Michael Malice, author of "Dear Reader," critiques U.S. gun control and political tribalism while detailing his 2012 North Korea trip, where he observed the regime's survival strategy relying on elite corruption and human suffering rather than incompetence. He argues that anarchy offers absolute individual rights, predicts Kim Jong-un's regime collapse due to recent mistakes, and identifies media, government, and universities as villains fueling progressive backlash. Ultimately, Malice suggests self-segregation via social media is essential for American freedom, warning that empathy between nations remains elusive amidst inevitable catastrophic conflict. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, we obviously have to talk about gun control this week.
Over the course of my many Rubin Report interviews, I've sat across from an array of people who are pro-gun rights, anti-gun altogether, or somewhere in between.
While the events surrounding the gun conversation are always horrific, with this week's tragic events in Vegas being perhaps the worst of all of them.
I believe that the conversation around guns, when done right, can offer powerful insight into how people think about society at large.
Gun ownership and the right to bear arms brings up issues about the American Constitution, states' rights, personal responsibility, mental health, radicalization, both religious and otherwise, and much more.
Unfortunately, as is so often the case these days, we're seemingly caught between two groups of people, the people who want to ban guns completely and the people who don't want to have any sort of conversation about sensible gun laws.
While I absolutely support the Second Amendment, I at the same time understand and acknowledge that the United States has what seems to be a unique problem related to mass gun violence.
Lost in the midst of all the awful events of Las Vegas this week are other senseless shootings across the country, like the 5 people killed and 30 others wounded by gunfire in Chicago this past weekend.
The weekend before that, 3 were killed and 36 were wounded in Chicago, and the weekend before that, it was 11 dead and 29 wounded in the very same city.
We've included a link down below which tracks the gun related violence across Chicago occurring every single weekend, and it's disturbing to say the least.
I bring up Chicago not to deflect from the events in Las Vegas, but to show how this murderous violence is happening in one of our biggest cities literally every single day, and happening so often at this point that the mainstream media has all but given up on reporting on it.
The reasons behind how and why people murder others also makes it hard to find one law around guns that works in every situation.
There, no doubt, is a difference between a murder that occurs during a robbery, versus gang violence, versus terrorism, versus suicides, versus a random shooter with no known political or religious motive.
And at the same time, there are times when someone with a gun saves innocent lives during a shootout, or when someone defends their property and their family by having a gun in the home.
So again, while I support the Second Amendment, I also recognize that we undoubtedly have a gun related violence problem on our hands.
Just look at the numbers.
I can also acknowledge that guns in and of themselves aren't the only problem here.
Without question, much of the carnage caused by guns is due to people with mental health issues gaining access to guns.
The truth is that if I or most of the gun owners in America had access to the most deadly weapons on earth, We wouldn't be randomly using those weapons against innocent people.
Not only are mental health issues an aspect to the people who are committing mass shootings, but also there is a problem with any ideology which drives people to commit these heinous acts, be it a religious ideology, a political ideology, or any other system of principles or beliefs which could drive someone to kill.
A weapon in and of itself can't kill anyone, it takes a human being and a corrupt thought process to pull the trigger and kill innocent people.
Also, as I'm recording this, it's still unclear exactly what weapons were used in Vegas, but authorities report to finding about 20 other firearms in the shooter's hotel room, and it's possible that this man was using a military style fully automatic rifle to commit this heinous act.
For all the defense I've offered of the Second Amendment, I cannot see how access to such weapons, which have the ability to mow down civilians at an incredible rate and which are designed for the battlefield, should be in the hands of regular citizens.
As we post this video, the story about the Vegas gunman is largely incomplete.
At the moment, we don't seem to know his motives, so it's hard to say if this was an act of terrorism under the most specific definition of the term, which includes having a political motivation to kill.
Nevada State's definition is a little more broad, not including the need for a political motivation, which in this case would in fact classify this killer as a terrorist.
Regardless of how we want to define this specific act of horrific violence, or how the gun discussion relates to terrorism, or the legitimate right of every citizen to have the ability to defend themselves, we must get better about talking about gun control between the shootings in order to prevent more shootings and not just talk about it when these acts occur.
Passing more laws in the heat of emotion is rarely the right thing to do, even if they are well intentioned, while doing nothing and hoping that these events will simply end is just as misguided as hoping that terrorism will completely stop if we just ignore it.
While we wait to find out more about the Vegas shooter himself, and at the same time mourn the victims of this evil act, we should also continue to talk to people on both sides of the gun debate to try to come to some sensible place of agreement.
