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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
17:33
To Ron Paul Supporters: I'm Sorry
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
So, Ron Paul supporters obviously are very disappointed, and I can really understand that.
I empathize with that. I, for what it's worth, completely applaud the effort, energy, time, and money that you've put into supporting this candidate.
And we all understand it's a rigged game.
It's nonsense. They change the rules whenever they want.
The teleprompter showed what the results of the votes were before the votes even came out.
This is all typical political nonsense.
Politics is the velvet glove on the mailed fist of the state.
Politics is the ex post facto justification used for the infinite use of deep violence.
Theft and predation and so on all have to be dressed up in words like stimulus, i.e.
selling off the unborn and indebting the nation.
Taxes have to be used instead of theft, and government has to be used instead of brute force.
Law has to be used instead of an opinion with a gun.
So all of this kind of stuff.
And these telegenic sociopaths who run for power are entirely picked based upon their ability to make the evil seem reasonable.
So I sympathize.
I understand the bitterness, the disappointment of the frustration.
I really get it.
And I really want to recognize and applaud everyone's efforts in the freedom movement.
Now, the fact that this hasn't worked...
It's not too shocking for those of us who have not underestimated the evil of the state and the desire for the state to have power to get things for nothing and to exercise brute control over the majority.
That is their goal.
And the words that are invented are just to grease that pipe or grease that pole, so to speak, so that it can be achieved faster.
So you can't change the government with words.
I mean, that's like trying to talk someone trying to talk a mugger out of mugging you.
I mean, this is not going to work.
And since the evil of the government is built on words, using words to get rid of the government or to control the government is like using a government program to control a government program.
Language is the ultimate government program, as is politics.
So, not to pick on the Republicans.
I mean, you can get this from either side of the aisle, but there's a little bit that went on that It was kind of laughable at the recent convention and other places.
So Cher Valenzuela was speaking on the theme, we built it, right?
This is their misreading of what Barack Obama meant.
What Barack Obama meant, of course, was that businesses rely on government infrastructure to flourish, right?
Roads and bridges and so on.
But their goal was to say, no, no, no, businesses are responsible for their own successes and so on.
So they had this woman in, Cher Valenzuela, Well, she spoke and said that businesses are self-sufficient, rely on their own entrepreneurial energies alone.
But her company received about $70 million in federal loans and contracts.
And she openly encourages other entrepreneurs to take advantage of federal loans and contracts.
So there's this guy who appeared in a Romney Webb ad criticizing the, you didn't build that line, but unfortunately he had done millions of dollars' worth of work for the government.
The owner of a metal fabricating plant, who's in another Romney ad, also received $800,000 in tax-exempt revenue bonds as well as subcontracts in 2008 from the Navy.
The stadium that the RNC was held in, the Tampa Bay Times Forum, was built in 1996 for $139 million, 62% of which was billed to the taxpayers of Florida.
So it's kind of tough when you can't even hang a sign called, we built it in a stadium that was actually built by the private sector.
Paul Ryan, of course, critical of social security.
He himself got a large part of his education paid for through social security survivors' benefits.
And, I mean, the guy wants to run the free market, the private sector.
He's a big fan of entrepreneurship.
But, I mean, the dude's been in Congress since he was 28, you know, bringing his Count Chocula hairdo to the hallowed halls.
And before that, he worked for these two senators.
And he's never had a job in the private sector other than some low-rent pool-cleaning gigs.
Of course, while the convention was going on, Mitt Romney is hosting this multimillion-dollar party for donators on a yacht, and the yacht was flying the flag of the Cayman Islands, or Bermuda, depends on who you ask, both of which, of course, are notable tax shelters used by Romney, his real allegiance, of course.
I mean, the lies in Paul Ryan's speech hashed out so many times.
Obama failed to save a factory in Paul Ryan's hometown, but the factory actually closed under George Bush's presidency, and while Paul Ryan was in office, so Paul Ryan was arguably responsible for failing to save the factory.
Paul Ryan criticizes Obama's stimulus bill, while at the same time he was lobbying heavily for stimulus money for his district, and most of the financial or business successes in his district came out as a direct result of the stimulus spending.
He criticizes Obama for cutting $700 billion from Medicare, but Ryan's own budget plan cuts exactly the same amount.
He attacks Obama for failing to act on the recommendations of the Simpsons-Bowles debt.
Commission, but Ryan voted against the urgent report that came out of that.
Commission, it's like stealing somebody's wallet and then criticizing them for being unable to pay a bill.
So this guy, Steve Daines, also made a speech at the RNC, praised his ancestor as not being saved by government, because I think on his ancestor's tombstone was saved by grace.
But of course, his ancestor did receive a huge government handout at Homestead and another federal program called the Homestead Act.
Ron Paul, you know, a sensitive topic, I understand.
Actually, I like him as a writer.
I think he's a great public speaker.
I think he's a great guy.
But Ron Paul makes the argument that we should cut a huge amount of government spending.
