Roland Solo hosts Part Of The Problem, discussing Robert Kennedy Jr.'s presidential run against corporate feudalism and vaccine mandates while promoting Chicago stand-up shows. He critiques Michael Knowles for missing that superstates destroy traditional institutions like family and religion, arguing conservatives must embrace libertarianism to reduce government size. Ultimately, the episode asserts that preserving community requires shrinking state power rather than expanding it, warning against repeating historical errors like supporting George W. Bush's policies. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Why We Need Less Government00:15:19
Fill her up.
You are listening to the Gash Digital Network.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am Roland Solo for this episode.
Rob is away on AIDS-related business.
So we wish him the best.
And he usually has a full recovery with these things.
Of course, me and Robbie the Fire Bernstein will be out in Zane's in Chicago at Zany's Comedy Club.
Really looking forward to this one.
These shows are all going to sell out.
So if you want to come out, there's still some tickets available.
They're probably going to be sold out within the week.
So go grab tickets for Chicago.
Live stand-up shows.
There's also a live podcast on Sunday night.
Live stand-up shows Friday, Saturday at one stand-up show Sunday, and then a live part of the problem podcast.
So come check us out in Chicago, comicdave Smith.com for tickets, and you can get all of our other dates and the ticket links will be up there soon.
A bunch more stuff being added that will be up on the site in the next week.
So very much looking forward to that.
Anyway, Rob's away, but I wanted to jump on because there's a couple of things I wanted to talk to you good people about.
The first thing that I think is an interesting story, I'm very happy about, and I thought was worthy of discussing is one Robert Kennedy Jr., who has officially jumped into the race for the presidency.
He is running as a Democrat.
And there's been whispers about this.
I think he had formed an exploratory committee several weeks back.
However, he just made it official.
Let's play a little short video clip of his announcement.
I've come here today to announce my candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.
My mission over the next 18 months of this campaign and throughout my presidency will be to end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power that is threatening now.
Is threatening out to impose a new kind of corporate feudalism on our country, to commoditize our children, our Purple Mountains majesty, to poison our children and our people with chemicals and pharmaceutical drugs, to strip mine our assets, to hollow out the middle class and keep us in a constant state of war.
All right, so there you go.
There was Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announcing he is running as a Democrat for the president of the United States of America.
I got to say, I just think it's great that he's running.
I really just think it's excellent.
And there's a lot.
Look, to be clear, he gave a speech.
It was over an hour long.
It was really good.
It was thoughtful.
It was in front of thousands of people who were very enthusiastic about it.
There seems to be, I don't know exactly how serious this campaign is going to be.
I don't know what type of results Kennedy can actually get.
And we'll see.
He's got a few things going for him.
Number one, I don't think there's going to be any other major insurgent candidacy challenging Joe Biden.
We're not going to see a Bernie Sanders run this year.
He's too old and too many heart attacks and too, you know, I just, that's not going to happen.
I also don't think Bernie Sanders would ever dare challenge a Democrat president.
You know, Bernie Sanders had his moments when he was running in the primary against Hillary Clinton.
This was when, you know, Barack Obama was president, but his eight years were up and it was who's going to be the next guy.
Then he ran against Joe Biden when Donald Trump was the president.
But he always, when he lost the nomination, you know, even when he was robbed of it, he always folded and endorsed the Democrat and always said the most important thing is that Donald Trump isn't president.
So he's not going to like challenge a Democratic president while Trump's running against him or whoever the other Republican is, because Bernie Sanders isn't actually a dissident.
He falls in line with the Democratic Party.
This is something very different.
Robert Kennedy Jr. is running against the whole system.
And this was made really clear during the biggest crisis of our lifetimes during COVID.
He was really, really opposed to the vaccine regime and the COVID regime and all of this stuff.
And for, I believe, for truly principled reasons.
So Robert Kennedy Jr. has been, he's, oh, listen, the guy's a Democrat.
Okay.
He's not perfect.
He's always been like a environmentalist.
