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June 13, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
57:55
3318 The Orlando Attack: The War on The West | Mike Cernovich and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi, everybody.
This is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
I am chatting with somebody you need to follow on Twitter at Cernovich, C-E-R-N-O-V-I-C-H. You can also check out his website at dangerandplay.com.
His name is Mike Cernovich.
He is a former Army Reserve officer.
He's a lawyer, free speech activist, a filmmaker, and we want to mention a little bit about that as well, and author of a book which is truly mind-blowing and energizing.
The best-selling book, Guerrilla Mindset, How to Control Your Thoughts and Emotions to Live Life on Your Terms.
We'll put all the links to those below.
Mike, thanks so much for taking the time today.
Thank you for having me on.
Now, annoyingly, or perhaps revealingly, or perhaps positively, events have elbowed aside the original topic of our chat, which was about your book and how to change your mindset to energize your life.
But, of course, there was this terrible shooting in Orlando.
Florida, where a Muslim extremist waded his way into a gay nightclub on Latin night.
And shot up a ridiculous number of people and a tragic number of fatalities and woundings have emerged from that.
And I got to tell you, I mean, I'm no expert in this area, and you certainly know more about it than I do, which we'll get to in a sec.
I couldn't visualize this attack.
I mean, Florida in June is like ungodly hot, like surface of mercury hot.
How does someone wade into a nightclub, especially when there's an off-duty cop outside engaging him, How does someone wade into a nightclub with that much ammunition, do that much damage over that extended a period of time?
And it never quite gels for me sort of instinctually.
And then, of course, looking at your website and reading your tweets, you've began to unpack some of this narrative and ask, of course, the essential questions, which...
It seems only people on the internet know enough or care enough to ask.
So I wonder if you could help step us through how this attack might have gone down, what might have happened, and what the really important questions to ask are.
Great.
Well, to start off with, you raised a point that the media never does, which is you actually thought.
You exercised independent thought and judgment and said, well, how could this could have happened?
What most people who read the media don't understand is These so-called journalists don't think.
The police will say, okay, there was one shooter.
There were 100 bodies.
This is what happened.
And then the media reports on that as if that is objective reality.
They don't actually think, well, wait a minute.
What was the weather like?
How much ammo would you need to kill all these people?
How much would that ammo weigh?
Where would you put that ammo on your body?
How long would it take to reload?
What weapons were used?
They don't know to even ask these questions because they aren't Independent thinker.
So what I did was I looked at Pulse nightclub on Yelp, and that gives you a sense of the venue, and then that gives you pictures of what the place looks like.
And I started to think, boy, it doesn't seem like you're going to get that many people in there to kill and wound over 100 people.
Yeah, and it is one of these questions that really needs to be asked.
I mean, the sort of evil genius might be something like have a couple of accomplices dressed up And in the nightclub to help you out.
But it seems to me that I don't really follow the pattern of what happened.
So this guy exchanges gunfire outside the club, gets into the club somehow.
I guess a number of people escaped because I think there were 330 people in the club I think there are 49 dead, and of course the one is the shooter, and about 50 injured, so that's 100.
I guess there were 30 hostages, that's another 30.
So I guess a couple of hundred people got out.
Is it possible, of course, and it seems more than possible, that some of the fatalities may have occurred because of a result of stampeding and clawing and all the stuff that would happen in that kind of situation?
Right, which is why we need the media asking real questions, ballistic reports.
It's also possible that the people were killed by the SWAT teams who had the shootout with the shooter.
Right.
And because we know that the shooter, we know that he shot into the ceiling, at least according to reports.
You've posted a very short video where you can hear 30 rounds going off in just a few seconds.
We also know that he shot at the cops, exchanged gunfire because one officer was injured, saved only by his Kevlar helmet.
So I'm just, you know, maybe I've played too many first-person shooters where you watch the ammo bar go down, but it seems to me, like, how could he have that many bullets?
Right, so yeah, let's unpack it.
What you want to do is you want to say, okay, you have X number of dead people, X number of wounded people, and in real life, bullets don't just fly out of people and hit other people, you know, like in the Schwarzenegger movies.
You kill three people with one bullet.
That isn't reality.
That isn't ballistic.
So immediately, you know, okay, If there were 100 casualties, I think the official count is 49 plus the guy, and then 53 are wounded.
So you're thinking, okay, there's over 100 casualties.
How many rounds would you need to take out 100 people?
Well, you would need at least 100 rounds to wound and kill, and that would assume that you killed everybody with one shot, one kill, like you're some kind of movie character, which is plausible.
So then you start to think, well...
Well, you'd probably need five, six, seven rounds, even in an enclosed area per casualty.
And then you start to think, okay, an AR-15 magazine is usually a 30-round magazine.
Okay, so how many magazines would he need?
Well, eight to 12 magazines.
All right, where's he carrying these?
Where's the vest?
How is he running around shooting all these people for hours?
He's not physically fit.
I'm sure that you've worn a vest, a weighted vest.
Put on a 20-pound vest and go run through Florida at 3 in the morning.
And tell me if you really have the composure to shoot people.
And then you have to think, okay, if he's shooting people, he's going to have an adrenaline rush because plus he had the shootout with the police, plus he's a freak, plus he's a manic.
So he's going to be huffing and puffing.
He's going to be winded.
He might have the adrenaline dump that anybody who's engaged in very stressful situations would have.
So It doesn't add up that he would one, be able to carry all that ammo, two, that he would be so accurate that he could kill these people, and three, that he would have the mental game or the mental fortitude needed to not completely freak the fuck out as he's shooting all these people.
Well, and of course, it's a disco.
So there's pulsing lights.
There's people running all over the place.
There may have been some counterattacks.
Of course, we don't know at this point.
But it's not just like shooting fish in a barrel.
I mean, there's lots of stuff going on that's going to make it harder.
There are people hiding under bodies.
There are people clawing over stuff.
There's people hiding wherever they can.
There may be people throwing bottles or breaking bottles and trying to counterattack the guy.
