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Feb. 20, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
41:26
STYX/MOLYNEUX: The Grim Farce of Modern Politics!
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom, back here with our good friend Sticks, Hex& Hammer 666.
I'll leave you to spell that out if you so dare.
Thanks for taking the time today. It's a spelling bee and thank you for having me on.
So, American politics, boy, there's really quite a lot to be talking about these days.
What are your initial thoughts as we head into, I guess, what seems like a long hot spring and summer and fall of campaigning up to November?
Well, the Iowa caucus is one of the best things that I've ever seen in my life, and I was extremely happy with the result.
And I think mostly Republicans or people who don't like at least the Democratic Party were very happy.
But it didn't really matter which Democrat you supported.
If you were a Democrat, you were sad.
And going into Nevada in a few days, they're using the same caucusing app.
So we're all hopeful that the same thing will happen there, and it'll be a freak show.
I know that sometimes there's this Dunning-Kruger effect where you say, well, it's got to be easier than it looks.
But I was a computer programmer for many years, and counting votes does not appear to be trying to develop some sort of Terminator AI that's going to solve the riddle of how to cure cancer.
It just seems like count some stuff and give some results.
The fact that it got so weirdly opaque and so scrambled and so messy does seem to indicate that...
These aren't the kind of butchers who don't want any fingers on the scales.
Yeah, I literally have no idea how they screwed it up either, because it wasn't a huge amount of people voting.
It's not like they had to deal with millions and millions of people flooding an app or anything like that.
We're talking in some cases, some of these municipalities, a few thousand people.
So do you think the relationship between the people who developed it and some of these senior people at the DNC, do you think that played in?
I think it may have. I don't think that Booty Judge having a connection to the app developer was actually that important.
Because if we look, the sort of margin that we saw in Iowa is similar kind of to New Hampshire.
He outperformed.
He almost managed to beat Bernie Sanders in a state that I've I've referred to as Bernie Sanders' de facto second home state.
It's right across from Vermont.
We can get into that a little bit if you'd like.
Right across the Connecticut River.
In Iowa, he's just a little bit ahead, and New Hampshire a little bit behind.
That doesn't seem suspicious, but then we find that Hillary Clinton's people were involved with this, what is it, Shadow Incorporated, which is about the most ominously titled thing you could possibly imagine.
It's like some villainous corporation out of a video game, and they've sort of come to fruition in this particular situation.
And I, you know, I wish that there was better, I wish there were better candidates coming out for the Democrats, because...
I mean, I think you and I both know as clear as day that the worse the candidates are, the more suppression there's going to be on social media.
And, you know, whether it's going to be Bloomberg or someone else, we can sort of get into that.
But I wish they had somebody who was not making constant gaffes.
Somebody, I don't know, whose direct family was not horribly involved in corrupt stuff in Ukraine.
Somebody who could remember which state they were in.
You know, just that kind of stuff.
It would be really, really cool because if they felt more confident in their candidates, they wouldn't need to be coming after us.
Well, the other thing is, it would be nice because if you're not a Republican, I mean, in the U.S. political sense, in the partisan sense, you don't want Trump to get complacent.
That's the worst possible thing that can happen.
He might get lazy and fail.
He might start doing dumb things that he shouldn't be doing.
He might forget about who elected him and not look out for his constituents.
It's easy in that position, I think, to get complacent, especially Trump's not a normal person.
He's used to the cutthroat Cutthroat boardroom thing.
So he's used to the extreme work that goes into it and all of that.
That's normal for him anyway.
My worry is that if there's no real challenge in the election, Trump wins, which I think will happen.
I give him a 90% chance at least he gets complacent.
I wish the Democrats honestly, they should have just pestered Jimmy Carter to run.
He would have been a better candidate.
And he's in his 90s, I think now.
Well, so this is the funny thing.
I don't share your optimism regarding the – whether it's optimism or not.
I don't share the prediction about 90 percent because, yeah, you could say, well, you know, the economy, although a bit of a Fed-inflated bubble is doing fairly well and – I don't know.
The 2016 victory took them so much by surprise.
And I think that there's a lot of vowing deep down in their soulless gullets that there's no way they're going to let that happen again.
And whether that means voter intimidation, whether that means a massive money bomb drop, whether that means, you know, the famous zombie undead 160-year-old voters mysteriously resurrecting and putting their leprous fingers on the D on the ballot.
I think that in a sort of sane universe, which we don't seem to be living in these days, Trump would be fairly assured.
