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April 6, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
54:02
4048 Fighting Darkness | Styxhexenhammer666 and Stefan Molyneux

Styxhexenhammer666 is an independent political commentator and YouTube content creator. YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/styxhexenhammer666Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/styx666officialYour 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

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Wallen.
Hope you're doing well. Back with our good friend StyxHexandHammer666.
Why? Because 665 was taken and 667 would be just plain nuts.
He's an independent political commentator and YouTube content creator.
You can find him on youtube.com forward slash StyxHexandHammer666 and twitter.com forward slash Styx666 official.
Thanks so much for taking the time today.
Yeah, glad to talk to you again.
So we're going to talk a little bit about ethics.
I'm always curious about the emotional or intellectual or spiritual source of ethics for people, and you certainly have a very strong ethical foundation.
And I'm just wondering, since the fall of sort of centrally organized Christian ethics, how do you see the moral landscape and where do you gain your sustenance to stand up against the mob for abstract ideals?
Yeah, well, I gained it partially from libertarianism, and that, you know, rolls over with sort of the deism of the founding fathers, the classical liberalism, you could call it, of the 1700s.
But also from paganism, I think that the tribal side of paganism, Vice had a piece today, literally, saying that paganism was being taken over by the far right, they were turning it into racism, and I thought for a second, first, Paganism isn't a race.
It's, you know, every group has its own pagan origins, its own tribal beliefs, but it's really just tribalism.
It's kind of the left that's trying to co-opt religion in this current age.
You see that happening every day now, I think, with the Pope.
They're even trying to go after evangelicals.
They're constantly goading them into attacking Trump because he had an affair maybe 10 years ago.
I'm sitting there wondering why anybody in their right mind would really care.
Well, JSK just has a legendary sex life.
Exactly. And FDR too.
One of my subscribers pointed out he got regular chiropractor visits despite not being able to feel part of his body.
I'm sure that those massages were something else.
Now, what does paganism mean?
I mean, most people, of course, it summons delicious images of people in robes rubbing oil on goats in the woods.
I may not be technically specific about all of that, but where does paganism come from?
For a lot of people, it just means, you know, ex-pre-Christian kind of stuff.
So how would you define the term so that people can follow it from a moral standpoint?
Yeah, well, the original is paganist, which is sort of the outland's The religions outside of the urban cosmopolitan centers, it's sort of a Roman terminology.
What it really refers to in the modern age is really any group that's not, it's not Judaism, it's not Islam, it's not Christianity, and it's not any of their offshoots.
Hinduism doesn't really fit in with that because it's mainstream.
You know, there are, what, 800-900 million people who follow it.
Buddhism is sort of atheistic.
It's not really quite the same thing.
It's more of a mystic path.
Now, anything else, for the most part, is paganism, other than certain atheistic groups, like the Satanists.
For me, it's mostly a combination of the veneration of nature and looking back, I think, and this is just an opinion, and I own up to the fact that it's just opinion, I think there was more the polytheistic paths of Greece, of Rome, of some of these places were wiser than the monotheistic paths that we see today.
Alright, I guess so, as far as I understand it, neither of us are accountants, but you're saying the difference between paganism and religion is tax-deductibility versus non-tax-deductibility, if I understand that correctly.
Well, paganism is a collection of spiritual paths.
It doesn't have to be organized religion per se.
That's not entirely the same, but it is religious in essence, yes.
It just happens to be usually non-monotheistic, not always, but usually, and not part of sort of the core of Abrahamism, yes.
So you said atheistic groups like Satanists.
Did I get that correct?
That does seem to be a bit of a normative contradiction there, my friend, because if you believe in Satan, wouldn't you also believe in other deities?
So how do you get the atheism from the Satanists?
Yes, that should be explained for any of your viewers.
Satanism, as it is held by most self-proclaimed Satanists, is in the sense of LaVey.
He was an atheist. He did not believe in an actual Satan.
The term he used, it was basically showmanship.
He's like, oh, you know how I can make money?
I'm going to call myself a devil worshipper and do all these weird rituals based loosely on Catholicism and people will pay me for membership.
Thinking I can cure their love life problems and stuff.
He was an atheist. He did not believe in Jesus.
He did not believe in the devil.
Ah. There are Satanists self-proclaimed that are literal devil worshippers.
They're just inverted Christians.
Now, as an atheist, how do you think that influenced the kind of, were there centrally defining principles to his Satanism?
I mean, I know that there's this, you know, satisfy your hunger no matter what the cost is kind of the cliche, but where did he come from?
Yes, he was atheistic, but he did have some kind of spiritual beliefs.
He looked at it in the manner of some of the eugenic era thinkers from before his time, from half a century before, maybe a DeLorence or people like that.
He looked at it as psychodrama, as something that could be used in a psychological manner, and Might is Right, which is a libertarian manifesto, one of the main libertarian manifestos, Really informed the Satanic Bible.
Some passages are taken verbatim, paragraph by paragraph, from Might is Right by Ragnar Redbeard.
Okay, you're just blowing my mind here, so let me just circle around and come back a little.
My understanding of libertarianism is pretty much the polar opposite, which is that, of course, the power mongers would say that might is right, but the whole point of libertarianism is to say that there's an overarching moral...
Set of absolutes, private property, liberty, freedom of speech, and so on, the non-aggression principle, that should contain power, and power should only serve those principles if it's allowed to exist at all.
So, how are we in the Might is Right libertarian world?
Well, might is right steps in and says, in regards to Christian morality, saying turn the other cheek, sort of deal with the fact that you're being abused.
Might is right.
The libertarian, the satanic side says, no, no, if you're being abused, you should not deal with mercy.
You should destroy your enemy.
You should, if you have property, you defend it.
You have a life, defend it.
You have the right to do that.
There are certain things that are definitely off limits.
You can't harm children.
If you're not eating the animal, you shouldn't harm the animal because it's like, you know, they're more peaceful than humans.
It's sort of a logical exercise.