It just seems like it would be a pretty chaotic venue.
It's not quite like the Virginia Tech shooter, as far as I remember, chained the doors, leisurely went around and shot people, and this was not that kind of situation.
And what pops into my mind, Mike, as well, is the shooting that happened at the concert in Europe last fall.
I mean, you've got multiple shooters who actually had grenades.
They detonated themselves with suicide vests, and they had one huge hall, not this sort of two main dance floors kind of situation.
There were 1,500 people at that venue, and so they got all of this hardware, all of this exploding stuff, suicide vests, grenades, and so on, five times the number of targets, and they still only managed to kill 89 people.
So the numbers to me just seem like they're circling each other without lining up.
Right.
There's 300 people in the club.
And a hundred of them are killed or wounded.
That's a one in three casualty rate.
One guy with one gun.
Again, it doesn't make any sense.
And a lot of people have created different hypotheses that it would have been very easy for one of the shooters to have gotten out with the hostages, right?
So maybe he's in there with multiple shooters.
There's a multiple shooter scenario during the carnage and chaos.
One or two slip out.
By the way, there was a phone call That a person, an eyewitness said that the shooter made.
Now, we always have to understand when we're dealing with eyewitness testimony, you can never accept anything as gospel.
But according to this witness, the shooter made a call and he said that there were three other people, that there were three other shooters involved with him.
So, maybe, maybe not.
Maybe that was an incorrect interpretation of what happened.
Maybe the witness hallucinated.
We can never know.
But that would make a lot more sense.
And we also know that The government does not want us to realize that ISIS is here.
They are here.
They're active terror cells.
They want to perpetuate this narrative that these are lone gunmen because otherwise it would go against the globalist agenda.
People would be really afraid and people would want to shut down the influx of these so-called refugees from the Middle East.
Well, I think the questions around immigration we can get to in a second.
And that's important.
It's really important, as I keep emphasizing, as you've talked about as well, Mike, that people understand that the immigrants are the significant voting bloc for the Democrats.
The Democrats are power-mad junkies who, like all addicts, will do anything to get the source of their satisfaction.
In this case, it's political power and money.
So, you know, some of these people could be considered innocent bystander casualties.
On the leftist drive to power, and that is something that people sort of need to wake up to, that there are pawns in political games, and the blood count, the head count, is less important to a lot of the people in power than simply getting and achieving and maintaining that power.
That's a kind of important mindset for people to really understand where they are in the political hierarchy.
This question as well of whether all of the victims were shot.
I mean, the guy or guys had three hours in there where, of course, there was no in and out as far as I know.
The police were waiting, and we'll get to that in a sec.
But there's no reason why he couldn't have had a bunch of knives and he couldn't have just walked around slitting people's throats, if that's his particular goal, to kill as many as possible.
So it may not all, of course, have been Bullets that could have been cold steel as well.
Well, but let's consider that hypothesis.
The amount of gore and the bleeding out that would have happened, you'd be sliding all over blood.
It would be the kind of gore that...
People haven't seen.
Now, maybe this person was some kind of—I mean, let's pause for a minute.
Even if you're a sociopath, walking around and slitting people's throats, and the gore, the gurgling, the screaming, that's the kind of scene that few people, even trained people, could comprehend.
So we have to—if we think that he's doing this, then a lot of things must be true of him.
He must have had super high-tech training with firearms, know how to conserve ammo, know how to shoot people.
He must have had a will of steel, the kind of will, a Kaiser Soze kind of will, a will that ordinary people can't comprehend.
And there isn't any evidence coming out that would support that hypothesis about him, that he's this super soldier, he's this Kaiser Soze.
He has an iron will, a will of steel that none of us can comprehend as mere mortals.
So Again, whenever we postulate these kinds of alternative scenarios, we have to think, well, what kind of man or what must be true of this man in order for this to happen?
Is this really a Kaiser Soze type of person?
It sounded like he was unstable.
He beat his wife before.
He posted dopey selfies of himself.
He looked kind of soft.
He might have been crazy, but to do what he did is really next level.
Well, and if he has this sort of iron Nietzschean will to power, to destroy, to murder, to perform the kind of butcheries that would be I don't know, one in a million kind of person could do that without freaking out.
It doesn't make much sense to me.
Like, he was harassing this cop when he was working at the security company.
He was harassing this cop.
He was talking about killing people.
He was talking about he was racist, of course, a homophobe and so on.
So if he has this massive amount of self-control, why on earth would he be broadcasting and spreading all of this crazy stuff before doing this kind of action?
Wouldn't you want to keep it coldly under wraps and appear perfectly normal to people?
Right.
He strikes me as a weak-willed person.
He has no track record of success.
Now, if this person who had done this had a track record of success, he was a high achiever, then this would all be more plausible to me.
But we essentially have a loser who is somehow performing tasks, Herculean level, this Nietzschean Iron Will level, this Conan the Barbarian level, this Kaiser Soze.
It doesn't add up with the life history.
Right, right.
It also bothers me just, well, more than a little bit that his ex-wife who found him so dangerous that her parents had to bungee in and pull her out of his home and leaving all of her belongings behind.
I mean, that is like next level get away from the crazy guy kind of situation that they didn't report him as far as I know.
He was never interviewed or arrested with regards to that level or capacity of violence.
Was not interviewed or arrested or charged with wife beating or whatever, escalated from the wife beating, perhaps death threats that caused his ex-wife's parents to bungee in and take her out with nothing left behind.
If they just reported him, if there'd been a chance to put all of this stuff together, things might have gone completely differently.
And I am pretty strong when it comes to people's moral responsibility when they're in knowledge, in possession of knowledge of that kind of potential for evil.
Yeah, and the police were incompetent.
That's the thing that we always have to understand with these shooting events.
We assume that whatever the police tell the media...
functioning, intelligent people.
So I don't even need to go the conspiracy theory route.
Oh, you know, I hate after every shooting when people call the false flag.
I think that that denigrates the victims.
And it's just kind of kooky.
Well, why is everything a false flag?
