thousands of small businesses closed their doors permanently.
[00:48:02]  Tens of millions of people put out of work and put on government assistance.
[00:48:08]  Millions and millions of kids' lives, just childhoods completely interrupted, mental health issues through the roof.
[00:48:17]  It's just everything you can think of.
[00:48:19]  Just the whole disaster of the COVID, the rise of the COVID regime that we've been talking about on the show for like two years now.
[00:48:28]  And this was an opening for the establishment to come back.
[00:48:35]  And the best they could put up there was Joe Biden.
[00:48:41]  Basically, no one else, you know, capable was really able to run.
[00:48:48]  And they threw everything they could at the wall and just, you know, they liked Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg and Beta O'Rourke, but all of these people just failed miserably.
[00:48:59]  They just didn't have an Obama.
[00:49:00]  You know, they didn't have anyone who could kind of like rile up the masses.
[00:49:06]  And then Bernie Sanders started doing pretty good because the people were so goddamn pissed off that even the ones on the left half of America were like, well, I like this populist socialist guy who's talking about actually doing something for us.
[00:49:17]  And this scared the crap out of the establishment because Bernie Sanders was unacceptable to them.
[00:49:22]  So they all got, you know, behind Joe Biden and they basically rigged it against Bernie Sanders again.
[00:49:29]  Perhaps not as Blatantly, you know, not as much blatant corruption as in 2016.
[00:49:37]  But who knows?
[00:49:37]  There were no leaked emails because, you know, Julian Assange is fucking killing him slowly from going insane.
[00:49:45]  So we didn't get any like big email dumps.
[00:49:47]  Who knows what was going on behind the scenes there?
[00:49:49]  But at least they rigged it out in the open, where right before Super Tuesday, everyone drops out and endorses Joe Biden.
[00:49:57]  Elizabeth Warren stays in all the way through to siphon votes off of Bernie Sanders.
[00:50:01]  You know, they set it all up for him.
[00:50:04]  And then basically the corporate press carried Joe Biden into the presidency.
[00:50:13]  They told him to stay in his basement the whole time.
[00:50:15]  And the media ran against Donald Trump.
[00:50:18]  And they also added this whole vote by mail thing.
[00:50:21]  And who knows what happened?
[00:50:22]  But Joe Biden's the president now.
[00:50:25]  And so the establishment made a comeback.
[00:50:28]  I mean, really, they never left.
[00:50:29]  Their policies never left, but their figurehead makes a comeback.
[00:50:34]  So this is now where we're at.
[00:50:36]  You enter Joe Biden.
[00:50:37]  Now the establishment is kind of back in control, the adults in the room and all this, which is what you hear from the corporate press as Joe Biden was about to be sworn in.
[00:50:48]  So now Joe Biden's been in.
[00:50:51]  And what do you see all around you?
[00:50:55]  Just disaster.
[00:50:57]  I mean, now you have not only all the damage of the COVID regime that's been continued and the mandates and the vaccine passports and all of this stuff, all the people whose lives have been ruined.
[00:51:07]  And he tried to do a lot more, but I guess the Supreme Court did stop him from a couple of his worst mandates.
[00:51:12]  Now you have us flirting with a nuclear conflict with Russia, and you really are starting to feel the destruction of the currency.
[00:51:21]  And where are Joe Biden's approval numbers?
[00:51:25]  In the toilet.
[00:51:28]  Only compared to Kamala Harris's approval numbers.
[00:51:31]  Do Joe Biden's approval numbers not look terrible?
[00:51:35]  So that's where we're at in the 21st century.
[00:51:41]  And what's dangerous about this is that the more that things have spun out of control.
[00:51:49]  And of course, this whole time, the response is always more government authoritarianism, more authoritarianism, bigger and bigger government, all of this.
[00:51:57]  And the more things spin out of control, the more that the government has to clamp down to maintain their power.
[00:52:06]  And we've gotten to a point where these things are pretty freaky.
[00:52:09]  I mean, you know, a lot of people are looking at the, you know, the lockdowns in like Shanghai and stuff like that and being like, God damn, I mean, our government did lock down.
[00:52:18]  They don't lock down like this, but like, this isn't that far off from what we have.
[00:52:22]  You look up in Canada.
[00:52:23]  This is not China.
[00:52:25]  This is not the Middle East.
[00:52:27]  This is not a country thousands of miles away.
[00:52:29]  This is our, you know, neighbors to the north that are supposed to be kind of just like us.
[00:52:34]  And just a couple months ago, they have this like working class populist freedom movement of truckers and some other protesters saying, hey, we want an end to these mandates.
[00:52:46]  We want to go back to 2019 or, you know, whatever.
[00:52:49]  We want to be free people.
[00:52:51]  And you had their authoritarian government just crushed this movement with, you know, invoking never before used emergency powers, seizing people's bank accounts with no due process.
[00:53:05]  And this is no joke.
[00:53:06]  This is like a really big threat that we're up against.
[00:53:09]  So that's kind of where we are.
[00:53:12]  So to people who believe in liberty, and specifically to those members of the Libertarian Party, this is what I would say to them at the end of the speech.
