Jan. 22, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
13:48
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| My word, my lordy above, Stéphane Molyneux, what an amazing couple of days were to be had in New York and what a genuine thrill, honor, and excitement it was to meet so many hundreds of you who were interested in philosophy, loved what we were doing with this conversation, and it was an amazing, amazing time. | |
| What a tsunami! Of love and passion and excitement we all had. | |
| So I was actually lucky I was able to do a two-for-one because James O'Keefe asked me to introduce him for his book launch for this great book, American Pravda. | |
| We'll put a link to that below. You should check it out. | |
| So I gave a short speech there and did a lot of meet-and-greets with people and we talked about philosophy and life and it was just a very elegant setting at a wonderful time and next day I did Lunch with a friend of mine, but found out, of course, that the venue, the original venue for A Night for Freedom, had cancelled under I would argue for not entirely upfront reasons. | |
| I've planned conferences before. | |
| I did a whole conference at the Skydome. | |
| It's wild because we had people flying in from literally all over the world to come to this event, to meet me and others. | |
| When you've sold north of $100,000 worth of tickets, you don't have a venue. | |
| You're having quite an exciting time, but if there's one guy in the world who can handle it, well, I think we know who that is. | |
| So we were able to, he was able to get a second venue, and I went down to check it out and see what could be done, and it all seemed to be locked down. | |
| So we went, we had a nice dinner, talked more philosophy and ideas, and then I had a great night's sleep, woke up in the morning, raring to go, and of course, what had happened is one o'clock in the morning, the second venue had canceled. | |
| Now who knows what kind of pressure had been put upon these venues. | |
| Who knows how they even found out about it because it was not something that had been announced publicly as yet. | |
| So I guess we'll find out one way or another as these events proceed. | |
| But it was really quite something to see this radical deplatforming that was occurring. | |
| If you want to talk about ideas and you're not strictly on the left or ineffective like a lot of libertarians and conservatives, well then you are in trouble and you face this Kind of stuff. | |
| And so I went in the afternoon to check out the new space. | |
| All seemed to be set. Next morning, boom. | |
| Well, actually, it was one o'clock in the morning when Mike found out that this second event had canceled. | |
| And then it became a mad scramble. | |
| And, you know, kudos to the guy. | |
| Guerrilla mindset. That's the way to go. | |
| Check out his book as well. | |
| And he was able to get a third venue. | |
| Now, this was great because the third venue was a big upgrade from the second venue, in my opinion. | |
| It was a fantastic space. | |
| It was at a nightclub, a huge space, very high stage, very high stage. | |
| So I went to that space early in the afternoon because I wanted to help out and also if you're there it's kind of tough to cancel and kick you out if you're already in and embedded. | |
| And you know it was kind of interesting, I have this like when I do public speaking and you know I've been kind of a studio band for the last half decade but It was great to be back out. | |
| I like to go out. | |
| It's a funny way of putting it for myself is what works for me. | |
| I go out and I make friends with the stage, make friends with the space, visualize, you know, the great speech, the great crowd, the great excitement. | |
| And because it was a high stage and kind of a smallish stage, I didn't want to pull an Aerosmith and tumble off the stage and end up being internet famous for fail videos. | |
| We started the event. | |
| I chatted with a lot of people, which was great. | |
| It's wonderful, you know, to meet people, to hear about how the show, how Freedom and Radio has affected their lives positively. | |
| We've met a couple of people who married through the show, that had kids because the show had changed their minds about fatherhood. | |
| There were peaceful parents all over the place. | |
| I mean, My God, this is the world beyond the YouTube comments and the bitchiness of... | |
| Anyway, this is people who've really put it into practice, and some people have come an enormous distance, and it was just an absolute thrill to meet them. | |
| And then Gavin McInnes, Mike Cernovich, and Owen Benjamin and myself, we did a podcast Q&A with the audience. | |
| That was broadcast, and I hope you checked it out. | |
| Afterwards, more meet and greets. | |
| This amazing energy was building in the room. | |
| I've done a fair amount of public speaking. | |
| I have never felt anything like it. | |
