The suspect in the Charleston shooting, Dylann Storm Roof, appeared in a number of photographs with the Confederate flag - prompting calls for banning of the flag nationwide as a symbol of racism and hatred. As lawmakers and business respond to the public outcry, Stefan Molyneux looks at the reality of the situation, and breaks down what’s said – and what’s not being said.
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| Okay, so here we have a child who grows up in a broken home, whose biological mother is absent for large chunks of his life. | |
| After giving a child to an abusive, controlling, and violent man who already has one child out of wedlock with a different mother, this kid ends up living with his father, a new stepmother, who gives this violent, abusive, and controlling man another child. | |
| So the man has three children with three different women. | |
| And his father is constantly on the road with his construction business. | |
| He has a little to no male influence in his life, let alone a positive male influence in his life. | |
| He's abandoned by his stepmother of ten years as she claims to be the victim of violent abuse at the hands of his father. | |
| She vamooses with her own children, leaving him rotting in this hellhole. | |
| He gets deeply involved in serious mind-altering drugs, which of course is a significant sign of the need to self-medicate after childhood trauma. | |
| He hibernates in his room, isolated, separated, and dissociated through drugs, through alcohol, through video games, with no any kind of family, school, or community, or religious intervention. | |
| You see, his father goes to church a lot. | |
| But the church doesn't do anything about the child. | |
| He gets unemployed, remains unemployed. | |
| He's financially supported and enabled by his family. | |
| He is sparked by the Trayvon Martin George Zimmerman debacle and gets caught up in a massive media race-baiting narrative, gets arrested on felony drug charges, Gets the future murder weapon less than a month later with money apparently given from dad. | |
| Gets arrested again for trespassing. | |
| Tells multiple friends he's going to go hurt people. | |
| He gives time frames. | |
| He gives location. | |
| He gives up to six months of warning that he's going to go and shoot lots of people. | |
| Nobody says anything. | |
| Everybody just looks the other way. | |
| Walks into a church and murders nine black people in cold blood. | |
| And as the blood is still drying on the victims, everybody jumps in with their own narrative. | |
| Gun control! | |
| Systemic white racism, you name it, that's what we're dealing with! | |
| And now, you see it's all about the Confederate flag. | |
| Oh my god! | |
| The lengths that we will go to as a species to avoid talking about some essential, foundational, fundamental issues like how children are treated in society. | |
| Like the drug war. | |
| Like ridiculously high minimum wages in places that make it virtually impossible for young people to get jobs. | |
| Like barring them from getting into the trades by crazy lengthy apprenticeship programs. | |
| Licenses for selling lemonade on your fucking lawn. | |
| No, no, no. | |
| You see, we've got to get out of that narrative. | |
| We've got to get out of that reality, and we've got to start talking about flags. | |
| Not child abuse, not unstable families, not drug abuse, not the war on drugs, not welfare, not any of these things. | |
| It's about the flag. | |
| Dylann Roof actually told everyone why he shot people. | |
| He didn't mention the Confederate flag. | |
| He's not like a bull. | |
| I saw red. | |
| I had to charge. | |
| If we listen to his history rather than his words, what pulled the trigger, what pulled his trigger, is as clear as blood in the rain. | |
| Confederate flag didn't murder nine people. | |
| Gun did not murder nine people. | |
| Racism didn't murder nine people. | |
| One. | |
| Count them. | |
| One carbon-based life form. | |
| Dylann Roof murdered nine people. | |
| With his family, his school, his church, his community, the media, and the culture all acting as accomplices by ignoring the clear and present warning signs which led to the creation of a monster capable of such acts. | |
| Are we learning anything about stable families, about positive role models, about not having sex with violent men and giving them lots of children? | |
| No, of course not. | |
| It's the flag that did it. | |
| That's what we're going to focus on. | |
| It's all the same ignorance that produced him in the first place. | |
| And of course people say, well, the Confederate flag is a symbol of racism because in the South people owned slaves, though of course in the North people owned slaves as well. | |
| And the government history books tell us that the Civil War was about slavery. | |
| Ah, that question is at least debatable. | |
| I've got a whole presentation called The Truth About Slavery, Past, Present, and Future, which you can link to below. | |
| Civil War had a lot to do with states' rights versus federal power. | |
| With taxes, you had 18.5% of the population in the South paying two-thirds of the cost of the federal government. | |
| Not particularly fair. | |
| You had only 4 or 5% of people in the South owning slaves. | |
| But apparently now, hundreds of years later, white people equals slave advocating racism. | |
| And this issue of states' rights? | |