So I don't, I'm not saying this is a false flag.
I'm just saying that there's no reason for me to trust the police and believe that a competent investigation has been performed.
Well, as you pointed out, I mean, the cops could have waited in their guns blazing and And the thing that sort of haunted me just last night or this morning, Mike, this idea that you have, I mean, I guess they called it a hostage situation, right?
So the guy first burst in to the club at around 2 o'clock in the morning, and it wasn't until about 5 o'clock in the morning that the SWAT team and the cops went in.
Now, of course, they got a chance to interview dozens, if not hundreds of witnesses who have come out of the club, and they would have known that they'd already been shooting.
There are wounded people.
Now, again, I'm no SWAT tactician.
But it would seem to me that if you know you've got a shooter who's shot people who were lying in the floor and, of course, bleeding out, what's with the three hours?
I mean, you've got people who are almost certainly going to die if you don't do something before those three hours.
I don't quite understand that delay.
Okay, we have this myth about policing in America, and the myth goes something like this.
Police officers are heroic individuals, well-trained tacticians.
Most police officers never fire a weapon unless they have to for range qualification, and the range qualification standards in many police departments are very lax.
A lot of times a cop will fire a gun maybe once a year to practice, again, for range qualification just to check a box.
So when we know this is happening, We're not dealing with heroes.
We're not dealing with army rangers here.
We're not dealing with soldiers who are saying, I'm going to go in.
All they want to do is they want to get home.
All they want to do is do a job.
All they want to do is get a pension.
Now, people don't like to hear that because we're taught that the police are heroes, but they're just regular guys.
So you would think, well, there's this active shooter situation.
Okay, let's go in.
Well, the average cop on the street doesn't even have any training for that.
He wouldn't even know what to do if he got in there.
And that's assuming that he had courage and will that most police officers simply don't have.
So it's just the normal domino clusterfuck of people not knowing exactly what they're doing, not having the right instruction, not having the right expertise, and events just kind of unfolding out of that snowball effect.
Correct.
It's mass hysteria, mass incompetencies.
So that's why a lot of people are too quick to call a conspiracy.
No, the police just didn't know what they wanted to do.
Even if they had the courage, how are they going to go into a nightclub and take out an active shooter where, again, the disco lights are going off.
It's loud in there.
People are screaming.
They don't know how to take cover.
Most of them are not ex-military.
They haven't had basic tactical training, cover and concealment.
Move in, take the guy out.
They aren't that accurate with their guns.
I mean, think about that New York shooting.
I can't remember.
It was a couple years back, but the police started shooting.
There was a guy in Times Square, and I don't think they killed people, but I think they hit seven different civilians.
The police did.
So the police are not highly trained.
That is a big myth people have, and that's why I don't want to take this conversation too off-tangent, but that's why people have to Right.
And when it comes to the big picture media narrative about this, I perhaps naively, Mike, I retain the ability to be shocked by the level of misdirection and avoidance and outright lying that occurs in the mainstream media.
But, you know, I I work in alternative media.
I think, as it's fair to say, you do as well.
So of course, I'm exchanging information with people who don't have an agenda, who are willing to follow the facts, who don't have a dog in the fight, so to speak.
When it comes to the mainstream media, reporting this as a mass shooting seems to me entirely wrong to the point of openly dishonest.
The shooter, according to The witnesses said that you stop bombing ISIS. That was sort of his demand with regards to why he was doing what he was doing.
So if America, you know, bombing ISIS as they are doing, if somebody attacks in America because of America's military objectives, that's not a mass shooting.
That seems to me that would be an act of war.
Now, again, is it organized?
Of course not, right?
That's sort of the next generation warfare that we're all kind of stuck in at the moment where nobody wears any uniforms.
On the other side and so on, and civilian targets are legitimate.
But that's not just a mass shooting, like some kids played too much whatever and went crazy, not that that usually happens, but they went crazy and just shot up a school.
This is a military response to military goals and military actions, which is the bombing of ISIS. So reporting this as a mass shooting is just disingenuous to the point of treason, seems to me.
Yeah, I've learned two things about the media.
One is that journalists are not intelligent, and two is that they are dishonest and paid by the power elite.
So whatever little faith I had in the media, they went away with the Michelle Fields hoax.
In real time— In real time, we watched it.
That's why I tracked it so carefully in real time.
We had a Washington—and I'm sure your readers are caught up, so I won't—you know, dear listeners, I'm not going to bore you with the details.
But long story short is we have proof that a woman lied and claimed she was assaulted, and a Washington Post reporter who witnessed it wrote an article saying, I saw her be assaulted, and she was crying afterwards.
And then we saw videos proving, wait, none of this happened.
Well, that was an actual media hoax in real time that before the power of the internet, before the power of social media, would have become conventional wisdom.
So these are dishonest people.
Now, the thing you have to look at—and I know that you don't like to go this way because you still have, I think, a little bit more idealism than I do— The media, there is an agenda of globalism.
There is a media of destroying West.
And I know most people can't comprehend it.
They say that I'm crazy, but all facts point this way.
There is a deliberate agenda within the media to destroy Western civilization.
It's nihilism.
It is a death cult.
And if they reported the truth, more and more people in America would wake up and realize Western society is worth fighting for.
So because of that, they're going to call it a mass shooting rather than what it is, which is an act of Islamic terrorism.
Right.
Now, you used the word globalism a couple of times, and I just wanted you to unpack that, not just for the audience, for me as well.
People use that term to meet a bunch of different things.
What do you mean by it, Mike?
Globalism is the idea that there should be no borders, that there should be a total free flow of labor, and that there should be no national culture.
Nationalism is taught as a dirty word.
People say nationalism is dangerous, right?
The idea that there should be a national identity, an American identity, a French identity, an Israeli identity.
Well, no, you can have an Israeli national identity, but if you say that you have an American identity or a French identity or a Canadian identity, that's a problem.
But you can say you have a Mexican identity, and you can bring a Mexican identity into the United States and fly your Mexican flag, and suddenly that is okay, which is awfully peculiar.
