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April 23, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:46:48
3661 True News: Week In Review - April 23rd, 2017
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio here with Mike.
We are going to go through all of the news that falls through the cracks, bring it back up and resurrect it, bring it to life, spread it into the stratosphere so you can see the shape of your society as it really stands.
And the first thing since April is the cruelest month.
We're going to talk about taxes.
Mike, did you have fun doing your taxes this year?
Was it fun?
No.
No, it wasn't fun.
And I had to write a big check, and I'm not happy about that.
Well, Trump says next week, Trump says next week he's going to start putting forward massive tax reforms.
And we're going to see how that goes, whether we can forgive him for the dreamer misstep by looking at what's going on with the tax code, because it is monstrous.
It is completely insane.
So we're going to run through a brief history.
Mike's going to take us through a brief history of the income tax, because...
Well, we love the tears of the audience.
We bathe in them, and this will help get a lot.
Well, if you love the income tax or don't, you can thank and or blame Abraham Lincoln, who in 1861 took stock of the federal government's ability to wage civil war against the South and said, hmm, I think we need some more money.
War is the health of the state.
Funny that the income tax was introduced in 1961 by Lincoln because of the Civil War.
So then he imposed the first federal income tax by signing the Revenue Act, imposing a 3% tax on all annual incomes over $800.
Now, that's interesting to me because one of the motives for the Civil War, I mean, it really wasn't slavery.
It was about getting more tax revenue from the South.
And so the way that they do it is they say we're going to fight slavery by imposing – because we can't collect enough taxes – by imposing more taxes.
In other words, we're going to pretend to fight slavery by actually imposing serfdom from an economic standpoint.
So just, you know, keep that in mind.
We have to fight slavery by imposing 3% slavery on those that have annual incomes over $800.
Thanks, Abe.
So, the Revenue Act's language was broadly written to define income as gain, quote, derived from any kind of property or from any professional trade, employment, or vocation carried on in the United States or elsewhere or from any source wherever or whatever.
So...
Fairly broadly written to scoop up as much tax revenue as possible.
The United States or elsewhere, or from any source, whatever.
Okay, this is just basic Aristotelian logic, right?
A is not A. So if it's the United States or elsewhere, where else is there?
I mean, underwater, Atlantis, my little pony villages, the moon, I mean, just everything.
If some Southerners wanted to grow tobacco on Mars, it was covered under the Revenue Act, according to Lincoln.
It's good to think of him thinking so far ahead.
So Congress eventually repealed Lincoln's tax law in 1871, and there was a bit of a reprieve until 1909 when the 16th Amendment was passed, which set in place the federal income tax system that we know and love and use today.
But remember, Mike, when they first put in the tax system, it's really low.
It was really brief, really low rate, and only a tiny number of people were affected because there's no such thing as a slippery slope when it comes to the state.
In 1913, there were only 400 pages in the tax code.
Today's stuff...
Would you venture a guess that there are more or less than 400 pages in the tax code?
No, I would guess.
No, hang on.
To be fair, I would guess that there are still only 400 pages in the tax code if you arrange the font according to quantum physics.
In other words, if you squish down the text to the point where you are arranging your language according to quantum physics, then you could probably squeeze it into only 400 pages, assuming those pages were as big as a sailboat.
Maybe one of the callers in the last call-in show would say that in an alternative timeline, there are only 400 pages in the U.S. tax code currently, so we can't say that there's more.
But in this timeline, there are, oh my god, 74,608 pages.
Yay!
So hopefully Trump can do something about that and we can simplify our tax code.
It wasn't very reassuring that he threw out the tax plan that he ran on, but we'll see what we get this week.
It's going to be hard for it to be worse than 74,000 pages of tax code.
Well, and this doesn't even count sort of the regulations and all the other stuff, which has significant fiscal impact that you are also supposed to comply with.
Basically, complying with the law is completely impossible.
There's no one who knows all of these laws and all of these regulations.
And good luck.
You know, roll the dice.
This is just a money-making machine for the state and for professionals who can give you a very flimsy legal shield to potential law-breaking because it's impossible to comply with this level of text.
So back to 1913, the top marginal income tax bracket was 7%.
And today, it is 39.6%.
Now, 7%, interestingly enough, it's just one of the taxes you have to pay in Ontario on everything you buy, just about everything you buy, right?
There's a provincial sales tax, a goods and services tax, and so the top marginal income tax bracket was 7%, which is now just one of the taxes you have to pay on just about everything you buy.
It doesn't even count your income tax, your liquor tax, your property taxes, your income taxes.
Ah, forget it.
Yeah, I mean, so, yeah, thin edge of the wedge, tip of the spear.
You've got to stop things at the beginning or they really spiral out of control with this stuff.
In 1913, the marginal income tax bracket was 1% to 7%, and today the range is 10% to the aforementioned 39.6%.
And it's worse, even than you think, because it was 1% to 7% when people were way, way, way poorer.
And I'm not just talking about money was worth more back then.
I'm talking about the amount that American income has gone up Over the past hundred-plus years, it's many, many times it's increased.
So now they're taking much more taxes on much more very real income, and they still can't balance the budget, of course, right?
Of course.
Well, when the income tax was started in 1913, only 358,000 Americans actually had to file a 1040 form.
And today, that is 148,606,578 Americans filing 1040s.
So yes, the population has increased.
No, that's not so bad for me.
Because my level of outrage kicks in at 148,606,580.
So the fact that it's still too below that means it hasn't quite triggered my tripwire of outrage yet.
But maybe next year.
In 2014, the federal government hauled in a then-record, okay, brace yourself, folks, $1,377,797,136,000 in individual income taxes.
Nevertheless, 52 million people, or 30%, filed what the IRS calls non-taxable returns, which means they paid no net income taxes.
Well, in fiscal...
2016 Americans paid a record $540.7 billion!
And those property taxes to state and local governments, and that was up about 3.2% from the previous year.
It's funny, we keep setting all these new records in tax collection, but the deficit just keeps getting bigger, and it's not like state and local municipalities' budgets and their unfunded pension liabilities are improving in any way.
It's odd how that works.
Well, of course, your taxes are assets that are used to borrow money.
It's collateral.
So, of course, the more you pay in taxes, the more they're going to borrow.
That's natural.
Through the first six months of fiscal 2017, and that starts in October of last year for people that may be wondering, the federal government collected record amounts of both individual income taxes and payroll taxes.
Again, again with the record.
Through March, the federal government collected approximately $695.4 billion in individual income taxes and $547.5 billion in Social Security and other payroll taxes.
Social Security, it's nothing like those 18-year-olds that get a job, fresh out of high school, they get a job, and they go, what's the Social Security tax?
And someone has to explain to them the whole social security system and how they will never see any of that at any point in their lives.
See, as an 18 year old who's been educated much more poorly than your grandparents ever were, and who is taxed much more highly than your grandparents ever were, you must pay taxes in order to support the very richest generation of the very richest people the world has ever seen.
And this is why you can't have a life.
Oh, boomers.
You gotta love them.
So despite collecting the record amounts of individual income taxes and payroll taxes, the Treasury still ran a deficit.
Of $526.9 billion in the first six months of fiscal 2017, which, as I said, began in October of last year.
So that equals $3,443 for every person with a job.
Now, let's just take a moment to mull that over, right?
Because significant proportions of Americans don't even have $500 in their checking account for emergencies, right?
Oh, those numbers are horrifying.
Yeah, they're just appalling.
There's new stats that come out on a weekly basis of just how screwed a large proportion of the former middle class currently is in the United States.
I stubbed my toe.
I'm now homeless.
This is where a lot of people's razor-edge lifestyle And, of course, record amounts of debt, credit card debt in particular.
But just think about this.
So let's say you get a bill for $3,443.
You're going to have a tough time covering it if you're most Americans.
Actually, if you're most Americans, or at least half Americans, you can't cover it at all.
So this is not the national debt.
This is not the unfunded liabilities.
This is not even a full year's deficit.
This is only six months' deficit.
It's almost $3,500 for every person with a job.
And people wonder why we say this is completely and totally and utterly unsustainable.
Are you employed right now?
Do you want to write a check for that $3,500 for the first six months?
It's probably going to be the exact same, if not more, for the next six months.
So yeah, unless you want to write that check, you might want to get pissed off and get pissed off now.
So in 2016, more than 4 in 10 American households, that's 44.3%, or upwards of 76 million people didn't pay any income tax to the federal government.
This year, that number is expected to be roughly the same at 43.9%.
Now, while I am glad that those individuals aren't paying income tax and aren't having money stolen from them, I'm glad that that's the case.
They're receiving income.
Refunds and benefits and all this stuff and taking out of the system that they're not paying into more often than not.
So, while thumbs up on not having to fork over large amounts of your income, if they even have an income, I have a problem with them taking lots from the kitty when they have contributed nothing at all.
This is the two Americas, and we can see these two Americas in elections.
We can see them in the riots regarding free speech, which we'll talk about in a sec, particularly Ann Coulter's proposed landing at Berkeley.
But these are the two Americas, the people who are taking money from the tax giddy and the people who are forced to contribute.
They have nothing in common and everything in opposition.
And this is where the great fracture line down the center of American society is and is growing.
Well, more than 31% of all federal individual income tax was paid by those that bring in more than $1 million a year who have a net effective tax rate of 25.3%, the highest of any group.
So, who's paying?
Are they paying their fair share, the rich?
Well, they're paying 31% of all federal individual income tax, that's for sure.
Another 14% of income tax is paid for by those who make between half a million and a million dollars a year, and they have an effective tax rate at 20%, which is the second highest.
So, lots of very productive people making lots of money that are taxed at high rates.
Is that their fair share?
What is a fair share?
If they have two pennies to rub together, have they still not paid their fair share?
Maybe socialists can answer this question for me at some point in the near future.
Well, and of course, the people who have that much money, if they're not paying an income tax, they're doing one of two other things, which is they're buying things in the free market, which creates jobs, or they're putting money into some investment instrument, which is lent out to entrepreneurs who will create jobs.
So it's not like, oh, they're going to hoard it all and roll themselves in vats of gold, molten gold.
I mean, this is taken out of the productive economy and used to buy votes and so that people can breed, who otherwise might restrain themselves in some fashion.
So this is important in terms of job growth, and we're going to get to some of the other barriers to job growth in a few minutes, but this is crazy.
It's crazy stuff.
And You know, this is the ambivalent relationship that people have with the rich.
You know, the poor.
Oh, we hate the rich.
We talk to hate the rich.
Class baiting.
The rich are all predatory and exploitive.
It's like, well, you guys are actually exploiting the rich because the people who've worked hard and who are successful in this way, the poor just want to pillage them.
Or rather, they want the politicians to pillage them on their behalf because it's kind of, you know, tough to pillage them directly.