But I don't think they're going to take it lying down even if they don't have any good candidates.
There's lots of other ways you can try and get in.
Well, I think that there'll definitely be some shenanigans going on.
But I go back to that same schism that helped to defeat the Democrats in 2016, where Hillary Clinton, she wasn't well liked by sort of the younger left wing voters because she's boring.
She's old. She's a neoliberal.
Her husband had already been in office for two terms, and they're like, Clinton, who's that?
They just remembered him as sort of the person who comes before W, I think, some of the millennials.
This time around, though, the race is packed, and these people are destroying one another, and Trump, I think, is flabbergasted, actually, at this point.
If I was him, I would be surprised at how inept the Democrats really have been, because I'm looking at a situation where, if Bernie is the nominee, and that's possible, and I think you might agree with that.
I'm not sure about your feelings on that.
He alienates the business Democrats.
If he's not the nominee, though, he's got at least 5-10% of the party that is extremely gung-ho for him, and whoever the nominee is gets all that Bloomberg money.
I don't think he'll—he might even be pressured not to endorse, which could cause an absolute catastrophe for the Democrats.
Okay, so let's talk the Bernie thing, because I'm a smidge older than you, and the idea that if Bernie Sanders gets the nomination, that you have Trump, an outright anti-communist, and, in my view, an outright communist going up head-to-head.
I mean, in some ways, that's a very exciting match.
In some ways, the fact that he would get so far as kind of the end of the republic.
I mean, this guy who honeymooned in the Soviet Union, who's a big fan of Castro, who, you know, like, straight up, you know, you can tell me democratic socialist all you want.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it.
That's a whole lot of makeup on a rotting old corpse.
And I... I don't know.
It's just wild. I get the frustration of the young people.
Like, I really do. They are being treated as tax slaves, as serfs.
They're not doing as well and probably won't live as long as their parents.
And the system is not working for them at all.
And a lot of them got lied into these mountainous student loan debts for I think degrees that left them worse off than if they'd never gone to school.
Because if you hadn't gone to school, you wouldn't end up hating the market that you have to enter into to try and get the money to pay off these usurious and fraudulent student loans.
But boy, you know, I mean, I guess Trump probably looks like an extremist to the centrist.
So does Bernie.
And we've gotten to such a or America has gotten to such an extreme place that there aren't going to be any moderate solutions going forward.
Well, Trump can almost break even anyway while being perceived of as extreme control.
But the Democrats are having trouble even with a moderate candidate in 2016.
They had difficulty.
This time around, I think if they nominate Bernie Sanders, they're insane.
Because what I think has happened is the Overton window has shifted, but only for the Democrats.
And so they're looking at a situation where Bernie to them is normalized, but only a few years prior, independents heavily would have broken against him if he had been nominated.
I think that'll happen anyway.
I don't think any other group within the country has really shifted the same way the Democrats have, and so what's happened is Sanders managed to drag the party's umbrella, as you will, a little bit further to the left so that it covered him.
Other people that were even further left realized it was possible, did the same thing, and Pelosi had to appease these people or risk alienating this youth vote, especially before the midterms, but now she's in a pickle.
Because I don't even think they wanted Sanders to run.
But when they realized what had happened, they could no longer stop him, at least without looking so corrupt that they would invite failure anyway, because then all of his supporters would flee the party and they would, I don't know, they'd vote for Jill Stein or maybe try to push Sanders to run as an independent.
But Trump's not a fanatic.
And I think at the end of the day, the average American voter in the independent sort of core, someone who's less partisan or nonpartisan, you know, in any sense, or center-right or whatever, I think they'll all break heavily for Trump.
Well, and the DNC doesn't seem to have the same zest for corruption that they had under Clinton.
Like, with Clinton, it seemed to be like this voodoo, artistic...
Baryshnikov-style dance routine focus on corruption, like it was just something that they loved, they enjoyed, it was a deep, pleasurable, old-world sport for them.
They're kind of going through the motions at the moment of being corrupt, but they just can't seem to commit in the way that they could under Clinton.
That's why I think Bloomberg's in the race.
I think Bloomberg is sort of the ace up the sleeve of the DNC, and I think, I really do honestly think they want to stop Sanders, but I don't see it even as...
It is being rooted in some deeper corruption.
I think as a party, they want money, which is, I mean, that's corrupt anyway.
Let's face it. The GOP is basically the same.