And where there are contradictions, I think you'll find that most atheistic Satanists will own up to that fact.
But yeah, nothing's perfect.
Ooh, that's handy.
Was it Walt Bittman who said, it almost bothered me, this phrase, where he said, you say I contradict myself.
Very well, and I contradict myself.
It's like, dude! Philosophy, Socrates, rational integrity, you can't just throw these things...
Oh, you say my bridge fell down.
Well, I want you to pay me anyway.
It's like... Is there not a thirst for consistency in these worlds?
There can be.
But you've got to understand, you get into various paradoxes between pragmatism and ideology, between idealism and pragmatism, rather.
For instance, it'd be the best of all possible worlds if there were no governments, no strictures of any kind.
It would absolutely be paradise.
The problem is the human inclination is to try to organize things.
It's to try to create a power structure.
It doesn't have to be a government.
It can be a religion.
It can be something privatized.
But it is there. And it does attempt to exact itself on every member.
Well, I say, okay, we can get into a bit of a debate here, I think.
And I agree with you that human beings have a natural thirst for the unearned.
And that's not bad.
I mean, people are too lazy to get up and talk to someone across town, so we invent the telephone.
Like, the amount of ingenuity we have poured into not wanting to do stuff that is not value-added, you know, like there's a reason why we don't want to plant, well, I guess you do, but most people don't want to plant their garden by hand.
They want some big giant machine to do it for them.
And so we do have a thirst for the unrend, we do have a thirst for dominance over others, because there's almost no more profitable crop on the planet than other human beings, and it is because of that, that allowing for the existence of the state is inevitably going to draw people to that power structure, and if that power structure isn't there, they don't have that as the tool by which they can dominate others.
Yeah, I would say that they would just invent a different tool, they would just use a religious stringency.
They would use some sort of other methodology to control others.
It's innate. We've seen government at some point spontaneously generates.
I wonder where that came from.
It wasn't just people decided up and decided, hey, we're going to have a state.
I think it came from other things, other forms of organization that then codified themselves and created legalism.
Alright. Now, if we say that there may be dominance based upon ideology, that is a different matter than dominance based on the state.
I mean, if I have a neighbor who follows a particular religious belief, but there's no state, then he can't use the state to impose that religious belief on me or to limit what it is that I do.
But if there's a state, that mechanism is universal initiation of force in a geographical area.
It is far more dangerous And you can't walk away from the state, but you can, of course, for most religions, leave the religion without any huge negative...
A religion could run a state, too.
You could have a theocracy, in which case the two would essentially be twain.
A privatized group, you could have a sort of corporate meritocratic system.
It may be less abusive, it may be less given over to problems.
Here's where I agree with, like, an anarcho-capitalist.
I think that the state tends to be the most abusive, specifically because of the modern understanding of the legal process.
But that doesn't mean that other things can't be abusive, too.
Where there's the absence of a state, the fall of Rome happens, or the fall of the western side of the Roman Empire.
You have very weak states for some time.
You have some barbarian warlords butchering each other on the margins of these areas with relatively little control.
But you do have a fairly strong church, and the same church that's credited with maintaining control, which is technically true in some aspects, certainly with literacy, with the monks copying books that otherwise would have been extinct, which is A good thing that comes out of Catholicism.
You also have them abusing people quite regularly.
Okay, so two points there.
I would say that it was not as a result of a tiny libertarian state or a weak state that the Roman Empire fell, because they were, of course, a massive empire.
Oh, no, I'm not saying that. They debased the currency, they, I mean, just the giant welfare state, the usual free church.
Yeah, I'm saying after the fall, yes.
Right, right, right. Now, the issue, and it's a very important point that you raised there, which is, The issue that the state is abusive, but there are other institutions that are also abusive, or could be abusive, I mean, it's a fair argument, and we should not say, let's say that we have this libertarian or anarcho-paradise of a stateless society, we wouldn't then say, ah!
Done and dusted. There will now be no more human inequity.
Everybody will get along. Everybody will fart rainbows and sneeze unicorns, and we will live in paradise.
But it's still a pretty big one.
Like, we could say, okay, if we end slavery, there will still be exploitive human relationships.
It's like, sure, but that doesn't mean that slavery is the same as a bad marriage or a bad job.
But I wouldn't say that that's an apples to oranges comparison, because it's more like replacing slavery with a different set of slave owners.
It's still slavery. If you got a theocracy.
If you got privatization of that same use of force, it simply amalgamated over time and became more prevalent.
It wouldn't need a state.
It wouldn't require one.
It could happen on the local or state level.
You could try to flee from it, but then of course organization would take hold elsewhere.
You'd get various, you get a patchwork world.
Instead of a world where you primarily have secular and semi-secular states, we could argue over Saudi Arabia or something.
Instead of a world in which you have secular states abusing people, you'd have different religious groups They would tend to organize.
Corporations would do the same.
Even you'd have mob rule.
In some cases, people would abolish all sense of control completely.
The first time that one person desires another person's land for some pragmatic purpose, when fight or flight kicks in, when the survival mechanism kicks in, there's a middle of a drought.
I don't have a pond on my property.
My neighbor does. I want your water.
No, you can't have it. Well, then I'll trade you for water.
Well, you've got nothing to trade for it.
Okay. And then I blow his head off and take his water.
You get the same problem.
It's a little bit like the paradox of the fall of Lucifer or some other crazy religious sort of thing.
But if people are going to use force to get what they want, we shouldn't give them a state, because then people can't even fight back or escape it, right?
I mean, this is the problem. The more you crank up individual thirst for violence, the more you discredit the concept of a state, because if people are just very happy to use force or willing to use force to get what they want, well, then the only balancing out to that would be individual self-defense, which is not possible against the state.
See, that's where you and I, I think, diverge.
We agree on a great many things, but you're more on the anarcho-capitalist side.
I'm a monarchist. What I would say is that you don't need to abolish the state.
You need to severely limit the state.
It should be more limited than like the U.S. is currently.
