It's the world premiere of ADAM VS THE MAN! We expose the gun in the room with Stefan Molyneux, host of http://www.freedomainradio.com; and mourn free speech with former CIA analyst, Ray McGovern. Adam also called out mainstream media pundits and dedicates his new show. If you want a revolution Adam has some good news for you: The revolution and the LOVE-olution will be televised on ADAM VS THE MAN.
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| Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the world premiere of Adam vs. | |
| The Man. Tonight, we'll expose the gun in the room with Stephon Molyneux, mourn free speech with the CIA daily intel briefer to President Reagan, Ray McGovern, and find hope with Charlie Veach, British Love Police. | |
| You say you want a revolution? | |
| I've got some good news for you. | |
| The revolution will be televised, and the love-olution will be televised, and you're watching Adam vs. | |
| the man. | |
| The passion of our hearts will be raised with our fists! | |
| George Washington neatly summed up the nature of government when he said, "Government is It is not eloquence. | |
| It is force. | |
| Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. | |
| Unfortunately, most commonly used definitions of government are useless and amount to little more than the people in charge. | |
| A precise definition would look more like this. | |
| Government. A fictional entity used to describe the group of people who have been granted, by consent of the population, a monopoly on the use of force in a specific geographic area. | |
| The founders of this country, and I don't say founding fathers to honor the essential role that women played, understood this and set out to form a government based on the ideals laid out by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. | |
| By virtue of our humanity, we are by our nature free and independent. | |
| Any use or threat of force against you, be it by a mugger or a tax collector, is a violation of your freedom. | |
| Joining us now from Ontario, Canada, is philosopher Stefan Molyneux, host of freedomainradio.com, the most popular philosophical conversation in the world. | |
| Stefan, thank you so much for joining us. | |
| Well, thank you, Adam, and congratulations on the show. | |
| It was very exciting. Thank you, thank you. | |
| We're very honored to have you on for our first episode tonight. | |
| Well, let's cut to the chase. Tell us, what is the gun in the room? | |
| What do you mean when you say that government is backed up by violence? | |
| Well, Adam, there's an old Chinese proverb which says that the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names. | |
| And we so often forget this when it comes to government, when it comes to the state. | |
| Governments are different from every other social agency that we have, in that governments have a legal right, in fact an obligation in many situations, to initiate the use of force. | |
| Not respond to the use of force. | |
| Self-defense is a universal right in most legal systems, but to initiate. | |
| The use of force. And that is very different from what you and I have as legal rights. | |
| So I can't go next door and threaten my neighbor with force in order to get him to pay for my child's education. | |
| But the government can through property rights and the educational system. | |
| I can't find some guy in my neighborhood who's smoking some herb that I find objectionable, lock him up in some basement, and then call myself an armed warrior for justice through the war on drugs. | |
| I can't print money based on nothing and use it as legitimate currency. | |
| The government can. And I can't create debt that other people have to pay without any choice in the matter. | |
| That's called fraud, but for the government it's called deficit financing and it goes to future generations. | |
| So government, by definition, is that social entity which legalizes whatever is criminal for everyone else in the population. | |
| And this creates two opposing moral systems, government and private. | |
| And they tear societies apart unless and until we find ways to reconcile these opposing moral systems. | |
| And we do that By consistently and continuously pointing out that whenever people talk about the government, there is a gun in the room. | |
| Law is an opinion with a gun. | |
| And once we keep pointing out that there's a gun in the room, and the gun is getting bigger and bigger as government gets bigger and bigger, we can begin to look for peaceful and voluntary solutions to our complex social problems. | |
| Now, you've said that all governments share this nature, that all governments are essentially competing protection rackets. | |
| Is there nothing special about America, then, in the human quest towards freedom? | |
| That's a good question. I would say that all philosophy is about definitions. | |
| It's irritating that way, but liberating in a way, too. | |
| So if you define America as a piece of land with a past and a future, then it's not special. | |
| It's just like everything else. | |
| But if you define America as the ideals under which the American system was founded, then I think you have something very special in the concept of American exceptionalism. | |
| The ideal that America was founded on, of course, was freedom from arbitrary force, freedom from the initiation of force, freedom from tyranny, freedom from theocracy, freedom from aristocracy. | |
| And that's why they founded not a democracy, which is all you ever hear about these days, but they founded a republic. | |
