Aug. 15, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
26:48
3790 CHARLOTTESVILLE
When people stop talking, inevitably, unfortunately and predictably violence escalates. Virginia Gov. Terry McAullife declared a state of emergency leading to riot police shutting down the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The violence escalated from there with many being pepper sprayed, hit with rocks, physically assaulted and most shockingly - event attendee James Alex Fields, Jr. drove a vehicle into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing at least one person and leaving countless more injured. Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Everybody needs to take a deep breath, a step back from the brink, and remember, use your words, not your fists.
Oh, there are so many people to call out.
Good thing that Magic Barack Obama was the racial healer everyone expected him to be, except everyone with the brain, when he got into office in 2008, so...
First, black American president.
Mmm, I can taste the racial harmony in the air.
Smells like cordite, actually, and pepper spray these days.
So many people to talk about.
Mike Signer, he's the mayor of Charlottesville.
A couple of interesting coincidences here.
So, earlier this year, Mike Signer said he wanted Charlottesville to be a, quote, capital of the resistance.
against Trump and his administration after Trump tried to halt some immigration from these seven countries that don't have any capacity to vet people in any reliable way.
The mayor also said that he wanted the city manager to talk with other city councillors about how to make Charlottesville a sanctuary city.
For those who don't know, that means where you can't be arrested for being an illegal alien.
And I guess this shows just how much he is committed to the rule of law.
Now, a well-educated man, without a doubt, he holds a PhD in political science.
I'm sorry, as if that's a science.
He holds a PhD in political science from where?
Ah, if you've been following any of the leftist attacks on right speakers and free speech advocates and so on, you may not be at all shocked to hear that the mayor of Charlottesville holds a PhD in political science from the University of California at...
Berkeley. So, good thing that indoctrination didn't take any hold at all.
Mike was appointed by Governor Tim Kaine.
He was, of course, Hillary's VP choice.
Governor Tim Kaine to a four-year term on Virginia's Board of Medicine.
So, fairly tight politically with Tim Kaine.
Tim Kaine himself has three children.
The youngest son of Tim Kaine.
His name is Linwood. And he was arrested in Minnesota for his alleged role in an organized riot Against the Trump administration and Donald Trump's policies.
This young man, 24 years old, he was charged in May by prosecutors in St.
Paul with fleeing on foot, concealing identity in a public place, and obstructing the legal process by interfering with a police officer.
Now, this is some fairly serious stuff.
One of his three charges as a whole.
One is punishable by up to a year.
In prison. So this is, I guess, the sticky SJW leftist net that the Unite the Right organizers and participants have wandered into, I guess, like Seyfried training a late-stage rather hungry tiger.
Now, what was the plan?
What was the plan? Well, first of all, the plan was to deny The permit for the assembly, for the Unite the Right assembly.
The Unite the Right was upset, some people were upset, because the statue of Robert E. Lee was being taken down and they didn't like that.
And, I don't know, do you know there's a statue of Vladimir Lenin in Seattle?
I think that's highly offensive.
I think it should stay up though as a reminder that communism doesn't work and we continually need to talk about that because apparently people have a short memory.
No matter how much it's washed in blood, that stain seems to fade away.
That was the impetus.
They applied for a permit and they were denied their permit at the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union, stepped in, took them to court.
The town of Charlottesville and said, well, you can't deny them their free speech rights based on the content of what's being said.
And eventually they won.
And so I'm going to give an imitation of what the city council was probably like afterwards.
Fine. Okay, Nazis, you can have your rally, but let's just see what happens now, shall we?
Because they had weeks leading up to the protest.
City and state officials got together, put their helium heads together, and drew up a detailed plan for how to deal with the rally.
Now, the rally drew a grand total of fewer than 500 people.
This is not exactly Germany in 1933, when Hitler is getting, what, 30-35% of the vote.
This is 500 people in a couple hundred million people country, so not massive.
Now, to deal with these 500 people, they had 1,000 first responders, including 300 state police troopers and members of the National Guard.