You do that in part by having a well-armed populace.
You've created another power block to counterbalance the state.
Private enterprise would be a third in the organized sense, both churches and corporations, businesses, things like that.
And then you have different branches of government.
They unfortunately cooperate, which is a bigger problem than them obstructing one another.
I think we'd probably agree on that in many cases.
I think what we need is to simply expand liberty.
Doing this constitutionally is a great thing, as long as you can then arm yourself enough to make sure that it actually happens.
All right. Now, how do you deal with the challenge, which we've seen with the British government over time?
We saw, of course, with the Roman Empire.
We see in particular, and very vividly with the American Empire, the challenge, okay, you get a small government.
It's really, you know, bound down by the chains of the Constitution, as was the original goal, which lasted for, what, 80 years or something like that.
So you get a small government, and this creates an enormous amount of wealth.
Or, rather, the government not being in the way creates an enormous amount of wealth.
People have trade, they have sound currency, and so on.
And then what happens, of course, is the government can grow without impinging on people's income.
Their income is rising by, let's say, 6% a year instead of 7% a year because the government is growing.
That does not give them enough incentive to push back against...
And the experiment of the United States, to me, is very instructive and needs to be answered by Minarchus, you know, not to put you on the spot or anything, which is this was the very smallest intellectually designed government by a group of morally flawed but still incredibly brilliant geniuses riding the tidal wave of the Enlightenment post-Renaissance government.
Post-Lockean minarchist thinking.
They created the very smallest government known to man.
It has now grown into the very largest government known to man in less than a quarter of a millennia or so.
It broke out of the bounds of the Constitution in a couple of generations.
You had a civil war.
You had central banking. You had a war.
You had the Fed triggering the great stock market boom.
You got a 13-year Great Depression.
There's another giant war.
Then there's a Cold War. There's Korea.
There's Vietnam. I mean, you name it.
And now there's the mass importation of the Third World.
Against the will of the population.
So how do you deal with the fact that it was tried and has been repeatedly tried to create a small state?
Same thing happened in England, I won't go over the whole thing, but it went from a relatively libertarian government to a giant empire that controlled a third of the world with some significant blowback as we're seeing now.
So how do you deal with the problem that the smallest governments tend to create the kind of wealth that allows them to grow without pushback from the population?
The first thing I would say is the founders should have constrained it more and made it less subject to the interpretation of the courts.
That's been a big problem.
It can be helpful, but then, you know, it's sort of like you create three or four problems and then you solve one.
It's not a movement in the right direction, I think, ultimately.
The second thing I would say is because of the information age that we're in, we have the chance to push back and put the genie back in the bottle, but we're only going to get one chance of this because what you have is a situation where if enough people are aware of the fact that that is a problem, They can create change.
They can refuse to go along with the system the way it is anymore.
They can encourage libertarianism, and I don't mean the Libertarian Party, which is right now basically Bernie Sandersville or something crazy like that, which is amusing, but it's problematic.
I think we need to definitely defend the Second Amendment, but we need to go further than just defending it as it is now.
Go further and rescind existing gun laws.
Not just defend the First Amendment from attacks on it, but rescind any form of legalism that impinges upon speech.
In the sense of states' rights, certainly the federal government has used the Commerce Clause above all else to become problematic above and beyond that.
Even the trial by jury at this point, we've got people in government arguing over whether or not some U.S. citizen that nonetheless is captured in a foreign land can be put into Gitmo and denied a fair trial.
I don't think that that should even be up for debate.
These are the things that concern me, but we're only going to have one chance at this.
Really use that, to use the communication age, the information technology, to put the genie back in the bottle.
The first step needs to be we need to do something about big tech censoring people because that it's an example against ANCAP mentality in a way.
These are private companies.
Now, I say as a monarchist, well, they're paired with government.
They're tied with government at the hip, essentially.
So I understand that they should be prevented from abusing users.
But even a lot of people who are supposedly libertarian or conservative, they don't even see that happening.
They don't even understand that it's abusive because it's not in the name of the state itself.
Well, okay, so let's go back a little bit.
So the argument is, if I understand it correctly, if there'd been a few more controls in the American government, then it wouldn't have grown.
But of course... Considerably more controls, yeah.
Okay, but let's say you have double the controls...
If it's able to surmount 50 controls, why wouldn't it be able to surmount 100?
I mean, because as you know, the incentive, the dopamine hit that people get out of political power is massively addictive, and there are massive swathes of the population that just want to rule other people because they have no love, heart, mind, soul, conscience.
I don't know what exactly hellish robotry mechanics goes into creating someone like that.
But the idea, it's sort of like...
The argument, well, real minarchism has never been tried.
Like, real communism has never been tried.
Like, if we just, let's do it, let's rewind, but tweak, and we'll get a totally different outcome.
Real socialism, this time, okay, post-Venezuela, we'll just, you know, we're going to adjust a little, change a few paragraphs around, add a little bit here, and it's going to work.
It would have to be well beyond that.
What I'm saying is, in a perfect world, if I could have my way, if I could solve the problem any way I saw fit within legal context, it would be an expansion of the Constitution.
That is, for instance, the Second Amendment.
Courts attempt over and over, says Cruikshank, to say that the militia is not the private population.
It clearly is.
If you look at the parlance used in the 1700s, it's obviously so, but for over a hundred years, they construed it successfully in a judicial sense as not being so.
The judicial branch is really the weakest link, I think, within American politics, certainly.
The executive branch has a relative lack of power at this point.
We always talk about imperial presidents, but when you start talking about activist judges, people look at you like you're crazy, like you're a conspiracy theorist or something.
It has become a problem. And it's not just on the right.
I mean, it's just not on the left.
It's also on the right as well, people who are moralistic.
Can attempt to weaponize the courts wherever they have the right nominees to try to prevent people from living their lives the way they see fit.
I think that the Constitution should simply be expanded.
The First Amendment should be massively expanded.
It should explicitly cover the internet.