I'm gonna do my best to do just that.
And if you guys know of some interesting voices in this debate that you'd like to hear on the Rubin Report,
let us know in the comment section right down below.
We're continuing our partnership with Learn Liberty this week.
And joining me is a columnist, a media personality and the author of "Dear Reader,"
the unauthorized autobiography of Kim Jong-il, Michael Malice, welcome to The Rubin Report.
I said to you right before we started, I was doing a little research, and then people see Kim Jong Un, the current one, then you got Un, you got Il, people think it's a two.
You could see why there'd be some language confusion there, I think.
Well, it's also funny when people think Kim is his first name, because that's the family name, and in Asia, they have the last name first, and some people refer to him as, like, Lil' Kim.
Yeah, you could Google Lil' Kim, and a whole There's a ton I want to talk to you about and I'm looking forward to talking about North Korea because I think it's actually one of the countries and from a part of the world that we haven't spent a lot of time.
We talk more about You know, obviously domestic stuff and some Middle East stuff, but we haven't spent that much time in that part of the world.
But first I just want to find out a little more about you.
You have an interesting biography.
You just told me a couple pieces of trivia about yourself that I think are quite interesting.
So for people who have no idea who Michael Malice is, who are you?
You know, when I started this North Korea work, it was driving me crazy that there's so many people on TV and in other forms of media who are running their mouths about this country, which is extremely complicated, and they have no idea what they're talking about.
And, you know, quoting Atlas Shrugged, I said, I'm going to put a stop to this once and for all.
And I kind of did.
The conversation has started shifting from, you know, we just need to bomb them into oblivion, to this is a nation of, what is it, 25 million slaves, and our hearts should go out to them, because they are absolute victims of this horrible regime.
You know, I was on an NPR affiliate, it's very funny, and she was referred to Kim Jong-il as a campy figure, and I said, well, that's a very unfortunate choice of words, and she was rendered pretty much suicidal, because again, they have concentration camps, you can see them on Google Earth, so whenever you see the press making North Korea out to be a carnival, this is exactly what I'm against.
Yeah, and that's actually one of the things that I really want to dive into in a little bit, because I find it to be one of those things where anything happens, you know, there's a missile test that now seems to be happening every week or whatever else, The amount of people, and again, you can't pay too much attention to what's happening on Twitter, but just the amount of misinformation, confusion, joking about extremely serious things when people have no idea what the consequences are, all that.
There's just a whole series of- Yeah, I was on a radio show this week, and the hosts were just cracking jokes about North Korea, and I wasn't having it, and he's like, oh, you gotta let me have my jokes.
I go, it's like North Korean missiles, you gotta make sure that they land.
So, the book is humorous, because I'm like, if you can make people laugh about this situation, you can get them to understand the darkness, because otherwise it's too intense.
You know, there's this amazing book called Nothing to Envy, and you read it and you want to jump out of a window, because we're so powerless to help these people.
But at the same time, I think it's important to understand both North Korea specifically, and generally how totalitarian governments work, and what that means in practice.
You know, I was born in the Soviet Union, so this is something that hits very close to home for me.
Yeah, so, alright, before we dive fully into that, you mentioned right before we started, and you just referenced Ayn Rand, you mentioned that you have her, did you say it's her first print, first copy of the Fountainhead?
I've got every book she's ever written and I stopped after a while because now with self-publishing people can write books about her and they're not worth reading, but to a point I had every book written by and about her.
I mean, she was a huge influence influence on me, but at the same time,
I don't often like talking about it because for a certain percentage of the population,
higher than 10%, less than 50%, saying you like Ayn Rand takes the mental space
of saying you're a Scientologist.
Most people just check out, they think it's a cult, and there's something to that.
So I mean, I'm very kind of wary of getting into the whole Ayn Rand stuff.
Yeah, it's so interesting to me because I've been doing some work with the Ayn Rand people,
and mostly we're just promoting free speech on college campuses, and I found them to be
some of the most open, decent, protecting the things that I care about,
Sure. - Free speech and all of those things.
And yet I know for sure, and there are people I've had on this show that'll say, oh, Ayn Rand this or that, just completely in a dismissive way, and maybe they've got some branding work to do.
One of the things that drives me crazy, and this is maybe my Soviet upbringing, is do not eat your own.
So the kinds of people who go after Rand or Rothbard or any of these other great titans of liberty who had many, many flaws and who did many messed up things, if your agenda is to take down the people who broke down those doors for you, you are, in my view, garbage as a human being.