So I use globalism as the understanding philosophically that nations don't have the right to exist as nations qua nations.
Well, of course, the argument, I guess, would be that Mexican identity is useful only insofar as it destroys American identity.
It's not useful in and of itself, and then after that, they'll turn on the Mexican identity.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Now, this general idea that, you know, the one ring to rule them all, the one ideology to rule the world, there are, to my memory, only two ideologies that have really made The first, of course, is communism, which was a worldwide revolution.
It was supposed to impose itself on every political system and overwhelm every political system on the earth.
So the first, of course, is communism, which has largely been discredited.
And I mean, it's kind of reforming itself in generic democratic socialism or leftism or whatever you call it.
But the other, of course, is radical Islam, which wishes to take an ideology and impose it upon the world and can't really rest content until it is done so.
So it's interesting to me that these two ideologies, one, of course, which is totalitarian and anti-theistic, which is the communism, and the other which has totalitarian elements for sure, but of course is very theistic, which is radical Islam, that these two situations seem to be working in concert in the West and that you that these two situations seem to be working in concert in the West and that you have leftists protecting radical Islam and you
And it seems that these sort of, you know, Star Wars, these two sides of the garbage thing, crushing in on our remnants of freedom.
Yeah, and the agenda above all that, of course, is If you think about the world rationally, you understand that the biggest threat to the globalists, to the people at the very top of the food chain, is upward mobility.
And you want to destroy upward mobility of people by suppressing their wages, suppressing their income, suppressing opportunity, making them not have any hope, making people feel nothing but despair and fear and hopelessness.
And that is being done at the course of the very top, the banking establishment, the globalist banking establishment, Bilderberg.
That kind of thing.
So Islam is just a pawn of the globalists because here's why.
Islam shouldn't be a problem in America.
We should just say, we don't need anybody from the Middle East coming to the U.S. We don't need immigrants, period.
America will be just fine and dandy.
Yet somehow people have been brainwashed into believing that America needs immigrants, that we somehow need more people in our country.
America doesn't need immigrants from any nation.
We're fine, and we'll be fine without them.
But when you say things like that, then all these people from think tanks who are funded, again, by the very people at the top, Well, if you did that, the economy will shut down even though we have 20% unemployment if you actually look at people who are not in the workforce and who are on disability.
So you want to go deeper and realize that there are people playing with the chess pieces at the top.
So guys like me, I'm all the way.
They could have me in a car accident gone in a second.
But they're using these ideologies and they're trying to spread these ideologies.
Why, for example, does Europe need Islam?
That's not rhetorical.
If you're a logical person, you're an intelligent man, give me one good reason why Europe needs anybody from the Middle East to emigrate into their country.
Well, I mean, the two answers that pop into my mind is, number one, there's this myth.
That depopulation requires new population.
And since it is easier to bring in adult taxpayers than it is to grow taxpayers from scratch.
So the people who are in power, the politicians, they are running out of money.
I mean, more than running out of money.
I mean, they're burning through it like you couldn't believe, right?
Because they've got a whole retiring...
Aging baby boomer population and they have a demographic collapse among the younger people who can't find jobs, who are miseducated, badly educated, propagandized, who've gone through terrible schools, can't think, can't reason, can't challenge, can't build, can't grow Can't make companies.
Can't do any of these things.
I mean, for the most part.
So you've got a kind of demographic and taxation collapse.
Some politicians don't want to own up to the fact that the bills can't be paid.
So they like to hoover in a bunch of people they assume will immediately start paying taxes.
And that could be an argument, you know, sort of amoral resource shifting perspective.
That could be an argument for that.
But I think most importantly, politicians don't want to be called racists.
And I think that word, you know, the Trotsky invented word that's been used to smash any kind of in-group preference among whites for a couple of generations, the saying, well, listen, we're going to block off this immigration.
We're going to stop this immigration.
Well, why?
Do you not like these people?
Do you not like diversity?
Do you not like multiculturalism?
Are you a racist?
And I think that Combination of not wanting to tell the people that you can't afford all the stuff that's been promised.
What are unfunded liabilities in America running over a hundred trillion dollars?
I mean, it's lunatic.
I mean, this might as well be a quintillion, billion, dillion quill dollars.
It doesn't matter.
They can't possibly pay for what they promised.
They don't want to say that, and they don't want to be called racists.
And I think that's the corner that a lot of people are in, maybe who aren't in on some big scheme, but are just trying to survive the next five minutes of media coverage.
Now, I like what you did there.
So the question I asked you was, as a rational thinking man, could you give me a good reason to bring in people from the Middle East?
And your answer is, no, you can't.
You have to immediately say, well, this is what they would argue as lies.
And that's the whole point.
Those are the questions we have to ask.
You're a smart guy.
There's nobody running things at the higher-up level who are smarter than you.
And there's no good reason that you can come up with For the idea that you should bring in people from a third world population into a western civilized country.
It's simply not logical.
Intelligent, rational people would not say, oh, we have a demographic issue.
We should bring in people who are uncivilized and whose cultural values differ from ours, right?
And then to the latter point, which I think is fascinating, is as Americans...
We have watched what happened in Europe.
We now have empirical data proving that when you let people come in from the Middle East in massive numbers, it destroys the culture, it increases the rate of sexual assault and rape, they don't actually become productive members of society, they don't assimilate, they take welfare, they commit crimes.
So in America, there's not a single person who's intelligent and rational and has any kind of thinking power People would say, yeah, Europe tried it.
We saw what happened there.
As a matter of just empirical reality, what they tried is false.
They are wrong.
And yet we're now being told by Paul Ryan, again, because it's a globalist agenda, there are people much bigger than you or I involved here.
We're being told by Paul Ryan, Hillary Clinton, and Obama that we need to let in up to a million people from the Middle East in a year.
In what world does that make sense?
Well, I was really struck by what you said earlier, Mike, about upward mobility being a great challenge to the globalists or to the sort of power elites.
And one of the things that has struck me, which is a very unreported on and I think unacknowledged factor in the growth of state power over the last couple of decades, is there's been a huge reduction in violent crime.
