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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:51:17
The Final American Revolution - Adam Kokesh Debates Stefan Molyneux
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Hi, everybody.
It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
Joining me now from what looks like about the most comfortable jail cell you're ever going to see in your life.
Wait.
No, actually.
No, I think he's out.
I think he's out.
Ladies and gentlemen, the one, the only Adam Kokesh.
How are you, brother?
Outstanding.
It's an honor to be invited to be your guest today, Stefan.
Thank you.
Now, we are going to be discussing civil disobedience, and we've ended up deciding to do a sort of video debate.
My initial approach to Adam was to say, Adam, let's have an arm wrestle contest.
But he ended up screaming, I think, like an anime character.
And so we ended up, you know, hiding under the couch and saying, please, with your noodley appendages, do not break my arm.
Actually, this is only funny if you know how muscular Adam Kokesh really is, and I believe even more so after his time in the big house.
So yeah, we're going to talk about civil disobedience, other options or ways in which we can bring the fight for freedom to the future.
So thanks again for your time, Adam.
For those of my listeners who may not be aware of you, and given how many new ones we've got lately, it might be quite a few, I wonder if you could give us a little background and the story of your recent exciting adventures into the non-theoretical world of civil disobedience.
Thanks for your time.
I think that's what the judge said after four months in the D.C.
system.
Yeah, it was a very interesting experience, and I'm glad that you've made these wonderful decisions on our behalf, Fawn.
That's very dictatorial of you, but as long as that's the direction this conversation is going, I'm still in.
I'm still in.
I engaged in a particularly flagrant, I guess is the only Adjective, I would take on it for myself to describe the act of civil disobedience that I committed on Independence Day of this year, carrying and loading a shotgun at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C.
I know, the irony and the symbolism is perfect there, right?
Freedom Plaza?
Okay.
In between the White House and the Capitol.
As a result, my home was raided, and I really gotta put this out front.
You know, just really as a, I guess, a token of humility that it was really kind of naive and silly for me of all people to expect that we can get a straightforward shot through the justice system, which I never even referred to as a justice system.
I like to call it either the criminal punishment system or the government injustice system.
That I expected something more than what I got makes me feel really silly in hindsight.
And I hate to say hindsight even because I'm only halfway through this thing, at least legally speaking.
I'm still facing charges in Virginia that stem from the raid.
My home was in Herndon, Virginia.
I've since been evicted, and I'm facing charges for possession of drugs and guns with drugs in Virginia.
And I took a plea after four months in jail to the charges of marijuana possession and carrying a rifle or shotgun outside a home in place of business with unregistered firearm and unregistered ammunition in D.C.
It was really tough.
I really didn't want to take a plea knowing that under the Second Amendment to the Constitution, under the natural law, under any sense of common sense, that I am innocent of any kind of real crimes that have victims.
to take a plea knowing that under the Second Amendment to the Constitution, under the natural law, under any sense of common sense, that I am innocent of any kind of real crimes that have victims.
So it really was a tough decision for me.
So it really was a tough decision for me.
But what really was naive on my part was to think that my home wouldn't be raided, to think that I would be politely arrested and booked and taken handheld through the system.
And obviously that wasn't the case.
So just a little background on me super quick, how I fell into this position, I was I got started as an activist with the Rock Veterans Against the War when I got back from the Marines or when I got out of the Marines in late 2006.
I was in Fallujah with a combat tour with the Civil Affairs team in 2004 and then ran for Congress in New Mexico.
Couldn't shut up when the race was over, so I got a radio show that turned into a TV show for four months before it was canceled for political reasons on the Russian television network, Russia Today, based out of D.C., and then decided to go independent.
And in many ways, taking your lead, Stefan, and following your example of how...
Well, I guess in your case, the term intellectual applies primarily.
Perhaps for me, troublemaking pundit of the internet is somehow more on par.
If Stefan gets to be the intellectual, we've got to come up with a different category altogether for what I do.
But, uh, to be in the same... I always felt that, uh, the word intellectual is like the consolation prize that you get when people think you aren't that intelligent.
You can't say he's intelligent.
Let's just call him an intellectual.
In other words, he's got big words which he assembles randomly in a word salad.
But, uh, sorry, go on.
Or when you can't say professor or best-selling author or television show host anymore, right?
You say, oh, intellectual.
It's just a nice catch-all.
But to be in the same general line of work as you, Stefan, to be in the same industry, if you will, of independent liberty media now is, I mean, there's nowhere else I'd rather be.
I'm working on, well, it's my second book, the first one having yet to be published.
So I'm adding to my pile of unpublished literature.
And I'm just, it's the business of freeing minds and helping people out and improve their lives and inspire self-ownership.
And maybe that's a really good catch-all for what we do, for what this line of work represents, for what people who I consider myself, you know, colleagues with are doing.
And it's really an honor to be on your show and a part of this great industry of inspiring self-ownership.
Yeah, I know you're talking about what to call the system.
To me, it's like the slow-moving gulag conveyor belt that they staple you to.
People who don't get involved in this kind of stuff, you know, when you watch it on TV, it's all pretty quick.
The guy gets arrested, next scene is a court scene, next scene is a sentencing or an acquittal scene, and so on.
the unbelievable frozen treacle nature of the slowness and the mind occupying headspace that these kinds of systems are part of.
It really is like it is giant.
They're just blowing up this slow balloon that takes over your brain really slowly.
And so for people who don't now, if you can, I think you can talk about it.
And if you can, of course, please feel free not to.
But the reports of the actual arrest, I mean, it sounded truly NKVD slash Gestapo style flashbangs dragging you out in your shorts, throwing you in a frigid cell with bugs and all that kind of stuff.
What was going on there?
Yeah, no, I have no problem talking about what's factually on the record in terms of the raid itself and my ensuing kidnapping and confinement, because that's pretty straightforward.
But you're right.
And yeah.
You know, you want to think, well, isn't this America?
Well, like, yeah, this is the representation of the police state, and this kind of stuff happens every day, and in a way, it's sort of like, okay, Adam, you've been telling these stories, you've been reporting on these kinds of incidents for years, it's about time one happened to you, and you go, wow, you know, right up front and personal for a non-crime And you go, this is the depths of it.
But yeah, my door was knocked down, or knocked in rather, with a battering ram.
The door was destroyed, as well as the door frame.
My dog was responding, I have a hundred pound Pit Dane mix, Baloo, and the sweetest dog ever goes up to the door to investigate the noise right as it's crashing in.
And I'm actually really grateful that they threw a flashbang grenade more or less at him.
It landed right at his feet.
I'm at the top of the stairs coming out of my bedroom.
It lands at his feet and goes off.
You know, enough that I get the effect of it.
Just being in the same enclosed space with a flashbang grenade.
It's enough to get the desired effect.
And, you know, I was still maybe, you know, 15 feet away from the actual point that the grenade went off because I was, you know, up a flight of stairs and it was a little ways in front of me.
But no, I got, you know, the ears ringing and, you know, the impact of it.
But my dog, I mean, it was right at his feet.
And I'm so glad that it happened this way because if they hadn't, if they had just, if they had forgotten the flashbang grenade, they would have shot the dog.
That's what they do.
That's really a sick standard common procedure.
If you understand the police mentality, it kind of makes sense.
In the status mentality, of course, a dog is an animal.
It's property.
If property is a threat, you destroy the property.
There's no consideration For the value of that property, even under that rubric, when it comes to the rights, uh, property rights of an individual whose home is being raided.
But fortunately, Baloo was, uh, was frightened enough that he ran upstairs and I was able to tell him to go in his crate, although I was standing there, you know, with my hands up.
And, um, fortunately, my, my incredible girlfriend, Carrie, who was in the shower on her period at the time, uh, was able to get the dog into his crate.
But she was pulled out while, undressed and was forced to throw something on and then was sitting in her own blood for hours before the police would let her address that.
They had all of us.
There were about eight of us in the house at the time, and they had us seated in handcuffs on the floor.
The unprofessionalism was just frightening.
And you might have heard this as they were pointing guns at us the entire time.
And it's true, but it's not necessarily what you would think because, yes, they pointed guns at us when they were getting everybody controlled and in position.
And, all right, you know, we're going around.
We're going to clear the house.
And you, all right, you come sit down here and you sit down here.
Yeah, they're actually pointing guns at people that way in a tactical sense, and that's kind of expected.
But the unprofessionalism wasn't in that, it was that they were then walking around with their M16s or their ARs, their assault rifles, or their M4s, whatever they were.
There was a mix, you know, slung across their chest with the barrels pointed down and kind of out, and what they were doing was sort of just walking around with these guns pointed at the heads of everybody who's, you know, sitting on the floor around them, which is kind of...
It was hard to tell if it was really disturbing incompetence or deliberate casual intimidation, but we were there for five hours while they ransacked the home, and there are photos of that online of just the house being turned inside out.
I cooperated right away.
They asked where the shotgun was, and I told them where to find it.
The shotgun in question from the video, or at least one that looked like it.
And that didn't stop them from going after everything else that they did, which is very suggestive.
And I'm not going to speculate as to what could have been going on.
There was certainly evidence, nothing conclusive, but evidence to suggest that there was a plant, that there was an infiltrator of my organization, and very strong evidence to suggest that the police were there for other reasons.
that there was an infiltrator of my organization, and very strong evidence to suggest that the police were there for other reasons, that they were looking for an excuse to arrest me and charge me right then and there, not just to execute this warrant.
So they were looking for an excuse to arrest me and charge me right then and there, not just to execute this warrant.
And one of the things that was really interesting about that is that the warrant said they could seize any documents pertaining to the production of the independent state video, and they didn't go for any documents, they didn't go for any computers, they went for physically incriminating stuff and my life savings in silver and guns they went for physically incriminating stuff and my life savings in silver and guns and ammunition, and fortunately they couldn't
But it was, really it's crazy to think there's nowhere safe in America anymore for, For me, as a dissident trying to build a life, I know those things are kind of incompatible.
Where do I save my money?
If I want to save money to raise kids and start a family or buy a home someday, what do I do?
in a bank account or or if I can't I can't keep it in silver my safe in my basement I can't have physical well anymore I mean it's it's unless it's perfectly hidden is there's really nothing you can do and we are all that all over so again just for the humility side it was a really humbling to know that you know that that can happen to anybody even with the kind of public scrutiny that we have
But then, for the first three days, I was in a cell with the light on 24 hours, I was given a t-shirt and the shorts that I wore when I was arrested, and no mattress, and there were ants in the cell, and I was on a starvation diet, essentially, of a sandwich and a carton of milk three times a day.
And I caved.
I cooperated at that point.
Because I was being tortured.
And I've done things myself.
When I was in Fallujah with the Marines, I did things that crossed the line, that constituted torture.
