Dave Smith and Robbie the Fire Bernstein dismantle Michael Knowles' false narrative that libertarians ceded power to liberals, arguing instead that conservative overreach—from the Department of Homeland Security to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—destroyed their cultural standing. They expose how government funding drives modern social issues like transgender advocacy rather than organic market forces, refuting claims that avoiding state power caused liberal dominance. Ultimately, the hosts assert that eliminating perverse welfare incentives is the only path forward, rejecting both authoritarianism and the myth of libertarian failure. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Free Speech Platform Debate00:14:56
Fill her up.
You're listening to the Gash Digital Network.
We need to roll back the state.
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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.
What's up, everybody?
What's up?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I'm Dave Smith.
He is Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
How you feeling today, Rob?
Oh, man, I'm doing good.
I was up all night on Adderall.
I finished my end of year thing, so I'm still cooking.
I'm still feeling that juice.
Oh, nice.
There you go.
That's what I like to hear.
Really tweaking out on that stuff we give to six-year-olds for some reason.
All right.
Well, I want to let you guys know before we get into the show today, we did for obviously for New Year's Eve, I'll be out at the comedy store with Louis J. Gomez.
The first show, I think, is all but sold out.
So we opened up a second show.
So you can still come.
There'll be another show there.
So go, if you're in the area, go grab tickets now.
This one is going to sell out as well.
So go grab some tickets and come hang out with us for New Year's.
Me and Robbie the Fire Bernstein are going all over the place in 2023.
We already have a bunch of dates booked out.
We're going to be in, where is Jesus?
St. Louis, Detroit, Dallas, Fort Worth, Pennsylvania, a whole bunch of stuff coming up.
More dates to come.
ComicdaveSmith.com for all of our dates.
And of course, Rob, you got your end of the year stuff coming up.
Yeah, come out to the show.
It's going to be party.
I got a bunch of really hilarious comics on the New Year show.
I got the Shedcast Boys doing a full concert.
So Friday, Saturday, New Year's weekend, come party.
It's going to be a good time.
Hell yeah.
Hope we both hope to see some of you guys out there with us.
Spend your New Year's with the part of the problem boys.
Okay, respectively.
And then we'll be together a bunch in 2023.
All right.
So a couple things I wanted to talk about on today's show.
There was last night on Timcast, on Tim Poole's show, Michael Knowles was on and they argued with Luke, with my boy Luke, about a bunch of libertarian stuff.
So I figured we'd get into a little bit of that because some of it made me want to pull my hair out, even though I love all those guys.
But first, interesting development with this Twitter story, which really does seem seems to be dominating so much of the conversation for a lot of the political world in America, at least.
But so did you see this, Rob, that Elon Musk banned an account that was well, I don't exactly understand if you know the details to it, but they were tracking the location of his private jet.
Is that right?
Yeah, this has been ongoing.
This was before he took over Twitter.
He was taking issue with, it's like a high school kid initially.
Maybe it's a new account, but initially he was a high school kid.
He was just posting where his plane was going to coming from.
He's got a lot of baby bombers out there.
He doesn't want people up in his business.
So now, from what I understand, this is public information.
Like you can find out.
That's how the kid's finding it out, right?
Like he's able to find out where, oh, the info is not public, Brian's telling me.
Okay, interesting.
So how is this kid figuring out where his plane is?
There's got to be a way to search.
Like I'm sure no one's going, hey, this is Elon Musk's plane, but I bet if you figure out what his plane is, there's probably a way to scrape like the airports of who I'm sure there's a way to do it.
Yeah.
So evidently, this led to someone showing up to the plane or someone trying to follow them or something like that.
And Elon Musk wasn't there, but it was like based on following the plane that he uses.
So Elon Musk posted a picture of the guy who was following whoever it was, and then put that on Twitter, then banned the account, and then I think banned a few other accounts who were like sharing it.
I believe Keith Olberman got caught up in this as well.
So kind of an interesting take.
Obviously, so much of the conversation around Elon Musk taking over Twitter has rely has been based around people getting kicked off of social media.
I'm curious what you think about this.
I really have no problem with this being an offense that gets you kicked off.
No, I think it's fair if you say, hey, I got a rule, which is I got a plane.
And if you're tweeting out where I'm going to be, I feel that that's threatening to me.
And so you can't do that.
The Washington Post, however, is claiming that he just took a lot of liberal journalists off the platform, claiming that they were doing that and they hadn't done that.
I guess that remains to be determined.
But yeah, if he's pulling some weasel move where he goes, oh, I'm not safe.
I don't feel safe.
You guys are threatening me and just pulling down accounts with differing opinions.
Well, that's not good.
Yeah, I think I said this like I think I said this several episodes back, but they, yeah, so Brian's saying that they all linked to the account that was tracking him.
You know, if that, again, I don't know which one is true.
If that's the case, then there's a little bit of an argument here.
Look, as I said several episodes back, free speech in general, right, is you get into trouble when people have this kind of like absolutism idea about free speech.
It's a principle that you want to like enforce to the maximum ability that you can.
In the same sense that any of us, like even like very hardcore libertarians, like we believe in free speech, but that doesn't mean you have a right to like go on anybody's property and say what you want to because there's a check on that.
Whoever owns the property could say, no, I don't want you here.