But if they want to win and get all of that money, all that wonderful donor cash and stuff, they can't have an avowedly socialist candidate who corporations at least have to visibly distance themselves from.
I mean, the dude's pushing 79 years old.
He'd be almost 80 years old on election day.
He's had heart problems.
It's a recipe for disaster.
And honestly, I don't know if he'll make it to the general anyway.
There's always the chance that he has a major health issue and is forced to drop out.
Biden could have the same thing.
He's got dementia. He couldn't even remember when he was in New Hampshire.
He thought he was in Vermont. Well, I mean, Bloomberg's talking about the possibility, I guess.
I don't know exactly who leaked it to the legacy media, but the idea of a Michael Bloomberg Hillary Clinton ticket, it'd be like going to heaven if that were to actually happen.
I hope it actually does.
I hope he becomes nominee, because, I mean, he'll piss the Bernie fans off.
That's good. He loses, number two, obviously.
That's good. He dumps money all over everything like a crazy man.
And then Hillary Clinton has to lose again, but she's not even the nominee.
She's just the running mate.
That'd be so great. You know, it's funny.
And I get all of the problems that Bloomberg represents.
But I gotta tell you, I kind of like him being in the race.
I think it's got a kind of frankness to it and a kind of honesty to it, you know, because there's no longer any smoke and mirrors.
It's just like, you know what? I'm just going to open up the bomb bays of cash, rain silver on everyone, and completely pave my way with gold to the presidency.
Like, there's none of this, well, you know, what about a super PAC and...
You know, there's a certain amount of influence.
It's just like, boom, straight up, fire hose of cash on everyone, and that will give me four extra inches of height and a dollop of charisma that I don't have.
And that's just straight up.
To me, it's like, you know, I'm not pretending to have a girlfriend and impress her with a car.
I'm just going to go buy a hooker for the weekend, you know?
It's just... It's just a straight up cash transaction.
There's no romance.
There's no pretense.
It's just, you know, hey, I'm rich and I can buy everything.
I mean, I just, we all know that that's how it works, but now it's just, you know, the mask is off and it's just straight in your face and it's almost refreshing in a way.
It exposes the lowered expectations of the liberals as well at some point.
I think he spent $350 million or some insane amount just on the Super Tuesday states.
He's not even on the ballot, I think, in Nevada.
I think If I remember correctly, in South Carolina, he might be on it, but I don't think he really cares.
I think he's focused single-mindedly on the Super Tuesday states.
Imagine a scenario where Biden and Booty Judge, who are basically the frontrunners, tied right now.
They go into Super Tuesday.
They've won collectively all four of the beginning states.
Other people start dropping like flies, but out of nowhere, Bloomberg manages to buy his way into the nomination anyway.
Can you imagine the schism within the Democratic Party?
It would be legendary. It'd make It'd make the antebellum period look tame by comparison.
Well, that's the beauty of it, of course, that the people who are very much against the oligarchy, very much against Wall Street and bailouts and hyper-financial post-free market capitalism that they might have as the ornament on the hood of their Rolls-Royce of power, Michael Bloomberg, of all people.
And I mean, the stuff that's coming out about this guy from from back in the day is is really, really quite something.
I'm going to let's just run through one or two of these.
I sort of picked them up before the show.
And we'll just sort of comment on this because this is quite something.
Some of it kind of amusing, some of it not not so amusing.
So in 2011, while promoting a new program, Bloomberg said that there was an enormous cohort of young black and Latino men that, quote, don't know how to behave in the workplace where they have to work collaboratively and collectively.
Woo.
Just sounds like a normal Democrat to me.
Sounds like a Crookshank era, 1870s Southern Democrat.
Yeah, or the Ralph Northam kind of situation, right?
That is something else.
He has proposed cuts to Social Security and Medicare, which is, of course, something Trump didn't do at all.
And the allegations that have gone on in his firm with women who got pregnant, this one woman alleges in a lawsuit that Bloomberg said once she got pregnant, she said, kill it.
I mean, boy, that is some...
I mean, you wouldn't put that in Michael Douglas's tongue, in Gordon Gekko's tongue, in the old movie Wall Street, because it'd be like, oh, come on, he's not Satan.
The best part is this sounds...
If you were to take that out of context, you could easily get 90% or more of all the Bernie fans and stuff to believe that those were Trump quotes.
If you were to present it to them, you'd say, did you hear what Donald Trump said back in 2011?
He told an employee to abort her child or something like that.