So, you had two first responders for every one rally attender.
Yes, that's pretty much the worst Beach Boys song that was ever written.
So, if they had weeks to do this and they had a two-to-one ratio, of law enforcement to actual participants in the rally, I think it should have been vaguely possible to keep it peaceful.
That was the plan. Now I'm going to go out on a limb here and although I have absolutely zero formal police training, I'm gonna construct a scenario wherein the peace could have been kept.
So the Unite the Right rally attendees were kind of pushed into a fairly small set of squares.
And then they were ringed by some, you know, peaceful, some obviously not so peaceful, some utterly feral leftist protesters who disagreed with their arguments, let's say.
So what I would do is I would put a human chain between the rally attendees and the protesters.
Yeah, the protesters could yell, the rally attendees could have their speeches, everybody could have a robust exchange of ideas and then go home in one piece and there wouldn't be the horrifying tragedy, if not downright murder, as it's been alleged, of a young man driving his car into leftist protesters, killing one and wounding many.
And quite possibly there may not have been a crash of a police helicopter that killed two policemen.
So you put the human beings, the cops, in between the rally attendees and the protesters.
And you make sure they don't come into physical contact with each other.
And if anyone throws stuff, you arrest them.
It's not that complicated.
You've got two to one.
It's not like the L.A. riots, people.
So this does not seem to have been done.
What seems to have been done is that the rally attendees were in a fairly small area.
They were ringed by leftist protesters and agitators and violent types.
And then the police melted away.
The police vanished.
And it was open season on the rally attendees.
Now... Given that they had weeks to plan, they have virtually unlimited budgets, they have virtually unlimited manpower, I think that what happened was the plan.
Now, the ACLU has recently confirmed that the police in Charlottesville were actually given stand-down orders.
And what does this do?
You've got two groups who virulently hate each other.
You have no police presence.
You have a stand-down order.
What do you think is going to happen?
This is not brain surgery.
This is setting up the perfect storm for the kind of catastrophes that unfolded.
So what happened was violence escalated.
There was a state of emergency. The riot was shut down.
See? You had your permit.
You couldn't have your meeting, right?
And James Fields, a suspect in this car ramming, as I mentioned, two state police officers died in a helicopter crash.
Just an absolute disaster all the round.
And now the aftermath, you've got people who have been photographed or videos of them, the Unite the Right protesters are being doxxed, and their employees, employers are being contacted, they're getting fired.
So that is...
What happened more or less in a nutshell.
And now it is time for the big picture.
It is time to bring the big soft hammer of philosophy down on people's crystalline delusions and expose what is really going on.
First point. I have been predicting this for over a year as have many other people with clear eyes and rational minds that if you continue to escalate in language Then it results in this kind of violence.
When you're going to call people Nazis and they must be smashed and they must be punch a Nazi and they can be killed and so on, well, that is an open declaration of the intent to kill, of the intent to maim, of the intent to attack, of the attempt to injure.
Of course, de-escalating the rhetoric is something enormously important and foundational.
I've had a public intellectual career for 11 years.
Actually, this week is the 11th anniversary of my very first YouTube video.
I have continually and perpetually called for reason versus aggression, for conversation versus violence, and a lot of people didn't listen.
A lot of people didn't listen because...
Well, if you look at history, humanity really likes to fight.
They like to fight.
Wars, conflicts, raids, rapes, you name it.
Human beings and ants, the two species that war among themselves.
So a lot of people want this.
They want this chaos.
They want this violence.
They get off on the videos of violence and I don't know what it is.
So, if you have been aware of this issue and you've not been speaking out against this escalating violence over the last year, sorry, you're part of the problem.
You really are part of the problem and you need to change right now.
You should have changed a year ago.
You need to change right now.
So, here's the thing.
Free speech. There is no alternative to free speech except violence.
Human beings, we need to make decisions in societies, in countries.
We need to allocate resources.
There are laws that need to be passed or repealed.
We need to make decisions.
