Part Of The Problem - Dave Smith - Happy Birthday America!
Aired: 2023-07-06
Duration: 01:03:26


=== America's Fourth of July Story (14:23) ===

[00:00:00]  Fill her up.
[00:00:02]  You are listening to the Gash Digital Network.
[00:00:09]  We need to roll back the state.
[00:00:11]  We spy on all of our own citizens.
[00:00:13]  Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
[00:00:17]  If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
[00:00:22]  Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
[00:00:27]  You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
[00:00:31]  Steer's your host.
[00:00:34]  What's up, everybody?
[00:00:35]  Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
[00:00:37]  I am Dave Smith, aka the Libertarian Tupac.
[00:00:41]  He is Rob Bernstein, aka COVID Jesus, the king of the caulks, the fire.
[00:00:47]  How are you, sir?
[00:00:48]  Happy 4th of July.
[00:00:49]  Happy 4th to you, my friend.
[00:00:51]  There you go.
[00:00:52]  Wow, look right in back of you.
[00:00:53]  It's ships.
[00:00:57]  Is it the Boston Tea Party?
[00:00:59]  What's happening back there?
[00:01:00]  Oh, okay.
[00:01:00]  I get it.
[00:01:01]  A friendly reminder that this country was started by a bunch of people that declared tea gay.
[00:01:07]  It sure did.
[00:01:09]  I don't think that's what they were saying.
[00:01:10]  I think it was a thing about taxes, but whatever.
[00:01:13]  You're the historian on this show, isn't it?
[00:01:16]  There was a proclamation.
[00:01:17]  They removed it from the textbooks because they didn't realize that just how much you could accomplish by declaring things like that.
[00:01:24]  Because why is that T looking at me that way?
[00:01:26]  You tell me that.
[00:01:29]  All right.
[00:01:30]  We are recording this episode on the 4th of July, the night of the 4th of July.
[00:01:35]  You guys won't hear it for a couple more days, but just so you know, that's where we're at right now.
[00:01:41]  Did you do anything for the 4th of July, Rob?
[00:01:43]  Yeah, BK Chris threw a party out in Brooklyn.
[00:01:45]  There was a crazy wrestling match with Zach Amiko.
[00:01:48]  Someone's face got split open.
[00:01:50]  My friend Mike Nice was rapping.
[00:01:52]  It was a good time.
[00:01:53]  Mike Nice?
[00:01:54]  Who's that?
[00:01:55]  The guy from the Shedcast.
[00:01:56]  I do a podcast with them.
[00:01:58]  Him and Sid Floyd rapped.
[00:01:59]  They're a good time.
[00:02:00]  Oh, okay.
[00:02:01]  Why does that name sound so familiar to me?
[00:02:04]  What does he look like?
[00:02:07]  Thin and poor.
[00:02:09]  Yeah, okay.
[00:02:10]  I used to be thin and poor.
[00:02:13]  I'm working my way out.
[00:02:14]  I'm trying my best to get fat and rich, but I was thin and poor for so many years.
[00:02:18]  I was just going to love when he hears us back.
[00:02:20]  He's like, well, I got a shout out.
[00:02:21]  And then just mercilessly roasted.
[00:02:25]  That really is great.
[00:02:27]  It is great.
[00:02:29]  Oh, man.
[00:02:30]  All right.
[00:02:30]  So the 4th of July.
[00:02:32]  Let me start by saying this.
[00:02:35]  It's in the context of today, America.
[00:02:40]  It's an interesting day.
[00:02:42]  It's interesting to just see where the kind of like political arguments go on the 4th of July.
[00:02:48]  And I've got a few things that I wanted to kind of touch on about that, but I'm going to start with, I think I did this last year, but I'm just going to redo it again this year because if we're talking about this country and what the 4th of July means to me, this story is, it was one of the most like American moments I've ever experienced in my life.
[00:03:12]  And it really had a profound effect on me.
[00:03:16]  And I don't exactly know what to make of it, but I always feel like this is a story I have to tell.
[00:03:21]  So I know you've heard this before, Rob, but it's been a while.
[00:03:24]  I'm sure some of our audience has heard this before, but it's been a while.
[00:03:28]  And we're always picking up new listeners.
[00:03:30]  So let me just tell this.
[00:03:32]  Okay.
[00:03:33]  So this was the 4th of July, 2020.
[00:03:38]  And at the time I was living, I had moved out of New York City.
[00:03:45]  I moved out of New York City in March of 2020 for the first time in my life.
[00:03:50]  I was born and raised in New York City.
[00:03:53]  And I left in March.
[00:03:54]  I left early.
[00:03:55]  I saw the writing on the wall with everything that was going on and I got the hell out of there.
[00:04:00]  This is before my son was born.
[00:04:03]  So it was just me, my wife, and my daughter.
[00:04:05]  My daughter was a baby at the time.
[00:04:07]  She was a baby.
[00:04:08]  Yeah, she was a baby.
[00:04:09]  She was one, one, not one and a half, but over one, something in that area.
[00:04:16]  She's born in December.
[00:04:18]  So by March, she was, you know, whatever.
[00:04:22]  What are we talking about?
[00:04:24]  Okay, I don't need to do the math.
[00:04:25]  Anyway, so we got out of there.
[00:04:28]  I was very concerned about when the lockdown, it was before the lockdowns, but it was like when it was pretty clear something really crazy was up.
[00:04:38]  And I was very concerned there were going to be like riots and empty shelves and stuff like that.
[00:04:44]  And I was like, I got to get out.
[00:04:45]  I can't be in an apartment.
[00:04:46]  I got to be in a house and I got to be out of there.
[00:04:48]  So we left.
[00:04:50]  Anyway, so July 4th, 2020, if you can try to put yourself back in that mind state of where we were.
[00:04:58]  So the lockdown started in late March.
[00:05:01]  So you had March, April, May, June, July.
[00:05:05]  This has now been months of the crazy COVID insanity.
[00:05:11]  Anybody who's good on COVID was, they got it already by that point.
[00:05:18]  I'm sure there were some people who were still like defending the lockdowns who now are like, oh, no, I was completely against it.
[00:05:24]  But at that point, we had all figured it out.
[00:05:27]  We had figured out what this whole thing was.
[00:05:29]  The 15 days to flatten the curve have turned into months and months and months.
[00:05:35]  And it's just this insane thing that we're living through.
[00:05:38]  And so in the summer, we're in July now, people started just not giving a shit anymore.
[00:05:47]  Even though there were government orders that were saying you have to still lock down or whatever, people were just like, I'm going back to my life.
[00:05:55]  You can't stop us.
[00:05:57]  So there's this guy, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
[00:06:02]  He is the voice of the pandemic response.
[00:06:06]  And he announces that fireworks are canceled.
[00:06:13]  You can get COVID from fireworks.
