April 20, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:23:13
3657 World War Globalism | Styxhexenhammer666 and Stefan Molyneux
What is the state of the ongoing battle between nationalism and globalism? Styxhexenhammer666 joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the battle against globalism, the nature of government, opposition to Kim Jong-un, the possibility of regime change in North Korea, the death of the legacy media, the diminishment of the political center, President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office and the possibility of World War III. Styxhexenhammer666 is an independent political commentator and YouTube content creator. YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/styxhexenhammer666Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/styx666officialPatreon: http://www.patreon.com/Styxhexenhammer666Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
He is a political commentator who has some very trenchant and insightful things to say about the world scene.
You can check him out on YouTube.com forward slash StyxHexenHammer666.
That's the number.
Don't spell it out.
And Twitter.com forward slash Styx, like the band, 666 Official Styx.
Thank you so much for taking the time today.
Thank you for having me on.
Now, one of the things that I've enjoyed about your show is the contrast that you point out between sort of globalism and nationalism.
That seems to be the big fight.
I've also noticed that evil things tend to rebrand themselves on a fairly regular basis.
And globalism seems to me to have its roots in communism, internationalism, and so on.
And even Nazism got rebranded because, of course, the original included the word socialism, which has to be scrubbed out so the lefties can have their way with history.
But do you think it's a fair characterization to say that the fight between collectivism, individualism, which on the international scene seems to translate to globalism, and nationalism is one of the defining or if not the defining conflict of the age?
Yeah, I would definitely say so.
The idea of the scrapping of national sovereignty...
In favor of what establishment politicians always branded as, as we're going to be sensitive, we're going to be multicultural, we're going to take care of the poor.
And they never actually do these things, but that's sort of how they sell it to people.
That's definitely a direct contrast to the concept of people need to do things themselves.
They need to take at least some effort to do so.
Nations should be able to decide their own fate.
You look at the EU, it's probably the best example.
You've got no border control within these states.
So even far left movements, and this can't be pointed out enough, even they, in a way, suffer.
They might want immigration, more immigration, but from a different area.
And they can't even accomplish that, really, under the globalist systems we have today.
And it destroys the host.
It destroys the donor culture.
It destroys the third world, the developed world.
It doesn't matter who you are.
Nobody benefits from globalism, essentially, except for the globalists themselves.
Yeah, there's this thing where incompetence likes to hide in abstract layers of bureaucracy, and the further away it can get from the people it's supposed to be serving, the more it can hide and pillage and prey upon the finances and the body politic.
So, you know, I don't like government as a whole, but if you're going to have it, it should be as local as humanly possible.
So, you know, you look people in the eyeballs, you have to live among the policies that you are creating.
You know, I mean, the people who want all of this Mass third world immigration.
In general, they tend to live in gated communities far away from the actual problems.
They certainly aren't living in these no-go zones or these immigrant ghettos and so on.
And so that's one thing that I've always really disliked about the EU or these sort of globalist, mega-national bureaucratic layers is there really is no sense of community connection impact for the result of what it is that they're planning.
Yeah, if they do something, they're sheltered from the results.
I mean, it doesn't even require globalism.
This was already a problem even with just normal nation states.
You look at here in the United States.
It's a big difference between how politics function in a state like mine, Vermont, very small.
There aren't really any major urban communities.
And so, you know, you'll see Bernie Sanders, for all of his faults, admittedly.
You'll see him, like, wandering around the airport or something like that.
The governor, you might meet him in the grocery stores.
But if you go to New York, even just the city, there's so many people, everything's so massively sprawling out.
There's no guarantee you ever see your mayor.
There's no guarantee you ever see some council person.
If it's a large state of California, why do you think it has so many problems?
It's gigantic.
So you probably never have actually even seen the people that supposedly represent you.
So if you're pissed off, they don't even, in all honesty...
They may be ignorant of the fact that people are pissed off because they've surrounded themselves by a bunch of yes-men who say, oh yeah, you're doing a great job.
And globalism takes that, amplifies it by several orders of magnitude, makes it all worse, and really takes that same sort of inefficiency inherent within government, even in the best of times, makes it worse.
Yeah, I mean, it is funny to me.
The elites on the bureaucratic, on the sort of supranational side of government, they seem to be, Sticks, genuinely shocked that anybody has any nationalism.
Anybody has any national pride.
Anyone has any cultural pride.
Anyone has any vague in-group preferences.
They're, like, genuinely shocked.
They can't comprehend it.
And that shows to me such a staggering lack of fundamental self-awareness.
You know, try being a non-lefty person and getting a job in a lefty organization, you know, like a lefty newspaper, which is to say a newspaper, lefty academia, which is to say academia, you get the general trend.
They won't hire anybody who doesn't sort of conform to this rather warped worldview.
They have a very ferocious in-group preference themselves, but seem to be genuinely bewildered that anyone else would even remotely and even to a small degree mirror the in-group preferences displayed by the leftists themselves.
Yeah, I think that part of it has to do maybe with a disconnect between the people that are leading them.
The average lefty is social justice, where they're like a teenager, maybe a millennial in their 20s or something.
But the people directing all this, they all tend to be on the older end.
And some of them aren't really tech literate, so they don't understand quite how nationalism, populism, all these different things, I think, are promulgated on the internet.
Because normal people, they can see, like 10 years ago, if you were arguing for nationalism, We have no state or Pacific National, whatever it happens to be, on our own borders and stuff.
But now you can actually talk to people in parts of the deep third world of the internet, and you find that they have the same views.
It's considered normal.
They have, like, Hitler shops in India or Thailand or something like that, people dressing up as Nazis.
And it's considered humorous, or people don't quite get, I think, why people in the West are so hung up on it.
And even more so, if it's the civic side, And the other thing that I've noticed when it comes to bureaucracy is sort of thinking about the EU, whose fate, I think, we'll get to France in a sec, but the fate kind of hangs in the balance at the moment on the EU side.
But one of the things that was happening in Europe with the EU was originally they were talking about sort of common currency and free movement of goods and services and human capital and so on.
I actually didn't mind that too much because I thought what that would do is it would set up competition between countries for attractive work environments, you know, lower taxes and fewer regulations and so on.
So I thought that, you know, because I was naive and thought back in the day, hey, maybe they're doing something for the betterment of humanity.
Nope, just creating a giant warren to hide their incompetence and predation.
But as it turns out, as you know, I mean, along with sort of the free movement of people and the common currency came like none, if any, border restrictions and massive regulations to sort of even things out.
And that to me was the great missed opportunity.
I kind of like if it had turned into a loose federation of states, similar in some ways to sort of the federal government and the states.
If the federal government's small, then competition arises among the states for an attractive work environment.
The same thing could happen in Europe.
But then they began layering in all of these, you've got to follow insane regulations.
Are you selling salmon?
Well, you have to spend $10,000 to get the label salmon on your salmon.
You know, it just got mad.
And that, to me, was one of the great missed opportunities.
And maybe it never was much of an opportunity, but it was kind of how it was sold originally.
I think, well, that was probably by design.
They didn't really care what happened to the average poor person or like a small business owner any more than when they passed regulations here.
The federal government says, oh, well, this will help the environment, and this will help people who are impoverished, and this will help workers' protections.
And it almost never actually does that.
Well, all it does is cost a lot of money.
The money that you've saved by, you know, you've kept workers from getting injured or solved some environmental issue, it's immediately absorbed by the bureaucracy that's used to actually take that program and implement.
I think it would be a better world if people weren't so given over I'm sorry, Sticks.
I just wanted to remind you.
We must be able to put you in a conceptual box.
None of you may spill out of that conceptual box.
All of you must stay within that conceptual box.
Otherwise, there's just no way to process your arguments as arguments in and of themselves.
Trust me.
People are constantly trying to wedge me into this or that box, and it's like, if you're a free thinker, the boxes aren't really going to work.
They're not...
Totally unhelpful, but they can be a bit misleading.
So I just wanted to mention that the labels are a challenge, and I sympathize with that.
Yeah.
People want to assume that if you use that label, that it's automatically, oh, you want the total abolition of the state and or you want to privatize everything.
I take up a more pragmatic line, specifically because human corruption, it does exist.
It's going to exist among the lower class, middle class, bureaucrats, politicians, whatever it happens to be.
But when they implement these things, they always give them family-friendly terms, don't they?
It's like the war on terror.
Oh, we're going to keep people safe.
It's going to be so great.
We can totally defeat an adjective.
We can wage war against syllables and win.
Or dreamers, which I sort of...
Yeah, we can wage war against groups that are only loosely defined to begin with.
And when they make these goals through bureaucracy, inevitably, it's the same thing.
Oh, it's workers' protection and we're going to enact regulations.
And it never actually helps those people.
It just strangulates the system more and more and more.