They can fight back.
And I remember Bernie Sanders this last week was complaining about how many...
How many yachts and houses do rich people need?
It's like, Bernie, you have three houses.
So I'm not really sure the glass house guy with a bad haircut should be throwing all those socialist stones.
Rolling themselves in vats of molten gold.
That's an interesting line.
That seems like if Scrooge McDuck was a supervillain, I imagine that's what the punishment would be for anyone that crossed him.
I do believe that that is actually going to be the title of my upcoming rap album.
Good to know.
I didn't know that was part of the business plan.
We should talk about that after the show.
I will rhyme about it with you after the show.
Oh dear.
I've wanted to say this for a while, and there hasn't really been a good place, so I'm going to shoehorn it in here.
If anyone has paid attention to the economic climate in the United States, things are going down, folks.
And the only chance the United States has to prevent some type of massive default and crash, and who knows how far they can kick the can down the road, will be to remove regulation, reduce taxes, and grow our way out of this.
this.
And I don't even know if that's possible.
I don't know if it's possible.
I'd certainly like to try and pull back and turn the United States into a thriving economic productive engine, the likes of which has never been seen on planet Earth.
But if that doesn't happen, it's just a matter of time till it all goes down.
I mean, you may get some type of amazing technological innovation, such as the internet, which can further allow them to kick the can down the road because it creates so much wealth and value in a short amount of time.
Maybe something comes along that is internet 2.0 or something of equivalent size that has that impact.
But if the fundamentals don't change, it's not going to look good.
And Trump has a lot of work ahead of him in order to try and just peel back some of the many layers that are currently strangling the business environment in the United States.
He's already done quite a bit regarding environmental regulations, and that's great to see.
The repeal of two regulations for every one that you pass that he's passed down to federal agencies, that's very encouraging.
But it's going to take a lot because this has been festering I mean, they're already prepping for a government shutdown because of the budgetary issues, and they've got to raise the debt ceiling one more time.
So the only way that we can possibly have any kind of happy ending out of this is massive amounts of economic productivity brought about by Drastically cutting to the bone regulations, taxes, and things to turn the US into an economic powerhouse.
That's the only thing that possibly, maybe, if done, can save us.
And odds of that happening are pretty slim.
I'd certainly like to give it a try instead of just sitting by and waiting for the crash.
But we'll see what Trump does and continues to do over the course of the next four years.
You know, if the plane's heading into the mountainside, you jump, right?
What are your odds?
Well, better than zero.
And zero if we retain.
And I think all of this, I mean, I think that's very true.
The other thing I would add is there still needs to be a change in the welfare state.
Because as jobs increase, there are a number of people who are going to say, well, you know, there's that welfare cliff where you have to like a single woman with two kids has to make 60 or $70,000 in the free market just to match what she's getting in benefit and money from the welfare state.
There's going to have to be a lowering of welfare state benefits.
And the only way that's palatable is if there's lots of jobs available.
Although drug and math testing.
Well, we'll get to that.
We'll get to that.
We'll get to that later.
The idea that there's not going to be an enormous amount of suffering is a false one.
And we need to just good ourselves for that.
There is going to be a lot of suffering.
You know, somebody who's been on drugs for 30 years, when they come clean, when they get clean, there is a lot of suffering.
And we just need to be ready for that.
And I'm speaking particularly to women, right?
I don't...
Maybe this is sort of my perspective.
I don't know what you think, Mike.
I find men pretty much okay with, okay, you know, this is tough, this is bad, it's going to be suffering, but we're going to pull through, everyone pull together, everyone, you know, take their sacrifices.
And women can do it sometimes.
I mean, they certainly gave up stockings in World War II, but...
There is going to be suffering.
And if people have this fantasy that there isn't going to be suffering, all they're going to do is prolong the problems and make the suffering worse.
So I just really want people to understand that.
And of course, you know, all the people on the left are going to blame Trump for the suffering and so on.
Like you blame the doctor who tries to get you off a drug for the suffering you go through rather than the drug dealers who gave you the drug for many decades.
But it's going to, you know, this band-aid does not come off without some hairs coming off as well.
Well, I think the ability to deal with suffering is probably proportional to the amount of testosterone flowing through your bloodstream at a given time.
And some of the men in the United States today, that's not a whole hell of a lot.
So their ability to deal with suffering and sacrifice and all that, maybe not so much.
Turns out there's only so much estrogen you can pump into the water supply through birth control pills when you end up with fat men with man tits and no assertiveness.
All right.
And it's turning the frigging frogs gay.
That's a whole other point.
If you have paid attention online at all lately in political circles, you've seen the deal with Bill O'Reilly and him leaving Fox News, the top news show in the United States.
And now it's over.
He's gone.
And it's all because of a New York Times article.
And well, not all because of a New York Times article, but that's the genesis of it.
So the New York Times reported on April 1st that Bill O'Reilly and Fox News had reached settlements with five women that totaled $13 million Between 2002 and 2016, a liberal-led advertiser education campaign, that's the best name for let's try and destroy someone's career and reputation that I've ever heard, advertiser education campaign led to 80 companies, probably more at this rate, dropping from advertising on Fox News and specifically the O'Reilly Factor.
Now, to put this in perspective, this $13 million figure for these settlements reached with five women, the factor generated about 180 million in advertising just in 2015.
So this show was a massive moneymaker.
And top show on news, that shouldn't be that surprising.
So, $180 million a year making, if people are coming to you with accusations, You can really see why you would just, here's some money, go away, don't bother me, I want to continue doing what I'm doing and not have to deal with this nonsense.
That makes quite a bit of sense when you know the economic variables involved here.
So of course there are claims of sexual harassment, but there's actually an accusation of verbal abuse during an outburst.
So O'Reilly was supposed to have, quote, berated a young producer in front of newsroom colleagues.
I don't know about you, Mike.
Have you ever been chewed out at work?
The only people that haven't been chewed out at some point in their life by their boss are people that have never had a boss.
Right.
I mean, when I was in a Shakespeare play, I was in King Lear.
We all wanted to do these micro-expressions because we were all very Stanislavski method acting studio guys.
And it's like, oh, I'm going to have a slight curl of the lip to indicate my disgust.
And the director...
Got so angry at us.
He's like, you're in a giant theater.
People are...
Why are the people in the back of the theater?
How are they going to see your subtle little acting moves?
This isn't, you know, camera up your nose movies.
This isn't...
Theater, you need to move.
You need to show your displeasure.
You need to act.
God damn it.
And he ended up throwing chairs across the stage.
I was like, it happens.
It happens.
I've been chewed out.
What's that great line Brad Pitt has?
It's not a great line, but the way he delivered it was great at the end of Inglourious.
Bastard is like, I've been chewed out before.
Probably get chewed out again.
And you get chewed out.
Do you take people to court because they yell at you?
You know, maybe she, I assume it's a she, maybe she really messed up repeatedly.
And if you don't like the way your boss is treating you, you can just quit.
But the idea you just take someone to court.
Some of the sexual harassment stuff, I mean, I'm half and half about it.
It's very gross and lewdish behavior.
Is it court-worthy?
Hard to say, for me, as far as that goes.
But this, you know, just being berated?
Yeah, he's got a temper.
He's Irish.
There's an O apostrophe, which means O angry.
And so, I don't know, do you drag people to court because they chewed you out?
I don't know.
It seems a bit girly.
Well, for God's sake, Steph, I mean, let's say that Bill O'Reilly did get loud with some people that he was working with.
Everyone's seen that.
I forget the name of the show where he says, fuck it.
We'll do it live!
We'll do it live!
So the ability for anger is certainly demonstrated by past evidence.
When you are a star...
And Bill O'Reilly, $180 million in advertising revenue in one year.
And he's been doing that for a long time.
He's a star.
You should not be inconveniencing the star.
I don't care what business it is.
I don't care if the star is a man.
I don't care if the star is a woman.
You need to make their life as easy as possible so they can continue to do that which they uniquely do to provide massive amounts of money to the business that you're involved with.
That should be pretty clear and pretty simple.
So the idea that he was mean to me, well maybe, and this has come out too with some of the allegations regarding the Tommy Lahren case and Glenn Beck, and it leaked out that apparently that there's a butt heating pad that Tommy Lahren supposedly wanted warmed up prior to her recording, and people are like, oh, what a diva!
It's like, okay, well she's...
She's very successful.
Lots of people are watching her show.
She wants a heating pad.
So provide the heating pad.
What's the problem here?
I remember being on a panel once in a really, really cold auditorium.
And it's really hard.
You know, it's hard to be comfortable on camera and to not appear ridiculously nervous if you're freezing.
And of course, you know, women, the biology of the female anatomy is that the blood centers around the womb for obvious reasons.
Their extremities get cold.
I guess maybe their butts get cold.
If it helps her do her show, what's the problem?
And if you're the manager, like if you're in charge of Fox and this guy's generating $180 million a year...
You make his life as easy as possible because if he gets annoyed and people who make $180 million a year for your business, they've got options.
They can go elsewhere.
Other people are hungry to get them.
It's your fiduciary responsibility, your actual legal responsibility.
If you mess things up and Bill O'Reilly leaves, you can get sued for failing to fulfill your fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits for your shelters, for your employees or whatever.
So I'm not saying they can do anything they want, you know, sacrifice an intern for the sake of my vanity.
But there is a real imbalance, and I don't know why it's hard for people to see that.
But an underling is upset, Steph.
An underling is upset, the horror of it all.
If Brad Pitt wants some shrimp, Brad Pitt gets some shrimp.
I hate to put it that way, but that's just the basic reality.
What if he's terse when he asks for it?
That's right.
He didn't say, please, I'm going to cry and drag him to court.
Huh.
I wonder how many more women will be hired if this is the outcome.
It's a real shame, because they harm opportunities.
There are other women out there.
Men and women, right?
There are other women out there who they can handle being chewed out.
You know, they just roll their eyes, they take it, you know, and they just, they can handle it.
What's wrong?
But they're spoiling it for those women who can get in and handle it because they're too fragile for a highly volatile environment, and that's a real shame.
You know what I did when I had a boss that treated me kind of unfairly?
I left and didn't work there anymore.
Funny how that works.
I didn't start crying and file a civil suit.
I really didn't.
A lot of these allegations regarding sexual impropriety and harassment and all that, it goes to a letter that the New York Times received in an envelope mysteriously.
It's kind of like Trump's taxes.
It just showed up.
And of course, everyone with these signed massive nondisclosure agreements and there's probably going to be some people getting sued over this whole thing.
And if I remember correctly, I was reading It was half a million dollars for any breach of the confidentiality, so yeah, that's going to be interesting to see how that flushes out.
But the lawyers allege that Mr.