And that doesn't mean that any newspaper has to publish your article because there's a check on that, which is that somebody else owns the newspaper and things to this extent.
When you have something like Twitter, what I was saying, what was it last month?
Was what you're looking for is to have the minimum, like the least amount of restrictions possible on what you can say.
Have those restrictions be reasonable.
Have those restrictions be clearly articulated and then have those restrictions be equally applied, not applied to like one political stripe or another.
That's in order to make it a free speech platform.
I think you have to come somewhat close to doing that.
I personally do not have any problem with there being some restrictions, some rules.
You know, like the reason we always hated tech censorship was because like, well, what people got kicked off for is basically like for not being progressives, for not supporting COVID lockdowns, for not supporting vaccine mandates and stuff like that.
And even presenting scientific arguments against them.
If you're going to say, hey, you can't give out people's real-time locations, you can't give out people's addresses, you can't give out, I find that to be completely reasonable.
If you were to say, hey, no sexualizing kids, I'd find that to be completely reasonable.
You know what I mean?
Like there's lots of standards you could have.
Make it very clear what this is and apply it to everybody.
You know what I mean?
That I don't have a problem with.
Also, the COVID stuff is coming from government.
That was why we were taking issue from it was it was clearly censorship that was coming from government.
If a platform were to even say, hey, I don't want to have Nazis on my platform.
And I personally, I like free speech.
Think the government should say, Hey, Nazis can't use the telephone lines because that would creep me out.
But if I have a business and I go, Hey, I don't want Nazis in my business because I think it's going to ruin my business.
I don't think like that's you should be allowed to do that.
You should be, or even if libertarians were so autistically annoying that every time we showed up to your party or making conversations about the Fed, imagine like you actually have a clubhouse and you're like, you know what?
I don't want to have libertarians in here anymore because they keep ruining everyone's evening of trying to drink, being all fucking autistic and talking about the Fed.
That's fair.
I mean, you probably actually just say no politics.
I don't think you'd act.
Like, how would you know that someone is a libertarian until they show up and like, fuck that autist stuck here?
But you get what I'm saying.
It's like, if you got a business and you think that most of your clientele does not appreciate the behavior of a single individual to make that decision is fine.
It's when it's coming from government.
Like, you know what I mean?
No, no, you're right.
Look, there should be a very clear line, a very big important distinction between what, you know, the it's a private company, you know, argument that people make, like they can do whatever they want to.
And when what we know now, which is where you've had, I mean, I don't know to put all of the evidence together.
We have the former White House press secretary admitting that they gave lists of people they wanted banned.
We have emails released from Arix Berenson saying that the White House was asking about him specifically.
We have, of course, the Twitter files, the meetings with the FBI, the meetings with the director of national intelligence, the Biden campaign team specifically asking about certain things to be scrubbed that all happened.
Not to mention, you know, say on other platforms, excuse me, other platforms like Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg admitting that the FBI essentially interfered in the 2020 election.
So, okay, all of that we're all completely against.
That's completely horrific and anti-First Amendment and all of that.
But even beyond that, even if there were no government involved, if these big social media platforms were just, you know, banning right-wingers for being right-wingers, I'd still think that was bad because, yeah, this is kind of today like the digital town square.
And you don't, this is just a bad situation.
It's not good for our society.
However, yes, I agree with you, Rob.
If it was with the absence of government intervention, then it's their, it is their right technically to do that.
But I also, but there's also a difference.
It's like not all rules are created the same.
Like if they were to just say, hey, you know, like there's a big difference between if they said, hey, any COVID misinformation, we're going to ban that.
And by COVID misinformation, they mean the government misinformation is absolutely fine.
Fauci's misinformation is fine.
But Alex Berenson, even when he's got a perfect argument behind what he's saying and all of the data bears out that he's correct, we're still going to label that as misinformation and kick you off.
If that's one rule, right?
And then a different rule was no cursing.
You know, we want no cursing on our platform.
They're not the same.
Those aren't the same thing.
Same from the same gay place.
Yeah, maybe.
But you know what I'm saying?
Like if the rule was no cursing, like I wouldn't like that.
I curse a lot.
But if that's the game and they just go, hey, look, you're not allowed to curse.
But aside from that, you can say whatever you want, have whatever opinion you have.
And there's no government, you know, involvement in that.
I'd go, all right.
Well, those are the rules.
You know, if I want to be on Twitter, I can't drop an F-bomb.
Okay, fine.
You know what I mean?
Like that to me is not nearly as like, holy shit, this is fucked up as look, I would have gotten kicked off Twitter already.
I can't even keep it together.
But that's not the same thing as like COVID misinformation stuff.
That's like a whole different creepy level of like Orwellian stuff.
Anyway, just wanted to make that point.
Go ahead.
I think an interesting theoretical question would be, so we acknowledge billionaire owns the platform.
It's his business.
He gets to make decisions about his business.
Now, let's say he wants to take down all bad news against Tesla or all bad news that criticizes him.
It's kind of interesting because, like, let's just say I built like, I don't know, an incredible mall and I just had like a hangout lounge area and it was mine.
And then I let people use it, like the public.
I was like, people can use this.
And then people are sitting there and they're just talking shit about me.
So I can understand, like, imagine like you're Steve Wynn or something.
You go down to the casino floor and you're like, yeah, I'm not going to let you just talk shit about my casino.