And then time after time, the government always grows.
It never shrinks.
That becomes a problem.
And you've pointed out with some of these regulations as well that you can control what people would consider to be environmentally unfriendly production methods in the West.
It doesn't mean that they just vanish off the face of the earth.
I mean, they will tend to relocate themselves to environments where the environmental damage that they can wreak is far worse than anything they could achieve legally in the West.
Yeah, I mean, we should keep all the industry in the West.
The coal, sending that over to China, we can't really use it at all here because people would flip out completely.
I can understand that.
But as far as factories that produce lower-cost goods and stuff, yeah, we put them in India or China or maybe some of these other auxiliary countries.
And there, it's like, oh, workers?
Yeah, you can pay them five cents a day.
They can live in squalor.
That's okay.
We don't have a problem with that.
You can enslave them in some of these countries.
There are still actual slaves in the world.
Some politicians said something that's vaguely unkind to minorities here.
Meanwhile, there are actual people from cradle to grave that are literally enslaved all around the world, often in the third world.
Nobody even wants to talk about that.
Half of these people, they end up in some slave factory.
The Chinese...
there, I think they took some of these down because it was the international press is like, oh, it's human rights violation evidence and stuff.
And like suicide nets underneath their factory windows.
So if a worker just got so despondent, they'd toss themselves out the window.
They wouldn't actually die.
So they keep them as cheap labor.
Oh, this is the wild thing, too, because, I mean, the racial divide, racial politics really hit a high or low point, I guess you could say, in the race between Hillary and
And the fact that there are now open-air slave markets in Libya, open-air slave markets in Libya, as a result of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama's kind of dual plan to, hey, you know, let's get rid of Mama Gaddafi because he's thinking of a We're good to
go.
Yeah, and look at what happened when he first got elected.
He gets a Nobel Peace Prize for absolutely nothing.
Proceeds to drop way, way more bombs on people than W ever did.
W with shock and awe.
Short process.
Saddam's forces flee.
We do occupy.
Bad idea.
It was a totally bad idea from day one.
Obama takes over.
He gets that prize.
I'm going to make peace in the world.
We'll have such a great reputation.
Then he completely destroys that.
Libya is just sort of a symptom of this wider globalist policy, I think.
Because the same thing, they tried to do it in Syria, and it didn't quite work because people didn't want to strike Assad at the time.
And I oppose the strikes we did conduct on Syria at large, I should say, under Trump.
I'm going to hold him to the same standard.
They tried to unseat Assad.
It doesn't work.
ISIS proliferates there, Iraq falls apart again, they tried to overthrow the government of Egypt, and it's probably the only case where a martial law style takeover of the government actually liberated people as opposed to making the situation work.
Think what you will about sort of the military style government there.
Isn't it better than the Muslim Brotherhood that Obama favored and said it was an Arab spring of sorts?
Oh, I think that's certainly the case.
And this is one of the great temptations.
Maybe it's the great temptation of power.
But I have, of course, opposed regime change in foreign countries and, you know, repeatedly and vociferously over sort of the entire 10 years I've been public facing as a thinker.
But boy, I got to tell you, when it comes to North Korea, oh, that's my ring of power.
I'm like Boromir there.
It's like, okay, just once, just once, give me that ring of power.
One regime change, that's it.
And it's partly because I know that there are extraordinarily high IQ population, right?
Regime change in a low IQ population for whatever the causality is, whether it's genetic or environmental or whatever it is.
Regime change in a low IQ population tends to be a disaster, but if you look at sort of the history of Japan and Germany after the Second World War, regime change in a high IQ population can actually work out pretty well.
And I just think of North Korea.
I mean, what is it, 20, 25 million people?
It is like the largest open-air concentration camp on the entire planet, and the amount of horror that goes on in that country can scarcely be imagined.
And it is really tempting to say, well, you know, the West has these giant militaries and they've been used for a whole bunch of really bad things.
Ooh, it's kind of tempting.
But then I think, okay, well, they'll just strike South Korea.
They'll strike at China.
They'll do whatever.
I mean, it would have to be something so surgical.
But that is the only place where I could even remotely be tempted to entertain the idea.
What are your thoughts about that?
I mean, am I completely deluded by power or do you think there's a possibility of it?
I actually completely agree with you.
But the thing is...
We shouldn't be too hard on ourselves for, I think, compromising that issue.
When Libya was involved Here you've got an area where you've got near first world standards in a lot of areas.
Gaddafi was insane, but fiscally he was great for Libya.
Assad, Syria, except for the famine they had there, wasn't doing that badly.
So when we came in, there was a good opportunity to make the situation a hell of a lot worse.
With North Korea, how are we supposed to make it worse?
How can it possibly be worse?
That's a good point.
It can only improve.
People already, they starve.
There is no freedom there.
You can't enslave them any more than they're already enslaved.
You probably don't have the risk of ISIS or similar groups.
You might get communist guerrilla factions afterwards.
They can be suppressed, and you've got a government that already lays claim to that region.
With the same ethnic structure and a similar culture anyway, only Western democracy.
South Korea, the Republic of Korea, they can reinstall order.
We can help them do that.
They will try to strike South Korea.
We can probably overcome that fact, and eventually it's going to happen anyway.
It's inevitable, so why don't we get a head start on it, strike first, strike hard, and hopefully save hundreds of thousands of lives, I would think.
Well, yeah.
I mean, I was watching a documentary last night, sort of preparing for our chat, and was it in the 90s, a million North Koreans starved to death?
I mean, that to me is horrifying.
I mean, that is a just horrifying situation.
Right now, even though they're genetically indistinguishable from South Koreans, North Koreans are four inches shorter.
And, you know, I guess it's because I'm used to sort of traveling in North America and in Europe where people are...
Fairly well rounded out.
But man, seeing like these skeletons in uniform in North Korea, and I assume that the army is better fed than the general population.
And some of the footage that's been smuggled out of North Korea, I mean, what a horrifying existence it is.
And how frustrating it is, though inevitable and predictable, that the mainstream media never refers to the communist origins of the dictatorship.
Yeah, they never want to mention it.
They say, oh, they're more nationalists than anything else.
It's not really nationalism.
In a way, they'd be imperialist under that sort of ethos, because they claim the Republic of Korea is theirs the same as the ROK claims their land and the DPRK. They both sort of claim each other, and they don't even realize the war never even ended.
Just because there's a ceasefire, the Korean War has been going on continuously since the 50s.
It's why we have so many soldiers there.
Thank you.
The DPRK's stated goal is to lay waste to its regional enemies and reunify the peninsula.
The stated goal of the ROK is to reunify the peninsula, but they prefer diplomacy.
But the North Koreans right now, I think they just rejected, if I remember, not even yesterday, they rejected several times talks with China.
They're no longer even listening to the Chinese.
Now, who's to say that if the regime starts to destabilize, Kim isn't going to say, okay, general strike on South Korea, because it's our only shot.
I'm probably going to die anyway.
I'm going to die with honor.
I'm going to unleash nuclear hellfire on these people and punish them for getting away from communist ideals.
People would like to think that that kind of madman dictator archetype is a thing from the past.
I don't think it is.
I think he's way more dangerous than anybody really wants to admit.
Not to us.
Not going to nuke California.
But what if he does that to Seoul or Tokyo or something like that?
It's within his capability to do.
Well, I mean...
The whole damn kingdom is a blaster in the past, literally.
I mean, the whole place is like something out of – it's like a highly armed, relatively technological, brutal feudalism.
And, of course, Korea has been like the hermit kingdom and a very isolationist country for most of its – History.
And just because I know that we're going to get, and I hate to use this phrase, the nap trolls are going to be swarming over this conversation saying, well, you know, if you go and do something to North Korea, it's a violation of the non-aggression principle.
Now, I'm a big fan of the non-aggression principle.
I know that recently you yourself have talked about this.
I wonder if you could lay out the case for people that it is not a violation of the non-aggression principle to start dealing with North Korea and potentially militarily.
Yes.
They have made credible threats against us and to our allies.
It's not a threat that has no weight behind it.
It's not like they threatened to nuke the moon, destroy the world's tides, and bring about worldwide famine from which they would emerge on magical flying unicorns.
It's not some out there claim.
He's already got a hold of atomic weapons.
It's not unthinkable that he manages to build missiles and the capability to fire them further and faster.
And the North Korean state for years now has repeatedly threatened to nuke South Korea, to nuke Japan even more.
The South Koreans, they still sort of have a kind of weird brotherhood with.
I think it's on both sides because it's the same ethnicity, same region, same original culture.
As far as the U.S., though, if they could fire nuclear weapons at us and not experience any problems, they would.
It would be like, say your neighbor says, I'm going to burn your house down.
Okay, you know, what's going on here?
You'd probably think it was odd.
You might call the police.