He's always kind of believed in the climate change insanity.
Although I don't know, I don't know exactly where he stands on the latest iteration of it.
But in doing his environmental work, he turned against vaccinations in general.
And I don't know.
I don't want to like paint with too broad of a brush.
I'm not saying he opposes all vaccines, but he became very skeptical of many vaccines.
This is before COVID.
And he was talking a lot about this.
And so then when the COVID vaccine came out, he was very opposed to the vaccine, very critical of it from very, very early on.
And he's also really opposed to much of the military industrial complex state of forever wars.
He's very, very good on the Ukraine situation.
And, you know, after all, this is Robert Kennedy's kid.
There's an anti-war streak in them.
And so this is just a very interesting dynamic.
You've got a guy who is got thousands of people very excited about him.
He's getting a ton of attention online, which is, you know, these days is very powerful.
The corporate press doesn't really have the ability to pretend he doesn't exist when the internet is getting him so much attention.
And of course, the other major thing that he has going for him is that he's a Kennedy.
And I know it's, you know, whatever, it's 60 years later, but there's still something, there's still some cachet to being a Kennedy within the Democratic Party and just within the country in general.
And he's not like a Kennedy.
He's not, you know, he's not like one of these like, oh, I married a cousin of the Kennedys and now I call myself Kennedy.
Like I'm kind of in this group somehow.
Like it's RFK's kid.
It's he's a real Kennedy.
That in itself builds in some credibility.
It builds in tremendous name recognition.
And there's some potential there.
There's some potential there to maybe be a campaign that actually gets some energy going.
I think that could be vitally important, vitally important.
It also kind of he has the ability, and we'll see how he does with this, but he has, let's say, he has the potential to kind of plant a flag in the ground for the non-insane Democrats.
For like, who, you know, who here is a Democrat, but is not buying into the COVID insanity, not buying into the Ukraine insanity.
That could be very powerful.
You know, a lot of there, I don't know exactly what the number is.
I don't know if any of us know exactly what the number is, but it's not zero.
And there's a lot of people, you know, Republican and Democrat, a lot of it just comes down to like a tribal identity thing.
Well, I've been a lifelong Democrat.
My dad was a Democrat.
So I'm a Democrat.
Same with Republicans.
It's not all, you know, it doesn't start with like a philosophical belief and then go to, usually it just starts with like a kind of, this is what everyone in my town does.
So this is what I do.
That's not true 100% of the time, but it's true the vast majority of the time.
And there are a lot of Democrats out there who are not on board with the insanity.
And it's possible that he could really speak to a lot of them.
It's also possible that he could wake a lot of people up.
I could see this president, this presidential campaign getting a lot of grassroots support, a lot of young people getting on board with him.
And that, you know, for whatever you think about the political system, the sad reality in America is that most people in this country pay attention to the state of politics the most during presidential election campaigns.
And so I just think it's, I think like the more people running who are talking and prioritizing some issues that really matter, the better.
And this is not like Bernie Sanders' campaign.
Bernie Sanders campaign is like, even though he was right about a few things, he never prioritized them.
And he always prioritized the things that he was the worst on.
Like his campaign would be centered around Medicare for all and raising the minimum wage.
It was never centered around actually opposing any of the wars or anything like that.
Robert Kennedy Jr. gave an over an hour long speech.
And the main theme of the entire speech was the unholy alliance between big business and big government and how it is this alliance that is screwing over the middle class in America.
And he's right about that.
He's dead right about it.
You know, there's, we have this system in America now where there's essentially there's socialism for the rich and the poor.
That's basically the system in America right now.
If you are, if you are super rich or if you are poor, you get socialism.
And then everybody in the middle is in some type of like sick feudalism where you now have to like work with the burden of paying for the socialism for the rich and the poor on your back.
That's essentially the system we live under.
It's complete corruption.
You know, like, yeah, if you're dirt poor, okay, you can get some, you know, you can get Medicaid or you can get some programs.
They suck.
It's not great.
But there will be some level of socialism for you.