[00:06:15]  You can get COVID from fireworks, evidently.
[00:06:17]  That was the, he was just following the science, Rob.
[00:06:20]  If you're out there, if you have a problem.
[00:06:23]  Yes.
[00:06:24]  If you don't believe that, you don't believe in science.
[00:06:28]  That's simply the truth.
[00:06:30]  So now at the time, even by then, this is July of 2020, everybody that had any sense about them was going, wait, what?
[00:06:41]  But here's the thing.
[00:06:42]  Fireworks are.
[00:06:43]  I just rioted and looted Louis Vuitton with my fellow people upset about George Floyd.
[00:06:49]  And now you're telling me I can't watch fireworks from a rooftop?
[00:06:52]  Like, well, racial injustice is a pandemic of itself.
[00:06:56]  Yeah.
[00:06:57]  So anyway, the people who understand anything, they're going, wait a minute, this is outdoors.
[00:07:02]  It's very easy to socially distance.
[00:07:05]  You don't have to be on top of other people to go watch fireworks.
[00:07:08]  Like, what, why could we possibly not do this?
[00:07:11]  And he was just like, nope, you can't do it.
[00:07:15]  So they cancel it.
[00:07:16]  They had no, at least in the New York, New Jersey area, they did not have any of the officially sanctioned fireworks shows.
[00:07:26]  So there wasn't like the under the Brooklyn Bridge or all the, it wasn't like any of like the big things that they always do.
[00:07:32]  And it was just like a thing, another like another tradition, another just like holiday being robbed from Americans who had already had so much robbed from them in the last few months.
[00:07:45]  And so where me and my wife lived at the time, it was, it was this house.
[00:07:51]  If you remember, Rob, you've been to my, not this house that I live in, but the house before this, you've been there.
[00:07:56]  And it was right on the water.
[00:07:58]  It was like a waterfront house.
[00:08:00]  And the view we had from the house was, it was really cool.
[00:08:05]  The view was awesome.
[00:08:06]  It was like right viewing.
[00:08:09]  You could see is from New Jersey and you could see Staten Island, Manhattan, and Brooklyn all kind of like on the other side of the water.
[00:08:18]  And what happened that night, I remember me and my wife, we get our daughter to sleep and we're out on the balcony having a drink.
[00:08:30]  And we didn't even know there was going to be any fireworks until you start hearing like fireworks go off.
[00:08:35]  But you know how you always hear that in 4th of July, like random people setting off fireworks.
[00:08:39]  But when we looked over the view of Staten Island, Manhattan, and Brooklyn, it was everywhere.
[00:08:47]  But it wasn't a big fireworks show.
[00:08:50]  It wasn't like one where you're like, look at the fireworks.
[00:08:53]  It was individuals all throughout all setting off their own fireworks, but all over the place.
[00:09:02]  Like, I mean, it must have been thousands of different people who were all having their own, you know, setting off their own fireworks.
[00:09:12]  And I just remember thinking it was the coolest like moment of civil disobedience I had ever seen.
[00:09:20]  Like I had goosebumps watching it.
[00:09:23]  Like there was just something so incredible about it that people had been told, you can't do this.
[00:09:30]  You're not going to be allowed to have this holiday.
[00:09:32]  And there was something about just like the human spirit that was overcoming that being like, fuck you, authority.
[00:09:39]  You're not going to tell us we can't do this.
[00:09:43]  We're doing it.
[00:09:44]  This is what we do on the 4th of July.
[00:09:46]  We're going to do this.
[00:09:47]  We enjoy.
[00:09:48]  And look, it's stupid on some level.
[00:09:51]  You know, whatever.
[00:09:53]  We like sending these things up into the air that explode and make light and crack.
[00:09:57]  And I don't know.
[00:09:59]  We're a weird species, human beings.
[00:10:01]  But there was also something like just so beautiful about it that it was like the spirit of freedom.
[00:10:09]  And it made me like proud of the country, even in this area of Staten Island, Manhattan, Brooklyn, New Jersey, areas that have become largely gay.
[00:10:23]  But that 4th of July, I was really proud of all of those people who were doing it.
[00:10:28]  There was something very cool about it.
[00:10:30]  And to me, that was almost like something that something about it was like the spirit of America.
[00:10:38]  Even in their darkest moment was like, no, we're doing this.
[00:10:41]  And I love that.
[00:10:42]  And I always love telling that story on the 4th of July.
[00:10:46]  Dude, I feel so American right now.
[00:10:48]  Do you?
[00:10:48]  I got a freedom boner.
[00:10:50]  Let's call it an episode.
[00:10:51]  That was great.
[00:10:52]  All right, there you go.
[00:10:52]  Thanks for listening, guys.
[00:10:54]  Come out to Kansas City this weekend.
[00:10:57]  By the way, do come out to Kansas City this weekend.
[00:10:59]  Me and Rob will be there all weekend at the Comedy Club of Kansas City.
[00:11:04]  Isn't there something that's, that's one of the things that comes up on the 4th of July.
[00:11:10]  It's like so much of the divide in America over right and left seems to be over whether, do you love America or do you think America is a force for evil or something like that, you know?
[00:11:23]  And I want to touch on this a little bit more as we go on, but there's something interesting about that split because I feel, and I think I assume, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you, you agree with me on this, that we're in this kind of unique position when it comes to that kind of left-right question of, is America great or is America evil?
[00:11:49]  And we're like, we're more in the position where we're like, look, no one bitches about what America does more than us, but we still think it's great.
[00:12:00]  We like, we think this country's fucking great.
[00:12:03]  Now let me tell you about all the ways it's fucking up.
[00:12:07]  Does that make sense?
[00:12:08]  Like that's where we are?
[00:12:10]  We're trying to end the American shopping spree on stupid bullshit.
[00:12:14]  Yes.
[00:12:14]  But we don't, but we don't hate our wife just because she's buying stupid shit all the time.
[00:12:18]  We just need the stupid shit to stop.
[00:12:20]  Exactly.
[00:12:21]  Well, look, I mean, there's so many things you could say that particularly the government of this country, but even like a lot of the people have done that are just like, God damn, they're fucking up in this way or fucking up in that way.
[00:12:36]  Did I make it, by the way?
[00:12:38]  I just realized I've dropped a lot of F-bombs.
[00:12:40]  No, we're 12 minutes in.
[00:12:41]  Our producer said, just try to not do it for the first few minutes.
[00:12:44]  All right.
[00:12:44]  So I'll try.
[00:12:46]  I think I did it, Brian, but I don't know how far I made it.
[00:12:50]  But like July 4th.
[00:12:53]  I did it.
[00:12:53]  All right.
[00:12:54]  Good.
[00:12:55]  July 4th, the Independence Day is a celebration of the day that the Declaration of Independence was ratified.
[00:13:03]  That's what the holiday is.