They may or may not do anything about it.
But if that neighbor then starts piling cans of kerosene on their lawn while leering at you and apparently arming up to destroy you, you're probably going to take some sort of action.
It's a credible threat.
It's not like just some random threat.
I know people say words can't violate the NAP. In a way, yeah.
If you're just saying, like, well, I hate this group of people.
I don't like that group of people.
All of this group of people should be destroyed or something.
It's not a credible threat.
It doesn't even necessarily have a specific target.
This is a person with access to hundreds of thousands of relatively well-trained soldiers who has thousands of pieces of artillery constantly trained on large urban centers just south of him and has threatened to use force against a neighbor, acting preemptively.
I'm not talking about, oh, nuke the North Koreans.
You know, bomb them all to hell.
Oh, we'll kill all of them.
Ha ha.
That would be crazy.
I'm talking about striking Kim and hoping there's no response because the regime implodes immediately.
If they do respond, fixate on their military.
We defend our ally.
They've already fired on South Korea before on multiple occasions.
There was a situation years ago.
some South Korean islands, killed people, actual civilians died, would that not violate the NAP?
So then they have the right to respond.
They simply chose not to invade.
Are you saying that it would have been okay to invade them at that time?
Well, then why not now?
Right.
Well, and there is a challenge when it comes to Western powers saying to third worlders or second worlders or anywhere in the world where they say, oh, you have to disarm them.
You have to disarm.
One of the problems that's happened, as I'm sure you know, is that the leaders around the world, they look at – just two examples off the top of my head, right?
These are two heads of state who were convinced by the Western powers to disarm, at least the weapons of mass destruction, right?
Hussein did it, and Gaddafi did it, and it was all independently verified, supposedly, and so on.
Now, after they disarmed, they were invaded and deposed and slaughtered.
I mean, there was this trial, of course, for Hussein, and then he was hanged, and then Gaddafi was dragged through the streets and sodomized to death with bayonets.
I mean, that's a pretty...
Base Shakespearean expert.
Yeah, nasty stuff.
So I think the question is, looking at that kind of history, and it's not the only place where it's occurred, looking at that kind of history, I think people say, well, I better get a hold of some pretty powerful weapons, because every single time, it's like, you know, if the American government said to Americans, you know, you better disarm, don't worry, we'll protect you.
And then, you know, people who were disarmed were sort of dragged off to jail, that would be It would make people pretty skeptical if they weren't already.
And that international standard of, you've got to disarm, and then after you disarm, you're considered to be vulnerable, and basically the West can do what the hell they want with you, I think has made people a little leery about that kind of unilateral disarmament, which the West would never consider.
Yeah.
No, I would agree with that, and then those people probably shouldn't disarm.
But, I mean, Gaddafi was not routinely threatening to nuke The Tunisians or the Egyptians or anything like that, apparently had no real military plans for anything around him, worked fairly well with the other African governments.
Saddam Hussein, the U.S. government gave him into, back when he was fighting with the Iranians, actually helped him gas the Iranians, and then of course hypocritically claims, oh, he's gassing people, we've got to do something about this.
But with North Korea, it's not clear that there's any other nation in the world That feels positively towards them.
If China has now begun to reject them, they're standing alone.
The regime will collapse eventually, by hook or by crook.
They will attack the South Koreans, most likely, if that happens.
And they've threatened us on a regular basis.
Saddam never said, I'm going to nuke the United States, or I'm going to nuke, insert country here, that happens to be a military ally of the U.S. And Gaddafi, least of all, he was practically pacifistic compared even with Saddam Hussein or Assad or somebody like that.
These people, they're power mad.
They're butcherists.
They kill a lot of people.
But it's not ultimately our fight.
They're not threatening us.
They're not also making credible threats to any close allies of ours.
We also do a lot of trade with Japan and South Korea.
It would be a violation of our rights in a fiscal sense, too, if you want to be like, you know, free market, libertarian capitalism stuff.
It would be a violation of that as well when you really think about it.
And the threat is credible because he does have It's not clear he has the economic or industrial capability to even attain those weapons, but North Korea already did.
They've detonated several of them already.
Right.
And I've had this sort of, I mean, it's not my own thought, but I've sort of been following various threads around the internet, where it seems that American aggressive foreign policy, I don't know, tell me what you think about these theories.
Now, number one, of course, is, you know, does the country happen to be close to Israel?
That seems to be something to do with it.
it.
But the other thing to do with it is the pattern of leaders who are considering getting off the petrodollar, who are considering introducing alternative currencies, gold-backed currencies, basket of commodity-backed currencies.
They seem to be somewhat implicated in U.S. foreign policy aggression.
What do you think of these ideas, or in particular the last idea, the petrodollar resting on, of course, the U.S. dollar being the reserve currency around the world, and anyone who threatens that could theoretically bring sort of dominoes into motion that could take down substantial portions of the U.S. economy?
Well, first to Israel, I would point out Israel is the only state other than North Korea that has nuclear weapons but didn't sign the NPT.
And I say it's a touchy subject.
Sorry, that's Sorry, that's the Non-Proliferation Treaty, just for those who wanted to get back to that.
Yeah, Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
And it's a touchy issue for me, because under our own rules, we're not supposed to be sending the military aid, which we do, if they haven't signed the NPT. They've never publicly said, yes, we have nukes.
U.S. intelligence declassified from the Pentagon from, I believe it was 1986, if I remember correctly, which was last year.
That shows, indeed, they have multi-stage nuclear weapons.
So, no, I would say, Israel, touchy subject.
No, we shouldn't be sending the military aid, probably not sending them a penny until they sign it.
North Korea, of course, never will.
With the petrodollar, though, what I've said is it's not really the petrodollar.
Oil is dying off now, actually, around the world.
It's becoming cheaper.
It's being displaced in many parts of the Western world, especially here.
We've got a lot of our own oil anyway, so it's less important, but it's coming from Arabia.
It's really about the military projection dollar.
A rogue regime doesn't want to do trade with you.
It's not so much about currency itself.
I think that's just part of it.
What it is, is we end up playing world police because we're the only military in the world with true projected force.
You look at China, their military is growing.
They're building, I think, a second or third aircraft carrier.
But we've got 10 of them, or 11 now, I think.
Several copter carriers.
We're building several more.
Russia, I think, has one aircraft carrier.
If I remember, France has one or two.
We've got more of this naval and air capability than anyone else.
And so we sort of become the guarantor that world trade works smoothly.
The main problem I see is corporatism and globalism takes that trade that should be free and it should be guaranteed.
It should be friendly throughout the entire world.
That shouldn't shouldn't be a military issue.
People should be able to do their commerce, be left alone in their private marketplaces.
But what globalism has done is you look at the TPP or something.
It turns it into a bunch of bullcrap about copyright law and corporations suing native populations and destroying small businesses.
And when some nation tries to exempt itself from that globalized system, yeah, they have a tendency to get bombed.
We've seen this half a dozen times in the last decade.
It's crazy.
When it comes to motivation for what it is you do, maybe I'm sort of going through a bit of a lull phase, but after putting out a huge amount of effort trying to move the needle on various discussions and debates to do with Trump and Brexit and even the potential for Frexit with Marine Le Pen and so on, Maybe I'm just in a bit of a lull phase at the moment in terms of feeling like I have an effect.
But you know when they're saying in England, well, you know, it's going to take a long time, a lot of negotiations.
Now they're going to have a snap election.
And May is saying, well, we may not be able to control much of immigration after all.
And now with France, what are they?
I was just reading this story.
It's one of these things like, is this the onion?
This can't possibly be true.
This story, I'm sure you've read it as well, where they sent out, what, half a million double ballots to people living outside France.
I assume that the people living outside of France aren't going to be as concerned about immigration problems because they're not knee-deep in garbage and mattresses in Paris.
Trump unable to control immigration or at least unvetted people coming in from countries which have no real vetting and the vetting is all very sketchy out there anyway.
So I don't know if it happens to you like this sort of sometimes I'm like, I'm going to change the world.
It's going to be beautiful.
I got to have a huge effect on things.
And other times it's like bang, bang, bang, wall not moving, forehead getting bloody.
Do you ever have that sort of peak and valley and where does it sort of sit for you if you do?
I just constantly ride a peak because my prediction is that the old corporate media will die off.
Their ratings are dying.
Their trustworthiness is dying.
We're the future of the media.
We're the alt-media people on YouTube.
They have their blogs, vlogs, whatever, podcasts, whatever it happens to be.
And it ties in.
This is a good thing to segue into, actually, with Le Pen.
It's also the death of centrist sort of establishment politics.
Consistently, look at all of the elections, regardless of whether the outcome goes for the right or nationalism or whatever you want to term.
It can go far left too.
Who keeps suffering over and over?