| Ah, you see, people say it's a dog whistle. | |
| You can't hear it, but the racists can. | |
| States' rights means racism. | |
| No, no. | |
| States' rights means having competition for smaller government among the states as a way of controlling the size of government. | |
| Also, local governments tend to be smaller. | |
| And more responsive to the people than larger, distant, bureaucratic organizations. | |
| That's just a fact of life. | |
| It's a fact of political reality. | |
| And so those who want to continue to expand the power of the government want to do it primarily through the federal government. | |
| Because if your local government taxes you more, you're more upset. | |
| You can do more about it. | |
| If the federal government taxes you more and it's almost impossible to easily move to another country, then you're stuck. | |
| And the fact that this is happening right when the Supreme Court of the United States is handing down some truly Dr. | |
| Seuss-ish baffling judgments is not a coincidence. | |
| Obamacare clearly states that you don't get a subsidy unless you sign up through a state exchange. | |
| And lots of states did not produce exchanges. | |
| I mean, they spent a lot of money trying, but, you know, HTML is hard. | |
| So the Supreme Court said, well, yeah, that's what the law says, but we don't like it, so forget it, right? | |
| I mean, this is the clear intent of the law. | |
| As it was passed, as it was debated, as it is passed into law, was just rejected by the Supreme Court. | |
| And the idea that you have to... | |
| Show your ID to vote. | |
| Ah! | |
| Shocking! | |
| Appalling! | |
| You've got to show your ID to rent a car. | |
| You've got to show your ID to get a hotel room. | |
| You've got to show your ID to cross the border. | |
| You've got to show your ID if you want to get a drink and you're youthful looking. | |
| But the idea that you actually have to show your ID to vote. | |
| Ah! | |
| Shocking! | |
| Incomprehensible! | |
| Astounding! | |
| Oh, man. | |
| Okay, but let's say, let's say that we accept this narrative that the Confederate flag is a symbol of racism. | |
| Okay, I mean, I don't agree. | |
| It's a flag. | |
| But let's say that it is. | |
| Well, so what? | |
| The flag didn't murder nine people in a church. | |
| The flag didn't give the child to an abusive and violent father. | |
| The flag did not abandon its child in an abusive environment. | |
| The flag didn't financially enable Dylann Roof to buy drugs and guns. | |
| The flag didn't shirk its common sense duty to report repeated threats of mass murder. | |
| The flag didn't spend the last few years fanning the flames of racial division in the streets. | |
| The flag did nothing! | |
| It is a piece of cloth, people! | |
| It's easier, of course, to blame a symbol than to hold individuals accountable for their actions and their complicities in the kinds of environments that produce these kinds of monsters. | |
| People have got blood on their hand. | |
| The media has blood on their hand with all this race-baiting crap that's been going on every time there's an election coming up or every time they need to gin up minority votes. | |
| They just produce all of this racial race-baiting narrative. | |
| Yeah, you've got blood on your hands. | |
| People like myself, who've been trying to remind people of the facts and evidence and innocence until proven guilty, get constantly screamed at and shouted down. | |
| Well, those of you who've been pursuing all this race-baiting narrative, you've got blood on your hands. | |
| You can try and wipe it on a flag, but just because the flag's red doesn't mean the blood is off your hands. | |
| You are all like Lady Macbeth at 3 o'clock in the morning. | |
| It's not the flag. | |
| Okay, let's accept that it is the flag. | |
| Why not? | |
| If an argument is bad, you can accept everything except the conclusion and it still falls apart. | |
| Okay, let's accept flags which cause death should be banned. | |
| Well, I am actually in quite an agreement with that. | |
| I think that all flags that cause death should be banned and all structures which initiate the use of force should be rejected by moral and decent human beings. | |
| Fantastic! | |
| Fantastic. | |
| Okay, so there are nine deaths attributable, let's say, to the Confederate flag. | |
| But let's say that it's true. | |
| Nine deaths attributable to the Confederate flag. | |
| Well, there's a Stars and Stripes flag which children pledge allegiance to like fascist drones every single morning while they're forced into the indoctrination camps and public schools and their parents are forced to pay for these schools and these crappy teachers whether they like them or not. | |
| Where the children, particularly the boys, are forced into rows where teachers squeak and groan and moan at the blackboard while the children's souls slowly collapse like a pyramid of ash inside their dying hearts. | |
| Oh, if you're restless, if you're bored as a young human-based life form, if you're bored and tap your toes and tap your pencil and don't pay attention, see, it's not the teacher's fault. | |
| It's not the institution's fault. | |
| It's not the system's fault. | |
| It's your fault. | |
| You're sick. | |
| We gotta drug you. | |
| Like the way they used to stuff horse tranquilizers up the ass of dissidents in the Soviet Union. | |
| You are drugged with brain-frying SSRIs. | |
