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May 25, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
55:01
"Trump's Chances in 2020!" Stefan Molyneux Interviewed by Paul Duddridge
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Welcome to the politics people.
Big treat today. We're talking to perhaps the instigator of the entire influence movement.
He's already laughing. I want to welcome, I can't believe he's agreed to do this, Stefan Molyneux.
Thank you so much for coming on today.
Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
This show is all about the...
I'm not so bothered about the topics and the politics, but I just want to sit back and just...
I would say it's not a topic I particularly focus on.
I mean, it's great that it happens if it happens, but, you know, my sort of focus is, you know, just moving that Overton window, chiseling in, reason facts and evidence into the public discourse as best I can, and to some degree to help with the consequences.
So, yeah, I mean, it's you raise up your flag and you see who salutes, as the old saying goes.
I try not to sort of think, oh, who's going to listen to this and what decisions are they going to make?
And, you know, I just really, really focus on the truth that I think is the most important.
Well, it's this factor, right?
The truth that is the most important, that is the least discussed, that seems to be where the sweet spot is for what goes on in the world or what needs to.
Oh, exactly. I mean, talking to a lot of you guys, I don't want to lump you all together, but I'm talking to left and right conservatives and radicals, all sorts, you know, from all parts of the spectrum.
And it's how little...
They commonly realise the amount of effect they have on politics or the public discourse.
I mean, this really did To me, anyway, surprised me because if you were in show business, you'd be rabid about this stuff.
If it was a bikini line or if you were trying to sell some sort of organic soft drink or something via Instagram, it would totally live in the metrics of the Instagrams and stuff.
But you guys have sort of bubbled up from nowhere, in my estimation, smashed it with social media.
And I'm now basically running most of the Western world.
Well, that's a very kind thing to say.
I don't know how far I'd go with that.
But it sort of reminds me of Huey Lewis, if you remember the old 80s.
I guess he's really old now, and he kind of blew out his hearing one year after the other.
But Huey Lewis kind of burst on the scene out of nowhere.
And I remember seeing an interview with him many, many years ago where he said, Yeah, I'm your typical 10-year overnight success.
Which is, you know, people have been grinding away a lot in obscurity, and then poof!
You know, it's like the Beatles doing Hamburg for two years and then, hey, look, they're really good musicians.
It's like, well, yeah, because they were playing six hours a day for like two years, right?
And so for me, I got into philosophy when I was in my mid-teens.
Now, I'm close to my mid-50s now, so we're talking four decades now.
15 years ago, I started doing it publicly, but that was after I had more than 20 years of experience, not just reading and debating and discussing.
I was a top debater in Canada in my college days across the entire country.
And I'd written a whole bunch of books.
I'd written a whole manifesto.
I'd continually debated with people.
I'd gotten a graduate degree in the history of philosophy.
So, you know, when I appear sort of fully formed, you know, like some Greek god off a forehead, it's like, no, you just you didn't see all the prep.
That's all. Well, this is it.
You describe yourself as a philosopher.
Again, I'm looking around and I don't think there's any of your peers That describe themselves as such.
It's interesting that that's the skew that you've gone for.
You see yourself as a philosopher.
Well, here's a funny thing, right?
So let's get back to Taylor Swift.
Because my pop culture references will not stop over the course of this conversation.
We've had Huey Lewis and Taylor Swift.
Now we're going to Taylor Swift. So listen, have you ever heard or read about Taylor Swift being described as a self-described musician?
You wouldn't sit there.
You'd say, okay, is she a musician?
Yes. Why? Well, she writes songs, she plays guitar, she plays piano, she sings, she does concerts, so she is a musician.
And then people say, well, wait a minute.
She doesn't have a PhD in musicology from Juilliard.
Therefore, like you would never see that.
Rihanna, is she described as a self-described singer?
It's like, no, is she a singer?
It's an old Aristotle statement, which is, we are what we repeatedly do.
And so you will see me, people don't like the fact that I call myself a philosopher.
Now, why can I call myself a philosopher?
Well, I'm pretty well trained in the subject and in the discipline.
I have a graduate degree where I got a straight A at a very tough university, the University of Toronto.
But that's not why.
There are lots of people who could do that who wouldn't call themselves philosophers.
But why is Taylor Swift not a self-described musician, but a musician?
Because that's her job. Because that's what she does, and she also is a very successful one.
Now, as far as that goes, what do I do?
Well, I make arguments from first principles.
I write books on philosophy.
I talk about philosophy.
I've done reviews of major philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato, some of which go into four hours.
Long, I've written original works on the philosophy of ethics and epistemology and metaphysics.
I've got a whole book called Essential Philosophy, and that's kind of what I do.
So I'm trained in it. It's what I do.
It's how I make my living.
But it's like they can't talk about me as a philosopher.
Like, they just can't. He's a self-described philosopher.
He's a, quote, philosopher.
Like... It's so strange.
And then they say, well, you know, he's not really being taken seriously by academia.
Like these people don't even know the history of philosophy, that academia hated Socrates, academia hated Aristotle, academia hated Nietzsche and kicked him out.
Like the idea that academia, they study philosophers who would hate academia in general.
So the idea that that is somehow the cinquanon or the essence of what it is to be a philosopher, the approval of people who take their money usually by force from people through the power of the state, I'm a...
Far from not liking it, I think philosophy is a better description of what's going on in this social media political discourse.
What I find so incredible is that in the 21st century, philosophy, embodied by you and certain others, has actually become the hottest media on the internet.
It's like this is such a mid-20th century, dry subject.