And it's really reprehensible for me to see.
I mean, the villain is the state, the villain are the people who want to dominate and control free people's lives, and you should always keep that in mind, as opposed to some kind of social posturing.
You know, I really like the way you phrase that, because we see so much bickering, inner bickering with people these days, and all the personal attacks, and all the labels, and all that stuff.
And it's like, you guys all don't have your eyes on the prize here.
What we should be fighting for is freedom.
What we should be fighting for is to expand liberty, all the things that you just mentioned.
And instead we're just like at each other's throats all day with people that have virtually no control over anybody.
And we should be at the throats of people who are sending those to war for no reason, who are sending people to prison for no reason, who are trying to censor free speech for no reason.
They're the villains.
So if you don't like how someone talks or thinks, you judge people by their actions, not by their thoughts.
Yeah, well, everyone's family is messed up just to different degrees and about different things.
What's it like growing up?
So, okay, you came here too, so you obviously don't remember what it was like to be in the Soviet Union, but with parents that lived through that and then come here as immigrants, what was that experience like?
English is my second language, and the first thing they did was send me to private school, because they knew that public schools would be the death of me, which I'm very, very grateful for.
But there's just so many little idiosyncrasies, like, you know, Russia is a no-trust society.
So you kind of have this paranoia built into your head, which, frankly, when you're dealing in entertainment or media, it's useful to have.
You're prepared for that person to kind of screw you over, but also the fact that most people in life are generally incompetent.
So if you have these backup plans for when someone messes up intentionally or not, it kind of behooves you well in business.
At the same time, it's hard for making personal relationships because you're paranoid and assuming everyone's out to get you.
So you don't think, if we disagree politically on certain things, you kind of want to let each faction just go its own way, as opposed to try to get something together?
Correct, it can't be good, but I don't know that it's gonna play out exactly like it seems, because Trump has been very good at pulling the rug out from people and humiliating him, and he's been a great wrecking ball in terms of bringing disapproval and distaste toward the political process.
So as someone that grew up with parents from the former Soviet Union and went through all this stuff and understands this trust issue, I sense you're basically a Trump guy, right?
No, here's an example of how the Soviet upbringing really helped me.
This thing with that guy from Google, James... James Damore.
James Damore, yeah.
When people were shocked how it played out, I'm like, it was mind-boggling to me that people were naive enough to be surprised there'd be any other consequence.
When you have that mindset, you know the essential Soviet thought is, if someone has power over you, arbitrary power, you should assume that they're going to exploit it.
Completely unfairly and arbitrarily, and always be aware of who has—for example, I have a landlord, and there's a problem with my sink, and my friends are like, why don't you tell him, you know, and say—you know, make a fuss about it.
I go, what he's just going to do is fix the sink, let's say it costs $200, and just raise my rent by $200.
They're like, well, he can't do that.
I'm like, he can.
When people have power over you, they will use that power.
And I think it's very naive for many Americans to think that, you know, politicians are in any way beholden to you or care about you in any way, whereas for them, you're just a resource to exploit.
So on the D'Amour front, so if it played out exactly as you expected, do you think that there's a net good or bad by what happened?
In other words, so I had him on the show, he was on Joe Rogan's show, he got a lot of press, and I think when he gets some of those ideas out there, I think that's actually a net good for society.
But you think the process is just obvious.
What's gonna happen?
This guy went against the narrative, and of course this is what's gonna happen.
The net good—and Trump has done this very well—is getting the veneer of civility to be exposed from the evangelical left and showing that, yeah, they will be nice if they need to, but they have no problem being very nasty if they want to.
And the more that is exposed, the more the sneering, the literal violence, the calls for—I mean, these people would be glad to have gulags if they had their way.
So the more that is exposed in this veneer of respectability that people in suits in Washington have, that is, to me, is the best good that came out of this.
I think that's the first time anyone's said the evangelical left.
We usually go regressive left, I've heard control left, alt left, all that other stuff.
But it's interesting because it does have a, as some of my guests have said, Peter Boghossian, that this sort of postmodernist leftist stuff, that there's a secular religion Well, I always say that progressivism is Christianity without the mythology.
So, they don't believe in a Christ figure, but they definitely have means of redemption, they definitely think systemic racism is conceptually identical to original sin.
You know, I'm writing a book on the New Right, this is all laid out in there, but these are religious people who hate heretics.
And they hate them with the fury of a thousand suns.
And once you realize that, that's their MO.
