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Dec. 3, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
28:58
Violent Communist Takeover?
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid.
I'm here with Tilly, who sent an urgent email about a very intense social, political, economic situation that's going on where he lives.
So thanks for taking the time today.
Why don't you get us up to speed on what's going on where you are?
Hi. So basically, roughly 30 days ago, I started a sort of Leftist uprising in my country, which started small by mostly students protesting on subway, and it escalated into a lot of violence.
In the last 10 days, the violence has sort of been reduced, but there's been a huge economic damage, and the uprising now continues on The political front, so the future of the country, economically speaking, is very blim.
Alright, so we're talking about...
Chile here. And of course, the last time I dipped into Chile, it was doing pretty well, at least relative to other countries like Brazil and Argentina, largely because of a commitment to free market and small government and, you know, certainly far from a perfect society, but did not seem to be that much at risk from the left.
So, I mean, was my assessment in the past somewhat correct?
Has it changed and how and why and what?
Yes, it is correct.
Chile is by far the most developed country in South America and the most pro-free market.
But this is not an economical crisis.
It is a political crisis.
There's been a slow, I would say, indoctrination of the youth going on since 1990 and it got really hard.
Big at universities and schools from the year 2000, and they built up a critical mass of leftist indoctrination that allowed them to do this coordinated uprise.
There's also some speculation about foreign influence, but the level of foreign influence is not determined yet.
Okay, so let's talk about some of the propaganda that, for you, the youth are being subjected to.
What kind of stuff are they hearing in the universities?
Well, it's the classical Marxist stuff, like the government has to do this, the government has to do that.
A lot of hate against law enforcement that the water...
I don't know, the water, electricity should be free, that the pensions should be higher is typical leftist populism.
Right. So, what do you think changed, I mean, after the terrifying scare, I guess, that Chile had regarding the close-to-socialist-slash-communist takeover in the past?
I mean, it seems almost, it's almost like this guy, he's like, almost dies of lung cancer, and he's like, hey, you know, it's been five years since I got my lung cancer diagnosis, I guess I'll start smoking again.
I mean, it just seems weird how quickly it bounces back to this, you know, default gimme, gimme, gimme position.
Well, the free market policies that have kept the country stable were implemented during the military government, but they have been slowly being dismantled.
Like the state has been growing slowly but steadily.
So have taxes and that has caused the economy to starting to slow down, especially during the government before this one, which was A more leftist government.
Right, so they put in regulations, they put in income redistribution, they borrow more, they tax more, and this begins to slow down the economy.
And then the Marxists come in and say, aha, you see, the free market isn't working for you, it's time for a change, right?
Yeah, exactly. Right, right.
Now, did you go to university recently and find out sort of firsthand about this kind of indoctrination, or where do you get this from?
Well, personally, I went to a sort of private university, and I got a major in business, so I was sort of away from that.
Oh, you're a class enemy now, man.
They're going to go through those lists.
Yeah, but my girlfriend is currently in college, so she goes to a sort of same type of universities, but even there, she sees this kind of stuff.
But you can see it on the news, like, they do university takeovers to protest for anything sort of government-related, and basically a bunch of leftist students take up the university and no one can go to classes.
And they keep people, the other students, from going to classes for a month on end, and this is repeated through most universities here.
Wait, this goes on for months?
Yeah, sometimes.
So they occupy, right?
I mean, they just have a sit-in, they occupy, they block people to and from classes, and I suppose the question always arises to me, like, okay, well, why don't they just call the police and have them removed for trespassing?
Yeah, well, there's this sort of leftover from the military time where people sort of, the police is presented as the enemy of the Like the working class or the people in general, and so is the military.
So even the government and lots of people in the general population are against the police doing their jobs, basically.
Right. So is it – where does the media sit?
The media is always the big sort of invisible ghost over this battlefield, so to speak, because it really matters how the information is presented to the general population, right?
So if you've got people occupying a building and unlawfully, right, and then the law is applied and those people are removed, then, you know, sometimes the media – well, most times the media is like, you know, peaceful protesters dragged out by fascist police forces and so on, and they engender this crazy – Sympathy and victimization of the poor protesters.
Other times it's like, you know, I mean, I guess in a more theoretical universe, it's like unlawful people standing between the poor and their education get removed so that education can continue.
Where does the media sit relative to all of this stuff?
Yeah, the media is extremely biased to the left, exactly like the United States, I guess.
Even more so.
When this uprising started and the The very first protests had a lot of support, and they were mostly not violent, but they would pretend that violence was not happening, that they would put on camera people talking about why they were protesting, and they would basically pretend there was nothing wrong going on.