O'Reilly began sexually harassing this woman in 2011.
And I'm sure that she brought these allegations to Fox and people immediately, right?
Well, no, no, she didn't.
She brought the allegations to Fox in August of last year.
Huh.
This is Juliet Huddy, right?
Yes, it is.
Okay, just now, before people do this, and this is audio, so I can only describe it as the tit tsunami, but before people review all of this, just go to your favorite search engine and just type in Juliet Huddy, H-U-D-D-Y, and look at the images.
Maybe she needs a settlement to buy...
The top cloth that goes over her cleavage or something like that.
But she has used her sexuality as a means of getting ahead.
Now, this doesn't mean that she doesn't have the right to not be sexually harassed or anything.
I get all of that.
But let's be frank.
It's like you see some of these news anchors who've posed in their lingerie.
Never seen Bill O'Reilly in his lingerie.
Quite happy about that as a whole.
But let's be honest that this is a woman who wears low-cut tops, has big boobs, and that is part of her appeal.
That's part of how she's gotten ahead.
Everybody knows this.
It doesn't mean she's not intelligent.
It doesn't mean she's not a good news analyst, but it's part of what she's doing, and that's just important to remember.
How would people be taking these allegations if it was a morbidly obese red-haired Asian man claiming that Bill O'Reilly something something years ago?
Red-haired Asian man?
Yeah, could happen.
You'd probably be confused.
Could happen.
She alleges that this happened in 2011, and she brought it to Fox's attention in August.
The settlement was reached on September 5th.
Why did she wait all this time?
So the New York Times article wrote and said, in January 2011, Mr.
O'Reilly invited Miss Huddy to lunch near his multi-million dollar home in Just as he does with elderly male interns as well.
Of course.
Of course.
Yeah, come on over for lunch.
I mean...
Maybe it was professional, but it's not unknown for women to attach themselves to a powerful male figure in order to advance their careers.
I'm not impugning anything to this woman or whatever, but she has to understand that if she was just some cameraman who weighs 300 pounds, she's not getting lunch and a bedroom tour of Bill O'Reilly's house.
I mean, come on.
I mean, this pretend naivety is to me kind of ridiculous.
There is no evidence that any of this even happened, folks, as well.
So keep that in mind as we read through it.
So, to shock and disgust, Miss Huddy was saying goodbye to Mr.
O'Reilly.
He quickly moved in and kissed her on the lips, the letter said.
Miss Huddy was so taken aback and repulsed that she instinctively recoiled and actually fell to the ground.
Oh, lordy!
I mean, I'm sorry.
She fell over?
Hi.
Welcome to my house.
Here's my bedroom.
How you doing?
And then, shocked and appalled!
Come on, you're in a guy's bedroom.
He's known to be a player.
Ugh.
It gets better in the next sentence from the New York Times article.
Mr.
O'Reilly, looking amused, did not even help Miss Hoodie up.
Mwahaha!
I tried to kiss you and you fell over and I stand over you domineering as your dresses tore and I'm just envisioning this entire, it's almost out of an Ayn Rand novel or something.
The buddy's ripper.
He's doing his best Mr.
Burns impression, you know.
Jesus.
I'm just saying I don't believe any of this, for whatever that's worth.
I don't personally believe any of this.
It does not, to me, this is the problem with the he said, she said stuff, and this is why this stuff used to be very tightly regulated in terms of there would be...
You wouldn't put yourself in this position as a woman.
You wouldn't say, I'm going to go to a powerful man's house who's known to be a bit of a hound dog.
I'm not going to go take a tour of his bedroom.
I'm not going to do all of that.
And if I do all of that, you know, it doesn't give him the right to kiss her.
She can, of course, say no.
But just this idea that it's absolutely shocking and appalling when a woman who got her position partly as a result of her sex appeal, which she uses all over the place.
Like, this boob's hanging all over the place.
Even things like excessive makeup or, you know, the rouge lips, right?
What do rouge lips mean?
They're a sign of sexual arousal.
So if, as a woman, you're really, really...
You would be upset that some guy's going to show up to work in really...
Tight pants that shows off his raging erection, if you would consider that inappropriate, that's not dissimilar from, you know, low-cut tops or from even red lipstick, which is a sign of sexual arousal.
It is a form of sexual harassment to show sexual arousal directly in front of people, and if you...
Wearing pants, you know, parachute pants with a giant tent boner sticking out ahead of you, and people would find that appalling, well, from the male perspective, signs of female arousal constantly being put in their face at work, it's not wildly dissimilar.
Parachute pants with a giant boner.
Ah!
We have a title!
The next week, and this is back to the article, Mr.
O'Reilly asked her to join him for dinner at the Harvard Club, followed by a Broadway show, according to the letter, and to current former Fox News employees.
So, a date.
Okay, so that's the reason why I'm reading through this, folks, because even in the context of A dinner date.
Yeah, a dinner date.
You don't do this.
If someone is harassing you and you don't like it and you don't want it and you're very offended, you don't follow up.
And there's always the argument of like, well, I don't want to hurt my career or this or that.
So you're like, oh, so...
You're pretty much – you're willing to sell being abused just so you can look pretty on camera and say words.
Okay, well, you have no self-respect.
You're not willing to stand up for yourself and go work elsewhere.
It's not like it's the only news company.
It's not like it's the only place where someone can go.
I don't know.
This kind of stuff drives me completely up a wall.
Just, yeah, go elsewhere.
You don't want to get ahead as a woman through dating or sleeping with some guy.
I mean, I understand that.
That's pretty gross.
Twice in my life I've had, actually no more than twice, but sort of two that I can mention briefly here.
So one time when I was starting out as a playwright, there was a woman who very openly stated that she worked at a fairly big place.
And she said, I can get your play on the radio.
We can get actors and get your play on the radio.
But I had to go out with her.
So guess what?
That play never made it to radio.
Another time, there was a woman who worked at a publishing house when I was hungry to get a novel published and, again, made it fairly clear that she would help me get my novel published if I was going to date her.
And, I mean, it wasn't even tempting.
It's gross.
Now, am I going to sit there and drag people off to court?
No.
I mean, I don't want anything coming out of that situation.
That's just...
We get these offers.
I mean, people get these offers, and you say no, and you don't go and do it and then later sue about it.
That is, I mean, that's to me, that's that's not right.
Stuff just so you know, I'd be willing to sleep with you if you will not perform this rap album that you mentioned earlier.
So there's number three.
Well, that's only because, you know, the kind of outfit you have to wear in the video.
Mike in spandex in jello.
Well, we will obviously talk about that offline.
But but also you can consider this a formal complaint large for the Freedom Aid Radio HR department, which is basically acres in size.
Miss Huddy was not interested in having a romantic relationship with Mr.
O'Reilly, but the letter said she felt compelled to comply with Mr.
O'Reilly's request, given that he had total control over her work assignment, end quote.
I'm sorry, she didn't have any proof.
He didn't say, come on a date with me or I'm going to give you a bad assignment.
She's not even claiming that that happened.
Right.
So this is just what she thought.
She thought, if I don't go on a date with this guy, there's a possibility my career might not advance as much as possible.
And again, I was just going to say, this is 2011.
This is not exactly, you know, the 1950s.
This isn't Mad Men, where, you know, everyone is dating their secretary and there's all kinds of stuff.
It's a very different environment.
So if she would have said, no, I don't want to go out and then stuff were to happen, she'd have more recourse than...
Making claims five years later, which is just kind of strange.
During the Broadway show, according to the letter, Mr.
O'Reilly moved close to Miss Hoodie in a way that made her feel uncomfortable.
He tried to hold her hand, but she pulled it away.
He then dropped a key to the room at a Midtown Manhattan hotel he was staying at into her lap and told her to meet him there after the show.
He stood up and left, the letter said.
This is like a bad romance novel.
Here's where things to me get incomprehensible.
Go ahead.
We're already incomprehensible as far as I'm concerned that she even went to this date after mohahaha standing over her.
But yes, it does get worse.
Miss Huddy went to the hotel to return Mr.
O'Reilly's key, according to the letter.
What?
What?
Are you serious?
The little plastic key that you can basically walk off with and they don't even care?
What is that thing worth?
Like, four cents?
Oh, I must return it because...
Because I need a way to explain why I went to the hotel.
Yeah, it's to return the key.
Why?
Keep it as evidence of him being a pig if you want, but return the key?
I don't understand it.
It gets more incomprehensible, Steph.
So the New York Times article continues.
She asked him to meet her in the lobby, but he refused and asked her to join him in his room.
Give the key to the bellhop.
Give the key to someone behind the desk.
It's not that complicated.
So just in the context of her story, folks, if you're going to believe her story, if this is true, she's an idiot.
You cannot say that this is true when she's not an idiot.
The idea that after all this happened, she'd go on the date after being pushed to the ground and being kissed and all that, and drops a key into her lap, and then he asks her to come to his room.
If this actually happened, she's an idiot to have followed through, as we will read right now, that she did.
So, Miss Huddy declined and explained that she was not interested in Mr.
O'Reilly on a personal or sexual level, the letter said.
Mr.
O'Reilly persisted, and again asked Miss Huddy to come up to his room, and she ultimately went up to give him the key, according to the letter.
Oh.
Oh!
Just give it to the bellhop and go home.
Women in the comments that are listening to this show and hearing this, do you have any respect for someone that would do this kind of thing and then claim, oh lordy, I've been harassed?
This is just incomprehensible behavior.
Well, the interesting thing is, according to the law, it is certainly not illegal to ask someone at your workplace out on a date.
It's only harassment.
Certain companies have policies.
Well, some companies have policies.
I'm talking about the law, right?
Yeah.
So the law says it's unwanted sexual attention.
In other words, it's only illegal if the woman doesn't want to go on a date with you.
How is that?
So you ask, and then you find out whether what you did is illegal after the fact or not, whether she says yes or no.
And we wonder why white people aren't breeding.
I mean, that's crazy.
That's crazy.
Now...
Who knows?
And this two-people-witnessed stuff, I'm sorry.
Like, nobody can believe anything that anyone says.
I mean, O'Reilly, of course, has said that nothing happened and so on, and she says that this, you know, he tried to kiss her and she fell over.
I mean, and then I guess she went back to his hotel room, or she went to his hotel room after this show...
And the cover story is to return a useless plastic key file?
I mean, that doesn't make any sense at all.
Well, here's the thing, and this is brought up five years later as well.
Right, so nobody can, right.
Oh yeah, if this supposedly happened and she reported it right away, well then you could contact the hotel, try to get the footage from whatever security camera they have in the lobby.
I mean, there's steps that could be taken to try and verify this story.
This is five years later!
I think that's the point of someone coming for a lunch or something.
But at this point, this is just all allegation.
There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of evidence backing it up.