And I don't mean everyone on the left.
There are plenty of people on the left who are like, we need some welfare, people shouldn't be discriminated against, so on and so forth.
I'm all for that.
I mean people who are like, you can't have your ideas anywhere on earth or even in the future or in outer space in like sci-fi or video games.
The thing is, if you are allowing racism to dictate the terms of discourse,
you've already allowing them to establish the rules And this is something Trump has done very effectively, because for years, for decades, racist was this huge term that used to completely destroy people.
That didn't work with him.
So now they've ratcheted it up to white nationalist, white supremacist, Nazi.
All of Trump's children marry Jewish people.
And yet he's told with a strange face that he's a literal Klansman and literally Hitler.
Oh no, it's the same thing, just sliced differently.
I was on a BBC radio show, this was 10 years ago, and I just repeated something that my father said about the police, which I won't do here, and the host kind of...
He audibly gasped and said, this is a family show.
So the perception of authority when you're coming from that background as opposed to America is very, very different.
And it was kind of shocking to me to see, I just did recently, just did grand jury duty, and to see how easily people fall into like the Milgram experiment, this idea that authority can be bestowed and we should be subservient to someone else for any reason whatsoever, is something that's very alien to my upbringing and my thinking.
I can't talk about it legally, but let's just say that if you have, one of the reasons I'm not a big fan of democracy, if you have one smart person and a group of people who don't have much principles at all, it's very easy for that one person to lead the herd.
Yeah, off the record, maybe later, you'll have to tell me some of that stuff.
But that's an incredible indictment of our criminal justice system.
If you can literally walk into the grand jury and say, guys, I'm an anarchist, I don't believe in any of this, this is all nonsense, and they're going, yeah, get going.
So it's more the idea that the idea of government is itself illegitimate.
Every criticism that Bernie Sanders and all these other people have of corporations are true.
But the biggest corporation is the government, which has government schools, which teaches you that it's a good thing that this corporation can steal, what, 40% of your income, and you should be grateful for it, and it can provide you crappy quality products and make you feel unsafe, and then the only answer is more things that'll make you feel unsafe.
That concept, I don't understand how people don't get, because this idea that what I hear Bernie and the rest of these guys complain about is the government.
They complain about, obviously, private companies and all that, and big corporations, but then there's always this, the government's corrupt, everything's corrupt, we're all corrupt and evil, blah, blah, blah, give us more money, make us bigger.
Well, it's also that this filthy, moth-eaten hippie Bernie Sanders, to watch him defending the CIA, which is like the bête noire of the hippie movement, was mind-boggling, but also shows the tribal mindset that anyone who is on our side is good, and anyone who is against us in the moment is bad.
You remember during the Obama years, we had this whole honeymoon with Putin.
You know, Russians are our friend now.
Cold War is an embarrassment of the past.
Mitt Romney, you're so stupid, and the 1980s called, and now Putin is literally Hitler.
I have not heard one reason in the press why Putin is supposed to be hated, other than his interests are not aligned with ours, which applies to every country on Earth.
That's one of the reasons I like the left better than conservatives and consider conservatism the vilest of all political philosophies, because they think you can sit down with these people and have some kind of meeting of the minds, and then you're going to come out with some kind of agreement in the middle.
Whereas, as you said, every three days the story's changed.
These people are not playing some kind of fair game.
They're engaged in war.
And, you know, if you're on the right, you shouldn't be for unilateral disarmament.
I mean, it's very left-wing, and though I don't agree necessarily with people politically, culturally this whole idea of, you know, having diversity of idea, diversity of expression, and all these other things is just absolutely wonderful.
Now, it's not for everyone, and if you don't like it, that's perfectly fine.
I'm not going to judge you for it like most of my colleagues will.
But at the same time, you have to appreciate, the left has its power for a reason.
It's not just getting ability out of nowhere, it's taking it from something.
I was in the green room and a prominent conservative, who I won't name, looked at them and he's like,
"What are you wearing?"
And it's not like I had like octopus wrapped around my feet.
It's just newsprint print.
And he's seen newsprint, he's seen shoes.
Maybe it's a little weird, but he couldn't wrap his head around it.
So much of conservatism is based on this aversion of, if this is new and I haven't seen it before, I don't like it.
Which is why so much of conservatives like crappy TV, like I Don't Know How I Met Your Mother, because they take innovative ideas, corporations do, digest them, and excrete them in ways that these people can find palatable.
Well, 90% of any artistry in any field is always going to be garbage.