And in that sense, that's what this was.
When I was arrested in Philadelphia in May, I applied the same strategy of non-cooperation and it worked.
I was released in a week.
And I think this time they decided, well, we've got more serious charges for you.
We've got something a little more incriminating, so we can lean on you a lot more.
Your resistance strategy in jail isn't going to work.
I refused to take the PPD shot.
I refused to take a DNA test.
When you saw me for that mugshot out of Fairfax, I was actually handcuffed to a wheelchair, which they used to take me in for a video arrangement for the judge as well.
And, you know, I kept that up as long as I could before I realized, you know, the public pressure wasn't there.
You know, if there had been some massive outpouring, if the American people had gotten behind me and said, oh, wow, you know, we can't let the government keep this guy behind bars, then the strategy really would have worked.
But, you know, at that point, the support wasn't there and they had enough of, you know, serious charge they were going to hold me.
So I did two and a half weeks of solitary in Fairfax and then I was in solitary for two months in D.C. and then general population in D.C. for two months.
Wow.
Yeah, I mean, I'm incredibly sorry for...
All that occurred to you.
I mean, it is a dangerous strategy.
Of course, if you're going to be on a starvation diet and not getting enough sleep, I mean, at some point that's going to start to damage your health.
People don't, I think, understand the degree to which, you know, I think it was certainly a shock to me to find out that like 95 or 97 percent of people arrested on drug trials have to plea down because They're just given ridiculous sentences, and then they have to plea down.
And, you know, when you're not facing that yourself, sometimes people say, you know, stay tough when they're not in the situation.
But when you're looking at years of your life being dribbled away in a tortuous environment, I can certainly understand why people make those difficult choices.
And it's very important that you point that out, Stefan.
I became uniquely aware of that, not just through my own experience, but when I got to general population talking to other inmates.
You know, it's insane when you have a system, and this alone should be just a sign that something is so terribly, terribly wrong, that there's this kind of subjectiveness in the system.
But in terms of time that is threatened against people, in terms of potential time that they would face for charges, My sense is that the average inmate really only does 10-20% of it.
And you might think, no Adam, that's crazy.
You know, good time, time served, all that.
That's only like a small chunk of it.
No, I'm talking about when the prosecutor can go, well, alright, well you were caught with This is what we have on paper.
Therefore, we can charge you with this felony and that felony and that felony.
Oh, and we can get you mandatory time for this.
And oh, and if you get convicted of that.
And the law is written in such a way because it has nothing to do with justice of compensating victims or any kind of real sense of property rights.
It's really a punishment system.
And it's very subjective.
And it's really scary when you're in that system.
And they go, Well, you could go to trial, and if you lose, it's a hundred thousand years, but if you win, it's nothing, or you can plead a five years, huh?
Sounds pretty good all of a sudden to do five years, and you start to understand, you know, the real pressure that they can bring to bear on someone once they've got their teeth into you.
But they can, you know, add and subtract charges.
They can fabricate charges.
I mean, they can say, well, we have just a shred of evidence on this charge, but it's enough to drag you through the courts for months, which is a sentence in and of itself.
Well, and this is one of the things that the gargantuan expansion of the prosecution for victimless crimes has done to the system.
There's no possible way that the amount of criminals that need to be processed through the system could ever get any kind of fair trial.
Like if they said, no more plea bargains, everyone gets a trial, the system would completely collapse.
I mean, it's on the verge of collapsing in various places like Detroit and so on anyway, Even murder charges, you know, can take five years to get to court, in which case half the witnesses are dead or vanished.
And so the corruption of the system wherein nobody can get their fair day in court is a result of this monstrous expansion of victimless crimes.
And I don't think people, you know, it would be a pretty bad cop show or pretty bad lawyer show if it was just like a Hey, cop plotted something, they manufactured some charges and plea down.
Ooh, what a grippy, like there always has to be this courtroom thing so that you think the justice is being served.
But it's like one in 20 people, less than one in 20 people who ever get that opportunity.
And, you know, they say, well, we found you guilty.
It's like, no, it's funny.
You can't bribe a judge.
You can't bribe a district attorney.
You can't bribe a policeman.
You can't bribe a lawyer with money.
But you can bribe people with 10 years of their life and somehow that is considered acceptable and just.
I was asked when I took my plea, have you been threatened in any way?
And I said, only in the normal prosecutorial process.
Yeah.
But you're right.
And it's sick.
It's sick how it's come to that.
And I met a lot of guys in jail who were dealing with far worse than what I was.
And that was a very humbling experience in itself.
But even for the guys who get that day in court, Stefan, it is oftentimes a sentence in and of itself.
And there was someone that I met there, Glenn A. Smith Jr.
If anybody wants to look up his case, it's actually the latest video still on my YouTube channel, youtube.com slash adamkokesh.
About his innocence.
And he was actually convicted of a murder that a video exonerated him from right before facing these rape charges, all from the same arrest.
And you look at the way this was processed and handled, he was the first black man to be convicted based on a white accuser with an all-white jury in D.C.
in 15 years.
And you see all of the various factors that conspire to put someone in that situation and go, wow.
Is it more, even for the guy that's convicted of a really heinous rape in jail, according to what they're saying, is it more likely that he did this?
And you look at who he is, and you look at his life story, and I got to see a lot of his paperwork, and go, no, it's far more likely that the system bullied a witness into this.
And, you know, cajoled a certain outcome from the process in order to meet numbers, in order to grind up one more body in the machine.
But there was another guy on my block, and you might know his name as an up-and-coming MMA fighter if you're a fan of the sport.
His name is Mateo Maldonado, and he was in jail for 10 months on pre-trial confinement before a jury found him not guilty.
What kind of justice is that?
His life, his career, just trashed, ruined, and you're like, how do they get away with this?
And I think the libertarian philosophy that you're so good at explaining to people really provides some obvious mechanisms of accountability that you know you would have in any kind of non-violent system, unlike what we have with the violent government system, where you can't just take 10 months of a guy's life Decide he's not guilty and let it go at that and not have any consequences for the people involved.
I mean, that is insane!
We are going to let the most important decisions in our society be made by people who have no accountability for when those decisions are wrong?
I mean, what kind of statist hell is this?
Oh yeah, I mean there was, I think, a lawyer who manufactured evidence that resulted in a guy getting 20 years in prison and I think he basically got 30 days in jail after he was finally caught.
And after that there was a huge amount of protests.
And people also, I think it's really important for people to understand that it can happen to just about anyone, right?
So we think, okay, well, so some guy was fingered by a guy who was caught for drugs.
He must have had some negative aspect to his life or whatever.
It's actually not true, of course, because what happens is they either catch or manufacture someone because they got their quotas to hit and all that kind of stuff.
And also the cops like scaring the criminal population in return for bribes and that kind of stuff.
And so they'll grab someone, whether fairly or not, or even according to the laws, just or not.
And then they say, well, we're going to give you 10 years unless you give up three or four other people.
And so the guy's like, oh, my God, I got kids.
I got, you know, I mean, I knew this guy.
I thought maybe he did something wrong.
And then there's this guy I knew in grade school.
And then there was this guy upstairs who I didn't like.
I just got to give some names because then they're going to give me three months as opposed to 10 years if I don't.
So people just cough up names.
And then that's enough to go and grab those people, and then they just drop charges on those people until those people give up names.
I mean, it's completely insane.
I mean, it turns, of course, all of the livestock against each other, and it has nothing to do with any particular evidence or any standard of proof or belief.
I mean, it's just this ripple of constant intimidation and threats.
Well, if you incriminate three people, and they each incriminate three people, next thing you know, we'll have two million Americans in jail!
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right, so again, I'm very sorry that this is occurring for you.
I know that I spoke with another Liberty activist once who was not paying taxes and was going to challenge the whole legality of the income tax and prepare this massive defense, had three binders with him, represented himself.
And then when he got his day in court, he was never even offered the chance to speak on his own behalf.
They just sentenced him.
It took about five minutes and he went to jail for 13 months and had a young daughter at home.
So it is a very risky thing.
I think it was Steph Kinsella who pointed out that even if there are laws that are in your favor, I mean, the laws are not magic.
They don't compel.
It's not like the laws of physics.
They don't compel anyone's behavior.
You know, a good man and a bad man jump off a cliff, they both fall down, but the laws are not magic spells that bind people's behavior.
Once you're on the other side of that wall, they can pretty much do whatever they want and face almost no repercussions.
So the laws are just kind of these, what they are is magic spells to keep people's anxieties about the randomness of government injustice at bay, but they don't actually change anyone's behavior when it comes down to it.
And if any of that anxiety is based in a rational analysis, it should have no effect whatsoever.
Right.
Okay, so let's have a little chat about civil disobedience as a course of action.
I didn't expect you to give me this long to ramble and to show how easy it is to be on the same page with the bigger picture of the criminal injustice system, but this is the part where you're supposed to tell me, right, hey, Adam, civil disobedience is great, but isn't that a silly, inefficient way to To wake people up?
You should be sitting back as the wise, bald philosopher, making videos and podcasts and spreading awareness and raising your children non-violently.
And I have to say, Stefan, I did do my part to catch up and get old and wise, and I did start losing my hair while I was in jail.
But, you know, that was about it.
Did you really?
Wow.
Well, that's good, because, you know, I have a general theory.
Can I just go completely off topic for a moment?
The more bald you are, the smarter you get?
Well, no, but it's not, you know, it's not, you know, it's less random than it sounds.
So the brain runs on energy and hair is protein.
And so my belief is that, you know, when you frontal, neofrontal cortex starts getting big and hungry enough, it starts sucking in your hair, you know, like you do with spaghetti when you're a kid, just suck that.
And you notice that nobody gets bald around the back and the sides.
And that's where the base of the brain, the lower brain is.
It can't really get smarter, right?
Because that's where our sort of chimpanzee brain is.
It's not a bald spot.
It's a solar panel for a sex machine.
point that out.
It doesn't happen to young people so much.
It happens when you sort of get to middle age a lot.
Anyway, I could probably spend the rest of the show on this pathetically defensive theory, but it's good to know that your brain is getting hungrier.
It's not a bald spot.
It's a solar panel for a sex machine.
I thought that's where you were going with that.
Philosophy machine, that's right. - So no, look, I mean, the first thing I want to say is I don't know exactly what the best course of action is.
I don't know.
Could be civil disobedience, could be something else.
I think there's a case to be made.
And so really what I want to do is just get people the opportunity to hear the case for a variety of possibilities and of course make their own decisions.
So no, you know, I certainly, I mean, the amount of courage it takes to do what you did is prodigious.
And I don't know if I am wise or chicken.
I don't even know if the two are separate things.
I think as the prize, and I'm sure this makes it all worth it, as the prize for your couple of months in jail, I thought maybe you could go first and make the case for how you think that civil disobedience is valid and powerful and an effective way of waking people up to where they are.