It should explicitly ban government and private censorship insofar as those businesses are engaged in human technology related to communication.
Be just like the postal service.
Well, and let's talk about the tech companies, because this has been something that has been spinning around my brain in a low orbit for quite some time.
And I know you've done some shows on it, which are very good.
This private company stuff, look, come on, they do not exist in a free market.
These companies do not exist in a free market.
They're heavily regulated by the state.
There's always the threat. Of antitrust action, and that can give you a whole lot of compliance when it comes to dictates from the state.
People don't know, I mean, if you're not older, maybe you've never really studied this, but IBM used to be the thing.
It used to be the dude when it came to tech, and one of the things that happened was they got hit with antitrust stuff, dragged on for like 13 godforsaken years.
And of course, if you have...
A shred, a spark of divinely given creativity, intelligence and entrepreneurship.
You don't want to be sitting there being dragged in front of various government agencies to explain yourself over and over and over again.
So you leave. So they lost a lot of top talent.
They lost a lot of top management.
And they never really recovered from that in the tech entrepreneurship arena.
Of course, you know, Microsoft ended up adopting their standard and becoming the de facto.
And so they do face, they need the favor of government when it comes to lawsuits.
They need the favor of government when it comes to avoiding antitrust.
And because there's so much power in social media to affect elections, because people want to gain access to the power of the state, they take a massive interest in what happens particularly in social media.
So the idea that they're just private companies, to me, it's more akin to saying, well, a serf ain't a slave.
It's like, yeah, but he sure ain't free either.
I think it goes beyond the elections, too, just driving society in general.
Religious beliefs.
Music. Think of the effect that music has had for a very long time upon people's mentality.
Well, if you can control that, if you can control who gets on the billboard, who releases the CD and gets the ad money, certainly that's a form of control as well, and it takes place now partially on places like YouTube.
Like, this will be on YouTube.
Think about how many people are going to see this relative to some of these large rallies we've seen.
Historically speaking, you see Martin Luther King speaking in front of 100,000 people at such and such a place, but there are people who live stream and 100,000, 200,000 people watch them.
Of course, it goes well beyond elections.
I would say elections are almost an afterthought at this point.
Well, there is this odd meritocracy that is occurring at the moment.
Now, I'm fully aware that you and I are sort of rising in the firmament of people who talk about this stuff on YouTube.
So this may seem like a lot of self-praise, and frankly, it probably is.
But there is this meritocracy.
But it's deserved. Yeah, it is. It's, you know, the numbers are the numbers.
Like how many millions of people do you reach a month?
It's a considerable number.
Yeah, probably 15.
Well, who knows? Who knows how many people download more than what?
It's like the population of a decent-sized nation.
Certainly in the millions. Now, that is a big lever to have.
And, you know, I know you take it responsibly.
I work to take it responsibly.
But that is...
The result of meritocracy because this, you know, you got, you know what's that old song?
All I got is a guitar, three chords of the truth.
You know, all I have is a, well, originally dial up a $20 webcam and the truth.
And this meritocracy is fascinating because, I mean, I would assume that you haven't been, your phone hasn't been melting down with people saying, hey man, you got a huge audience.
You know, you do these spontaneous monologues that are really detailed and good.
We got to get you in a live TV show.
We got, you know, we got to get you out there in the mainstream media.
Maybe you shave a little, work out a little, and you'll be set.
You'll be good to go.
Some tanning machines.
All I have to do is sell out, cut my hair, and wear a suit, and I can make it in the world.
Right, but they don't.
And that, to me, is really fascinating as well.
Because every time the mainstream media writes about the alternative media and every time the mainstream media writes about social media, it is Coke writing about Pepsi.
This is something that people really don't understand.
This is the cigarette companies doing an objective review of the link between tobacco and lung cancer.
I mean, they are directly targeting their competition that's kicking their ass.
Who was it? Who went after it?
Wasn't it CNN did that piece on Infowars on YouTube?
I think it was CNN that did that piece.
But yeah, I mean, it's definitely interesting to see.
But warning to people in the next half decade, like probably at the end of this paradigm, if they can't beat you, they're going to try to join you.
And by join you, I mean they're going to try to use money.
To get people aboard, get us shined up.
And when they realize that they can't stop us all, whatever they haven't crushed into the ground, they're going to try to buy off.
I guarantee it. They're going to try to do that to people like you.
They're going to come and they're going to say, hey, Stefan, here's a half million bucks.
All you've got to do is recant these two or three views, put on a suit, We'll give you your own show.
Here's your studio. We'll advertise your podcast.
Here, look, you have access to all of these wonderful services.
You want a limo? You can have a limo.
You want this plane ride to Jamaica?
Okay, all expenses paid.
Two months. They're going to do stuff like that.
They've done it before. They've tried to woo people into terrestrial radio that way in the 90s.
Well, here's the thing, right?
I mean, it's demographics as well.
No, not the demographics I normally talk about.
We're going to take a different view of the demographics.
And these demographics are that the audiences for the mainstream media is like they're on a conveyor belt off the Grand Canyon of mortality, my friends.
They are crypt keepers.
There's a reason they have to speak up so much when they're doing these shows.
Turn the volume way up. Because they're old.
Yeah, 67 for CNN. CNN has an average listenership age of 67.
That means twice or half are older than that.
And, I mean, you deal with a younger audience, I think, even than I do.
But, you know, we're here for the bell curve population bulge in the middle.
And, you know, the government teachers have the kids and the mainstream media have the old people, but we can't have everyone else.
Assuming that I did nothing else, my audience wouldn't be as old as Fox or CNNs until I myself was geriatric.
Assuming that they age at the same rate, you're probably in the same boat.
So, I mean, they're fighting a lost battle.
And when they realize that, right now they're trying to fight back and they're not doing a very good job.
Their trustworthiness and their ratings continue to fall.
They're not going to get better.
I know CNN can get priority status on YouTube and gobble up subscribers because they're in everyone's related videos now, anything related to politics.