So Bill O'Reilly lost his life's work in his career, his big job, top show on cable television.
He lost $75 million individual.
Yeah.
He signed a contract for $100 million for your deal, $25 million a year.
I just signed it, and he got a $25 million payout to leave.
That's one year's salary.
So he lost the last three years of that deal, $75 million.
And, you know, I assume, you know, he's made his money.
He certainly likes doing his show.
So this guy, and this isn't about Bill O'Reilly, my thoughts on Bill O'Reilly.
I'm not a big Bill O'Reilly fan by any means.
He was a cheerleader for the Iraq War and a bunch of other stuff that I find morally reprehensible.
But at the same time, this is a guy's life and career and livelihood, a powerful guy supposedly, being destroyed over allegation, over people saying, you did X, despite a lack of evidence.
I have a problem with that.
And if you've listened to the show for any length of time, and if you listen to the show we did on Syria, you would have heard a similar thing.
Innocent until proven guilty.
Innocent until proven guilty.
There's lots of people that claim lots of stuff.
Doesn't mean it's true, folks.
Doesn't mean it's true.
I want some evidence.
I want some facts.
I want an investigation.
I'm not just going to say, well, someone said something.
It done must be truth.
Nope.
That's not how it works.
It's not how it should work in the court of public opinion either.
But nonetheless, the mainstream media, you know, they see Bill O'Reilly, he's not on our team because we're all lefties.
Oh, wow.
So let's report what happened to Bill O'Reilly as absolute objective fact.
Look, allegations, they must be true.
Okay.
Just like with Bill Clinton.
Oops, no, we're not going to pay attention to that, because he's on our team.
This is also true from the EEOC website.
Harassment does not have to be of a sexual nature, however, and can include offensive remarks about a person's sex.
For example, it is illegal to harass a woman by making offensive comments about women in general.
Now, offensive is a subjective statement.
That doesn't say false comments about women in general.
Offensive comments.
In other words, if a woman feels upset about what you may have said, and she perceives it to be about women in general, well, you're breaking the law because she's upset you're breaking the law.
Thankfully, Steph, we're aware that women don't get upset at all, ever.
It's such a cliche.
How is this breaking the cliche that women run on feels?
Feminism, everybody!
That's empowering.
I need the government to negotiate my salary, so I'm going to have equal work, equal pay for work of equal value.
I need the government to negotiate my salary.
I need the government to protect me from guys who are attracted to me that I don't want to date.
I need this, I need that, because I'm independent and empowered, and I need a man like a fish needs a bicycle, unless he's part of the court or law system, in which case I'm going to need him to manage my basic life.
So there was another woman who came out with Some allegations after this New York Times article dropped, and I'm not going to read her name because it's not particularly relevant, but what she said I thought was fairly interesting.
So she said...
She is black.
This makes more sense, right?
Yes.
Within the first week and a half of working there, he made like a grunting noise.
As time went on, I noticed every time he walked past my desk, if no one was around, he would make that noise.
Four to maybe three, four weeks in, we were on an elevator, alone, Coming up to our floor.
And he let me off first, as gentlemen usually do.
As I was getting off the elevator, he said, Looking good there, girl.
The hair is on the back of my neck.
Because I knew the grunts and groaning were going on as I'm walking in front of them.
Okay.
I like how in every example that she brings up, It's alone!
No one was there!
This cannot be verified in any way.
It continues.
One day he walks past my desk.
He walks past and says, hey, hot chocolate.
He walks past and doesn't look at me.
When he said it, I didn't respond.
I was mortified because it not only was sexual, I took that as a very plantational remark.
I didn't know that was a word.
I don't know that it is.
It's got a big red squiggle line and word underneath it.
Oh, that's just extra racist.
Okay, I see.
That's what it is.
I took it as a very plantational remark.
I've been around enough racism, such a blatant person with such a high profile, making me feel uncomfortable, but then not even acknowledging me as a human being.
So that's the end of the remarks.
So Bill O'Reilly, incredibly successful person, whether you like him or not, is apparently going around, according to this woman, and just randomly making boar-like grunting noises.
You know, I mean, he's Irish in 67.
He might just be digesting.
I'm not sure.
Bill O'Reilly, 25 mil a year on this new contract.
He's very famous.
I don't think Bill O'Reilly would have a problem getting dates from women that actually wanted to go on a date with him if he was so inclined.
I don't know that he needs to go around the office making boor-like grunting noises at employees when no one else is around.
Call me nuts!
I'm just going to be a little skeptical about this and would like to see some proof, but there doesn't appear to be any.
It's just much like when Donald Trump was, weeks before the actual election, was accused of all kinds of stuff from women of dubious trustworthiness.
People jump out and say, hey, Bill O'Reilly's going down.
Look at me.
I can get some attention by saying he did X to me, despite I have no proof.
This is the world we live.
Guilty in the court of public opinion.
Destroy a very successful man.
And now he's going to be forever tainted with this accusation.
They're all going to be believed to be completely true, certainly by people on the left.
Lots of people on the right that don't like Bill O'Reilly that will believe them to be true.
Again, I don't really like Bill O'Reilly that much either.
But again, innocent until proven guilty.
Good God.
The second we veer away from that at all, and we have veered a very far way from innocent until proven guilty, I mean, society itself just collapses upon itself.
Well, and of course, there has been a lot of work done in the legal system over the past few decades, which we'll get to one a little later, just elevating a woman's accusation to the status of beyond a reasonable doubt just because breath.
Female, female breath.
really needs to be pushed back against because it is not giving women the moral agency of the potential to be corrupted, to do things for money, to lie, which, you know, we understand men can do and women can do as well.
We need to retain proof beyond a reasonable doubt, or at least in the sort of the preponderance of evidence.
And one word versus another word?
I mean, God, didn't we all learn this in the playground?
You know, we would be in the playground, we'd get in some conflict with a kid, and then the teacher would come over, and we'd say, well, he hit me first.
And the other kid would say, well, no, he hit me first.
And what happened?
They'd say, I can't figure out who's right to stop fighting with each other.
They wouldn't take a side.
But now it's all changed.
And that is horrendous.
White male, you're guilty.
Yeah.
So O'Reilly, as we mentioned, will be getting $25 million from the network after being terminated, which is a quarter of the $100 million he was guaranteed in his four-year contract he signed in January.
And he put out a statement after, you know, Fox News.
It sounds like Fox News made the decision.
I don't think Bill O'Reilly wanted to give up his show and his very successful role at Fox.
But Bill O'Reilly put out the statement, said, over the past 20 years of Fox News, I have been extremely proud to launch and lead one of the most successful news programs in history, which is consistently informed and entertained millions of Americans and significantly contributed to building Fox into the dominant news network in television.
It's tremendously disheartening that we part ways due to completely unfounded claims.
But that is the unfortunate reality many of us in the public eye must live with today.
I will always look back on my time at Fox with great pride in the unprecedented success we achieved and with my deepest gratitude to all my dedicated viewers.
I wish only the best for Fox News Channel.
That's from Bill O'Reilly.
So this whole thing, this kind of plays into a larger story, which is not new, but it certainly has heated up as of late.
So Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck both got attacked really strongly in 2012, and their advertisers were specifically targeted by, again, I don't know if they called it an advertiser educational campaign or whatever the heck the We're good to
go.
And they survived that.
Now, they just started coming after Breitbart.
They convinced 1600 companies to no longer advertise on Breitbart.
And that's continuing.
Major advertising agency AdRoll suspended its syndication of InfoWars product ads across millions of websites and platforms, creating a potential loss of about $3 million a year.
Milo, of course, was targeted, specifically.
PewDiePie, of course, was attacked and smeared by the Wall Street Journal.
You know, he's a Nazi.
He's anti-Semitic.
He made jokes.
Jokes bad.
Leading to Disney Maker Studios to drop him.
And he's certainly seen his advertising revenue decrease because of that.
It's interesting that there's these people that develop alternative platforms that don't exactly go through mainstream channels that suddenly get targeted.
Or people on the right that are effective communicators.
It's funny how they get targeted.
I'm sure this is just a coincidence.
YouTube, of course, targeted by Wall Street Journal, leading to a mass advertiser exodus, cutting ad revenue from more people than just those on the right.
Most content creators are down to mere pennies on the dollar when it comes to their advertising.
I've heard some absolute horror stories from people that we know or friends of friends, that kind of thing.
I mean, some people, they're down to like 5% of what they were making before.
And some of these are not political channels either, so everyone is suffering because of this, which...
There was an ad on a racist video.
Maybe, maybe not.
Who knows?
We must now demonize the entire platform.
Doesn't make much sense, but nonetheless, this is what they're doing.
Because again, if you get people on YouTube, they don't have to go through the mainstream filter.
There's no gatekeepers.
That platform existing is a problem for those that want to control the narrative.
And we're in a position now where, for God's sakes, Ann Coulter is having to go through hell to practically give a damn speech on a college campus which used to be known for free speech.
This is just all part of a larger picture that is going to continue until people put their foot down and say no mas, that people on the left or people that don't go through filtered mainstream channels are going to be opposed at every angle.
Their advertisers will be targeted.
They will be silenced.
They will be smeared.
They will be branded every terrible thing in the book.
PewDiePie is anti-Semitic.
Blah, blah, blah.
He's a Nazi.
Blah, blah, blah.
Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean.
Yeehaw!
Actually said on Twitter that, regarding Ann Coulter, that the First Amendment doesn't protect her because hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment.
We're going to the point where we have someone that has sold over 10 New York Times bestselling books, been incredibly successful, that wants to give a speech, and it's hate speech because, what, you disagree with it?
You don't like facts about immigration?
Like, for God's sakes, Howard Dean.
And he's wrong.
And he's wrong.
Hate speech is completely protected by the First Amendment.
You know that the left is facing down the First Amendment because they're going for advertisers rather than trying to get speech they disagree with classified as hate speech, which is what they're doing in other countries.
So, no.
Hate speech is completely protected by the First Amendment to my understanding and knowledge, and so he's entirely wrong about it, which I guess makes us all the more grateful that he did not become the president.
This is a war, folks.
This is what's going on.
And this whole guilty until proven innocent in the court of public opinion thing, you need to speak out against it.
Yes, you, the person listening right now, not the person next to you, not some other listener that you imagine that we're talking to.
You need to speak out against this.
And it doesn't matter if you don't like the person.
Matter of fact, if you don't like the person that's being smeared, it's more powerful if you speak out in favor of them and say innocent until proven guilty anyway.
Again, I'm not a Bill O'Reilly fan.
I'm not.
But I don't like seeing anyone smeared with accusations that are then believed to be true because someone said something.
If women were saying this about Rachel Maddow, who we'll talk about in a few minutes as well, I would come out with the same stance that, sorry, there's no possibility that any legal system can mediate between he said and she said.