| In other words, to bind the government down, as Harry Brown used to say, in the chains of the Constitution. | |
| And unfortunately, it didn't stay that way. | |
| It took maybe 80 years for the government to break out of those bounds and begin its huge growth into the monster that we see today. | |
| But I think that America is extremely important in terms of its instructive history. | |
| So I don't think it's accidental, Adam, that America started with one of the smallest governments in history and now has ended up with one of the largest governments in history with an empire the likes of which the world has rarely seen before. | |
| Small governments promote economic growth. | |
| The night watchman state that protects persons and property promotes economic growth. | |
| That economic growth causes a massive increase in wealth. | |
| The government begins to swallow that more and more. | |
| The leviathan begins to swallow things up more and more, creating more and more control over the economy, strangling economic growth, which is unfortunately the situation that most of the West is in today. | |
| Well, Stephan, I know in Canada, you certainly have good reason to be afraid of what's going on here in America, because you've got it going on there, too. | |
| But there are those of us here in the United States who are working to bring America back to those ideals. | |
| Thank you so much for joining us tonight. | |
| Thank you, Adam. | |
| That was philosopher and host of freedomainradio.com, Stefan Molyneux. | |
| Thomas Jefferson said, "The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers." Today, we get news from people who want you to believe that celebrity news is real news, that you have nothing important to worry about and can just go back to sleep. | |
| The mouthpieces of U.S. government propaganda. | |
| Some even serve as controlled opposition. | |
| That is, they give voice to legitimate dissent only to divert it into harmless blather. | |
| Bill O'Reilly, bootlicker in chief. | |
| Let me start by diagnosing you with authoritarian personality disorder and prescribing some intensive therapy. | |
| As the most watched commentator on TV, if there's something wrong with America, maybe it's you. | |
| You epitomize establishment shill, manipulating the fears and angers of your audience. | |
| The tides go in, the tides go out, and just like an idea whose time has passed, so will you soon enough. | |
| Sean Hannity, your definition of freedom is so sick and twisted that Thomas Jefferson would be offended. | |
| I'd call you a boot liquor, but you've got that thing so far down your throat you can't get out a straight thought to save your life. | |
| You praise the military like it's sacred, and your Christ would be ashamed of the violence you promote. | |
| For a man who never put on a uniform, you've got quite the military fetish. | |
| Glenn Beck, I'm disappointed to see you go because you have brought a lot of good knowledge to the attention of the American people about freedom and the Constitution. | |
| However, to real libertarians, there's something very offensive about you. | |
| The fact that you call yourself a libertarian. | |
| Remember your truther attack on Deborah Medina in the Texas governor's race? | |
| Deborah Medina was the real libertarian in the race against Rick the Hare Perry and Kay Bailout Hutchison, and Glenn Beck sabotaged her campaign. | |
| For the record, Glenn, I'm not a truther, and neither is Deborah, but I'm a skeptic, and if you believe the government conspiracy theory on 9-11 without questioning it, you're not just unpatriotic, you're a sucker. | |
| Glenn, you're an embarrassment to real libertarians. | |
| We don't need our own, and we can live up to the American dream without your neo-McCarthyist Muslim fear-mongering. | |
| Comedy and demagoguery. | |
| Both love one-liners. | |
| Jon Stewart. Or should I say, Jonathan Stewart Leibowitz! | |
| Maybe you just didn't want people to know that your brother is the COO of the New York Stock Exchange! | |
| Just kidding. I'm not gonna play the replacement for your Glenn Beck punching bag. | |
| I think you're hilarious, but it's easy to be funny when you can just be cynical and laugh off important issues, as if you're too hip and cool to offer any real solutions. | |
| Your kind of cynicism, that is, if it's not just from your writers, is part of the problem in this country. | |
| Anderson Cooper, wish I could have been in Egypt with you. | |
| You really are amazing to get down in the crowd like that and get pummeled without getting a scratch on your face or a hair out of place. | |
| Chris Matthews, former Media Matters for America, misinformer of the year. | |
| Has that Obama tingle up your leg reached your brain yet? | |
| Ed Schultz, the worst kind of hypocrite. | |
| Please tell me the Obama administration put you on the payroll as the biggest cheerleader for the war in Libya? | |
| For my fellow libertarians on TV, John Stossel, Judge Andrew Napolitano, question. | |
| John, are you aware that your mustache makes you look like an 80s porn star? | |
| Judge, is Fox still gonna let you invite me on your show after this? | |
| Keep up the good work, gentlemen. | |
| Now that you're watching RT, you're at least enjoying a different perspective on the world. | |
| But if you want, you can always go back to... | |
| Actress Lindsay Lohan back in court. | |
| Tyler has told Rachel that these women meant nothing to happen. | |
| People are suggesting she's a hooker. | |
| No, she says, she's a porn star. | |
| So if that's what our corporate media wants us to be distracted by, we can still count on the First Amendment to protect our freedom of speech, right? | |