Now, discounting, or I don't want to sort of skate over or completely ignore the Ferguson effect for the last year or two, but overall, it's gone down enormously relative to times in the past.
Whether that's, you know, better parenting or they got let out of the paint or whatever it's going to be, there has been a significant reduction in violent crime.
Now, if violent crime goes down and incomes go up, what happens is people have less need for government.
Because they're less threatened by criminals and they have more money themselves to pay for services that may be provided by people that replicate government services like security or protection, private security guards in a gated community or whatever.
And so if people are more wealthy And crime is going down the need for the state begins to diminish and of course the need for the state diminishes if people are earning their own money then they are focused on reducing taxes because they don't want to pay that much in taxes if people aren't able to be employed or are sucked into welfare or...sucked into disability, then they become dependent on the state and they will vote for bigger and bigger government because they're on the receiving end of the gravy train, not on the paying end.
So I think this sort of reduction in crime and the great wealth accumulation that has occurred over the past couple of generations, I think has threatened the basic perception of the need for the size and power of the state.
And it seems to me fascinating that as crime is being reduced through a variety of social factors, people who have a tendency to commit a lot more crimes are being imported into countries almost like the government sells you protection.
Oh, you don't need as much protection?
We can fix that.
Yeah.
I always tell my people, my readers and stuff, I go, just imagine if you wanted to destroy America, what would you do?
And if you start from that proposition that our leaders in government are not good people, they're not well-meaning, they're amoral power mongers, and they're sociopaths in many cases...
Then, start from the proposition that they're not trying to lead us.
Start from the proposition that they want to destroy the fabric of Western society.
When you look at it that way, everything that they're doing makes total sense.
Should I even have sex with women because I might end up as a rapist?
Tell women that you can have it all and that there are no biological realities to pregnancy and let them think that, oh, if I'm 40 and I want to have a kid, I could just have a kid as easily as if I were 25.
Let's import a criminal thug population.
Let's import a toxic ideology.
Let's create these structures that say, if you call any of this out, you'll be a pariah and you won't actually be able to earn a living.
You won't be allowed in the media.
You won't be allowed to work in any kind of television network.
You'll be publicly shamed by these other media outlets.
So even if you have a job completely unrelated to media, you'll lose that job.
Well, when you look at what's going on and what's happening, and you look at it from the idea that they do want to destroy Western civilization, I would say that we have the most competent leadership we've ever had in the history of America.
You mean they're good at being evil.
That's their experts at it, and they're PhD level in malevolence.
And, of course, there is that old thing, which struck me when you're talking about the cops, that you don't have to explain something with malevolence if incompetence can serve.
But I think that the incompetence, if we could call it that, with all the stuff that's been going on over the past few decades, is so much in the same line towards the destruction of historical values, all at the same time.
And this is what's so mind-bending about it.
Is at the same time, Mike, that they claim they love things like diversity.
And diversity is one of these neutral words.
I mean, nobody even knows what it fundamentally means other than, I don't know, people like different music and different foods.
Hey, so do I. That's not a bad thing.
But this idea that diversity is a value.
Okay, well, even if we accept that it is, it doesn't take more than a moment's thought to say, okay, well, if diversity is a value, importing intolerant cultures is going to damage diversity.
Right?
And if diversity is a value, should we not be bringing or allowing people into our country or countries that value and promote diversity, from a culture that values and promotes diversity?
If not, then diversity clearly isn't a value.
And so it seems to me that diversity simply means the inability to criticize all non-Western cultures.
That to me all seems, that's what diversity seems, it's just a basic form of gag censorship saying shut up Westerners and don't criticize anyone who is not part of your culture.
And we'll just call it diversity because censorship sounds kind of ugly.
You know, I saw a great picture that floated around a year or two ago on Twitter and it And it's from the Canadian Broadcasting Channel or somebody, and there were no white people in the picture.
And diversity actually means anti-white, especially anti-white male.
And as gay men are finding out, the gay men are actually finding out, you've been relegated to...
Us over here, us white guys, because now it's all about these other different interest groups.
So diversity means anti-white, especially anti-white male.
It's as simple as that.
Watch how they use it.
Nobody says the metro system in Washington, D.C., 97% of the drivers are black.
Nobody is saying, well, we need more diversity because that's way too many black people.
You should have more white people in there too.
You never hear anybody We're good to go.
What was the development, I mean, I think I agree with that perfectly, but what was your development along the lines of these ideas?
I'm almost really fascinated what sort of the major turning points are, you know, very few of us are born this way, and Lord knows you don't get this kind of stuff at government schools or, heaven forbid, social justice warrior infested public or private universities.
So how did you, what were the tripwires for you that got you to these kinds of perspectives, Mike?
Steve Saylor and Ramsey Paul are probably two of the more influential people who red-pilled me, as the kids say these days.
I would note, you know, Steve Saylor had a great line which is called, you know, there's a war on noticing.
So if all you do is you're, as a human being, you notice patterns, these patterns are empirically verifiable, then you're in trouble, right?
Well, you can't say that.
So we've moved from A world where you observe the world, you make a rational analysis to, we have these so-called hate facts.
Well, sure, it is true that some groups of people commit more crimes than other people, but that doesn't matter.
You're not allowed to say that.
And then Ramsey Paul helped un-brainwash me because I used to think nationalism was a bad word.
I was a conventionally educated guy, went to college, went to law school.
I thought nationalism was a bad word and I realized I didn't know why I thought that.
I had simply been brainwashed by the globalists into believing it was a bad word.
So Ramsey Paul definitely woke me up on that issue.
Yeah, and I mean, I've certainly had a circuitous journey, but I think one of the things that has occurred for me is the recognition that immigration is this big giant government program.
The free movement of people all sounds great, but that's not what's happening in the world at the moment.
What's happening is the productive classes are being stripped bare of resources in order to bribe at least arguably less productive classes to come into Western countries.
That the free movement of people is not what is occurring.