Which party lost the most support in the Netherlands?
Builders gained support.
The far left gained support.
The centrist collapsed.
You look at Le Pen versus Macron.
Macron is barely able to maintain any advantage at all, despite being sort of the standard bearer of what used to be the juggernaut political movement, the we're the sane establishment party, is now tied with Le Pen, barely ahead of basically a communist and another nationalist.
You look at Austria, it was between, you know, essentially, communism light, a green movement, and Hofer, who used to lead an ethnic Teutonic party.
Where's the center?
The centrist parties have basically disappeared.
United States.
Clinton has difficulty against a self-proclaimed socialist.
Would that have happened a decade ago?
People are pissed off all over the world.
Some of them think, we need to go further left.
Corporations are the problem.
War mongering is the problem.
We need socialism or whatever, where they haven't experienced it usually, honestly speaking.
Other people, they want populism.
They want right-wing politics.
They want more of a free market.
But the center is completely gone.
The old interventionist sort of cronyism really seems to be dying off everywhere.
Trump is a symbol of this, too.
He may be, as I predicted that he would be, a half-assed reformer.
He's not perfect.
He has faults.
Some of his fans are delusional when they say he's perfect.
But he is different.
He's not the same.
His campaign was different.
What he said he would do is different.
The very idea, after sort of the Obama era of politics, Let's build a wall and make America great again.
It seemed almost antithetical to the old Goddard establishment.
These people would have been centrists maybe a decade ago.
Now, increasingly, they can be cast as far left, really, really out there.
And we see they're taking damage constantly, especially on the Internet.
All this censorship that's coming from the tech firms is an attempt to try to suppress not just the populist nationalist left, but also the real left wing at the same time.
on behalf of the same corporation-sponsored establishment movements in the corporate media.
At least that's the way I see it.
Right, right.
So when the center gets hollowed out, I mean, this sort of gives me the – I'll be back on the train track of like Weimar, the Weimar Republic, right?
When the dislocations in the German economy in the 1920s – and this was true throughout the world, you know, with the Smoot-Hawley tariffs and the massive drops in international trade and so on.
When the predictability of life, when the general soft steps up to the fairly comfortable middle class, the oft-maligned bourgeois, which, you know, everybody hates but seems to want to become a part of anyway, when that begins to hollow out, the lines do really begin to form in more extremist ways.
And I say extremist, and again, I hate falling into this kind of language, because everything sort of, for the last...
I don't know, 100 years in Western political thought has tended to favor the irresolute middle.
You know, extreme left, extreme right.
Well, on the extreme right, you have fascism, and on the extreme left, you have communism.
Therefore, something in the middle must be just lovely.
And it just, you know, no spine, no principles, short-term pragmatism, no ethics, no virtue, nothing to stand for.
And that sort of hollowing out of the middle, I guess maybe I could say it's more absolutist or just people who are more committed to their particular goals.
This hollowing out of the middle It doesn't always land the right way.
You don't always land, you know, when you spin that coin, it doesn't always land the right way.
And I think that's sort of my concern about what might be coming up.
Yeah, I've been concerned for a couple of years that that's what's happening.
The center is boring.
So a new generation comes along.
You see, nothing's working.
There are a lot of people that are out of work, they're poor, whatever.
They're going to blame somebody for it.
It makes sense to blame the same establishment that actually made all the decisions.
What the establishment then is devolving into is using a bunch of weird moral wedge issues.
They try to pit people against one another on meaningless basis.
Oh, well, black population, white population, gay and straight stuff.
They did this for years.
And it stopped working.
People are beginning to re-solidify on both the left and the right.
Now, does it really matter which side wins out in the end?
The hope should be.
That what replaces the establishment is sane.
That it's not going to start purging people.
That it lambasted before.
Unless it's some dishonest politicians.
Okay, that's okay.
Some bankers or something.
That they won't be purging people in the streets.
You know, you'd think.
Some Red Guard communist movement manages to gain some power.
And they're like, oh, we're going to crush the fascist skulls now.
They start lining people up and shooting them.
Or you get people who are like goose-stepping around.
They're like, oh, you voted for the Liberal Party 20 years ago off of the I think the longer the center holds, continues to be in power, the worse the situation gets, because then even the more sane movements, like Le Pen, she's sane.
She's not some crazy Nazi or anything like that.
She's sane, she knows how to govern.
Nothing she's suggested is really that out there.
It's just a difference from the establishment.
But if the center suppresses her and makes her followers feel more and more socially alienated, They may go further than that.
They might abandon Le Pen-style nationalism life and go into something far more violent.
The left, like maybe Melanchthon, someone who's halfway between socialism and communism, might go full Marx mode.
And they might actually gain support.
And there's not a whole lot the EU or any other group is going to be able to do about that.
The sums of people involved would be too massive, I think.
Unless they intend to commit genocide, then it's even worse.
Yeah, I mean, to use a ridiculous analogy, like you got one foot on the pier, one foot on the boat.
If the two are drifting apart, you got to choose one or the other, or you're just going to fall into nothingness.
And this, in some ways, I prefer...
Less of this centrism.
Because the centrism is, to me, always appeasement and compromise.
And just this hunger for kicking the can down the road.
Let's avoid...
I mean, we've known this for the Western governments for decades.
I mean, I've said this on the show before, but I remember when I was a kid, in grade 8 or so, I remember the teacher was saying, Oh, you know, well, of course, you've got to remember, you're going to have your old age pensions when you get older.
And half the class just burst out laughing.
Like, I mean, the idea, even when we were in grade 8, and, you know, we weren't all stone geniuses or anything...
But the idea that, oh yeah, don't worry, don't worry, you know, 50 years down the road, that pot of gold is going to be right there for you, because everyone knew about the debts and the deficit and all this kind of stuff.
And so this appeasement, this vote buying, this kick in the can down the road, to me, that's the middle.
That has to go.
No matter what.
And I think you've made a great point that the longer the middle holds, the longer that the descent can be suppressed, the longer it can be pushed, then it's like you're hiking and someone ahead of you is walking, and you get that blowback of the branch ahead of them.
The longer that branch is pushed, the worse the blowback happens.
And so we'd kind of want to, in a sense, get that backlash earlier so it can be more manageable rather than later when people have given up on any kind of compromise or any kind of reaching across the aisle.
And then you're basically just going to focus on either a cultural or a political or a direct physical civil war.
Yeah.
I mean, if these parties were to take hold now, like the right wing, the so-called far right in Europe, You'd get the dissolution of the EU, the restoration of national borders, some maybe restriction of some of the free movement, and that's all that would probably happen.
There wouldn't be any other axe to grind because that's what people are talking about.
It's when you wait longer and longer that all these other sort of side issues get injected, those which cause people to feel emotionally uncomfortable.
They rise to the top because they're the ones that everyone starts talking about.
It gets worse and worse.
We are lucky that Trump won the election.
It would be worse.
You'll notice the center, they always choose the wrong side when they make, as you said, when they take the left and the right and they try to bring them closer and make compromise, that compromise always involves corruption, bureaucracy, the loss of some sort of liberty.
We see it time and time again.
They're inept.
The alternative isn't always better, but at the very least it's something new that people will go after.
It's innate.
It's going to happen.
It's going to continue.
I do view these next rounds of elections in Europe as about the most important time in the history of Europe politically.
This idea, you know, we're going to bring in all these different cultures, all these different ethnicities, and everything's just going to work out hunky-dory.
Okay, well, explain to me then why Seoul, Korea, about the same size as Mexico City, is about the most peaceful place on the planet, right?
They don't have any diversity.
99% ethnically homogenous, language homogenous.
How come South Korea is doing – I'd like people to explain that to me.
If diversity is a strength, how can they possibly have any possible wealth or freedom or anything like that?
But if this dream, this idea that we're going to bring all these different groups together with a lot of whom have opposing goals and ideals, and it's just going to somehow work out, you know, it's like that old cartoon, you know, like the guy is up there at the whiteboard, there's a blackboard, he's up there at the blackboard, he's a mathematician.
And, you know, there's a whole bunch of equations to the left, a whole bunch of equations to the right with a solution.
And then in the middle, there's a cloud which says, and then a miracle occurs.
And there's someone who's looking at this and says, could you just break that middle part out for me a little bit?
Because that seems to be kind of the crux of the issue.
And so bringing all this stuff in together, diversity plus proximity has revealed to be...
Combat-based throughout most of history.
The miracle that is supposed to occur, nobody really has an answer as to how this miracle is supposed to occur.
And if there can't be some political solution, how can it not escalate into this kind of Balkanization, Kosovo-style aggression that we've seen so many times throughout in history?
And this basic reality is what I really want Europeans to wake up to.
This experiment has been tried before.
It's never been tried with a welfare state, which to me is one of the big problems.