They would not talk about the small businesses being looted, they would not talk about the streets being blocked, etc.
And only after they encouraged this for Like 20, 30 days, they sort of flipped a bit and said, oh, yeah, we're destroying the economy and people are scared to death in their homes.
Okay, so we went from sort of student protests to businesses being looted to people being scared in their homes.
Just help me jump that particular chasm so I understand what you're talking about now.
Oh, yeah. The students taking universities has been a It's something that has happened all throughout the last 10 years.
It's not always happens, but it happens two weeks, three weeks, and the classes just get scheduled forward and so on.
The protest, I was talking about this, what has happened in the last 45 days since the uprising sort of started.
Okay, so tell me a little bit about the uprising and its effects.
Well... At first it was, as I said, it started with sort of more peaceful protests, between quotes, and basically the government, which was a center-ish right government, started capitulating, changed its ministry, I don't know the word, its staff.
Then that didn't work, so they started promising a lot of welfare, Stuff like raising pensions, the minimum wage, and the protests continued and basically they fully conceded and we are now in the process of changing our constitution.
Well, and this is...
The protesters put forward this argument that says, well, you know, we want to raise the minimum wage, we want more pensions, and then we'll be satisfied.
And of course, if they get that, well, they're not satisfied.
Because, I mean, if they're hard left, their goal...
Is to destroy the free market.
And, you know, increasing the minimum wage and increasing pensions is a way to undermine the free market because, you know, you increase the minimum wage, a lot of people with low skills get thrown out of work, which creates more resentment.
Towards the system, but it's not a fix-it situation.
It's a burn to the ground and rebuild in the image of Marx kind of system, and I guess it's hard for people to remember that, and of course then what it does is it propels conflicts between the police and the, quote, protesters, which of course then the leftist media around the world is going to portray in, you know, the new fascists in Chile kind of thing.
Yeah, actually there was an article in the New York Times called the police is turning the students blind or some sort because during the same protests there's basically a three-stage destruction.
First you've got the peaceful protesters and they provide cover for people who build road barricades.
And then there's Those road barricades allow a third group of people who start looting and burning stuff down.
And basically the police has used this sort of rubber shotgun, I would call it, which is a non-lethal weapon, but it bounces sometimes on the ground or sometimes because of the size of the complex that the police have used incorrectly, that's true. And has resulted in sort of like 200 people with eye injuries, of which 20 have actually lost an eye.
Well, and a similar thing is going on in the Yellow Vest protests in France, but of course you don't hear much about that, and that's been going on for a long time these days.
I see, true. Now, so the looting is occurring, but I guess my question is, and it's always a basic question of economics for me, What are the protesters living on?
You know, like when I was young, I was broke pretty much all the time.
I mean, I was in school, I grew up poor.
And so for me, it was always like, okay, well, I guess I could go protest, but I kind of need to eat and I need to have a roof over my head, particularly in winter.
So what are they living on?
What are they surviving on while they do all of this protesting?
Well, I'd say like all of the protesters, the big majority are...
Are young people, like below 30.
And many of them are even university students.
So most of them, they probably live off their parents.
And there's this sort of alliance of them working with professional criminal gangs and drug dealers who do more of the dirty work.
Some of the data we have now is that Crimes against homes, for example, have dramatically been reduced because the professional criminals switch jobs, basically.
Oh, so the professional criminals are working with the far-left student organizations to bloody their hands, so to speak, or to go and loot, which is, I guess, what they want to do.
And that means that homeowners are less susceptible to home invasions or thefts of that kind.
Is that right? Yeah, because that's a sort of harder job.
But it's like the hard-left Students, I would say.
Anarchist groups, which there's a lot of here.
They are the ones that do the sort of burning churches and other stuff that's burning government buildings.
That's all happened. Yeah, these aren't the good, cool anarcho-capitalists, like who want a real free market and no government.
These are the nihilists who just want to undo every particular fabric of civilization.
Yeah, that's correct. Right, right.
And is it getting worse?
Is it stable? Is it getting better?
What are your sense of which way the wind is blowing?
Right now, it's better in terms of public safety.
Because at two points, the crime was so high that I thought they were going to deploy the military to take over.
But I'm not sure what happened, but...
But the president didn't do it, even though many people wanted that.
But the crime in mainstream areas has been reduced, but there are certain areas that are sort of controlled by criminals now.
And there's a problem with the police that I wanted to talk about.
Our judicial system basically has our police and even the military under threat of Sort of imprisonment.
So the police can't really use their firearms and that's why they can't control the situation.