If you are in the billionaire class and you are politically connected, you can get trillions of dollars in bailout money and corporate giveaways and banker bailouts, things like this.
But if you're anybody else, if you're anybody else, you just got to pay for all of that.
You just got to pay for all of that before you start getting anything for yourself, which is why so many Americans in the working class and the middle class, even the upper middle class are essentially working half the year for the government.
You're essentially in a state of being a quasi-slave for this system.
I mean, I don't know, you know, like you can say the term slavery is hyperbolic or whatever, but half of the year you are working and not getting the fruits of your labor.
So, you know, maybe between a third and half of the year, I guess, depending on exactly what state you're living in and what income bracket you're in.
But it's pretty bad.
And so he talked all about this, talked a lot about the COVID vaccine, the war in Ukraine, all of this stuff.
Really, really interesting.
A really, really interesting candidate who's got a lot of important things to say and seems to be prioritizing the things that he's really good on at the center of his campaign.
This is one of the reasons why I was much more attracted to Tulsi Gabbard's presidential campaign than to Bernie Sanders.
Because even when Tulsi Gabbard was bad on a lot of things, it always seemed like what she prioritized in her campaigns, what she cared about the most were the things that she was really good on.
That's what she wanted to run on.
She wanted to run on the threat of nuclear war with Russia and how we should be walking away from that, the problem with regime change wars and why we shouldn't be fighting them.
That was her reason for being there.
Bernie Sanders' reason for being there seemed to be raising the minimum wage, which as we talked about on the last episode is one of the dumbest policy ideas.
Robert Kennedy Jr. is running on the corruption, on trying to end the corruption.
And that's a very important thing to raise awareness about, to help people understand.
Now, look, I could, obviously, there are, he's not perfect.
He's a Democrat, you know, he's not a libertarian.
But it's still good to be doing that.
The issue, of course, with these types, I think what they don't understand is that when you have what he calls this merger of corporations and the state that are kind of conspiring to screw over the rest of the country, the only answer to that is to drastically reduce the size and scope of government.
That's the solution.
Like problem and solution.
In the same sense that if you don't want to get cavities, the answer is to brush and floss.
It's just that scientific.
That's the solution.
At least that's the solution that doesn't screw over all the people even more.
When you have a gigantic government, it's either going to be socialist or fascistic in nature.
Those are basically your options.
And the idea that we could have a gigantic government that spends six, $7 trillion a year and nobody's going to lobby for power, nobody's going to attempt to wield that power is impossible.
It's say unrealistic would be quite an understatement.
The only answer is to reduce the power of government, essentially decentralize power as much as possible.
All right, guys, let's take a quick moment.
The Libertarian Insight00:14:39
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I'm not really looking at Robert Kennedy's campaign and saying to myself, well, is he going to know what to do once he gets in there and he's president?
It's more about what can this campaign mean?
What type of like how many people could be moved and changed and have their eyes opened up by this campaign?
Could enough people rally around someone like that that it scares the establishment, that it makes them back off of some of the things that they might want to do.
I think there's real potential there.
I'm not saying this is a guarantee.
This campaign could crash and burn.
It could just not make that much noise.
But you see a guy who's a Kennedy who's giving, you know what I mean?
Who's giving a really well, like this guy really knows his stuff.
He's written books about this stuff.
He's that speech he gave was very good the other day.
To see that is at the very least, very interesting.
And I'm happy he's running.
I hope as many people who are dissidents and are good on some of these important issues run as possible.
Now, look, I don't mean to say this in a, I don't mean to be rude.
There is a little bit of an issue with the fact that he has trouble speaking.
He's got like a medical condition.
And you probably heard there in the clip.
He's got a medical condition where his voice is very weak.
And that's just a little bit of an issue.
I mean, the gig of being a presidential candidate is essentially a speaking tour.
I mean, there's other aspects to it as well.
There's fundraising and there's networking and other things, but the real, the, the important thing, the thing that can get what we want to see out of this, which is like a mass awakening, a mass rallying, well, that part is a speaking tour.