[00:13:05]  And for whatever, whatever negative things, anyone who believes in liberty, whatever negative things you could say about this country, it's pretty incredible that our national story is based on celebrating the Declaration of Independence.
[00:13:27]  So many other countries' national story, their myth is like celebrating.
[00:13:32]  And I'm saying this is a myth too.
[00:13:34]  I'm not trying to pretend it's not, but the national myth of so many countries is like the queen of so-and-so came here or this land is something or this something.
[00:13:45]  It's all like kind of either religious or something about like a monarchy or something like that.
[00:13:54]  But America, the story is like, hey, look at this document.
[00:14:00]  Look at this document.
[00:14:01]  And what the document says is like, we believe God gave us natural rights.
[00:14:08]  And we believe governments are created by men to protect those rights.
[00:14:12]  And if they don't, then screw you, we can overthrow you.
[00:14:17]  And we believe in our rights and we'll use violence to protect them.
[00:14:21]  And there's just something so badass about that.

=== The Power to Overthrow Government (02:58) ===

[00:14:24]  Something so great about that.
[00:14:25]  And that that also turned out to make the most powerful country that's ever existed.
[00:14:32]  It's just something cool about that.
[00:14:34]  And I don't think that's a negative thing.
[00:14:37]  Like I think that's there's at least enough positive there that it should be fought for.
[00:14:44]  Rob, you hate America.
[00:14:45]  What do you think?
[00:14:46]  No, and so much of the prosperity was built because of freedom and the ingenuity that freedom brings.
[00:14:53]  So, you know, we really, we established something new and it was had a pretty good run.
[00:14:59]  Yeah.
[00:15:00]  No, I think that's true.
[00:15:01]  And it's over.
[00:15:02]  I mean, but hey, we had a good run.
[00:15:04]  No, it's not over.
[00:15:05]  We're going to take this thing back.
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[00:16:18]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:16:21]  Okay, so I wanted, the thing I wanted to open with today was a clip by Patrick Bet David that he said something on a recent podcast that had me thinking a lot.
[00:16:33]  And I wanted to, we're going to play this clip and we're going to talk about it a little bit.
[00:16:38]  But before we get into that, I actually, I wanted to say, I've been thinking about this a bit over the last couple of days, partly because I just spoke with Patrick Bet David recently.
[00:16:49]  I love that guy.
[00:16:51]  He's an incredible.
[00:16:52]  He's like, if you guys don't know who he is, he runs the Valutainement company and he's a boss.
[00:17:00]  The guy is just incredible.
[00:17:01]  Just one of the sharpest guys out there in this world.
[00:17:05]  And he's a business guy who's been incredibly successful.
[00:17:10]  And so anyway, we're going to play this clip in a second.
[00:17:12]  He bought the Yankees or he bought a stake in the Yankees.
[00:17:15]  Yes.
[00:17:16]  He is an owner of the Yankees now.
[00:17:19]  He came to this country as an immigrant with nothing and bought the Yankees.

=== From Refugee to Yankees Owner (09:32) ===

[00:17:22]  What an American story.
[00:17:24]  Yes.
[00:17:25]  Now, so that's almost what I wanted to talk about before we get into this clip.
[00:17:29]  But while on the 4th of July, I see as I, after I got my kids to bed, I was on social media a little bit and I see these kind of left-wingers and right-wingers having all these arguments about what is America?
[00:17:40]  You hate America.
[00:17:42]  You love America.
[00:17:43]  If you love America, you love racism and slavery and all the, you know, seeing like all these kind of silly debates.
[00:17:50]  And from my position, you're like, what is America?
[00:17:55]  And I think Patrick Bet David's story almost sums it up better than anything else I could think of.
[00:18:03]  Now, so here's his story, okay?
[00:18:07]  He was born in Iran.
[00:18:12]  He was a refugee of the 1980 Iran-Iraq war.
[00:18:19]  Now, this war, if people don't know, I think it lasted like six years or something like that.
[00:18:26]  So it started in 1980.
[00:18:30]  In 1970, I believe, shit, double check me on this, but I believe in 1979, there was the revolution in Iran and Saddam Hussein came to power in Iraq.
[00:18:43]  These are neighboring countries.
[00:18:46]  And so they both had new governments in that year.
[00:18:50]  And the next year, they go to war with each other.
[00:18:52]  Now, the United States of America supported both sides of that war.
[00:18:59]  They actually funded both sides of the war, but they really supported Saddam Hussein.
[00:19:05]  You know, Saddam Hussein, the same guy who we went to war with twice, but they supported both sides of the war.
[00:19:10]  They had funded Iran and they had funded Saddam, but they really supported Saddam.
[00:19:17]  Not only supported him, but sold him chemical weapons that he used on the Iranian people.
[00:19:24]  Brutal war.
[00:19:25]  Something like 500,000 people on each side died.
[00:19:28]  So like a total of a million people died and died brutal deaths.
[00:19:32]  And America was directly responsible for intervening in this war and in many ways causing it, certainly fueling it.
[00:19:41]  Certainly a lot more people died in it because of America's intervention than otherwise would have died in it.
[00:19:47]  And so he's on the Iranian side of this war as a kid, as a little kid, while America is supporting the brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein, giving him all types of crazy weapons that he's using on the Iranian people.
[00:20:06]  So that's like what America's role is in the war that he's ultimately a refugee of.
[00:20:14]  And then he went, I think, to Europe and was in some type of like refugee camp for a little bit.
[00:20:19]  Then he comes to America, comes here with nothing, starts a business, is wildly successful, was a huge Yankees fan as a kid, you know, starts this, I believe he started an insurance company, rose up, makes millions of dollars, makes millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars, starts a podcast network.
[00:20:45]  Now he's one of the most influential guys in the country, and then ultimately buys those New York Yankees, who he was such a huge fan of as a kid.
[00:20:56]  So what is America?
[00:21:00]  It's all of that.
[00:21:02]  Like America is, yes, we are the government that did that, but we're also still the country that allowed this kid who was the victim of what we did as a government over there to come here.
[00:21:20]  And because he is just like he's just a monster and like a force of nature, he could come here and rise up and become the guy who bought the New York Yankees, who he once loved as a like refugee immigrant kid in this country.
[00:21:39]  And if, you know, if you want to just paint America as one or the other, you're going to be missing the point.
[00:21:47]  You know what I mean?
[00:21:48]  Like we're both of those things.
[00:21:50]  And so I think it's particularly important for libertarians to recognize that like we are simultaneously as a country, all of that.
[00:22:01]  And so you should be furious about the shit that the government's doing, but you should also like really go, it's pretty awesome.
[00:22:08]  There's a reason why so many people still want to come to this country, even today, even after everything we've been through in the last few years.
[00:22:16]  That's my assessment of America.
[00:22:22]  Doesn't that story kind of sum it all up, Rob?
