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May 3, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:44
222 Media Warriors - Live and Die by the Sword
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Good afternoon! How are you?
It's Steph's three remaining brain cells.
I'm really tired.
It is 5 o'clock on Wednesday, May the 3rd, 2006.
And after a night of no sleep, I have gone through my workday, struggle, struggle, struggle, focus, focus, focus, watch the screensaver and pretend it's an epic miniseries about life in my lower colon.
And so we'll just see how the podcast goes when we don't have a whole lot of friction rubbing along through these brain cells or what there is going on is possibly just a little random.
So let's see. Let's just see what happens with Media Part 2.
Whether this is a broadcastable podcast or not.
Now, I guess...
First things first, the order of the day, the business of the podcasting.
FeedBurner, just go to thefreedomainradio.com, FeedBurner, enter your email, let me know how many people are listening to this.
Couldn't be happier to find out the actual numbers and not just sort of try and backwards calculate it for my bandwidth requirements divided by the average size of the shows, blah, blah, blah.
I appreciate that. I also appreciate donations.
We have a new gift, new gift, new gift, new gift, new gift, which is the audio version of The God of Atheists.
I've been recording it off and on over the past little while, so we have up to Chapter 16.
If you donate $100 to Free Domain Radio, you know, or more, and I'll probably even take it if you're 99, but don't take it any lower than that.
I just won't stand for it.
Then I will send you the super secret link to the location of the God of Atheists buried somewhere out there on the internet.
And you can have all of the tasty downloads of it for yourself that you like.
Of course, I'll have some idea of how many people have it because I'll be sending it out individually.
So don't share it if you'd be so very kind.
So let's have a chat at Media Part 2.
Now, Media Part 2 is going to talk about media...
Somewhat obviously, but also a general human problem or a general human reaction to a corrupt situation or a corrupt environment.
Well, I'll start off with a family story.
You know who we haven't talked about for a while is my mom.
And because it's Mother's Day coming up, let's have a little chat about my mom.
Because I think she can be very instructive in some ways.
I think one of the ways that I became...
I guess a fairly decent and fine upstanding citizen of the anarcho-capitalist community is by looking at everything that my mother did, and my father did too, and my brother, and saying, I think I'm going to do the exact opposite.
Whatever you're doing, invert that, and you have ethics, because my family was just so pointed at corruption that doing the opposite was usually a good first way of deciding what to do, and I think it's paid off fairly well, so...
We can thank them for their negative instruction, at least.
Now, what I want to talk about with my mother is this fairly common human phenomenon, which is, what do you do when you have been corrupt?
And it catches you up with you.
Pardon me. I'm sure that you don't really care about my food intake, but I did have a Jamaican patty.
I was just starving at work.
I think I'm up to three sandwiches out of 3,500 calories a day I eat.
Anyway, so I'm just trying to dig it out from between my teeth.
Just be thankful that this is not a smell-o-rama podcast, or you'd be getting some good old fine Jamaican spices wafting through your earphones at the moment.
But my mother, like most people who are caught up in corrupt situations, who have made their bed in a corrupt environment, it catches up with you.
Unless you're lucky enough to get hit by the apocryphal bus, it's always going to catch up with you.
And what do you do then? And this will actually tie into the media, because my mother is, in fact, Rupert Murdoch.
So this really will tie together in a way that's going to be startlingly, unusually...
Perceptive, if not concise.
Never concise, sometimes perceptive.
And so my mother had this corrupt, horrible way of raising children, sort of tumbling them up, as Dickens talks about in Great Expectations.
And so...
She was a horribly monstrous and corrupt evil mother, and it caught up with her, of course, because I began to examine ethics in my teenage years, and my brother became quite rebellious towards her in his teenage years.
So it all began to catch up with her, and then she lost her job, and my early teenage years was never able to work again, so lots of things were going on, but the upshot of it was that it all began to sort of catch up with her.
Now... I know that it's very hard to apologize and it's very hard to back out of situations that you've dug yourself into, particularly if you've been using the argument for morality all the way through your corrupt situation.