And I don't know if that's going to impact how effective he can be.
I will say that he gave a very good speech the other day.
And despite the fact that he's got vocal issues, I can't remember the name of his, he's got some condition that's like that's that causes that.
But despite those issues, it was still a very good speech.
Jury's still out on, you know, whether that will hold him back or not.
But man, you know, I don't expect to see him on a debate stage with Joe Biden, but I would love it.
I would love that because this guy will like, he's not, he's not doing what Bernie Sanders was doing.
He is not like, I want to insert my ideas to a certain extent, but I don't really want to confront you.
I don't want to really have this battle with you.
He's there and he is pissed off.
The other element of all of this is like there's something that is, he's a particularly red-pilled Democrat.
And when what I mean by that, you know, if everybody, anyone doesn't know the analogy we always use from the Matrix, the idea of being red-pilled is when you kind of like, you see things for what they are and you see that the entire system is kind of a carefully crafted illusion that is designed to screw you over.
It's not there to help you.
It's, you know, there's so much of what we thought was just reality actually is all a lie.
And what's actually going on is a very carefully crafted system to screw you over.
That'd be my definition of being red-pilled.
He is a truly red-pilled guy.
Like he doesn't think that the COVID vaccine was like had some side effects that people didn't realize.
He doesn't think that the war has some unintended consequences.
He's out there saying that this war is intentionally designed to try to pick a fight with Russia to see regime change in Moscow and that they're lying to the American people about it.
He thinks that, you know, big pharma owns all of these politicians and these news outlets and that they are poisoning our children, you know, for profit.
And he's also a Kennedy.
Like he's also well aware of who killed his family.
That's a powerful thing.
The guy, the guy who knows the CIA killed his uncle is not sitting there going like, well, I don't want to ruffle any feathers.
You know, I just want to like get in here and insert some ideas and then go away.
If he's on a debate stage with Joe Biden or even just running a campaign against Joe Biden, he's there to ruin him.
He's there to like take him out.
And that creates a whole different thing than almost any presidential campaign that I, you know, like Trump falls into that category.
I suppose Ron Paul certainly falls into that category.
There's not too many others.
There's really not too many others, particularly in the big two parties.
So that's something about this is just very interesting and exciting.
I hope he does great.
Open invite, Robert Kennedy.
If you ever want to come on the show, I'd be more than more than happy to talk to him about all of this stuff because he really has been very, very good on some very, very important issues.
I'd say the most important.
All right.
So we'll keep watching that.
The presidential election season just got a little bit more interesting.
All right.
Now, the other thing that I want to talk about today is, so there was a recent debate between Brad Palumbo and Michael Knowles.
And there was a clip of it.
A friend of mine, Ben, who is a young libertarian, he asked a question during this debate.
I thought it was a very good question.
And it was an interesting answer by Michael Knowles that I thought we would talk about and respond to a little bit.
I have not watched the entire debate.
I saw part of it.
The debate was over, it was a debate on transgenderism.
And I think it was specifically about whether transgenderism should be regulated by law, I believe was the question or the resolution.
So the reason I wanted to talk about this clip, Ben shared it on Twitter.
And I thought it was interesting.
It kind of, in a way, it was much bigger than just the question of transgenderism.
To me, it kind of spoke to more of like what the right wing gets wrong and why right wingers really need to learn their libertarian lesson.
That's been a major theme of mine over the course of the last few years.
And this is something that Hans Hermann Hoppe talked about in the 90s.
I personally think that there is, I think that libertarians need to learn their conservative lesson when it comes to cultural matters.
I think many of us have.
I think that right-wingers need to learn their libertarian lesson.
And it seems like far too many of them have not.
Again, this was kind of the state of things with the paleoconservative movement in the 90s, and it persists today with kind of the broader right-wing movement in America today.
Now, I know you can, by the way, when I say libertarians need to learn their conservative lesson when it comes to culture, I'm not suggesting that you can't find libertarians who certainly have not learned this lesson.