But that's not gonna last.
People will find workarounds.
Most people aren't engaging with their material.
And I've seen it. Keep tabs on these people the same way they keep tabs on us, which they clearly do.
Holt practically breathes down my neck no matter what I do.
You've probably got people from five or six different agencies.
When this goes live, five or six different pundits and reporters will watch it to see if there's one thing that we said that was offensive enough to warn a hippies.
And it's funny because we're exhausting them over time.
They're losing. It's great.
Well, this is the funny thing, too, is that I've always wondered how people can maintain this level of hysteria without, like, burning out their adrenal glands and, you know, aging, literally cryptkeeper, you know, evil Nazi melting in Indiana Jones, like, right before our eyes.
How do you think they keep it going, this brinksmanship hysteria?
It's coming from the left, to some degree it comes from the right, but I think right now, because of Trump, it's coming from the left.
Man, that's got to be exhausting.
I mean, it's like, you know, these scare videos.
You know, they get someone with an air horn.
This is how these people wake up.
You know, evil.
Fight, fight, fight.
I mean, that is an exhausting, debilitating, and I got to think fundamentally unpleasant thing to be around.
But they managed to keep it up.
I mean, they're going well north of a year now, and I think they've dug in for the long haul.
Eventually, they're going to run out of options and they're going to have to cut it short.
But it's like this, like, have you seen the condom challenge?
Now, supposedly, a lot of teenagers are snorting condoms and pulling them out their mouths for a sort of challenge.
I've never heard of anyone doing this in real life.
I've never seen anyone doing this in real life.
I have a sneaking suspicion that this is some sort of meme cooked up by 4chan.
CNN and these groups took it seriously, ran with it, and now it's becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy among the most ignorant demographics.
I think this is the way that things work.
They're trying to generate stories.
They try to antagonize us, number one, so they can get a hot scoop.
They try to go to anonymous forums to find whatever satire, which is what it often is, is posted there.
They'll take it seriously and misconstrue it.
But eventually the shtick is going to wear thin because the weird side of YouTube alone can now compete with them when it comes to that sort of stuff.
I can go to the weird side of YouTube and find out why the Earth is flat and it's orbited by reptilian pyramids.
Why would I want to watch CNN? Yeah, as if those pyramids are reptilian.
That's just crazy. The other thing, too, of course, Dix, is that, to me, this snorting condoms, yeah, it probably has about the same veracity as lipstick parties, but it is also, to me, interesting, right after the mainstream media injects 17-year-olds into constitutional debates about gun control, suddenly this other stuff emerges, and it's like...
Don't they notice that they're kind of playing 17-year-olds?
Maybe they should be allowed to vote.
We should really... Oh, well, they're also doing Tide Pods and condom snorting.
I mean, they're putting up a position and knocking it down themselves, and then they claim that they lack credibility because other people are better at lying.
I mean, that's just mad. Yeah, their journalism degrees, their mothers must be very proud.
But no, I thought it was funny when they're talking about how we have to listen to these kids and they're going to lower the voting age.
Okay, that's fine.
That means 16, 17-year-olds can also buy guns.
It's like their latest Parkland-based debate when they raise the buying age to 21 and in every state where they've done this, including soon here in Vermont, people will sue.
I wish I was 20 right now.
I'd be a millionaire within a few months.
But when that happens, they're going to make it clear in the courts, hey, if someone's hit the age of majority, you can't deprive them of the Second Amendment.
They would literally have to raise the voting age in order to make it constitutional.
It would be the funniest thing ever to see the liberals fighting for that.
Well, the left always wants to lower the voting age because they want people who have the natural leftist sympathies of youth to vote for leftist policies.
I mean, we all grow up in this.
Go ahead. Yeah. And by the way, the right is totally fudging it when it comes to this issue.
Don't attack the youth.
Big mistake. People should know better.
Like, we were all young.
Like, I was young. You know, 10 years ago, I was close to that age.
Yeah, I had some liberal leanings.
Look at what happened to me.
Look at where I am now. Don't worry about the youth being maybe more far left on social issues.
That could be a good thing. Look, I'm still on the left on some social issues.
I don't care if someone's gay. I don't care if someone has an abortion.
We probably debate about that.
As far as guns, I'm further right than Ted Nugent.
But attacking the youth isn't going to get you anywhere on that.
It's just dumb. Well, and they're prettier.
You know, I mean, look, come on, it's a visual medium.
It's a visual medium. You're putting me next to some of these teenage activists, and I look like somebody that should be chewing on their jugular.
I mean, it's just not good.
And, you know, the journalism degree, okay, just something popped into my head.
I'll share it for better or for worse, right?
So this is my idea about how you actually get a journalism degree.
So, of course, you go to school for a couple of years, and you learn how to How to fudge and obfuscate and all the other stuff that Don Henley yodles about.
And then what happens, this is a graduation ceremony, tell me what you think.
So you stand in front of someone, they hand you your journalism degree.
And they say, do you have a journalism degree?
And you say, yes.
And then they say, no, you don't.
And then you get confused.
And this repeats and repeats and repeats until such time as you're standing there holding a journalism degree and someone says, do you have a journalism degree?
And you say, absolutely not.
With great conviction. It's like, okay, now that you can lie convincingly, now you have a journalism degree, go forth and multiply.
Or a position in the Senate. Right, right, right.
No, I would definitely agree with that.
I mean, it's obviously not working for them.
Like with CNN talking about WikiLeaks, oh, don't read the WikiLeaks releases.
Let us analyze them for you because it's illegal to read them.
It's a bald-faced lie.
They knew it was a lie.
They had to have known it because they're not that dumb.
Nobody's that dumb to actually think that.
A lot of people looking at it knew it was a lie, but they said it anyway.
And this idea, I mean this blowback, every weapon that they use gets magically transformed into a weapon against them, right?
Because it was the mainstream media, for those who don't know, it was the mainstream media who came up with the term fake news to begin with.