If you want people to come into your society and integrate to some degree, and I think new ideas and new perspectives and so on, fantastic, right?
But if you want them to integrate, they need to kind of have an incentive to work within the framework, moral, legal, economic, within your system.
If you bring them in and pay them to not integrate, which is basically what the welfare state does, how on earth can this possibly work?
You're just getting more and more balkanization in your society.
Yeah, you need to have a very strong civic culture, and it can't be a tidal wave of people coming from some other culture.
You get social alienation.
And then the politicians, those same centrists, they always love to capitalize on it.
They see that there are multiple groups and they'll they'll talk to one group, say, oh, that group stealing your jobs or something.
I'll talk to the other group.
All the other group of people is oppressing you.
And it's they're enabled to do this because there are so many newcomers that don't assimilate because of the welfare structure, as you said.
And things just sort of they stay perpetually destabilized.
But the establishment doesn't want stability internally.
It may want a stable globalist world order.
But within countries, it wants at least a little bit of instability.
It's like the fireman that sets fires so he can be a hero and go put him out.
That's how government justifies its own growth.
And so I'm not surprised that they constantly harangue on this.
The same people that are saying, oh, let's all live together and sing kumbaya.
Then they turn around and say, oh, white privilege, though.
You gotta pay reparations or something like that.
Or they go over and they say, oh, Well, Black Lives Matter, or they say, oh, well, this community's got higher crime.
Oh, we caused the crime through rampant poverty, through government interventionism, but just ignore that part.
Vote for us, please.
Oh, this...
I can't remember.
I think it was in South Korea where they were being nagged about multiculturalism, and they said, well, why?
I mean, because when you get ethnic groups coming in, all they do is vote their own in-group preference and set up conflict.
I mean, that's inevitable, so why on earth would it be on it?
It's like, ah...
That's why you guys clock in at 106 IQ. It's just those few extra points.
It seems to make all the difference in the world.
And this, I think, is important.
I was just thinking about this this morning before we chatted, Styx, that when I was growing up, and this may be because of white privilege, but I don't think so.
When I was growing up...
I was in high...
Okay, so first I went to boarding school when I was six, and there was no question of racism.
I mean, to be honest, it was wall-to-wall tapioca, so there really wasn't much going on that way.
When I came to Canada, I first lived in Whitby, then I came to Toronto and went to school, went to a variety of different schools.
And when I went to school in Toronto...
I think there was like 12 or 1300 kids in the high school.
Lots of different races, ethnicities and so on.
Lots of friends of different groups.
But this obsession with race and racism really wasn't there.
And nobody sort of woke up in the morning saying, oh man, I hope I don't get called a racist today.
I hope that the label doesn't stick to me.
I hope that's not that big problem.
And now, when I'm talking to younger people, even in high school, that's a big thing these days.
It is sort of, and I guess I left high school, oh lord, let me not do the math here.
Yeah.
But let's just say, a couple of decades back, it was not that big an issue.
Now it's a huge issue, and that to me is one of the fundamental problems, that if you're going to have a multi-ethnic society, if that's what people want...
You know, focus on stoking racial grievances or multi-ethnic society.
Pick one because you can't have both in the long run.
If you can invite a lot of people in, great, you know, fine.
But let's not set each other against each other all the time and set up all of these grievances and all of these problems because that is a clear path to massive destabilization.
Yeah, it just makes the problem worse.
It's like when I was in school.
It was sort of pre-white privilege era.
And so we were aware, yeah, racism is not something that you do.
It's unacceptable.
And there was no reason to be because it's like nobody was fixated on the issue.
It's like, oh, fellow human being.
It doesn't matter if they're, like, black or, you know, you have some exchange student.
They're from Taiwan or something.
Who cares?
Yeah, because nobody's trying to blame you and say, oh, because you are white.
I mean, I don't use the term reverse racism because it's literally just racism.
When some politician or business or something is saying, oh, you've got Les Melanin, you're white, of European origin.
Therefore, reparations, privilege, something wrong with you, you don't know how it feels, blah-de-blah-de-blah, you've got it so easy in life, you know, you're poor as shit, but you've got it easier in life because you're white for some reason.
That's what really caused all of these problems here.
All of the racial divide was caused...
Mostly by the multi-culti leftist politicians.
It wasn't caused by the right.
They went out of their way for years and years there to not even address the issue because they didn't want to be called racist and they didn't want racial tension.
The Republicans kept trying, election after election, to absorb minorities into the party because they said, well, help us in this state and that state.
And it's all very political, but they were trying to do that.
They went out of their way to be polite to people.
would continuously browbeat them.
Oh, you're not apologizing enough.
You passed some law 50 years ago.
It was insensitive.
So therefore, you're a racist.
And anyone who doesn't bow at the altar of diversity, they're a racist too.
Well, and of course, Japanese Americans, East Asian Americans outstrip whites when it comes to income and so on.
Nobody complains about that privilege because they're not enough of a tax base to pillage, right?
You've got to focus on the group that pays the most taxes, generally white males, make them feel as bad as possible, and then use them as livestock to buy votes by making them feel guilty, cough up all the resources in the known universe.
To me, it's mostly just about resource transfer, not particularly about the question of racism.
That just happens to be the lockpick that opens up the treasure chest.
Yeah, then they don't want to talk about affirmative action.
Huge issue for quite a while.
They don't want to talk about how it's also applied to Asian Americans.
You're Japanese.
You're trying to get into a school.
It's heavy on math.
Good luck, because they're going to downgrade your score.
you get a really high marks in the SAT.
You have to get way higher than somebody even who's white in order to get into the same school, let alone somebody who's black or Native American or something.
Meanwhile, on the other side, they're saying to like black people, essentially what the left has told them is you're not smart enough to compete on an even footing.
We have to help you and give you a leg up because of evil white people.
And it's downright insulting.
It doesn't make any sense.
It's like, are you going to look at people as individuals as the left once proclaimed it should do?
Oh, you know, imagine a future where all our children, little black boys and girls can join hands and sing to God together and stuff.
Are you ever actually going to get around to doing that?
Or are you going to continue talking about my privilege because I happen to be white or something like that?
You can choose one and only one.
Well, let me tell you about my days.
So my days, I wake up in the morning, brush my teeth, do my hair, takes a while.
And then I stare at the phone and I wait and I wait and I wait for the phone to ring and for someone in the NBA to call me up and say, hey man, hey Steph, we've been reviewing our numbers and we're so sorry but we don't have enough 50-year-old white guys in the NBA. So, you know, come on in.
Come on in.
We're going to lace you up with some kicks and you're going to pretend that you can jump more than a foot and a half.
And this is just, you know, this sort of affirmative action stuff.
Well, I mean, and of course, it was supposed to be temporary.
It was never supposed to be quotas.
And of course, you know, whatever the government says it's not going to do, get ready.
That's what's coming in, like a brand to the forehead.
That's what's going to come in next.
And this...
And it goes past race two.
It's like females in the workplace.
Nobody complains about not having enough females in the coal mine, so to speak.
That's true.
Now, this also I was reading this morning about – and this is sort of old numbers.
I mean, they've been updated for this year, but I think a lot of people know them.
But I think there's some pretty significant implications.
Like 1% of the richest Americans pay like 40% of federal taxes.
40% of Americans don't pay any federal taxes.
That doesn't mean that they're completely not paying any taxes at all.
But, you know, there is a real divide.
You know what Ayn Rand used to call like the producers and the looters.
And there, I think, is a huge divide in America.
And I don't know how to solve this divide.
And the divide is, of course, people who are contributing through force to the state coffers and then the other people who are receiving the benefits from that.
Because if you work, and I know you work very hard with you.
Video tour day is a lot of work, right?
So if you're working hard, if you have a family, if you're sort of that kind of responsible person, you don't have a lot of time to do things, like to go protest, to write up placards, to go march and wear vaginas on your heads or whatever crazy stuff is going on this particular week.
But the people who are dependent on the state...
A, a huge incentive because, you know, significant portions, if not all of their income, is coming from state coffers.
They have a huge incentive to keep the government big and keep taxes high.
They don't care about tax increases.
Tax increases are kind of good for them because it means more money.
They can say, well, you know, the government collected more money.
Let's go get more benefits from the government.
A huge incentive to maximize state.
No incentive or a negative incentive to minimize taxes.
And all the time in the world to organize and to, you know, get things going, particularly with, you know, new social media and so on.
Whereas on the other side, people who are working hard and busy don't have the time because they're paying less in taxes than other people are receiving as a proportion of their income.
Maybe 20%, 30%, 40% they're paying in taxes.
Other people are getting 100% of their income from taxes.
No time, negative incentive versus lots of time and massive positive incentives.
I don't really see how this is going to play out in any peaceful way without some general economic collapse or collapse in state funding.
How?