Get the fuck out of here.
So it's kind of interesting because like Twitter does exist like a publisher.
And I think we would all go like, oh, yeah, Elon Musk can't just be a billionaire who's basically editorializing the public like picture of him by taking down bad and like information that criticizes him.
But on the same note, it's like, I don't know, there is an argument for it.
Yeah.
I mean, I think the counter to that is almost that, look, Elon Musk bought Twitter with the promise of this is why I'm buying it.
So you at least could certainly accuse him of some hypocrisy.
Yeah, but I guess the market could leave it, which is interesting.
Like, I guess if he really censored the platform to a point that it wasn't of interest or everyone thought it wasn't cool, it could just leave.
It does raise some interesting questions.
Now, another interesting question, and this is something that a lot of people are pointing out, is that there are some of the now, I know Keith Olbermann, I don't know who the other liberal journalists were.
I saw some of them before, but you know, so there's been a handful of liberal journalists who were who were kicked off.
I guess you said that you said there was a Washington Post piece claiming they didn't actually share his information, but then he's claiming, no, they did link to this guy.
So leaving that argument aside for a second, there's an interesting speaking of hypocrisy, it leaves us, let's say, the people outside of the progressives who are basically considered right-wingers by the progressives, but whatever libertarians or conservatives or right-wingers or anyone who does not fall into that kind of progressive area.
When you have liberal journalists who would, and we know this, celebrate tech censorship, celebrate people being kicked off these platforms when it's the politics they don't agree with.
Like they will be thrilled that Alex Baronson is booted.
They'll be thrilled that Alex Jones is booted, all of this.
And then they get booted.
How should we feel about that?
You know, it's like, should you extend this kind of view about freedom to people who do not extend it to you?
This is a broader question that I think has been in many ways sometimes separates the libertarians from the right-wingers over the course of the last few years.
This is something that's been coming up a lot.
I will admit there's an interesting conversation to be had here.
There's an interesting argument.
You know, you could even extend this to like the people who like, you know, the people who would have been fine with you being on house arrest or you in reality being a second-class citizen for a while when vaccine passports were implemented.
Should we still be advocating that that person has their full liberty?
Preemptive Account Removals00:14:27
You know, like, I, by the way, I come down on the side of yes, we should, but just presenting the question that there is a question there, you have to admit.
Go ahead.
What are your thoughts?
No, I just, I personally don't like it because it's a losing game.
If we're always, if whoever has the upper hand is just using it to punish the other side, like at some point, someone's got to be the bigger man and go, all right, I got the upper hand, but I'm going to be nice and I'm going to treat you fairly because I'd like to be treated fairly.
It's like someone's got to take the initiative to actually put the principles into action and try and make it better.
So to be petty and go, well, you guys were trying to censor us.
So now we're going to censor you.
It's just, it's a losing game.
Well, I tend to agree with you.
And I also think there's a middle ground between like, you know, the two positions.
Like there's a position where you could still not become everything you hate and become everything you were against up until five minutes ago.
And also still kind of like, remember, you know, like, like, you know, like still kind of remember, like, yeah, we still got to be vigilant and make sure that person never has the authority to fucking fuck all of us over again.
But we also at the same time don't have to just become the exact thing we were fighting against.
The thing about it is, is that you automatically lose once you say, oh, we're going to be right back to playing that game.
Now, I understand, by the way, this is a point that I'll make on the other side.
The kind of slippery slope argument doesn't like, like, this was a traditional libertarian argument, which I think there is a lot of merit to and has been historically.
It has been borne out like this.
But they'd be like, hey, you know, you might want to use, say, government power or something like that when you have it, but be careful because that same power could be used against you.
Now, this is borne out as very wise advice when it comes to things like, say, you know, right-wing and conservative America all getting behind the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act and the war on terrorism.
And look who are the targets of it now.
It's right-wingers.
So there's some real wisdom in that.
However, when you talk about like the tech censorship regime, that argument just doesn't resonate quite as much because right-wingers are like, but we're already the victims of it.
Like there's no slippery slope to get to the point where like, oh, could you imagine a world where they have control of this?
It's like, yeah, I'm living in that world.
We're still living in that world on YouTube, Facebook, and Google.
And we were living in that world on Twitter until five minutes ago.
So that argument isn't quite as appealing here.
I would just say that, look, if you, if you want to actually win, you have to think about what it means to win.
Like, what does that actually mean to win?
And to me, if you have people who, the people who already agree with you and are already in your, in your, on your side, they're with you.
And the people whose minds cannot be changed and are against you, they're against you.
But there still are lots of other people.
Almost every libertarian and right-winger who I know was once neither.
They were once neither of those things.
And they got persuaded.
And if you want to win, you got to be able to persuade more people to your cause.
And that's really when it comes down to it, what everyone's in the business of doing.
There's really only two different camps when it comes to political thoughts.
There's the people who are in the business of wielding power and the people who are in the business of persuading people.
That's it's basically a binary.
And all of the, then you have this camp of like a few like neo-reactionary right-wingers who are have no political power, but are arguing that we need to wield political power.
But really, they're just in the business of trying to persuade people that we need to wield political power.
So they don't actually have any.
You know what I mean?
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If you're in the business of trying to persuade people, you don't want to go down the censorship road because this is you're you're gonna you're gonna suffer from the same atrophy that the left suffers from.