We're either going to reason with each other or you're going to have...
Plastic bottles filled with concrete thrown at someone's head.
You're going to have cars plowing through protesters.
It is free speech or it is violent.
Do not fool yourself for one minute that there is some third option.
Manage speech or, well, it's just hate speech, I don't like it.
No. Free speech.
Free speech. It's the only thing that keeps our jets cool.
This is really important to understand.
Of course there's speech out there that you hate.
There's speech out there that I hate.
There are people out there who hate your speech.
There are people out there who hate my speech.
If we allow an extremity of emotion to silence people who are speaking peacefully, where does it end?
And this is what they do.
This is what people who want to control speech, who want to shut off debate, what do they do?
They find the most unpopular group that could possibly be imagined And they say, well, if you defend their free speech somehow, you're pro their position, right?
So, ooh, let's find a guy with a Nazi flag.
Okay. There's a guy with a Nazi flag.
Nazism is violence.
It is collectivism. It is racism.
It requires a massive totalitarian state.
Engage! Engage!
Listen, I do a call-in show for hours a week.
I've had communists call in, I've had fascists call in, I've had people I enormously disagree with, and we have it out in a public forum.
That's what you do in a free society.
If people's ideas are so bad, so wrong, so egregious, let them speak!
Don't pull a Blues Brothers and drive them off a cliff.
Drive them off a bridge.
You let them speak so that everyone can hear How bad the ideas are.
And if their ideas are so bad, you should be able to rebut them and dismantle them very easily.
Listen, if I can spend over an hour having a debate with a guy who believes the world is flat and that the sun is closer to us than Australia, you can handle some toxic ideology.
You can handle it.
Because what happens is they say, well, that speech, that's horrible speech.
We should stop that speech.
That's hateful speech.
We should stop that speech.
And you say, yeah, because you don't want to stand on principle.
You say, yeah, I don't want to be out there defending Nazis.
But you're not defending Nazis.
You're defending yourself.
You're defending your capacity to speak.
Because, look, You can find, always find some group whose public pronouncements you find odious, horrible, wretched, reprehensible, evil.
But guess what?
There's one or more people out there in your country who find exactly the same of your speech.
They think exactly the same of your speech.
And if you're going to allow hatred, rage, contempt to silence people, It's just an escalation of offense then.
I'm going to manufacture the most offense to shut people up that I can't beat in a debate.
That's going to be you, you understand?
We don't surrender that power to anyone.
You may hate their speech.
Somebody's going to hate your speech.
You do not want to give up that power.
You do not want to give up that power at all.
That is where civilization ends.
Completely. And the thing is too, like I don't understand this.
Why are you hitting people you disagree with?
Maybe they're completely horrible and wrong.
The lowest of the low, the vilest of the vile.
So prove them wrong.
Show how wrong they are.
Bring the reason, bring the evidence, bring your rhetorical skills, bring your eloquence.
What the hell are you doing?
Bad idea! I'm gonna hit them with a brick!
Are you stupid? You don't hit people with bricks because they're saying things you find offensive?
What are you, retarded?
Actually, that's sorry.
I apologize for that. That's an insult to retarded people because mentally challenged people aren't hitting people with bricks for disagreeing with them.
Hitting people?
Throwing feces and urine at them?
Pulling fire alarms?
You are confessing that you don't know Had a reason.
You're confessing that you can't find any way to productively disagree and disprove what they're saying.
You're saying, I can't answer their arguments with reason and evidence.
I'm going to hit them with a brick or a car.
Stop it! Now!
That is not how we are going to have a civilization.
No hitting people with bricks.
You understand? Stop it.
Learn how to reason. Read your Socrates.
Read your John Locke.
Read your Aristotle. Read your Plato.
Learn how to make a goddamn argument and stop hitting people with bricks.
I'd call it childish, but that's an insult to children.
Oh look, I hit someone with a brick, I made him a victim, and now he's got free publicity for everyone else who wants to join his cause.
Good thinking, everyone!
Way to solve problems!
