Sept. 19, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
28:28
2220 Mainstream Media, War and Propaganda - Stefan Molyneux in the Liberty Hot Seat
Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, is interviewed by Scott Horton at http://www.libertychat.com Topics include: Western Governments and the Arab Spring: 2:02 Mainstream Media and Propaganda: 5:49 Reformation and the Middle East: 11:30 The Effects of the Embargo on Iraq: 17:35 Mitt Romney's Supposed Gaffe About Americans Not Paying Taxes: 24:50
All right, and now it looks like we're joined on the phone, on the line, on the chat machine, something or other, somehow, by Stefan Molyneux.
Welcome to the show, Stefan.
How are you doing?
Good.
I really like the way that you describe your technical setup.
I can tell that you are really just the pretty Miss America in front of the camera while all of the busy beaver nerds are making it all work behind the scenes.
Talk into the chat box to my head thing.
Are you talking to me?
I'm sorry, I missed about half of what you said there.
Oh, go ahead.
Oh, I'm sorry, I just missed that first statement.
You're a little low on your volume there, Stefan.
Oh, let me see if I can up it a little.
No, I'm too scared to up it.
I don't know this interface either, but can you hear me now?
Yeah, you sound quite a bit better.
Well, and I just turned you up in the room, too.
So, yeah, in the chat room, they say they can hear you now.
Good.
All right.
Okay.
So, what's our topic, my friend?
Welcome.
I was just commenting how, given the way that you talk about the technical setup, you are clearly the Miss America puff piece up front talking head, just designed to look pretty while all of the technical beavers work under the desk.
Yes, exactly.
You would not believe the number of interns running around here making everything work for me.
It's incredible.
So you're saying you have interns under the desk.
I believe you could be a president.
Yeah, there you go.
Well, basically, I focus mostly on doing my hair, and I let everybody else take care of everything else.
And that guy had a $300 haircut.
This is back when $300 meant something.
Which has been not too long, actually.
It's amazing how quickly you can debase a dollar.
But anyway, so Freedom Domain Radio.
Tell us real quick, for people who aren't familiar, all about Freedom Domain Radio.
What's that?
It's one syllable less.
It's Free Domain Radio.
It's, I guess, been around for six or seven years.
It's the biggest philosophy show in the world.
We just did a quarter million downloads last week.
I mean, we're tracking over 45 million downloads or something now.
Yeah, I do this philosophy thing.
I used to be a software entrepreneur.
I used to be an actor.
I trained in theater and dance and all that kind of funky stuff.
And now I yammer incessantly at a microphone and beg for change from passive bias.
It's Socrates with some technology.
That's really what I'm aiming for.
Okay, now in the chatroom they're saying our levels still aren't right, so I'm trying to turn me down a little bit, but I'll ask you to try to turn you up a little bit more still, and hopefully we can get a good balance here.
All right, I will try to move the mic a little bit closer.
All right, so I am now very close to French kissing my microphone.
Thank you.
Thank you.
We've never felt closer.
One day I'm gonna figure out How to turn off the bleeps and bloops, but keep your volume.
But I guess today won't be today.
Someday soon.
Let me ask you, first of all, about what you think of the latest round of protest.
I saw somewhere they said, well, it's the Arab Spring turns to summer.
It started out kind of inward looking revolutions and rebellions and protest movements against dictatorships in the region.
It seems to be taking a much more anti-American focus now.
What's your read on the situation?
Well, American foreign policy by fairly conservative and independent reports has been responsible for the deaths of about 30 million people overseas since the Second World War alone, and a large proportion of those have been Arabs.
I don't think that the average Muslim or the average Arab in the Middle East is anti-American.
That's like saying that Jews in a concentration camp are anti-German.
No, they're kind of anti-being in concentration camps.
The Muslims in the Middle East are kind of anti-getting bunker busters shoved down their chimneys every third day.
They are anti-having their children vaporized in front of their eyes.