This is why they're no good at arguments, you know, because it's like they don't actually ever have to confront them.
You gotta what you got to be able to have Keith Olberman on Twitter and still wreck him.
And there's also something to be said for, like, you know, if we're really on the right side of history, I don't mean to borrow the left's you know slogan, but like if we're correct, I mean, I shouldn't say the right side of history, I retract that.
If we're if we have the truth on our side, then we should want these people on Twitter.
I love Keith Olberman being on Twitter, it fucking exposes what a psychopath he is regularly.
I don't want him to go away, and now he gets to kind of have this like, oh, they couldn't handle what I was saying, so they shut me up type thing.
Again, I think it's a reasonable rule to say, Yeah, don't share Elon Musk's fucking current location.
I think that's a reasonable rule for him to have, but just wanted to say, in the broader scheme of things, no, I don't think we should support censoring those people who would support censoring us, otherwise, we're just becoming what we oppose.
And I think that's not good for your soul.
And we don't need it, truth is on our side, they need it.
That's why they're freaking out about the fact that there's open platforms as far as we're concerned.
Like you said, let Oberman document all of his dumb opinions.
Yeah, no, that's right.
I want them to make their arguments.
You know, I remember there was one, I think it was when Gene Epstein was in one of his capitalism versus socialism debates.
It was, I can't remember if it was against that guy, uh, um, what's his name?
Bon Carr.
I'm blanking on his fucking name, but there was that guy, and then he debated Richard Wolf.
It was one of those two debates.
Um, and someone in the audience heckled one of the socialists at one point, and Gene chastised him pretty quickly.
And Gene, like, he's he like booed him or something like that.
And Gene was like, No, no, no, we don't do that here.
Like, we, this is not what we do here at the Soho Forum.
Like, be respectful, like, don't do that.
And, um, and I remember I was in the audience when it happened, and I, you know, in your mind, you're like, dude, shut up, shut up right now, let him talk because Gene Epstein is a monster and he's about to destroy him in front of an audience of people.
It's like, let him have that.
What, what would happen if you drowned him out?
That, like, you literally just are robbing Gene of his ability to like.
And by the way, Gene won both of those debates decisively, just decimated the arguments.
And those, I think they've both been viewed like millions of times.
You're like, dude, what are you doing right now?
We want them here.
We want them to speak.
We want it to be demonstrated that they're up against superior ideas that they don't have a response for.
So, anyway, it's just kind of like on the same theme.
All right.
Any other thoughts on the Elon's?
I guess I'm curious to see better documentation on whether or not these accounts were taken down for actually retweeting it.
And then also even retweeting the other guy's account.
I understand that that's shit kicking, but without kind of being expressly told, hey, I view this as a threat to my safety and well-being and you have to stop doing that.
It does seem a little bit preemptive to just be yanking accounts down from like kind of ultra liberals.
So my guess is they'll be restored.
That's my guess, too.
Yeah.
And if that's the case, then it's also not nearly as bad.
Look, again, like I say with all this stuff, you know, you can't make the perfect the enemy of the good.
If their counts are restored and it's kind of like, hey, look, this is the rule going forward.
Just know that now.
That's still a lot better than where Twitter used to be.
But I do, those are, that's kind of like my criteria.
Like I said before, there should be minimal rules.
The rules should be reasonable.
They should be very clear and they should be equally applied.
If that's the case, I'm okay with that.
And I mean, you already said it, but it's nice to have exposed these people of apparently they really don't like being censored.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That is.
There is something kind of nice about that for sure.
All right.
So let's get into what I was mentioning before the other day.
So on Tim Pool's Tim Cast last night, they had Michael Knowles on the show, who first off, just say I like everybody involved in this video.
I love Tim and Ian and Luke, all great guys.
Love doing that show.
And I don't know Michael.
I've never met him, but I have enjoyed a lot of his content.
I think he's over at the Daily Wire, but he puts out a lot of good shit and he's a very smart guy.
But man, I really think he gets stuff wrong when he's talking about libertarians.
So anyway, just a couple clips that I wanted to play from this and kind of respond to.
Let's start with the first clip, Brian.
It's not a clip, but the first time stamp and let's hear what he had to say.
Because people will start pushing.
But I suppose the conservative view from the past 20 years is politics is downstream of culture.
So stop passing laws.
It's really just a libertarian view, but stop passing laws and just, you know, I don't know, make better music or something.
And I'm not really mocking it.
Obviously, the culture matters a great deal, but you can't neatly separate these things.
And the law is a teacher.
So if I'm looking at how we got to this insane cultural position now where we will be debating the virtues of child pornography and pedos.
It's already happening.
It's happening.
They're accusing just to be clear.
What I think Michael Knowles is guilty a lot of quite a bit in this episode, if people want to go watch it, is like this kind of narrative creating where he's kind of starting from his conclusion and then building a narrative around this to support it.
Just to be clear, it is not the conservative or libertarian position, certainly hasn't been over the last 20 years to say, stop passing laws, go make music or go, you know, the culture is what affects society, not, you know, the government, that culture is downstream from politics.
I mean, it is true that Andrew Breitbart, who's a conservative, had a famous quote saying culture is downstream or politics is downstream of culture.
Excuse me.