Now, he knows, of course, that there's going to be a lot of pain and a lot of suffering in cutting government spending.
These kinds of adjustments are not easy on people.
It doesn't mean they're not right.
But, you know, when you get rid of slavery, a bunch of slave owners lose money and a bunch of slave catchers lose jobs.
The reality is that federal spending in Ron Paul's district has quadrupled since 1999 to more than $4 billion a year.
So it makes his congressional district as one of the highest per capita federal spenders in the country.
Almost $15,000 spent per resident annually, and that's quite a lot.
So in 2010, Ron Paul asked for a $4.5 million grant for the annual youth fair in Wharton County, which has a population of 41,000, which includes a chicken chase, a bull blowout, whatever that is, and the Weak Folks Pet Show, and to the Princess Pageant.
He also asked for almost $9 million over three years for something called the Vanadium Safety Readiness Project, $2.5 million for a streetscape in Baytown, Texas, Including the landscaped sidewalks, benches, trash cans, bike racks, and decorative street lighting.
He asked for two and a half million dollars for the Revelation Baptist Church and a million dollars for some RV park to enhance tourism and so on.
Now, I mean, Ron Paul's argument is like, well, look, they take our money, they take our highway tolls and so on.
We have every right to apply for them back.
And he does not vote for the earmarks, but he argues that the people he represents should get their money back.
He also, to Ron Paul's credit, does not participate in this congressional pension program, and he returns a portion of his budget to the U.S. Treasurer every year.
Now, of course, he knows that the earmarks are going to get passed even if he votes against them.
It's still a stand-on principle, but it doesn't really add up to much.
And he also knows, because he's very fluent in Austrian economics, Ron Paul knows, that the money that comes from the federal government is not the money that was taken from his constituents, right?
Because it's all debt.
And so he's not taking money back that's taken from his constituents.
He's taking money back that is stolen from the unborn.
And that is not really a good way to justify that.
Of course, and even if the money was being taken from his constituents, it's not going back to his constituents.
What he should do, of course, is he should take that money as best he can and just mail a check back to everyone, but it doesn't go back to the same people.
But none of that is really the point.
The point is that... If you are going to say to the world as a whole, to your country as a whole, we need to go through a lot of suffering in order to change society, to shrink the size and power of the state, then you need to show how that's going to work in your own district.
If you show how that works in your own district, then other politicians will follow suit.
But if you can't show how it even works in your own district, asking everyone else to take the bullet you're not willing to take or to risk is not particularly credible.
Now, Let's just go through a few other facts, which I think are kind of important.
People in general, I mean, they want empty political gas-bag platonic platitudes rather than any hard facts.
Hard facts are very difficult in a political campaign because, of course, whoever you say you're going to cut then mounts a big campaign against you, blows you out of the water and so on.
Whatever special interests you piss off are going to just, you know, turn their government-funded laser sights on your forehead and open up a big wide hole of get the hell out of here.
So... Why do people want all of this retarded stuff?
Why does nobody want to discuss morality or issues but just once, you know, we're building a bridge to the 29th century kind of crap?
Well, because most people are complete idiots.
As George Carlin said, think how dumb the average person is.
Well, half of them are dumber than that.
And I don't mean this is innately dumb.
I mean, they've been raised in government schools, which means that they've had the hinged desks of status indoctrination repeatedly closed on their frontal lobes until they become a bruised and Twitching, broken-ass mess of fallacious syllogisms.
So, let's look at some of the facts.
National Adult Literacy Survey.
It's a five-year, $14 million study from 1993.
Almost a quarter of Americans who are adults are not able to locate information in a piece of text.
They could not make low-level inferences using printed materials and were unable to integrate easily identifiable pieces of information.
That was in 1993, a follow-up study in 2007.
No improvement. 46 to 51 percent of U.S. adults read so poorly that they earn significantly below the threshold poverty level for an individual.
Roughly 15 percent of the sample could function at the highest levels in all three categories.
Roughly 40 percent were at either basic or below basic levels of proficiency in all three categories.
So, I mean, these are people who are too dumb as adults to even be able to hold a median level job.
They function significantly below the threshold poverty level.
These are people who've been turned into a permanently underwired brain underclass, and it's truly tragic.
So this is from 2003.
So, you know, one in seven Americans are illiterate.
Illiterate. You can't explain the gold standard to somebody who can't read the word gold.
32 million U.S. adults lack basic prose literacy skills.
This means they can't read a newspaper or the instructions on a bottle of pills.
63% of prison inmates can't read.
30 million people over the age of 16, 14% of the U.S. adult population, don't read well enough to understand a newspaper story written at the 8th grade level or fill out a job application.
But this is, remember, after only 12 years of government education.
What about general knowledge of Americans?
Well, almost a third of Americans believe that the sun revolves around the earth.
Maybe the government revolves around them.
Only 53% of adults know how long it takes for the earth to revolve around the sun.