And I'm not saying that the social conservatives are right about everything.
But what's important for libertarians to learn, and I think for the most part we have, if you look at the people who are like the most popular figures within the liberty movement, if you look at the people who orchestrated the takeover of the libertarian party and, you know, the broader movement in general, most of them have kind of figured this out.
And basically what they've figured out is that these kind of traditional values, things like community, religion, family, decency, morality, these things are important.
And they're not, it's important to preserve them.
Now, that doesn't mean that individuals who live alternative lifestyles don't have rights.
That's the libertarian position that they do, that all people ought to have natural rights.
But at the same time, you realize that if you're not going to have some type of internal governance, you're going to have external governance.
And that if you don't have these kind of tried and true traditional norms, it's not going to be a situation that bodes well for a free society.
That I think is something libertarians need to learn.
But I think right-wingers really need to learn their libertarian lesson when it comes to the role of government.
And the fact that they don't is why they're destined to lose.
That's basically my perspective.
It's why they continue to lose over and over and over again, because they fundamentally do not understand this lesson.
And even though they have their big political victories, you know, it's like, oh, I mean, you can look back to them across my whole life, but, you know, okay, in 2016, Donald Trump wins the presidency.
Republicans control the House and the Senate.
And where are we?
Three years later, everyone's taking orders from Dr. Fauci about whether they're allowed to leave their goddamn house or not.
It's like, what's happening here?
You're not really getting any victories.
Even when you get a victory, you just lose more.
And what, you know, did it even like push the cultural, you know, pendulum back at all?
I mean, you know, people were complaining about the woke shit in 2016.
And now it's like, you know, I don't know, trans stripper shows with little kids.
It's, it's by every metric, everything's moving still in the same direction.
So it, it's interesting that, you know, you would think right-wingers would stop and ask themselves, like, okay, what piece of this are we missing here?
And I would submit that I think libertarians have something important to offer, an important insight to offer for them.
Anyway, before we get into this specific clip, I'd say my thoughts on the overall topic of where, you know, transgenderism being regulated by law.
Look, to me, the libertarian position on this is all, it's always built around the fundamental libertarian position, which is like about the non-aggression principle.
So what is and is not aggression is kind of like what we would want to get to the bottom of.
Now, I personally think that in the same sense that we accept that children cannot consent and that having sex with a child, even if it was like quote unquote consensual, meaning like even if you say, oh, the kid agreed to it, that doesn't mean anything because we go, yeah, they're not capable of consenting.
And you have to draw a line somewhere.
You know, it's a little bit arbitrary exactly where you draw the line.
Should it be 18?
Should it be 19?
Like, okay, it's a little bit arbitrary, but you recognize the line has to be drawn somewhere.
And to me, I think it's perfectly reasonable to say if children can't consent to contracts and to sex and to getting a tattoo and to, you know, all of these different things, then it's perfectly legitimate to say they also can't consent to hormone blockers or, you know, in the more rare cases, to actual, you know, elective, you know, transition to transition surgeries.
And to me, I just think that's completely reasonable, completely consistent with libertarian principles.
And so I'm fine with puberty blockers and transition surgeries being illegal, being barred by law.
In fact, they should be.
I'll say that.
As far as the stuff with like for kids, just like socially transitioning, you know, it's a little bit more debatable.
Certainly it should be illegal for anyone to do it without parental consent.
It's really right up there on the line of rubbing against a form of child abuse.
I don't know exactly how you would enforce that by law.
I'm not sure that anyone has a great answer to that, but I think there's something debatable there.
Enforcing Parental Consent Laws00:10:31
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When it comes to adults, there's an argument that I've said before.
There's an argument that doctors shouldn't perform the surgery.
There is a really strong argument for that.
And there'd certainly be a very strong argument for like private medical groups to say like, like, we don't recognize you as a practicing doctor if you perform this surgery.
The truth is that while there is some of this like scientific community that will say, oh, this is, you know, we need gender affirming care or whatever they call it, there's no real evidence in the literature that this does anything positive for people.