[00:53:21]  Well, here's what you got.
[00:53:23]  You got the biggest opportunity you've ever had to reach more people to do an end around around the corporate press and really speak to a large audience of people.
[00:53:37]  And you've got a disaster and a terrifying prospect of rising authoritarianism.
[00:53:46]  So biggest opportunity you've ever had.
[00:53:49]  Very dangerous situation.
[00:53:53]  So what do you do?
[00:53:54]  What do you do in that moment?
[00:53:57]  Well, I would say that if you're in a situation where you can reach a lot of people and speak to a lot of people and they have been completely screwed over in the 21st century and the trust for the major institutions has evaporated,
[00:54:13]  if no one, you know, if no one trusts CNN anymore and you've got an opportunity to go speak to them, maybe you don't want to sound like CNN when you speak to them.
[00:54:29]  Maybe you don't want to sound like the Washington Post or the New York Times or Hollywood or academia or the political class or any of these other groups that have been completely discredited, especially when what you're trying to say to them is that these other groups have caused nothing but disaster.
[00:54:50]  I think at that point, what you want to do is distinguish yourself from them to say something different and important and bold and meaningful.
[00:55:00]  And I tell libertarians this, that I think the best two moments from my perspective in the history of libertarianism, in the history of libertarians talking about libertarian things, the best two moments were Ron Paul Giuliani,
[00:55:17]  the great Ron Paul moment, which is sometimes referred to as the Giuliani moment, but it was all Ron Paul's moment where he explained what led to 9-11, that it wasn't just that they hated us because we were rich and free.
[00:55:33]  And in fact, they hated us because of what we're doing over there, namely killing innocent civilians and propping up brutal dictators and propping up the Israeli government and stuff like this.
[00:55:43]  And he got booed out of the arena.
[00:55:47]  And then Rudy Giuliani just got thunderous applause for challenging him.
[00:55:52]  But he started a whole like movement because of that.
[00:55:58]  Because there's a lot of people out there who have a hunger for the truth.
[00:56:02]  And even if the, you know, even if you say something that might get you booed, at least you're going out there and telling the truth and sounding different and saying something that no one else is willing to say.
[00:56:12]  The other example that I would give is Harry Brown.
[00:56:16]  There's two LP presidential nominees in the past, Harry Brown, who wrote this wonderful, amazing, courageous piece called When Will We Learn.
[00:56:26]  And it was basically making the same argument, like what led to 9-11.
[00:56:30]  And it was published on September 12th, 2001, which if you think there's anything like it for younger people, if you think this environment, it's scary to like say the wrong thing, you know, if you think it was like, oh, it was really ballsy to come out like, you know, against the vaccine or something like that, or it's ballsy to come out, you know, like against, you know, the official narrative with the war in Ukraine, that was nothing.
[00:56:57]  You have no idea.
[00:56:58]  After 9-11, the idea on September 12th to blame U.S. military action for 9-11 was like, the amount of courage it took to do that is it's hard to put into words.
[00:57:14]  So that's when libertarians were at their best.
[00:57:18]  When they were saying things that would just get you destroyed by the corporate press, destroyed by the powerful, you know, like ruling class.
[00:57:30]  But it was the truth.
[00:57:33]  And so I'm just saying, like, right now, we have this tremendous opportunity.
[00:57:38]  We can tell the truth to more people than we ever could before.
[00:57:42]  And they are more ready to hear the truth than they ever have been before.
[00:57:47]  And so the question is, what are we going to do with that opportunity?
[00:57:51]  And I would humbly submit to you that we tell the goddamn truth and we tell it loud and unapologetically.
[00:57:59]  We don't ever have to try to mince words or sound like any of these other failing institutions.
[00:58:05]  We don't have to make sure that we, you know, like go like, no, but look, I also want you to know that we're not, we're not messed up and we're not saying this and we're not saying anything bad.
[00:58:15]  And it's not that we don't think that it's not that I think anyone in Washington, D.C. is bad or that I think anyone at CNN is bad.
[00:58:21]  I mean, I don't, you know, we don't need to be worried about being labeled anything by these blood-soaked monsters who have handed the American people nothing but disaster in this 21st century.
[00:58:34]  We should call all of them out.
[00:58:35]  We should unapologetically tell the truth.
[00:58:38]  And right now, we have a real opportunity to do that.
[00:58:40]  And as I said before, what we're up against is a legitimate, terrifying threat.
[00:58:46]  So you got the biggest opportunity you've ever had and you're up against the biggest threat you've ever been up against.
[00:58:52]  So who's up for that challenge?
[00:58:54]  And that's why I think it's worthwhile to be in this party.
[00:58:58]  And yeah, people can point and say whatever.
[00:59:00]  Oh, you know, third parties never win or something like that, or you're just the spoiler party or something like that.
[00:59:05]  It's like, yeah, maybe third parties never win, but, you know, the country's never really been on the brink of collapse the way it is right now.
[00:59:13]  And there's really never been an alternative, you know, outlet.
[00:59:16]  Back then, they used to always the whole thing.