They are anti-US weapons being sold to the dictatorships.
Which rule them.
They are anti-wars of imperialism, wars for resources, propping up of dictatorships, overthrowing democratically elected governments.
They are like the, I mean, without some of the nobility, but they're like the French resistance fighters.
Were they anti-German when they were resisting Germany after May of 1940 through August of 1945?
No.
They were anti-getting the crap blown up out of them, anti-torture, anti-murder.
And, of course, the view from inside the Empire is always radically different from the view outside of the Empire.
Inside the Empire, it's like we live in this biodome, and they have all of these wonderful images and screensavers being projected up on the biodome.
Like that Jim Carrey movie, you know, like all we see are these entertainments and this loveliness and this patriotism and, I mean, you don't see what is going on outside the biodome of propaganda.
You don't see.
I mean, this war has been going on for over, I guess, over a decade in Vietnam.
Sorry, in Vietnam, but I repeat myself.
In Afghanistan and, what, eight or nine years in Afghanistan.
Iraq, and have you seen one body, one body of anyone, one piece of blood, one piece of shrapnel, one human shadow against a wall from a rocket blast?
Have you seen one casualty in the press?
There's no censorship.
They could print whatever they want.
They will not get thrown in jail.
They will not get fined for showing the body of one person who has died of the million Iraqis or so who have died and the millions more who've been displaced.
Have you seen one body?
No.
I mean, we're living in this complete fantasy bubble world where the guns that are regularly pounding the outside world, we don't even feel the recoil.
We don't even hear the trucks driving up the ammunition refills.
We don't see any of it.
And then we just wonder why people out there just seem to be all so kind of negative for us.
I mean, it's diluted beyond words.
Yeah, you know, it's funny when you say that.
It reminded me of a time, I guess, maybe four or five years ago where it could have been Reuters, but I think it was the AP, printed one picture, not on TV, of course, but in a newspaper, printed one picture of a dying Marine, bleeding.
And it was a far away picture too.
It's not like a good close up of his face and he's screaming for his mother or something real like that.
It was a, you know, he could have been a cardboard cutout as far as how well in focus he was and how far away the photograph was taken and the rest of it.
And it caused a huge outrage that just how dare they even consider Yeah, the people in the media are contemptible, war-sucking scumbags who are betraying the very fundamental humanity that they claim to represent.
By not broadcasting, by not showing, by not telling, they are Goebbels-ready propaganda hamsters.
They are court toadies, they are unbelievable.
I mean, the mainstream media is just such a bunch of over-perfumed, bouffant, over-made-up human zombie Barbies and Kens that in the future, it will be absolutely astounding when they look back through the tunnel of time and see the joking and the laughter and the hanging out on couches and the absolute amount of...
The hysterical and giddy perfume that they're pouring over the stench of these rotting bodies around the world, it's absolutely appalling and it's absolutely unbreakable.
It is an absolute iron wall of protection around the bloodthirsty tyrants at top.
Well, it certainly protects Americans from the images, but now, over there in the Middle East, it seems like, well, in most of the cases, well, it's not in the Middle East, in the so-called Muslim world, it's 25 countries or something where these protests are going on now.
I wonder what you think that means for the future of the American empire over there.
Is this...
It sort of seemed like, and I don't know whether you agree with this, but it seemed like at the beginning of the Arab Spring in 2011 that, well, it's going to take a while and it's going to hurt like hell, but there's no going back now.
Eventually, these people will have some semblance of self-government, some semblance of independence from the empire.
I wonder whether you think that this is a big step on that path or not, or anything along those lines?
I mean, look, the average Muslim on the street rioted because the price of wheat doubled.
And 40% of people in Egypt are living on $2 a day or less.
So when the price of wheat doubles, you run out of food.
And when you run out of food, you start becoming desperate.
The Arab Spring had nothing to do whatsoever with any kind of philosophical revolution.