So if, for instance, let's just say that my mother was a reporter, and as a reporter she had been absolutely focused and obsessed with telling everybody she always met, how dedicated she was to raising the people's consciousness, and how...
Basically, her second heartbeat was the lifeblood of democracy, and she lived and breathed to inform the public about this, that, and the other.
She was just one big, glowing, levitating, yogic-flowing, trance-based public service announcement for her entire career, and the fact that she was paid was a sort of embarrassing aside, sadly required by the need for such a transcendentally beautiful human being to actually need to intake and expel food.
So if that's all that she had ever sort of talked about with herself, a glowing beacon of democracy and serving the people and serving the people in the democratic fashion and so on, then when it all sort of went to crap, well, what was she going to do? Was she going to say, well, I'm serving the people, but the people don't seem to want me anymore?
But they want some Joker who's shiny and pretty and writes nice prose but doesn't really have any substance.
That sort of broadcast news, if you get a chance to see that film, is quite good, but it's a broadcast news phenomenon.
But... When her level of depth and insight and awareness and caring and sharing and all that kind of stuff for the general population and her love of democracy and so on, when it is spurned for the sake of shallower, ranty kinds of things, is she going to say, well, I was pretty much in the mainstream.
I won a Pulitzer or two and maybe even a Peabody.
And so if the culture is going into the crapper, I may have had something to do with it in some way that I'm not sure I understand right now, but maybe...
I'll go and ask some minarchist or anarchist or libertarian or some objectivist.
Because maybe I had something to do with the problem of the culture.
And she's not going to do that.
She's not going to do that at all.
Whenever people have been involved in corrupt situations and then those corrupt situations catch up with them, they always do kind of the same things, right?
They, in a slanting kind of manner, in a passive-aggressive kind of manner, they blame the general population.
And this occurs in libertarians as well.
And the other thing that they do inevitably is attack the innocent.
It's so much a certainty that you can bank on it as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow, that people will blame the general population and attack the innocent.
It is as night follows day.
When my mother's corruption as a mother began to catch up with her and lost her job and lost the respect of her children and didn't want to spend any time with her.
We did for, I guess, about, oh gosh, for me it was probably about 15, maybe 12 years.
You know what, let's just cut to the chase and say 20 years now that I'm thinking about it.
15 to 33 or so.
Just 18 years, I guess.
That I would still continue to see her, but it was pretty intermittent.
It was like a lunch every week or two, and that was about it.
When all of this stuff begins to catch up with her, well, what happens?
Does she look and say, well, they are my children, and I was their mother, and there was no other parent around to blame things on?
I guess I can blame the father in absentia, but that's not going to work that well, because he really was, I mean, since I was a kid.
An infant was gone, so no real effect on me in that direct sense.
The effect is through absence, which is tough to deal with, of course.
You always say, well, how can I miss what I didn't have?
But that's not going to be enough for me to lose all respect for my mother.
And so she's really the one front and center in the raising of her children.
She was a corrupt and evil mother.
And so what happens when it begins to catch up with her?
Well, she blames the general population and she attacks the innocent.
Now, In blaming the general population, it's a passive-aggressive way of saying, I'm right and you're wrong, but I'm going to lump you in with the general population because I really don't have a leg to stand on.
So my mother started inventing, I mean, she always had been quite a bit of a hypochondriac, but she started inventing all of these ailments, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and all this kind of nonsense.
And she then would say that people as a whole have trouble understanding how difficult it is to have this kind of illness, oh, this kind of ailment, how sad it is, how awful it is, and how few people understand this kind of issue.
She then would get people on the phone to talk to me and say, well, you have to understand what your mom's going through, like all the crazy evil people like herself.
And so she would say people in general, while sort of looking at me in particular, have, you know, no sympathy for this kind of ailment because of this, that, or the other.
And so there was this general attack on the population as a whole, focused on pretty specific individuals, but there's an attack on the general population.
And the second thing she did was start attacking and suing all her doctors.