How do you think these imbalances can be addressed short of collapse?
Or can they?
I think we collapse the tax system by reforming it and making sure that virtually everybody is paying little to nothing.
I think the vast majority of government functions aren't even necessary.
It's not necessary for our military to be...
What is it?
I think it costs as much as the next three or four nations in a row combined.
We've got all the welfare spending.
We probably wouldn't need it.
If we just lowered taxes on small businesses, people would be able to make a living.
They wouldn't need welfare.
You address half the problem there.
There will always be some people who slip through the cracks if you've got a free market.
It's possible to take care of them without spending hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars on all of these programs.
It can be massively streamlined.
You could eliminate basically, you know, Easily, three-quarters, 80% of all the bureaucratic positions.
Put them in the private marketplace.
If that function is really necessary, then let it be privatized, largely.
There are a very small number of things that the government does well.
Welfare is not really one of them.
It's relatively inefficient, it seems.
Military would be one of the few things the government should focus on.
Oh, it's crazy high.
Yeah, it's massive.
But the multinational corporations don't pay that rate.
They pay zero.
Sometimes they get a tax return.
It's the small businesses and the self-employed that get hammered.
There's a self-employed tax on people's side income.
If you edit books and get donations and stuff, you have to pay that additional tax too.
It doesn't make any sense.
And then if you get to a certain income bracket, that actually gets removed and you no longer have to pay it.
It's like a weird inverted system.
I don't even quite understand.
I don't know exactly what genius decided to route the tax code the way that it works.
My goodness, if they're dead, we should dig them up and throw them in the ocean.
Bring them back to life so we can kill them again.
But I think the analogy that comes to my mind sometimes sticks is...
If dinosaurs could lobby God to ban mammals, they sure as hell would have, right?
Because, you know, I mean, and so when big corporations, when you give the government the power to do something, this is an old argument that the late, great Harry Brown used to make, but when you give the government the power to do something...
You give them the power to sell influence and you give them the power to do the basic of politics, to reward their friends and to punish their enemies.
When you give the government the power to do something, that power is going to be influenced by people who aren't you, who aren't me, and who aren't anyone that we know in general.
And so, yeah, big corporations are going to do it.
Big unions are going to do it.
you know, the huge numbers of people at the very top, the very sort of top of the pyramid of power, they're going to be the ones who are having the handshake deals under the table with the politicians.
They're going to be the ones who can afford the lawyers to defend against complex regulations.
It is a war of big corporations and the state against the mammals of entrepreneurship and the innovation of smaller, leaner, more hungry entrepreneurs.
I mean, I was an entrepreneur in the software field for 15 years now, My God, the amount we worked was staggering.
We were so hungry.
We were so focused in grabbing the new technology, going to conferences, getting the latest and greatest stuff.
And we had the nimbleness.
No HR department.
You know you're in the sweet spot of business when you don't have the pink ghetto of the HR department.
But we had all of that incentive, and the large corporations always face that problem, that there are smaller, leaner organizations full of younger people who can work all night, who don't have kids, you know, all this kind of stuff.
And they have to unite with the state to minimize competition.
I mean, if the government had been 100 years ago as it is now, we'd still be driving...
Horses and carriages because the horses and carriages, well, you know, the car is environmentally unfriendly and it's bad.
Horse crap aside.
And so the innovation comes despite the fact that there's this uniting of big business and the government to squelch the nimbleness of youthful competition.
Sorry, there's not even a question in that.
I just, you know, wanted to get that off my chest.
What do you think?
Yeah, just imagine how wonderful it would be if they weren't able to collude and suppress small businesses and entrepreneurs and, you know, people inventing stuff and over-regulate everything out of existence.
My goodness, we probably would be living on the moon right now.
I want my jetpack!
I was promised a jetpack!
Yeah, but they don't care if we progress and start making like a Mars base or a lunar colony because under that system where we've actually accomplished it, they wouldn't profit from it.
Or their profit margin would be a lot lower.
And so it makes more sense for them to strangulate the US. That's where globalism comes in.
They want to strangulate all the other countries too, both rich and poor, and subjugate them to the same sort of system.
And that way they can continuously siphon.
They give people a little bit of liberty here and there, and people, they have some of their money, and yes, you can buy the new TV, but you're going to have to wait and get the iPhone next month or something.
And they do this to both people who make very little.
You know, people who don't pay into the system.
I don't even blame them.
I don't care that they don't pay taxes because I think that many more people shouldn't pay any taxes.
You look at them, they get screwed.
By the government.
So does the brain surgeon that makes seven, eight hundred thousand dollars a year.
They just get screwed in different ways, essentially.
Right.
Now, where do you think culture is these days?
Because culture was pretty much a monolith when I was growing up.
Basically, lefties ran everything, and it was just a matter of time before you were going to get verbally attacked for thinking for yourself, as lefties tend to do.
But with the rise of – I hate to sort of this left-right thing is a bit of a bichromatic non-rainbow that's not very intellectually interesting.
But let's just say the rise of alternatives to leftist orthodoxy that have arisen, particularly, you know, we own the YouTube.
I mean, we own YouTube, which, of course, is why YouTube is being targeted now.
How do you think this is affecting culture?
How do you think this is affecting not just political discourse, but just very sort of foundational discourses about state, society, individual philosophy, and so on?
Because this really is, I think, outside of the printing press and Martin Luther back in the day.
This is pretty unprecedented in human history to have this kind of explosion of alternative viewpoints in the world.
Yeah, and that's just what it is.
It's the rise of the outsiders.
Viewpoints that before could be easily suppressed because you never heard about them or you only heard negative stuff about them, now they can put their own views out there on a blog or a vlog or something.
And that's good for the far left, it's good for the far right, it's good for libertarianism and ancaps and syndicalism and primitivism.
It's good for anyone who doesn't agree with the boring status quo.
And the boring status quo is the old guard corporate model, the old guard media model.
I mean, even when they do suppress their competitors, they're still on their way out.
Their profits are down.
It's not really working.
I can't think of an older guard company.
If I had money to invest, I would invest in any of them.
I'd rather invest in someone who's still working out of their garage or their basement or something, making some nonsensical invention.
It's probably going to be a better return on your investment at this point.
The old media is dying, the old establishment politicians are dying, and everything is changing.
I spoke during the election of the idea of the paradigm shift.
We saw this in the Rust Belt in the election results.
And we go through these from time to time.
The particular paradigm we've been suffering under for the last couple of decades, neocons, neolips, social Marxism, and social engineering, is beginning to die.
That means that for a while now, they'll look like they're actually, they'll attempt to suppress people.
They'll use the power that they do have to make themselves look bigger, to make themselves look invincible, while they try to convince you and I and everyone watching this video, by the way, that we're doomed.
That they're the ones that'll be in power forever.
But they won't be.
In a decade, half of these people won't exist.
They won't have their positions in power.
It's happened before.
It happens continuously throughout the human timeline in every culture, except where there's so much militarism, I mean like a North Korean model, where there can be no change because any attempt to be an agent of change is killed off immediately.
Yeah, I mean, if just people like you and I, I mean, I tried in some ways to work within the existing artistic and intellectual paradigms.
I mean, I was in theatre school and wrote plays and produced plays and tried to work that way.
But running into that soft, sticky, squishy wall of general Canadian cultural leftism was just like, you know, you have those dreams where you're slowly running into thicker and thicker jello.
Yeah.
I can't move slow motion sickness.
I couldn't.
It was just getting too hard.
So then I'm like, okay, well, I really like to think and talk and write and so on and went into undergraduate and then graduate school.
And my talents were recognized.
I had essays read out to entire classes as an example of perfect essays and all that.
And everyone recognized my talent until they understood my arguments.
And then it was like...
Back to Jell-O. Slowly going uphill through electrified Jell-O. Can't seem to...
And it just got slower and slower.
And then I moved to the business world and had a great deal of success there.
But, you know, again, as you grow there, things get more political.
And then there's, of course, the whole problem of people wanting to make a quick buck off your stock price.
And, you know, it just...
But now, like, I finally have a no-compromise position.
I finally have a—I can speak my mind.
No gatekeepers.
I don't have to please anyone except my audience, and hopefully you in the course of this conversation at least.
But that idea of being able to speak to the world forever— With no gatekeepers, other than, you know, my own integrity and conscience, which you kind of want to begin with, I mean, what's that been like for you, to turn from, like, the most interesting guy at the dinner party to a guy with, well, north of 100,000 subscribers?
It's been interesting, and I try to use that to support liberty and to make people aware of what's going on in the world.
It's not like some show of genius or anything, but It's easy to understand what's going on because we can see it throughout human history time and time again, but people that get so caught up in what the corporate media wants them to talk about or wants them to think about, they don't even think about these things.