| Well, it's more like you're free to talk about what we tell you to talk about. | |
| Our next guest is Ray McGovern, who delivered the CIA daily intelligence briefing to President Reagan and had become one of the leading voices of dissent in America, speaking out against our unconstitutional foreign policy and the erosion of our civil liberties. | |
| Ray, thank you so much for joining us. | |
| You're welcome. Now, you were at an event where Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was, of all things, talking about free speech in the Middle East. | |
| We have a clip from that. Let's play that clip. | |
| TV satellite signals were jammed and internet access was blocked for nearly the entire country. | |
| So this is America? This is America? | |
| Who are you? So, Ray? | |
| Tell us what you were doing there. | |
| What were you trying to accomplish? | |
| What happened? Well, I was there to hear the speech, actually, at George Washington University, but I got really turned off with the standing ovation and the offensive kind of I took off my shirt and I had Veterans for Peace on my shirt, turned my back and decided I would not have her get away thinking that everybody supported her policies. | |
| Your answer to the standing ovation? | |
| Yeah, and so I stood but I didn't sit down and I had my back to her. | |
| I was about 12 yards in front of her and the clip comes on when I'm being taken out and she's just after saying, and the government in Egypt pulled the plug. | |
| While you were getting the plug pulled on yourself? | |
| The cell phone service was cut off, internet blocked. | |
| The government didn't want the people to communicate with each other or with the press and didn't want the world to watch. | |
| Then I get thrown out. | |
| Is free speech dead in America? | |
| Well, it's limping, okay? | |
| But if she thinks that this kind of brutality is going to stop free speech, she's got another thing coming. | |
| I understand that she watches RT every now and then. | |
| She does, and she believes that we are the ones who are winning the information war. | |
| Yeah, she said something about not getting any real news from the other media broadcasts. | |
| Of course, none of the media, what they call the mainstream media, carried any of my brutality against me. | |
| But if Hillary is watching now, I have some words for her. | |
| Here's some real news for you, Madam Secretary. | |
| We're not going to stop. | |
| We know what was necessary to defend the freedoms in the First Amendment. | |
| You know, and I know, and other veterans know. | |
| She doesn't know. Her boss doesn't know. | |
| Her husband doesn't know. | |
| They don't know from nothing. | |
| They don't know what war is like. | |
| And so we're going to continue to speak out. | |
| We're not going to let this infringement on our First Amendment rights continue. | |
| And unless the American people at large, and I don't think they are, unless they're as dismissive Of constitutional protections as the fellow that she works for and others in that coterie. | |
| And when we'll prevail, it will just take a little struggle and a lot of standing up and maybe a little brutality against this. | |
| That doesn't mind. We'll see you in the trenches, Ray. | |
| Thank you so much for joining us tonight. | |
| That was Ray McGovern, the former CIA analyst who was responsible for President Reagan's daily intelligence briefing. | |
| When we come back, we'll see how the root causes of the revolutions in the Middle East are affecting Americans and consider what the new American Revolution, love-olution, might look like. | |
| You're watching Adam vs. | |
| the man stay tuned let's not forget that we had a part-time regime right here | |
| i think the rock of the bomb it was beautiful Whenever government says they're going to keep you safe, get ready because you're going to lose your freedoms. | |
| We'll be right back. | |
| We'll be right back. | |
| A government designed to serve the few at the expense of the many will resist change. | |
| But what happens when the established order becomes obsolete and the government stands in the way of progress? | |
| The answer is revolution. | |
| And while we might not be as close to one as some countries in the Middle East, we just as badly need to shed the old order. | |
| Those who wield the guns of government, that is, police, military, all government security forces, have a unique responsibility in times like these. | |
| Knowing that government is force, you have a duty To ensure that force is only used for moral purposes. | |
| When the government begins to behave erratically in times of crisis, you have a choice. | |
| In the face of uncertainty, you can cowardly seek the comfort of the ranks and look to authority to tell you where to point the guns. | |
| Or you can turn to the one reliable source for guidance that you have when instant obedience is being called for. | |
| Your own conscience. | |
| In Egypt, security forces attempted to put down the protests with violence, and many suffered despite the military's presence. | |
| The army, which had previously sided with the protesters, now has become the tool of oppression as they force protesters from Tahrir Square. | |
| In Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, and God knows how many other countries, brave young men and women willing to fight and die to protect our fellow Americans are fighting a new kind of war. | |
| No other generation in American history Has been able to go to an on-base internet cafe between firefights. | |
| How can you go back to the violence after that? | |