Now, I'm sure her doctors weren't the best doctors in the world because they are in the public health care system and were government workers and so on.
And they're in a system which rewards illness and treatment and does not reward health or prevention.
So, I'm sure that her doctors were pretty bad.
Were they as bad as she made them out to be?
I very much doubt it.
Were they crazy? Well, sure.
I mean, she went to lots of doctors and ended up fixating on one guy who was German in background, just like she was, and, you know, was an older guy, just like her father.
So, yeah, he was kind of crazy, too.
And strangely enough, a friend of mine, when I was younger, ended up marrying this doctor's daughter.
It was very odd. But anyway...
So she starts attacking the innocent, right?
I mean, her doctors may not be the best doctors in the world, but it's certainly not their fault that my mom's life went into the crapper.
It's not her doctor's fault that her children don't respect her or love her or care about her at all.
I mean, that's her fault.
I mean, it's absolutely her fault, completely and totally and utterly.
And... So, she's going to attack the innocent.
So, blame the general population to attack the innocent.
Absolutely guaranteed. That's what's going to happen when you get into these kinds of situations with people where their corruption is going to catch up with them.
So, for instance, when George Bush, the sort of no weapons of mass destruction, Then he blames the general population of the world, and all the governments believed the same thing, and all the governments agreed with me that there were weapons of mass destruction, so if they're to blame, if anyone's to blame, and you know, it's not us alone, everyone, whatever, right?
And so that generally occurs.
And then he attacks the innocent, right?
So he attacks the intelligence gathering community.
This is all just so inevitable.
It's like watching a sort of a movie you've seen 15 times or 15,000 times before, rolling its way through your consciousness again.
You can predict everything's coming with a sick feeling of familiarity when this sort of stuff goes down.
So, the way that this works in the media is if you are a reporter, and I was listening to an audio interview of a reporter in this kind of situation, if you're a reporter, then maybe you feel that sort of in the 90s,
and particularly came out of the early 90s recession up until about the crash of 97, that If you are a reporter and you're working for a newspaper, then what happened in the 90s was people began to focus very heavily We're good to go.
And you get rid of your R&D, you get rid of long-term marketing, you get rid of long-term product development, and you just, you know, and then you're like, wow, there's no overhead.
How fantastic. What an amazing profit ratio we're now turning.
What an efficiency we've, right?
But you're totally eating the future.
Oracle almost ate itself in the late 80s, I think, or early 90s with this.
It's called stuffing the pipe, right?
Where you offer large reductions to people who will buy your product if they buy it now rather than the future.
And so you get a huge amount of sales volume that increases, but you're just preventing people from buying in the future, which when they might have bought at a greater cost, right?
So if you offer your software that you normally sell for 10 grand at 5 grand if you buy within the next month, right?
Then all that happens is you'll get a huge uptick in sales, but all that'll happen is that you're just eating the future, right?
Because everyone who buys now is not going to buy over the next quarter, so you take the smoothness out of the growth.
And also, for a lot of software, which requires some manual intervention to get it up and running, you stress out your business to the max.
They have to hire people, the customers are dissatisfied, and then all those people who are hired end up getting laid off again, At huge expense to your company when it turns out that this uptick was temporary because you were stuffing the pipe and robbing the future to spike the numbers in the present.
all these kinds of things.
I'm sure you're fairly aware of it.
So when you do this kind of stuff, you end up with news organizations getting the deep coverage is sort of dismissed or sold.
The future is sort of sold, and the experienced and highly competent journalists have gotten rid of, and their budgets are slashed, and their research and fact-checking departments are slashed.
And you get people like this Jason Blair at the New York Times who goes for quite some time, and not just because of the color of his skin, just making stuff up and having a whale of a time doing that.
And so you get these news departments which get eviscerated and you can't put out as high quality news.
It's all about flash and sizzle and it's all sizzle and no substance and all sizzle and no steak.
And you end up with situations where the government in the United States can put out a couple of hundred advertisements for government programs packaged as sort of real news items and have people pick them up and broadcast them because everything's become sort of short-term.