They'd say, oh my God, it's so terrible.
And then you'd have to tell them, no, it's actually Michael Bloomberg, one of the Democratic frontrunners.
And they wouldn't even believe that the cognitive dissonance would kick in.
And they've done experiments like that with fake quotes from Trump.
And it's always hilarious.
Somebody needs to do that.
Well, back in the day when he was New York, he said that if golf fairways would suffer if illegal immigrants were returned to their native country, quote, you and I are beneficiaries of those jobs.
You and I both play golf.
Who takes care of the greens and the fairways in your golf course?
Now, boy, I mean, this guy, it's like if you took a caricature of the Monopoly baron, you know, with the monocle and The Robert Barron stereotype and you ran $40,000 worth of amoral electrical currents through him and animated him as a statue of gold.
You wouldn't expect more cliché things to come out of the man's mouth.
Who's going to take care of our golf?
Golf resorts if there's no illegal immigration.
Oh, man. I mean, that is astounding.
He needs to be cast as Scrooge in the next Christmas Carol, only this time Scrooge never repents.
Just doubles down.
Oh, boy. The spend, what has he got now?
Ad spending to date, Sanders, $42 million.
40 for Buttigieg, Warren 2 million, Biden 12 million, Klobuchar 11 million, Bloomberg 418 million dollars.
I mean, the man is committed.
And I guess if what is he making a billion dollars a year just in interest or something like that.
So it's still somewhat spare change that he finds under the golden throne of his couch.
But it is really a an acid test just to see if you can buy your way upstairs.
At some point, though, I've got to believe that this is going to hurt the Democrats, whether he's nominee or not.
I mean, I wouldn't even take him seriously if he were nominated, because I can't imagine the liberals rallying behind him in any way, shape or form.
Oh, they'll rally if he's got a path to the White House.
I mean, they're like a bunch of amoral scum to begin with.
I don't know if all of them would.
I think some of them literally at that point would like be, you know, tying the noose.
Right. Okay, so this thing with the farmers too.
I mean, boy, talk about your out of touch Wall Street financier thinking about farming, right?
So, you know, how to alienate the Midwest and all of that.
So Bloomberg said, I could teach anybody, even people in this room.
No offense intended to be a farmer.
Yeah. I think that's hilarious.
Even you idiots, I could teach you people.
No offense intended.
It's like, dude, you can't really walk that back.
He says, farming, it's a process.
You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn.
You can learn that.
I want to hire him to stand in my garden for 10 minutes.
He'd probably be even a bad scarecrow.
Well, actually, no. With his windbreaker, he'd put a lot of CO2 into the plants.
All the neighbors would run off.
But that's really wonderful because, of course, farming is highly technological, highly...
I mean, as I tweeted, like, ask South Africans how easy it is to farm in that environment.
It's pretty bad.
So after insulting people who are farmers with just saying it's a simple...
It's like saying, hey, just write a best-selling novel.
You've got... You just put your fingers on the keys, man.
Just type whatever, right?
I mean, it's, you know, a little bit more to it than that.
Then he says, then we had 300 years of the industrial society.
You put a piece of metal on the lathe, you turn the crank in the direction of the arrow...
And you can have a job.
Wow. I mean, it's just amazing.
This lofty, hoity-toity, let-them-eat-cake, aristocratic, down-the-nose look at all of the people who produce food and actually build things and so on.
It's like, you know, you're just moving a bunch of digital crap around and making money usually off the suffering of others.
But no, it's people who are actually growing food who are the idiots.
Well, I guess they are if they're not making that much.
I'm wondering how he's in third place, basically, nationwide, I think.
I'm wondering where his supporters are, because I've never met one, I've never heard of one.
I mean, what demographic does he even possibly appeal to?
Well, I'm pretty sure he would appeal to anyone who's selling ads.
I think that's his entire base.
On a slightly more serious note, of course, you know, he raised millions for the 2004 Republican Convention and was an opening day speaker.
He supported the Iraq War and the re-election.
George W. Bush.
Now that, of course, to me, is a very, very serious deal.
Making fun of farmers while gorsh and tasteless doesn't actually cause the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
But to me, anybody who was positively involved in the prosecution of that war is straight up disgorged from hell through some sort of hole of the time-space dimension.
And that, especially now, like back in the day, that wasn't as bad.
But now, That America has gotten so kind of war-weary that even mention of it causes people to roll their eyes and half fall asleep in despair.