I mean, 90% of podcasts are terrible, 90% of comedians are terrible, 90% of books are terrible.
In fact, when I started becoming an author, I read this amazing book by Dennis Johnson called Jesus' Son.
I didn't realize he was a poet, and it made me distraught.
I'm never going to be able to write this well.
Yeah, I'm like I don't have to write as well as him I could write as well as me and when I tell people how to get into writing I go look at how many crappy books are out there That could be you you could be that mediocre author and when you put in those terms people find it aspirational I'm in the middle of writing my first book.
All right, I do want to go deep on North Korea, but let's just do a little bit more here first because I wasn't intending on going this route, but I'm with you.
Okay, so you start writing and then you start appearing on these TV shows saying what you think, all of this stuff.
It seems like we don't have a lot of people these days who will say what they think with some actual knowledge behind it.
Everyone's saying something.
But to actually have an understanding of what you're talking about.
Do you find that when you're doing a lot of these cable shows?
Because I'll watch some of these things sometimes and I'm like, man, these people don't know what they're talking about.
Gavin McInnes didn't even know that the Patriots were out of Boston, so I had one up on him.
So, I think that's tough.
I think a lot of people's role—and there's nothing wrong with that—is to be a talking point machine and then to represent their side, because the person at home is like a good Republican, wants to see their good Republican view portrayed on screen.
I think that people are smarter—it's not that they're dumb, but it's very hard to be quick and articulate and informed about anything, so it's a very small pool to draw from, I think.
And a lot of people have told me, and I never thought about it until after I did it, that what I do is their worst nightmare because they're not able to kind of answer questions on the spot.
And I guess for people like us, it's just something that either comes natural or something we learned.
Yeah, it's funny because anytime I do one of these things or when I do a public speaking event or something, I always feel that less preparation.
Of course, I want to know what I'm talking about.
I want to know the topic that I'm giving a speech about or something like that.
But beyond that, less preparation and being able to hear someone when they do it.
I love Q&As because it's like, You thought of something and now I will respond naturally and not in a canned way and yet we watch people on TV all day that it's like we could be watching the same thing that they said three years ago on some other channel.
My favorite thing is when I'm on one of these shows and someone who sees me as humorous therefore thinks I'm a silly clown and they come for me and I just eviscerate them and the person at home knows this wasn't planned, this is off the top of the head and that's my favorite kind of moment.
So they were desperate because they don't produce anything of value, so they're desperate for currency.
So this is one of their mechanisms for doing it.
And there's one flight in and out out of China, or you could take the train out of China, which, you know, as a New Yorker, I take the train enough already.
I was fine with that.
Right.
And you're there for a week, and I mean, I hate all these people who go on a trip and then it changed their life forever and their Facebook is whatever, but I mean, the thing that drives me, that gets to me, is knowing that every single person I met there is still there.
Like every kid I wave to, every old lady on the street, they're all still prisoners of the regime.
I mean, I could go, I wrote an article at ForReason.com, ForReason about it, you could look it up, but it's, you know, my whole principle there was to try to break down my guide.
I do a lot of ghostwriting, and when I do that I interview the people, kind of get inside their head, get past the press releases, and I'm like, I'm going to use those techniques in my guide to get her to kind of Let me know what she knows.
And there was this funny moment how they're very quick.
I mean, this is what people don't get.
The North Koreans have a sense of humor.
They're humans in jail.
And they have something there called Cholima, which is a pegasus, which is the symbol of speed.
And I asked my guide, I go, if I could send you anything from the outside world, what do you want me to send you?
And she goes, a Porsche.
And I go, lady, I'm not sending you a Porsche.
I'm not sending you Cholima either.
And she goes, we have the original one here.
What do I need you to send it to me for?
So very, very quick, very, very funny.
And she said she wanted perfume.
And I go, what kind of perfume?
And she was struggling for the words.
And imagine, it's hard for us to describe perfume.
Scent is not something that lends itself to language.
So North Korea has something called Sanban, which is a hierarchy based on your loyalty to the regime.
So to even step foot in Pyongyang, your family has to have a good background, right?
So to be talking to foreigners, you have to be off the charts in terms of your family background.
And one of the people, you know, stayed behind on the tour.
He did solo for a few days, and she told him all she wants to do is travel the world.
And you know, your job is to show tourists around, and you see college kids, you know, and you get to see Like on my tour, America, Canada, Ireland, Belgium, and you know you're never going to be able to go.
Ever.
No matter how much money you have, no matter how much power you have.