The law cannot handle private, unverified, contradictory statements.
The law cannot handle it because the law requires objective evidence or witnesses in order to function.
Without that...
It is absolutely impossible for a legal system to determine who's in the right and who's in the wrong.
But of course, women want to have that power for obvious reasons, and men want to give them that power for less obvious reasons.
Eggs!
Well, you know, this ties into our next story, but Julian Assange, who there's rumblings that the U.S. may seek prosecution of him in the very, very near future—I hope those rumblings are incorrect— He's had to live in pretty much a damn office cubicle for many, many years because of a rape accusation, which if you dig into, to any degree, you'd have some questions about it.
Let's just put it that way.
And we'll do more on Julian Assange in the near future.
Hopefully we won't need to.
Yeah, we've got a show on that.
People can search it on the channel.
Just look for Assange at freedomainradio.com slash videos or youtube.com slash freedomainradio.
We've got a whole video on it for people who want to find out more about these accusations.
Yeah, so moving to our next story.
On Tuesday, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, he's a Republican, signed a no means no bill.
Now, the goal of this was to make it easier to prosecute rape cases, including...
SB 217, or Criminal Law Sexual Offenses Physical Resistance.
Now this eliminates the requirement that victims of sexual crimes prove they physically resisted their assailants.
Previously, victims of rape had to prove they did not consent and that their resistance was overcome by, quote, force or the threat of force, end quote.
And that's according to Maryland criminal law.
Now no longer the case.
Now you don't need to prove that you resisted by force.
Or threat of force.
Or threat of force, yes.
A 2016 BuzzFeed investigation, and this one didn't involve a piss-stained dossier, no, no it didn't, into the Baltimore County Police Department found that the language in the law often allowed police to dismiss rape charges as unfounded if they believed there wasn't enough evidence that the victim fought back.
So the police wanted evidence that a rape actually took place.
Okay.
The investigation states that even if a victim submitted to sexual acts out of fear for their life, the assailant was able to, quote, walk away without so much as a police investigation, end quote.
And out of the 42, quote, unfounded, end quote, cases BuzzFeed investigated, 15 were dismissed because the victim did not resist enough.
That's their own verbiage.
So it's kind of tilted in their direction.
The bill, signed Tuesday, amends the law.
Specifically saying that evidence of physical restraint by a victim is not required to prove a sexual crime was committed given that a victim increases their chances of being maimed or killed if trying to physically resist a rape.
This bill will clarify that a victim of rape does not have to fight the perpetrator or put up physical resistance in order for the court to hand down a guilty verdict.
End quote.
So if you look at this on the surface, it's like, well, I can understand.
Like, you don't want...
A victim who is terrified, maybe a knife pressed to her throat or something like that, to have to fight back in order to be evidence that something occurred.
I can understand, from that standpoint, this type of law.
But at the same time, this is also removing standards of proof that are going to, unquestionably, it's just a matter of time, lead to people that are innocent.
being found guilty whether it's in the court of public opinion or in a criminal courtroom of rapes or sexual assaults that they did not commit There are of course crazy and evil men who rape women There are crazy and evil women who rape women and crazy and evil men who rape men.
And there are crazy and evil women who will accuse a man of rape for reasons other than he raped her.
And this basic reality is why there needs to be a high standard for the burden of proof.
What this does, and the threat of violence as well, if the man has a knife, If he's found with a knife after and she says he pressed a knife to her throat and so on, that I'm sure would be enough.
So it's not like she actually has to fight back.
There just has to be some evidence that force was used or threatened in order for it to become rape.
Because what this does...
Is, tragically and horrifyingly, what it does is it means that it is impossible to differentiate between a woman who had voluntary sex and later charges a man with rape from a woman who was genuinely raped.
Because it's her say-so.
Now she can define the act afterwards.
She can say, I felt like I had to.
I felt like I couldn't say no.
I felt, I felt, I felt.
Maybe she even believes it.
Maybe she could pass a lie detector test.
But I don't know what that means in terms of proof.
I don't know what that means in terms of proof.
There has to be some standard by which the he said, she said can be adjudicated in favor of the victim.
And for that, you need evidence of some kind.
People's words are not enough.
Otherwise, we can just go full-on invasion of the body snatchers, stand on a street corner, screech at people, and the police can just throw them in jail.
Because you just said something.
We cannot have people's words, people's statements, people's...
Stories.
It cannot be enough to put people in jail.
That is turning into a totalitarian system.
You know, and after this segment we did on Bill O'Reilly and those accusations and this law changed, you know, people go like, well, Steph, you just must be pro-rape and pro-sexual assault for having this standard of, you know, there actually needs to be proof and evidence before you find someone guilty.
No!
No, folks!
This is not a system that I would wish on my worst enemy.
This guilty until proven innocent stuff.
Well, imagine if we take gender and the emotional explosiveness of rape out of it.
Imagine that some man can accuse a woman who lives next door of entering into his house and stealing something of his.
She came into my house and she stole my Visa card.
Now, if you call up the police and you say, my next-door neighbor, this woman, came into my house and stole my Visa card, they're going to say, okay, well, show me the sign of forced entry.
Show me this, show me that.
We're going to go talk to her and so on.
But if there's no physical evidence that she did it, what can they do?
Now, if we want to have it as a legal principle that a mere accusation in the complete absence of any physical evidence or any physical indications of what happened, if the accusation is enough to put people in jail, there's no need for a court system at all.
There's no need for lawyers.
There's no need for innocent until proven guilty.
You can save a lot of money.
Yeah, anyone who accuses can get anyone else thrown in jail.
We understand that that is horrifying.
That is totalitarian.
That is the Soviet style.
Show me the man and I'll show you the crime, putting people in jail for thought crimes and so on.
This cannot be how things run.
It's horrendous.
And it undoes more than 2,000 years of development of standards of proof going back to the Roman era.
Well, and I'd feel a little more comfortable about these legal changes if there was some kind of punishment for people that made false accusations.
Unfortunately, that more often than not doesn't seem to be the case.
So you have incentives where someone can make a claim believed to be true legally and in the court of public opinion.
And if it winds up not being true, Maybe, maybe, maybe in rare circumstances down the road, there'll be some consequences, but likely not so much.
All right.
Well, moving on to equal pay and Senator Elizabeth Warren, everyone's favorite, a little more amusing topic.
So Elizabeth Warren, over the last few years, she's said lots of stuff about equal pay, including some tweets.
This is one from last year.
She said, today is equal pay day.
And I cannot believe that I have to give another speech fighting for equal pay for equal work for women.
Another tweet from her.
Women are tired of hearing pay inequality isn't real or it's somehow our fault and we're ready to fight back.
Hashtag equal pay.
You can search her speeches, search her website, search her Twitter account.
Lots of equal pay, pay equality, pay gap type stuff.
So...
Somebody did some research into the pay of Elizabeth Warren's staffers, and they found that Elizabeth Warren's female staffers made more than $20,000 less than their male counterparts last year.
The median annual salary for male staffers in Warren's office amounted to $73,750 in 2016, while female staffers brought in a median of $52,750 in 2016.
So, pay gap of Over $20,000.
Female staff in Warren's office made $0.71 for every dollar that their male counterparts made.
So women are tired of hearing pay inequality isn't real or it's somehow our fault.
Well, Liz, it's actually your fault.
If this is a problem for you, this is actually your fault.
This is what you're paying your people.
So pot, kettle, black, look in a mirror.
I don't really want to be lectured about pay inequality and the pay gap from someone that's doing exactly what they say is so damn terrible.
It'd be really ironic if this is the case for other Democratic women as well, like managers.
That would be too much almost, too good.
Former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton paid women about $15,000 less than men as a senator and then paid women $16,000 less than men as secretary of state and then paid women $7,000 less as a presidential candidate.
I'm noticing a trend.
Campaign staffers noted that her campaign's tendency to pay men more than women and saw it as a vulnerability in the election.
You don't say!
You don't say.
Women working at the Obama White House also earned less than men.
So, do as I say, not as I do.
Yep, yep, yep.
I mean, this idea that women are just somehow mysteriously paid less than men has been debunked so many times.
It's just one of these really, really boring things.
This is how you know when somebody's just in a complete echo chamber and has never, ever, actually looked into any contrary information to the propaganda that they're receiving.
It's really, really boring.
MIT Press is publishing a communism for kids book.
Because why not, right?
It's a book aimed at three to seven-year-olds.
And the paperback is available on Amazon currently for $10.08.
So using capitalism to sell communism for kids.
Okay.
Just what it is.
The author, B.D. Adamczak, I think that's how you pronounce the name.
I don't care enough to look it up, is a Berlin-based social theorist and artist, of course.
She writes on political theory, queer politics, and the past future of revolutions.
Steph, would you like to read this book description?
In an ideal world, no.
Very much not.
But okay.
Here we go with the book description.
Are you ready?
I'm going to put my best movie preview voice.
Once upon a time, people yearned to be free of the misery of capitalism.
How could their dreams come true?
This little book proposes a different kind of communism.
One that is true to its ideals and free from authoritarianism.
Offering relief for many who have been numbed by Marxist exegesis and given headaches by the earnest pompousness of socialist politics, it presents political theory in the simple terms of a children's story, accompanied by illustrations of lovable little revolutionaries experiencing their political awakening.
And freezing to death in Siberia!
Wait, sorry.
Sorry.
That's a bit of an editorial.
It goes on to say, It all unfolds like a story with jealous princesses, fancy swords, displaced peasants, mean bosses, and tired workers.
Not to mention...
A Ouija board, a talking chair, and a big pot called the state.
Before they know it, readers are learning about the economic history of feudalism, class struggles in capitalism, different ideas of communism, and more.
Finally, competition between two factories leads to a crisis that the workers attempt to solve in six different ways, most of them borrowed from historical models of communist or socialist change.
Each attempt fails, since true communism is not so easy after all.
But it's also not that hard.
At last, the people take everything into their own hands and decide for themselves how to continue.
Happy ending?
Only the future will tell.
With an epilogue that goes deeper into the theoretical issues behind the story, this book is perfect for all ages and all who desire a better world.
Man, it's cold in this archipelago.
Sorry, go on.
You've been to play centers.
You've seen this kind of thing certainly more than I have.
How are three- to eight-year-olds with, like, other kids playing with their toys?
I know some kids are good with that, but typically, from what I've seen, that doesn't normally go the greatest.
No, no.
See, what you do is you go trick-or-treating with, say, a dozen kids, right?
And then you invite them all back to your place.
And you have them dump all of their candy into a giant pile.
And then you take it as the parent or as the adult, the authority figure.
You take it all, and then you give it to them based upon their conformity to your ideology.
And kids love that.