I think it's a pretty heavy millstone around his neck at the moment.
Yeah, I mean, they were crucifying Trump for maintaining the true presence in several countries.
I'm willing to call him out for that as well.
But Michael Bloomberg, I mean, he was almost as big a warmonger as Hillary Clinton.
Yes. And also, of course, there is the whole stop and frisk expedition that he has been justifying.
He has been talking about how you have to start denying health care to elderly people in order to save the health care system, although I don't think he included Ruth Bader Ginsburg in that.
And here, during Bloomberg's three-term tenure as mayor of New York, the NYPD worked with the CIA to deploy teams of undercover agents known as rakers into Muslim neighborhoods to gather information.
And of course, after this fairly unconstitutional surveillance, they got no actionable piece of intelligence whatsoever.
So it's pretty rough all around.
And what I find fascinating is, well, first of all, the media's had this stuff for a long time and haven't gone after him.
And if you and I were to, even by accident, spill one-tenth of one percent of this kind of stuff into the airwaves, I mean, there'd be smoking craters where our little webcam studios would be.
But this guy, again, just racing high above the stratosphere of that which the media goes after is really something.
And the stuff that's coming out right now is coming out so fast and furious one, I guess, can only assume that he's putting it out to get it all behind him and, you know, creak up with that, oh, this is already old news by now kind of thing when November rolls around.
Well, yeah. I mean, he is a media mogul.
He literally is Bloomberg.
He's already instructed his people not to run anything negative about him and about, I think, certain other Democrats, if I remember correctly.
Now... He's nuts. The...
I can never remember how to pronounce this woman.
Gislaine Maxwell.
So, yeah, he's got pictures with Jeffrey, I guess the late Jeffrey Epstein's girlfriend and alleged madam.
His name is in Epstein's little black book.
That's some pretty sinister stuff.
There as well. And although, of course, the Epstein thing kind of crested and then vanished in some fairly bad jokes, that is some very, very dark stuff that floats around Jeffrey Epstein.
And I have significant concerns about anybody who's in that black book.
You mean the man who didn't kill himself?
Yeah. Yeah, that guy. Yeah, I mean, but all of these people, I think, sort of went to the same parties.
We can't necessarily determine that he was involved in anything perverted, but it should be explained.
But it never will be because there are too many rich and famous people that were on Epstein's Island.
So we're never going to know sort of the who's who's list, who was just there for cupcakes and who was there for pizza.
Well, and that's something that I just noticed to sort of wrench the wheel a little bit here.
The Theranos woman, Elizabeth Holmes, they've started to restrict the case against her and start to narrow it down.
And of course, given the number of people who were on Her board, some very, very powerful high-up people were on her board.
I've got a feeling that it's going to be kind of tough to go after her as well because that's a rabbit hole that leads to a whole bunch of powerful people's offices as well.
And I've got a feeling she's going to skate because too many people would be implicated in that kind of fraud.
Yeah, there's an old saying that the law is like a spider's web.
The flies get caught and the wasps go free.
And I think that definitely applies in the case of the Epsteins and the Weinsteins of the world.
Well, in the Andrew McCabe's, you know, this, they're not going to prosecute this guy for the falsehoods.
falsehoods.
Well, this, you know, this is to me enormously dangerous.
When people lose faith, as they have, in the law and order matrix of the republic, then it just becomes a game of cat and mouse.
Like if you don't have any respect for the law, if you don't have this fantasy Joe Friday homicide, just the facts, G-man kind of positive outlook.
And it takes a long time to lose Republican respect for law and order, but I think they've managed to pull it off.
And now you just look at this viper smoke squid swamp that's just constantly protecting itself and attacking anyone who disturbs its vile nest.
Now it's just, okay, well, the law is meaningless.
It is a tool of the rich and powerful to destroy their enemies.
And there's no justice, no objective morality.
Well, once you lose that magic connection that people have, that triangulation of choice, virtue and law, you know, one of those gets away and the law very quickly becomes inoperable because it can only operate in any productive manner when the majority of people believe in its virtue.
You take that away and things get very bad very quickly.
Yeah, and the problem is that it seems impossible at the moment to reform it.
Like, Trump, for all of his strengths, and I do generally support him, has done relatively little in regards to reforming that situation.
He's been focusing much more on economic populism, which is great, but then there's this other thing that he's completely ignoring along with tech censorship and things related to it.