Again, it's usually just the preserve of academia, as you're saying.
And their nose is out of joint because it has now been...
It's back with the people where it started, basically.
It's an exchange of ideas.
But I'm still interested in how you, 15 years ago, as you said, you set out on this.
You just started, you know, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but you obviously...
You took advantage of some kind of emerging platform and started espousing your philosophies.
Could you have had any idea how big your reach was going to get at that time?
Oh, absolutely I did.
I mean, you get the life you plan for.
Oh, I mean, absolutely.
I knew that I had the skills, talent, ability, work ethic and willpower.
To be huge, to be the biggest philosopher in terms of reach.
And come on, 700 million views and downloads.
And I don't say, oh, I'm the biggest philosopher in the modern context because I want to brag.
Again, false modesty is a form of hypocrisy.
I am the biggest and most influential philosopher in the modern world by numbers, by reach, by variety of topics, by influence on elections, by influence on people's lives, with my anti-spanking, anti-circumcision, peaceful parenting, UPB in ethics, my book on relationships and how to bring philosophy to relationships called Real-Time Relationships, my work on theology, my book on relationships and how to bring philosophy to relationships called Real-Time Relationships, my work on theology, my work on I mean, the breadth and width and depth of what it is that I do is almost without precedent.
And, you know, some of that is my abilities, of course, and some of that, again, is just a really wonderful audience that has been thirsting for philosophy.
And, yeah, you're right.
Philosophy is back to its roots, baby.
I mean, this is how it started. It started with, you know, Socrates and Diogenes and Plato and Aristotle.
In particular, Socrates, sort of one of my foundational role models, something that Nietzsche said, like every single philosopher has to wrestle with Socrates, right?
And Socrates' equation, reason equals virtue equals happiness, right?
If you're rational, then you can be virtuous.
If you're virtuous, that will make you happy in the long run.
That's the basic equation that I've been trying to work modern data and arguments through.
And Socrates, what did he do?
He wandered around town and he would say, hey, want to talk about virtue?
Hey, want to talk about justice?
Hey, want to talk about politics?
Hey, want to talk about love?
And this is what he did.
And what did people do?
They found him interesting to talk to.
Many people ran at him and the Socratic method kind of undid their assumption of virtue.
And they bought him lunch.
So, you know, people are all sort of, wow, you know, like you don't take any ads.
You don't have any sponsors.
You don't sell anything, really.
How do you make your money?
It's like, well, I talk about philosophy with people and then I ask them to buy me lunch if they want.
And, you know, some people, a small number, a small percentage of the total number of listeners decide, I think, to do the right thing and pay value for value.
And that's how it works.
So the idea that what I'm doing is something new in philosophy or something unprecedented, no, it's just Socrates on steroids.
And by that, I'm not trying to say I'm equal to or better than Socrates.
I'm not trying to say that. I'm just saying that the methodology of talking about reason and virtue and happiness and love and truth and courage and how society should be organized and the role of virtue in our individual lives is You talk about what matters to people.
I mean, when was the last time?
I remember thinking this years and years before I ever became a public philosopher.
I remember thinking about this.
Kind of funny. I was watching the news.
And you know, every time there's a crisis, what do they do on the news, right?
They say, we need an expert.
By God, we've got to get an expert in here.
And you know, you see this, the people who are great at pandemics, you talk to them about COVID, right?
The people who are, I don't know, experts in whatever, like the economics, they will talk about the economy and so on.
And it's like, we have an emergency.
We absolutely need an expert.
And I was sitting there every single day.
I would watch the news or read the newspaper.
I got to tell you, man, Not once.
Not even once.
Did I ever hear a newscaster say, wow, do we ever have an emergency here?
We've got to get ourselves a philosopher.
And I remember thinking, well, that's weird.
Because philosophy is like the big major discipline.
It's the discipline that encompasses all other disciplines.
It informs the scientific method and how you determine truth from falsehood in science.
It informs ethics and politics and personal life and all of that.
So it is the uber all-encompassing discipline.
And the second smartest people in the world by IQ are in philosophy.
Number one goes to physics and then number two goes to philosophy.
So this is supposed to be the discipline That helps people.
And you see more physicists on the news than you see philosophers, which is, if you've seen one philosopher, I mean, I guess I've been on the news occasionally, usually not very positively, but that's another repeat of the Socrates tale.
And I remember thinking, like, what the hell is wrong?
With philosophy and philosophers that nobody has that in case of emergency break glass and in there is a little guy in a toga, you know, that comes out and tells you how to organize your thoughts.
And I thought what a desperate shame that is.
And, you know, we pay thousands and thousands and thousands of people across the Western world hundreds of millions of dollars to be philosophers.
And we never use them at all.
Well, I guess we use them to keep people like me out of the public sphere, or at least we used to.
So I kind of broke through with the one-to-one communication of the Gutenberg press of the Internet.
But it's really, really sad.
How on earth can we possibly pay hundreds of millions of dollars to thousands and thousands of people to study and teach philosophy and never, ever call on them when we need them?
It is absolutely insane.
And I'm like, that has to change.
Oh, yeah.
Absolutely. I couldn't agree more.
But in your personal experience, or even professional experience with this, was there a turning point?
I mean, were you an overnight success the minute you start actually having a public platform?
Or was there any kind of topic that you seized on and that became a catalyst for your...
Because you're massive.
I mean, you are absolutely massive.
I'm surprised you didn't reply to me.
I'm always happy to talk philosophy, man.
So as far as inflection points of growth goes, so I started talking about some fairly abstract topics, but I was always personal.