| And that, of course, is the amazing, positive, joyous, connected energy that the opposition wished to prevent from coming into being. | |
| It was a really joyful place. | |
| So I went up and I did... | |
| My speech and I mean it was literally surfing on a geyser of joyful crowd enthusiasm and I really let rip in a barn burner of a speech which I was very happy about and then afterwards that we were I was doing the meet-and-greet like chatting with with listeners and and doing selfies and all that but we were kind of by the speakers and it was like I could feel my brain slowly spraying off into the other side of the room from the sonic booms so then we went to another area which was quieter and It was, | |
| again, a humbling, amazing, wonderful experience. | |
| 500 people, I bet, were coming up and we chatted and I found out about their lives and the show and what philosophy was doing for them. | |
| It was like four or five hours of meet and greets and another hour or two at the O'Keeffe event. | |
| It was incredible. | |
| Then, of course, during the event, I think it was before I gave my speech, we had found out There's 75 to 100 members of this terrorist organization, as it's designated, of Antifa, were coming down to, I assume, attack people coming into, going out of the event, maybe even try and force their way into the event. | |
| But there's this wonderful woman who was in charge of security, who I've met before, who I would, I guess, kind of did place my life in the hands of, and she was incredible. | |
| She was perfectly in charge, perfectly competent, and I felt perfectly secure. | |
| So I continued on with the meet and greet and I did not hear until later about the violence that occurred outside when the members of this Antifa gang, well I guess one, I don't know how many people, but a guy was I think 53 years old, Middle-aged guy, upper middle-aged guy, was walking, trying to leave the event, and one guy chased him down and half beat him to death, and the victim ended up in hospital. | |
| The guy's been arrested, and it's very, very serious stuff. | |
| This guy's going to spend years and years In prison, and I mean, what a terrible thing. | |
| What a terrible thing that this radical left-wing organization is, to me, it's kind of like a civil rights issue, not just a free speech issue, because we're getting together to talk about politics and ideas and philosophy, and people are being physically attacked and half-killed as a result of gathering to talk about ideas. | |
| And it sort of put me to mind, you know, it put me to mind of the last time that a left-wing terrorist organization attacked people for getting together to talk about ideas. | |
| We're talking about the civil rights movement in the South in the 1950s and the early 1960s. | |
| The blacks who would get together, the people who would get together to try and raise the standards and make more equal under the law, the victimized black community, they were also attacked by left-wing terrorists. | |
| They were called the KKK. Now, people who are gathering together to talk about freedom and equality under the law, And liberty and free speech are being attacked by a left-wing organization. | |
| And this is kind of the funny thing, and it really is absolutely tragic to understand this. | |
| Like, if you're on that side, You are a bad guy. | |
| You are one of the bad guys. | |
| Now, it may not be obvious to you at the time, just like KKK wasn't always the bad guys, but it's going to be very obvious if any reasonable history is to be written in the future. | |
| It's very obvious. You may feel like you're a tough guy, like you're fighting fascists and you're punching Nazis and so on. | |
| You're a bad guy, and you should change that. | |
| You really, really should. There's a wonderful life, a wonderful world. | |
| If you look at the energy inside, positive, wonderful Chelsea Manning showed up and was treated with great respect and deference and happiness, and I don't believe she was misgendered the whole night, and people were enthusiastic. | |
| I mean, some people really disagreed with With what she did, but she came in. | |
| Now, imagine if I went to a radical far-left conference. | |
| Can you imagine what would happen to me? | |
| Can you imagine what would happen to me? | |
| I'd probably not even make it into the conference, but Chelsea Manning can come in and be treated with respect, and it's just a very different world. | |
| If you look at the energy inside, there's this positive, enthusiastic, joyful energy of the crowd and its enthusiasm for freedom and this hope for the future this passion for truth versus outside where you have people dressed all in black and one of them hunting down half beating to death a guy who wanted to come and talk about ideas that is a very very different world and it I mean I read some of the media coverage and it's all Pretty, | |
| pretty terrible. You know, because they have to refer to it as a knight for freedom. | |