It almost begs the question, would we need the Democratic Party to lose in a spectacular fashion, crash and burn and, I don't know, reform themselves into like a party of JFK thing in order to actually get somebody elected who can do the other side of the reforms that we need?
If we've got immigration and the economy, those are taken care of while we still have this whole other issue that basically hasn't been tackled at all.
And it seems like Barr's been hamstrung.
He hasn't really been doing anything.
Well, there is, of course, the case that Barr is just another swamp creature that's protecting his own.
And there's those funny connections, right?
Those funny connections. Wasn't Barr's father somebody who taught at the school that hired Jeffrey Epstein?
And like there's all of these funny little lift-the-lid subterranean connections that just really seem to stretch the credulity of coincidence after a while.
Yeah, but if we mention it too much, we're conspiracy theorists.
Noting that it's odd, noting that there's something strange going on, you're too smart for your own good at some point, I think.
What do you think is the hesitation that Trump has regarding the question of censorship on social media?
Honestly, I think it's because he's ignorant of social media.
And let me qualify that.
He really knows how to make a good tweet, but he doesn't know anything about the inner workings of content creation and these other things.
Because, I mean, that's not his forte.
That's why Don Jr.
has been doing basically everything regarding it.
And it's like I was speaking with Alex Jones, and I pointed that out, and he pointed out, we don't want a bone to be thrown to us.
We want actual action.
I can almost, though, understand why Trump himself would almost be unable to do that, because he simply doesn't know that much about that side of the Internet.
He doesn't even, I think, to this day, own a personal computer.
Well, I mean, I know that he's been pretty loath to adopt anything like email, which I can certainly understand after you get a bunch of lawsuits wending its way through the upper classes that people get taken down for some email from seven years ago.
I can understand why you wouldn't want to do that, but I mean...
You don't have to be an expert in everything.
If you've got good advisors and a common, you know, a good head on your shoulders, which I think he does, then you would, of course, have people say, well, you know, the tech companies have this pretty sweet immunity deal, provided they remain neutral and questions are arising around their neutrality.
I don't think it would take a lot to get the shareholders kind of goosed about maintaining the value of these companies because, of course, if they lose that immunity, their business model becomes inoperable in about nine nanoseconds.
Yeah, and much as I would like to trust the plan and hope that he's just biding his time and gathering more info for a massive lawsuit against Silicon Valley, I don't think it's happening.
I would say, though, there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
We've even got Mark Zuckerberg lately pushing back just a little bit, you may have noticed, against the new censorship of Silicon Valley, and he's gotten flack for it.
I haven't heard that.
What's he been talking about? Facebook has declined to police some of the political content on site related to the election With regards, I believe, to political ads.
And then Jack Dorsey's wandered off.
He's, I think, still taking his sabbatical in Africa.
Meanwhile, Twitter crashes and burns.
So that might be a good sign.
Who knows? Well, so this is an odd thing, too.
Let's sort of jump back into the Sanders thing, because, I mean, I try not to get too shocked these days.
I consider shock to be a lack of preparation for the inevitable these days.
days.
But some of the stuff that came out of Project Veritas, James O'Keefe's robust and powerful organization regarding the Bernie Sanders supporters and their affection for all things Stalin and Gulag related and the re-education camps and they had conjugal visits in state-run prisons for bad thinkers James O'Keefe's robust and powerful organization regarding the Bernie Sanders supporters and their I mean, it's like, I mean, I think these guys are still employed.
There's been no disavowal.
It's just kind of vanished.
And my gosh, I mean, if you can, and it's sort of a boring and useless game by now, but I'll give myself just one more indulgence because you sort of think, okay, let's say someone on the right, so to speak, or at least somebody not on the left was saying positive things about concentration camps in Nazi Germany.
*bzzz* I mean, the world would draw to a gradual, immediate, sudden, savage and inflammatory mushroom cloud of bye-bye to whatever you are saying online.
And this stuff, man, I mean, it just, it comes and it goes.
And, you know, the only punishment that I've seen is what James O'Keefe is off Twitter at the moment.
And that's as far as it's gone.
That is really, it really tells you where the power is, where the concentrated authority is, and where the communists are hiding out.
Yeah. Well, I mean, the thing is, it's not a surprise that people that are more communistic would support Bernie Sanders.
That's, you know, neither here nor there because it was obviously going to happen.
I think the one good thing that Veritas managed to accomplish there, though, is that there are people that are sort of on the fence and otherwise might be taken in by Bernie Sanders' economic snake oil because he seems like a harmless, ice cream-loving old dude.