In fact, anyone who's a diplomat or something like that who leaves North Korea for any reason, their family has to stay behind as hostages to make sure you don't defect.
What that means, and this is to me the beginning of the end of the North Korean regime, it means you can bribe your way out of trouble.
One of the first things I saw when I landed at the airport, I was looking at the parking lot in the back, and one of the guards stopped some rich lady, and by rich in North Korea she's dressed in 80s clothes, right?
And she's on her cell, and he's basically like, papers please, and she rolled her eyes at him, didn't even look at him, showed him whatever he needed to, and he waved her off.
And as the regime has stopped being able to provide for its citizenry, the corruption has spread throughout the country, which is a great step to bringing down a country which is based on glorifying the government, right?
So now when you're wealthy, you can just pay whoever you want to get whatever you want, and that is a good step towards getting people in North Korea to realize this is all a house of cards.
Well, when Kim Jong-il took over in—so Kim Jong-il was born in World War II and died in 2011.
So in my book, as he tells the story of his life, he's actually telling the whole history of North Korea.
Because like Forrest Gump, he's everywhere where something important happens.
When he took over for his father, the founder of North Korea, great leader Kim Il-sung, his campaign slogan—people think it's a joke, it's not—was, do not expect any change from me.
So, their whole principle is this Mount Paektu bloodline, which goes from father to son to grandson now, is a continuous process that's going to bring forth the revolution through the generations.
So, Kim Jong-un, people make fun of his haircut, his haircut's that of his grandfather from the 40s, because he's harkening back to that era and showing this kind of sense of continuity through the golden era of when North Korea was actually competitive with the South.
Because I think there's such a cult of personality around him.
People say, well, him and Trump, it's like the match made in hell, because they're both erratic, they're both boisterous, and they love headlines, and all of this.
Right, and the point I always make when people are like, oh, he's this crazy person, if you look at Gaddafi, if you look at Saddam Hussein, if you look at Romania, Ceausescu, who's very inspired by North Korea by his own admission, when these leaders go down, they're usually shot, and with good reason.
So even if he wanted to kind of step away from the gun, I mean, that gun's gonna be turned on him immediately.
She didn't get half the lyrics, but that's the level.
Because when you're in Pyongyang, it's like being a New Yorker.
You think of yourself as this international cosmopolitan.
So everyone in Pyongyang has these big heels.
They like to pride themselves on being cultured and civilized.
But increasingly, thanks to cell phones, thanks to people being refugees and memory sticks, people are getting an understanding of the outside world in North Korea, which is also very healthy.
They used to be taught that South Korea, you know, they have to wear gas masks in the pollution and that the women are raped by American soldiers in order to give them AIDS and things like this.
And now you just look across the Tumen River into China, in these towns, and you're like, they have electricity at night, why don't we?
So I sense that your prescription for all this would be that it will crumble under its own weight, not only because of everything that you've just described, but also technology will eventually, it can't, they can't stop it with borders.
Yeah, they can shut the internet, but there's just a zillion other ways now.
There's this great quote from either Steinbeck or Faulkner, I always forget, and he says, how did you go bankrupt?
And the answer was two ways, gradually and then suddenly.
So this is exactly how the Soviet Union came down, because during the 80s you had all these women in Russia watching Dallas and Dynasty and saying, why on this show does the maid have a fur coat and I'm wiping my ass with the literal newspaper?
And it's as simple as that.
You can tell people Kim Jong-un is the greatest thing since sliced bread or sliced kimchi,
whatever you wanna call it.
At the end of the day, you want your kid to have food.
And if this other alternative is, I'm gonna have food for my children,
No, from their... Look, so Kim Jong-il, the leading philosophy of North Korea is the Juche idea, which is invented by Kim Il-sung.
Kim Jong-il changed that to the "sun gun" idea, which means "military first."
And what he meant is the military is the basis of our country, which preserves all the other
freedoms that we have.
And he said, "In order to fight the American eagle and the Chinese dragon and the Russian
bear, I have to turn North Korea into a hedgehog."
And what he meant by this is an animal with missiles in every direction.
And Kim Jong-nam, the eldest son, wanted to demilitarize.
And Kim Jong Il said, no, no, no, it's these missiles that are going to keep us safe.
So look at it from his perspective.
He's a country the size of Pennsylvania.
He has gotten the entire UN against him.
He's making a fool of America on a daily basis and laughing about it in the photos.
And he's saying, look, we're tiny and look how strong I've made us.