I always wanted to talk about philosophy in my life because I don't like this idea of philosophy as an abstract discipline that doesn't allow people to make practical, tangible decisions to increase their happiness and power in their own personal life.
It's kind of weird. It's like studying...
To be a philosopher in the academic sense is like saying, I really, really want to cure diseases, so I'm going to study Klingon, and I'm going to study imaginary Klingon bodies, and imagine what a silicon-based life form would be like and figure out how to cure diseases in a silicon-based life form.
Yeah, I guess that might be okay as a semi-masturbatory retirement hobby, but how about you actually do some good in the world for people who are really ill?
And so I really wanted to talk about personal life and all of that.
So, you know, the show kind of trundled along, and I started while I was still an executive and entrepreneur in the software field for like 15 years before I got into this crazy gig, but I was in my car.
It's just... I would talk about thoughts and ideas and arguments I'd had over the years.
And then, you know, people would email me back and forth a little bit when they started to get big.
I published on some websites that were well-trafficked by libertarians and so on.
So I sort of got into conversations.
And I've always been really, really social.
I love people. I love chatting with people.
Like when I go and give speeches, I'll hang around for like four or five hours afterwards to chat with hundreds of people about philosophy.
It is a really great pleasure of mine.
And of course, a lot of people who are into abstracts are not so good with the social side.
So I kind of get that. But that comes out of, you know, I did a lot of social stuff in the business world.
I was presenting and training people and all that kind of stuff.
So the big thing happened, I think it was maybe...
A year or two after I went full-time, the media started to really go after me.
And I was like, oh, okay. That's kind of predictable in a way.
Because, you know, the same thing happened with Socrates, right?
He talks to people and philosophy starts to actually impact people's lives.
And philosophy gives you the strength to resist evil.
It gives you the strength to identify and resist evil.
Because I'm not just a head guy.
I'm a gut guy. Our head is for analyzing problems.
Our gut, and we have a second brain down there, is really powerful.
And our unconscious mind has been clocked at 8,000 times faster than our conscious mind.
And so we just have this consciousness, which is like this little...
Grain of sand on the top of a giant pyramid of evolution.
I sort of call it the post-Monty beta expansion pack that's still buggy as hell.
And so because I teach people to trust their instincts, to trust their anger, and to explore and harness the power of the subconscious mind, it gives people a great defense about evil.
Because a lot of modern thought, a lot of thought throughout history is talking people out of identifying evil, which is, you know, don't trust yourself.
Don't trust your instincts.
Trust those in authority.
Trust people who have power over you.
Trust, you know, trust the structure.
Trust the media.
Trust everyone else.
Let everyone else accept everything and everyone else accept your own instincts, which are incredibly powerful at detecting and protecting you from evil.
Anger and our gut is like the immune system of our moral body.
It identifies the intruders and it encapsulates and rejects them.
So I was really, really good because I talk about personal life and all of that.
Hey, you don't have to have abusive people in your life.
It doesn't matter if they're your husband, your wife, your siblings, your parents.
Like if they're relentlessly abusive and you can't talk your way into a better relationship, yeah, you don't have to spend time with them.
And that is arming people against evildoers and giving them something that can really empower them when it comes to philosophy.
You know, like there's all this, oh, do we have free will or determinism?
It's like, okay, that's an interesting abstract discussion, but people kind of got to live their lives as if we have free will.
Or are we living in a simulation, Descartes style?
And it's like, yeah, well, that's interesting, but we kind of got to get on with our life.
And I don't like the idea of philosophy as this little vacation home that you go to that has no relation to your everyday life.
So after I began talking about this kind of stuff, yeah, some people separated from some people that they had identified as evildoers and those, you know, people ran to the press, they ran to the newspapers, oh my god, this guy's running a cult and wrecking families for fun and profit and all this kind of stuff.
So I got some, you know, real, you know, they say there's no such thing as bad publicity or I don't care what you write about me, just make sure you spell my name right.
I was really testing the edges of that theory, to put it mildly.
So what I did was like, okay, this stuff, I, you know, maybe I've spent so much time in philosophy and reading about psychology and self-knowledge and virtue that's kind of It's kind of second nature to me.
You know, like if you're really fluent in Japanese and you just start speaking to Japanese, someone, oh, that's right, they don't speak Japanese.
Sorry, let me translate that for you.
So what I did, and this was the first big boost outside of the media attacks, the first big boost was like, okay, well, I've got to go start talking to experts, to professionals.
And so that's when I started going to talk to psychologists, to ethicists, to psychiatrists, and to people who'd written great books on self-knowledge.
And, you know, I love interviews.
I love chatting with people, as you can tell, perhaps a little too much at times.
But so I started to gather together.
You know, it's funny.
My father said, because he's a great big letter writer.
He died recently.
But he was a big letter writer.
And he said, I collect people the way some people collect postage stamps.
And I sort of in the same vein started collecting expertise.
Because what happens is if you...
This is just the nature of the world, right?
So if you advance an argument that people find shocking or appalling, then they will try to attack you.
But if you say, hey, I'm just the messenger.
Here's the experts.
Here's the data. Here's the presentations.
Here's the facts. Then it blunts the tip of their spear because you've got this armor of, you know, don't shoot the messenger stuff.
So that helped a huge amount.
Now, when I started to do a series called True News...
And I started going on news programs and doing more outside interviews and debates, and I started really dealing with current events.
The show took a big leap forward.
The Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman event and other sort of racial tension events, I did a pretty clear analysis which proved to be entirely correct legally and morally, I think.