But that has not been the conservative governing attitude for the last 20 years, certainly.
And that's not at all the libertarian perspective.
Listen, I'll say right now that I've, as I've said many times for years and years on this show, and I don't know any libertarian who would disagree with me on this, that the two are very related and that sometimes politics is downstream from culture and that sometimes culture is downstream from politics.
You can see lots of examples of this.
I mean, you can think about the cultural effects that the lockdowns had.
This was not an example of politics being influenced by culture.
This was completely led by politicians and they completely changed the culture.
I think of public school indoctrination and how much that affects the culture.
So just to be clear here, that's not the libertarian position.
That's not a conservative position.
The libertarian position isn't stop passing laws.
The libertarian position is like, let's abolish a lot of the existing ones and roll back.
The libertarian debate usually comes back to like down to like, should we roll back 95% of what we have or 100% of what we have?
So I just don't, I just think he's starting from an inaccurate place.
From a chicken and an egg perspective, I think politics is more of the driving force because perverse market of incentives, it drives every decision that people are making in our culture.
And so when we have funding for things like getting your woke degree, being a complaining person, the way the healthcare markets are set up, low interest rates to fuel spending, or like, by the way, the whole transgender thing is because of laws that Obama passed that made sure that it was funded.
Like a lot of this stuff is only exists because government made government money made it available.
And government actually pushes culture by funding certain activities while, you know, basically stripping your ability to make an income doing other things.
Like we all want to do well in life.
We all want to have class and status.
Like these are human things.
And government does a very good job of manipulating the market so that the things that it likes are funded, that you, you got your professor job.
I mean, it's what Rothbard discusses is about basically the intellectual class.
Intellectual class.
Yeah.
Is that the people that are paraded as the intellectuals are the ones that are going to say the garbage that the government wants them to say.
And that all comes down to government funding.
HR Dictates Consumerism00:02:31
So I don't really 100%.
100%.
And I mean, look, the best example there, to me at least, or the most powerful one is just Fed policy.
I mean, look, just think about that.
Like, just think about that.
There is, there's this, what, what do they call it?
The board of governors of the Federal Reserve.
They just meet and decide what the interest rates are going to be.
And then that has this drastic effect on how the entire market's going to move, right?
Like this, even just like half a point, you know, where they were just like, oh, I think they just said in their final meeting of the year, they're going to raise another half point rather than, you know, 0.75, you know, three quarters of a point or something like that.
That alone drastically changes the way markets are going to move.
So, no, is that an example of like politics being downstream from culture?
No, it's completely the opposite.
It's that a few people who are appointed by politicians are going to make a decision all on their own, having nothing to do with the culture.
And then they're going to completely dictate how much consumerism is going on versus how much savings versus how much, you know, asset investment, et cetera, et cetera.
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Lessons from the 60s00:15:03
All right, let's get back into the show.
All right, let's keep playing.
Accusing anybody who criticizes actual pedophiles, they go, why are you talking about gay people?
We got here.
You just mentioned it.
But we got here because of censorship, because of people saying you can't counter this.
No, no, no.
We got here because those ideas haven't been able to be challenged because people have been censored for going against them.
People have been arrested for going against them.
Why, when we had a more censor-minded regime that censored bad things and promoted good things, as opposed to what we have now, which is a censorship regime that promotes bad things and suppresses good things.
Like, what's an example?
What do you mean?
Well, I would say, let's see, the Pilgrims land at Plymouth Rock in 1620.
And then from 1620 up through the founding of the American Nation, up through about, I don't know, the early 60s, we had a basic consensus on what is moral and what is immoral.
And it was Christianity.
It was based on the Christian moral view.
And then in the 1960s, you saw, led by the government, led by Supreme Court decisions, led by laws that weakened some of the freedom of slaves.
You saw the attacks on McCarthyism in the House on American Activities Committee.
You saw the free speech movement at Berkeley that led to a weakening of our obscenity laws.
You saw a weakening of our laws proscribing certain sexual behaviors that then led to the sexual revolution.
When you opened up that society much more, what happened?
Did it lead to this wonderful period of flourishing?
No, the society has gone downhill.
It's gone straight to pot ever since.
Pause it.
Right here.
Okay, so this is like, let me start with saying that.
Okay, so there's like a kernel of truth, I think, to what Michael Knowles is saying here.
And that would be that, I mean, look, he yada yadas over a lot of history.
Like it's hard to go from Plymouth Rock to the 1960s and just be like, this was the story.
The story was that we censored everybody.
And then the problem is then we tried, what, liberty after the 60s?
And look at this, all this liberty just gave us this terrible, you know, denigrated society that we have today.
Look, it is true that the consensus, as he calls it, there was much more of a cultural consensus in America up until the 60s.
And that certainly the culture was much more hospitable to families and Christianity and tradition and, you know, gender norms and things like this, you know, so, and, and that has degraded.
It drastically degraded in the 60s and has continued to degrade ever since.
So that part is true.
But for him to then, I mean, this is what I mean by the narrative painting.
I mean, look, I guess we all have our narratives.
It's just like which ones are more really based on facts and what actually happened here.
But for him to say, well, the reason is because there was this free speech movement at Berkeley, or the reason is because, you know, this led to like, yeah, we, we, obscenity laws were being stripped down or things like that.
It's like, come on, man.
Like, what were really the major things in the 1960s?