It's like an attempt to veil your perception of reality, like pulling the wool over your eyes.
And if you can lift that back and let people see things as they really are, try to give them analysis, try to give them some information, They can go out and do the rest themselves.
All you've done is take the illusion away that's been spun around by CNN or by some political movement or something like that.
And it's rewarding.
It's fun.
It's entertaining.
I have a great time doing what I'm doing.
Not just making videos.
I write.
I edit books, too.
It's fun.
It's profitable.
But at the end of the day, primarily, it's fun and entertaining for me.
And hopefully, it's helping people's awareness a little bit.
Do you watch any dino media?
What do you call them?
Now, no good story usually starts with those phrases.
Usually it's, and I suffered so much, I thought I was dying.
But no, I just went for a cleaning and all that.
And my dentist has, it's like old school TV. You know, it's like three-dimensional TV, not like the flats, like old school TV. I know, I'm telling you, it's like going back in time, but not so far back in time, they have to pull everything that moves.
And I was lying on the back, you know, they put your Bono glasses on and the bright lights like you're being interrogated by the mafia or something.
And I'm looking up there and the woman who was cleaning my teeth was like, oh, CNN is playing.
Do you mind?
And my first impulse was like, yes, I mind.
Good Lord, it's a brain virus.
And then it's like, actually, no, the last time I saw CNN, I was at the airport.
So I said, okay, you know what?
Do it.
You know, let me hear CNN. And it was Wolf Blitzer.
Oh, my God.
It's so transparent when you see this kind of stuff.
And one scene, you know, it can't be unseen.
Because he was interviewing, I think it was a congressman or something, about Trump's, you know, wanting to use American steel rather than foreign steel to buy American stuff that's going on.
Yeah, and Wolf Blitzer was like, well, wouldn't you say, though, that that might make goods and services more expensive, thus driving up the cost for the average American?
It's like, yeah, fucking right, Wolf.
You've always been so concerned with rising prices.
That's why you've done so many stories on the Federal Reserve and fiat currency and central banking.
Oh, I remember when this whole thing was going on with QE1, QE2, QE666. A little shout-out for you there.
Everybody was like, oh yes, well all of this extra money printing, that's really going to drive up prices.
But the moment that Donald Trump is suggesting a policy that might get Americans jobs, oh now we're very concerned about rising prices, even though that probably wouldn't happen.
Nobody talks about the fact that if they have jobs but they're not on welfare, government can reduce taxes more than the price of goods will ever go up.
And it's so transparent.
CNN needs people to be unemployed.
Why?
Because it's three o'clock in the afternoon and they need people to not have a job so they've got an audience.
They also need people to not work so that they don't care about rising taxes.
They don't care about big government.
They want.
So for the left, it's very, very clear.
Anything that is going to help Americans get jobs is the enemy for the dino media because it cuts out their daytime viewing and it creates a whole bunch of people who want smaller government because they're finally paying taxes rather than collecting from the trough.
And I'm watching story after story, and it was all the same thing, and it's so transparent.
I think people are sort of seeing it with CNN and other places but man Man, it's like blind...
North Korea, I mean, at least they know it's propaganda.
Yeah.
I've watched literal North Korean TV streams, the pirated feed.
Even that has more intelligence half the time than CNN. I avoid encountering that material as often as possible because I really don't want my IQ to go down, you know, over time.
I don't want to be a drooling vegetable or anything like that.
I think it's funny, though, when you see someone like Blitzer, American Steel, for example, a good example to use.
It's like, oh, the prices will rise.
Well, you don't care about the prices rising because you enacted new regulations.
You're just worried that those steelworkers will make a higher wage and that the new prices won't even really affect them.
Well, and of course, it was the Rust Belt and manufacturing belt that really helped Trump get into power.
So of course you don't want people to get manufacturing jobs.
Also, if there's a road to the middle class called manufacturing, then people aren't going to pay $100,000 to be brain infected with lefty viruses in universities by pursuing art degrees that ended up working at baristas while hating corporations.
I mean, so the whole thing is just so ridiculous.
Okay, so let's close off with one Monsieur LeTrump.
So, in viewing your videos throughout the election cycle, the previous election cycle, you certainly had, I think it's fair to say, qualified support of Trump.
And I think that's, you know, a reasonable position, you know?
Okay, if he does what he says he's going to do, a lot of good's going to come out of it.
But, you know, there is that strikes like a cobra deep state...
Pushback that's going to happen.
We all knew what's going to happen, at least those of us who understood how these things work.
So in the battle between the sort of embedded hydra of the alphabet soup deep state agencies and dependents and, you know, Trump and his supporters and so on, how do you think he's doing and where is he relative to your expectations and where do you think it's going to go?
He's doing decently.
He's doing as well as I expected him to do, because I never expected to be some magical savior.
You know, all of a sudden, every international bank bursts into flames, and the Federal Reserve crumbles off into the swamps of D.C. Wait, wait, say that again, but more slowly.
No, I'm kidding.
Go ahead.
What was I going to say?
Oh, yes.
Trump is doing fairly well.
He shelved the wall, but that's because of congressional Republicans.
People need to know that's not his fault.
It doesn't mean he doesn't support the idea.
It means they refuse to fund it.
They want to negotiate further.
It's going to take him more time.
He tried to freeze the migrant crisis here, like refugees and so forth.
The courts wouldn't let him.
Again, it's not his fault.
He has no way to override them without going to the Supreme Court.
That takes a lot of time.
He'll have to formulate a case for that.
On the Second Amendment, he's already made inroads.
People haven't noticed that, right?
But he's been repealing a lot of the Obama-era executive orders on gun control.
Yeah, I believe it was the Hearing Protection Act.
He supports that.
Did that already pass?
I can't even remember.
I don't know.
But I know he would sign it if it does, and the Republicans have the House and Senate.
Second Amendment, that's all good.
He's trying with the wall and with immigration freeze, although on the latter, by the time it gets to the Supreme Court, it'll no longer be an issue.
So there's that.
I opposed his strike on Syria.
Wait, hang on.
Sorry to interrupt your thoughts again.
You mean as far as if there's a wall, it will be less of an issue?
No, no.
I mean on the immigration freeze, because if it takes years and years to enact it, what's the point?
Right, right.
You need the immigration freeze now rather than later.
Well, and there are more migrants coming in under Trump than even under Obama.
Because, of course, if they feel that there's going to be a freeze, this is when they want to push to get in.
So it's one of these horrible things where, because you wanted to control migrancy, you may end up with more than you had before.
Yeah.
Yeah, you should focus on the wall first.
Yeah.
As far as foreign affairs go, he's doing fairly well.
He actually got China to ignore the North Koreans, which is something that no former president has done.
That's already at least a mild victory for him.
Syria, I oppose the strike, but if it's just diplomatic hand-wringing, it's not like a game-changer for me.
Overall, I'd give him like a 6 out of 10 right now, which is pretty good.
Now, that's not great, but compared to what we've been through for the last few decades, yeah, it's stellar.
Another Ronald Reagan at the very least.
Well, and compared to what might have happened under Hillary.
Oh yeah, Hillary already would have taken us to war with Iran by now.
Well, and I think there would have been significant suppression of dissent.
She'd already talked about going after people on the internet, on social media, and so on.
There could have been, you know, what's happening to Facebook in Europe, where, you know, they're hit with massive fines if they don't comply with various dictates limiting free speech and opinions and so on.
And I think there would have been a huge series of disasters that would have occurred.
So this doesn't solve the problem for me any more than Le Pen saying, OK, well, we're going to freeze immigration.
Let's say she gets in in France in a couple of days.
Let's say that she is able to do that.
It's one thing to say it.
It's another thing to actually achieve it through the sticky molasses of the Western court systems these days.
It buys maybe another 10 or 15 years for France to try and solve some of these problems.
It doesn't solve the problem.
We've got disparate birth rates and the math isn't that complicated.
But Trump does not solve the problems.
I don't know if you agree with this or not, but I just want to remind people that he buys some time.
But, you know, foundational issues still need to be addressed, whether he addresses them or someone else.
You know, don't just sort of think, well, I ticked that box and, oh good, all the problems are going to be solved.
The same thing in France.
You know, this is just the beginning of some of the real challenges.
You know, for the last 100 and 150 years in various places in the West, things have got progressively more central plan-y, socialist-y, and all of that.
And certainly academia and the media, which is how a lot of people get their stuff, directly or indirectly.
And the culture is very much on the left.
So, you know, this is just the beginning.
You know, Trump may have spun the wheel on the supertanker, but it's going to take a lot of people to keep it turning.
Yeah, they give us the opportunity to solve these problems, which is an improvement.
The alternative is you don't even have the possibility.
Trump, Le Pen, all these people, they give us a fighting chance, which is all we need.
I believe fundamentally in the Western world.