They love not having any control over their own candy that they've gone out and earned.
They love it when they have to be forced to surrender all of their candy.
And they certainly love it when authority figures only give them scraps of candy based on how much they're willing to echo and parrot the authority figure's ideology.
That's paradise for kids.
That's really how all summer camps work.
I wonder if there's a chapter in the book on nationalizing Kit Kats and Reese's Pieces, because I think that would make it a very interesting literary journey.
I was actually, you know, before we did the show, Mike, Mike is the one, he's the common sense one.
And so my inner Mike, right, so I was going to say, let's rewrite this as national socialism for kids.
You know, once upon a time, people yearned to be free of the misery of dot, dot, dot, right?
Dot, dot, dot.
And I thought, I could...
Like a seven-year-old!
No, this is the thing, though.
You always have to be paranoid about the remix, right?
So I could have done this in Nazism for Kids, you know, and rewritten this whole thing about...
A different kind of Nazism, one that is true to its ideals and free from authoritarianism, right?
Because the big problem with Marxism, it's not that I've been numbed by exegesis or given headaches by the earnest pompousness of socialist politics.
The problem is it killed over 100 million people in the 20th century alone!
The problem with National Socialism is not its earnest pompousness.
It's actually quite a little bit different than that.
So I was going to rewrite this as National Socialism for kids, and I was going to read it.
But then, of course, my inner mic came and said, okay, imagine how that could be taken out of context.
It's set to music, stirring music, the time for arguments is past!
And then, you know, massive amounts of video production could go into that and give people entirely the wrong impression.
Is that a fair way to have been in attunement with my inner mic, Mike?
Yeah, I think that's a pretty good idea to be aware of that, you know, looking from the outside in.
Dot, dot, dot!
Yeah, you know, it's a shame the hit that satire and irony have taken a lot of hits from remixes, but, you know, it's just part of the price.
All right, so Rachel Kushner.
Oh!
No relation, I don't think.
Wait, wait.
For this part, it's a shame that she has that last name.
I just wanted to point that out, because people will be thinking it anyway, but go on.
Author of the communist novel The Flamethrowers, which was New York Magazine's number one book of the year, and named a best book of 2013 by...
The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, oh!
The Oprah Magazine.
Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The New Yorker, Time, Flavor Wire, Salon, Slate, The Daily Beast, Bookish, and The Jewish Daily Forward, to name a few.
Can I just, sorry to interrupt.
First of all, I'd really, really like it if certain Jews stopped praising communism so much.
That would be pretty cool.
Secondly, I could actually get behind a communist novel called The Flamethrowers, but probably not in the way that people think.
I could also get behind a communist novel called Free Helicopter Rides for Everyone.
Anyway, why don't you go on with this is the woman's review of this book, right?
Yes, she said, quote, Okay, let me just jump out of this.
Yes, let's give the three-year-old the book on the destruction of the world.
That's going to be completely healthy.
That won't traumatize them or damage them in any way, shape, or form.
Come on, little Joey.
Time to get up.
Come on.
Up you get.
Let's enjoy our last seven minutes on the planet.
You're four years old.
Do you feel like switching genders?
You did like the movie Frozen.
Oh, wait.
That's a whole other topic.
We'll get into that another time.
Back to the review.
Have 200 years of capitalism brought us freedom?
Or just more inequality than has ever been experienced by humans on Earth?
Question mark.
Global capitalism is not human destiny.
It merely is.
That is not an argument.
To think beyond it, with the help of Adam Zak's primer, is to take a first step toward freedom, at least the freedom to imagine other worlds.
Now, again, communism on other worlds, that's another book I could get behind, as long as those other worlds involve no air or water.
Hey, I could get behind Trump funding NASA. I could really get behind that if the goal was to colonialize Mars and just put all the communists and leftists on Mars.
Truly, truly earning it the name of the red planet.
Oh, I did.
I'm afraid so.
You did go there.
I'm afraid so.
All right, well, Frederick R. Jameson, Oh, God, Steph, can you pronounce this?
I'm just going to butcher this guy.
Right.
Professor of comparative literature, professor of romance studies.
French!
Now, sorry, this is Frederick, it's not Frederick, it's Frederick, F-R-E-D-R-I-C, and I'm going to go out on a limb and say that there may be some Germanic influence in his history.
No!
But he's a professor of romance studies, French, director of Institute for Critical Theory, Duke University.
Critical theory generally means Marxism, but that's just my particular take.
So he said, this delightful little book may be helpful in showing that there are other forms of life and living than the one we currently, quote, enjoy.
So basically Marxists are aliens?
Actually, actually, that would really help us update the gene wars presentation.
So yes, folks, you can go to Amazon.com and through the use of some of the remaining capitalist abilities that we have in this country and the world as a whole, you can buy this Communism for Kids book for $10.08.
Wait, wait.
I don't suggest that you do that.
Hang on.
They're charging for it?
Yes.
Well, it's communism for kids.
The parents have to pay.
No, but- Because they exist as capitalist slaves.
I assume that they're charging more than it costs to produce it.
Well, especially since the Kindle version is, like, similar.
It's a little less, like 50 cents less, but, you know.
So they're charging more money than it costs to produce it over time.
They're aiming to make a profit, and they're using capitalist mechanisms to get their book on communism out.
By the way, communism...
Not an appropriate topic for children, if talked about honestly.
You know, it's like taking them to an eternal century-long horror movie that is currently sucking down the entire planet and, again, stands on the bodies of more than 100 million people.
Not very appropriate for children.
These are probably the same people who are horrified when kids get hold, even of a mild paint-based first-person shooter.
No, not an appropriate topic for children at all.
Well, not to mention that, as you've described many times, and we'll probably do another video on this in the near future, a lot of these ideas, such as communism, come out of an arrested childhood, which I'll just leave it there for now, and we can talk about that at a later time, but communism for kids...
And leads to a literally arrested adulthood.
Yes.
Yes, to put it mildly.
Germany is now going after social networks, folks.
So Germany's cabinet...
Approved a new bill that punishes social networking sites if they fail to swiftly remove illegal content such as hate speech or defamatory fake news.
Now, problem with that, again, who gets to define what is hate speech or defamatory fake news?
Well, if it's the German government that has a problem with any type of immigration-related statistics, that doesn't sound so great for people that like facts.
Chancellor Angela Merkel's cabinet agreed on rules that would impose fines of up to 50 million euros, which is $53.4 million on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms.
Business-friendly environment in Germany.
Well, I mean, this is the great challenge to globalism and propaganda is social media, and they're fully aware of the power of social media to shift election results, to shift election thinking.
And I wonder if this is going to be equally enforced...
On the left or the right?
I mean, I just wonder.
I also wonder if, you know, some of the more extremist ISIS stuff that seems to float up regularly on Twitter and other platforms and doesn't seem to get taken down very often, I wonder if that is also going to be as strictly enforced on the left and the right.
I'm going to go with no, Alex, for infinity.
Well, if you take that stuff down, they won't feel included in society and then they'll bomb us.
So you have to allow...
You have to allow not only the propaganda on all social media accounts, you need to allow people to walk through city squares waving ISIS flags, which there's an awful lot of pictures of that happening in Europe and people just going about their business as someone is waving a terrorist flag!
Boy, Germany and flags, you want to watch that video, and you can look this up on YouTube, watch that video of what Angela Merkel's face looks like when someone hands her a German flag and she just throws it to one side like somebody just Rubbed crow shit in her hand.
I mean, it really is appalling.
I mean, but that's globalism.
That's, you know, the rebranded communism.
Well, a German justice minister said that companies offering such online platforms are responsible for removing hateful content.
He said the new bill would not restrict the freedom of expression.
Right.
Taxes will remain only applicable to a tiny percentage of the population and rates will remain low.
But intervene only when criminal hatred or intentionally false news are posted.
Intentionally false news!
Hatred is now a crime.
It's a thought and literally this is thought crime.
Criminal hatred Angela Merkel arrested for her response to the German flag.
No, no.
He continued and said, just like on the streets, there is also no room for criminal incitement on social networks.
The internet affects the culture of debate and the atmosphere in our society.
Verbal radicalization is often a preliminary stage to physical violence." Just wanted to mention too, sorry to interrupt your thought, Mike, I wanted to mention too, that European governments cannot control the increasing radicalization of Islamism within their own prisons, which means even if they make the entire society into a prison, they they will not be able to control verbal radicalization.
So this has nothing to do with that and everything to do with controlling narratives.
Well, your point was better than mine, so I'm going to move on because that's a brilliantly put point.
Social networks need to ensure that obviously criminal content, as defined by German law, which I'm sure will be completely objective, will be deleted within 24 hours and other illegal content after seven days.
So what's going to happen here?
Well, what happened with YouTube and restricted mode and all this stuff when they face the advertiser backlash?
They're going to create all these algorithms that just scoop up all kinds of stuff and flag it or delete it or hide it, and it's going to create a whole bunch of people that are very upset.
So anything even in the realm of what they're looking for, and given what we've seen with Action by Germany and that, you know, people that are concerned about immigration, concerned about the migrant crisis, all that stuff, it's probably going to get swept up in what other algorithms are...
Created by Facebook and Twitter to deal with the threat of 50 million euro fines for not deleting that stuff.
They're basically, rather than adjudicate anything, I assume that these social media sites are just going to, they're going to get a list of stuff from the state and they're just going to delete it automatically.
Because why on earth wouldn't you want to do that?
Or shadow ban it or ghost it or something like that.
No, no, it doesn't say it says delete it.
You can't even shadow ban it.
It has to be deleted.
And here's the thing.
It's going to rely on people complaining, right?
It's going to rely on people flagging stuff.
It's going to rely on people sending stuff to the state.
Now, we know two things about the left.
Number one, viciously intolerant.
Do not like to engage in open debate, right?
I mean, Madeleine Albright went to speak at Berkeley.
Now, Madeleine Albright was pretty much heavily implicated in the deaths of half a million Iraqis and later said, yeah, it was worth it.
No complaints.
But Ann Coulter comes.
Massive, massive problems.
And, you know, there's other people come to speak, and there's just like Lauren Southern goes to speak, the free speech rally, and, you know, there's You know, these firecrackers going off and people throwing rocks and so on.
And so the left is really intolerant and the right is not.
So anytime you have a free speech control system which relies on reporting, well, the left is going to be scanning and attacking and all of that, and it's going to be disproportionately against the right or against the non-leftists.
And also the second thing we know about the leftists is they have a lot more time on their hands because they generally tend not to be overly burdened with, say, employment.
And so they're going to have lots more time and far more vicious motives.
So even if it's just a kind of reporting system, it's going to be heavily attacking the right and protecting the left.
And that's just how it's going to go.
Now, Steph, if you're talking about employment, they might be...