Well, considering that the real objective of my activism was to get booked on Freedom Aid Radio, I would say that... Yeah, because that's tough.
What a high wall that is to get over.
He just phoned me up.
Hey, I'm not busy for 20 minutes.
Hey, me neither.
Let's do a show.
Right, right.
Sorry, it's really not that easy.
You don't have to buy me dinner.
I'm easy.
So, you know, I'm not here to say that civil disobedience is the be-all end-all, and if anything, I'd want to take advantage of this opportunity to have maybe a broader discussion with you than just about civil disobedience, because, you know, the libertarian movement has kind of come to a
I really think the most pressing question for the liberty movement right now, and I don't mean on the six-to-one-year timescale, I mean more on the maybe five-to-ten-year timescale, but the most important question right now is in the how.
And if you look back on the evolution, the development of libertarian thought and philosophy, historically speaking, it's still very new.
In a sense, it's eternal.
It's as old as the human condition.
We all want to be free.
We all want to live without violence in our lives or without the threat of violence from other human beings.
In that sense, the struggle for liberty is eternal.
But in the phase of human history that is the development of modern societies and modern governments, the complete libertarian philosophy As a counter to government, if you will, as maybe a more fundamental truth than the falsehoods of the government racket, it's a relatively new idea.
You know, really only codified even, and Stefan, you know, as a history major yourself, and as someone with a better sense of this than me, maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong here, but to me, it seems like the emergence of the libertarian philosophy as such cannot be said to have been flourishing for more than the last 50, maybe 100 years at most.
And in that sense, it's very, very new.
And in that time, this phenomenon of modern institutionalized bureaucratic governments has also grown exponentially.
And as this concept of liberty as a framework, as a philosophy, is congealing in the minds of a critical mass of the public.
We see the problem itself just radically changing.
And to where it is today, and especially with technology, you know, I mean, things that you want to say, you know, Rothbard or Mises, you know, never could have envisioned, or Locke, or Adam Smith even, could have imagined in terms of the
Potential uses of this technology for government for control and of course you and I I'm sure would be quick to point out at the same time for enlightenment through the internet and the sharing of information and the greater connectedness that this technology provides but the how that came out of the
Modern libertarian philosophical development of the 70s and 80s even kind of stopped short at the, you know, education and activism.
And of course, it was Sam Konkin III that really developed the idea of agorism, of economic civil disobedience, really widespread as a lifestyle of living outside of the purview of government, conducting your economic affairs like government doesn't exist.
And he predicted that pockets of agorism would develop and sort of subsume the pockets of statism that remained or eventually overtake statism.
And in a way, we see that happening.
I mean, the rise of Bitcoin, of so many other means of barter online.
That's technically taxable income or when you gain something from barter, at least according to the IRS.
But as you know, it's not enforced and practically unenforceable.
So we see this.
And despite the rapid growth of agorism, deliberate and undeliberate, you know, the growth of the black market in general, you would think that that would do something to check the power of the state.
But it hasn't.
The state has continued to grow.
The state has said, oh, you want to trade in gold and silver dimes and have your little thing at Porkfest once a year?
You know, we'll just keep printing more money.
Screw you.
It doesn't matter.
And that's almost taken it to the next level already.
But to go back to education and activism, you know, education is so fundamental and so ongoing and really is the foundation of the paradigm shift.
And I really believe that that is essential.
The work that people like you do in developing that framework and winning converts to a really deep-seated intellectual grasp of libertarianism and philosophy, as you do, is so important to that activism uh you know maybe that's you know and and i don't want to try to parse out specific definitions here but anything that you do because because there's such an overlap you know and and i we could debate that for a couple hours by itself but
Activism is sort of bringing people to education or inspiring them to want to embrace the philosophy.
And in that sense, I feel like civil disobedience plays into that.
But if people don't live their lives differently in terms of agorism and getting to that how, education and activism together are both irrelevant.
But I would even go a step further, and this is why, as I'm sure you're aware, I'm running for president in 2020 on the platform of dissolving the entire federal government.
And I'm not suggesting that that is the how, that that is the be all, end all.
I'm sorry, I just wanted to mention that I believe it's perfectly legal to suggest that as long as you don't use bath salts.
Because they are classified, I believe, now as a drug.
Just wanted to mention, don't mention bath salts in the dissolution, the perfectly legal and voluntary dissolution of the American government.
Sorry, go ahead.
I'm sure there's some really bad, breaking bad reference joke in there too, where we can talk about the dissolving of a bathtub and things just sort of falling through.
But, I don't know, maybe that's too evocative of Grover Norquist.
I just want the government to be small enough that I can drown it in a bathtub.
But all of these things contribute, and in a way, I read a letter from someone when I was in jail about my civil disobedience, but it was about calculus.
And he was saying that, this supporter of mine was saying that, you know, sometimes with the development of higher math, you don't know what you're doing.
You're just trying different things.
You're plugging different numbers in.
You're trying to see what the results are.
And in a way, when you're dealing with something as huge and complex as the problem of the modern paradigm of statism, We have to be willing to try all things and know that not everything is going to be easily measured in terms of efficiency.
Could I have woken more people up if I didn't spend four months in jail?
Quite possibly.
I don't know.
Could I have been more effective?
I'm sure there would have been something.
And in everything we always do for this cause, there will be a chance to say, you could have done it better this way, you could have done it more effectively that way, you could have done it more efficiently that way.
And civil disobedience, like you said, it's a high cost, it's a high risk, and so the efficiency question really comes into play here.
But I see it as sort of a supporting role in achieving a free society.
Civil disobedience, when it's For the traditional framework of civil disobedience.
If you're going to break a law, you're going to do it openly, you're going to make a public spectacle of it, as opposed to quiet civil disobedience, where the point is to disempower the state and your lifestyle.
I think that's just one method of activism.
Right.
Well, just by the by, I think one of the challenges of libertarianism, as opposed to out-and-out voluntarism, which is, you know, voluntarism or the anarchic position, is there's no taming the state.
You cannot tame the state and it is... I'm sorry?
What's the difference?
If I may, on an aside here, Stefan, I really think we need to stop trying to, you know, cater to everybody that's perverting the definition of libertarian to mean anything that is not grounded in self-ownership and non-aggression.
And coming up with these terms to be, no, no, no, specifically this is sort of like, no, can't it just be libertarian?
And can't that mean self-ownership and the non-aggression principle?
Well, of course, if you take the non-aggression principle and apply it universally, which is really, I would argue, what ethics are supposed to do, then the moral justification for statism vanishes.
And one of the challenges of libertarianism is that it says there's a cure for the state called a constitution or, you know, the awareness and disagreement of the people and so on.
And so my argument is, if there is in fact no cure for statism, Then pretending that there is is only going to fuel the growth of the state.
Like, if people who are smokers think that there's a pill you can pop that's going to cure lung cancer, the odds are they're not going to quit smoking, right?
They're just going to smoke more and say, well, I'll just pop that pill.
Because the growth of libertarianism as the delusion that you can control the state with paper, you know, it's sort of like saying, well, I can take a hand grenade and I can roll it into a tent, but don't worry, I wrapped some paper around it so it's not going to go off.
Well, I'm sorry.
The logic of violence outstrips that of ink.
Sorry, go ahead.
I hope this isn't getting to be a semantics argument, but when you say that libertarianism is about, you know, you can have the government checked by a constitution, I don't think that's libertarianism.
I think that's statism.
To say we're going to have a constitution that gives the creation of something called the state that is going to create a violent monopoly, that's not libertarianism.
That might be minarchism or constitutionalism or some other form of, you know, Republicanism, but that's not libertarianism.
No, no, but of course the common perception of people, Adam, based upon the platform of the libertarian party is they want a constitutionally limited republic, right?
Most people know libertarians as the libertarian political party.
Through Ron Paul or through other people who've been associated with the Libertarian Party.
You and I know libertarianism probably, we can argue, is founded on the non-aggression principle, self-ownership, respect for property rights, and so on.
But to move sort of, I just sort of, to me it's interesting that the growth of the state has coincided, though I'm not saying it's directly caused by the growth of libertarian philosophy.
Yes, sir.
I feel, I'm not great with body language, but I feel you have something to add to this.
I'm not willing to be chased off of the word libertarian.
It seems like people who seek truth always get chased off of the terminology and are always looking for new terms to take a stand and define what they believe in.
And I'm not willing to give up the term libertarian.
I think it means what it means.
I think if you believe in liberty, even if it's defined as simply as that, if you believe in liberty, great, then you're a libertarian.
Wait, I believe in a constitution.
Oh, so you're not a libertarian.
Sorry, that's just how it is.
You know, it was great when the people who were against slavery had the term abolitionist, because there was no ambiguity in that.
There was no, well, we kind of want to make slave owning better.
We kind of want to take the whips away and replace them with jello shots or something, you know.
The abolitionists were, you know, we just want to get rid of slavery as an institution completely.
And I don't know that there's a great term for that.
Unfortunately, anarchism means also idiots who put on balaclavas and throw garbage cans through Starbucks because they hate lattes or something.
And voluntarism, I don't even know, most people don't even know what that means.
And libertarian often means wanting to return to sort of the founding fathers' limited constitutional republic.
So I just like to use the word philosophy because I hope that encompasses the exploration of these areas in all rational consistencies.
But I almost feel like you have something else to say there.
No, no, I'm just standing my ground.
If you believe in liberty, this is what liberty means.
And one of the reasons that the libertarian cause in general, historically, has had a problem, or I suppose the eternal weakness of the concept of liberty, is that people don't consider what it actually means.
And if you give people this license to say, look, libertarian can mean, I'm going to accept, oh, you're going to say that libertarian means constitutional republic, Well, then I'm going to say you're a liar because you don't believe in liberty if that's the case.
Because either you believe in liberty or you don't.
Either it's a moral principle or it's not.
And if you say, well, no, well, I believe in, you know, some liberty.
Like, you know, I believe in the right to life except some people should be murdered.
You know, just in general.
Like, I believe in liberty except we should have this monopolistic state, you know, over whatever territory empowered by a constitution.
Sorry, you don't believe in liberty.
Sorry, you're not a libertarian.
To me, yeah.
I think what we're arguing for is principles without asterisks.
Like, you ever have one of these contracts, you know, and it's like, this car is available to you for $200 a month for 48 months, and then you see this little asterisk, and you go down, and there's like this two-point squint-o-vision type, and it's always that guy who speaks really quickly on the radio.
Does not apply to pandas.
Does not include people from Chinese origin.
Does not include people who wear umbrellas when it's sunny.
And all that, you know?
And to me, it's just, it's a consistent principle.
It's just, thou shalt not kill.
No asterisk.