[00:22:25]  You got opportunity here, if you can get in.
[00:22:28]  Yeah.
[00:22:29]  Yeah.
[00:22:30]  And too many of you are getting in, but still, for the ones who do, for the ones who do, we want you to have opportunity once you get here.
[00:22:37]  Okay.
[00:22:38]  So Patrick Bett David, someone I have a tremendous respect for, he recently did an episode with somebody who's been on the show.
[00:22:48]  So I've been on his show and he recently had on somebody who's been on this show before, who is, of course, Colonel Douglas McGregor.
[00:22:56]  By the way, it was a great episode.
[00:22:59]  I believe you watched it, right, Rob?
[00:23:01]  I think we talked about this.
[00:23:03]  I watched the clips, which were excellent.
[00:23:05]  And then sometimes I got to go back and watch the whole episode because I do watch quite a bit of Douglas McGregor.
[00:23:12]  And sometimes he scares the shit out of me.
[00:23:14]  And I'm definitely not taking what he says.
[00:23:17]  And just, you know, I haven't really been prepping.
[00:23:20]  So I hope he's wrong about what he envisions for the next year for America.
[00:23:24]  But he seems to, at least on the Ukraine war, be the most insightful figure at the start of this, kind of informing everyone, hey, we're not winning this war.
[00:23:35]  And I don't think, I mean, he's not a libertarian.
[00:23:39]  So he's got a different perspective on the country than you or I, but he does seem, even though he's coming from that other perspective, he does seem to be the most well-informed and rational.
[00:23:50]  Yes, I do appreciate his perspective quite a bit.
[00:23:52]  He is certainly not a libertarian.
[00:23:54]  He's more of like a colonel.
[00:23:58]  Like he's coming at it from a strategic point of view where he's like, this is, look, I'm going to give you the information and you do with that what you will.
[00:24:09]  And I will go, sir, yes, sir, and go deliver these orders.
[00:24:14]  He reminds me of Michael Scheuer.
[00:24:18]  I always mess up how to pronounce his last name, but he was the CIA chief, not CIA chief, but he was the chief of the bin Laden unit in the CIA during the 90s.
[00:24:30]  And he came out and he was, I think he became like a kook later in life, but he was his thing, he was, he testified before Congress and did several like interviews.
[00:24:41]  Planning and executing 9-11.
[00:24:42]  Let's change it, man.
[00:24:44]  Yeah, right.
[00:24:45]  Well, no, his whole thing was he was just like, look, the Bush administration is lying to you about what caused 9-11.
[00:24:56]  And I will tell you what did cause 9-11.
[00:24:58]  And I was the head of the bin Laden unit in the CIA.
[00:25:02]  I was running operations.
[00:25:04]  I was doing all this shit.
[00:25:05]  And I will tell you that what they hate about us is that we fight wars in the Middle East and we prop up brutal dictators in the Middle East and we support Israel.
[00:25:14]  That's why they hate us.
[00:25:16]  Now, and his attitude was always, it was not a libertarian attitude at all.
[00:25:20]  Like he had the attitude of like, look, if you're telling me if we nuke the Middle East, that's in the best interest of America, then I'll go help you nuke the Middle East.
[00:25:31]  I'm just telling you that this is what's going on here.
[00:25:36]  Now, you tell me what you think the right move.
[00:25:38]  And I think McGregor has some of that quality to him.
[00:25:43]  Like, it's kind of like, look, if you're telling me going and starting this war and slaughtering a bunch of people is what's going to help our country, then let's go do that.
[00:25:52]  And I will give you the best drawn up plans on how to do that.
[00:25:56]  But I'm telling you that slaughtering these people is actually hurting our country.
[00:26:00]  Now, me and you may have a different view.
[00:26:02]  We may be like, oh, it's wrong to go slaughter all these people.
[00:26:05]  It's horrible.
[00:26:06]  But that you can still really appreciate what guys like this bring to the table.
[00:26:12]  And so, you know, Michael Scheuer was his thing was just like being like, look, don't, if you say we have to support Israel because that's the most important thing to this country, then okay.
[00:26:29]  Then that's what we have to do.
[00:26:31]  But don't pretend it doesn't come with these costs because these costs are also involved in it, which is that the rest of the Muslim world is going to hate your guts if you do this.
[00:26:42]  Anyway, I think Douglas McGregor has been phenomenal throughout this whole war.
[00:26:49]  He's been a much a much needed voice and someone I'd recommend everyone listen to.

=== Why Listen to the Full Podcast (02:40) ===

[00:26:55]  I hope he's not right about some of the stuff he said on this podcast.
[00:26:59]  But by the way, I recommend people go listen to the entire podcast.
[00:27:02]  It was very, very good.
[00:27:04]  He's one of the only people, firstly, who's been talking about that we're not advancing our strategic interests with the Ukraine war.
[00:27:11]  He's also predicting that this is going to be the end of NATO.
[00:27:15]  He's predicting that we might have drastically weakened our currency.
[00:27:19]  He's been talking about, I would say those are kind of like the very interesting talking points.
[00:27:26]  But then he also predicts that we're kind of so doomed here that the next election's not happening.
[00:27:31]  That was the big bombshell that I haven't heard him say before that he said on this podcast was that he doesn't think we'll make it to a 2024 election.
[00:27:39]  But then he did kind of like caveat that with if we do, it'll still be like an election where it's all like mail-in ballots and all types of like shit like that.
[00:27:51]  And basically basically saying a Republican can't win with the setup that they have right now.
[00:28:00]  So there's just, it's going to keep going in this direction.
[00:28:02]  So I'm hoping he's wrong about that last part.
[00:28:06]  We will see.
[00:28:07]  All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is FreezePipe.
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[00:29:34]  All right, let's get back into the show.

=== Libertarian Views on Tolerance (15:34) ===

[00:29:35]  This was something that at the end of this very interesting, like fascinating episode, this was something that Patrick Bett David said that was something I heard him say this, and it's just been kind of, it's like every now and then you hear someone say something and it just gnaws into the back of your brain a little bit and just stays there and rolls around a little bit.
[00:29:59]  And it's something I've been trying to grapple with.
[00:30:01]  And I wanted to talk about it.
[00:30:04]  As soon as I heard it, I was like, fuck, I think we need to talk about that on the podcast.
[00:30:09]  And so, all right, let's let's play the clip and then we'll we'll respond to it.
[00:30:13]  Here is Patrick Bett David.
[00:30:15]  Four things I pray about, and I'm struggling with one of them a lot lately.
[00:30:19]  I pray for courage, wisdom, tolerance, understanding.
[00:30:22]  I do.
[00:30:23]  And those are four things.
[00:30:24]  I need courage to do what I'm doing on a daily basis, family business, all this stuff.
[00:30:29]  I need wisdom because I'm talking to people that are smarter than me and I want to get as much wisdom from them as possible.