Like, you see, there was a shopping center that was looted by roughly 400 people and there was roughly 30 or more policemen there and they couldn't stop them because they are not allowed to use their weapons to that stuff.
They are only allowed to use their weapons in extremely, extremely...
Oh, so if they were to use force to prevent looting, then the judicial system might say something like, oh, well, you weren't, you know, nobody was pointing a gun at you, and therefore it's not self-defense, and therefore we're going to try you for like, I don't know, capital murder or something.
Yeah, exactly. And it's not only them, but for example, the president is also scared of the same stuff.
You probably talk about a bit of the propaganda of the police blowing up the protestor sites.
They would probably try to make him personally responsible for the repression of the state, if that makes any sense.
Right. Well, he would then face significant challenges to his power and possibly even legal action against himself.
Is that what you mean? Yeah, it is.
And it's, you know, the Pinochet is a complex figure.
I mean, there's a lot that I dislike.
But compared to something like straight up communism, you could certainly make the case that it was, even if you say marginally better than straight up communism, it, I can certainly understand that case.
But of course, the left has done a great job Of completely demonizing him, like he was just complete antichrist, preventing a wonderful new classless society from coming into being in Chile.
And that is...
Yeah, that's a tough thing to...
It's a tough narrative to challenge at the moment.
Yeah, that's for sure.
But it's not even about him anymore, I think.
Like, there was also a lot of...
Some corruption cases between the police and the military where they unlawfully took some money and they've used that as a sort of weapon to portray that all police and all military are criminals and that they shouldn't be doing their job, basically. So in your daily life, you said there are certain areas still under protest, certain areas controlled by...
Criminals, in your daily life, what's it like to navigate this kind of environment?
Does it change much or is it mostly out of sight, out of mind kind of thing?
Right now, it's like a side thing.
I live in a very peaceful area because it's sort of roughly isolated, but if I take a 10-minute drive towards another part of the city, you have to take care if your car is going to get wrecked, if you're going to be stagging some protest.
And there are certain areas that are off limits at night.
I'm lucky in that sense.
I'm sorry, get it? I'm lucky in that sense.
Are the students, I don't know how it works where you are, but are the students living off student loans and grants and that kind of stuff to pursue these actions?
No, that doesn't happen much.
They live off their parents mostly.
The university gets sort of paid.
There's a lot of programs so they can afford the college.
For people who are really poor, it's free.
Many of the protests are people who already finished college and they are in debt from college and they want their debts erased.
Right. Yeah, well, I'm sure that they took pretty economically useless degrees.
And now the consequences of those decisions are becoming pretty clear.
And rather than take responsibility or blame a system that may have propagandized them into college is always valuable, now they just want to...
Escape the consequences of their choices, right?
It also bothers me to some degree how the parents are like, sure, you can go out and riot.
I'll cook you a nice meal when you come home.
And like the parents could be exercising some authority and saying, hey man, you know, if you're going out there and working with criminals and if you're going out there and looting houses or looting businesses or looting malls, you know, I'm not putting a roof over your head for that.
Yeah, exactly. There's also this sort of, I'm not sure the word in English, but Basically, these people go and they say, oh, we are protesting peacefully.
They are still blocking roads and basically the people who have businesses in the area of the protest have all gone bankrupt.
But there could be other people starting barricades next to them and they pretend like they have no responsibility in that.
Right. And how is the...
I mean, it's hard to ask one person about the general mood.
I kind of understand that.
But if you can sort of take a swing at that anyway, what is the general mood of the population?
Are they, yes, you know, the protesters have valid concerns, or, you know, I just want to get to work without my car being burnt down while I'm at work.
Where does the general population sit in this?
I'd say the majority...
It's sort of, yes, the protesters have valid concerns, but in their mind they completely disassociate the protests from the violence.
So the protests are still sort of have popular support, but it's been greatly reduced.
And also the president has very, very low support, bordering on 10% because basically half the country is pissed at him because he has not handed out, he has not destroyed capitalism or the free market.
And the other part of the country is pissed at him because he's allowing all these looting and he's capitulating to the left.
Well, I mean, if he's out of control of the judicial system, then it's a pretty tough position to be in.
When's the next round of voting?
In roughly two years.
Oh, yeah. So this is going to drag on.
No, no. Because the presidential election is in two years, but there's a parliament election and the vote if we are going to change the constitution is in April.
And what's the constitutional change being proposed?
There's no concrete proposal yet.
The vote is, are we going to change the constitution?
And is the constitution going to be changed by people in the parliament and people elected independently or fully independent people?