And of course, the alternative media, the honest media, the unbought media, the non-prestitute media, took that and bounced it back.
Everything in life that is publicly proclaimed and a lot of stuff that's privately proclaimed is filtered by some particular idea.
You do shows because you care about something.
It doesn't mean that what you say is false, but everything is selected from the wide opportunity to do a show on just about...
Everything. I could do an entire show on Indian throat singing, which, you know, maybe the second half of this show, people can just stay tuned to find out.
So we all select particular topics based upon things that we believe or things that we believe are important.
So in that sense, it doesn't mean that people aren't telling the truth, but everything is selected from an infinity, and that selection matters.
It's like when somebody paints a picture of a beautiful sunset, well, they know that there's Ugly skies and ugly scenes in the world, but they choose to focus you on beauty.
If somebody paints a picture of a bum throwing up in a gutter, well, he knows that there are beautiful sunsets in the world, but he wants you to focus.
Everything is selected. And the idea that you can immediately say, well, this is fake and this is true and this is false and this is objective and this is subjective, to me, is very, very tricky.
And, I mean, I certainly strive to be as clear about my principles and why I'm talking about things and why it matters.
But the idea that you can just have some Hogwarts sorting hat, you know, that this is real, this is true, this is fake.
I mean, that's called the market.
That's called free speech.
It's not called some government agency.
It's not called some truth commission.
It's not called hate speech laws.
And it certainly is not called the mainstream media.
And I saw Facebook and Twitter both gonna start fact-checking memes.
You're not understanding the point of satire, are you?
It's not meant to be true.
It's meant to be maybe thought-provoking in a political sense sometimes, but a lot of it's just shitposting.
They're gonna be sitting there fact-checking it.
Some of it's demonstrably and provably false, and it's meant to be false.
It's meant to literally cause people to be like, well, what the hell did I just read?
That's why it's funny.
It's a joke. But they don't appear to understand this.
They're starting to take their own platforms that five years ago the lamestream said was nothing more than satire.
They would look at us You or I or anybody else on YouTube and say, well, they're, you know, ultimately it could be funny.
There's some cat videos and some funny practical jokes or a bum fight, but there's nothing actually particularly intelligent or professional there.
Now all of a sudden they're terrified of us.
They're so terrified that all they can do is run hit piece after hit piece every single day.
It's a non-stop tidal wave.
And they're still losing.
It's kind of like trying to put out a big fire by kicking it.
Hey, look, Sparks!
Hey, look, you're also on fire.
Hey, look, it's spread. Now, there is, I think, a fundamental battle going on at the moment, and I think you have a very good perspective on this, my friend, which is the battle between dignity and shitposting.
The battle between, you know, it sort of strikes me, it's sort of like this Monty Python versus the over-serious Roman...
Phalanx. Because there is this kind of dignity that is attempted to be presented by the mainstream media and there is this constant undermining and, you know, this cliche, the right can't organize, the left can't meme.
The left sure as hell can't meme.
And the memeing and the shitposting and the undermining and the...
It's Loki.
It's Loki. It's the trickster, like the fool in King Lear.
It's the trickster who brings...
The truth, or as Oscar Wilde says, you can tell people the truth, but you have to make sure they laugh first, otherwise they're going to kill you.
And this capacity, humor used to be more on the left when I was growing up, and now it seems to have moved to the non-leftist, to put it mildly.
How do you see this battle between this pretend dignity, this wounded victimhood, this I'm shocked and appalled sort of old Victorian stuff, And the chaos, the 4chan geniuses, the shitposting, the meme wars, it is, I think, something that's occurring, as they say, the battle between the article and the comments section.
How do you see this playing out, if this is a reasonable analysis?
I think if you look throughout history, every single time the group that, the attempts to suppress any group never seem to work.
The downtrodden, oppressed group that happens to be usually younger, usually politically more outside, always ends up winning and forming the new paradigm.
It's only a matter of time before we do win.
I can say that for certain.
The problem is it's how many people have to get abused and suffer before then, but I would side squarely with the shit posters on that.
I think that mocking and satirizing And howling at the media is a better idea than trying to present facts, because it's obvious if people want facts, if they want seriousness, they're not watching CNN at this point.
What happened was that the whining, pearl-clutching churchwives, the moralists, the temperance-era style jackboot lickers, they just stopped considering themselves conservatives around the middle and late 2000s and started calling themselves CNN fans and watching Rachel Maddow and voting for Obama.
That's really what they did.
Because I think what happened is with Obama, because the left started to harangue on race as a wedge issue, the racial wedge issue was declining away from use.
Under Bush, in all honesty, even though Bush was shitty as a president, he didn't use race as a political issue, really.
He wanted to represent anyone badly, but he did.
But then Obama came out and said, oh, I know how to win.
Hey, I'm black. And so all of the moralists came out and said, well, that sounds good to me.
I can virtue signal and I can tell people I'm holier than them because I voted for Obama for his first and second term.
I'm such a wonderful, guiltless Yeah, and people think that party and ideology are the same thing.
They're not. Well, this is one of the great lessons that if you appease the wedge drivers, you're just gonna get more wedges.
It's like, oh, well, we're gonna heal racial divides by giving Obama the presidency, although the presidency was more taken for Obama by the IRS, in my opinion, rather than given to him by the American people, certainly the second round.
But it's like, okay, well, if you're going to reward racial divisiveness with the presidency, guess what you're going to get a whole lot more of next time?
Ooh, wait a minute. If we hit the white guilt button, if we hit the race button, we get the presidency?
Well, I guess we'll never do that again because everything's been healed.
Yeah, and just think they project on Trump constantly.
He almost never really mentioned race.
He's just saying, oh, I'll make America great again.
You know, you can think what you will about his private life.
Yeah, he's done some slimy stuff as a Manhattan billionaire.
But I never had the sense, I never heard anybody claim that he was racist or anything, sexist maybe.
But racist, I never heard anything like that before the last couple of years.
I can remember when I was in high school, the Trump versus Rosie O'Donnell stuff.