It had nothing to do with any grasp of first principles, of philosophy, of the Declaration of Independence, of Western values, nothing to do with any of that.
It was starving people who were rioting, and then it was harnessed by, you know, intellectuals with a grudge, and it was funded, of course, from outside.
So this had nothing to do with any kind of movement.
I mean, the Arab world as a whole, and the Western world has a lot to do with this.
I mean, the Arab world is stuck in medieval pre-Reformation religious hysteria.
I mean, this is just a fact.
They have not had their Reformation.
They have not had their internal squabbles about doctrine that lead towards things like I mean, they're way back.
And they're way back not because there's something wrong with the Arab mind or the Arab world.
They're way back because they are rich in resources and we happen to develop gunpowder ahead of them.
So, that's the basic reality.
And so, the Arab Spring had nothing to do with any democratic movement, nothing to do with...
I mean, obviously, they want to be free.
All human hearts that aren't completely corrupted yearn for freedom.
But the idea that the Arab Spring was going to lead to some wonderful flowering...
I mean, the wonderful flowering of the human spirit takes the dedicated and extremely dangerous work...
Of literally thousands of sung and unsung intellectuals, usually over hundreds of years.
I mean, think of how long it took.
Plato was against slavery, and oh, a mere 2,500 years later, we managed to scrub it off the human face.
There were people who were against, who were for rights for women in the ancient world.
Oh, it took 2,000 years for that.
Even when the Krakers began to, the abolitionistic movement to end slavery, it still took 150 to 200 years, and huge amounts of bloodshed and so on.
Human prejudices, human bigotry, human ignorance, human superstition is so deeply pounded into children.
They grow up with their brains formed in this very way.
To change that requires a massive, unending amount of human sweat, strain, and tragically often blood.
And none of this happened in the Arab Spring.
They rioted over food.
Everyone called it some sort of awakening to solve the guilty conscience of the West.
We threw a couple of guns at them and some funding and then we went right back to doing what we're doing in general Which is giving huge amounts of military aid to the dictatorships which rule over them and suppressing and quashing Any move towards any kind of regime change that might threaten our access to their resources So it's the same old story of empire, but I mean the American empire is toast anyway I mean, it's uh I don't think it'll be more than 10 or 15 years before the bases.
I mean, they're just gonna collapse like powder I mean, it's the same thing happened To England after the Second World War.
Same thing happened to Rome at the end of the Roman Empire.
You know, it's a house of cards.
It's built on debt and enslavement and counterfeiting and lies and brutality and violence and the greedy slurping of shallow entertainment by the traumatized hordes behind the biodome.
So, I mean, it's all going to crumble and fade.
I mean, what's going on now is just this massive grabfest Before the whole, you know, crap system comes down.
I mean, this is what QE3 is all about.
I mean, nobody's expecting another housing boom is going to solve the problem, and the Fed buying up $40 billion worth of housing securities and promising to keep interest rates at zero, thus punishing savers and anyone who's got any kind of interest-bearing equities.
I mean, this is just an admission that the whole crap house is coming down, and everyone's just grabbing as many bags of silver as they can to sprint out.
All right, now, as far as, you know, Reformation in the Middle East and all that, you might think I'm utopian and silly, but, you know, being the libertarian that I am, I want to sell everyone on libertarianism, and I felt this way before the war on terror and all of this,
you know, this century's, you know, cranking up of this horrible foreign policy, and in the name of, you know, Wolfowitz's You know, freedom agenda doctrine and what have you and all that.
And it seems to me like, you know, right now, especially technology-wise and all that, in the 21st century, that the kind of backwards and ossified parts of the Muslim world would never be able to withstand the onslaught of free domain radio, you know, on a regular basis.
Well, except for the fact that the American government is going around claiming your ideas, obviously very watered down, but claiming to believe in the individual liberty that you're describing while they kill everybody.
And it seems to me like especially when in the Middle East This last decade and this time right now, you have super majorities of the populations of most of these states are under the age of 30.