If they're on the left and they're employed, they might be academics, and then they'll have plenty of free time to still go and participate in protests and be intolerant.
And swing bike locks!
Yeah.
Thank you, Paul.
Good job.
And yeah, they're okay with open debate, but only if open debate involves throwing glass bottles and MADs and all that kind of stuff into crowds of people.
And for those that haven't listened to this interview yet and read the study that the discussion is about, you should look up the interview that Steph did in the last six months with John Wright, who is a researcher that has a study showing why leftists are more violent than people on the right.
It's fairly detailed.
And he's got lots of good data on it.
And if you want to try and poke holes in it, feel free.
But it's a great study.
It was a great conversation.
And if you haven't checked that out, it's going to be more relevant than ever in the near future if, well, my news feed continues on the track that it is going.
Up next, this is something I wanted to talk about last week because I saw these numbers and I was just completely gobsmacked.
But we had to do the state of Trump.
But this week we're fitting it in and apparently Japan is completely doomed.
Completely doomed.
So, numbers released by the Japanese government show that the newborn population has dipped below 1 million for the first time in more than 100 years.
The birth rate has fallen to its lowest level since World War II, with only 981,000 births, while the death rate is estimated at 1.3 million.
It's the lowest number of births since the census first began, which was back in 1899.
Ah, so Japanese not having children.
Well, it's funny what a 20-year-old zombie economy and watching your fathers get work to death through karoshi can do to one's fertility rate.
The National Institute of Population and Social Security Research in Japan reported that the population of Japan is expected to plunge to 88.08 million in 2065.
Now, if you're not up on what the current population of Japan is, that would be a 30% fall from the 2015 level.
So, 50 years, 30% decline in population.
That is like dozens of times more depopulation than was achieved with two atomic bombs.
Putting it in that context, especially since the last time that the birth rate has fallen to its lowest level, is especially relevant.
Japan's population peaked At 128.08 million in 2008.
So by 2065, they will have lost 40 million people.
And this is just a reminder, if you've listened to this show, you know this, but Japan has an average IQ of 105.
And that's good.
That's good for an average IQ. So just think, 40 million people.
Average IQ of 105.
That's a whole lot of human brainpower that's just gonna...
gone.
Please, Japanese people, start having sex.
I need my cell phone to get better.
On the other hand, though, to balance things out, there is a massive population boom in sub-Saharan Africa.
So...
So, in 2065, people 65 and older will account for 38.4% of the total population.
Which means the workforce and working population will be cut by over 50%.
You know, all these old people, no one's working, no babies being born.
You know, in most...
Zombie-pocalypse movies and TV shows, they don't seem that old or short, like the zombies themselves that are feasting on the young.
They seem taller, more vibrant, more...
I mean, maybe they know less kung fu.
I don't know.
But this is the challenge.
I mean, there's no way that the economy can sustain that.
And I think people kind of...
Smart people, and this is one of the smartest populations in the world, I guess, second only to the...
Ashkenazi Jews, I mean, they get this, they understand this, that the future is not friendly, and that the economy is not about to turn around, and independence is not around the corner.
And this was a highly energetic, if somewhat explosively evil at times, population, you know, pre-Second World War, And if you look at the work that Japan did to raise its economy, to get to Western standards after the Second World War, an enormously energetic and focused and concentrated population, and now it's just become apathetic and weird in a way.
I mean, this, I don't know, well, this, you know, weird hair anime stuff that goes on in Japan and some of the Stranger sexual practices, and they seem to be very, very keen on developing robots to have sex with.
But it's a really tragic decline of a very vital and brilliant population.
The reason why this population decline and these projections stand out so much is Japan is one of the few countries that hasn't tried to supplement this decline in the native-born population by bringing in lots and lots of immigrants from the Third World.
Well, Japanese culture, Japanese science is very race realist.
I mean, I remember reading sort of Philip Rushton's stuff, the late professor, I think, at the University of Waterloo.
And he would have regular exchanges with people in China and people in Japan and so on.
And they are very clear on race.
They haven't had sort of the leftist communist infiltration that has suppressed differences between the races in testosterone IQ and other kinds of things.
So in Japan, this is well understood.
This is well known as it is in China, which is one of the reasons why they don't view this as an option.
So it just further highlights as well the kind of population declines and the numbers that you would have in Western countries that are bringing in lots of third world immigrants with high birth rates if that wasn't done.
And it's just, it's really shocking to see these world powers and the idea that they're gonna lose, Japan's gonna lose 40 million people in 50 years.
How many people sitting around a dinner table?
How many conversations that are lost in that?
It's heartbreaking.
Yeah, and of course, any one of those tens of millions of people could discover a cure for cancer or could discover cures for other things or could invent the next great thing, could give us our jetpacks, and all is missing because they simply won't let the economy self-correct through a recession.
I mean, the zombie companies that are staying alive because the government is redistributing income from productive to unproductive people and is printing money like crazy and is managing interest rates in very destructive ways.
I mean, it literally depopulates.
I mean, bad policies, bad economic policies could literally aid in the depopulation and perhaps eventual destruction of the entire gene pool.
It is worse than war.
It is worse than war.
At the end of the Second World War, Japan lost a lot of people and then got a lot of people back.
Where the hell does this turn around?
Do you understand?
It is like radiation.
Bad economic policies, central planning, refusing to let banks fail, refusing to let organizations fail is worse than radiation.
It is worse than some sort of bioattack.
It is a depopulation scenario.
People just don't grasp how incredibly dangerous and destructive and frankly genocidal these policies can turn out.
Well, and along the lines of people talking about overpopulation, I'm sure there's a lot of environmentalists and people that are very concerned about the climate footprint that human beings are leaving on the planet that will look at these numbers and go, well, that's a step in the right direction.
But overpopulation?
The world isn't overpopulated by intelligent people.
The whole point of having smart people is they add more value than they subtract.
So, as you said, would one of these 40 million people that are lost in Japan, would they have cured cancer?
Would they have cured other diseases?
Would they have led to the next internet or the next big technology that would add untold economic growth to the world population, rise people out of poverty and do all that great stuff?
This is a lot of incredibly smart people that aren't going to be there unless things change and change drastically.
And it's not looking good.
Another study found that 60% of women and 70% of men aged 18 to 34 in Japan are not in a relationship.
Although 90% would like to have a family, quote, at some point in the future, end quote.
Well, it's the same thing that's happening in Greece.
I mean, the Greek couples are just giving up on having kids or having even more than one kid because they've kind of postponed it since 2007, 2008.
But now, a decade later, doctors are reporting that the women in these marriages who maybe have frozen their eggs or kept their eggs, they just say, oh, destroy it.
We're not having the kids.
And smarter people care about the future and limit their reproduction when there's economic uncertainty.
Less intelligent people just breed like rabbits.
And this is another one of the grave dangers that happens when you have bad economic policies.
It's a stranglehold on the high IQ population and a fertility boost to others.
And, well, we've got an interview coming out about this more, so I won't go in it more later.
All right, next we move to Venezuela.
Ah!
Okay, repeat, Joe.
So on Thursday, MSNBC's racial maddow of, hey, look, I have Trump's taxes.
Let me milk it for 60 minutes and such as people go, really?
That's it?
He paid taxes?
Really?
Of that fame, she claimed that people in Venezuela are protesting the government over starving, over nationalizing bakeries.
No, no, they're protesting in the streets over donations that the government made to Donald Trump's campaign.
What?!
The government of Venezuela made donations to President Donald Trump's campaign?
Hold on, we'll talk about that in a second.
So Rachel Maddow said, Venezuela is a country in intense turmoil right now.
The sanctions that the U.S. put on Venezuela were put there in 2014 after 43 people got killed while participating in anti-government protests.
Another three people got killed just yesterday.
There has been protests for weeks and weeks and weeks, and today Venezuelans are enraged anew.
Yeah, that's right.
When they're literally dying of starvation and handing their children to strangers to feed, the big problem is an FEC filing from the White House.
Oh, other quick question, Mike.
2014.
Now, I'm no professional historian.
It's still Trump's fault.
Yeah, okay, just checking.
He was breathing in 2014.
I thought the Jagir beanpole was still in power back then, but apparently it's Trump's fault.
And the big problem is not massive crippling socialist policies, which have destroyed yet another country, as it will do over and over again until we learn these goddamn lessons.
It's not crippling socialist policies.
It's not central planning.
It's not corruption.
It's not the flight of high IQ people from Venezuela.
It's an FEC filing.
That's the big problem they have down there.
It's not real socialism stuff.
How many times do I have to tell you it's not real socialism?
We'll just try it again.
So, and this is weird.
I mean, this is something that people should pay attention to, this fact that Citgo, Petroleum, a U.S.-based subsidiary of a major state-owned Venezuelan oil company, donated half a million dollars to Trump's inauguration ceremony fund.
That's weird.
Not if you're one of the, I assume, approximately nine executives who desperately want citizenship to get the hell out of the hellhole called Venezuela.
That's my guess.
But yeah, who knows?
And it seems kind of weird that this kind of stuff would be going on.
Well, the idea that an oil company...
Or energy companies would donate to Trump, given that Trump is one of the most energy-friendly presidents that you could envision the United States having.
I mean, good God, we have the CEO of ExxonMobil as the secretary of state, which I thought was like, hey, business friendly guy.
Lately, I'm not so sure about that as an idea.
But I can see why energy companies, oil companies would want to invest in Trump and invest in his campaign.
But yeah, Venezuelan owned oil company.
Half a million dollars to Trump's inauguration ceremony fund.
Certainly worth asking some questions about.
I have no problem with that.
But yeah, Rachel Maddow, that's not why there's protests going on in Venezuela right now.
I mean, that would be pretty low on the list regarding things that people in Venezuela have a problem with.
It's not why they can't eat.
It's not why they're hunting rats in the sewers because of this donation.
But of course, if you're in crazy lefty world, sure, you can't talk about socialist policies being bad and it's got to be Trump's fault somehow.
And look, we found a connection.
You have to pull up the clips of this because there's like there's these riots in Venezuela and there's this masses of people shown.
And then the lower third is like protest over Trump donations.
And it's like, oh, my God.
I mean, I was trying to come up with an example of, like, worse fake news from CNN or MSNBC or something just in its lower third display.
This one is pretty tough to top.
And the opposition coalition that, you know, called for these protests that Rachel Maddow was commenting on, the Democratic Unity Roundtable, they repeatedly tweeted saying that the protests are against the dictatorial socialist government.
And the footage from Venezuela on Mad Osha was captioned.
This is what I was talking about.
It's something.
Unrest in Venezuela over Trump donations.
This is the point where the news just becomes so comical.
It's like the real world is the onion that this can actually happen and that this woman She has a career still.