Same thing, of course, is happening now with the McMichaels and Ahmaud Arbery.
So once I started dealing with current events, that helped a huge amount.
The Brexit was a big deal.
But Trump, of course, 2015, 2016, the series that I did, The Untruths About Donald Trump, it's just terrible.
I think it was the late writer, Michael Crichton, who said, when you're an expert in something and you see the media deal with it, You realize just how wrong they are.
It's like I worked in computers and I still do work in computers from time to time, but I was decades working with computers and programming.
So, of course, whenever a movie or the mainstream media would talk about computers and programming and so on, they're like, oh, man, they don't know their ass from a hole in the ground.
And so he pointed out, like, when you know something and then the media talks about it and you realize just how false they are about everything and how much they lie and distort and manipulate, and you realize that's just your area of expertise, then you've got to expand that and say, well, that's everything they talk about.
There is no clear motive to deliver the truth to the population for the mainstream media.
That is one of the reasons why there's such a market opportunity for people like you, for people like me, because they're not in the business of delivering news to customers.
They're not in the business of delivering entertainment to customers.
They are in the business of delivering customers to advertisers.
And that is a screwed-up relationship when it comes to the truth because it means you can't offend your audience.
Now, I have no problem offending my audience.
I regularly go through these purges where I talk about some topic that people – it triggers them and they all run screaming.
And it's like, good, you know, you've got to clean out the basement from time to time and remove the detritus, so to speak.
And so, yeah, there were a couple of points where in the show definitely went up considerably.
And then I think it was early last year I got – I'm just very naive.
With this whole sphere.
I came out of the UK comedy scene and moved to Los Angeles, etc.
So I had a lot of interaction with the BBC, for instance, and only through the entertainment side of it, not politics or news or anything.
And I did actually voice, when I was at the BBC, my disquiet with certain practices.
And that sort of gave me an inkling into how these massive institutions work.
But my feeling is with you and people like you, because you really are, you know, a pioneer.
There are people that started three years ago trying to compete with you.
But, you know, you actually were there from, you know, the dawn of the possibility of actually getting these messages out there.
Sorry, just real briefly, like I remember, this is what's so shocking to me, not shocking, but appalling, is the amount of censorship on social media these days.
I was like user number four on YouTube.
I immediately got, man, this is the way to go.
So I was on YouTube in like early 2006 and I had a good 10 years of censorship-free existence on YouTube.
And so I've been not censored for a lot longer than I've been censored.
And that is, you know, that is a harsh thing to see, you know.
And so people who've just started now, they're always self-censoring because they know that these people have got the finger on the button, right?
But I remember what it was like to just focus on the truth and you had a neutral platform.
Look, that's kind of my rambling, my preamble to this question, is that you must have surely, and I don't want to put words in your mouth like I could, but you must have felt crestfallen or disappointed that this, I would imagine putting myself in your shoes and people like you, that you had a message and, gosh, there's a platform.
We've got peer-to-peer communication at last.
We can actually share a message.
Isn't this great? And for it to be trampled and Banned and shadow banned.
There must have been a period of disappointment and being, you know, sort of, like I say, crestfallen before you actually took on the mantle of like, okay, well, I'm just going to carry on and do this the right way because it's, you know, I'm fighting evil.
It must be surprising to see.
It's almost, it was almost like the Body Snatchers or some Kafka novel.
The way that, you know, institutions that you've grown up with and trusted turning on you and people like you just for having a new message or for having a reinterpretation of an old message.
Yeah, I mean, that's certainly a good question about sort of the emotional impact.
So the question is, of course, when you're facing that kind of shadow banning or those kinds of falsehoods that are put out about you through various platforms, So for me, I always have to look at, okay, well, first of all, it's not too shocking, right? That's one thing to understand.
And if you weren't successful, you know, it's kind of a cliche, right?
Like you only take flack when you're over the target.
So if I wasn't successful, I wouldn't be suppressed, right?
So I guess they both start with the letter S, right?
So staff, suppression, and success, they all start with the letter S. That's three S's, not two, for my haters.
So, I would say it wasn't entirely too shocking, but of course, what you have to do is be focused on the truth, not on success.
And that's the real challenge.
If you focus on success, then you're open to manipulation because what you're trying to do is you're trying to focus on something that is beyond your control.
And you really, really have to grit your teeth and will yourself to focus on the things that are under your control.
I can't control what people say about me.
I can't control whether I'm promoted or suppressed in various searches.
I can't like people were searching for my Hong Kong documentary that I shot last fall right before COVID where I was talking about how dangerous China was.
Could have been quite helpful to get that out when you think about it.
And people would put the exact title and couldn't find it.
Like it was like gone, baby, gone.
Right now.
Now, I can't control any of that kind of stuff.
All I can control is the quality of the work that I produce, the moral courage I bring to the conversation and the focus, intensity and hopefully occasional bits of charm that I bring to be the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down.
So, of course, when you get suppressed and they want you to feel depressed and hopeless and then they want you to start self-censoring.
Right.
And you would do that because you're like, oh, I want to get back into people's good graces.
It's like, well, no, I can't control that.
And the moment you need things from people.
who are opposed to the truth, they'll just use that to crush and destroy you, right?
I mean, so focusing just on the message and the quality of the conversations that I can have with listeners and experts and people like yourself, that I can focus on, that I can control.
And so I resolutely kind of will myself back from the edge of trying to will things I can't control, you know?
Like, if you're in a flood zone, you know, build a barrier or move, right?
But don't just sit there saying, I'm going to try and will the waters back, you know?