In other words, you know, you can look at things where like trans people have incredibly high suicide rates.
It's very sad.
They have incredibly high suicide rates.
It's not brought down at all by the surgeries.
You know, there's no real evidence that this is helping.
And I do think that like, for example, you know, if you went into a surgeon and said, you know, I want to have my ear removed because I identify as a person with one ear.
And the surgeon said, no problem.
I'll take your money.
Here, let's have the surgery.
Well, I would argue if we're dealing with adults here, I don't think that should be illegal because I just, you know, I stick to my principles on this.
I think it's your body and you have a right to do it.
However, it is insane.
And I think in a sane society, what we would hope is that that doctor, that surgeon goes, no, I am not removing your ear simply because you identify as a person with one ear.
I will, however, be very happy to recommend a good shrink because that's like kind of the appropriate response to that.
So in other words, I don't think that I don't think the law should regulate adult behavior.
I do think we should try to create a society that where there are some sane boundaries that other adults have.
I certainly don't think we should encourage people's delusions.
But anyway, all that's just kind of my take on this.
In terms of like the law regulating like every aspect of adults being transgender, like if you're going to like try to regulate whether men can wear dresses or not, I mean, I think that's just silly.
And there's no, you're, it's not going to work, let's just say, and it'd be silly to try and you'll probably end up with much worse problems as a result.
Anyway, all of that aside, that's not really what this was about.
That's not really what I wanted to talk about.
But what I did want to talk about was this clip in response to a question that my buddy Ben asked.
Let's play it and take a listen.
Hey, thanks for coming, guys.
I've been a fan of both of you for a long time.
Mostly Brad, though.
Hey, there's one.
We got one.
So, you know, the reason I'm a libertarian is because government is inherently a monopoly on violence that will always further accumulate more wealth and power no matter what you do.
So having said that, as this, my question is for Michael.
As the size of government has grown, so has the acceptance of alternative or degenerate lifestyles on a systemic scale.
Culture and the legal system reflect this.
How can you recognize this fact while believing that simply using the state to fight this behavior in the legal system will lead to the necessary cultural change to eradicate it from public life?
So let's pause it right there before we even get to the answer.
Excellent question, Ben.
Very well said.
An absolute excellent question.
And I think that if nothing else, even if right-wing archetypes are going to argue for like a top-down solution, a legal solution to some of these problems, then I think they're wrong.
And I'll get into that.
But I think you have to fundamentally recognize that this is a deep rooted cultural issue, you know?
And if you're not addressing that problem, you're really not going to solve anything.
And of course, as Ben points out that, you know, like, hey, let's take a look at this.
As the government has gotten bigger and bigger and bigger, this problem has gotten worse and worse and worse.
Now, why is that?
Might there be a relation there?
And of course, I'm going to argue that there is.
But first, let's give Michael Knowles a chance to respond.
The government hasn't just grown.
I guess that's the misconception at the heart of this.
Yes, obviously, we're a much bigger country now, 330 million people.
The federal government is much more powerful than it was some 200 years ago.
But in other ways, the government has weakened.
In other ways, the ability of local governments to control their own communities and set standards.
That's weakened considerably.
The ability of school boards to set curricula now is quite controversial.
The rights of states have completely gone away.
The states essentially have no real power anymore if they ever disagree with the federal government.
So once again, I don't think this is an issue just of government getting really big or government getting really small.
Conservatives have never supported small government.
It's not possible for a country of 330 million people with a global empire to have a small government.
What we can have is a limited government.
So we want government to be within its natural and proper limits.
And so when we're talking about the limits of the government, especially in a self-government such as ours, we have this question.
Do we have the political right to set certain standards?
Are our rights merely the individual licenses to pursue whatever delusional and depraved sexual identities that we want to pursue or any other kind of fantastical ideas?
Or do we have an exalted freedom that will suppress some of our lower appetites, but will give us a flourishing community?
That latter idea was the idea that has animated our country, that made our country great, that made our whole civilization great.