What happened?
Well, the CIA murdered the president on national television.
That was a pretty big one.
Okay.
That was like a pretty big thing that shaped the generation.
And then they got us into an insanely stupid, evil war in Vietnam where every able-bodied man was terrified that they were going to get drafted.
And then they started dosing all of the young people with LSD.
That's kind of where this counterculture came from, also.
You know what I mean?
Like, it's not like, oh, we're just supposed to ignore that part of it.
Look, man, what happened in the Vietnam, and I think almost anybody, if you were talking about what really was the impetus behind the countercultural revolution, that was it.
That was it.
It was the Vietnam War.
And it was this war where, first off, all the young people were very incentivized to be against it because they were terrified.
This, this is like, it's very different than any war that any of us have lived through.
Talk to like, you know, your parents, if they were, you know, alive in that age, some of you younger guys, maybe your grandparents or something like that.
But it's like everyone knew someone who was getting drafted or someone who was trying to dodge the draft.
Everyone.
It was everywhere.
If you had any like military age man in your family, this was a real thing that they might be forced to go over there and fight in this most bloody war.
And it was so transparently bullshit.
And we were fighting over it.
Like, it's not even like, it wasn't like World War II, where you could convince yourself maybe we're the good guys here.
This was just like, oh, what?
We're trying to impose our will over Vietnam because what?
If the commies take Vietnam, Kansas is next.
Like, what you know what I'm saying?
Just a horrific amount, two to five million Vietnamese and other, you know, Asians, Cambodians and such were slaughtered in the war.
Just horrific.
We were just so clearly the bad guy.
And you, you were terrified you were going to have to go take part in this killing madness.
And this did a tremendous amount to destroy the culture in our society.
But there's also a lot of stuff that came even before that.
You know, there was the even back as far as, you know, what was it, 20 years earlier than that, 30 years earlier?
Yeah, something like that.
It was the creation of Social Security.
So it was no longer, you know, like really weakening familiar bonds where it was like, oh, okay.
So instead of your retirement plan being like, oh, your kids would take care of you in old age.
Now the government was just going to take care of you in old age.
Of course, in the 60s, we also built up the welfare state with the great society.
This did nothing but completely undermine the family unit.
So just to just say, oh, the problem is we didn't have like censorship laws anymore or something like that.
There's just much more to it than that.
The story is not that we tried liberty in the 60s.
In fact, at the time, the 60s was the greatest expansion of state power in American history by far.
The war in Vietnam, the great society, we put a man on the moon.
Government spending was out of control.
This is why we immediately went off the gold standard in the 70s and then really ushered in the era of big government to follow that.
But it's all because of the spending in the 60s and the money printing in the 60s.
That's essentially what happened in the early 70s, right?
Was that like the Europeans called our bluff from the 60s because we were supposed to be on a gold standard, but they could obviously tell you guys are printing way more money than you have gold.
So we're going to redeem our money for gold.
And we were like, no, we're off the gold standard, no longer redeemable.
So it's just like, you know, you can come up with a narrative that the problem here is that we just did too much liberty, but that's just not backed up by any of the empirical facts.
So, um, I don't know.
Anything else you want to add on that, Rob?
I wasn't alive for the 50s, but was it that fun?
I mean, did people really like it?
Like this claim of, oh, back when we lived in these small towns, we went to churches and you were stuck with your husband your whole life.
Like, did people really like it?
I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to advocate for like a non-religious lifestyle.
I mean, I'm out here doing comedy, which I love.
I get to do what I love.
But I mean, in a 1950s world, my dick jokes wouldn't be probably going to be well appreciated.
Yeah, but it would have been like, but it would have been like a way tamer version, but still seemed crazy edgy.
Like, he'd have been like, maybe, maybe I'll go down on the hoo-ha.
This guy's nuts.
So I'm just saying, I wasn't there for it.
No, I get your point, but I'm just arguing that, like, look, he's taking this from the conservative Christian point of view.
So to him, yes, that's a better world, right?
But I'm saying, even from your point of view, this is what actually happened here.
It's not that there was a drastic increase in liberty.
That's just not right.
It's not, you know, let's go to the next clip, Brian, which is further down because this one, this one really made me want to pull my hair out.
I can't remember exactly what it is, but I'm sure I'll be refreshed in a minute.
To be too harsh, you know, on the libertarian effect on the conservative movement, but a lot of the reason why the libs have become so good, specifically over the last 60 years, at wielding the government in a way that it was not very good actually at before.
You saw, you know, you saw the beginnings of it with Woodrow Wilson and FDR, but you still had a lot of conservative political power within the government.
A lot of the reason why we're not good at it anymore is because the libertarians convinced the conservatives that wielding political power per se is wrong and immoral.
And by doing that, we conceded the entire political field.
And now the libs run all of the institutions.
Pause it right there.
Oh, oh, Knowles, this one really grinds.
This is what's so frustrating about being a libertarian: it's like libertarians have been warning against every mistake that the conservative movement has made forever.
And then we're right about all of it.
And then they go, hey, you know what?
The problem is that we just listen to you libertarians too much.
That was the problem.
So they'll be sitting here like, you know, like, the libertarians are like, do not fight this war in Iraq.
It's going to be a disaster.
Do not pass the Patriot Act.
It's going to be a disaster.