It's not going to work.
Yeah, listen, I think that's a great analogy.
I just...
It reminds me of the Trump situation.
I remember I was promoting a film in Italy in 2015, I think it was, and they just innocently asked about America and Trump.
And I was like, I think Trump's got it.
I think Trump's going to do it.
Maybe early 2016, actually, when we were in Italy.
And people were just shocked and aghast.
And again, this is how stupid I am.
I still can't figure out why they were shopping.
What I was going to say was I believe that because of the opposition that Trump faced, he actually became a much more conservative president.
He actually became much more, well, frankly, sort of my guy.
You know, it's just like somebody who was actually prepared to take on institutions and prepared to fully take on the media.
I don't think that was necessarily his agenda when he got elected.
I think he kind of got shocked into the level of opposition.
And so, again, waffling on, he's running the country, running the world, doing foreign policy, etc., but also constantly having to fight a parallel battle with the institutions that would seek to take him down for even merely having an alternate opinion.
And that's what I see in people like yourself.
It's like coming to the platform with a message.
I figured this out, guys.
I've got the Q or 2X, Y or Z. But then actually spending 50% of your time dealing with people that want to shut you down or even having the temerity to have that message.
Well, I mean, so Trump, the opposition to Trump is because Trump is anti-communist.
And communists from the 1930s onwards have been infiltrating US media, US academia.
And, you know, this whole myth of McCarthyism was, oh, he was just imagining...
You know, communists coming out of his marmalade or whatever.
It was all true.
And in fact, it was far greater and far deeper even than Joseph McCarthy.
And this is not like my theory.
They have declassified the encrypted Venona communications from Russia.
I mean, they were just riddled with spies.
Eastern Europe was handed over to Stalin because of Soviet spies.
And China was handed to the communists because of communist spies at the State Department.
You know, A quarter of the world's population was handed over to a brutal totalitarian dictatorship that slaughtered tens of millions of people because of these communists.
And it wasn't like after World War II they said, well, I guess we're done here.
Let's just go back to whatever, right?
There are thousands of outright self-avowed Marxist teaching in American universities.
But don't worry, everybody. The danger is imaginary Nazis in Charlottesville, right?
I mean, this is the Nazis in Charlottesville.
It's all completely mad, right? So Donald Trump's mentor was, I think his name was Roy Cohn, he was anti-communist and so Trump grew up with a healthy appreciation of the free market and the beautiful things that the free market has created in terms of sustaining the world population to its very high level, which if we lose the free market there will be a mass death extinction event of billions of people because they're kept aloft by free market productivity.
We lose the free market, billions of lives hang in the balance.
So all of those who are against the free market at the moment, when we have a large population only because of the free market and land in particular and agriculture and production, they are driven by what Freud would call thanatos or like a death wish or an extinction wish or a hatred of life wish.
And those of us who are fighting to maintain a system that keeps people alive are driven by eros, the love, the love of life, the love of happiness, the love of independence and freedom because happiness and surviving and freedom, they're all tied together.
All about the non-initiation of force, the respect for property rights and so on.
So Trump comes in and he challenges the entire progress of the communist takeover of the United States.
Which again, because the communist control or leftist hard, leftist control the media and Hollywood and academia.
This sounds all like, oh no, they're trying to take over America and you're being paranoid and so on.
No, I mean, listen, you just have to go and read the 10 planks of the Communist Manifesto.
The vast majority of them have already been implemented in America.
The government is in control of at least half the healthcare.
It's in control of the banks. It's in control of the money supply.
It controls the interest rates.
It controls academia.
It licenses a third of Americans so that they have to beg the government for permission to even earn a goddamn dollar or two.
And so, yeah, I mean, this is like they were this close, man, and they're still pretty damn close.
Yeah, we're good to go. Under Trump's regime,
does anybody really worry that Hillary Clinton would have gone after these people, you know, given her history of not really seeing sexually dysfunctional people in her immediate environment or, say, her bed?
So there are a lot of people who want a lot of power.
There are, of course, billions of dollars in money that goes both to mass immigration and to foreign aid, and an America First agenda threatens all of that.
There are all of the gross, horrifying, monstrous child abusers and exploiters who are, you know, thousands of whom have gone to jail.
And of course, when any one of those people go to jail, everyone in their network shits themselves considerably.
Sorry, I don't know if I can swear, but you can edit that out if you want.
You're a comedian from LA. I'm sure you've heard a word or two before.
I'm not editing another...
Do you know what? I was never a comedian.
I was just only ever a writer and an agent.
I couldn't be a comedian.
But I'm not going to edit a word.
I've managed to get you on the show. I'm not editing a word.
I'm going to add stuff. Are you kidding?
I'm going to get an impersonator in next and start filling it out.
I just was curious with your trajectory and your history with this.
Have you ever, in the time since you've become a public figure, have you actually reversed your thinking on anything?
Have you modified...
Oh, yes.
And so for those who want to know, I mean, it would be completely insane if I hadn't.
Like over 15 years, developed new data and overturned existing opinions for sure.
Yeah, there have been a number of things.
And in fact, I'll just touch on two of them.
I've got a whole series on my YouTube channel called I Was Wrong About dot dot dot, where I sort of explain why.
I have talked about this.
So I've changed my mind on something like immigration.
I've changed my mind on the virtues and values of Christianity.
I have changed my mind on the value of participating in the political process at all.
I was very much a purist in the past.
My first big video was The Truth About Voting, where I compared voting to a sugar addiction that was going to get you killed.
And a humiliating begging for freedoms from people who just don't care about you.