| How can you come home from war, get on Facebook, and not weep for the loss of shared humanity that is war? | |
| My fellow veterans, We have a special role now. | |
| Our opinions of particular policy may vary, but we share a willingness to put our lives on the line for what we believe in. | |
| Let's make ours the last generation of war veterans the world will ever know. | |
| As the last participants in mass organized violence, let us show the world that war is obsolete. | |
| In the age of the Internet, poor men will have the wisdom to not fight and kill and die in rich men's wars. | |
| I'm 29 years old. | |
| The oldest of Generation Y. The Millennials. | |
| The first digital natives. | |
| For those my age, we grew up alongside the Internet. | |
| But the kids today, some kids today even have smartphones in high school classrooms. | |
| I might get the Internet, but people that seem young to me are different. | |
| It's as if you have the Internet hardwired in your brains. | |
| And all of the implications of the Internet, all of our potential with it, all of the promises rest with you. | |
| You can lie to us, but you can't get away with it for very long. | |
| We have the truth button right there, just one click away. | |
| And we've been asking our parents' generation why for our whole lives. | |
| And it seems that the more we ask why, especially when it comes to government, the less satisfying the answers become. | |
| Mom, Dad, thank you for providing me with a loving home and so much encouragement through the years. | |
| Like so many of your generation, you did not stay together to see me grow up, but as you said you wanted to achieve, you have given your children everything we could possibly need to exceed you. | |
| You probably won't enjoy the benefits of the Social Security system you've paid into, but we'll do our best to be there for you as you were there for us. | |
| And I love you both. | |
| To my younger siblings, Andrew, Alex, Alden, and Audrey, despite our parents' best efforts, you have been raised in an educational paradigm designed to crush the human spirit in exchange for obedience and conformity, but most importantly, subservience. When you turn 18 in America today, what they call your share of the debt is over $45,000. | |
| Remember, Even under the limited notion of what we are taught is slavery, the masters fed the slaves enough to keep them productive. | |
| Humanity will come to a crossroads like we have never seen. | |
| And Audrey, Alden, Alex, Andrew, you had better start paying attention to things that matter. | |
| This show is dedicated to you. | |
| Our parents' generation left us with the greatest technological capabilities in the world, but also left us the greatest challenge the world has ever known. | |
| It is up to our generation to figure out how to achieve the things our parents told us we need government for without the violence, without the force and coercion and exploitation. | |
| And we will. | |
| And thanks to the highest ever rates of youth unemployment, our parents have given us plenty of time to figure this out. | |
| But this is far bigger than the American system of government, which, by the way, if you are my age or younger, You'll probably outlive. | |
| Humanity itself is at a crossroads, and like no generation before us, we have an opportunity to shape its destiny. | |
| We have seen the impact of the Internet on what, when we step way back, seemed to be relatively superficial issues. | |
| Our parents called it a revolution when the Internet fundamentally changed the way we do logistics, shopping, communicating. | |
| But we have yet to see the full impact of the Internet on society, and when our generation is in charge, we will have started to realize the true revolution of the Internet, the paradigm shift, the love-olution, I'm not gonna tell you that you have a responsibility or a duty. | |
| You have a choice. | |
| If you choose to be a participant in the world around you and not just a spectator, I hope I can be of help. | |
| This show is about empowerment. | |
| The man is just a way of saying everyone who thinks they can force you to live your life a certain way. | |
| No human being has the right to take another's freedom, and to do so is to rob humanity of its potential. | |
| We are all better off in a world based on cooperation, not coercion. | |
| Respect, not violence. | |
| Love, not fear. | |
| Although it may not look like any we have seen before, what we are experiencing in America today is nothing short of a revolution. | |
| A revolution of ideas. | |
| A paradigm shift. | |
| The old order is crumbling before our eyes. | |
| There's an old Chinese proverb that goes, may you be blessed to live in interesting times. | |
| I'd like to update that, begging permission from the Chinese, which is appropriate since they practically own us now. | |
| May you be blessed to be living in neo-revolutionary America. | |
| Just as today, we look back fondly on those nameless primitives who made fire and invented the wheel. | |
| Someday, perhaps from another planet, people will look back on our generation as the one that wielded the Internet and defeated governments. | |
| Joining me now in studio is Jake Diliberto with Veterans for Rethinking Afghanistan, another young veteran who is actively participating in the American political dialogue today, representing our generation of veterans, speaking out on their behalf, and questioning the current paradigm of our foreign policy. | |
| Jake, thanks so much for being with us on the first episode. | |
| Really appreciate it. I'm very glad to be here. | |