[00:59:18]  And this is like a lot of old school people, like a lot of the old dogs in the Libertarian Party still say this way, still think this way.
[00:59:25]  I saw one, you know, guy at an LP convention who said, he was like, the only thing I want to hear out of presidential candidates is who's got a plan to get us on the presidential debates.
[00:59:39]  And I remember looking at that and thinking to myself, this is so like, this is just, you know, nothing against that guy.
[00:59:45]  He was a good guy and everything, but you're like, this is just like dinosaur thinking.
[00:59:50]  Like this is, this is extinct.
[00:59:52]  That's not the way the Libertarian Party should be thinking.
[00:59:55]  We shouldn't be like, oh my God, we have to get into the presidential debates.
[00:59:58]  We should go out there and make so much noise and persuade so many people and be just like such a big, like the thing that everyone has to ask about that they want us in the debates, that they come to us and go, okay, can you guys come to the presidential debates?
[01:00:13]  And that's when we tell them, we'll see if we can squeeze, if we can squeeze you in.
[01:00:18]  That should be our attitude.
[01:00:20]  And we need to put forward our vision for what this country should be and what it could be.
[01:00:27]  And the vision is essentially this, that none of it had to be this way.
[01:00:32]  This didn't have to happen.
[01:00:34]  The whole 21st century didn't have to happen.
[01:00:37]  Not like this.
[01:00:38]  It didn't have to be this way.
[01:00:41]  Even if you're going to grant, you know, the 20th century already happened and we can't go back and change that.
[01:00:46]  You know, the 21st century did not have to be this way.
[01:00:49]  The response to 9-11 did not have to be, you know, 20 years of disastrous failed wars.
[01:00:58]  Didn't have to be that way.
[01:01:00]  We didn't have to, we could have trapped Osama bin Laden, killed him in Tora Bora and declared the whole thing over.
[01:01:05]  We didn't have to fight a regime change war against the Taliban.
[01:01:08]  We didn't have to fight that whole war, that whole 20-year war in Afghanistan.
[01:01:12]  We never had to fight the war in Iraq.
[01:01:14]  We never had to do any of this stuff.
[01:01:16]  And therefore, we wouldn't have had to hold interest rates that low.
[01:01:19]  We wouldn't have had the housing collapse.
[01:01:21]  We didn't have to do any of that.
[01:01:22]  We could have been a normal country.
[01:01:24]  And we could have, you know, when COVID came, we could have had a normal response to it.
[01:01:31]  And we could have said, hey, you know, look, here's the information on this virus.
[01:01:35]  And, you know, it does seem to be killing like old, sick, fat people.
[01:01:40]  And so if you're an old, sick, fat person, or I guess any one of those things, but definitely if you're all three, hey, you may want to avoid that.
[01:01:46]  Maybe, you know, you stay, you know, away from people, blah, blah, blah, but everyone else can assume their own risk.
[01:01:51]  We didn't have to kick tens of millions of people out of work.
[01:01:54]  We didn't have to destroy hundred thousands of, you know, small businesses and fuck up millions of children's life.
[01:02:01]  We didn't have to do any of that.
[01:02:02]  It could have been different.

=== Warnings About Fiat Currency (01:54) ===

[01:02:04]  That's the libertarian I have a dream moment.
[01:02:07]  It didn't have to be the I have a dream that we didn't do any of that shit, that we were just a normal country.
[01:02:12]  And we could have been.
[01:02:14]  And we can continue.
[01:02:15]  We can do that in the future.
[01:02:17]  There's no, nobody's like made of magic here.
[01:02:20]  We're all just people.
[01:02:22]  And the people who are in power are deciding that we're going to do things this way.
[01:02:26]  And it's our job to go tell as many people as we can, you know, to wake them up to this reality that this is why it's this way.
[01:02:37]  This is why the country is spinning out of control.
[01:02:39]  And this is how it could be.
[01:02:42]  And that's what libertarians have.
[01:02:44]  We are the ones, you know, who have been telling people that we never should have fought the war on terrorism.
[01:02:51]  We're the ones that have been warning people about destroying your currency and saying that you can't have this crazy fiat currency and you can't just print money endlessly and not expect it to destroy the currency.
[01:03:03]  Your currency should be tied to some type of hard commodity.
[01:03:07]  And we're the ones who were warning against the, you know, the spying apparatus and the military industrial complex and the police state and, you know, the incarceral state and all of this stuff.
[01:03:19]  And of course, we were the ones warning against the COVID regime.
[01:03:24]  And that's what we can be.
[01:03:26]  And if we go do that, man, we got a fucking unbelievable kick-ass message when we have the best opportunity to spread that message, when the people are most open to hearing it, and when it's most important to spread that message.
[01:03:41]  All right.
[01:03:41]  So that's more or less been what I've been saying at these state LP conventions.
[01:03:47]  And excuse me.
[01:03:50]  And okay, so that's where I'll wrap the podcast up.
[01:03:53]  Thanks, everybody, for listening.
[01:03:54]  And next time, Robbie the Fire will be back with me.
[01:03:57]  Okay, peace.