[00:30:34]  So God's surrounding me around smarter people than me that I'm learning from everybody.
[00:30:38]  Tolerance is what I prayed for for the longest time.
[00:30:42]  And then understanding to be able to see the other side of the argument, somebody I disagree with or disagrees with me.
[00:30:47]  On the tolerance side, it's to the point where I think sometimes if you were to look at the most tolerant denomination or sect or religion, you would say the most tolerant religion is the non-denominational Christian is who it is.
[00:31:03]  Okay.
[00:31:05]  You would have to say that because they're very forgiving.
[00:31:08]  Oh, it's okay.
[00:31:09]  You know, turn the cheek or do this or do that.
[00:31:12]  Okay.
[00:31:13]  And we're seeing that the country in the world with the least amount of LGBTQ members is Indonesia.
[00:31:20]  Less than 5% is not LGBTQ members.
[00:31:25]  Indonesia doesn't support same-sex marriage.
[00:31:28]  Less than 5% of Indonesia support same-sex marriage.
[00:31:31]  I think in America we're at 72%, give or take what the numbers.
[00:31:34]  It just dropped off 7% to, it was 71%, now it's 64%.
[00:31:39]  I think Christians are part of the problem in America.
[00:31:42]  I think lazy Republicans are part of the problem in America.
[00:31:46]  I think libertarians who are like, man, I don't give a shit what you do.
[00:31:50]  Just leave me alone.
[00:31:51]  Let me make my money.
[00:31:52]  As much as those are all honorable type of things to look at, I think they're all part of the problem because they don't realize that a part of what Jesus or who they admired did, they had a level of intolerance to compromise certain values and principles.
[00:32:07]  They were not from the mindset of it's okay, it's okay, it's okay.
[00:32:10]  They were like, no, no, I'm not crossing the line here with you.
[00:32:14]  You want to do that, you, but you're wrong and I disagree with you.
[00:32:17]  That's where we're going to stand.
[00:32:18]  Where it's more like to each his own, to each his own, to each his own.
[00:32:22]  And this concept of being too tolerant has gotten America to go from being the greatest country in the world where we were feared, respected, admired, and secretly everybody kind of wanted to be like us.
[00:32:33]  Of course, we're hated.
[00:32:33]  Anytime you're number one, you're going to be hated.
[00:32:36]  Who's the most hated football quarterback of all time?
[00:32:38]  It's very easy.
[00:32:38]  Who's the most hated basketball player of all time?
[00:32:40]  It's very easy.
[00:32:41]  Who's the most hated country of all time?
[00:32:42]  It's very easy.
[00:32:43]  We were able to do something these countries for 2,000 years, 1,000 years couldn't do.
[00:32:46]  We did it in 150 years, 200 years.
[00:32:48]  Of course, you're going to hate that country because it shows incompetence in your philosophies and your ideas, right?
[00:32:53]  So I understand that, but I kind of agree with you where I think the American people from those three sects, the lazy Republicans, the libertarians that are like to each his own, and to the two tolerant Christians that are saying it's okay to everything.
[00:33:11]  I think they've kind of compromised what these 56 men, brave men that started this country with the reason why I'm here as an immigrant from Iran, they kind of hurt that.
[00:33:21]  But anyways, right at the end of the podcast.
[00:33:23]  All right.
[00:33:23]  So that was the comment that I wanted to respond to.
[00:33:28]  Now, here, Patrick Bet David said all of my trigger words on that.
[00:33:33]  He said part of the problem like five times.
[00:33:37]  And he said libertarians a couple times.
[00:33:40]  So that's how it's like you summoned me.
[00:33:43]  That's how you get me out of my, that's how you summon Dave Smith.
[00:33:48]  So if you say part of the problem in the libertarians bunch.
[00:33:51]  But I thought there was something about what he was talking about there that was very interesting.
[00:33:57]  And I found myself agreeing with him.
[00:34:04]  I found myself at least going, yeah, I think there's really a point that he's making there.
[00:34:08]  That is something there's something to that.
[00:34:12]  And there's something that I've kind of been talking about this for a while where I think he is pointing out.
[00:34:20]  By the way, he's not saying there's a he really isn't saying there's a weakness in libertarianism.
[00:34:28]  He's saying that there's something wrong with what libertarians have done.
[00:34:35]  I'm going to leave aside the Christians and conservatives and the other groups who he was throwing in that because I want to respond to like my group here, who he's kind of calling out.
[00:34:45]  And I don't think he's wrong.
[00:34:48]  I think he's got a point.
[00:34:50]  Do you like before I even get into it, Rob, do you, what's your initial reaction to that comment, to that, that, that, that point that he made?
[00:35:00]  I'm fine with it.
[00:35:04]  The answer is I'm fine with it.
[00:35:05]  It's something that you and I have talked about that, you know, we're all for freedom and you should have the freedom to do whatever you want.
[00:35:10]  That doesn't mean that everything should be celebrated.
[00:35:15]  I do have a slight rebuttal that's kind of nuanced, but you might want to lay out your points first.
[00:35:22]  Well, so let me say this, that, right.
[00:35:24]  So to your point, or to the first part that you made, which is the point we've made several times, is that libertarianism is objectively, what libertarianism is, is a belief in the non-aggression principle.
[00:35:44]  That's what we believe.
[00:35:46]  We believe that you don't have a right to violently impose your will on other people.
[00:35:58]  And that if somebody is acting in a way that doesn't initiate violence against you or against others, that they have a right to do that.
[00:36:13]  That's kind of the libertarian position.
[00:36:15]  And I think for a while, and I think for a while, this kind of made sense, that a lot of libertarians seemingly deduced from that, that we ought to be tolerant of people who do things that are not initiating violence against other people that are different.
[00:36:37]  We ought to be tolerant toward that.
[00:36:40]  It reminded me of, I think it was in For a New Liberty by Charles Murray, but he made a very interesting point.
[00:36:46]  Well, For a New Liberty is Murray Rothbard.
[00:36:48]  Yeah, good point.
[00:36:49]  I don't remember which book it was by Charles Murray, but it was definitely Charles Murray.
[00:36:52]  Okay, so you're talking, Charles Murray, you're not talking about bell curve.
[00:36:56]  I think you're talking about his follow-up book to that.
[00:37:00]  But anyway, go ahead.
[00:37:01]  He made a point about the elites.
[00:37:04]  Yes, they'll live a certain lifestyle and they know that the lifestyle is better, but they don't want to hold or preach that lifestyle to other people.
[00:37:14]  So for example, if you talk to people who are in the elite, they probably eat pretty healthy.
[00:37:19]  But at the same time, they're not going to shame anyone for being fat.
[00:37:23]  But are you helping the person by living this kind of double standard culture where you have a standard for yourself, but in a way, you're almost not educating other people so that there is a better lifestyle.