Everything's become sort of like, well, let's just cut as much long-term overhead as we can and then, by God, we're going to see the stock price rise and everyone's going to make a fortune and this and that and the other.
And so people get mad, you know, journalists sort of as one get mad at capitalists, right?
They sort of generally, they obliquely blame the general population which hitherto they had been serving, right?
Because what you always hear is, you know, well, the news got dumbed down, we got rid of all of our research, our fact-checking, our budgets were cut, the foreign desk was cut, and the international affairs was cut, and all this kind of stuff, and...
Well, the fact of the matter is that people that you were claiming to be serving end up eating the crap that's now served up, like the general population, the media consumers, and they don't sort of say, well, forget it, I'm not going to buy this if you're not around.
So you end up having to sort of blame the general population.
Well, they're just being fed a bunch of pap now, and they don't even know the difference.
They don't even know any better.
Well, weren't these the people that you were bringing the light of democracy and truth and honesty to all those years?
Anyway, so you end up blaming the general population, and then you end up attacking the innocent.
So, for instance, you will end up attacking the guy who took over your media company and cut all of these things in order to drive up the stock price.
Like, human nature just changes over the course of a year or two.
So, news organizations that have been around for 100 years or 50 years or even longer...
That somehow stocks which have also been around, the stock price motivation has always been around since the founding of the stock markets hundreds of years ago in Holland.
There's always been this desire for big stock price and so on.
But there's always been a balance between short-term stock gains and long-term stock gains and stuffing the pipe and this kind of stuff, right?
So, nobody ever sits there and says, well, that's very interesting.
Well, human nature didn't change, right?
I don't think that we just became a sort of completely different species.
So, why would there be this fairly universal phenomenon in the stock market or the stock market-driven management styles in the 90s where people just eviscerate their news departments and start pushing out this PAP and end up Just basically repackaging government handouts as the news.
Well, what happened? Why did everything change?
You can say, well, the next generation, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, well, you were the next generation to the previous generation, and you didn't do it, so that's not really a very good answer, right?
You can say, ah, the world these days, blah, blah, blah, right?
And you can blame the innocents, you can blame Coke commercials and all this kind of crap, right?
But, oh, the schools are underfunded, or whatever it is you're going to come up with.
But you're absolutely going to attack the innocent because when you see a capitalist who finds a pretty fundamental difference or a pretty fundamentally different or opposing way to maximize his profits from sort of one year or two to the next, then you know that the sort of baseline environment of the economy has changed.
And of course the only thing that's able to affect that is the government through regulations, the money supply laws and subsidies and so on.
So, when people who are rational and human beings who want to do the right thing are generally in the situation where, yeah, okay, well, we need that foreign desk.
I know that it's expensive, but, you know, we get a lot of readers who come in for the foreign news, and they really appreciate the perspective, and blah, blah, blah.
And when you have that going on for a couple of hundred years, and then it all changes within the span of a couple of years, or a year, or whatever, then a reporter with any kind of brains, in my opinion, would sort of say, okay, well, what changed in the environment here, would sort of say, okay, well, what changed in the environment
I mean, if the fish have lived in the lake for thousands of years, and then in the space of a day or two, they all die and come floating to the surface, do you simply say, wow, there's somebody out there, down there, killing all the fish, No, you say, well, what has changed in the ecosystem that has caused such a radical reversal of behavior?
Like, they were swimming around, and now they're not so much with the swimming, and a little bit more with the floating.
Then you, as an intelligent person, you would look not at each specific individual and say, well, if that boss hadn't come along and was so obsessed with the stock price and blah, blah, blah, whatever, right?
But you actually looked at the ecosystem that the economy swims in, right?
I mean, the capitalism in the modern sense, right?
It's just a fish that swims in the sea or in the lake, I guess would be a more appropriate metaphor.
And so, if something changes and all the fish start doing X when they used to do Y and new kinds of fish come along and old kinds of fish die out, I mean, you don't just look at individual things.