Do not like all these things.
They're right about all of it.
They can't even argue the specifics anymore.
But then they just kind of, it's like, whenever we're in this moment, though, it's like, yeah, yeah, you guys were right about all that shit.
But in this moment right now, yeah, the problem is we can't have any more liberty.
That's just like the problem.
Yeah, that's the so again, what Michael Knowles is doing here is he's starting from his conclusion.
It's like the conclusion is like the liberals run all the institutions and it's libertarians' fault.
And then we'll just work backward from there to build a narrative that justifies that conclusion.
The problem is that it's just objectively, demonstrably complete bullshit.
That is complete bullshit.
Look, here's the truth.
Okay.
The reason why the fucking the liberals control all of the institutions today is because in this 21st century, to start the 21st century, the conservative movement did not follow Harry Brown.
They did not follow Ron Paul.
They did not even take into account any of their advice.
The idea that we convinced them that exercising state power was per se bad.
And they went, golly, gee, you libertarians really are right.
We're just not going to exercise any more state power.
And then the left came in and they exercised all the state power.
And that's how we are here.
That's how we got here.
We listened to you libertarians.
And then the leftists came and took everything over.
It's like, well, no, actually, Ashcolly, what happened was the fucking conservatives in the year 2000 controlled the House, the Senate, and the presidency.
And what happened to budgets?
They exploded.
And then after 9-11, they created the Department of Homeland Security.
They launched the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq.
They passed the Patriot Act.
This is what the conservatives in America supported.
Those are the politicians they supported.
They did not support politicians who were saying we just can't wield government power because we've been convinced by these libertarians that it's immoral per se to do that.
That's no, the truth is that after 9-11, the culture, the conservatives and the right-wingers had a real seat in the culture.
Like the fucking, the entire culture for people who are, you know, alive back then and remember it well, was all about patriotism and nationalism and fucking, you know, like praise for the military and like all this shit.
Yeah, it was America fuck yeah times.
That's what we were living in.
It was not the evangelical Christians who got George W. Bush elected, they had a real seat at the table.
And you know what they did?
They put all of their chips in on slaughtering a million Iraqis for nothing, for fucking nothing.
They put all of their chips in on, and what do we get?
What do we got to show for it?
Fucking a much more well-armed Taliban, nothing but destruction in Iraq, in Syria, in Libya, in Yemen, in Somalia, all over the fucking place.
All that.
And what did we get for it?
30,000 of our brave young men blowing their brains out.
And then like another 7,000 dying over there in combat fighting.
That's what lost conservatives their seat at the table culturally, not listening to libertarians, ignoring us, doing the exact opposite of what we fucking warned you guys.
And where were the libertarians?
At every step of the way, accurately predicting what would happen if you did this.
And in fact, now your own war on terrorism has been turned on you.
So don't give me this shit that the, you know, the problem was that you accepted this libertarian premise that we just can't ever use state power.
And then the left came in.
It's like, no, no, quite the opposite.
You actually built up more of these institutions.
Look, man, even beyond that, because he did say the last 60 years, not just the last 30 years or 20 years or whatever, but the EPA was created under Richard Nixon.
The Department of Education was fucking, the budget tripled under Ronald Reagan.
You know, this is just not true that there was ever some Republican administration that had been won over by these libertarians and convinced that it was evil to exercise state power.
And this is what led to the left overtaking these institutions.
It's like, no, the conservatives supported the Republican Party.
The Republican Party was in lockstep with the Democrats about expanding these institutions, creating more and more state power.
And the left had a better strategy than you guys.
They had a long march going and they took over all of them.
Now, that's bad.
I'm not happy with it.
But come on, let's get things straight here.
This is not, this is just not true.
None of this is right.
This is not what happened.
It's not the story.
And God, it's fucking frustrating to after, you know, like to be right about all this stuff and then have them turn around and say, man, we really shouldn't have listened to you.
Look, we listened to you and now look where it got us.
It got us with the left controlling everything.
It's worth fucking like, if conservatives can't look at what happened here and learn some lessons from it, yeah, oh yeah, that was a major mistake, all of this stuff.
Then man, they really do not have much hope for the future.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
So, all right, anything you want to add on that, Rob?
Well, that was flawless, but I will still add, even though you got gems in there.
Libertarianism vs State Power00:07:15
No, we got principles for freedom, which would include aggressively defunding all of the funds that are put towards a leftist agenda.
But what this guy is describing is like a fucking dictatorship.
So, like, what?
You and your other Christian friends are going to get together and then by might of government, dictate that we all have to live your style life?
Like, I don't want that at all.
I don't want to, I don't want to have to go to church.
That's not what I'm into.
Like, what is this guy prescribing?
So, there's supposed to be a dictatorship of you and other Christian leaders overtaking government and making decisions for all of society.
I hate that.
That's like the old Christian right that we used to have to deal with.
It used to be censorship came from these fucking Christians.
Like, and that's, and that's the fear with these conservatives is the second that they grab power again.
Like, we mostly are commenting on liberals because they're the ones in power.
But the second you let these Christians take power, they're just as bad.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, you know, it's almost like the choice is they're they're trying to go like, well, look, someone's going to wield this state power.
So, if it's not these guys doing it, then, you know, we're going to have to be the ones to do it.