| But they always refer to it. It's predictable. | |
| It's very boring and tragic and horrible. | |
| But they, of course, they say, well, violence erupted, like it just happened. | |
| No, like, but no, no, a guy was trying to leave the event and he got chased down, half beaten to death. | |
| That's not violence erupting. | |
| That's a guy being targeted and attacked by a terrorist, in my opinion. | |
| And, you know, they have to say it's the event, the so-called Night for Freedom event. | |
| It's like, no, it's not so-called. That's the damn name of the conference. | |
| That's the name of the party. | |
| And they don't ever say so-called anti-fascist, so-called Antifa, you know, which has become what they despise, I suppose. | |
| And the media stuff is predictably terrible. | |
| And there's no content of ideas, right? | |
| The media's goal is just to fire this pepper shot of labels at people in the hope that you won't explore their ideas any further. | |
| And that was tragic and horrible, and I wish the man the very best in his recovery. | |
| And the police were fantastic. | |
| The police had been following these guys around, and when they swarmed this gathering, They created this cordon of safety. | |
| People called in their cabs and Ubers and got in and were able to get out safely and you know kudos to them for keeping the event as peaceful as humanly possible and just massive interstellar curses. | |
| And they're not protesters. | |
| The media is referring to them as protesters. | |
| Protesters are chanting signs and they're not violent. | |
| This is a feral attack upon people who wish to talk about ideas. | |
| And it is a brutal, brutal deplatforming. | |
| And again, we'll find out what happened before. | |
| So there is going to be another one. | |
| If you missed this one, you're kidding, right? | |
| I mean, where else would you want to be? | |
| It's an amazing group of people. | |
| I met people even more individually. | |
| We did, I guess, a brunch and a lunch. | |
| The next day. | |
| That was on the Sunday. | |
| God, just yesterday. I can't believe it. | |
| And I got a chance to have a sit-down, do a couple more speeches, and have a sit-down and talk to people. | |
| We broke bread, we talked ideas, we talked philosophy, and I heard people's stories, and just beautiful. | |
| And it is a shame, you know, when this sunlight of reason is spattered with the blood of the innocent and the philosophical, and it was incredible. | |
| The other thing which, of course, seeing a lot of people who got into crypto to some degree as a result of free-domain radio is wonderful to see. | |
| You know, philosophy has traditionally been something that's really harsh and very negative and you end up being chased around or deplatformed or unfriended or drink hemlock or thrown in jail or whatever. | |
| But here, philosophy has actually finally given people the gift of some financial freedom, and that is a wonderful thing to see, and I'm very proud to have been any kind of part of that. | |
| So, to the 500 or maybe 600 people that I met with and chatted with over the course of the last couple of days, Thank you guys so much. | |
| I hope that everyone understands just how much passion I have for the people who watch what it is that I do and participate in this amazing philosophical conversation. | |
| I truly love you guys. | |
| As I said to a lot of people there who thanked me for what I do, for putting myself out there, you are beyond welcome. | |
| I mean, it's a real privilege and a joy to do what it is that I do. | |
| I'm only there because you listen, because you view, because you share, because you support what it is that I do. | |
| That's the only reason that I'm there and I hope that I do you proud when I go out into public and talk to people and give speeches and And I do work very hard to make them. | |
| This is not just off the cuff. | |
| I mean, I work very hard. I spent two days working on an eight-minute speech for James O'Keefe, and I spent two weeks off and on working on the speech that I gave at Cernovich's A Knife for Freedom. | |
| So I do not take, I don't just sort of, oh, well, I'm just going to go up and I take very seriously the fact that I am to some degree the public face of our conversation here. | |
| So it was an incredible pleasure and privilege to meet you all. | |
| And I hope that I get to meet you at the next one. | |
| Synovich.com. I'm sure there'll be lots of information about that. | |
| You can follow Mike. on Twitter for more about that and I just thanks to the organizers, thanks to the DJs, thanks to the venue who held it against I'm sure some very staunch opposition and thank you. | |
| Thank you for the past 11 years that is culminating in some absolutely amazing stuff. | |
| What a community we are going to build and what a world we are going to save. | |
| Thanks everyone so much. |
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