Does not count if you're in a uniform.
Does not count if you vote for it.
Does not count if...
It's just liberty.
Does not count if – and no, thou shalt not steal.
Does not count if you're a member of the IRS.
Does not count if you believe in taxation.
Does not count if you believe that you help the poor.
Does not count if you have a foreign policy that is kind of aggressive based upon Ayn Rand's writings.
So, I mean, to me, it's just like you get rid of the asterisk.
Thou shalt not kill.
Thou shalt not steal.
No asterisks.
If you see an asterisk, you are in the wrong place.
It's just liberty.
And if you believe in liberty, you can call yourself a libertarian.
Okay, so I'll just put on a little thing to help some of the people understand my perspectives.
So I was actually kind of, I came late in life to the libertarian movement because I'm an extremely slow starter.
You can certainly see that in the morning when I'm sort of pouring myself like puddles down the stairs until I get three coffees in me.
But I came to the libertarianism, I guess it was in my early 40s or something like that, as a sort of movement.
You know, I liked it and all that, but I was in the business world.
Now, when I was in the business world, I did a lot of R&D, did a lot of technical management, and wrote a lot of software and stuff.
And one of the things that got drilled into me repetitively was, know your market.
Know your market.
Do the research before you start building stuff.
Find out what people's capabilities are, what their needs are, what the competition is, and so on.
And I brought all of that.
And people get very confused by my show, which I hope it's a plus.
But they get confused by my show because it's like, man, I love what you have to say about the state.
I love what you have to say about the Federal Reserve.
What are you all talking about spanking in personal relationships?
What does that have to do with the price of tea in China and so on?
And, you know, I'm here to lift the curtain, to reveal what all of that has always been about.
So when I was in the business world, you know, and you probably know this from being in the media world a lot more than I have been, you know, people talk a good game, right?
They're, you know, this show is going to be about integrity.
Oh wait, we have an advertiser?
Well, we can't say that, right?
Or whatever it's going to be, right?
Nobody in business says, well, we'll bend the truth to make a profit and we'll shaft the client a little bit by misrepresenting ourselves in order to close the deal.
People are always like, we have the highest standards of integrity.
And so in the business world, unfortunately, I had a habit of listening to what people say rather than what they actually did.
And so when I got into the liberty movement and I kind of realized that there was a role for me, I really wanted to get a map of where people were coming from and where they were.
And there were a few things that kind of gave me trouble.
So obviously to diminish the power of the state is gonna require that people act against their own immediate economic self-interest.
That's natural, right?
I mean, people are going to have to give up lucrative contracts for the military-industrial complex if we reduce the military.
People are going to have to give up welfare, they're going to have to give up unemployment, they're going to have to give up subsidies, and they're going to have to give up protective tariff walls, and farmers are going to have to give up subsidies.
So we're going to have to require people to act against their own immediate economic self-interest.
Like, if you're a nutritionist and the guy says, I'm going to eat whatever I want whenever I want it, it's like, well, I...
I don't really think I can help you, because you kind of have to deny yourself some stuff you want if you're going to get healthy.
And what troubled me, and has always troubled me, is the degree to which Libertarian academics are still in academia, right?
I mean, they're all over the place in academia.
You know, you and I have shown that you can make a reasonable living off the free market by talking to people directly without government protection, government unions, government subsidies, wonderful sabbaticals and working three to five hours a week for $150,000 a year, as I think some academics have pointed out to their great self-satisfaction.
So what I got was that and these people all have PhDs in free market economics and so on and so my concern was that if we need people to act against their own immediate economic self-interest in order to get a better world and if the people who openly proclaim Their allegiance to non-aggression principle and to voluntary free market.
If we can't get people with a PhD in the free market economics to go against their immediate economic self-interest for the sake of consistency, then I kind of got the feeling that expanding knowledge wasn't going to help.
Like even if I could give everyone or make everyone take a PhD in free market economics, they were still going to want their ill-gotten.
economic gains and come up with some ex post facto justification for it.
So my concern was that expanding knowledge of freedom was not going to work because we already had people who'd committed their whole lives and had tens or dozens of years invested in this who still weren't giving up their economic ill-gotten gains.
So whatever was going to help people gain knowledge about libertarianism, I couldn't see how that was going to result in people giving up their unjust economic gains.
Absolutely.
So I just wanted to get your thoughts on that, because that was something that was of great concern to me at the beginning.
Absolutely.
Well, just to be clear for any non-libertarians that might be listening right now, he is saying give up your short-term monetary compensation for the promise of much greater long-term compensation with a free society and a free he is saying give up your short-term monetary compensation for the promise of much greater long-term compensation with a free society and a free world And yes, it's a short-term sacrifice for a long-term benefit, right?
I mean, that's essentially what we're talking about when it comes to giving up the... Yeah, put down the cheesecake, don't get diabetes.
Put out the cigarette, don't get lung cancer.
It's just really that sort of argument.
Give up your economic gains for the moment and you'll end up a lot better off in the long run.
Put down the welfare and the ballot and maybe you not have to suffer through more wars, for example, right?
Just put it in stark terms.
But, you know, if that's what you're trying to convince people to do, it's definitely a tough sell and you really have to have a certain amount of, you know, you also have to give them a certain confidence in that.
What is that long term compensation going to look like?
You know, hey, You're gonna you're gonna give up this stuff in the short term.
You're gonna get this in the long term.
And the reality is that it's it's a long term uncertainty.
You're asking people to give up a short term certain benefit in favor of a long term uh...
uncertainty which is clear to anybody who believes in non-violence is a universal principle is going to be much better for society as a whole but like you cannot promise an individual your life will be better it's just it's it's the impossible promise but the state can promise here's fifty bucks and here's another fifty five hundred and i think you know And the state can do that every single day that the printing press is operational.
They can keep doing that.
So I mean, I agree that there is that Sort of tension, but in a way what I am actually proposing as the how and as the solution overcomes that a lot.
And this is one of the things, one of the ideas I've been developing for myself lately and thought about a lot while I was locked up, which is the concept of localization.
I really believe that the way that we are going to abolish statism is from the top down.
A lot of libertarians will suggest, well, we're going to do this and then we're going to do that.
We're going to educate.
We're going to create this great intellectual foundation for the movement.
We're going to have Mises.org.
We're going to have FreedomAidRadio.com.
We're going to have LewRockwell.com.
We're going to have all these great repositories for libertarian philosophy and thought and economic treaties that explain exactly how things are going to get better and how things are worse because of how they would be now.
And we're going to do activism and we're going to reach out to people and we're going to take advantage of every opportunity and we're going to promote agorism and civil disobedience and resistance and tax resistance.
And then what?
uh, And then what?
And then it's going to collapse?
No, no, Adam.
Doctor, what you don't understand is then a miracle occurs.
Right, right.
And in that cloud of miraculous occurrences will emerge, you know, like Phoenix coming out of an egg, will emerge a free society.
And I apologize in this sense for discounting your ultimate solution of non-violent parenting, which I think is huge, and it's a major underpinning to the psychological roots of violence, and it ties in very much at a very primal level of education.
You educate your children in the ways of non-violence, in the ways of relating to people with reason, and then the next generation is that much more liberal.
Well, let me just finish my second point and I'll try and keep it brief.
So, my skepticism around educating people about libertarian principles and efficiencies is, I think, pretty clear.
People say, well, why am I interested in spanking?
Well, I mean, if you've ever done a Google search, I think you'll know.
But why is spanking a big issue?
Well, I mean, I think that's good, you know.
You have to turn off the Google safe search function in order for that joke to work.
All right.
For whatever you do, don't do that.
I'm sure eyeball exploding stuff.
But one of the reasons that I really talk about spanking, obviously, I think there's good scientific reasons that it's going to make kids smarter, that it's going to make kids less prone to want to involve themselves in a hierarchy and mentally healthier, and they're not going to become criminals.
And so I think there's lots of really good stuff around that.
But there was also another reason which I haven't really discussed at all, which is, you know, whenever you get involved in a movement, I think there's a fundamental question you want to ask everyone around the table, which is, are you guys serious or not?
Right?
I mean, because you don't want to be like, hey, we're going to charge over the hill.
And then you go charging over the hill and everyone just kind of veers off and you're like alone.
It's like five million lasers on your head and so on.
Right.
Which for me, of course, makes a beautiful disco ball.
But you really want to figure out whether people are.
The question was, which one of you are working for the government right now?
Well, that's your question, absolutely.
That's a very important question.
Or who's been turned with threats of jail time into being an informant and so on, right?
These are all... But to me, it was very important to figure out... Wait, Stefan, you haven't actually tried to organize any such cavalry charges yet, have you?
Well, I was considering it at the beginning, right?
But I really wanted to know whether people were serious.
So, if you're a personal trainer, right?
Yeah.
If you're a personal trainer and you're talking to someone over the phone, you might want to say, can you lift five pounds?
Right?
And if the guy says, yeah, I can lift five pounds, can you lift 10?
Can you lift 20?
You start to design what they can do based upon, you know, you meet them in person and, you know, they're fairly fit or whatever.
And so the first question I always had was, okay, can you guys lift five pounds?
If you can lift five pounds, we get to the next level.
But can you lift five pounds, which in businesses, can you even sell one of these damn things?
If you can sell one, then maybe you can sell more.
But if you can't even sell one, we got to figure something else out.
And so when it came to spanking.
Wasn't the question for you?
Can you can you read a book?
Was that something like the first question?
No, no, it came to me, are you people serious about your belief system?
So, spanking is very interesting.
So you're talking, because I kind of go back and forth listening to you, trying to figure out if you're addressing other libertarians or if you're addressing the general population.
No, no.
Libertarians.
Other libertarians.
Other people in the movement.
Other people who are in the movement.
That's who I'm questioning.
Right?
And I think this is a Socratic question.
The market research to figure out the best way to do things based upon where you are.
Now, I think that people who are into the non-aggression principle, if they can apply the non-aggression principle when it is perfectly legal, Then there's a possibility they may attempt to perform it in other situations.
But if they cannot perform the non-aggression principle in a perfectly legal situation, then they're not particularly serious about it, right?
Now, can they also perform the non-aggression principle when it's perfectly legal, when it's socially sanctioned, in other words, generally approved of, and when it results in huge benefits to their lives?
Now, if they can't do that, in other words, if they can't fulfill the non-aggression principle when it is perfectly legal, socially sanctioned, and provides huge benefit to their lives, then they are talking heads with no moral or intellectual substance of any kind.
When I started talking about spanking, I made very strong cases.
People can go to FDRURL.com forward slash VIB to see the whole scientific series, The Bomb in the Brain, about the effects of violence and how beneficial non-spanking is and so on, or better parenting.
Non-spanking is just one aspect of it.