And these U.S.
imperialists, as they call us, who tried to kill us during the Korean War and are biding their time to come back and kill us all, I'm the one keeping us safe.
So it's not even a crisis so much as—it's more of a—our reaction is much more of a crisis, because we're all hysterical.
And he's like, ha-ha-ha, what are you going to do about it?
So North Korea has always complained about how is it the United States is the biggest arms deal in the world, and we don't have the right to sell our arms.
So by doing this, they can show every little dictator, look how good our weaponry is, and it's gonna be available for sale, and look what it can do to America.
And it'll, you know, it'll be the best kind of home security system you're ever gonna have.
They are very bright people, and they're very evil people.
So I always talk about this, I compare it to, like your comic book, the Batman villain, the Joker, because people see the clown, but that clown has a lot of bodies behind them, and that clown has pulled off a lot of stunts in his day.
So the idea that he's this silly idiot, it's like, this silly idiot, they've been around for 70 years.
If they're suicidal, they're doing a really bad job of it, and they've outlasted everyone except for Cuba.
And I talk about this very heavily in my book, because when you go there, they brag about their strategy.
So, you know, Kim Jong-il is very boastful of his techniques, and they've been very effective, because when he took over in 1994, they mentioned Krauthammer by name in their literature, like, they all think it's not gonna last another six months, and now it's 2017 and they're still there.
So, despite all the predictions, despite all the claims that these people are stupid and crazy and incompetent, Kim Jong-un's hold on power is pretty strong, and this is not an accident.
This is at the cost of humanity, and at the cost of human life, and the cost of anything that you and I hold decent and moral.
China doesn't want an American ally on their border.
China doesn't want 25 million North Koreans who have never—who don't speak Chinese or who haven't been on a computer swarming the border and setting up camp in Manchuria.
So they're in a tough spot.
But China has turned their back on North Korea a couple of times, when in North Korea they built this gigantic gold statue of Kim Il-sung in the town square.
If you go to my website, you can see a photo of me next to statues.
I called it leadership.
In the 80s, North Korea for a very long time fought having North and South both in the UN because that would make permanent the idea that these are two countries divided.
The North regards Korea as one country.
And China in the 80s turned their back on that, and both countries are allowed in.
So, these were two moments that China has turned their back on North Korea.
But at the same time, if you—North Korea, just recently, Kim Jong-un pointed out, this latest hydrogen bomb was made using homegrown ingredients.
That's their way of saying, you can sanction us, you can make exports illegal, we can still build them, and there's nothing you can do about it.
He just had a storage of, what was it, 1 million gallons or something of oil, pointing out, even if you seal stuff from the outside world, these tests are going to continue.
I think we can continue, even if China turns their back on us.
I think the game's been played the same way for decades, which is we are going to do whatever it takes to maintain our hold on power, and we're gonna revel in the fact that we're going to, in their words, slap America across the face.
Yeah, and then at the same time, in a weird way, they can do whatever they want, because as you just said, China doesn't want them collapsing and then having to deal with either a migrant crisis or an immigrant crisis or...
What other, any other military crisis that's gonna come after that?
All right, so to sort of wrap up the military side of this thing, so when we hear all this back and forth these days and we hear about the hydrogen bomb and everything else, I think we're playing chicken and both cars are going at each other at the speed that they can and it's going to be a question of who blinks first and what it's going to take to blink.
And you certainly couldn't have had Trump without Clinton, so it does kind of make sense.
That being said, as someone that basically likes what's happened to the system because of Trump, Do you think Trump has the capacity, either mental or otherwise, to deal with this game of chicken?
Or is there someone else that you would have preferred?
I don't think anyone has a good answer to this issue, including me.
But I'm very heartened by hearing Rex Tillerson and Mattis and all these other people saying, and Bannon recently said it, you know, he goes, we all know that military conflict with North Korea would be absolutely catastrophic.
You see some conservatives saying, Kim Jong-un insulted us, so therefore we should bomb this country into oblivion.
You're going to take the moral high ground and kill 25 million slaves because someone assaulted you?
No.
Go to hell.
So, there's a very strong understanding in the White House that military conflict would be the worst possible course.
Yeah, which I would never want, but I always think it's interesting how anytime someone says something about the military, I mean, the average person, I think, doesn't understand what deterrence is anymore, or just doesn't understand what some posturing is, or what public statements are.
So they make it seem like anyone who ever says anything about the military, or we might do this, or all options are on the table, or whatever, that they're automatically the warmongers.