They had like flash games of it and everything.
And people thought it was funny that the big meme about Trump at the time was, hey, he has a lot of money.
He has a lot of money and he tried to bully Rosie O'Donnell and she's overweight and she tried to bully him.
And that was the whole premise of why it was funny.
Well, he also has the home decorating sense of your average rapper.
So, I mean, rappers used to love this guy.
I mean, until, of course, right, I mean, he threatened the, as he perceived to have threatened the left.
And this is the thing, too, that's hard, is that, I mean, one of the least humorous human beings on the planet, I think, for good reasons of evildoing is Hillary Clinton.
You know, it's kind of hard to smash up countries and unleash a massive migrant crisis and be responsible for the reemergence of slave markets in Libya.
And then be funny. But she's seriously not funny.
Donald Trump, whatever his other faults, can be hilarious.
And that is something that is really...
Humor is such an underrated weapon.
It's one of the reasons why I talk to comedians and all of that.
It is an incredibly powerful weapon to...
Because how do you fight back against humor?
Well, if you get dour, you look humorless.
And you look over-serious.
And you look like you can't take a joke.
So you have to try and be funny back.
But if you don't have that lively imagination and that irreverence, which is...
The irreverence used to be part of the left.
I mean, think of the 60s and all of the music that came out and the plays.
There was this irreverence against authority.
And that's when they had the power.
Then, of course, they ascended through academia, through the media, and through Hollywood into positions of power.
And once you have positions of power, you lose your irreverence because...
You're basically mocking yourself, and that's kind of a tough thing for a lot to...
And so the irreverence has now moved to the non-left, and it is this kind of weird cycle that now the non-left is able to poke massive fun at the left, who can only respond with spluttering and continuing clichés and more divisiveness and hatred and aggression and fire alarm pulling and attacks on free speech.
And there is this ridiculous cycle that keeps going on, which is, we hate authority!
Oh, wait, do we have authority?
We love authority.
We hate people who hate authority, and it's like, it's this grim cycle.
Well, just imagine, I use this as an example.
Imagine if Eminem were just starting out on his rap career now, the sort of lyrics that he has now, he would get absolutely trashed by people on the left because he's white, too.
He comes out and attacks Donald Trump, but it wouldn't be the right wing at this point that would have a problem with what he was saying.
I mean, the left would be like, oh, you're a sexist.
You're a racist. You said the N-word that shall not be named.
You're a racist. You know, there's all sorts of problems.
Homophobic, I think as well. Exactly.
Homophobic. Extremely so, including recently.
If they were being honest, they would attack him now for stuff that he said, you know, back in the 2000s.
He could never have a career now.
He wouldn't even sell a single album.
He'd be so heavily censored.
Well, and this is why, I mean, he knows that he obviously wants to continue to have I mean, he obviously is worth $200 million.
I guess a clue costs about $201 million.
But he wants to be back in the public eye.
So, I mean, it's amazing to me just how instinctually people read the tea leaves, right?
So he's like, well, if I want to become back in the public eye, I have to attack Trump.
If I attack Trump, all of my prior sins will be forgiven.
And that is just the amazing thing.
And this invitation, it's like the Catholic process of, well, without even much atonement, right?
The confessional, right?
I go and confess my sins and I say some Hail Marys and do X, Y, and Z, and my sins are forgiven.
If you wish to get back into the public eye, for whatever reason, or you wish to increase your visibility, just attack Christ.
Trump. Just attack Trump, and all sins will be forgiven, and you will be elevated.
And, of course, all that means is that all principles have to be abandoned.
And that is a tragic thing to see, because I used to respect the left a lot for anti-war stuff, for the aforementioned, you know, I mean, the lack of hostility towards homosexuality.
Dude, I went to theater school. My best friend was gay.
I mean, it's... No problem as far as that goes.
In particular, of course, the anti-imperialistic stuff, anti-defense stuff, although a lot of that was rooted in wanting to disarm America in the face of communism, there was still some good stuff in it.
But now, I mean, they really have just become such a parody.
And now Hillary Clinton's the warmonger.
Trump's sitting there joking about John McCain and Lindsey Graham trying to start World War III. Hillary Clinton's like, oh, he won't be tough enough on the DPRK. He won't threaten nuclear war enough, I guess.
But yeah, it was actually funny.
I think there are two basic groups of, at least for millennials anyway, two different groups of liberals, ideological and party-based.
The party-based liberals voted for Obama because they had guilt Or they were like, oh, well, we need to embrace progress, hail socialism.
The other much unfortunately smaller group actually were ideologically on the left, at least on certain issues, maybe on war, on certain social issues, and voted for him because they were tired of Bushism and they thought McCain was more like Bush.
I happened to fall into the latter group.
It's like I voted for Obama in a way, quickly learned my lesson within a couple of years, realized he wasn't actually going to do any of the things that I wanted him to do, except throw billions to corporations, which was hilarious, and then ended up voting for Ron Paul.
When people vote for Donald Trump, Some of us, I think, the millennials that voted for Trump.
My assumption is that a lot of it is remnant Ron Paul supporters who were pissed off at the GOP for shafting him and for jerry-rigging Romney.
And I can still remember that fateful day when they had their convention and they bust a bunch of Ron Paul delegates around the venue, wouldn't let them take their seats, and then they used a teleprompter to fix, essentially, who was the nominee.
Now, it may have been inevitable, but they could have gone through the normal procedures.
They could have at least had a vote.
What they didn't want, I assume, Styx, was they didn't want the Republican establishment to realize how strong the Ron Paul movement was, because then they would have had to have bent some of Romney's policies to appease that particular group.
So it wasn't necessarily that Ron Paul was going to win.
He wasn't, but they didn't want to see just how strong a contingent there was for...
You know, a truly, you know, this is of all the politicians, right?
I mean, Ron Paul would certainly be closest to minarchism and certainly closest to where I would be.
And his criticism of the Fed is beyond reproach.