And you know how young people are idealistic and interested and open, and there's plenty of evidence to show, like at the Minaret of Freedom, that Islam and Libertarianism and Individualism are perfectly compatible philosophies and ways of looking at the world.
And so it seems to me like We could have been making a whole lot of progress in spreading the Enlightenment to that part of the world, except that our government has made it that much more difficult by polluting and poisoning our message with their depleted uranium.
In the scattershot of thoughts, and I'm certainly not complaining since I'm doing the same, I mean, there was a number that I agreed with and a couple that I disagreed with.
The one where you say that Islam is perfectly compatible with libertarian philosophy, perhaps you can explain that one to me a little bit more.
I must have tripped up on that one a little bit because I may not see it the same way.
Well, I sure don't know, you know, everything there is to know about Islam, but it is You know, like Christianity, it's based on a personal acceptance of it, right?
Not whether your town is saved, but whether you are or not, your own personal relationship on an individual basis with the monotheistic God as opposed to some of the other ways of looking at things.
So, you know, I would recommend you to Dean Ahmed at the Minaret of Freedom.
He's got a lot to say about it, and he's a real good libertarian, you know.
Well, I mean, you know.
Sorry, go ahead.
Okay, so even if we, let's say for example that they're just opposites, that they're just not compatible.
Well, that you really have to have a more, you know, reason-based, secularist outlook to really even believe in liberty.
Still, we could be doing a lot better to, in that sense, water down fundamentalist Islam in favor of a more reasonable Islam that actually could be compatible with Enlightenment ideas.
Same sort of argument.
Well, when you say we, do you sort of mean the states, the powers that be, the political masters?
Well no, I guess I just mean, you know, especially the libertarian populations of the West.
You know, we're the ones who understand all this stuff right in the first place.
If we're gonna, you know, export the philosophy, we better start with, you know, some kind of libertarian.
Sorry, did you have more to say?
Did you cut out?
No, no, I guess I just meant, I just wanted to make sure you understood.
No, I didn't mean I want the state spreading liberty.
I'm saying when the state kills people and calls it spreading liberty, that makes it that much more difficult for people who do want to spread liberty.
Because after all, what does it cost to spread Molyneux podcasts all over the Middle East?
Nothing.
I mean, you could put the entire ethics of liberty and John Locke's second treaties on civil government and whatever you want on an iPod and send it over there for 45 cents.
You know?
Well, yes, but of course the barrier in a lot of these countries is that, you know, apostasy is punishable by imprisonment or death, right?
So, deconverting from Islam is a capital offense.
Bloggers who've simply questioned religion have been on the run for their lives, I think, and the film stars have had to flee and go live in Paris, not exactly the worst punishment in the world, but Human beings are very powerfully ruled by force.
It takes only a few examples and we are very powerfully ruled by force.
Our biological imperative is to survive and reproduce, not to be heroic shadow stains on the wall of freedom from the Gestapo boots of historical inevitability.
So, in the Middle East, I don't consider it to be a very sort of freedom-friendly environment because there are so many laws that are compelling At least outward professions of piety that, I mean, I certainly do have some listeners in the Middle East, but it's, you know, it's a hard thing.
I mean, I'm, you know, it's like, I only hope that I get caught with porn and not philosophy, you know, because that explains porn in a way.
A lot of this has to do with America supporting their tortured dictators for all these years, for generations now, and the Brits before us.
Of course, the CIA funneled Saddam Hussein and his buddies, all the lists that they needed of, you know, anybody nearsighted.
Round them up and kill them, and we'll make sure that nobody could ever explain to any neighborhood full of Iraqis why they ought to not have to live like this, you know?
Yeah, and of course, it's not like they never had intellectualism there.
It's just the CIA killed them all.
Yeah, and then there was this embargo, which, I mean, caused Saddam Hussein to become even wealthier.