But to be fair, of course, there really wasn't much choice before this new populist wave from the mid-20-teens came along.
There really wasn't much choice.
And I mean, we can see with Brexit just how little choices actually played out.
People voted for Brexit to get lower mass immigration.
And now England has the highest mass immigration it's ever seen.
And so, well, I guess next stop will be blood in the streets.
But, you know, we certainly can say we did our best to prevent that.
Yeah, I was actually seamlessly alluding to that, I think, to your modification of beliefs.
Again, I think that the opposition to this kind of populist thinking is pretty intransigent.
I don't see them ever modifying their argument at all.
If anything, they become more entrenched and more Well, the way that you control people is through virtue.
And propaganda is fundamentally about virtue.
So, for instance, you always hear, you know, diversity is a strength.
Multiculturalism is a strength. And anybody who questions that is an evil racist bigot who wants to set fire to crosses and hang people in the woods, right?
Now, if you get people to believe that, foundationally, without question, without data, then you've set up, you know what, triggered, right?
This whole thing about the people get triggered.
Well, triggered is when you tripwire over a very well constructed and well laid in moral trap, wherein people think that even thinking about something is evil.
Right.
And so there is, of course, a stream in Christianity and, of course, other religious systems, which says that there is such a thing as thought crime.
Right.
So, I mean, Jesus did say that if you look at a woman with lust in your heart, who's not your wife, it's the same as if you committed adultery or at least in the same category.
And so there is a thought crime and thought crime, of course, from 1984 to just about every modern totalitarian regime.
And increasingly now, all countries in the West outside of America, which has had the Supreme Court say there's no such thing as hate speech.
But there is such a thing as speech crime, as thought crime.
In other words, to discuss certain ideas, to discuss certain data, to discuss certain facts can in fact result in criminal fines and criminal sentencing, and it doesn't matter whether it's true or not.
It just is these are thought crimes.
And philosophy, of course, has grown out of an extraordinary hostility towards the concept of thought crime.
Because thought crime holds us all back as human beings.
Because, I mean, the entire modern world is a thought crime compared to, say, some of the superstitions and theological absolutes of the Dark Ages, of the early Middle Ages.
The entire modern world is a thought crime and then we've suddenly thought, hey, let's just...
Let's get thought crimes back, and I'm sure our progress will continue.
It's like, nope, it really, really won't.
And so people who question global warming and the need for trillions of dollars in taxes and massive expansions of government power to combat a tiny temperature rise 100 years from now, well, you hate it.
People want them to die and you want people to drown and it's a thought crime.
Talking about ethnic differences in IQ, it's a thought crime.
Talking about the differences between male and female brains, it's a thought crime.
Coming up with arguments as to why there are disparate group outcomes in a meritocracy like the market, something other than racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, bigotry, blah, blah, blah.
Well, that's a thought crime.
And so something as simple as, you know, diversity is a strength.
Well, the data is very, very clear.
There was a researcher who sat on the data for about five years, Bill Putman, his name was, I think.
He did the research and he found out, no, diversity is not a strength.
Diversity lowers social trust.
It fragments neighborhoods. It causes kids to not play outside.
It causes people not to spontaneously form social organizations.
I don't think it's necessarily because we're all just suspicious of other groups and types.
It's because the media is constantly looking for potential evidence of this boogeyman racism everywhere.
So if someone complains, if someone gets upset about something, people are just nervous about other groups because they're nervous about accusations of racism.
You know, we'll never know if we could all get along without the media constantly race baiting everyone.
Well, maybe we'll know one day.
I hope we will.
And I think we'll get along a whole lot better.
But so, yeah, this thought crime thing is a huge, huge problem.
And the fact that it's becoming increasingly legalized to it is now becoming illegal to talk about certain ideas.
It doesn't matter if you're correct, doesn't matter if you have data, doesn't matter if you have good arguments.
Well, when you bring a dark ages fundamentalist repression to a world built entirely upon free speech and free inquiry, all that's going to happen is you're going to drag the modern world back to the dark ages.
But with the added bonus of massive social engineering and control through technology.
Are you...
I'm a very sunny optimist in this whole area.
I'm relieved that Well, it all depends on the timeframe that you're looking at.
I'm not optimistic in the short run, but I'm optimistic in the long run.
And all that happens is the defenders of freedom seemed to be relieved when the bullets missed, but they can't stop them firing.
Like, everyone's so relieved that Trump didn't get impeached, and everyone is so relieved that Justice Kavanaugh got onto the Supreme Court.
But all of these are just, okay, the bullets missed you, but is there any chance that either, and again, this is all allegories and metaphors, any chance you could get them to stop firing at you or maybe even fire back a little?
And so I think it is a war of attrition.
At the moment. And, you know, there's only two ways people learn, right?
They either learn through reason, they learn through evidence, data, arguments, the flow of free speech, and they're willing to adjust their behavior before it gets bad, or they learn through hard, bitter, ugly, painful experience.
And certainly Europe has given up on free speech to a large degree.
And people are, I mean, I get messages all the time from people in Europe who's like, I can't share your videos, I'm afraid to talk about these ideas, even privately.
Because everybody comes with their own CIA recording device called a cell phone, right?
So you'd never know. You could be at a restaurant chatting with a mate.
You know, somebody next to you recognizes you, doesn't like you.
If you've ever done anything on social media or maybe they just remember you from someplace, they could record you.
They could post it anonymously with your identity on it.
And then, you know, like the extreme leftist organizations could dox you and then people contact your work.
And, you know, this social credit score crap that goes on in China and so on.