As we've lost that, the government's gotten all out of whack, as you describe, and the country's gone to pot.
That was an absolutely decisive question.
All right.
Let's respond to all this.
So I found this to be a kind of like shockingly shallow analysis and one built off kind of critical errors or omissions, at least.
So Michael Knowles, first of all, someone will have to explain to me the distinction between small government and limited government.
If a government is limited, then presumably it's limited from growing into areas that are off limits, making it smaller.
So that is just a distinction without a difference at all.
But he kind of says like, well, in some ways the government has gotten much bigger, but in other ways it hasn't.
And yes, the federal government has expanded tremendously, but the ability of local communities to set standards and state governments and local governments has been tremendously weakened.
And he almost puts that out there as if these are two things that just happened.
Like they both just happened.
So on one hand, this happened.
On the other hand, this happened.
And seemingly doesn't seem to recognize that they are clearly related.
It's not as if coincidentally, as the federal government grew larger and larger and larger, local communities also at the same time, coincidentally, lost more and more of their authority.
It's like, no, it was undermined by the federal government.
That's what happened.
The federal government came in and stripped them of these powers and said, we'll be making these decisions in Washington, D.C.
So those two things are completely related.
So it would seem to me quite self-evident that if what you want is for local communities to have more autonomy, then what you need is to have far less power in Washington, D.C.
And that power returned to local communities.
That I think that's just obvious.
And it was bizarre to me to hear him talk about that, these things that are so obviously connected and say it as if they were just two things that happened to occur.
Then he also mentions that, you know, you can't have a small government with the size of our population and a global empire, which is, that is correct.
You know, it's like, yeah, you can't have a global empire that has a small government.
You need a pretty big government to rule the world.
But that seems to lead to a question that Michael Knowles doesn't even seem to address.
Small Batch Cigars and Empire00:03:04
It's almost just like, well, that's a given.
That's a given that we're the global empire.
And so therefore we can't have a small government.
And of course, the question that one should be asking themselves is, ought we be a global empire?
And if you're talking about the original, as he says, like, well, I forget his exact words, the original ideas that animated this great country, well, they sure as hell weren't being a global empire.
In fact, all of our founders to a man, I mean, they disagreed about a lot of things.
They all agreed.
The last thing you want to be is a global empire.
And if we are a global empire, then this experiment here has failed.
So it's, you know, it's kind of amazing to hear him say that and not recognize that, yeah, that is actually the core of the problem here.
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The Divide and Conquer Tactic00:07:51
The thing when I say that right-wingers need to learn their libertarian lesson is this.
Giant superstates always, always.
Always work to undermine all of the things that Michael Knowles claims to care about.
They're always going to work to undermine communities, religion, family, and tradition.
And the reason is very simple, because all of those things are a hedge against big government.
That's why you look at any of them, any giant superstate.
They always try to undermine these cultural traditions because these are the things that check you against state power.
They don't like a society of devout religious people because if you're like a devout Christian, then it's much less likely that you view Barack Obama as a god because you already have a God.
If you have a strong family, then it's much less likely that you're going to be dependent on the government because you have a family you can be dependent on if you hit hard times.
If you have a strong community, you don't really need a welfare state because communities tend to take care of each other and they know much better about who's actually, you know, like out of work because they're just a lazy bum and who's out of work because, you know, they fell on hard times or, you know, they have a legitimate issue or something like that.
There's local communities who know the people within their community make these decisions much better than a federal government hundreds of miles away that gives the lazy bum and the guy who's actually falling on hard times the exact same handout, thus incentivizing you to be a lazy bum.
But this is the direct, like the relationship is so direct here.
It's not a coincidence that as the government grows bigger and bigger, the culture falls apart more and more.
And man, if conservatives and right-wingers do not recognize this, then they fail to recognize this at their own peril.
This is the whole game.
This is the whole game here.
The more the government comes in, it crowds out communities, churches, localities, and traditional norms.