You look at the, you know, the acidity of the lake and the temperature of the lake and the pollutants in the lake.
I mean, that's so completely obvious that it would be ridiculous to think anything else, right?
So, if an entire section of economic activity suddenly reverses direction, and before it was interested in long-term profit and growth and quality news and so on, and then, boom, one day, wow!
It just changes, completely reverses.
We're going the other way now, completely.
Do you just sit there and say, well, the problem are the bosses, right?
I mean, the bosses are, I mean, I know, I'm a boss.
You just react to the market like everybody else does.
You don't sort of get to come in and be like this guy who just reverses everything with no argument for the market and so on.
And so what would a competent reporter do in that situation, or a moral reporter, or somebody who hadn't sort of been corrupt and lying and hiding all the state power for their whole career, his or her own career?
Well, you'd come in and you'd say, okay, well, what changed?
Well, a couple of things changed, of course, in the 90s.
I mean, as I've mentioned before, more and more money got herded into the stock market, which caused people to be able to make more and more money out of speculation, out of short-term stock gains, and so on.
So that was sort of one effect.
Now, another thing that occurred as well is that inheritance taxes went up quite a bit.
Now, that's fairly important, right?
That is fairly important.
If your inheritance tax goes up, we'll talk about inheritance tax another time, but I'll just sort of mention it briefly here, of course.
When your inheritance tax goes up, let's say your inheritance tax doubles, well, you're not so much into the long term anymore, right?
Because the long term is you're going to lose twice as much as you used to under this new inheritance tax.
So you're not going to be as interested in long-term investments.
You're going to want to, you know, short, short, short, quick, quick, quick, so that you can get the money and you can hide it.
Or you can get it offshore.
You can put it into goods.
You can do something with it.
You can launder it. You can, I don't know what, something.
I'm no money launderer, but...
You definitely don't want to leave it invested in a major business that you're going to leave to your kid, because that's going to get taxed for sure.
You know, if you buy a villa in Turks and Caicos, then I think that there's probably lots of easier ways to get that transferred to the next generation without paying the increased income tax.
And this definitely was occurring, right, during this time period.
And a lot of the families that owned the newspapers, the media outlets, they're long-established families, multi-generational families.
I mean, it's in your blood, right, this kind of stuff, the news.
And so the fact that they're all saying, well, you know, I've really got to sell this puppy because I just can't...
If I hang on to it, it's already lost a whack load of value, right?
Because as soon as you get inheritance tax and you see a family that's had a company and it's hereditary sort of hand-me-downs for the past couple of generations...
Well, the value of that company is immediately going to dip because people are going to say, well, it's not worth as much because the inheritance tax is a problem and so on.
So the first thing you're going to want to do is sell it, right?
Because people who buy it won't be subject to the inheritance tax.
They'll pay it with their own kids, but they won't be subject to it in getting it from you.
And so there's sort of another thing that occurred.
And I mean, there's lots and lots of things that are going on sort of simultaneously.
And of course, the people who want to sell all of their media outlets want to get the best price for them, right?
And as I mentioned in the podcast this morning...
The way that you get the best price for something is to remove all the possible restrictions on the people who are going to buy your good from you, right?
So if there's only two guys in the entire city who are allowed to buy your second-hand bike, then you're not going to get a very good price.
However, if there are 500 people who are going to buy your second-hand bike, then you're going to get a better price.
I mean, that's just sort of natural, right?
We instinctually kind of understand that, right?
Which is why we advertise or get a real estate agent or something when we want to sell our house.
And we want lots of offers, so that whatever, right?
So, when you have a bunch of media outlets that are suddenly up for sale because the inheritance tax has jumped...
Then, what you want to do if you're sort of an old, established, backbone-of-New-England kind of family that owns lots of media outlets and has several politicians in their pockets, Supreme Court judges, and perhaps even the guy who runs the FCC, who knows?
Could be? Could be? And what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to get ownership restrictions lifted as quickly and as widely as possible so that you can sell your media outlet for the greatest possible game.