I mean, that's here, man. That's here.
You know, I don't know if you remember this story.
It is here, but it's being resisted.
You know, this is where I have great hope, is that this stuff was the stuff of, you know, paranoia 20 years ago.
The idea that there was any kind of deep state, that there was any agenda to suppress individual freedom or to even create, you know, even globalism was just called paranoia 20 years ago.
This stuff's all in the open now, and all I see is Unexpected result for Brexit.
Unexpected result for Trump.
People aren't engaging with the polling services in exactly the same way they used to.
They're mistrusting them.
Like I said, I'm just a cockeyed optimist on this.
I think it's like our 52% has become almost like the French resistance, you know?
Well, I think that's true. And optimism and pessimism have a certain amount of predetermination to them.
So if you're an optimist, you think things are going to work out well.
My concern is always then that you work less hard to achieve a positive end because you're optimistic.
So, you know, things are going to work out well.
Like if you're very optimistic, you're not going to crash on a bike.
You don't wear a helmet, right?
So which could get you killed.
So pessimism at the same...
You're correct. I am fat and reckless.
You're absolutely right. I'm lazy, fat and reckless.
Yeah, don't be too optimistic, man.
Like, you know, but you need optimism to live, right?
I mean, we all could, you know, tear our butt muscles and have a heart attack like Brian May tonight, or we could die in our sleep, but we kind of plan to, you know, do something tomorrow, right?
Like, when we set this...
I didn't say, unless I'm dead, because, you know, we just assume we're going to make it for a week.
So I think the optimism is good.
But let me just sort of very briefly say that I don't generally think in terms of optimism and pessimism.
I think in terms of maximum effective labor to achieve a positive end.
And so, you know, like I try to eat well.
I weigh pretty much the same as I did when I was 18.
And I don't smoke and I don't drink.
I have like a light beer once or twice a week.
And so I will act in a positive way to achieve a positive end.
But as far as thinking what that end is going to be, what I can do in terms of...
I can't control, you know, what happens in the world.
world.
What I can do though is I can act in a way where I either have the satisfaction of helping to save the world or if I can't save the world, I don't have the regret of Oscar Schindler at the end of the movie is like, "I've got to save people with this watch!" And so I just want to either help save the world or if I can't, at least not have to live with the regret of I could have done more.
Not Frank.
Listen, I'm just a bystander to this.
I guess that that would be a issue.
You see, you're actually in the eye of the hurricane, and I can imagine that's maybe why you might get different signals.
Just as a bystander, seeing normal average people who, you know, even on our best day, are not going to care too much about the granular level of these subjects, they're coming round.
That's what I see just in my normal, everyday schlump life, is that people are addressing things that they wouldn't have 20 years ago because it would have been too rare for them to even worry.
Well, okay, sure. Sorry, but the challenge is, right?
So the challenge is that you're going to need people in political power who share your values, right?
Now, this is the problem, right?
And we saw this with Trump and we saw this with Maxime Bernier in Canada.
We've seen this with Marine Le Pen in France.
And there's lots of places and examples.
You see this with the AfD in Germany and so on.
So when people come up with a more nationalistic, pro-Western, anti-mass immigration position, then the Marxists and the leftists in the media will simply savage them until they become practically unelectable.
And that is the problem.
The media, by savaging people who, like, the vast majority of people in the Western world don't want mass immigration.
They don't, of course.
And it makes perfect sense why they wouldn't, right?
There are questions of cultural compatibility.
It's very expensive on the taxpayer purse.
It makes it more expensive and challenging to educate children because of language barriers and cultural barriers and so on and so.
You know, growing your own domestic population is something where you can be fairly sure that there's going to be a lot more compatibility and so on.
And so people in the West, they don't want mass immigration.
And so then what happens is they start looking into politicians who reflect their views, right?
And, of course, the way that democracy is supposed to work is you find someone who reflects your views, you vote for them, you support them, and hopefully you can get your views put into practice, right?
So what happens, though, is the media will latch on to anyone who is nativist or who is anti-mass immigration and so on, and they will just simply attempt to destroy that person.
I mean, they certainly tried with Trump, but Trump has this crazy robustness and, of course, huge amount of money and 40-plus years in public life as a famous person.
So he's got particular strengths around that.
But you don't have a fair democracy because the media has a particular perspective and, you know, the idea that Russia is somehow manipulating the U.S. election when 97 percent of the media stories were hostile to Trump.
The idea that the Russian...
Come on, it's completely mad.
It's a complete projection. Same size economy as New York or Italy.
Oh yeah, no, it's completely mad. So we don't have free elections.
Because the media will simply, you know, dig up dirt and lie about people and just grind people's reputation into the dirt.
But he won.
My point is, he still won.
By 70,000 votes, though.
Well, you know, look, I'll tell you what my prophecy is for 2020.
I think he's obviously going to win again.
No, exactly.
My take is that a lot of people who are pro-Trump, even wore the MAGA hats, didn't vote for him in 2016 because he was a symbol.
He had no chance of winning.
The very fact that they've tasted the fact that he can win, I'm telling you, every single person who's even vaguely supportive of him will be out to vote in 2020.
I think that's why the 70,000 happened.
Nobody expected him to win.
Well, no, I did. And I talked about that.
I did. Yeah, yeah. It was not hard to see.
Because once you get out of the media bubble and you actually talk to people and look at the data, then the big issue, which was mass immigration and illegal immigration from Mexico and the need for the wall and all of that, that was all, like, when you actually talk to people rather than read, go into the matrix, brain-twisting, lower intestine map of the craziness, nose of the mainstream media, you actually talk to people and realize what their issues are.