And, I mean, I was reading just unbelievably terrible stories about the results of this in the 90s.
The US and UK led sanctions against I mean, it stripped medicine, it stripped healthcare, it stripped food, it stripped anything you could imagine.
I mean, one boy's father in Iraq had to hold his son down while his son's leg was amputated without anesthetic because they simply could not.
I mean, can you imagine?
You can't imagine.
I can't imagine the amount of horror.
You know, millions of Iraqi children dying for lack of access to basic healthcare and You know, our media, because we're so removed and we live in this bubble, our media can hide this from us because it's so far away.
But you can't hide the war from its victims.
I mean, they just have to look out the window.
They just have to march past the plots of graves in their backyard.
They just have to look at the exes on their family tree.
They just have to look at the hat hung on a wall from a guy whose head rolled off his head from a sniper and never came home.
So they can't, even if they want to, they can't avoid the effects of the war and the blockade and the propping up of these dictatorships.
They live in fear.
They live in abject rage.
And they live in frustration.
And they live in, you know, they know as well, they know very clearly that we're not, for the most part, aware or seeing anything that is going on there.
They see us highly concerned with how many red and yellow balloons are there available to float up in the candidate.
They get translations of the candidate's speeches if they can't speak English, and they know that the wars aren't even being mentioned.
In the presidential race, there's not a whiff or a word of the longest-running wars in American history.
You can't talk about it, you can't see anything about it, but they can't avoid it.
And then we just, we act completely bewildered as to why there might be all these problems.
Yeah, well, hey, at least we have that going for us, that they watch American TV on the satellite and say, oh, well, no wonder the Americans do this to us all the time.
They have no idea what their government is really doing over here.
You know?
Well, but they know about the internet too, which means that we have no excuse for not knowing what is going on over there.
We have no excuse.
I mean, I could understand when, you know, when I was a kid, there were like two news stations that you could get, and the rest of the dial was just static.
And so it was, you know, you couldn't get foreign newspapers, you couldn't get foreign perspectives, you didn't have the internet.
So you could understand how people were able to break out of the bubble even in Vietnam.
Even in Vietnam, towards the end, you began to actually see the casualties.
It took seven or eight years for the anti-war movement to really, you know, have an effect, and it took really the broadcast of the information coming back.
But even in the bubble of the 1960s, you could get that information across.
I mean, if I were in the Muslim world, I would look at the Americans and say, You people have zero excuse.
It's one click away.
Iraqi bodies, images, done.
It's one click away.
That's all you need to do.
And I would just be very aware of every second of every single person's day that passed that they were not doing that.
And I would not be able to hold them innocent.
Yeah, well, I agree with you.
I... Well, I'm an aberration because it's all I want to talk about all day long.
It's all I want to interview anybody about all day long is the very worst thing in the whole world.
America's Pentagon's behavior.
I mean, what the hell else is there that's important to talk about?
I just don't get it.
And I'm almost alone.
I appreciate you showing up.
You make me not feel so bad.
Oh, it is.
It's completely mad.
I mean, it's completely mad that these atrocities are going on all over the world.
And people, you know, it's like that line in the old song, Don't Dream It's Over, where they say the newspaper tells of war and of waste, but you turn right over to the TV page.
I mean, this is back in the day when newspapers used to talk about war and waste.
And the newspapers wonder why they're losing so much money.
It's because they have, I mean, there's no credibility.
You know, I've got a radical business plan for the mainstream media.
How about a radical business plan called Tell the Truth?
The important truth, the truth that matters to people, the truth that has an effect on people.
Don't just cover up all the crimes.
Don't spend your entire janitorial days sweeping the bones under the rug for the crunch of the politicians' heels as they walk to a podium to describe yet another new glorious plan for making the world a better place.
How about you just stop draping flags all over the coffins and then blowing the coffins and flags into deep places where nobody can see them.
Just lift the lid a little bit on what is going on outside the matrix and we'd all be a lot better off.