One election cycle.
Only 59% of adults know that the earliest humans and dinosaurs did not live at the same time.
Only 47% of adults can roughly approximate the percent of the Earth's surface that is covered with water.
And only 21% of adults answered all three of these questions correctly.
These are not hard questions at all.
Only a fifth of people surveyed were able to explain what it means to study something scientifically.
Over the past 20 years, the percentage of U.S. adults accepting the idea of evolution has declined from 45% to 40%.
55% of Americans believe in life after death.
33.5% believe the Bible is the actual word of God.
45.4% believe in an evil spirit called the devil.
49.6% believe in a hell.
45.6% in miracles.
Because you have to be superstitious to believe in the state.
Almost 4 in 10 people believe in ghosts, 22% believe in astrology or horoscopes, 27% believe in reincarnation, and 15% believe in fortune-telling or tarot cards.
Now, this is really bad.
I mean, this is a significant dumbing down of the general population.
In 1950, only 10% of the public believed in ghosts, and 2% thought they had seen one.
So it's a four-fold increase in the number of people who believe in ghosts.
I mean, we're heading entirely in the wrong direction.
So, you know, basic political quiz, only a...
So half of people fail a basic political quiz.
Only about one in six people would have earned either an A or a B. You could go on and on.
But you understand, we are not working with fine clay in the forging of these potteries of the future.
And so... This is the reality that we're dealing with.
And this is the level at which politicians have to speak to get the general vote, which is why they go into empty platitudes.
Anything more challenging than that, people simply can't follow.
They have been incredibly dumbed down, particularly since the 1960s, since it became impossible to fire teachers, pretty much.
It's been absolutely catastrophic.
Most people walking around have smoking craters where their brains should be.
Short-circuit, brain-damaged, state-idiosized robots.
There's a reason why there's been a massive resurgence and fear of and interest in zombie movies, because zombies lack brains and therefore want to eat others.
The zombies are public school teachers, right?
I mean, that's the reality. And the people they produce, statists.
So that's the reality. That doesn't mean there's nothing we can do.
It doesn't mean that there's not open options for change.
So somebody wrote to me and said, well, it's fine for you to criticize everyone else, but what have you achieved?
Well, I haven't achieved anything.
I've just done a bunch of yammering.
But I could estimate, based upon listenership and proportion of people who write to me, a couple of tens of thousands of people who listen to my show have stopped hitting their children.
Stopped hating their children, stopped yelling at their children, stopped intimidating their children, stopped telling their children pious and superstitious lies, whether it's about their society or their gods.
That's great. You know, we still got 80 to 90 percent of parents hitting their children.
To reduce that number is to actually reduce the amount of violence in the world, both now and in the future, because a lot of violence comes out of trauma in early childhood and like adult violence.
So you can check out some of my work on this, The Truth About Spanking, and my interviews with Dr.
Elizabeth Gershoff and so on, and others.
And you can also check out my free audiobook reading of Lloyd DeMoss' The Origins of War and Child Abuse for more on this information.
If we can begin to help people to stop hitting their children, well, that's a net reduction of violence in the world.
And that snowballs. That really creates a momentum.
And tens of thousands of people have stopped hitting their children as a direct result of this show.
And, of course, if you funded it, your funding of this show.
Well, that's great.
I also am very strongly encouraging of therapy and remind people that they don't have to stay in abusive relationships, whether they're vertical or horizontal.
So that also reduces the amount of trauma, ugliness and aggression and violence in the world.
So this is net reduction.
This is still very early days.
This has made 45, probably million downloads by now.
And for philosophy, it's had a huge impact very quickly, which of course produces the inevitable backlash.
This is things that you can do.
I mean, you can't stop the Fed.
You can stop hitting your kids. You can remind people to stop hitting their kids.
You can show them the information to stop hitting their kids.
You can remind them they don't have to stay in violent, destructive and abusive relationships.
You can be happy yourself.
If you have a program which you cannot achieve, which is trying to turn evil into good, trying to join the mafia and turning it into a charity, You're going to get frustrated.
You're going to get unhappy. You're going to be bitter.
And that actually drives people away from philosophy, from the truth.
Reason equals virtue equals happiness.
We are trying to sell happiness.
We are trying to sell joy.
We are trying to sell authority, power, the genuine capacity to create and enact virtue in our own lives.
And we can't be fat guys on the cover of a diet book.
I mean, we just can't be.
If you are embittered, which I understand, then you've got to understand that you're not bringing anybody over to the fold.
I mean, you just can't.
You have to demonstrate. Because people are so illiterate.
They don't understand ideas.
They only understand examples.
So you have to live your values, which means not trying to convince the powers that be to not be the powers that be, which is never going to work.
You have to live your values, reject violence in your own lives, reject violence in your own families, reject violence and aggression in your own relationships, live all of the joy and happiness that comes out of that.
And then, and then we can lead people by example, which is really the only way we can build a bridge to the future.
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