And really, he's got all of these completely violent fans.
He surrounds himself with people who are paid on his campaign, and they kept trying to say that these were volunteers who are constantly talking like this, like, you know, we're just going to put Trump fans in the salt mine or in the rock quarry or something when we get elected.
I think that that does help with people who otherwise might take him seriously.
I think that can push them over into the other camp of either not voting, potentially, because they're just like, screw it, Or they end up supporting Trump out of necessity or within the Dem primaries, potentially a different candidate.
What are your thoughts on cross-aisle, friendshipy kinds of things?
It sounds like a bit of an odd question, but a study came out pretty recently that said that only 3% of liberals would be a big fan of being friends with a conservative or a Republican.
And a significantly greater proportion of Republicans would be fine being friends with a liberal.
And, you know, when you see the stuff coming out of the Bernie Sanders campaign, and yeah, you can say, well, that's, you know, a couple of bad apples, isolated, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But the lack of disavowal and the lack of follow-up means that people think it's a lot more widespread than it is, and it might be.
So my argument sort of many years ago is, you know, a lot of these people, like, they're not kidding.
They do want you thrown in camps.
They might want you lined up against the wall.
You know, when people show up for events that I was at and said, enough of a red pill, how about a lead pill?
You know, they're not really kidding.
And the idea of befriending the enemy, it's, you know, maybe it's a bit too Christ-like for me or something like that.
But the fact that the left does view with great hostility the people who are anti-left, but the right seems much more open and accommodating and friendly and one could say perhaps lambs to the slaughter, inclusive.
Where do you stand with political opponents and personal relationships?
Well, I don't really care what a person's politics are.
I judge people as an individual, which can be a naive quality, admittedly, in some cases.
And so I don't really, like, say a person is a Bernie Sanders fan and have a problem with them.
But if they were to talk like that, certainly I'd choose not to be friends with people who are generally given over to psychopathic tendencies.
And I think that the average person who endorses communism would fall under that umbrella because you have to have something wrong with you to think that that's a working system or a moral one.
Bernie Sanders himself goes to great lengths to even...
I've constantly tried to gaslight people, and I've noticed his fans do this too, like with Sanders, and you've probably noticed this.
If you say, well, you're a socialist, you say, yes, I'm a democratic socialist.
There's a difference. I don't want to be like Maduro.
And then his fans, in some cases, will actually go further.
And the more strategically minded people on Twitter, who have hammer and sickle avatars usually, will say stuff like, he's not actually a socialist, he's a social democrat.
And you can point out to them Bernie Sanders saying that he's a socialist, and they say, oh yeah, that's just what he says, but he's actually a social democrat because X, Y, and Z, and it becomes very, very funny.
But he does want to remake and reshape the U.S. economy in favor of central planning.
That's pretty much front and center in a lot of what he plans.
Yeah, and I mean, the thing is, these people think that he's actually going to be able to, number one, get the other Dems to go along with it, which I don't think, honestly, I think he'd be a lame duck on day one if he were elected.
I don't fear that, per se.
Number two, that it would actually work for the people who would vote him into power, which is the lower classes.
All it would do is end up equalizing them and make 90% of the population poor.
Which seems to be enough for the envy-driven class warfare that characterizes a lot of leftist thinking.
I can't have you. No one will.
And that includes dollars as well as significant others, I suppose, from time to time as well.
So how do you feel going into this?
I guess, I mean, it's an election year, an election cycle and all of that.
How do you feel with regards to your output and security?
Are you like checking yourself every morning?
Am I still on? I mean, how is it going for you?
Oh, I feel fine about it because at this point I've branched out into alt-tech so much that mainline censorship no longer really has any relevance to my life.
I don't even think about it.
And I think you've definitely done so as well.
I believe you're on Library as well as BitChute, if I remember correctly.
Yeah, now I've got a bunch of different irons in the fire.
Exactly. And that's what more content creators need to be like that.
They need to take it seriously because you could see the purging of independent content.
It doesn't even have to be centralized.
It can just be a group of people who happen to be reasonably tech literate, decide to get together with a bunch of bots and harass you off of YouTube.
You may get your account back, but it can take them three or four days.
What if something critical, you're a live streamer, something critical happens in that period of time?
It'd be crazy not to have an alt-tech presence.
BitChute, Library, Brighteon, all of these other sites, even if you're going back to older sites, I've got a Dailymotion account.
