April 12, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
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| You ever have that moment, I'm sure you did at some point, where you look at your authority figures when you're a child or a teenager and you can't help but notice, and it comes usually in quite a rush, that whereas they've given you moral lectures all of your life, they really don't have a clue what's going on. | |
| They're ridiculous, they're manipulative and foolish. | |
| And with that understanding of their ridiculousness comes significant danger. | |
| Because what do you do with your authority figures when you realize how ridiculous they are? | |
| Because you either act on that ridiculousness, in which case you expose yourself to their retaliation, or you mask it up, you cover it up, you pretend that they're not ridiculous, which is humiliating and degrading to your sense of morality and reality and so on. | |
| It's very dangerous. | |
| moments some people have it with parents some people most people have it with teachers if you've got half a brain and Professors and so on and you have it with the media when you realize just how biased and ridiculous they are and You can't have a civilization when the people who are in charge are viewed as Ridiculous, I mean one of the reasons that the Roman Empire fell was people no longer believed in the moral mission of the Republic and | |
| They viewed Rome as a squabbling internecine band of backstabbers and pillagers of the general population, and they no longer respected the rule of law. | |
| And when you no longer respect the rule of law, when the law is not, at least in the perception of the public, imperfectly derived from some larger moral purpose, some larger moral vision. | |
| If the law is simply now perceived, as it so often is in late empire societies, if the law is simply perceived as a weapon used by the wealthy, by the powerful to protect their own interests and to harm those who threaten the interests of the rich and powerful. | |
| Once the law is no longer a shining central moral monument to imperfect human justice, but rather is a predatory weapon used to punish those who threaten the immature sociopaths in power, Then you, it's just a matter of time, because then people don't feel guilt for disobeying the law. | |
| In fact, people start to feel foolish for obeying the law. | |
| And then what happens? | |
| You end up in this ridiculous game of whack-a-mole of cat and mouse where The law is perceived as a cat, the citizens are perceived as a mouse, and of course the mouse doesn't want to feed the cat, although the cat wants to eat the mouse. | |
| We don't look at a mom who doesn't feed her child and view her as a moral monster. | |
| We don't look at the mouse who doesn't feed the cat and view the mouse as a moral monster. | |
| It's like, you go mouse, you run. | |
| I can completely understand that. | |
| Is a huge issue and you can see the many hammer blows that the sense of justice in America has taken just over the last couple of years here Jesse Smollett Hillary Clinton, I mean just you name it I mean because now with Julian Assange, of course, the big argument is that well, you know, he he done broke the law and You know, we got a Crack him down. | |
| We got to track him down. | |
| We got to get him extradited to the United States. | |
| We got to move him over here. | |
| We got to punish him because he did a bad thing. | |
| You see, he put American lives in risk. | |
| He accepted stolen documents and published them and therefore he must be punished. | |
| Now in America, of course, it's because of the First Amendment. | |
| It's a huge and tricky issue to pursue journalists. | |
| And yes, he is a journalist. | |
| He publishes information In full light of the need for public disclosure and its relevance to public discourse and so on. | |
| And they can't get him for publishing stolen information. | |
| That's a well-established principle in American journalism. | |
| The Supreme Court ruled on it way back in the 70s with the Pentagon Papers. | |
| There's been the Panama Papers and of course a whole bunch of American outlets reported on all the information that WikiLeaks published that came out of Chelsea Manning. | |
| And so They can't get him for that. | |
| So what they're trying to do is they're trying to get him on helping Chelsea Manning crack a password and therefore involving himself in the crime. | |
| And we'll see how that plays out. | |
| But this whole idea that you see national security is paramount. | |
| National security is so, so, so important. | |
| Okay, so that's the argument. | |
| But of course, if national security is so important, then why is Julian Assange being punished? | |
| And the people who committed the crimes that the videos and the other war material that was published? | |
| Why are those people not facing any justice? | |
| They don't, right? | |
| Why is it that Julian Assange is being punished, but people who lied about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, they're not being punished. | |
| So people who lied America into a war are not being published, but people who publish the truth about that war are being punished. | |
| What about the war in Afghanistan? | |
| The Taliban was offering to hand over Osama Bin Laden. | |
| No need to go to war. | |
| They went to war anyway. | |
| Now it's America's longest-running war with 18 years plus. | |
| Obama dropped a hundred thousand bombs on innocent, mostly innocent Muslims in the Middle East. | |
| Any punishment there? | |
| When it comes to compromising national security Hillary Clinton was ridiculously exposing sensitive information. | |
| They have records of her saying, well, strip the classified headers and send those facts non-secure. | |
| So, the cover story is what's needed to punish Assange, but nobody really believes the cover story. | |
| Nobody really believes the cover story. | |
| If national security you see is so important, That you've got to go and pull out a guy who's been driven half crazy in basically solitary confinement for year after year after year in a horrible inhumane manner. | |
| You've got to go and yank him and try and pull him across the Atlantic before the statute of limitations run out. | |
| But if national security is so important then why doesn't America have a border? | |
| If national security you see is so important. | |
| And there's no evidence, to my knowledge, that what Assange published caused the deaths of any US servicemen, to my knowledge. | |
| It did embarrass a lot of people in power, and it did strain America's relations with its allies, but didn't get anyone killed. | |