[00:37:35]  So if you don't want to judge other people for, let's say, being overweight drug addicts that don't raise their own kids, are you actually doing them a favor?
[00:37:42]  His argument was that in cultures that have elites and kind of celebrate their elites, at least there's a little bit of like a role model or an example for better forms of human behavior versus the way that our elites kind of act where they go, hey, we're all the same and I'm not judging you.
[00:38:01]  But the truth of the matter is privately, they do have disdain for your lifestyle.
[00:38:05]  Yes, coming apart.
[00:38:06]  Coming apart.
[00:38:07]  They do have disdain for your lifestyle.
[00:38:09]  And then they're also not really educating you or helping other people be held to a higher standard.
[00:38:15]  Yes.
[00:38:16]  Yes.
[00:38:16]  There's something about that.
[00:38:18]  So there's, I also, I understand, but I also think this is almost like first level libertarian shit versus like moving up the levels where you go, well, look, if we're not for, you know, if we're not for enforcing our will on people who live different lifestyles, then we ought to be tolerant of them.
[00:38:46]  But at a certain point, you go like, well, wait a minute.
[00:38:52]  So if we're not for enforcing our will on people who are living a different lifestyle, that doesn't mean that we can't object, that we must be tolerant.
[00:39:05]  And tolerance is a very different word than like non-aggression.
[00:39:11]  You know, we don't have to tolerate things.
[00:39:13]  We don't have to demonstrate tolerance.
[00:39:16]  We have to not aggress against them if we're libertarians.
[00:39:19]  We have to not commit violence against them, but we can see, and that's kind of what he was saying, that a lot of these original Christians was like, look, you have a right to live this way, but I'm going to tell you that I disagree with it.
[00:39:31]  I'm going to let you know that I think, and perhaps even encourage others to disagree with you also, or perhaps encourage others to shame you for that.
[00:39:41]  None of that is inconsistent with libertarian values.
[00:39:44]  And so I get the point that he's making.
[00:39:47]  And when you see what we have today, it's hard to not think that like, yeah, maybe that whole spirit actually has contributed to our downfall.
[00:40:01]  So Ludwig von Mises, who in many ways is the godfather of modern day libertarianism.
[00:40:10]  I mean, Murray Rothbard is really the godfather of modern day libertarianism, and he was a student of Ludwig von Mises.
[00:40:19]  Now, Ludwig von Mises would not have called himself a libertarian in his day.
[00:40:24]  He just called himself a liberal because that's what the word meant back then was something completely different from what it means today.
[00:40:31]  But he had this quote where he said that liberalism, and by that he meant, you know, what is now referred to as classical liberalism, not what, you know, he didn't mean AOC.
[00:40:45]  He meant the original liberals.
[00:40:47]  He meant John Locke and, you know, people like that.
[00:40:50]  And he said that liberalism must be in intolerant of all intolerance.
[00:40:58]  And so he, you know, that quote today can sound like something that is something very different from what he originally meant it as.
[00:41:10]  You know, the term intolerance today could mean, you know, people think of that as meaning like, what, you don't love transgender people, then you're intolerant or something like that.
[00:41:23]  But I think when he said, because if you look at his views on like gays or his social views, they were not, you know, what I mean, he was a guy who was like writing this in the 20s.
[00:41:36]  He wasn't a guy.
[00:41:37]  I mean, we're in the 20s in the 1920s.
[00:41:41]  What he was saying was that you can't be tolerant of views that are inherently intolerant.
[00:41:49]  And that if you are, then you're going to lose the whole plot.
[00:41:54]  And in a lot of ways, I think that there's been far too much of a tendency from libertarians and right-wingers and conservatives to be tolerant of views who are intolerant of you.
[00:42:11]  They're intolerant of what you stand for.
[00:42:15]  And if, and if something is not like, if there is some view that is not going to tolerate what you believe, then you have no obligation to be tolerant toward them.
[00:42:28]  And this is a lot of, I think a lot of what the problem is today, is that there's been so much like seeding of ground toward a progressive worldview that views like that views me and you, Rob, as neo-Nazis.
[00:42:47]  And like, why the hell on earth?
[00:42:49]  Now, we can have our libertarian principles and think, yeah, you can't just shoot someone because they believe feel that way.
[00:42:57]  But why the hell do we have to have tolerance toward a worldview that thinks that if you think biological men are men and biological women are women, then you're a Nazi.
[00:43:11]  Like they're not demonstrating a lot of tolerance toward us.
[00:43:14]  Why the hell do we have to demonstrate tolerance toward them?
[00:43:18]  Why should that be the attitude?
[00:43:20]  And I will say, whether you look at our, you know, like I think Patrick Bed David is alluding to like our military having transgender leaders or our teachers in our public schools hanging pride flags up or whether it's just walking down the streets of New York City today and what you see compared to what I used to see growing up.
[00:43:48]  And you're like, oh, I think this seems to be the result of an abundance of tolerance.
[00:43:58]  And none of that seems to be good.
[00:44:00]  None of that seems to be actually helping the nation, helping this country, which as we said at the beginning, that we love.
[00:44:08]  As much as we hate the government, we love our country.
[00:44:12]  And this does not seem to be helping.
[00:44:14]  And then it also, you know, just reminds me that this isn't actually something you can deduce from libertarian principles.
[00:44:21]  It's not like because I believe in free markets and the non-aggression principle, that doesn't mean that I have to believe that you can't have strong moral convictions.
[00:44:32]  And not you can't enforce your will on other people.
[00:44:37]  That's wrong and also counterproductive.
[00:44:40]  But certainly you can you can say that, yeah, I don't accept any of this.
[00:44:48]  I think this is wrong.
[00:44:50]  I don't know.
[00:44:50]  Does that make sense?
[00:44:52]  It all makes sense.
[00:44:54]  And I just want to say conceptually, I agree with it.
[00:44:56]  And it's right.
[00:44:59]  I do think that it misses one little aspect, which is I think tolerance is an attribute of whoever has the weaker hand.

=== When the Weaker Hand Yields (02:22) ===

[00:45:10]  And I think at any given time, whoever has the weaker hand, they go, hey, I just want to be able to be left alone and do my own thing.
[00:45:17]  And I think the reality is more often than not, if the Christian right had the upper hand right now, they wouldn't be as tolerant.
[00:45:24]  I think it's all an outpouring of socialism and that there's so much wealth and resources that is put into the left and the victim culture and all of these progressive activities that the conservators are kind of forced to pretend like their outlook is just, oh, we don't care if you want to go be gay over there or you want to go do whatever it is over there.
[00:45:47]  We just want to be left alone to be able to raise our families and have nice Christian values.
[00:45:52]  That's because they have the weaker hand.
[00:45:53]  If they had the stronger hand and they were more of the majority, believe me, they wouldn't want this trip club in their town.