So I can say, look, it provides you enormous benefits.
It makes your kids smarter and wiser and more peaceful and better and so on.
It makes your parenting experience so much better.
So huge, huge advantages.
It's socially sanctioned in that there's very few people who see you reasoning with a child and say, you're a complete asshole for not hitting it.
Right?
I mean, most people, you know, it's kind of socially sanctioned, scientifically supported, and it's fully inconsistency with the non-aggression principle, because spanking is a violation of the non-aggression principle for a variety of reasons I've discussed in a variety of articles and shows.
So I thought, okay, well, if I put this argument forward, I'm going to see what the libertarian community does with It's advantageous.
It's better for your kids.
It makes you happier.
It makes your kids wiser.
It's socially sanctioned.
And it's perfectly legal to not hit your children.
And so my question was, OK, what are they going to do with this information?
And if they were like, wow, you know, the Fed is really interesting, but I can't do much about that.
But man, I can really get behind the science and the empiricism, the rationality and the virtue of championing this within the community.
And I basically dropped these arguments.
There have been some positive responses, but for years, there was basically like shouting down a well into the dark side of the moon.
And so what I got was that for the most part, it seems to be intellectual posturing or rent seeking in terms of, well, I can get paid for talking about stuff that I find interesting, but where the rubber really meets the road in terms of people acting.
Political activism is one for sure.
Are you willing to stand with me at the barricade and do all this kind of stuff?
But another was, are you willing to deny the role of violence in your own life and in your own parenting?
Are you willing to live the non-aggression principle in your life?
People said, not so much, really, and kind of got pissed off at me for bringing up this argument.
And the last one, which I can do very briefly, was the against me argument.
You know, I still get emails saying, oh, I saw that speech you did at 09.
There was Adam Kokesh in the audience.
He asked you a question.
Nobody even knew what he was, who he was, right?
Back when you had all your liberty and a little less forehead.
So I said, okay, the against-me argument is, if it's true that the government is supported by the allegiance of the people, and if it's true that support of the government results in violations of the non-aggression principle, then your relationship with statists should be in question.
Right?
Do you support the use of violence against me for following my own conscience in a peaceful manner?
If the answer is yes, then you want me thrown in jail for disagreeing with you.
If that doesn't cause any problems in your relationship, then your allegiance to the non-aggression principle is kind of bullshit.
You know, it's like, while I really hate racism, I'm just on my way to a Klan barbecue because my uncle serves a great chicken.
You know, it just tells people that you're just kind of full of crap when it comes to that sort of stuff.
And so these sort of three elements, when I wanted to sort of test the intellectual integrity of the community, with some exceptions, you know, to be perfectly fair, has gained very little traction.
The expansion of knowledge doesn't seem to work because we've got so many libertarian academics and spanking.
It still remains a pretty verboten topic, a non-talk-aboutable topic in the libertarian community, and the against-me argument has fallen largely on deaf ears.
And that tells me that people aren't willing to do that which is uncomfortable and perfectly legal.
That they're not willing to change their lives in ways that are only emotionally difficult, but don't get you thrown in jail.
Now, getting thrown in jail is both emotionally difficult and By the way, you get thrown in jail, which is really bad, right?
I don't have to tell you that.
And so if people can't lift the five pounds, then expecting them to bench press the 300 of civil disobedience, I think is somewhat illusory.
But I just want to get your thoughts on that.
Yeah, well, I also have to remain very humble in my process.
And you know, you said it wasn't until you were in your 40s that you really engaged with the movement and with this particular philosophical perspective, as I understand your story went.
And it also took me ten years.
It took me ten years to go from being in high school saying, well, I don't want to be a Republican or a Democrat.
What are my options?
Okay, I'll be a Libertarian.
Yeah, that makes sense.
To understanding what it meant philosophically.
Like really ten years for me to go through that.
And so it And that's from 10 years of direct exposure, you know?
I really do have to stay very humble in that sense, thinking about that, dealing with other people and their experiences and what it takes.
And I think your frustration is certainly warranted.
Hearing you articulate the intent of those two themes of your work, with which I am familiar, peaceful parenting and the against me argument, I think your frustrations are certainly warranted.
But at the same time, you don't give yourself enough credit for the impact that you've had on the movement, Stefan.
Really, the introduction of peaceful parenting, I don't know if it really came from you, but certainly most people who call themselves libertarians today, who are even glancingly aware of the implications of peaceful parenting, are in debt to you for introducing that idea.
In terms of the against me argument, Your point of this is that your measurement is not how many people are using this argument, right?
Because you can't really measure that either, but how many people you see in your sense of the community around you, how many people are applying it to clarify and shake up or shake off They are personal relationships with statists.
Oh, you would put me in jail for x, y, and z. You would use violence against me, therefore I don't want to be friends with you, right?
And I think even there, while that is a very stark, extreme measurement, you know, hey, how many people took the against me argument and actually Technically applied it properly to every statist in their life and then, you know, disassociated with everyone that gave the wrong answers.
I mean, that's a really high standard.
And if anything, I would want to give you, Stefan, a certain amount of credit for the number of people in the movement who today have realized the power of principled ostracism in their own lives.
I think that's huge.
I think a lot of libertarians are doing that.
So I agree that those stand as measurements of the committedness of libertarians, but it also seems like you're trying to impose too high a standard.
Oh, you want to call yourself a libertarian.
Oh, you want to believe in this.
You've got to live up to all of your values.
You've got to live a perfect life based on your principles.
As you know, that's impossible.
In a statist world, the only way to live a purely non-violent lifestyle by which you know you are not supporting or feeding into any violence in any way is to live like a monk.
It really is.
I think, to go back to what I said about understanding who you're talking to, because a lot of those arguments you could apply to the population in general.
Oh, so you want a world that's less violent?
Will you raise your children with non-violence?
I mean, the idea of peaceful parenting, you don't even have to be a libertarian to understand.
You're a caring, engaged citizen.
You care about making the world a better place for your children.
You care about the evils of government, even if you're a total statist.
Are you willing to pay attention to how you raise your kid because it's going to make them smarter and less violent and they're going to be happier, more productive people in general?
Are you willing to just be a better parent?
Even people who are not libertarians will say, yeah, absolutely!
And this is why, on a much bigger time frame, the technological empowerment of the internet, of the information available in general, is going to make for a better society.
People are going to raise their children less violently because Dr. Fox said so.
It's going to make their kids smarter, not because Stefan Malin said, hey, and that's how we're going to defeat government.
No, because, hey, point A to point B, I raise my kids like this, you know, they're smarter and happier as adults.
So, What I want to do, though, is ask the same questions that you asked to the movement when you came into the movement to the general population.
Because I really believe that everybody's a libertarian, they just haven't figured it out yet.
In the universal sense, that everybody wants nonviolence, everybody wants their rights to be respected, everybody wants a peaceful world.
And I think keeping that in mind,
In serving the general population, we don't see, I mean, when you think of the market of libertarianism, when you ask those questions, you said the market, and you were referring to, if I may put some words in your mouth here, the market of, yeah, please, open wider, open wider, the marketplace for libertarian ideas and libertarian punditry and entertainment of a libertarian theme.
You weren't looking at what is the bigger market for information in the world, in America, or in society, or in my community, or within human nature itself.
And I want to see the state as a competitor, and ask the kinds of questions like, well, what is it that people get out of the state?
They get to vote.
Ah, yes, they can vote their problems away, and they see that that's not working.
But people are willing to vote.
61.8% of the American population came out despite not having a significant choice in the last election and put Obama back in office.
They're willing to engage for a second.
Perhaps an easier way of achieving this isn't to say, well, how do we get the people that are Really committed or claim to be really committed to do something relatively difficult and involved.
But how do we create the results that we want by making things as easy as possible for everybody else?
Now, that could launch me into an hour rant about localism and how it brings people together from across the political spectrum.
And puts us in a very, very solid direction towards a truly voluntary stateless society without even winning more converts and while making things as easy as possible for others.
And I think creating a mechanism like that, seeing the market is bigger than the libertarian movement, it makes the questions much more relevant.
And then in that sense, I would ask, How is it that you have grown your audience over the last decade?
What is it that you have done to win people over, to bring more people in?
And it hasn't been by asking them to do difficult stuff.
It's been by showing them how to make their lives better.
And for the people that are intellectual enough, To sit and listen to blowhards like you and me for an hour or two are a completely different audience than the average voter, than the average member of the American mob, or the global statist mob.
How do you win them over?
And I think actually using the system against itself, and I think using the electoral process, and it doesn't have to happen electorally, but using some massive consensus process to say, hey, can we get rid of this thing now, this federal government at least?
Can we at least push it down to the states?
Can we get rid of this Soviet system?
Can we at least make government local?
Can we do that?
And the idea is that if we get it down from federal to state to county to city, eventually it gets pushed down to the individuals.
People realize the virtues of self-governance.
You don't have to convince them, even, of the entire philosophy to convince someone that they'd be better if violence was More local and more tailored to suit the needs of the community.
At worst, as opposed to this out-of-control central authority that we see not just in the United States, but in governments all over the world.
That's the kind of question that I want to be asking.
If anything, when I get my daily production back up, when my legal issues are behind me in a couple months, I really take this opportunity as a good start for a clean slate.
I want to bring the ideas of non-violent communication to the Liberty Movement, but what I want to do is do it by not speaking to people who are already converted, but really speaking to the general population and being a lot more positive in our message, showing positive solutions.
If anything, I think my production has only been about half of what it could have been for lack of better organization and consistent production values alone.
How is it that we, you know, not just even not grow our audiences, but how is it that we provide the mechanisms for the dissolution of the state that are as easy as voting?
Right.
I mean, those are all very big questions.
And I've always loved that quote which says, you can't solve a problem with the same kind of thinking that produced it.
And this is why, to me, things like political action and education and civil disobedience are uh, continuations of the same momentum that has produced the problem to begin with.
So when I sort of look at how do I want to change the world for the better?
Well, I mean, you have to sort of start with a blank page.
You know, one of the things that I learned in business is that, uh, all like, if you have a huge problem, then everything that has been tried before is probably contributing to that problem.
You know what I mean?
It can't be that you have a huge problem and something that you've tried before.
Everything that you've tried before has to go out the window or at least be open to question.
You start with a blank page.
We said we want to make the world less violent, right?
And I think that's the goal of all reasonable... You're right.
It's not just limited to libertarianism.
Libertarianism is sort of the analysis of the political wing of nonviolence.
And so if we want to make the world less violent, we have to ask ourselves, where does violence come from?
And if it's genetic, we're screwed, right?
Because then we're trying to sort of say, let's breed human beings with five arms like a Hindu goddess.
And we, you know, we might end up with some cool looking avatars, but we're not going to change the biology of the human species in any fundamental way.