There is a massive amount of bribery that is occurring through refugee programs, through various kinds of welfare and other payments that are available to people who've never paid into a system.
The whole point of welfare is insurance.
Ideally, in the abstract, you pay into a system and then if you run on hard times through no fault of your own, you can withdraw from that system that you've paid into.
It's sort of like having a life insurance company where people don't have to pay in, they can just As soon as, you know, if someone's dead, they can just go and apply for a million dollars in life insurance, and that's not any kind of rationally sustainable situation.
So once I sort of understood that immigration was a giant government program of resource redistribution and vote buying, it became a lot easier to oppose it because I'm actually not opposing the free movement of people.
I'm opposing the escalation of violations of the non-aggression principle represented by the giant government program called immigration.
Well, the issue I have – same thing.
Like what you're saying is true.
The government always wants to grow itself.
It's just the nature of mission creep.
The reason I went from – I was very sort of quasi-open-border libertarian is you can't have the free movement of people and then an ideology of bigotry, which is white privilege and that white people are evil.
So what happens is if we brought in people from the Middle East and here was the agenda.
Alright, you're from a shithole.
Guess what?
You don't get to bring those shithole values here.
You're going to conform to our Western culture.
Then I would be much more open-minded about immigration.
But what has happened now is you bring people in from a shithole.
They have this toxic beliefs that would never be allowed by me.
If I talked about women the way Muslims do...
I'd be persona non grata even more than I am.
So there's no intellectual consistency other than that they really hate white people and they really hate the white man.
So what happens is we're going to bring people in from terrible cultures, and then we're going to tell them that if anyone criticizes the culture, you're allowed to say, no, no, no, you can't criticize me.
So we make primitive people immune to criticism, immune to any kind of social shaming, immune to any kind of cultural assimilation.
And then what happens?
Well, you have the second generation people.
That was the thing.
The shooter in Orlando, he was not a recent immigrant.
His parents hadn't assimilated.
He hadn't assimilated.
The Chechnyans, those Boston bombers, Same thing.
In great kids, their parents came over as so-called refugees.
They were total welfare deadbeats.
They never loved America.
Their kids never loved America.
And their kids were never socialized to realize, wherever you came from is shit.
Period.
Children should be taught in every school, wherever you came from is shit.
You're in America, and if you don't like America, you gotta get out.
But if you taught that in the schools, you'd be fired as a teacher.
Oh, and not just fired as a teacher.
We see, of course, people who challenge the narrative where the powers that be can get any kind of hooks into them.
Their lives get, well, quite challenging indeed.
And I had, of course, a listener from Europe.
We've been talking to Europeans about their thoughts about the so-called migrant crisis.
And they say, look, we're not afraid of being called names.
We're afraid of being hauled off to jail and having our sources of income destroyed and having no life and not being able to feed our kids and I mean, that, I think, is where people are, and it's a pretty desperate place for a lot of people to be.
Yeah, well, they take away your income now, and that's just the rest of us, right?
That's the idea.
The government, they'll audit you.
There's a lot of ways that they can jam up your life.
In the U.S., fortunately, we do have the First Amendment.
We do have free speech.
And we have to fight very hard to keep that.
Otherwise, yeah, we'll end up—I mean, Europe is done.
I lived in Paris for three months, and it was like—it wasn't like what you would imagine being in Paris was.
You're walking around.
You better watch your back.
People are mean-mugging you everywhere.
And by people, I don't mean native French people.
I mean this immigrant population that they've accepted.
They look angry there.
8,000 Jews, actually.
Not to go off on too much of a rant, but I think it's hilarious that the media is saying— So the media is telling you, my god, there's these people on Twitter and they're posting a frog and the frog has a swastika and the frog is putting people, Pepe the frog is putting people in gas chambers.
Oh my god, this is terrible.
Meanwhile, 8,000 Jews had to leave France last year because the Muslims are fucking them up, essentially.
The Muslims are beating them up, attacking them.
If you go in certain parts of Paris that are their no-go areas because Muslims live there, you can't walk around as a Jew in Orthodox attire without being at risk of an actual hate crime.
So our media is telling you, oh, can you believe that these people on Twitter, you know, they put my last name in three parentheses.
How terrible.
But they don't have anything.
To say about actual real anti-Semitism, actual real hate crimes, because we live in this culture now where you can't call out bad behavior unless you're allowed to, and you're not allowed to call out actual violent criminal behavior by Muslims.
Right, right.
No, and of course, the media who is afraid to criticize extremist Muslims is the same media that constantly tell us, oh, no, no, it's just a religion of peace.
And, you know, square that circle if you can for me, Batman, I just can't do it.
Well, Ramsey Paul made a great point, which is that...
Everybody says the white man is evil and we're afraid of white men, and yet nobody has any problem bashing white men.
Nobody has a problem putting a crucifix of Jesus Christ into urine or defecating on an American flag.
But boy, if we're so dangerous, we white men are so dangerous, why is it that people are not afraid of us, but they are awfully afraid of drawing a picture of Muhammad, aren't they?
It is one of these...
I don't know.
I hate to sort of use the phrase end times.
It's the end of a particular mode of thinking and hopefully it's going to be for the best and not for the worst.
But I've almost gotten to the point, Mike, where if somebody is attacked, I automatically assume that they are the nicest and best and most decent person in the situation.
And whoever is defended, I assume, is the least nice person.
In other words, whoever is the most dangerous, in other words, the most irrational and aggressive, those are the people that the media swarmed to defend.
And whoever is the most reasonable is the person held up to endless waves of attack.
And it's kind of got this inverse situation where a bad reputation is usually the mark of a good character.
Yeah, because now the people who are giving you a bad reputation are actually the bad guys and the evil people.
And again, it is hilarious.
If white men are so evil and we're such bad people, why is it that we can get hated on every day, have our religions mocked, have our cultures mocked, have our way of life mocked, and we're not out killing people because of that?
Who's really evil?
Right.
And it also—one of these double standards, too, where people say, ah, well, you see, it's blowback.