| You can look at the actions of, oh my good Lord, look at what happened with Obama and Hillary Clinton and the destruction of Gaddafi in Libya. | |
| You destroyed an entire country, caused the deaths of countless people. | |
| You've got open air slave markets. | |
| You've got a flood of migrants heading across the Mediterranean into Europe, which is exactly what Gaddafi predicted. | |
| He said, if you take me down, then Europe will end up with a migrant crisis. | |
| Didn't matter. | |
| The guy, though a nasty dictator, still had a stable country and still protected Europe. | |
| And he was dragged through the streets and bayoneted in the rectum and killed in the most horrible manner possible. | |
| Nobody faces any punishment for that. | |
| Hillary ordering a stand down during the Benghazi attack, then lying about it. | |
| When you have hundreds of thousands of people pouring across the border into America, And you have that they're going to sanctuary cities. | |
| There's no sanctuary cities for people who don't pay their taxes, right? | |
| Sanctuary cities for people who break American law. | |
| There's no particular repercussions for that. | |
| So, like everybody understands, it's not about national security. | |
| America has friendly neighbors to the north and south. | |
| There's giant oceans to the east and west. | |
| It should be, of all the countries in the world, Just about the most able to avoid getting involved in major conflicts and entanglements. | |
| Heaven's above if Sweden can manage it. | |
| Surely America can. | |
| But American foreign policy of invasions and foreign aid to dictatorships and selling of weaponry overseas and selling weaponry to Saudi Arabia of all things. | |
| The idea that this is somehow about national security. | |
| Unvetted people pouring across the border. | |
| The American government, when they claim that they're doing something for the sake or in the cause of national security, there's not a single human being alive who can take that even remotely seriously who's got an IQ above room temperature. | |
| So people just don't believe it. | |
| They know that it's retaliatory. | |
| They know that it's punishment. | |
| Now the other problem, of course, is that the media Michael Malice had a good point calling it the mainstream media kind of normalizes it. | |
| The corporate media right so the corporate media has an issue as well because what is it a dozen years Wikileaks has been running not one thing that they published has proven to be false not one thing they are batting 1,000 in a highly contentious realm of publication. | |
| I mean if you compare what goes on with Wikileaks and the publishing of you know factual important relevant information and then you compare that I mean, you could take any one of a dozen or 50 things, but just to take one, this Russia collusion conspiracy theory that was pushed by the media on behalf of the Democrats to avoid the exposure that Attorney General Barr is currently pursuing, which is spying, as he referred to it, this Russia collusion conspiracy theory that was pushed by the media on behalf of the Democrats to avoid the exposure that Attorney General Barr is currently | |
| And if you look at all of that, the media has a big problem writing about WikiLeaks because WikiLeaks, the non-corporate media, is far more successful, far more accurate, far more relevant, far more important than the media. | |
| They are. | |
| So when the mainstream media is writing about WikiLeaks, they are writing about a far more successful competitor that is not in the business of selling, right? | |
| You understand the news is not a, the corporate media is not in the business of delivering the news to you, right? | |
| That's not their business model at all. | |
| Their business model is delivering your eyeballs to their advertisers. | |
| And they will use whatever hooks, whatever tricks in order to achieve. | |
| That's one of the reasons I don't do ads and don't take major sponsors. | |
| I don't take any organized sponsorship. | |
| It's all reliant upon your donations at freedomainradio.com forward slash donate so that I can focus on bringing you the truth. | |
| Because my decentralized funding model allows no person to hold sway over what is that I say and do. | |
| So because the media is not interested In delivering the truth to you, but rather delivering you to their advertisers, they have to play to your prejudices. | |
| They have to play to your irrationalities. | |
| They have to coddle your vanity. | |
| They have to provoke the weirdly satisfying cortisol-laced, just quote, outrage of people who are easily triggered and heavily programmed, right? | |
| So they have a huge problem in writing about WikiLeaks. | |
| They also of course in New York Times and lots of other outlets have published classified material in the past and so they really can't go for that so what are they how are they going to talk about it? | |
| It's a very big problem and you'll see the delicate landmine footsteps the do-si-do the corporate media is doing when reporting on this kind of stuff because this is where the world has come to. | |
| I'd like to say I don't know where the world is going to go. | |
| I have my suspicions, but because I'm in there frantically peddling against the drifting death current towards the waterfall of social dissolution as hard as I can, I'm not going to say, well, I know where the world's going to go because I'm fighting its inevitable direction, or it's inevitable if you don't fight it. | |
| But this is where the world is. | |
| This is what has | |
| Become of the world which is people have become so anti-rational the world as a whole has become so hostile to reason and evidence and so addicted to the fentanyl pablum of propaganda that telling the truth has become increasingly risky and everybody knows that the only reason | |
| That the American power structure was angered by WikiLeaks is because WikiLeaks told the truth about what was going on in a war theater and in behind the scenes. | |
| It's the same thing like the DNC got really really mad at the emails that were published and the Podesta emails that were published. | |
| Why? | |
| Because it lifted the lid and it showed people the truth about what was going on in the world. | |
| And we are in a very bad situation. | |
| When those who commit crimes are not punished. | |
| Those who reveal those crimes are pursued to the ends of the earth and punished to the full extent of the law. | |
| That is a very bad situation to be in. | |
| And of course it's a warning to others. | |
| Don't publish. | |
| We'll hound you. | |
| We'll harass you. | |
| So, philosophically speaking, this means that people are committed to lies. |
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