| I'm very proud of you to have your own show. | |
| Congratulations. Well, tell us a bit about Veterans for Rethinking Afghanistan, what you've got going on, and how you see our generation getting involved in politics, specifically our generation of veterans, like none before us. | |
| We've seen veterans come home. | |
| We saw John Kerry turn into some kind of hyper-liberal after coming back and doing great work, telling the truth about what was going on in Vietnam. | |
| We've seen Smedley Butler, Major General. | |
| You were in the Marines. What's your take on that? | |
| Well, what Veterans for Rethinking Afghanistan was and is is a bipartisan coalition of veterans. | |
| I myself come from the religious right. | |
| I'm very much a social conservative, always have been. | |
| I went to seminary. | |
| I was a pastor. But I work with People on the right and on the left, and our job was to inform the American public about the nuances and problems with Barack Obama coming into office and taking on a nation-building exercise in Afghanistan. | |
| So we've used new media, we've used films, we've used a whole lot of people in Hollywood to communicate our message. | |
| We're reaching troops in the field with this. | |
| That's right. Our film was actually given to Carl Eikenberry in his hands. | |
| We get hundreds of emails from Marines and soldiers in place abroad, and they tell us this is so true. | |
| We see this stuff every day that nation-building in Afghanistan doesn't allow us to kill terrorists, which we need to do. | |
| perspective, then, that is available to us through the internet affecting our generation of veterans when they're looking at these issues, when they're looking at the big picture. | |
| So many of us who grew up with this wealth of human knowledge at our fingertips, we're generation Y, but we're the ones asking why. | |
| And when you say, why is there war? | |
| Why are we in Afghanistan? | |
| And even if you go all the way down the rabbit hole and you listen to every excuse from the establishment, There aren't any good answers. | |
| No, there's not. And Adam, you know something? | |
| You highlighted this earlier. | |
| When we go off into battle, we go and get in firefights or see IEDs, etc., and then we come back to the base, the camp, etc., and then we get on Facebook. | |
| I mean, no other soldiers have ever done that in war. | |
| Or we're tweeting about it, or we're seeing other tweets about it. | |
| And smartphones with pictures of everything. | |
| I mean, I have some videos that I took when I was in Iraq, and I can only wish I had taken more. | |
| Now the war is becoming viral. | |
| It's becoming at the fingertips of everybody. | |
| And I think that in terms of the way that we understood war before has fundamentally changed. | |
| And those of us that went from the battlefield to going on Facebook, we have a different perspective about war. | |
| So you can today truly be opposed to nation building, like as I am, and be a conservative for our own conservative reasons. | |
| And be influenced completely different. | |
| I have many problems with the center-left coalition, and I just interact with them and say, I don't get you, but I'm informed by a whole number of things. | |
| And so, a lot of times, our generation's interacting much different than our parents do. | |
| Right, and it's kind of ironic that under the Bush administration, anybody who spoke out about foreign policy Was a crazy liberal, you know, with their hair on fire, running around naked, when there was a big chunk of us. | |
| And I think it was, to me, it was extremely offensive to hear critics of the anti-war movement lump us in with Some of the more radical members. | |
| Not that I have any problem with standing with people that disagree with me on philosophy or bigger picture issues. | |
| I think, especially when it comes to war and issues where there's an immediate loss of life at stake, If you feel passionately about something, you should be working with anybody who's willing to make progress on that issue. | |
| Am I right? Yeah, well, I mean, I certainly agree with you to a degree. | |
| I mean, the left anti-war movement, I mean, bothers me so much because they try to hijack those of us who are conservatives but who are opposed to the war for our own reasons. | |
| They try to hijack us and lump us into this leftist agenda. | |
| And, I mean, I'm not for Obamacare. | |
| I'm not for the Democrats. | |
| I think the Democrats are parasites that try to eat American freedom. | |
| But I'm certainly, if they oppose the war, I'll certainly stand with them and say, hey, we're both opposed the war. | |
| We have our different reasons. And I'm not a part of the left. | |
| Outstanding. Well, Jake, thank you so much for joining us on the first episode. | |
| Really hope to be hearing more from you. | |
| Adam, glad to be with you. I'm proud of you. | |
| Sorry we couldn't get you our scheduled guest Charlie Veach from the British Love Police this evening. | |
| We'll get him on in a future episode. | |
| There's a lot of inspiring work going on there, and he's working right now to disrupt the royal wedding coming up just next week. | |
| Thank you so much for tuning in to our first episode. | |
| There are many more to come, and I would love nothing more than to involve you in the process of making this show something of value to the freedom movement. | |
| So please check out our website, adamvsttheman.com, to vote on guests and topics, and find me on Facebook and Twitter. | |
| You can catch the broadcast live as it airs at rt.com slash USA and on YouTube. |