You know, white people did all these terrible things around the world, and therefore it's blowback.
And, I mean, first of all, that's, you know, the Crusades.
I've got a video called The Truth About the Crusades, which we'll link to below.
People should watch that.
White people ended slavery worldwide and expended dozens of years of blood and treasure in order to do so.
But then, of course, only white people get blamed for slavery.
But this basic reality that people talk about, well, blowback, you know, it's just blowback.
Okay, well, I wonder if those same people, you know, this is a terrible thought, but if gay people ended up, I don't know, doing something terrible to Muslims as a result of this, would people defend those gay people and say, oh, well, it's blowback.
It's like, no, blowback only occurs against white people, and it's only justified against white people.
And if, let's say, gay Latinos did it, would people then say, oh, you said blowback against the Muslim thing, therefore, you know, we're going to make up some kind of excuses for it.
It just seems I'm kind of trapped in this one-way maze that leads to, like, bad whitey everywhere you turn.
Yeah, right now, again, the only people you're allowed to hate are white men, and everything has been filtered through these weird privilege rubrics.
Well, if a gay man killed a Muslim, who has the right – Ramsey Paul – I like Ramsey Paul because he's so pithy.
And Ramsey Paul said, what happens when a gay person demands that a Muslim baker make a gay wedding cake?
And I thought, oh shit, right?
Yeah.
You know, he can really pack in very deep observations in just a sentence or two.
So that's what I kind of like to ask liberals now.
I like to troll them with that, is I go, well, if a Muslim demands that a gay person make a cake for their wedding, what are you going to say?
And immediately the cognitive dissonance hits them, and they don't know how to handle it.
They don't know how to answer it.
So those are the kind of things, too.
And that's another thing I like about Ramsey Paul, and what we need more of, and what I try to do is...
We need to have more good humor and we need to make our points in ways that trigger people.
But I don't like the one thing that a lot of people do, which is try to trigger people by being extremely offensive.
That can be effective.
But I think when you trigger people with humor, you just completely shut them down.
And then everybody who watches goes, hey, yeah, I mean, you're right.
What if we're supposed to tolerate people?
Well, Muslims aren't tolerating gay people.
This doesn't make sense.
Therefore, your ideology is intellectually bankrupt.
We need more of that.
Okay, let's talk about that because, I mean, you are famous, I would say, for, I don't know, not starting fights on the internet, but as the saying goes, ending them.
What is your approach and standards by which you engage?
I know you sometimes go after some pretty famous people.
But what is your standard, Mike, by which you engage and attempt to unmask or show the hidden stripes of people on the internet?
Okay.
In a perfect world, I only go after people with very large platforms because otherwise I think it is – to use an overused word, it is a little bit bullying.
If I just randomly picked on some guy that had never heard of me because I saw him post in a hashtag, that isn't really what I do.
If somebody finds me, then of course I'll give them a fight if they want one.
But I like to discredit and destroy the media establishment because we have to destroy before we can rebuild.
People like you, people like me, Breitbart is doing some good work in many instances.
We have to completely burn down right-wing media.
We have to let people know that the conservative media, the National Review, the Blaze, Red State, that is exactly owned by the same people who own the left-wing media.
So my goal is every day to To discredit the media.
Because by doing that, more people are able to wake up because the media has such a stranglehold on our minds.
So that's my big approach is, am I discrediting narratives that are spread by the media?
Yes.
Am I destroying the media?
Yes.
So every day I try to make people trust the media less.
Which of course opens up people to look for alternatives to media control and programming, which I think certainly helps people like you and I and other people who are involved in this noble endeavor.
Now, you've also talked a little bit about, you know, when people hear about these terrible situations like this attack over the weekend on the gay nightclub, I think people feel a certain amount of anger and despair.
Anger, you know, I'm with Aristotle.
Anger is a very positive and powerful emotion if you know how to express it in the right way about the right topics in a way that has a positive effect on the world.
So the anger I'm a big fan of.
The despair is the worm that eats the apple that could otherwise feed you.
And you've had, I think, some great things to say, Mike, about how people can fight the despair, the paralysis, the overwhelmingness and feeling of helplessness and futility in the face of these powers and these decisions.
What would you say to people to help them to act in positive ways?
Well, as logical people, we have to recognize that the way we feel is going to be controlled by what we're looking at, what we're choosing to focus at.
And we also have to focus on what's in our control.
So here's what happens.
There's a mass shooting.
And if you really fully comprehended it, you would have post-traumatic stress disorder.
It's immense suffering.
But you have to realize that that is happening every day, everywhere.
There's nothing you can do to stop it for the most part.
But what you can do is we all have family.
We all have friends.
There are people who died that night.
They have loved ones who said, boy, I wish I hadn't been in a fight with that person.
I can't believe that I had a chance to make amends, but I let this petty grievance distract my real life.
So we need to focus, as educated people and as citizens, yes, we do need to be active participants in democracy.
We do need to be aware, but we need to focus on those human relations.
We need to make sure that Today could be the last day you ever live.
Do you really want it to end without letting people know how you feel about them, letting people know that you love them?
Do you really want to let grudges and old drama and old beef over nothing?
What if that's the last time you see that person?
Right.
Yeah, there's a shadow side to that as well.
And you mentioned it in Guerrilla Mindset about sort of toxic people and so on.
You know, and I feel sort of emotional even just talking about this.
But I also think of the people who are facing What obviously was, for some of them, turned out to be certain death in the nightclub attack.
Maybe they'd been in a bad relationship.
Some mean guy or just someone who was abusing them or ignoring them.
And maybe they just spent the last three years pursuing someone whose heart was a vault closed to all rational or emotional entreaties.
And maybe they...
Regretted not just the opportunity to be close to people who they had unjustly distanced themselves from, but also the last couple of years, if they'd been in a bad relationship, that that was the last three years of their life.
And it could have been so much better if they'd made a more proactive choice to detoxify themselves from difficult people or destructive people in their lives.
Yeah, so today could be my last day.
So I always want to make sure that I'm living a life that I can be proud of and that I want to have any regrets on.