And this is sort of naturally what you would do, right?
Completely inevitable. And...
So you get lots of lobbying efforts going.
You've got lots of media stuff on the block.
And you want to lift the restrictions that says you can only own five newspapers in different outlets and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Because you want this sort of gorge fest of buying or selling media companies to be open to as wide a group of people as possible.
So you're going to get rid of restrictions on media ownership.
And all of this stuff is completely self-evident.
And it's completely inevitable.
And I claim no particular intelligence for following this pattern.
It's, you know, what would you do, right?
If you can't leave your car to your kid and you're getting old, you're probably going to want to sell it.
I mean, this is not brain surgery, right?
This stuff is all so pitifully easy that, you know, again, as I said this morning, it takes real effort to not see it.
It takes real effort to avoid seeing this stuff.
It's just so freakingly obvious.
And so you're going to want to make sure these ownership restrictions are taken off.
And then, of course, people are going to bid lots of money for your media outlets.
And, of course, to recoup that money, they're going to have to dumb it down because they can't go to an exclusive audience.
They're going to have to put more emotional rhetoric in.
They're going to have to be oversimplifying things or just simplifying things in general.
I mean, it's all perfectly inevitable, perfectly natural.
And so what does a reporter do?
Who, I guess like every other single reporter in the known universe, has been talking about how you need to soak the rich with taxes.
You need to stick it to the rich, screw the rich, and give the money to the poor, and blah blah blah, right?
Well, my friends, we are all on the same boat.
You can dynamite the other side of the dinghy, and we all go down together.
So, naturally, when you've had all of this rabble-rousing socialism from all the left-leaning and some of the right-leaning news outlet people, reporters and so on, well, then, of course, the government actually enacts the agenda, right? And, oh, let's raise the inheritance taxes.
Inheritance taxes are innately unfair.
They're innately wrong because they give people unfair advantages in life, right?
Like being born pretty over the great singing voice doesn't do that either, right?
But you don't hear of attacks on singing voices or pretty people, right?
Anyway, or hair models.
Oh, the bitterness is coming out now.
Oh, the defenses are down because he's had so little sleep.
There's almost nothing left to restrain the fiery furnace of the core personality.
But, um, the, uh, so there are, oh yeah, let's tax the rich and inheritance taxes, blah blah blah, right?
But we're all in the same boat. Whatever you dynamite on your end brings another guy down too.
And vice versa. And so, well, what are you going to do?
Are you really going to start digging into this and say, well, I guess I was a freaking idiot.
I guess I was a freaking moron because I guess I just never thought any of this stuff through.
I never thought, okay, well, if there's inheritance taxes, people are going to want to ditch their media empires.
They're going to sell it to people who can get...
They're going to want to slim them down in preparation for sale, right?
So nobody wants to...
It's called cleansing a company, right?
If the company's got lots of debts or lots of overhead before you sell it, you want to cleanse it, right?
It's the same reason you clean your car before someone comes over to buy it, right?
Otherwise, they'll just deduct the cost of having it cleaned from the money you get.
It's cheaper for you to do it, right?
So I guess the reporters don't really start digging into this and say, okay, well, why would everyone change all at once, want to dump their media outlets, and why are they selling to all these conglomerates?
Well, it's because, you idiots, you started arguing for all these socialist stuff.
I mean, yes, it also comes out of the stuff we were talking about this morning, arguing for public schools and this, that, and the other.
But by focusing on soak the rich taxes, you also end up with this problem of inheritance taxes, which means people want to dump their businesses.
And so you're kind of hosed that way, right?
I mean, that's inevitable.
And just because you didn't think it through doesn't mean that you get to attack the capitalists who are simply following through on the kind of stuff that you advocated and went for and thought was a soap-stomping...
Fist-waving, foot-pumping, toe-tapping kind of populist rhetoric of screw the rich and let's get some inheritance tax going.
And then it ends up destroying your media empire.
Like, so your own media job and it dumbs everything down and it's all stupid and that.