[00:45:59]  They wouldn't want, you know, I think it's just really more of an outpouring of the point is not just that they wouldn't want this trip club in their, in their town, but that they would use force.
[00:46:09]  Yeah, they would go police and evict it.
[00:46:11]  Yes.
[00:46:11]  I think just whoever has the weaker hand, the way that you play the game is to go, listen, you guys, go do your thing.
[00:46:17]  I just want to be left alone to go do my thing.
[00:46:19]  No, that's a great, that's a great point.
[00:46:21]  It's a great point.
[00:46:22]  And it's like, it's like if you're being mugged and someone holds a gun to you and goes, give me your wallet.
[00:46:28]  It's very easy to go, I think it's wrong to mug people with a gun, you know?
[00:46:34]  But when you have the gun, that's the real test.
[00:46:37]  And conservatives have failed that test over and over again.
[00:46:41]  So that is, you know, when they did have the gun, when they were in that position.
[00:46:47]  So that is absolutely a completely fair point.
[00:46:52]  But I do think there's something to Patrick's point here, where, you know, tolerance is a virtue to an extent.
[00:47:05]  And then at a certain point, it's not anymore.
[00:47:09]  There should be certain things that you're intolerant of.
[00:47:13]  And I think that's something as a country that we got to kind of like recalibrate and figure out.
[00:47:22]  So anyway, that's that's something I'll probably talk about this a bunch more because that was just something that I has been rustling around in my head.

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=== Social Media Control and Truth (13:45) ===

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[00:50:03]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:50:05]  All right, let's switch gears.
[00:50:09]  Let's talk about something else that also happened today on the 4th of July.
[00:50:13]  A federal judge gave down an interesting verdict that has, I think, a lot of implications on what we do, Rob, on what our whole profession is based around, having to do with government intervention into social media.
[00:50:38]  So we have a clip here from Fox News covering this.
[00:50:41]  Brian, let's play that clip.
[00:50:42]  Federal judge says the Biden administration may have violated the First Amendment during the pandemic by censoring social media posts.
[00:50:50]  Justice correspondent David Spun reports live from the DC newsroom.
[00:50:54]  David, what can you tell us?
[00:50:56]  Hi, Jillian.
[00:50:56]  This is a temporary injunction, not a final ruling.
[00:51:00]  However, this temporary injunction could have major implications on free speech.
[00:51:05]  It came down today on a federal holiday from a federal judge in Louisiana.
[00:51:09]  Judge Terry Dotty blocked officials and agencies in the Biden administration from communicating with social media companies, think Facebook, Google, Twitter, about the topic of protected speech.
[00:51:20]  Judge Dottie is based on a prior lawsuit brought by Republican attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri.
[00:51:27]  He ruled on that, among other complaints.
[00:51:30]  The attorneys general say the Biden administration overreached its authority during the height of the COVID pandemic when they tried to convince social media companies to address, in some cases, take down posts on platforms that could contribute to vaccine hesitancy.
[00:51:48]  Now, according to Judge Dottie, quote, the plaintiffs, meaning the attorneys general, have presented substantial evidence in support of their claims that they were the victims of a far-reaching and widespread censorship campaign.
[00:52:01]  This court finds that they are likely to succeed on the merits of their First Amendment free speech claim against the defendants, the defendants being the Biden administration.
[00:52:10]  Now, the administration, as have administrations in recent years, develop close relationships, Jillian, with social media companies.
[00:52:18]  Sometimes those relationships are hot and cold, depending on the topic, but the administration also, the independent FBI and DOJ, are in frequent contact with these social media companies, especially covering the DOJ.
[00:52:30]  I see it with fentanyl and other types of trafficking.
[00:52:34]  They reach out frequently to these social media companies.
[00:52:36]  We'll have to see how that all plays into the future now that this judge has ruled this injunction.
[00:52:42]  Now, it reached out to DOJ a little while ago.
[00:52:44]  I got an email back, DOJ officially declining to comment.
[00:52:48]  And again, this is not a final ruling, but it's clear the judge is leaning in a specific way.
[00:52:53]  Jillian.
[00:52:55]  All right.
[00:52:55]  Rob, what are your thoughts?
[00:52:58]  Well, we know that seemingly what government's been doing is completely illegal.
[00:53:03]  We had an incident with Jen Psaki that she said that they had backdoor channels to talk to social media.
[00:53:08]  We had Mark Zuckerberg accidentally said, or I'm saying accidentally said on Rogan's podcast.
[00:53:14]  Yeah, we got basically the FBI told us to be on the lookout for whatever.
[00:53:20]  And so we removed it.
[00:53:21]  We know that.
[00:53:22]  Well, I'm sorry.
[00:53:23]  Just to be clear on that, what you're alluding to there is that Mark Zuckerberg said when asked about why they censored the Hunter Biden story, he said, well, the FBI had told us a couple weeks earlier to be on the lookout for a Russian dump of misinformation.
[00:53:45]  And we now know that the FBI had had Hunter Biden's laptop for what looks like a year previous to this and knew what it was and still said that right before that story.
[00:54:01]  Well, validated it.
[00:54:02]  Then I got a call from the Democratic Party.
[00:54:07]  Well, Blinken, to be more specific, saying, hey, this is going to cost us the election.
[00:54:11]  Didn't quite say those terms, but essentially, this is going to cost us the election.
[00:54:15]  And then the CIA said, oh, don't worry about it.
[00:54:17]  We'll claim that they came from Russia and we'll contact the social media companies to make sure that it gets removed.
[00:54:22]  Yes.
[00:54:23]  And then all, and then putting that together with the fact the FBI went to Facebook, went to the head of Facebook a couple weeks before that came out and said, hey, be on the lookout for Russian disinformation.
[00:54:38]  And then they all came out and said this thing has all the earmarks of Russian disinformation.
[00:54:42]  And Facebook, I believe what he said is they didn't go as far as Twitter, the old regime at Twitter that banned it from, that shut down the New York Post and banned the link from being shared.
[00:54:55]  But he said they turned down the signal on it.
[00:54:58]  So if you shared it, you know, no one would see it.
[00:55:01]  And then we also know from the Twitter files that the FBI had direct access to Twitter.
[00:55:07]  And in fact, they even had people from their old staff working at Twitter.
[00:55:11]  Yes.
[00:55:11]  And at the same time, they had a running bill with them for the amount of resources that they were swallowing when they were making demands about posts being taken down or otherwise.
[00:55:21]  And Alex Berenson won a lawsuit, which, and I think other parts of it are still pending, but it was specifically because someone in the Biden administration specifically reached out to Twitter and named, I believe, him by name, like, why is this still on the platform?
[00:55:37]  Yes.
[00:55:38]  Long story short, I guess if a social media company and they're a private company and they realize, hey, we don't want anti-vax stuff here because this is bad for our business.