But there must be some reason why the proposal to change the constitution is being put forward.
There must be something that they want.
Oh, yeah. The extreme left that is pushing this needs to dismantle the constitution to break the free markets.
Ah, and do you know what it is in the constitution in particular that they're targeting?
Yeah, there's certain things.
I would say the constitution was written by what would be our Chilean conservatives during the military regime and was approved by roughly 66% of the population back then.
Certain things that protect our private property...
And the central bank, which is really important to keep the government at check.
Right, so they want to loose the restraints that allow them to prey on private property and also they want to be able to expand the government significantly, I assume, right?
Yeah, the central bank thing, in Chile it works as an independent entity that has to keep inflation at 2%.
The government can't print money Independently, like they're doing, for example, in Argentina.
Right, right, right. So if they destroy that, they can really...
Well, then they'll wreck the currency, and then they'll say capitalism doesn't work, and then they'll just be a full socialist or communist takeover, right?
Yeah. Right. Yeah, I think that's what they're after.
Yeah, well, that's what they're traditionally after.
And what does this mean for you, personally, about your future here?
I'm not sure yet.
I have an import company with...
I'm not going to say what we sell or anything, but it's basically an online retail store.
So you have some geographical flexibility, I guess.
Although, you know, we're all running out of places to go, right?
Well, it's within the country, but I also have a lot of savings that I've been keeping apart for years.
I'm putting them on American stocks, so I sort of have savings.
For example, our currency since this started has lost roughly 15% of its value against the US dollar.
So now I'm not sure I can keep operating because my import company pays in dollars and we are losing 50%.
Our cost went 50% up basically.
Right, right. And, you know, as an entrepreneur, when these big giant levers of the economy get pulled and pushed, it's sort of like trying to play basketball when the gravity keeps getting dialed up and down.
It becomes increasingly possible to do anything valid.
Or, you know, for people who play video games, if your joystick is kind of half working, it's actually more frustrating than just not playing the game at all.
Because everything just keeps changing and it becomes very hard, if not impossible, to predict what's next.
Yeah, that's true. My company is a bit more resilient to that because we have a low-cost strategy, but basically there's been tens of thousands of small businesses that have gone broke in the last 30 days.
30 days! Wow!
And is it the currency or is it the looting?
What is the primary factor behind that?
It's a remarkable number for such a short amount of time.
In the immediate term, there's the looting and the street blockades.
There's a lot of small businesses that are located in places where protests go on every day, so they can't sell, and one month without sales, they just go under.
And for the long term, it's the loss of the value of the currency, which is going to hurt the importers, and it's going to create a chain effect on all the economy.
The inflation is probably going up, etc.
Now, I'm not going to say it's all one big blob, but I do remember when I was in Brazil to give some speeches, there was a relatively small but very vocal pro-free market group.
And I assume that there's the same, if not more.
In Chile, is there any place where you can get the arguments out, where you can say, hey, the problem is interference with the free market, not the free market, and this is going to potentially end up being a very hard leftist coup, which generally gets a lot of people visiting the underground for forever.
Is there any way to get the pro-market views out in Chile?
Yes, I would say it's the internet mostly.
Like in most countries, YouTube channels, people using people-to-people communication because the mainstream media is pure leftism.
That's how our current president won the election last time.
He wouldn't be a Republican right-winger.
He would be more sort of, I would say, a moderate Democrat.
But he won very convincingly versus the other candidate who was the left-wing country.
I would put him like a radical left Democrat, if that makes any sense.
Right, right. Listen, I really appreciate the update.
I want to make sure that the message that you want to give out to Chile and, of course, to other countries facing these kinds of challenges, which is not a few countries in the world, what is it that you most want to say to people that they need to hear?
It would be that you can't take your situation for granted, the stability of your country and that left indoctrination towards the youth needs to be stopped.
It is a slow cooking process they use, but they are using it very effectively to destroy many countries.
Sadly, they have a fair amount of experience in that.
Sorry, go ahead. Like, I really thought that when I saw other Latin American cartoons, oh yeah, that thing can never happen here.
And it looks like I was wrong.
Right. Well, listen, I really, really appreciate the updates and let us know in the comments below if you have resources that can help try and turn this around.
And yeah, I mean, you think that you've solved this problem for a while and it turns out like one generation removed From the horrors of creeping socialism and suddenly it's like, yeah, let's go socialist again.
And it really is quite tragic.
But as long as we still have a government at the center of society and propaganda at the center of university, it feels almost inevitable.
So keep me posted about how it's going.
I really, really do appreciate the update and stay safe, my friend.
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