You know, if you just think if you remove the government from the picture, why is it that these like these traditional norms were traditional norms?
Why would there be a tradition of getting married before you have kids?
Well, because it's much harder to raise a kid on your own.
It's much easier to do it if you have someone there who will help support you.
However, if the government comes in and says, we'll support you if you're out on your own, you now disincentivize the traditional incentives.
And this is true over and over and over again.
Every inch of government from Social Security, which came in and like basically overtook the old retirement plan, which used to be your kids would take care of you.
You're incentivized to have kids to treat them fairly decently so that when they're adults, they want to take care of you.
Well, now the government's going to force you to, you know, pay in your whole life.
And so that incentive is pretty much gone.
Of course, the welfare state creates all of these incentives.
And I think more than that, there was something I was talking about this quite a bit in my speech that I gave in New York City at this Mises Caucus event just a few weeks ago.
But there's also a big part of why the right-wingers lost this country was because they went all in on George W. Bush.
And this is really what started off the 20th, the 21st century, excuse me, on such a bad note, is that basically all the evangelical Christians in the country supported George W. Bush, and he was the biggest disaster in our country's recent history.
And then they had no seat at the table.
They were in no position to lecture the rest of America about how they were forgetting about their traditional norms.
And they just lost all their entire seat at the table.
I mean, who the hell were you to lecture about what Jesus would want when what you decided Jesus wanted was to slaughter a million Iraqis and hand us a financial crisis?
It's right-wingers and conservatives really need to learn this lesson.
And unfortunately, far too few of them have.
But this is the whole game.
This is the whole game right here.
It's this.
If you want, you know, you want to save the republic, you got to kill the empire.
If you want to save the tradition, you have to drastically shrink the size and scope of government.
It's the only way it's going to happen because this is what's undermining it.
And no, you're not going to keep the government this big and then change its incentives around to be pro-family and pro-religion or any of these pro, you know, pro-traditional norms because that doesn't benefit a superstate.
It doesn't benefit them.
This is why like you'll never, you never heard like Stalin or Hitler urging all of his people to go to church.
They weren't looking for you to go worship something else.
They were looking for you to worship them because that's how they maintain their power.
Because the whole thing is that government is all an illusion.
It's not real.
It doesn't exist.
There's no such thing.
It's a Fughesi, right?
There's no government.
It's a construct.
There's no, I mean, there's buildings and there's men with guns and then there's men in suits who give those men with guns their orders, but there isn't a government.
It's not a real thing.
It's just something we believe in, you know?
It's a social construct, but you, it requires that you really believe in it.
You have to believe in their perceived like authority to rule or the whole thing doesn't work.
This is why they're so upset about January 6th.
It's not because some windows were broken.
They're not upset that some windows were broken, which they have an endless amount of money that they can print to replace the windows.
It's because these people dared to claim that the, you know, the sacrament of democracy wasn't properly executed and therefore this government isn't legitimate.
And they spit on the face of its perceived legitimacy.
They're farting on desks.
The smashing windows thing is symbolic.
They didn't respect the capital.
You can actually listen to this.
If you listen to like what like people on cable news and stuff and the corporate press were saying, I think we've played some of the clips before on the show, but they'll actually say things like, this is a holy building.
You know, like they'll let you know right now, this is our religion.
It's this.
It's believing in this thing, the state.
It's just an idea.
It's not real.
And so they need you to believe in that.
And the more that you have strong families and religious communities, you just believe in something else.
You believe in a different thing.
That's not that.
So they're always going to work to undermine what you care about.
And of course, they're always going to do their best to pit people against each other because that also helps them rule.
It's a tactic, divide and conquer.
It's as old as man.
I guarantee you, divide and conquer tactics are as old as like the first tribe that humans ever had.
It will always exist.
But the more people you want to rule, the more important that tactic is going to be.
And this is why we're even talking about the transgender thing to begin with, because it's a great way to pit people against each other.
A lot of lessons in here that the Michael Knowles types really need to learn.
And I'm hoping at some point some of them learn it.