But the left, of course, wishes to hugely resume, you know, the mass immigration that has been put to some degree on hold, at least for citizenship, if not for or for green cards, if not for these itinerant workers and so on.
So COVID has put mass immigration to some degree on hold, which is going to aid Trump to some degree in the election.
But of course, a lot of Trump supporters are older.
And the fact that COVID has hit a whole bunch of people, like COVID has probably killed off as many old people as the window for victory for Trump in 2016.
So you have a loss of older voters, you know, in the same way in Brexit, they hated the older people who remembered what England was like before and didn't like, you know, all of this stuff that was going on.
So it is going to be tough.
But, you know, the big issue, of course, is we do have to remember what are they pushing for?
They're pushing for voting by mail, right, which is they're just going to corrupt and steal the election.
Right.
So, yeah, my particular concern is that because Biden is such a weak candidate, the left is going to start looking for alternatives.
Like, they're not the kind of people who are going to say, well, you know, the people have spoken, and I guess they've chosen Trump again.
They're going to recognize, especially, I think, after the first debate, when, if Biden even makes it that far, he's going to get his—the floor is going to be wiped with his doddering old butt.
And so then the left is going to panic and freak out.
out?
Are they going to push more for vote by mail?
They're going to push more for, you know, these amazing undead vampire zombie stories of people who are 160 years old who still managed to vote 100% for Democrats and so on, right?
And so my concern then is that because of the weakness of Biden as a candidate, the left is going to start looking to rig and steal the election.
And of course, they already did try a coup, right?
Let's call the impeachment process and the spying on Trump for what it actually was.
It was an attempt to overturn a legitimate election.
For the first time in American history, the peaceful transition of power was utterly threatened and undermined by the hard leftists and by Obama, which is to say the same thing.
I think he knew about it.
I think he ordered it. I think people in his cabinet knew about it.
I think people at the top of the CIA and the FBI had pretty good knowledge of it, to say the least, certainly the FBI. People have just kind of gotten over this attempted coup.
And if the perception is, and I think it will be pretty clear, that the left has stolen the election in 2020, America is, I think, in danger of heading towards a civil war.
I think you're right.
But in the reverse, you don't think that if he wins again, that there would also be a civil war?
You don't think it's as fevered on the Dem side?
No, I don't think so.
They tend to be more manipulative.
They tend to not be very much into the First Amendment.
And for the most part, Western communists don't like to fight in the streets.
The Chinese communists were a lot tougher.
The communists in the Khmer Rouge were a lot tougher.
But the Western communists, you know, the neckbeard, pencil necks who hide out in academia and type slavishly away in computers on their parents' basements, they don't tend to...
And I face these people down, like when I'm on a speaking tour of Australia...
We had to face these people down.
They were attacking people, overturning buses and so on.
And they were pretty feral, but they were fairly easily scared.
And so they tend to be anonymous bomb threats and death threats and so on.
Not so much fighting in the streets.
They don't tend to do that as well.
And you always see this, you know, when the hard leftists come out, they always need to outnumber someone before.
And there's a lot of very robust people in America.
And of course, the old statement attributed to The Emperor of Japan during the Second World War when they said, well, you can't invade America.
There's a gun behind every blade of grass because of the Second Amendment.
Sorry, I meant to say Second Amendment earlier.
So it is – I think that they'll just wait until the demographic shift occurs, right?
Because America is heading towards minority whites and it's whites who tend to support the republic and have the – Ties to history and focus on small government.
Blacks and Hispanics and other groups that are imported by the left tend to vote for big government.
It's just the way things are.
It would be nice if we could figure out how to change that, but nobody knows how to do that as yet.
So if they lose, I don't think there's much point for them having some sort of big civil war, some insurrection.
They'll just wait until the demographic shift occurs to the point where you can't get a small government elected again for the foreseeable future.
OK, well, that's sobering.
I mean, we'll agree to differ on that.
I think I'm with you on the Civil War aspect if it gets stolen from us.
But I think Trump wins.
And I think due to the actions of people like yourself, I honestly see.
I live in the epicenter.
I live in Los Angeles, California.
And I swear, people sort of see me as somebody that can come and confess the fact that they voted Trump.
You know, they just assume That I'm a Trump voter.
And I'm getting so many people, covert Trump voters.
But they're won over by the argument.
And a lot of them would say, like, they hated him, they didn't want to vote for him, etc.
And over the last two, three years, they've actually seen the arguments evolve, if you like, in front of their eyes.
Nobody cared about China five years ago.
And he's put it, you know, well, nobody that doesn't take that...
Yeah, nobody except crazy people like me.
Yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah, exactly.
Exactly. And now it's actually very front and centre.
And I think that's the mark of a great statesman.
He's actually set the agenda.
And people are responding to that.
And like I said, I'd expected us all to be chased out of the barn with flaming torches and pitchfords.
But we've actually, I believe that people are getting more convinced.
But as I said, I just want to say that's due to the actions of people like you in the eye of the hurricane.
We're constantly putting clarity and great messaging out there for people to digest in a way that is attractive to them.
So I can't thank you enough for that.
And I really appreciate your time today because you didn't have to do this.
My pleasure. It was a great chat and I hope it's of value to your listeners.
I appreciate the time as well.
Bless you. Stefan Molyneux, you're a legend.
Thank you very much indeed for your time.
Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest Free Domain Show on Philosophy and And I'm going to be frank and ask you for your help, your support, your encouragement, and your resources.
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