But if violence, if the roots of violence can be traced, go ahead.
That's the movement I went in on.
I'm switching now.
Oh, five arms.
Can you imagine?
You'd never need to date again.
Anyway.
At least I wouldn't.
I'd need six.
But anyway, I'll get back to you another time.
So with that at least one dick joke, it's just not a Freedom Aid radio show in any way, shape, or form.
I don't want to mention that.
So you say, well, where does violence come from?
And until that question is fundamentally asked, I don't know that we can really have a movement that has any kind of coherence or goal.
And the roots of violence appear to be quite scientifically validated.
It's early trauma and abandonment issues in childhood create an overactive amygdala and hypothalamus, which produces the fight-or-flight mechanism, which is not intercepted by the deofrontal cortex and all that kind of stuff.
And so impulse acting out.
Why is it that if you want to change how people think, you first of all have to understand how they think, or rather how they don't think.
Science, again, is very clear on these issues that most people experience an activation of the fight.
When confronted with a difficult issue, they experience an activation of the fight or flight mechanism.
They act it out and then they will justify it afterwards with reference to the most windy and useless abstractions known to mankind.
And so this is sort of where we are.
And then the question is, well, how do we deal with that?
Well, there's no particular way that I know of to reverse that.
I mean, you know, if you didn't get enough food and you grew up to be too short, it's not like eating a lot of food later is going to make you taller.
It's just what you have to work with.
I do know that therapy helps with dealing with the impulse action problem by intercepting rational principles between impulse and reaction.
So therapy helps a lot.
Commitment to non-violence and parenting in a relationship helps a lot.
And growing human beings to be non-violent is quite well known.
The manure that is necessary seems to be verbal convincing of the non-aggression principle.
And so that to me seems that would be a logically scientific, empirical, rational, moral way to approach the issue.
That doesn't seem to be particularly strong in the libertarian community, but it does seem to be something that has a fair deal of respect in the outside community, particularly on the left, which has a particularly strong emphasis on the scientific method, at least that's what they claim.
So, to me, just keep hitting the science, keep hitting the facts, and keep referencing the ethics.
I know it's going to take a long time.
I mean, there is some impatience for me with some of the hypocrisy in the libertarian movement.
Well, before, the non-aggression principle.
I can't argue that spanking doesn't violate the non-aggression principle, but I still won't take a stand against it.
That's kind of frustrating.
I do know it's a multi-generational process, but I have this alternate history in mind, and I'll just spend two minutes on that and then let you Knocked down all of my carefully erected ice sculptures, but with the heat, laser light, you know.
But I have this sort of alternate history that in sort of the 60s when the libertarian activists were working, the Rothbards and all of that, were working to sort of figure out how we build a freer society.
If they had looked at some of the science that was available even at the time was fairly compelling.
If they'd looked at the science and looked at the facts and not said, well we have to do political action and education because Because that's what that's you know, that's what you have to do.
Well, if they'd said, OK, let's do a blank slate, throw everything out, really think creatively.
What is it that we want to do?
And if instead of founding the Libertarian Party and writing endless newsletters about the evils of the Fed and the bad things that foreign policy is doing, if they'd said, OK, what we really want to do is figure out great parenting.
That stuff we can act on, that stuff that is fully in conformity with our values and that stuff is going to be really compelling.
You know, there's no better sales pitch than incredibly happy, successful, well-adjusted children.
You know, everybody wants a piece of that, right?
I mean, and if we as a community 50 years ago, or 150 years ago, if you want to sort of look at classical liberalism, if we'd said, well, screw politics, Screw academia, screw free market theorizing.
It's great to have that, you know, knowledge and so on, but we have to really start working locally in getting things done.
We would now have two generations of incredibly successful and accomplished and peaceful and confident and healthy and powerful libertarian kids.
There'd be millions of libertarian kids raised peacefully around the world.
With people who had taken time off from work to stay home with their kids for the first five years, who'd successfully completed bonding, who had reasoned with them and brought them up to be, you know, ferociously competent and peaceful moral beings.
We would have that sales pitch, so to speak.
We would have that example of what a peaceful society looks like.
And people would say, well, how can nonviolence work?
And we'd say, well, look at all these kids.
They've got IQ 10% above the average.
0% of them are in prison.
0% of them are in politics, which is just a different prison with a gold pillow.
And 0% of them have joined the police force.
And 0% of them have joined the armed forces.
And blah-di-blah-di-blah.
And look at this.
This is what we can show as having worked.
Now, that didn't happen, and you don't want to cry over spilt milk too much.
But what I don't want is this goddamn movement in 50 years to still not have millions of kids that have grown up to be incredibly powerful and peaceful adults, to still have those holes in the movement where we're still talking about how the Federal Reserve is bad and we're still answering questions about how freedom and peace can work in theoretical examples rather than look at this incredible community and what we're able to do with our kids to still have those holes in the movement where we're still talking about how the This is how we can show that it works.
I just didn't want that to be missing in the future.
Well, it's quite possible that while you sissies were raising your kids without spanking, I was spanking my kids and teaching them discipline.
And now my kids are in charge of society and your kids are in jail.
So how do you like them apples?
And I know that's just kind of a bad attempt at a joke, but in a serious sense, it's a great thought exercise to think, well, what would have happened if the Foundation of the movement was on non-violent parenting, and that would have happened.
And I think to parse out the problem here, though, there are two separate problems, almost three, because you said, are we dealing with something that's genetic?
And I would argue, yes, at a certain fundamental level.
Without being, again, too precise to haggle over here, there is a predisposition.
There is a tendency to violence.
It is somehow rooted in our genes.
I would argue that that is not something that we are trying to immediately overcome.
Then there is the expression of that, the general violence in society.
And as you know, we are living in the most peaceful times in human history by the measurement of interpersonal violence.
We live in the most peaceful times, and that's exciting.
That's incredible.
That's a great thing for us to be proud of, to be a part of.
And you say we would have this ...resume, if you will, to point to as libertarians.
Like, look, we've got all of these children who are that much happier and so on and so forth.
And instead, it's the people that are doing the work in moving parenting forward that are getting the credit for that, as they should be.
And they are.
And people who are not libertarians are raising smarter, more peaceful children, oblivious to the implications for the government.
And that's great!
And I see that as a wonderful part of human advancement.
And if it wasn't for the fact that we weren't all hunters and gatherers, we wouldn't have the time to read books about parenting or take time off of work in the first place to come home and be better parents.
And yeah, you can argue in the state of nature everybody had more time and was a better parent, sure.
But this is a good thing.
This is a part of this positive development.
So the third problem that I think you're skipping here Is the problem of institutionalized violence.
And I think you're kind of missing that connection there.
And that connection is in the few that choose to exploit and deceive and manipulate and organize violence.
And so back to my bad joke, you know, while you were parenting peacefully, I was raising my kids to be assholes.
And they have come to dominate society and they're still going to screw your kids up.
Sorry.
So I think we've got the Sort of two longer-term problems, if you will, of the inherent predisposition to violence, which we might be evolving out of as we speak, which is in and of itself a completely beautiful other possibility that I would say I believe is actually happening, perhaps to an insignificant or immeasurable degree, but I would argue that evolution is still happening and that the pressures of society and on the human race is still generally favoring
Cooperation over coercion and non-violence over violence.
Pretty easy to substantiate, too, in that, hey, people that go around beating people up every day don't have a lot of kids, you know?
Or are less likely in today's world to be able to reproduce successfully.
And that's great.
You know, as for the sort of expression of violence, I think you're absolutely correct that psychological awareness and peaceful parenting are the key to overcoming that.
That still doesn't answer the immediate questions or problems of how with government.
And, you know, you could say, hey, we raise all these kids to be peaceful.
Let's say it's 90 percent.
How many does it take to oppress them?
If they don't know if all they know is how to be peaceful because they've been raised nonviolently unnoticed, I'm not saying that that's like the only thing that would come out of this, but if that's all they have, hypothetically, and 10% of the population is still highly trained killer exploiter statists, you're still going to have the problem of statism.
So that's my only critique is that you're kind of, and I guess it's a big critique, is that you're really missing the short term of how.
And it's how do you inspire people to raise their children peacefully with the conviction that a lot of libertarians, thanks to you and your work and your example as a stay-at-home father, have already really taken on so vigorously.
Raising their, I'm going to raise my child, not just because, oh, I'm a happy child or to make me a happiest parent.
No, because this is the right way to do it.
This is the moral way to do it.
This is going to create a better citizen for a better world.
Excuse me, maybe citizen's not the right term there.
But then we're going to have a better world with better people in it because I'm raising a better child.
And I think there still is a how for the immediate problem of entrenched, institutionalized, bureaucratic of statism that has so much momentum.
And I would argue that already more people are on our side than we know, even if they're not as ideologically fervent.
If you could say, would you vote for a more localized government?
Would you vote for a more voluntary society?
And I don't believe that the be-all end-all solution is in politics.
I believe that it's in changing the paradigm.
And the paradigm is changed by education, by activism, by peaceful parenting, by people learning from the example of agorism.
Those are really the big large-scale foundations of achieving a sustainable free and voluntary society.
However, On top of all of that, we have the immediate problem of the current institutions of modern, dangerous, violent, oppressive governments.
While I'm all for working for the long term because I care about the guy that's going to die in war tomorrow, I care about the next guy who's going to jail for some bogus charges, because I care about the next business that doesn't happen because of some tax or some regulation, because I care that some kid is going to bed hungry because their parents had to pay that much more in fines or fees
Or, you know, that one parking ticket came out to one load of groceries for somebody?
I'm sorry, but, you know, storming the hills with the banner of peaceful parenting isn't going to do it for those problems.
I agree with that.
I mean, when I say peaceful parenting is essential, I don't mean it's the only thing.
So, I mean, I think to support what you're arguing for, not only do we want to produce healthier, more peaceful, more rational, more morally strong children.
But we also want to prevent the production of traumatized children.
So as of course you know from your war experiences and coming back, a lot of the soldiers who go over, they come back kind of screwed up to say the least.
And they have alcohol problems, they have drug abuse problems, and if they're fathers, they're going to have anger problems, anger management issues and so on.
So by opposing something like the war, or wars in general, wherever we can make that case, if we can stop 10,000 people from going to war, we are going to make the experiences of the children of those 10,000 people that much better.
So, you know, I'm fully in accord with you as far as that goes.
That's why I do shows other than, you know, peaceful parenting.
There is a strategy of making sure that people have as good... You know, I talked to the unschooling, the homeschooling movement, too, because I think that kids who are at home with functional parents are going to have a better experience than being trapped in the, you know, dog-eat-dog, lord-of-the-flies shitstorm called public school.
So I think that there's a lot that we can do that is not just strategic or long-term, but is tactical and, in the moment, that is going to improve the quality of children's lives.