Because look, when we listen to you libertarians and like as if this ever happened and no one was wielding state power, oh, look, they all took it over.
Except the problem is that's not true.
It was when you tried to expand state power and failed miserably.
They all took it over.
And to your point, Rob, it is quite likely that this is going to swing back because right now the liberals are failing miserable with all their control of this state power.
But the point is that the issue with any of this insane woke shit is not that like, well, it's just that like we let people have too much freedom.
And now look what freedom's led to.
Freedom's leading to like everybody, you know, praising the transgender shit or whatever other example you want to use.
It's like none of this shit could survive a week in a real market.
You could just look at it.
It's all completely propped up by all of the government institutions.
There's no organic movement for any of this shit.
It's like, and to the extent that there is, it's tiny.
It's absolutely tiny.
Look, even just college, college is a big government program.
And that's always been the biggest source of all of this crazy left-wing ideology.
That's what all their whole industry is propped up by government loans.
You know, this is why they're begging to have their loans forgiven.
Kind of lets you know they never could have afforded that tuition without the government paying for it to begin with, right?
This whole thing is propped up.
And then what do you have?
You have the corporate press, which is basically just an arm of the government.
You have the political class.
You have the deep state.
You have all of this shit.
This is what's propping it all up.
So it's not like, you know, people act like in some ways that believing in liberty is, you know, like, you know, like, I think somebody said, I was on a panel with that guy, Pasta and Jimmy Doerr, like two like leftists, but like real anti-war leftists.
His name is Pasta.
Well, it's his nickname.
I don't can't remember his full name.
But, and he, but they're great.
I like both of them a lot.
But they said at one point, like, they were like, well, libertarianism is like very passive and we need something like more proactive.
In other words, so which I can understand on its on the surface seeing it that way.
Like, you know, it's the most proactive.
It's stripping government of its power and funding all this lunacy.
You guys are missing the picture that it's all because of government funding.
And we have the prescription, which is just get rid of that and get rid of the distorted market because of the Fed.
Well, that's, this is what I said to him.
But I understand like on the surface of it, if you could say, if one person's like arguing, like, well, let the market figure out how people get health care and then we'll get really good health care.
And someone else is saying, no, we have to have a plan to give everybody healthcare.
You don't get how good the market is.
You just don't get it.
Right.
But I can understand where you'd think of that as like being more proactive.
But my response to it was like, I was like, no, libertarianism is very proactive.
Like in the same sense that like, I think chemotherapy is a pretty proactive treatment for cancer.
You know, like we're saying, this is the cancer.
We need to eliminate it.
That's, that's like the essence of libertarianism.
It's like, that's the solution here.
Now, I'll grant you how to get from step A to step B is something we all need to figure out.
And there's, there's strategies and theories, and different libertarians have different competing strategies.
And I, you know, I, I tend to be a person who sees a lot of merit in a lot of them, like a lot of them.
Like, I really love what the Free State Project guys are doing.
I think that's like an awesome idea to like strategically relocate to try to like really influence a geographic area.
I think that's a really cool idea.
They've had a lot of success.
Good for them.
I think the homeschool movement is like really, I love what they're doing.
I think that's great.
I think they've had a lot of success.
I think good for them.
I think there's Liberty Republicans.
There's Libertarian Party Libertarians.
There's a lot of us with different, and I root for everybody.
And you know what I mean?
Like I don't, most of them don't at all like conflict with the others, like, you know, whatever.
But the point is that we know the answer is like abolish these government programs, get the government the hell out of all of this shit.
And there's no chance it will prop this up.
Look, things like family and religion and like traditional norms and things like this, these are things that have lasted for thousands of years for a reason.
There's there, it takes a tremendous amount of force to keep these things to keep these things down.
You know what I'm saying?
Like if you just think about it like this, right?
It's like, why What prevents in a free market, what prevents a woman from having like six babies out of wedlock with five different fathers?
What prevents her from doing that?
And it's like, because she's gonna ruin her life, right?
Like she's gonna be completely destitute and completely screwed over and completely at the mercy of just begging people for help.
But what comes in?
The welfare state to fucking reward her for all of these decisions.
You know what I'm saying?
Like what, what pushes people toward like having a stable family?
It's like, oh, because you're more, it's stable.
You're more likely to have a good life that way.
All of the natural market incentives kind of do push for at least a balance of like a healthy society.
Not necessarily like some Christian theocracy where you're like banning the shit that you don't like, but like, yeah, a healthy society that's not like, doesn't have the instability that we currently live under.
So all of this shit is because of perverse incentives.
All of this shit is because of horrific authoritarian government policies.
And that a lot of this stuff like really isn't, I find to be pretty irrefutable.
I don't even really think there's much of a debate to it.
Much like Michael Knowles arguing that the problem here is libertarians convinced conservatives we can't wield state power.
It's like, but what about the fucking 500 examples of conservatives wielding insane state power, not even just wielding it, but creating new power, drastically expanding state power?
Perverse Incentives Explained00:01:05
I mean, come on.
Come on.
Was there one time?
Show me one fucking conservative Republican government that cut anything.
Show it to me.
So I'm not seeing it.
All right.
Anything else you want to add or we could wrap up there?
This guy sucks.
He's actually, Michael Knowles is not terrible, man.
He's, he's had some good some good content, but goddamn, this one, this one was not good.
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