[00:55:48]  We got so many moms and pops here.
[00:55:50]  Anti-vax is bad for business.
[00:55:52]  Then I guess great.
[00:55:53]  If that's their business decision, private company.
[00:55:56]  But when they're getting calls from the government going, hey, we thought we said that that was bad information there.
[00:56:02]  Why would you have bad, dangerous information here?
[00:56:04]  Wink, wink, nod, nod.
[00:56:05]  How come you're not complying with us?
[00:56:06]  And here's a paycheck if you do.
[00:56:08]  Hey, you want to get pulled back in here for another congressional hearing and nine hours of testimony as to why you're allowing pedophiles on your platform?
[00:56:17]  I think it's been pretty transparent of the fact that government, I mean, Jem Pasaki literally said it.
[00:56:22]  She said it directly.
[00:56:24]  We have lists.
[00:56:26]  Yeah, and we got back channels and we discuss it.
[00:56:28]  And it's always under the guise of the misinformation and the dangerous things that are going on.
[00:56:34]  But I mean, if anything has proven that government should not have that power, it's the amount of information that was removed from social media relative to COVID and the COVID vaccine that turned out to be right probably on a six-month timeline.
[00:56:47]  Nearly every single thing that was taken down from social media is misinformation over the course of COVID probably turned out to be right, except for like magnets and Bill Gates and like that stuff.
[00:56:57]  Like except for like the craziest stuff, almost all of it's been validated.
[00:57:01]  And then the biggest news story that was removed on the basis of Russian misinformation or whatever turned out to be the deep state literally trying to cheat for the Democrats.
[00:57:11]  So if anything, the track record of the last two years is proof of the fact that we need absolute free speech and just like no compromises there.
[00:57:20]  And the government has certainly been working backdoor channels to actually remove information and censor the internet because they kind of have to.
[00:57:29]  With all that being said, great, this judgment will come down.
[00:57:33]  I can't imagine that that's a full unraveling of the policy unless there's accountability that goes way beyond, oh, you can't do that and you shouldn't be doing it.
[00:57:43]  Yes.
[00:57:44]  It seems like I completely agree with everything you just said.
[00:57:48]  It seems like there's, you know, this is a 4th of July miracle.
[00:57:54]  And this judgment is going to be perfect.
[00:57:57]  But of course, it's pretty hard to imagine that this one federal judge, you know, issuing this injunction is actually going to stop the CIA and the FBI and all the other secret three-letter organizations from, you know, intervening into social media.
[00:58:18]  But it is a very positive step in the right direction.
[00:58:22]  I'll say that.
[00:58:23]  The good news is when it comes to truth has value.
[00:58:27]  I think everyone's kind of interested in truth.
[00:58:31]  And it feels like unless they can get absolute control over the internet over a long enough timeline, they lose because the truth does come out.
[00:58:41]  And if anything, it forces their hands to like, they're always testing the water of what they can get away with.
[00:58:47]  And it's because of the efforts of people actually exposing truth that sometimes it doesn't work.
[00:58:52]  Here's a proof in point.
[00:58:53]  Just last week, Larry Fink was saying they're not using the term ESG anymore.
[00:58:57]  Does that mean that they're done trying to rig the markets to value them and to impose this social justice nonsense, you know, for their profits onto everyone?
[00:59:04]  Of course not.
[00:59:05]  But even the most evil and wealthiest and most powerful individual who sat down with the team at some point, at some point, I would think he probably sat down with the CIA NSA and they worked up a plan for ESG scores and they tried to impose it on us.
[00:59:18]  And guess what?
[00:59:19]  They have to go figure out how to resell it because the efforts of people like me on podcasts who were able to expose that story enough.
[00:59:27]  So it's like, as long as there's truth on the internet, their thing will cave.
[00:59:32]  It doesn't work unless they can actually censor us.
[00:59:35]  They've ramped up their efforts of censorship more than ever in our lifetimes over the last two years.
[00:59:41]  And they still weren't able to completely remove us from the internet.
[00:59:45]  They couldn't get rid of Rogan.
[00:59:47]  And so if anything, I guess any efforts that kind of push back on their ability to police the internet like leads to a victory for us and for them.
[00:59:56]  Dude, that is the ultimate white pill.
[01:00:00]  That's the ultimate thing to be encouraged about is that they, if it was so inevitable that they were going to win, they wouldn't need to put all of this effort in toward into controlling the narrative and propagandizing the population.
[01:00:19]  And they wouldn't be so afraid of people who are pushing back against that.
[01:00:24]  And the fact is that we've seen a lot of evidence that they actually can't control all of the people who are pushing back against it and that so much of their propaganda gets exposed.
[01:00:36]  To me, that's the ultimate white pill.
[01:00:39]  That's the thing to really gain optimism from is that it doesn't seem like they can win.
[01:00:50]  They're not set up to live in a world where Tucker gets kicked off of Fox and then can just go to Twitter.
[01:00:56]  And be way bigger.
[01:00:58]  Right.
[01:00:58]  And be way bigger than he was on Fox.
[01:01:01]  They're only set up for, hey, here's a giant paycheck if you work here.
[01:01:05]  And if you don't work here, then you don't exist.
[01:01:07]  Yes, they're set up for a world where Tucker Carlson doesn't exist anymore once they kicked him off Fox.
[01:01:15]  And they go, haha, we got you.
[01:01:17]  And we're still Fox News and you're nobody now.
[01:01:21]  But instead, what happened when they kicked Tucker off is that Fox News is now reduced by 50% and he's bigger than he's ever been.
[01:01:31]  They need to live in a world like with what happened to the Smothers brothers, that they had like a giant, I know this is like a nerdy comedy reference, but it's a good reference.
[01:01:40]  Yeah, but they had like a prime time television show.
[01:01:43]  They made a Vietnam War, from what I remember, they made a Vietnam War joke, they lost the show.
[01:01:48]  And I don't think they went on to have major financial success after that.
[01:01:52]  Yeah.
[01:01:52]  Yeah.
[01:01:53]  I think that's it.
[01:01:54]  Well, back then, it was like, if you get kicked out of the game, that was it.
[01:01:57]  You're out of the game.
[01:01:58]  And that's not the game anymore.
[01:02:01]  That's something we should be, that's something we should really draw some optimism from.
[01:02:07]  And okay, that's actually the perfect thing to end this episode on.
[01:02:11]  So happy 4th of July, everybody.
[01:02:14]  America's still got a fucking shot.
[01:02:16]  We're still a kick-ass country.
[01:02:18]  We have the most evil government, but we have the best goddamn country.
[01:02:23]  How about that?
[01:02:24]  All right.
[01:02:25]  Come on out and see me and Robbie the Fire this weekend in Kansas City.
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[01:03:23]  All right.
[01:03:24]  That's our episode for today.
[01:03:25]  Peace.