She's not being, you know, Bill O'Reilly's got to step down because some people said he did some stuff five years ago, okay?
But Rachel Maddow can do this, make this decision, and heads aren't going to roll, people aren't going to lose their jobs over what is clearly complete bullshit.
So, dictator Maduro in Venezuela and his plans to arm as many as one million chavistas seeking to join government-sponsored gangs.
Oh, good!
Government-sponsored gangs.
That's exactly what I want to hear.
On the anticipation of continued protests.
The Spanish newspaper El Paris reported that Maduro was seeking to build a 500,000-strong militia as soon as possible but ultimately sought a million-strong army of socialists to intimidate the opposition into silence.
Yay, I want a million-strong army of socialists and government-sponsored gangs.
This sounds encouraging.
Well, no, Mike, to be fair, 500,000 does show up on both sides of this equation.
So one is $500,000 donated to Trump's inauguration ceremony fund.
The other is a 500,000-strong militia, as soon as possible, to smash the opposition into silence.
Where do you guys think you are, Berkeley?
So, you know, since we're talking about Venezuela, let's throw in a few Venezuelan facts, since no one else wants to talk about this.
The country's economy shrank by 18% in 2016, its third consecutive year of recession.
Unemployment is set to surpass 25%, and its people have suffered from widespread shortages of food and medicine.
But again, we're upset because Donald Trump something something.
Okay.
In a 2016 living conditions survey, A survey of 6,500 families in Venezuela found that little over 32% of Venezuelan households eat only once or twice every day.
93.3% said that their income does not support their cost for food, and thus they have resorted to cheaper foods such as vegetables, namely potatoes.
Due to this, almost 75% of the Venezuelan population has lost an average of 19 pounds.
Now, hang on though.
Also, we're not talking like a Tennessee population to begin with here.
This isn't Michael Moore going on a diet, no.
This isn't like Honey Boo Boo's family, you know, being a little bit short of ding-dongs.
This is like a relatively slender population getting down to like count your ribs and play them like a xylophone territory.
What's her name?
The Honey Boo Boo Mom.
She has a show on her weight loss.
Mama June!
Not proud I know it.
Not proud I know it.
I don't know if the people in Venezuela are getting a show on their weight loss.
Certainly not amongst the lefty mainstream media companies these days.
I would in fact specifically advise Mama June not to travel to Venezuela for obvious reasons of being hunted.
So yeah, 75% of the Venezuelan population has lost an average of 19 pounds.
Oh my god!
On horrifying stat of the week, I don't know if that's worse than the population numbers in Japan, but it's pretty horrifying.
And we're talking women who, you know, weigh a buck, buck ten to begin with.
I mean, this is horrendous.
This starts to become dangerous weight loss.
And the fact that the mainstream media is not talking about it, or only talk about it as some weird, obscure backdoor way to slam Trump, ugh.
God, I hate these people, Mike.
I just, you know, sometimes I can get philosophical and other times I'm just head stranglerly enraged at these leftists and their complete disregard to this unbelievable suffering because it's their team's fault.
It's your team's fault, assholes.
It's your team that is causing this unbelievable devastation in Venezuela.
Venezuela could have gone the way of Chile.
Venezuela, you all were praising, praising Hugo Chavez to the skies.
Oh, he was going to take back.
He was going to take back the corporations from the foreigners and he's going to help the people.
And this, it's your team.
It's your blood on your hands.
It's their blood on your hands.
And they're just not talking about it.
Not talking about it.
It's a cover-up, exactly the same as what happened with the crimes of Stalin in the 1930s.
It is a cover-up and it is ungodly evil.
Oh, the blood is on their hands, without any question.
And you mentioned of seizing companies.
Well, General Motors found out that the Venezuelan government wants to seize companies because they just seized one of their manufacturing plants.
And General Motors is clearly upset and said this is a total disregard of its legal rights.
General Motors, for whatever reason, thought they had legal rights in Venezuela in a dictatorship.
Wait a minute.
Fact!
You don't!
Hang on, hang on.
Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time in recorded history, white people have built something that has been nationalized by a foreign country.
Thank goodness that never happened with the development of oil in the Middle East.
That was close.
Well, in 2016, Kleenex maker Kimberly Clark suspended its operations in Venezuela as well, stating the country's rapidly escalating inflation and continued deterioration of economic and business conditions.
And the government said, ah, that closure is illegal.
And then it took over operations at the facility.
Well, good thing they were wrong.
What impact does this have on any remaining business in Venezuela?
I can't imagine there was much left in Venezuela, but it's leaving immediately if they're going to let them out of the country.
How often does this horror show need to repeat itself, Mike?
Uh, continually?
Because it's not real socialism, Steph.
It's not real socialism.
This is nothing new.
This has happened dozens and dozens and dozens of times throughout history, and not distant history, like over the last 100, 110 years.
This has happened over and over and over again.
And every single time these guys cover up the bodies, they roll up the bodies in their ideological carpets and dump them in a river.
And I just, it's appalling.
It shows you this supposed leftist or socialist compassion is total bullshit.
They would rather people continue to starve and die in Venezuela than question their ideology.
It is a murderous, murderous cult dictatorship mindset.
Maybe if we get that Communism for Kids book and we can ship some of them to Venezuela, maybe we can educate the children about why them starving and having to Their parents losing an average of 19 pounds.
Why?
That's great because, you know, communism is an ideal you can live up to in the future.
You don't have to live in this world as it is present day.
I'm okay.
I'm okay with that if we print it on rice paper so they have something to fucking eat.
Then that's okay with me.
Well, this isn't related to Venezuela starvation and riots, but it's an interesting fact regarding Venezuela that was in the news this week, so I wanted to bring it up.
The former head of the Office of Identification and Migration in Venezuela reported that the office issued at least 10,000 passport to Syrian, Iranian, and other Middle Eastern nationals with no ties to Venezuela.
As Venezuela does not have a history of terrorism, A Venezuelan passport is more powerful for international travel than those of war-torn terror-ravaged countries in the Middle East.
He estimated that up to 25,000 people may have received these passports while he was running the agency between May 2008 and October of 2009.
So, not even two years, and they may have cranked out 25,000 passports to God knows who, saying that they're from Venezuela, and God knows where these people might be now.
All over Europe, You name it.
Horrific.
Horrific.
Well, you know, we will continue to talk about Venezuela and the horrors that are going on there.
I mean, my heart breaks for what's happening over there and the media blackout on the left about it.
To only talk about it, for Rachel Maddow, to only talk about this horror, this terrifying and terrible situation...
For her only to talk about it in terms of ideological opposition to Donald Trump is so cold-hearted and manipulative, I don't even have words for it.
And I am not entirely empty of words.
I don't have words for how cold and horrifying that is to exploit this tragedy for your own tiny-minded political agendas.
Oh, it's gross.
It's gross beyond words.
Well, speaking of gross beyond words, we go to our final story of the show today.
U.S.-led NATO intervention to topple Libya's Gaddafi in 2011 resulted in a power vacuum that has allowed terror groups like ISIS to gain a foothold in the country.
That we know.
We've talked about that before.
That's come up in our discussions around the idea of regime change in Syria and the god nightmare that that would be.
What's happening in Libya right now?
Well, the UN's International Organization for Migration has reported that West African migrants smuggled into Libya are being traded and sold at what witnesses have described as modern-day slave markets.
Yay, Hillary!
You're responsible for modern-day slave markets!
The United Nations official told Newsweek that of the migrants and asylum seekers in Libya, almost every woman Has been sexually abused.
So we got people being sold at modern-day open slave markets, and all the women are being raped and sexually abused.
I am with her, Hillary.
Your foreign policy, you should have been president.
Well, this, of course, is generating massive interest from feminists and black activists, right?
Black Lives Matter.
And all of the black activists and other activists, of course, who are appalled and horrified at the tiny percentage of whites in America who owned slaves 150 years ago, have focused their laser-like attention and efforts on bringing attention to I think?
Rocketing down and they are bringing all of their focus and attention and outrage and marches towards these horrifying situations where the women who are maybe fleeing war are being sexually abused and sold as slaves.
Except they're not doing any of that.
Why?
Why is this not being talked about night and day?
Surely, modern-day slave markets are slightly more goddamn important than 3 or 4% of whites owning slaves in America 150 years ago.
Modern-day slave markets.
Why are they not talking about it?
Why is this not being brought up?
Why is there not outrage and...
Rage, in general, being focused on this, well, for the simple reason that it doesn't make them any money.
They don't get to yell at white men and get white men to cough up resources.
The actual moral content of this is far more horrifying.
Modern-day slave market versus Slave markets 150 or more years ago.
People actually living and dying, being bought and sold right now rather than what happened.
Tiny percentage of the population, a century and a half ago or more.
Why aren't they talking about it?
Because marching for this doesn't get them any free stuff.
Marching for this doesn't get them reparations.
Marching for this doesn't intimidate people into paying them off.
Doesn't get them bonuses.
Doesn't get them preferential legislation.
So you see, they don't really care about women being sexually abused.
They don't really care about slaves.
Because if they did, they'd be focusing on this exclusively and raising a much greater cacophony over this.
Have you heard about this?
Or have you heard about mansplaining or manspreading?
Which do you think is a little bit more important?
Slave women being sexually abused and raped?
Slaves being bought and sold?
Or Men shifting their jollies around in their pants and spreading their legs a little bit.
Or men explaining things perhaps a little bit too much.
No, they don't care.
They don't care.
And this appalls me, I think, more than any of the other stories that we've talked about today.
It is Horrendous.
They're using these historical tragedies in order to gain political advantage, to gain resources in the here and now.
If they actually cared about women being sexually abused, about women being mistreated, and about slavery, they would be talking about this.
But if they were to talk about this, it would put some of their other grievances in more perspective, and it would also be leading, like crumbs through the Hansel and Gretel Woods, it would lead them right back to Barack Obama Can't say it better than that.
So, in closing, I have an idea for next week.
We cover news stories.
We've done, lately, we've done the show on Syria, then we did the show on Trump, and I like the shows where we were able to go through a litany of different news stories.
I would also like to add a mailbag to this show.
So, if you have any questions, you can email me at operations at freedomainradio.com.
That's operations at freedomainradio.com.
Try and keep them short.
But, I think I'd like to try next week to squeeze in a couple questions at the end.
We'll see what the news cycle is like next week, but I think that might be a fun addition to this show.
Let me know what you think of it, send your questions in, and thank you for listening this week.
Yeah, and of course include a photo of your mailbag.
Thanks everyone so much for listening.
Appreciate it.
Let us know what you think of the show as we evolve and as we respond to what people like or don't like.
Please let us know what we can improve, what we can drop.
Look forward to your feedbacks.
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Thanks, of course, so much.
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