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Jan. 22, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
08:11
3970 American Pravda: Stefan Molyneux Introduces James O'Keefe in NYC
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- Well, thank you everybody.
Welcome to New York for a wonderful evening.
Now, I... You guys can hear me.
It's a good volume. It's all right? Okay. So I run a philosophy show, so it's time for the big picture.
I'm going to put Project Veritas, what James O'Keefe does, in a bigger picture.
It is the bigger picture that sustains us.
In the battles that we face.
Nietzsche said, not a philosopher I agree a lot with, but Nietzsche said, give a man a why, he can bear almost any how.
So I'm going to give you the why, what James does and what Project Veritas does is so important.
History. History is a tragedy of retroactive wisdom, of wisdom that is found too late.
Entire civilizations rise and fall, nations, cultures rise and fall, and there's this autopsy that is supposed to happen afterwards.
It's supposed to find the cause of death.
It rarely happens, and it almost never seems to provide enough information, enough wisdom to prevent the next recurrence of the tragedy of history, the cycle of freedom, of wealth, of decadence, of decay.
A third of the planet In the 20th century, fell prey to totalitarian communism.
Why? Do we know enough to prevent it from happening again?
The question that we face is the question of information.
If you look at Socrates, 2500 years ago, you had a mob of sophists who cried out that he was corrupting the young, that he did not believe in the gods of the city.
And they put him to death.
Freedom. Freedom of speech now with hemlock.
The First World War, arguably the greatest tragedy to before Western civilization, was embarked upon, it was a family war really, was embarked upon with no knowledge of what would happen, what dominoes would fall.
That the First World War would last close on half a decade.
10 million soldiers would die.
Many more would die with diseases spread after the war.
Leads to hyperinflation, leads to a 13-year Great Depression, culminates in the most destructive war in human history.
Why did they do it?
Why couldn't they stop it?
Because they lacked information.
They lacked the facts.
The fall of Rome. Nobody wanted Rome to fall.
Everybody acted rationally within an irrational system, the result being that Rome fell.
Now imagine if we could take what we know now and send it back through time.
All the perspective, all the knowledge that we have gathered In our long human journey, imagine if we could encapsulate it and send it back through time, what decisions would be different?
Imagine if the sophist Miletus in ancient Rome knew that he would be vilified for thousands of years for bringing his false charges against Socrates.
Imagine if the senators and the citizens of ancient Rome knew why it fell.
Excessive government, excessive taxation, the selling of citizenship for tax income, Debasement of the currency.
Open borders. It's like there's a pattern.
Let me know if you can see it.
So this is where I want to talk about where James O'Keefe and Project Veritas come in.
They bring us the truth.
The truth that normally takes generations to accumulate and transmit.
They bring us the truth. And the question is though, the truth about what?
What do they bring us the truth about?
They bring us the truth.
About what people lie about the most.
What do people lie about the most in society?
They lie about power.
They lie about power.
We all lie about power.
We're all tempted to lie about power.
We imagine that it's benevolent, that it's helpful, that it saves the poor, heals the sick.
But it is fundamentally coercive, manipulative, destructive.
Power is a predator that hides in lies.
And if we can see the truth about power, we can reveal power for the brutality that it is, and people will recoil from it.
The truth is a strangely...
Impotent endeavor.
The truth doesn't stop bullets.
It doesn't stop bombs. It doesn't stop tanks.
All the truth can do is peel back the curtain.
All the truth can do is take away the lies that the predators hide in.
And that is a noble and civilization-saving endeavor.
Power can really be defined as the capacity to lie and get away with it.
Which people who have wielded power throughout history have done over and over and over again.
Until now. Until now.
What Project Veritas does is so important because normally it takes generations for the lies to be revealed.
We can all think of examples throughout history where after the fact, many years later, decades later, sometimes generations later, the truth is revealed, which does nothing To save the millions of lives destroyed by lies.
The truth is not an angel that can wander through a graveyard, snap its fingers and bring the dead back to life and restore them.
It can do none of these things.
We need the truth before the disasters hit.
Now, we can't send the truth back through time to save all of those who've died for lies, but now, with technology, with organizations, with courage, We can spread the truth far and wide enough in the hope that we can prevent this cycle of history from repeating itself.
Now we finally have the chance to tell the truth to the world and break the cycle of history.
And this is where what Project Veritas does takes its real root.
The truth is reason and evidence.
Now, Philosophers come up with the conjectures, the hypotheses, the theories, the ideas.
But we need the evidence.
We need the facts. Science is nothing without data.
And what Project Veritas does is brings the evidence of corruption, the evidence of lies.
It blows back the smoke that hides the predatory nature of power.
American Pravda, the book, is an essential read.
It shows us the corruption in real time unmasked by Project Veritas and James O'Keefe.
Because we either see corruption or we aid corruption.
There seems to be little in the middle.
So my hope and the reason why I love what they do, my hope is that for the first time in human history, We get the facts before the disaster.
We get the truth before the collapse.
Because it is either collapse or revolution or truth that curtails power.
There's nothing else. We have nothing else.
So, for once in human history, let us get the truth before disaster strikes.
And here is the man who is doing it in front of the world in real time.
I would like to introduce with great pride my friend, and I dare say colleague, Mr.
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