| Ooh, you have attention deficit disorder. | |
| See, it's not bad teaching. | |
| It's not stupid, useless information that you're forced to imbibe. | |
| It's nothing to do with that. | |
| It's not a bad imbi- You are the problem. | |
| You can't pay attention to really boring, inconsequential shit, so you must be drugged. | |
| Like, I produce a really boring movie. | |
| Here's two hours of my toenails growing in slow motion. | |
| And then anybody who gets bored and restless, I say, you have attention deficit disorder for my great toenail film. | |
| I'm going to drug the shit out of you. | |
| Because you have to be fixed. | |
| It's nothing to do with my quality of presentation. | |
| It's you. | |
| You're the problem. | |
| Madness. | |
| Oh, and remember, you see, you can't have intelligence tests for jobs. | |
| See, that's not legal, because apparently they're discriminatory. | |
| So, which they're supposed to be. | |
| See, less intelligent people don't do as well on intelligence tests. | |
| See how that... | |
| Anyway. | |
| So, you've got to have a driver's test to go out into the road, but you can't have an intelligence test. | |
| So, because you can't have an intelligence test, which poor people can study for and do Really easily and well on. | |
| You have to have a four-year college degree to get into a lot of occupations, because you can't have an intelligence test, even though a four-year college degree is simply an intelligence test that costs about $150,000. | |
| Can't have an intelligence test. | |
| Gotta go to college. | |
| Welcome to a life of college debt, enslavement. | |
| Feel like rocking the system? | |
| No! | |
| Because even bankruptcy will not discharge this debt. | |
| All of that is done under the stars and stripes, under the flag. | |
| Oh, I got an idea. | |
| Want to think about how many military bases the United States has overseas? | |
| 750 or so. | |
| It's quite a lot, really, for a country with friendly neighbors to the north and south and giant oceans to the east and west. | |
| Not a bad place for freedom and peace to grow. | |
| No! | |
| We must meddle, we must interfere, we must arm, we must control, we must sell military, and we must subsidize dictatorships all over the world because safety is paramount. | |
| Great! | |
| How's that working out? | |
| Twenty to thirty million people killed by U.S. imperialism since the Second World War alone. | |
| Twenty to thirty million people. | |
| That's between a half and three quarters of World War II. You've got launching drone strikes, killing innocent men, women and children to get a bad guy who was probably previously on the CIA payroll anyway. | |
| How many families are going to get destroyed by the war on drugs? | |
| How many people are kidnapped and caged on drug charges? | |
| Stuffed into the prison industrial complex of rape rooms known as jail? | |
| How many people get openly stolen through acid forfeiture laws? | |
| How many children born into unpayable debts? | |
| Because of government's rampant desire to buy the population with imaginary money stolen from the kidneys of the children of the future. | |
| Five-year-old makes a pair of jeans in China, everybody loses their minds. | |
| We enslave an entire generation of unborn children through unbelievable levels of debt and unfunded liabilities. | |
| Everyone's just like, hey man, that's democracy. | |
| How many people are just taxed and taxed in the United States? | |
| 100% of your labor removed by force, see that's slavery. | |
| But 50%, that's freedom! | |
| Just look around at the world. | |
| There's not a piece of cloth that is causing the problems in the world today, people. | |
| It is not a piece of cloth. | |
| It is not a symbol. | |
| It is not a voting booth. | |
| It is not a card. | |
| It is not a flag. | |
| It's you who are causing the problems, most likely. | |
| Probably a little less if you're listening to this channel, but for the most part it's you, or if it's not you, it's the people right behind you, or the people around you. | |
| Your freedoms are dying. | |
| Your freedoms are dying. | |
| There is no end to this road. | |
| Except war and fascism. | |
| There's no end. | |
| This has been history's repeated pattern over and over again. | |
| No end to it. | |
| It will not end until you stop it. | |
| How do you stop it? | |
| With words. | |
| Nobody has to take up arms. | |
| Because violence is merely supported by the lies that hide violence. | |
| You expose the lies, you expose the violence, and people recoil from violence. | |
| Violence is a predator. | |
| That people flee from, which is why it camouflages itself as idealism, as helping the poor, as helping the uneducated, as nation-building, creating stability around the world, fighting the business cycle. | |
| Good job, Fed! | |
| Glad that's in the rear view. | |
| This increase in state power is only going to increase until you stop it by exposing the state for the agency of force that it is. | |
| Are you fighting? | |
| Because the state, this oligarchical hierarchy drenched in blood, this Aztec pyramid with the hearts of children cut open at the top, this debt monster that swallows entire generations and continents, the state is not in Washington, it's not in Arlington, it's not in Langley, it's not in West Point, and it certainly is not in a flag. | |
| If you're not fighting for freedom, the state, the tyranny, the fascism of the future, it's not out there. |