So what do you do? Well, you obliquely attack the general population, and you then directly attack the innocent.
It's not the capitalist fault that the media was very keen on the sort of left-wing agenda of inheritance taxes.
It's not the capitalist fault.
It's not the guy who came in to run your company who had a mandate to sell it from the owners.
It's just so funny.
It's just so funny. I mean, you work for these families, right?
And you're like, ah, let's screw these families.
Let's get the inheritance taxes and other kinds of taxes.
Let's just shaft them. It's for the poor.
It's for the poor, because I'm a populist, and I'm all about the democracy, and I'm all about educating the people, and a functioning democracy needs a free and inquisitive media, blah, blah, blah.
It's like... Yeah, you're absolutely right.
I mean, if there were to be any such thing as a functioning democracy, then that would be the case.
And certainly, a better media is better than a worse media, of course, right?
But what evil fairy, what deranged, lunatic part of your brain thought that you could attack your fellow citizens and give all this power to the state and have them just sit there and take it and not change their behavior?
In ways that are completely predictable in terms of what they're going to do and the outcome it's going to have for yourself.
So, they advocate the use of violence, right?
These are reporters, the media.
They advocate the use of violence at every turn.
You can never, almost never pick up anything that's coming out of the media that doesn't just have raging, ranting, endless demands for the expansion and institutionalization of violence.
It is as the day follows the night, every time you pick up the newspaper or listen to the news or whatever.
So, well, what happens then?
Well, of course, the government is like, freaking great.
I'll take all this violence.
I'm good with that.
I'm down with that. We like the violence.
We like the guns. We've got the guns.
You guys don't. So if you want us to pick up the guns and you're willing to sell the guns to the general population, sell us using the guns, hey, we're the state.
We're absolutely more than happy to oblige.
And then, when the deleterious effects boomerang straight back into the lives of the reporters, right?
Or violence, right? What we sow, we reap, right?
You sow a demon seed, you reap a flower of fire, I think, as the song goes.
And it's absolutely inevitable.
You advocate violence, you are going to end up suffering.
You live by the sword, you die by the sword.
So if you advocate violence against your fellow citizens, rich, poor, or otherwise, you, my friend, will end up giving the state exactly what it wants, and then it will turn that power directly onto you.
So you will then be left in this pathetic position of having to obliquely criticize and attack the general population that formerly you were totally dedicated to serving.
And then you will end up attacking the innocent and thus further creating excuses for the expansion of state power.
And this is the vicious cycle of brutality and evil and the red, bloody, rolling wheel of violence that is constantly cycling around these horrible ideologies of justifications for centralized coercive violence.
Coercive violence. You know what?
I think that's my first redundant phrase since I was, I guess, about 12 minutes younger.
Anyway, so this is sort of what's funny about the media, right?
That they advocate the use of violence when it boomerangs on them and dumbs them down, and they realize, oh, you know, I attacked my brother.
And now, I dynamited my brother's side of the dinghy, and now we're both going down together.
Well, I'm going to attack my brother.
Now, I'm going to say, you bastard.
How could you do this to me?
I mean, this is how funny it is, right?
I don't remember a lot of the media companies putting out a whole bunch of stuff that said, we think that reporters specifically should be taxed an extra 50%.
We think they should be thrown in jail for X, Y, and Z. But, of course, the reporters were going the other way completely, right?
We think that these rich conglomerate guys should be taxed in inheritance or some other kind of tax much higher.
And then they complain when the rich guys who own the media outlets don't really want to play with them anymore.
They just don't want to get out of the market.
You change the entire environment so people can't make any money anymore.
And that's pretty gruesome.
That's pretty bad. And that's something that you will never, ever hear anybody in the media ever admit to.
They just won't see it.
And they work very hard to not see it because, as I've said all along, It's so obvious.
It is just like opening your eyes in a bright room and not seeing any light.
That's how much work it is to avoid seeing this kind of stuff.
Thank you so much for listening as always.
I hope that it was relatively coherent and I will see you on the boards.
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