Again, that's not the only thing that we do, but I do think that it does have to be not just a one-note orchestra or a one-note symphony, so to speak.
But I do feel that it is not as emphasized as it should be, so I hope that people will forgive me when I overemphasize it.
Just because I don't mean to say that it's the only thing and this is why I said at the beginning I don't know what the final solution is going to be.
It's not just going to be droning on about peaceful parenting because the governments are producing really traumatized kids all the time.
Breakdown of the family, single parenthood, war.
Welfare, the drug war, ripping fathers away and throwing them in jail for non-violent offenses.
All of these things need to be talked about and opposed because the government is cranking out traumatized kids by the hundreds of millions, and you're right.
If we can't beat that tide, then what we do as a community isn't going to be enough.
So I think I just got behind and lit several rockets under your argument, but I just really wanted to point out.
But there's still this problem of, you know, not just the how, but what is it that we do to engage a broader part of the population on this broader agenda?
But how do we get past fighting issue by issue?
And you say, I'm doing shows about other things.
Well, even for me, gun control, talking about gun control or my civil disobedience is only a means to an end that contributes to something else.
And I get really There's still a big missing piece here, because you can say, well, we want to defeat the state.
We want to defeat organized coercion and organized violence, and we're going to fight this policy.
We can sum up the state as a collection of policies, and then we can fight them one at a time.
and reduce the impact or the size of it and then get to it.
But it's something bigger behind that.
So when I fight against a particular law, like when I take a stand against gun control, for example, the point is not to defeat this idea of gun control.
You know, because it would be nice.
You know, you're reducing if people had a common sense worldview about the use of force in general and gun control wasn't the issue it was, you know, you'd be avoiding trauma.
You would be creating a more peaceful world eventually in that one little element.
But you fight issue by issue.
You fight inch by inch.
And they take a mile behind your back and they laugh at you while they're doing it.
And, you know, what is the end run?
And it seems like there's this mentality.
mounting of two divergent forces of all the people that are going towards freedom, towards a free society, that every time we do some civil disobedience, every time you produce a video and it pulls a new person out of the matrix and they go, OK, well, I'm a libertarian now, I'm going to live in this direction.
You know, the state is still going sharper and sharper in its way away from that.
And there's a great divergence there.
There's a great Divergence like never before in human history compared to like, say, when we lived under monarchs.
And it was like, well, the certain amount of the population was all, well, he's this, you know, divine right of kings.
Therefore, you know, we got to go along and get along.
If anything, like right now, there is less people than ever in society going, yeah, this, this centralized government thing, the way it's going, that's a good idea.
We want to, you know, get on board and we want to support that.
So I feel like there's gotta be, You know, some other approach.
And like you said earlier, it's got to be like something that's never been tried before that gets us to fix that divergence, to at least solve these incongruities.
And one of the things that I saw when I was in jail, and in the military too, but in jail, I mean, there was a guy who came up to me, a guard, a guard who came up to me and said, Hey man, I like your work.
And I was like, wow, you know, I'm blown away.
Hey, I got a fan who's keeping me in jail.
And it turns out, you know, he's a big fan of Alex Jones.
And he was like, yeah, and I heard you on the Alex Jones show and, you know, you're really good.
You're one of the guys who can really talk sense into him.
And I like your plans and your reason, your logic.
And I was like, and you're And you're standing on the other side of this cage door right now.
You're handing me a tray full of GMO slop, and you're working your wage slave job, and how is that?
And there's no easy way out for someone like that.
They're doing it to support their family, and I can give them all irrational arguments and say, you know, okay, so you're providing for your kids.
What are you providing them?
A more violent, dangerous, crime-filled world to grow up in?
You know, are you providing them more love by taking a job, by making it your profession to be an enforcer for the state, really?
And you don't think you could sustain your family and do so in a more loving, if slightly less materialistic way, through some other career choice?
And if you can't convince someone for that, how did they get convinced to take on such a bad path in the first place?
Well, it was presented to them as, all you gotta do is vote here and take this paycheck.
And that's what we're up against when we think about those of us who see this vision.
For what a non-violent society can be, or we've simply figured it out, because let's be honest, it's much more mathematical and specific and scientific than that.
It's not like we have some crazy vision of some utopia.
No, we have figured out that a non-violent society is going to be happier, more prosperous than a violence and coercion-based society.
I mean, hello?
But that we want to share this with people in a practical way, how do we do that?
The competitor is not the next Liberty Pundit or the next politician.
The competitor is the state itself.
What is it that the state provides?
Yeah, and it's a tough question.
The first thing, again, I'll say is I don't know.
I think that we as a movement need to keep asking questions from a blank page and be willing to throw out.
You know, we always talk about the creative destruction of the free market.
You know, how about the creative destruction of our movement, where we don't make assumptions that are based upon prior momentum.
Or we say, well, new industries come along all the time and blow up old industries.
Well, why do we still have the same think tanks?
Why do we still have the same academics?
Why do we still have the same approaches?
We need to keep Asking the questions and show that we embrace the creative destruction and willingness to think anew, that we praise so much in the free market.
I think that's the first thing.
The second thing I think that's important is we need to be willing to make sacrifices.
And this is a word, you know, the objectivists hear this, you know, and self-sacrifice is canty and it's altruism, it's evil and all that.
And no, I mean, it's not.
There is an integrity and a conviction.
that comes from making sacrifices for a greater cause that you cannot replicate any other way, right?
I mean, I was a software guy making like $160,000 a year, plus, plus, plus, and I, you know, threw it all away to random people on the internet and begged for donations.
I was writing like two books a year.
I have barely written a book since my daughter was born because I'm spending the time to be a parent and so on.
Now, this does not make me nail to a cross on Calvary.
I'm not going to pretend that, you know, I'm having my fingernails pulled out or even living in a dungeon with ants like you were.
But if we're willing to make sacrifices, if we're willing to live our values and go through the necessary discomforts and risks of living our values, we gain a credibility in the world that cannot be replicated any other way.
Like, if you've got a great diet and exercise program and you're 300 pounds, nobody's going to believe you.
Like, you may have a great diet and exercise program, but if you're not following it, then nobody's going to believe you.
I mean, if you propose that and said, you know, well, I want to be the guy who talks about the hair restoration formula that I've developed that is fantastic and necessary, put my bald ass on top of a DVD, people are going to say, well, that's not even a good joke.
That's just a bad joke.
And so there is an element of sacrifice.
Academics should give up their state-sponsored positions.
People should stop taking government money.
People should question politics as a method of getting things done.
We should, as a movement, be willing to make those sacrifices.
Then people at least will say, well, shit, they take their stuff seriously.
No, no, no.
This is purely rhetorical, but it is very important, I think, Sacrifice is the wrong word.
If we can say that it's an investment, I think it's a much more accurate and positive way of looking at it.
Because that's what it is.
Because when you say that it's a sacrifice, you're giving up something.
You know, and sacrifice sure can be, you know, you can say that an investment is a sacrifice, right?
A short-term sacrifice for a long-term gain.
But people, when they think of sacrifice, they think of it as a complete write-off, as a loss.
And that's not what we're talking about.
We're talking about making an investment.
In a long-term payoff, because we know that there's going to be a certain payoff.
Pitching it that way, I think... No, no, no, but...
Sorry to interrupt, but remember, we have to speak Mughal, too, right?
Like, we have to speak the language of the herd.
And in the language of the herd, sacrifice is a positive thing, right?
I mean, weren't you praised a lot for your sacrifice for the cause of freedom in your military service?
And, I mean, okay, maybe it's a problematic point, but I still think that we need to remember to give up short-term gains for the sake of long-term credibility.
That, I think, is still important, whatever word we want to give it.
Maybe it's not sacrifice.
You could be right about that.
But I still think that we need to show people that we're serious about what it is that we're doing.
And whatever that means.
I still think we live a pretty comfortable life as activists.
Sorry, go ahead.
You know, live by the example of our values.
I think that's very important.
But it's also by the courage of our convictions to know that if I Sacrifice some time from writing books and instead raise my daughter non-violently and spend time cultivating her mind.
That's an investment, that I would rather have a smart daughter than another book in a few years.
That's not a sacrifice, Stefan!
Stop it!
Okay, well tell me this then.
What is the payoff going to be for your time in prison?
I mean, the odds of us bringing down, in any appreciable sight, legally reducing the size and power of the state in our lifetimes is fairly small.
So what is the payoff?
You know, I agree, my daughter is a higher priority and so on, but tell me what the payoff is for the time in prison.
I would disagree.
I'm sorry?
I would disagree there, too, because, you know, we're all going to be living a lot longer now.
But also, I really do believe that what is coming is going to happen, you know, and you know as well as I that all of these things, these broader dynamics, are motivated by technology and that technology is increasing exponentially.
And I really believe that in the next 50 to 100 years we are going to see The achievement of a voluntary society, at least, maybe not in every practical sense, but I think we're going to get past the paradigm shift in a way that is reflected substantially enough that we will have known that we've passed it.
But I want to go back, because you say these questions are hard to answer, and they're really not.
What does the average citizen get from the state.
It's really not that hard to figure out.
Now, one of the things, obviously, is a sense of pride and a sense of belonging, and in a way, that's only going to change as the psychological health of the population continues to improve, as I believe that it is, partly through technological profusion, the wealth profusion that's driven by that, Spare time that's available, access to information on the internet, the way people are able to form communities on the internet based on psychological deficiencies, support groups on the internet, all of these things.
But I believe that that's changing and I believe that already as we see the development of a more global sense of community, People are turning less to the state to get a sense of identity, that tribalism being satisfied is coming less from the state as people are able to find more meaningful things from it.
As a movement, I don't think we're going to really be able to do anything to challenge that, except what I feel like I'm able to do by incorporating in my message, hey, you should not be Subservient to anybody, you should be the alpha of your own life.
You should be in charge of your own life.
You should not need to have, you know, you are a free, beautiful, independent human being.
You don't need to be a member of the herd in order to give yourself a sense of identity.
I think people are getting that anyways.
But to a more practical, what do people get from the state?
Financial security, or at least, you know, and oftentimes we can preface every one of these answers with the illusion of, right?
But what do people get from the state?
Well, if you're a state employee, you do get a certain amount of financial security.
In a long-term sense, it's an illusion, right?
Is your pension that's enumerated in dollars going to be worth anything when they switch to another monetary system, or the dollar continues to lose value?
Probably not, but who knows?
Maybe they're going to be able to keep it going with adjusting for inflation forever.
So there is a certain amount of security that comes from that.
They get a certain psychological gratification for voting.
I mean, think of the power That voting has as a psychological style that people are able to say, oh, well, I voted for a guy who cares about the environment.
Therefore, I've done my part to save the environment.