And his anti-war stance is beyond reproach.
And his hostility towards the IRS is beyond reproach.
And they just didn't want to go there because that would mean actually standing up for principles rather than just bamboozling people for votes, which has been the, you know, there's no bigger Benedict Arnold's In modern American political history than the Republican Party because the Democrats, they're pretty upfront. You know, we want your stuff.
We're going to raise taxes.
We're going to regulate more. Open borders.
They've been pretty frank about it.
So they are, you know, they're showing up and they're honest about what they want.
It's the Republicans who keep claiming, oh, no, we want smaller government.
Here's $1.3 trillion in an omnibus spending bill.
Yeah. And the level of anger towards that hypocrisy and betrayal can scarcely be measured, I think.
Yeah. I mean, I can remember back when Bush is in their first term.
He's like, oh, I'm a fiscal conservative.
It's like, here's your stimulus.
It's like, you know, a few hundred dollars.
And Trump's like, hold my beer.
And the tax cuts that he's already passed are significantly larger.
They're actually more along the lines of what I would expect from actual fiscal conservatism.
Hell, I think he doesn't go far enough.
He's talking about a second round of tax cuts.
I fully support it. I think he'll blow the Democrats out of the water if he also says we need to cut spending.
I would love him to do that.
It would show, at least on the economy, he would have an A-plus from me.
He took a half step back from guns.
I didn't like that. On foreign policy, you know, some good, some bad, like any other president.
But on economics, he's done pretty well, by my estimation.
And I think that there's a significant proportion, though, as you know, of Americans whose major concern is immigration.
And demographics and DACA and You know, we may someday, you know, if he writes his memoirs or whatever, he may reveal all of the reasons why this promises did not materialize.
And maybe he just, you know, there are too many activist judges.
Maybe he's got to deal with the FBI in particular, which just seems to be an unbelievably, horrendously rotting from the spine up and down organization.
Maybe... The control that the federal government has over the errant sanctuary city-addicted states is much more tenuous, and maybe he's got concerns about that.
Maybe that's why he's pouring more money into military spending.
I don't know, because I'm not, of course, privy to any of those conversations.
But to me, Trump is going to come down to immigration just like Brexit did now.
Brexit failed. The question remains whether or not Trump can do anything on immigration or even to control the borders in any way, shape, or form.
That's what people are waiting for.
I think the tax cuts are nice.
But it's not going to solve the fundamental problem.
I think that people are going to be very surprised in that Trump is going to pull a rabbit out of his hat in the most strict sense.
And I think he will succeed, at least with regards to his wall in sanctuary cities.
As far as DACA, that's on the Democrats.
People still... In polling, a lot of them do blame the Democrats for that problem.
He's hoping, I think, by saying, well, there'll be no DACA deal.
He's hoping they'll come crawling to him and say, no, no, no, we were supposed to have some sort of deal.
Okay, okay, we'll give you a couple more little things that you wanted.
Each time he does that, he gets a little bit more of what he wanted.
He's got the bully pulpit.
It's just a matter of how long he has to drag it on and the midterms matter.
Now, if the Democrats do retake the House, all bets are off the table.
I just don't see them doing that.
I think they're setting themselves up for an abysmal failure because they're beginning to talk again about blue wave.
The Republicans will lose forever.
The Democrats will take back the House.
The Senate will impeach Trump.
They're getting a big dick about it.
I don't think that they should do that.
Well, certainly I think that's the hope.
That's why they're not coming to the table with anything.
So I think that they're hoping, of course, to gain control.
And then they'll start impeachment proceedings.
And people say, well, on what grounds?
It's like, does it matter?
They're going to have control. And there's a lot of activist judges.
So let's just close with this.
Let me ask you... You have some optimism for the future.
I'm not here to talk you out of it, but hopefully you can talk me into it more.
How do you see this playing out, Stix, in terms of best case scenario?
Let's just say it's all a hole in one on all 18 holes or something like that.
How do you see this playing out to the point where this could be turned around?
On immigration? No, the whole thing.
Just life in general?
No, the size of the state, the increasing controls over liberties and so on.
Yeah. The best case scenario is that because of the complete decentralization of the communication age, people have become so used to being able to speak their mind like a mob that censorship will always be stripped apart thereafter and that news sites will just come up to replace old, dying sites that censor things.
In which case, public opinion, more or less worldwide, will begin to move in a more libertarian direction.
You'll never have utopia.
It's impossible. It's the paradox of eternal struggle.
It will never happen. But things generally as a rule will be better for longer periods.
The downturns will be shorter and less bad.
It'll be sort of like the moderation of Plato's Republic.
You think about the movement of a government.
A republic doesn't eliminate that sort of circular system that he saw.
It simply contains it within one type of government, limits it.
The highs aren't as high, the lows aren't as low.
Things are more stable for longer.
I think that's really what a republic does.
So instead of an oligarchy, you just get a government that's sort of more centralized.
Instead of a tyranny, you get, you know, a strongman, a couple of imperial presidents.
Then you go back to more of a democratic system.
Someone rises up within the republic to replace them, essentially, and it sort of spirals around.
I think that communication technology, alt tech especially, in the sense of cryptocurrency, the blockchain, total decentralization, Is capable of safeguarding liberty probably better than anything else on the planet.
We've already seen it happen, even before the rise of Altec, like with the Tunisian counter-revolution there.
Islamists tried to take over.
Facebook was used to organize mobs of people to resist them, and they won.
They maintained a marginal Republican system of government against Islamofascism because of Facebook.
Now, Facebook is old hat and dying at this point.
But there are other sites that they can use for that.
That would be my best case scenario.
All right. Well, whether we end up being governed by a candle or a bagel, in other words, one, very small, or zero, none at all, we'll remain to see in the future.
Just wanted to remind people to check out, if you haven't already.
It's a great channel, youtube.com forward slash stickshexandhammer666.
You can find the link to that below.
twitter.com forward slash sticks666 official.
A great chat. Thank you so much for your time today.
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