I think we'll pull through in the end.
But if we keep going down that Centrist, censorship, globalist road.
We don't even have a chance anymore.
We keep getting weaker and weaker.
And when the West starts getting really, really pushed into alienation, when it gets really weak, when it's getting invaded on all sides, it's when you get genocides.
That's when you get the true fiery hell of war happens when the West is really, really pressed in on itself.
We saw this during the Muslim conquests and stuff.
All the butchery that results.
It's like, well, we've been pushed too far.
It's go time now.
If you can reform things and change them ahead of that, so be it.
Either way, I think the West survives, but Trump and Le Pen and others can only enable us to have the ability to do so.
And it's a funny thing, too.
I get these thoughts occasionally, and it's not a fully fleshed out thesis, but I'll run it past you anyway.
The traditional solution to government promises that are impossible to fulfill has been war.
You know, oh, well, you know, we can't possibly meet our obligations, and so we're going to just have a war, and that is going to trigger people's capacity for sacrifice.
I mean, in order to solve the fiscal problems Western governments face, there's going to have to be sacrifice.
People are going to have to forego pensions.
People are going to have to cut – the benefits are going to have to be cut.
I mean, there is going to have to be sacrifice, and there's going to have to be suffering.
And we are sort of tragically or inevitably wired such that we will accept sacrifices when there's imminent danger.
But when the danger remains largely abstract, people get very resentful at being asked to sacrifice.
And so the way that sacrifices have been triggered is through war, historically.
Now, in the West, war has become obsolete.
Certainly war with nuclear powers, like proxy wars in other countries without weapons of mass destruction.
Sure, you know, but that's kind of remote and that doesn't trigger the kind of sacrifices that people need to make in order to right the ship.
I mean, this is why in the 60s, you know, had Vietnam plus a massive expansionistic welfare state.
People wouldn't even say, well, you know, we can't have the welfare state because we've got the war in Vietnam.
They're like, yeah, we can have both because printing presses.
And so...
In the West now, given that there are, I mean, I don't know, I hear these numbers and they just blow my mind, like $180 trillion of unfunded liabilities that the American government has gotten itself into.
Historically, the only way out of that has been war.
And there's never been a war or collapse, you know, one or the other.
And a collapse isn't going to happen if war is possible.
And so I wonder...
And I don't know if this is like guys in a smoky room with, you know, those weird green visors and stuff, or whether it's just this instinct that people in power have to coordinate what needs to be done.
But I wonder if the level of social conflict that's being engendered through race baiting, through gender baiting, through Christian and non-Christian baiting, through immigration and so on.
I wonder if it's like, well, they know that the riot is coming to an end.
It's not possible to start a war because no one's going to invade anyone else in the EU.
They've all got nukes and they've all got treaties and it's not going to happen.
So I wonder if it's just like, well, we're just going to provoke war internally.
We're just going to create so much social conflict that we're going to say, well, you know, we'd love to be able to fulfill all our obligations, but, you know, sadly, there's just too much conflict and now we have to suppress your free speech and, you know, we're not going to pay your pension and you have to shut up about it because, look, half the country's on fire.
I think it's worse than that.
I think we're headed towards World War III. You've mentioned that, yeah.
Let's have the case for that, because I feel a flutter of hope in my chest, so please see if you can put your jackboot on it and squash that butterfly, cold joy.
What do you think?
Because I know you've got some pretty dire predictions about this stuff.
Yeah, it's not certain, but it gets more and more likely by the day, and what I think is going to happen is eventually mutually assured destruction will break down.
Somebody's going to get it in their head, That they should attack the other side preemptively because they're going to develop the means to destroy mutually assured destruction.
My best money is on sometime in the next half century, the United States develops, whether it be energy weapons, whatever it happens to be, the ability to destroy most or all of an enemy's nuclear deterrent without it being used.
When that happens, that other country will attack us preemptively before it's able to be fully deployed.
Because otherwise, the U.S. wins the grand chessboard, Matt goes away anyway, and we end up bullying everyone else for the rest of eternity, and the whole world falls into chaos.
In the resulting worldwide civil war, it'd probably be even worse than a nuclear conflict, honestly.
More people would probably die.
There'd be even more instability.
But once mutually assured destruction is taken off the table, there's nothing to restrain a nuclear power from using those weapons.
And whether those means are developed or not, you could also have an accident.
You could have sabotage.
There are any of a number of other ways in which nuclear war could erupt.
I'm not saying, by the way, just to make it clear, I'm not saying what's happening in North Korea is the precursor to World War III. That's a regional conflict.
If we were to attack the DPRK, the most that would happen is China would grab up half of the northern end of the peninsula.
It wouldn't lead to a nuclear war beyond maybe Korea, and even that's in question.
But given the long-term span, there's no way to put the nuclear Pandora's box back into itself.
There's no way to take the problem and make it go away without actually getting rid of nukes by using them physically.
Unless we get invaded by aliens and the whole world decides to nuke them instead.
Right.
And there is this problem, and it's a very big and deep-seated problem that I've only sort of become aware of more recently, which is – I sort of think about the hugely collapsing birth rates among sort of first world nations.
I mean with Japan, of course, leading the pack, I think, and Italy and other sort of Western European countries fairly close behind, that when – you develop wealth because high IQ, universalism, a sense of equality under the law, property rights, free trade, all those kind of very advanced conceptual property rights, free trade, all those kind of very advanced conceptual And when high IQ populations, advanced cultures get a lot of resources, you make a lot of money and all that.
They stop having babies.
And that is a big problem.
It's like, okay, intelligence is cursed by its own success, so to speak.
But when less advanced cultures or civilizations get excess resources, they just have a whole bunch more babies.
And so you get this kind of displacement, this dislocation.
And if you look at the population of Africa over the past sort of 100 years, it's gone through the absolute roof.
Which is partly why, I mean, plus, you know, the collapse of Libya is partly why there is this, and then the open borders policies of the EU, or failure to enforce borders, or failure to enforce basic refugee rules, has created this overpopulation in one area, underpopulation in another area.
That just is a huge challenge.
And again, the traditional solution for overpopulation has been, you know, a plague, a famine, or war.
You know, three at least of the four horsemen have to ride through And I think, I don't know where that goes from here, and I can't think of any particularly fun way to solve the problem, but that is, I think, one of the challenges.
Successful societies stop reproducing, less successful societies, especially if the successful societies are like, hey, here's tons of food aid, here's tons of foreign aid, here's tons of money.
And because they say, well, you know, when we give money to Western women, they stop having kids.
But if you give money to other cultures, they just seem to have more of them.
And that is, It has created, I think, a huge problem.
And whether it's something as direct as what you say, or whether when Western governments run out of money, then foreign aid collapses, food aid collapses, and then there's wars in Africa or other continents, I don't know.
But it seems that general meddling in private property, general meddling, violations of the non-aggression principle, coercive transfers of resources within and between cultures have kind of set up a powder keg and...
Much though I'm trying to wrestle the joystick for a soft landing, I don't know how nose down it's going to be.
Yeah.
In the past, only nature could destroy mankind.
We hadn't developed the ability to destroy ourselves.
Now we've got both in play.
We just have to wait and see which one happens first.
Will it be the next Black Death or Spanish Flu that sweeps through and our world's population is far more dense now?
We've suppressed the medical infrastructures of the Third World by investing directly and sending our own doctors there.
You can't compete with free.
It's like when we give out mosquito nets.
Yes, it's very humane.
It saves some child from getting malaria.
That's wonderful.
That's not a problem.
But you've just suppressed their own domestic medical infrastructure.
We should be, if we really cared, oh, I should say, if the corporations and governments of the West who pretend to care about the Third World actually did, They would invest in building hospitals and infrastructure and sanitation and then let those cultures invest in themselves.
Get an educational system set up so that they can improve their culture.
They don't need the West anymore.
They can do it themselves.
That solves most of the world's problems right there if we were to just do that.
It would slow down the growth rate.
It would take care of the problem of epidemics and famines.
we suppress their farms again by free food handouts.
But they don't care about these third world cultures.
They see them as, well, I've got surplus grain.
We want to keep the prices high.
I'll ship it to Africa.
Oh, we've got too many medical professionals because everyone wanted to get that six-figure salary.
Oh, you should do two or three years of work in the third world before you come work at our hospital.
It's just for excess labor and resources.
It's all it is.
Yeah.
And it's going to have very, I think it can have particularly unpleasant and outcomes.
Well, thanks a lot for a great chat.
Really enjoyed it.
I just wanted to remind people, of course, youtube.com forward slash stickshexandhammer666.
We'll put the links to that below.
twitter.com forward slash sticks666 official.
Sticks, if you wanted to mention your Patreon channel, which I urge people to go and check out and donate to, if you could give out the vital stats for that.