I actually use it on a day-to-day basis.
It's just another platform I exist on.
Let's close off with the coronavirus.
I know you've been doing a lot of work on that.
I know that this Paper.
It's a pre-publication paper.
Of course, we should take it with all the grains of salt that characterize Utah, but...
Do you think this argument that they've made that there are significant indications about the bioweapon source that it got out of the Wuhan facility and so on, do you take that seriously?
Where do you think, I mean, we may never find out, we probably never will, but that does seem to be the latest research that's coming out of it.
I think it was a Chinese university that produced this argument.
Where do you sit on source arguments at the moment for the coronavirus?
For the most part, I'm willing to entertain the idea that it was the result of a viral leak from a lab.
Here's what I would say, though.
It almost doesn't matter what the origin is.
We simply have to look at it for what it really is.
In and of itself, we can prove the following.
It's infected over 72,000 people.
It's killed almost 2,000.
It's in multiple countries.
It has multiple significant epicenters now in China with 0% containment.
And the Chinese government was at the very least caught with its pants down and is now underestimating cases.
And that's the best case scenario.
It could be a bioweapon and there could be half a million people out there that are sick and they simply haven't even been tallied because we're talking about a country where We're good to go.
They're afraid of having their door welded shut at this point.
Their disinfection has done absolutely nothing, it seems.
In Wuhan, you still have, what, 1,500, 2,000 new cases a day just in this one metropolitan district.
I think it'll spread. I think it's likely to become a world pandemic, and I've encouraged people to take basic preparatory steps because of that.
Yeah, it is one of these black swan events that just kind of comes crashing into the new decade that is really upsetting everyone's plans.
I mean, the effect on the world economy, the effect on local morale and the long term effect, I think, on people's respect for the Chinese government.
Because there has been this deal that I talked about.
I did this documentary not too long ago called Hong Kong Fight for Freedom.
And I talked with the guy who founded their basic law, their constitution.
And he said the kind of the deal has been, okay, well, we won't get that many civil liberties, but at least we can go make money.
And if there is now this perception that the government is so mismanaged and corrupt that it would allow for the spread of this kind of illness without enough preparation and forewarning, and of course if it does turn out that it did come from a lab that's even worse, then there is that fundamental break in people's trust with the government and that, now that it's also spread into North Korea, who knows what might come out of that, but that really does shake people's faith.
When you see a government response too late and too harsh to something that the government could have prevented or at least ameliorated pretty early and easily, that does reshape people's relationship with the state considerably.
And I think you had pointed out actually not long ago in a video that it could harm the Chinese economy to a drastic degree and I happen to agree with you.
I think that's a perfect point to make.
The Chinese economy already has problems with slowing growth.
And to have investors leaving, that's like the silver bullet for their economy.
Investors are starting to leave.
Burger King just closed up shop indefinitely.
They're not sure when they're going to reopen.
They're not employing anyone at the moment.
They're all on furlough.
They're not making any money.
How many employees does Burger King have in China?
It's got to be in the tens of thousands.
I'm talking many, many locations.
And then there's all the secondary stuff.
The truckers aren't getting the shipments to send in, even if they could get around the quarantine.
Things have fundamentally stopped for several entire provinces in China now for the better part of a month.
Zero economic output because nobody can even do anything.
It is going to be remarkable to see how that plays out in China and also how it plays out in the West.
I mean, people are getting pretty tired of this, you know, old communist technique of calling everyone a racist and a Nazi and so on.
But I think when it comes to things like a potentially deadly infection saying, well, we don't want to be called racist, so we're going to not do as much as we could to stop the spread of this illness.
Hopefully that's going to be another one of these slow nails in the coffin of this vastly overused and destructive, Well,
it's helping facilitate the spread of a potentially deadly disease, it seems a bit more serious.
Yeah, and so far I've managed to hold off encouraging my fans to try to get leftists to lick doorknobs in order to fight xenophobia or something, so I guess that's a good day.
Right. Well, listen, thanks a lot for your talk and your time today.
I really, really appreciate it. Enjoy your show and recommend it to others.
Can you just tell my listeners, I'm sure most of them are aware of who you are, but just in case, how to find you, where to find you, we'll put links to it all below.
Yeah, I'm StyxHexandHammer666 on BitChute and on YouTube, and you can find me at my website, tarlwarwick.net.
That's probably just as hard to spell.
Well, we'll put links to it below.
Thanks, man. It was really a great chat.
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