You understand?
In a debate, whoever punches first loses.
Because here's the thing: If you're not smart, if you don't know how to debate, if you don't know how to reason, if you don't know how to communicate, of course you're going to want to downshift to violence. of course you're going to want to downshift to violence.
Less intelligent people are generally better at violence.
In the absence of rational arguments, it is the brutal losers who will win the day.
Is that where we want to go as a society?
Where the fists and the bricks and the hurtling cars are what define the debate, are what define the conversation?
And I know, I know there's supposed to be this, let's all come together.
But the first thing I saw was punch a Nazi.
Punch a Nazi. Punch a Nazi!
You can punch Nazis! Punch a Nazi!
And then guess what?
The definition of Nazi began to spread just a little bit.
Do you remember that? A Nazi is now anyone who's in the extreme right.
What is the extreme right? People I really don't like.
Oh, who else is a Nazi?
Anyone who's on the right.
What's on the right? I don't know.
They're to the right of Chairman Mao.
Oh, I know who a Nazi is.
Anyone who likes Donald Trump.
I know who a Nazi is.
Everyone in a MAGA hat. I know who a Nazi is.
50 million Republicans.
They're all Nazis.
You understand? It's not even a slippery slope.
That's a theory. It's a slippery slope for which there is over a year of empirical evidence.
Punch a Nazi. The definition of Nazi expands to the point where you can pretty much punch anyone who disagrees with you.
You cannot punch a Nazi!
You understand? Stop punching Nazis!
Prove them wrong!
Expose their flaws, their bad reasoning, their bigotry.
Expose them! I don't even know why I need to say this stuff.
It's like you all never went to kindergarten.
Use your words, not your fists.
And of course, punch a Nazi becomes punch a communist.
And you end up with this Weimar-style street fighting.
And of course there is selective outrage with the media.
We all know how this works.
A couple of days ago, an anti-Trump fanatic murdered a GOP commitment.
Boom, boom! Two bullets to the head, right in front of his wife.
Was that talked about?
Obama did not condemn the race hatred fueled by certain elements within Black Lives Matter.
When Micah Johnson gunned down five cops because he hated white people, he didn't condemn that.
Did anyone ask him to condemn that?
Good Lord above!
We got video of Donald Trump in 2000.
Decrying against David Duke, a racist, a bigot, a problem.
You've still got to deny all this.
Disavow! Meanwhile, you can see a picture of Hillary Clinton virtually tongue-kissing Robert Byrd, a former member of the KKK. Do you have to disavow that?
No! Because you're on the left.
So, what is the left up to?
Why is this happening?
Well, the left lost the intellectual argument 50 years ago.
Seriously. In the 1960s, when the crimes of Stalin came out, when Khrushchev talked about the cult of personality, when Alexander Solzhenitsyn published the Gulag Apicalago, in the 70s, the concentration camps, the nightmarish totalitarianism of the Soviet system became clear.
And you get the Cambodian system, you look at Cuba, all across.
They lost the argument completely.
In terms of productivity and freedom and opportunity and a better society, you had the giant experiment of East and West Germany and East and West Berlin replicated everywhere.
Communism, complete disaster.
Body count of about 100 million people in the 20th century alone.
So they lost the argument. What do they do?
Do they say, oh, well, I guess the theory was wrong.
We're going to embrace the free market and freedom and personal property and contract rights and woohoo!
Freedom, baby! No.
No, they want power and they're addicts.
So they said, okay, well, we're going to switch immigration from Europe to the third world.
We're going to get third world migrants or third world immigrants to come into America.
And this was the 1965 Immigration Act.
Immigrants from the Third World and immigrants from Mexico overwhelmingly vote Democrat.
And this is why Democrats want immigration, and it's one of the reasons why Republicans don't.
I mean, if the immigrants all voted Republican, the Democrats would not want immigration from the Third World, but they vote for the left, overwhelmingly.
And so this was the plan.
We can't win the intellectual argument, so we're just going to import people who are going to vote for us, because they don't have the European...