You know, I'm going back to my nine to five job of, you know, consumerism and, oh, well, I care about poor people because I voted for a guy who cares about poor people.
You know, and it's the illusion of having participated in and done these things.
But, you know, I look at what it is that people have to lie about in order to get elected.
I think that's a very positive thing.
That's the measurement of what people want, right?
If Barack Obama had gotten elected saying, I'm going to write a health care plan that is written by the insurance companies.
I'm going to try to start another war.
And I'm going to keep these two wars going as long as I can.
And I'm going to increase taxes and regulation.
And my administration is going to be the least transparent in history.
People would be like, I don't think so.
But if he had gotten elected on that platform, I'd be a lot more frightened than I am today.
Right?
But the fact that he had to say the opposite of all of those things in order to get elected makes me go, well, okay.
I don't think the philosophy is really going to do it.
And what those lies represent, it represents the delusions that people think they're able to get out of government.
So when we can address those, and again, I don't think the philosophy is really going to do it.
I think we're going to win more people over with practical policy.
And, you know, I hate to bring it back to plug Adam2020.com and tell people that, you know, my presidential campaign is going to be it.
But I think that some solution like that, that isn't fighting inch by inch, but says this is how we are going to extricate ourselves from this problem as a whole, from modern statism, This is the way out.
This is the how.
I really think dismantling governments through an electoral process from the top down is going to be the way that we get ourselves out of the system, because so many people are dependent on it.
So many people really do get an illusion or a real financial security, if maybe only a short-term payoff out of it.
You know, in a way, I don't want to pull the rug out from underneath anybody.
If one person, you know, and I know this really is challenging some libertarian orthodoxy if you will to get it back to this fundamental question because it's often asked right if you could push a button and end all coercion in the world today would you do it of course well no you don't your answer is no to that no no because i i
I mean, there are people who have made significant life choices on the existence of the current system.
And there are some people who would be able to change those life choices.
And there are some people who would be unable to change those life choices.
And so I think we have to remember that there are people who have become parasitically attached to the state in a kind of a way through no fault of their own.
I mean, this is the propaganda.
This is what they told they deserve.
This is what they're told is right.
And there are people who would be medically uninsurable in a free market, who would have a tough time paying for their own health care and who may die as a result of this kind of stuff.
I don't take that stuff lightly.
I don't think that stuff is unimportant at all.
And, you know, moral injustices need to be addressed.
The transition can be very jarring.
You know, laying the framework for the American Revolution took about 2,300 years of philosophy and about 150 years of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.
And then people were kind of ready.
There's lots of people who would benefit and maybe it would be worth it.
I don't know.
I don't like to make those kinds of calculations because I'm a voluntarist, not a central planner.
I think it would be great if people got the arguments and changed.
But if there was a switch, it would never exist.
But if there was a switch, I'm not sure I'd be all over it like, you know, the proverbial fat kid on a Smarty.
I think it would be a very tough decision to make.
I don't think it would be immediate or instantaneous.
See, I don't know, this is a kind of question that is often, at least among the hardcore, as like, you know, kind of a litmus test.
If you had the red button to end all violence and coercion, would you do it?
And I would still fall on the side of yes, I would.
And because I know that the benefits would outweigh the consequences.
But because there is no such red button, we have to look at what is the actual how.
And I've thought about this a lot exactly from the perspective that you just described of, well, what about these people and this and that and the immediate human suffering that would result because people have become dependent on the system.
And because of that, I think that localization solves that problem as well.
You don't even have to convince those people directly.
Give it up.
Just say, why don't we do this on a level where you don't have this thick, massive, encrusted layer of corruption at the top?
Why don't we just cut it down to this local level?
Why don't we make it a global thing that if you're going to have government, there should be no governments larger than say, you know, a county area.
And if you try to create a territorial monopoly bigger than that, Your people, your territory is going to be cut off from the world market.
Maybe that's just a fantasy of mine of a particular mechanism.
I know it would never quite be that neat, but I do believe that if we give the libertarian philosophy teeth, if you will, in the how, and that is localization.
We dismantle governments from the top down.
I think we provide a way forward that gives people everything they think they're getting from statism that doesn't pull the rug out from underneath anybody and provides an easy way for people to express a preference for liberty that gives us a transition mechanism that is peaceful and allows for the least amount of backlash.
Now, one of the problems, if I may, this addresses very importantly, is the power vacuum argument.
And that's the greatest argument against, well, let's just overthrow the feds.
Let's just abolish the federal government.
It's the push the red button argument, right?
Well, if you push the red button and get rid of government, well, then you're going to have tyrannies come up and you're going to have totalitarianism.
To the extent that I agree is the extent that, you know, we need to fill that vacuum with self-governance.
And, you know, one way or another, the space has to be there.
The desire for self-governance has to be strong enough that it pulls that power down ultimately to the individual.
And I think that it's going to go in that way.
There's, you know, step two is just underpants.
Step three is a free society.
A lot of people are going to say, okay, I'm a libertarian.
Great.
I'll try to raise my children less violently.
And when I can get away with it, I'll pay less taxes and you know, good luck with the whole revolution thing.
And this is where I think you find your frustration with a lot of people in the movement is that at least, you know, like with the Ron Paul campaign, you had the how of, well, we're going to elect somebody.
You know, we have this massive goal.
It gets people energized.
It shows them, you know, at least a potential for a tangible change in the immediate future.
And when you when you provide that with people, even if the only benefit is the long term, well, we're going to change the paradigm.
We're going to win people over.
We're going to spread some ideas.
We're going to inspire some some self-ownership, some assertion of self-ownership.
But without that, I think you end up with a lot of people in the position that you end up frustrated with them over, which is okay, I get it, now what?
All right, fine, Stefan.
I'm going to raise my kids non-violently, and I'll check out your videos every now and then.
I'll enjoy your podcasts, and maybe I'll share them with people in my inner circle who are cool enough to answer the questions properly when I ask them if they would ever use violence against me through the wonderful against me argument framework that you put out.
But it still is missing, I guess, just to go back, what we described as the immediate short-term problems of statism.
Well, I mean, I've made the argument before, but I think that attempting to reform the government from within is like trying to enter the mafia and turning it into a charity.
I mean, it's not going to work.
It's not reforming it from within, it's destroying it from within.
Well, all right.
So, listen, we're pushing, hang on, we're pushing the two-hour mark and giving people's patience and occasional need to pee.
We should, I think, wrap it up.
I, you know, I think the conversations are important.
I have to pee, isn't it?
I'll be here.
I'll be here.
Sacrifice your bladder for the sake of the cause.
Sacrifice your seat.
I think that the purpose is we need to keep asking the questions.
I don't claim to have final definitive answers.
I don't have a roadmap because I think such a thing is impossible.
I think we need to act with as much integrity as we can if we're going to take these values seriously.
I'm like in for a penny, in for a pound is sort of my approach.
If you're going to do something, if you're going to follow a philosophy, then just damn well do it.
And, you know, life doesn't go on forever and you don't get any points for compromises except in the short run.
So I think that we need to keep asking these questions as a movement.
Is there any stone that's been left unturned?
Any reason, any evidence, any science, any expert opinion that helps us to build a more peaceful world that we haven't examined?
Question everything that has come before.
Let's not go back to the default positions of whatever it is.
You know, if people believe that peaceful parenting is the default position, keep re-questioning that.
You know, we love the free market and how it overturns things, let's emulate that within our own movement and never assume that we have the final answer.
Keep on asking the questions and I certainly appreciate the contributions that you have and that other people have made to the movement, but I think we do sometimes get complacent and think we know how it's going to happen and I think look like those little The cars that just kind of roll around those little boxes, you know, they go up the walls, little toy cars.
And I think we really need to keep examining the movement.
Let's not assume we know how this thing's going to happen, but stay in conversation about best possible practices.
So I hope that your show is going to be back on the air soon.
I wonder if you can leave my listeners with your vital stats on the web, how to contact you, what's going on for you soon.
Sure.
And your legal defense fund, if it's back up and running, if people want to contribute to that, maybe they want to help you out in that practical sense.
Yes, well thank you, Stefan.
I hope that Adam vs. the Man funds don't go to any more illegal causes at this point.
And we do have, you know, because money was stolen from me while I was in jail, we had some unique challenges.
You know, my operation was sabotaged by the person who stole my money in order to cover his tracks.
So the last month has been, you know, just getting my life back together one piece at a time.
And it's been really challenging.
But you know what, if I may take another minute before I get into all that, I do want to thank everybody who helped me out while I was in jail.
Everybody who wrote letters, everybody who made phone calls, everybody who wrote letters to the judge, everybody who helped spread the word in the media, everybody who helped maximize the impact of my activism because they saw the value in it too by using it as a teachable moment to spread the message, to wake people up and to get at least some exposure to wake people up and to get at least some exposure for liberty in the mainstream I think it was great.
And without everybody who supports me, my impact would be insignificant.
So on that note, I am still raising funds to help relaunch Adam versus the man, We're looking forward to a two-hour live podcast, five days a week, starting as soon as mid-February possible.
Keep your fingers crossed.
There's some big unanswered questions legally as to whether or not that's going to be possible.
So please, adamvstheman.com slash invest.
All of your funds go support Adam vs. the Man Operations one way or another.
I'm working on my manifesto right now, so promoting and distributing that is going to be absolutely essential, and I'm very grateful for everybody who just supports me having my voice out there.
I think this book is going to be a really, really valuable outreach tool.
I hope that people are able to put it to good use.
I've got court coming up on January 17th for sentencing in DC.
Hopefully that gets that half of my legal challenges behind me.
It's a great time to be engaged in this.
I mean, I don't know what else to say.
Stéphane, just being able to talk to you is so much fun.
Being able to have these conversations, I mean, it is such an amazing time to be alive and to be a part of the human experience and to be a part of this conversation.
And because everybody who supports me, I'm just grateful to be able to do this.
So adamvstheman.com slash invest.
You can find my Litecoin and Bitcoin wallet addresses there.
I just diversified a little bit into a few other altcoins, if people want to send me other altcoins directly, of course.
You can give cash through PayPal, through credit card, everything else online, everything is secured now.
And you can email me, Adam, at adamvstheman.com and sign up for my email list at adamvstheman.com.
Fantastic.
Well, I'll be keeping my fingers crossed, of course, January the 17th.
I hope it works out.
And thanks again for the time.
It's always a real pleasure to chat.
I'm sorry we've both been kind of busy over the last couple of months, but I'm sure we'll do a show again soon.
And best of luck getting set up at the new gig.
Likewise, Stefan.
So that was two hours now, right?
So that means I've got you for like eight interviews on my show later.
Eight short ones.
Fair enough.
Each of those are two hours, you know.
I inflate my currency too.
Take care, man.
Have a great day.
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