But of course...
Looking for that kind of courage in the mainstream media is like looking for a mohawk on my bald scalp.
It's just kind of a waste of time.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I don't know what it is about me.
I'm just desperate for a silver lining tonight.
And I'm thinking that, you know, one thing is you couldn't be more right about the way you portray the mainstream media and just how far off their narrative is from the real world.
And the silver lining there is that when people realize that, It's shocking.
It hits them like a ton of bricks all at once.
Holy crap, have I been living in a fantasy world if I thought that, you know, well, I don't know who does the news anymore, but my example's always, if I thought that Brokaw would correct Rather, I was wrong.
They don't check each other.
At all.
They don't protect us from each other at all.
You know, oh my goodness, there must be some important point of view here.
I'm not being exposed to.
It mattered to me.
I'll give you an example.
When I first heard a Branch Davidian on an AM talk radio show, and it occurred to me that like, oh my God, there are Branch Davidians who are alive and have things to say.
Now there's something that TV never, ever, ever, ever gave me.
Even the realization that like, They would be there saying things if only there was the invitation.
Never even occurred to me.
And yet, here they are.
Some of them still live, and some of them don't quite agree with what TV had to say about their situation.
You know, I mean, that could be a real important thing to kind of shake the hell out of somebody and get them to realize.
The silver lining is we may be denied the absolute reality of the evils that are being committed in our name and with our enforced money.
But the important thing to remember, Scott, is, and I think we can all take some relief in this, we do have endless exposure to slideshows of the sartorial style evolution of Michelle Obama's personal wardrobe choices and the price of each dress.
We do have comparisons between the amount of money spent on Ann Romney's dress and the amount of money spent on Michelle Obama's dress, because that is the really, really important That is the stuff that is going to have real impact.
Or, you know, as has happened to Mitt Romney when he was giving a I've had a private speech to 30-odd high-level donators recently.
Somebody videotaped it.
He actually said, well, 47% of the people don't pay federal income taxes and they're kind of dependent on the Democrats to keep shoveling money through social programs at them so they're not going to be available to us as a voting base.
And, of course, the left-wing media goes completely insane and characterizes this, and they don't actually provide any facts.
Like, nobody actually says, well, is this true or is this false?
Do the Democrats have a history of appealing to people who are more dependent on government?
Well, of course they do.
I mean, of course they do.
Why do you think 99.9% to round up a little of money from public sector unions goes to Democrats and not to Republicans?
I mean, this isn't even guesswork.
This isn't even...
I mean, you'd have to have your head so far up your ass you're seeing out your own throat to miss this.
So he's saying something that is kind of true.
Republicans appeal more to the entrepreneurial types than to more of the private sector types, the military-industrial complex accepted, and the Democrats appeal more to the people who suck on the state teats.
You say this, though, and everyone goes insane.
Where he forgot to mention all the billionaires that are on welfare, too.
Of course, of course.
They can't talk about the wealthy who are on welfare, because that's not their gig, right?
And I understand that, but that's not what the media is saying.
What the media is saying is, this is shocking, this is appalling, this is really bad for his campaign.
I can't believe he said that.
Spit, floam, spit.
And it's like, but is it true or not?
Nobody cares whether...
Facts don't matter.
We are in a post-fact society.
Sorry?
All right, well, listen, we're over time here.
It's been great talking with you.
We should do it again soon.
Everybody, Stefan Molyneux, Free Domain Radio.
And is it youtube.com slash freedomainradio?
It sure is.
Okay, good deal.
Well, thank you very much for your time.
I really appreciate talking to you again.
Thanks, man.
Just for your listeners, too, if you have a chance to come out, check out Libertopia.org.
I'll be doing three days of speeches and emceeing and maybe even singing with a band over in San Diego.
So I hope people will check out Libertopia.org, and I'll be speaking in November the 3rd in Toronto at Liberty Fest North.