Tradition of relative separation of state and economics, church and state and so on.
Now Trump is threatening that plan because he wants to reduce immigration considerably.
Perhaps even worse, Trump is doing fairly well.
I mean, it's a bumpy road. Obviously, it was never going to be smooth sailing.
But, you know, more than a million jobs have been created since, you know what, just in this year?
And when more than a million jobs have been created, what happens is people move from being dependent on the state to paying taxes.
Now, when you're dependent on the state, you don't care about growth of the state.
In fact, you probably want it because that's more...
Oh, they're going to raise taxes.
Well, I'm on the receiving end of that tax bandwagon, so sure, go for it.
But if you're paying taxes, suddenly you want less regulation, you want lower taxes, you want less government involvement in your life, and you have more bills, like you have more money to pay your own bills, so you don't need the government as much.
So there's this kind of shift.
There's this kind of shift.
And they're worried.
You know, they had this plan.
It was almost in the bag. They had this plan.
They almost overwhelmed the entire body politic in America with third worlders who were going to vote for the left.
Well, it didn't work out.
At least there's been a hiccup in the plan.
Also, also, let's not forget, the whole Russia stole the election, Russia hacked the election, that whole narrative has virtually completely fallen apart.
There's been, I talked about this in the show before, significant analysis.
run on the data that was taken from the dnc server and shipped off to wikileaks and the copyright at which it was taken virtually ensures that it was a local usb key probably usb 2.0 it was not sent at those speeds over the internet to romania i mean so this whole aspect of things has fallen by the wayside as well so a lot of stuff not going well for the democrat party so what's their goal what's their plan well now you see Their plan is to amplify far-right white nationalism,
to amplify it, to bring it into the public's attention so that they can scare blacks and Hispanics into voting for the left.
They don't have much left to offer, right?
They're not in power. And the government doesn't really have that much money left in America.
So they just can't roll out massive new programs and Obamacare is collapsing anyway.
So they don't have anything positive to offer.
And when you don't have anything positive to offer, then you offer something negative, right?
And so what they're offering now is, well, there are all these terrifying Nazi white people out there.
So you better vote for us so we'll protect you.
Now, the fact that this is tearing the country apart, what do they care?
I mean, drug addicts tear their families apart.
They don't care. They just want the drug.
And the Democrats are in the late stage of drug addiction.
They will foment crimes in order to get the drug that they want in order to get their hit.
So that... Is really what's happening.
And it is a trap.
It is a trap. Come have your rallies.
You can have your rallies.
And then we're going to surround you with aggressive, pumped up, hyped up people who think that they're fighting the reincarnated zombie of Adolf Hitler with supernatural powers to take over the world.
The resulting violence.
We're going to pump that violence up.
We're going to escalate it. We're going to use it to attack Republicans.
We're going to use it to attack Donald Trump.
And we're going to completely obscure any message that you might have.
It's a great trap. Bring you into an enclosed area, surround you with aggressive leftists, withdraw the police presence.
Oh, look! Violence!
Terrible Nazis!
It is an obvious trap.
It's a clear trap.
And the solution, of course, is to be aware of the danger of the situation that you're putting yourself in.
Do not imagine that there's some abstract rule of law that is going to protect you and encircle you and shield you.
Do not imagine that for a moment.
That's not how things work, unfortunately, in the West, in the world these days.
Return to the arguments you want to make.
I say this to everyone. The people I agree with, the people I disagree with, the people I severely disagree with, return to your arguments.
I'm just about to release a book called The Art of the Argument about what an argument is, how to make one, why it is so fundamentally important that we recommit ourselves every day, every generation.
To having debates rather than using force.
When you surrender to force, the liars, the cheaters, the violent, the sociopathic, the suicidal, they rule society.
It literally becomes hell on earth when we give up the argument and we return with modern technology to Stone Age practices of physical domination.
So I urge, I wish I could command, I urge everyone, everyone, please, please, you must make arguments.