So yeah, there are two sides to that coin.
One is you don't want to let nonsense end a relationship.
But two is, yes, if people are genuinely toxic, then today could be your last day and you're spending all of your time and all of your energy on Focus on negative people, focusing on toxic people, focused on family members who they actually want to hold you down.
They don't want you to live life how you want to do it.
They don't want you to live your life vision.
Yeah, you have to get rid of those people and you have to recognize that we as people...
Anything can happen today.
It could be a car crash.
It could be an asteroid hit.
You could get mugged.
You could get shot.
That's why we have to prepare for life too, and that's why it's important to, you know, meditation or prayer, spending time with friends and family, trying to eat healthy, you know, trying to go to the gym, trying to be physically fit.
We have to prepare for the daily challenges of life because we do never know what's going to happen that day.
And more importantly, we don't know when it'll be our last day.
So we want to make sure that we're living a vision life, right?
A visionary life, a life of purpose.
Because otherwise, your time could be up today.
So there is no tomorrow.
You always hear people say, you know, I have this dream.
I want to do this.
I want to do that.
Well, tomorrow you might not have.
Today might be your only opportunity to do it.
So what are you waiting for?
So Mike, the last...
I mean, I'd like to talk to you all day.
But the last thing I really wanted to get across to the listeners is...
I'm quite excited about the film that you're working on about free speech.
I think I'm, I presume, someone who said free speech, you really know you're using it when you're a little nervous about what you're saying because it means you're not going to be boring or cliched.
Where people can disagree with you, that is where civilization occurs.
If we all agree, in general, whoever you agree with, and the larger number of people you agree with, the more likely you are to be wrong.
But what's the impetus behind the movie?
Where is it at?
When's it going to be out?
And how can people get it?
All right.
The big theme of the film is to tell a kind of story of free speech in America, and that'll kind of cover the West, which is – and it's called Silenced.
We think that there's a war on free speech brought by the government, but the government by and large in America, you're not going to get in trouble with the government for what you say on Twitter.
But the rest of us are censoring each other.
Oh, you said that.
I'm going to unfriend you on Facebook.
Oh, you like Donald Trump.
I have to unfriend you on Facebook.
Oh, you posted a tweet.
I'm going to report that to Gawker, and Gawker is going to write an article about you, and we're going to ruin your life, and we'll never get you a job ever again.
So this is culturally – we have this attack on free speech and this attack on free thought and this attack on dissent.
And the point of this movie is we've talked to all kinds of people.
We've talked to Alan Dershowitz.
We've talked to Scott Adams.
We've talked to people that you've seen on Twitter, Gavin McInnes.
We've talked to Anthony Cumia.
And the idea is people like us, people like you.
You are actually the cool people.
The people who want to censor people, they are the assholes.
They aren't the good guys.
And we don't want to make it so black and white that there's a good guy and a bad guy, but free speech is cool.
Thinking for yourself is cool.
The people who want to silence you, those are the people who aren't cool.
As far as the release date, we'll be entering silenced into some film festivals, so the release date will depend on what is accepted, but it will be done by the end of August.
Right.
And this idea of the horizontal attack, you know, if you can get slaves to attack each other for talking about freedom, you don't need a lot of overseers.
And the degree to which we're willing to horizontally attack each other for saying things that are startling or unusual or thought-provoking or even offensive.
Oh, especially offensive.
That's usually where the real – you turn the earth to plant the seeds and the earth gets disturbed.
But the degree to which we're willing to attack each other is the degree to which we can have a big and powerful state.
Because when we attack each other, you need far fewer enforcement costs, which means that the more profit for the state, bigger state and so on.
So people, they always want to look upwards and say, how am I going to get rid of this giant ziggurat of power over me?
And they don't understand that it flows and is fed by our willingness and sometimes our eagerness to attack each other.
Well, here's what I noticed, and this was another awakening I had during the bails of Wall Street.
I used to be a libertarian sheep who believed, oh yeah, Wall Street, they should be allowed to create any financial instruments because of free markets and everything else.
And then once the government bailed them out, I realized, buddy, you'd been played.
But here's how I kind of started to think about things.
Wall Street has public relations firms.
They have public relations arms.
They own people in the media.
Why are regular people Ever defending Wall Street, right?
Think about, well, we should protect Wall Street because they're job creators.
And I started to think.
I said, you've been brainwashed into not helping your fellow man, not helping people who actually care if you live or die.
And you're investing all of this emotional energy into political figures.
And even though I support Trump, I don't have an emotional connection to him.
I think he's best for America.
But emotionally, I'm not – his rise and fall doesn't impact me emotionally.
Emotionally, it's about my family, my friends, the people that I can help, danger and play readers, guerrilla mindset readers, that kind of stuff.
And that was another awakening that we have to have as a people.
Why do we feel that we need to take energy and defend the politically powerful and the rich?
Why do we feel like we need to attack each other?
And then you start to think, oh yeah, we are being used as useful idiots.
They're making more money.
They're looting the country.
They're gaining power because we're all distracted fighting each other.
And that fighting has to end.
Yeah, it is a tragic cycle of history that freedom brings wealth and wealth attracts the parasites and the leeches and the controllers and the power junkies who then use the accumulated wealth to feed themselves at the expense of the future.
Well, Mike...
Really, really enjoyed the conversation.
I really want to urge people to go to DangerInPlay.com, follow Mike on Twitter at Cernovich.
Again, we'll put the links below.
Your Twitter output is prodigious.
I assume that there were nine of you going to join us in the conversation today.
And your thoughts and originality are always powerful.
And the book, Guerrilla Mindset, is, you know, just, it's a good audio book.
It's a, you can get it very easily.
It's worth reading and it really will jolt you out.
I tried my first cold shower since I was a teenager, so...
Hopefully we can get together and talk about that.
But I really, really wanted to thank you for being an inspirational and courageous man out there on the Wild West of the human frontier of challenging the powers that be on the internet.
Mike, thanks so much for your time today.
Thank you.
It was fun.
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