And in effect, it's almost completely reverse, actually.
And Trump went on TV and said they're going to face fire and fury like the world has never seen.
And Chuck Schumer, who doesn't know anything about this issue, and I don't blame him, was like, this is this, you know, reckless rhetoric isn't helping.
Because it's one of the things that drives me crazy more than anything else when you see this, because if we were just saying all the time, We're never gonna do anything, you can do whatever you want, and blah, blah, blah, even though I'm not an interventionist by nature and all those things.
But it just doesn't really encompass anything that's even how humans react to each other.
So as soon as we all sit down to discuss it, I've already lost.
You are entitled to your religion, you're entitled to your life, you're entitled to raise your kids as much as you want.
I don't know you, I don't wanna know you, and I don't care what you think about anything, and I'm not interested in persuading you, I'm interested in stopping you from implementing your ideas on my life and my person.
Once you see government is not a mechanism for effecting social change, the system starts to break down and you're gonna see healthier consequences, is my opinion.
There's this blog called Slate Star Codex, and he pointed out that our best mechanism nowadays of self-segregation is not by race, it's not by culture, it's by ideology.
And the more that happens, which is a function of social media,
where you can only talk to people that you agree with if politics are important to you,
I think the better that is, because this freedom association
is essential American freedom.
And it's one that the left, and many times the right, does not regard as essential.
And the more that happens, I think the happier everyone's gonna be.
Well, one of the great things, and this just shows the evil and the brilliance
of the regime, when they were unable to feed the border guards, if you bribe the border guard,
they'll let you go.
Now, what the regime has smart enough to do is they allow the border guard to keep the bribe as long as they turn you in.
But this was a very big mechanism, people crossing—the Tumen River is very shallow between North Korea and China, so people in these border towns would go into China all the time.
They were smugglers whose job it is to kind of get people—because you are officially a South Korean citizen if you're North Korean, so as long as you set foot in a South Korean embassy, you're home free.
And I think Kim Jong-un, even just given his age, is nowhere near as smart as his dad.
I think he's freaking out.
I think Otto Warmbier was a very big mistake on their part.
And I think Trump cares enough about human rights and is reckless enough, in a sense, to be like, alright, I'm going to see the end of this regime before the end of my presidency.
For example, when this Kathy Griffin thing hit, I talked to a lot of my buddies on the right and I'm like, how are you offended by this when you put up all these awful memes and they go, we're not, this is a scalp.
And they got her.
A week later, they got Reza Aslan fired from CNN.
So, rather than having this old conservative model of Buckley, who is the great villain, standing at Thornton Hill, history yelling, stop, it's like, we actually want to stop.
We actually are going to do something about it and force people to kind of have casualties on their side.
And I think Bannon's strategy, which he kind of let slip, is The more we make this a cultural fight, the more they're going to lose because the more they're going to get into hysteria.
Now, here's an example of that.
For decades, you know, as I said earlier, calling someone a racist is an effective mechanism.
Because most people are scared that they're racist in the sense that if you meet someone from another country, you don't want to offend them accidentally.
It's a problem.
No one is scared that they're a closet Nazi.
No one is scared that they're a closet white supremacist.
So if you're telling the layman, you know, you're a Nazi, it's like, my dad fought?
My grandfather fought?
Like, what are you talking about?
Even though the rhetoric has escalated, the effectiveness has decreased.
And in my view, this is a sign of them freaking out that they've lost control of the megaphone.
So for the violence part, I mean, I suspect you don't want just violence to be erupting all over the place, but do you almost see that as a necessary piece of this now?
Or an inevitable piece, I guess, is a better question.
The three villains are the media, the government, and the universities, right?
So the media and the government have been discredited.
The university is still very much a bourgeois aspiration for Americans.
Like, my kid's the first one to go to college.
You know, this is such a big deal.
You need a degree to make something of yourself.
I've never taken a writing course.
I didn't want to waste time educating professors.
Now, I don't care where you are on the political spectrum— That was quick.
Thank you.
I don't know where you are on the political spectrum.
I don't care if you're a human or an animal.
If you see fire, you're against it.
We saw this in Ferguson, and it gave the Republicans their biggest landslide ever, and we're seeing it now.
If you look at a university and you're seeing schools being burnt down, if you're seeing your daughter go to school as a pretty young 17-year-old and coming out looking like a swamp walrus, As a parent, you are going to be against this, and this is a very important next step towards breaking the last piece of progressivism, because the goal of the university is to turn young children into the shock troops of the progressive militia.