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May 30, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:36:07
"JOIN US IN BATTLE!" Stefan Molyneux Interviewed by John B. Wells
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Stephen Molyneux is a very interesting man.
He's the founder and host of Freedomain, the largest and most popular philosophy show in the world.
Now, get these stats. More than 4,500 podcasts, 12 books, and 700 million downloads.
Stephen has spread the cause of liberty and philosophy to millions of listeners around the world, so why not just ask him that quintessential question?
Stephen, what are we going to talk about tonight?
Well, we could, of course, take a massive tour of abstract philosophy, the history of philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, you name it.
But I got to tell you right now, what's tickling my feathers is the fact that Trump has just, or is going to talk about today, An executive order opposing what he perceives as rapid anti-conservative tech censorship in the public square.
And I've got a leak of the executive order as it stands.
It's going to be coming out today.
This is a real lifeline to people who face massive amounts of suppression and deplatforming from social media companies.
And it's going to be a very hotly contested issue over the next couple of weeks.
Can't wait to get into this. I'll tell you, we've had a little taste of suppression ourselves here and there.
So, ladies and gentlemen, do yourselves a favor.
And at the same time, you'll help us.
You'll be doing a large favor for yourself.
You just become a member of Caravan to Midnight because we started this platform because we saw this suppression coming early on, and you see it's happened.
People getting banned permanently sometimes from Twitter, Facebook, thrown off of YouTube.
It's interesting, in our own case, we are not able to...
We've been completely demonetized because they say our content is not suitable for monetization.
However, They run ads on our channel.
So it's alright for them to sell ads on our channel, but it's not alright for us to sell ads on our channel or have ads on our channel and make a few shekels from that.
So that's just the way it is.
We do for them, but they don't do for us.
So I look forward to this conversation with Stephan Molyneux, and I invite you to become a member of Caravan to Midnight to get the details, the important details.
You know the whole thing about the devil's in the details?
Well, the truth is in the details too.
Very seldom is any truth Contained inside a headline, unless it's, you know, A-bomb strikes Lord only knows where.
Hopefully that won't happen, but you get my drift.
This is what we do.
We go through, and it's not boring, tedious, good grief, eye-rolling, back-in-your-head kind of detail.
It's the important stuff.
It's the substance behind the actual headlines, whether they are true, whether they are false, whether they are half-truths, which is, of course, the worst kind of headline.
Half-lie, half-truth.
Okay, so enjoy this beautiful musical interlude, and we shall continue with tonight's guest, Stefan Molyneux, here on Caravan to Midnight.
Is this the part where I sing?
Because you're going to have a beautiful musical interlude.
I'll just... Somewhere over the rainbow.
I got that. We're paused. Stefan's on.
Hit it, maestro. There you go.
Okay. Alright, let's just begin to begin.
Alright. We're going to sit around talking like a couple of guys who have known each other for years, and it'll be just fine.
Ready, John? Yep.
Four, three, two...
First time on Caravan to Midnight, Stefan Molyneux.
He holds a master's degree in history from the University of Toronto.
His graduate thesis focused on the history of philosophy, detailing the relationship between the metaphysical arguments and the political ethics of major Western philosophers such as Plato, Kant, Locke, and Hegel.
Prior to launching Free Domain, That's F-R-E-E-D-O-M-A-I-N. Stephan built a thriving career as a software entrepreneur and executive.
In 07, he left that work in the tech industry to devote his efforts to spreading philosophy.
Now a full-time parent and philosopher, Stephan's given speeches at Liberty-themed events all over the world.
His speeches cover subjects ranging from politics and philosophy, economics, relationships, Bitcoin, parenting, and how to achieve real freedom in your life.
He traveled to Australia for a sold-out speaking tour.
He addressed the future of freedom and the necessity for philosophy.
Other live appearances have included presentations at the New Hampshire Liberty Forum, Libertopia 2010 and 2012, Students for Liberty 2010, 2011, 2013, Freedom Fest, Liberty Now, a speech followed by a question-and-answer period, Capitalism and Morality Part 1 and Part 2, Liberty Fest West, the Brazilian Mises Institute's Sounds more Italian when I speak it.
Part 1 and 2, Freedom Summit and the next Web Europe Conference.
He also stars in the media documentary, Hoaxed, which you can see at www.hoaxedmovie.com.
H-O-A-X-E-D movie.com.
All right. Without further ado, here he is.
Hey, thanks for coming on.
It's good to have you on your first time.
Oh, thanks, man. It's great. And listening to that resume, I feel tired.
I guess I've been up to quite a bit, which is great.
And now I can add your show to the list, which I appreciate.
Me too. Me too, very much.
Begin wherever you'd like to begin.
I don't have a big list of, ask a question, get an answer.
Ask another question, get an answer, and go on.
Let's just freeform this thing.
What you came out of the chute with about this suppression, you know, I cannot, I understand that it's a reality, but I cannot understand why it has been allowed other than what I predicted.
Ten years ago, I started popping off over the public airwaves about the resurgence of global communism and the stifling of free speech and free anything else, and sort of a devolution of philosophy.
I thought philosophy was the study of what makes a good life.
What is a good life?
But now, it seems that the philosophy generally, at least I sense, that there seems to be a huge component of, well, What makes a good life is getting over on other people, taking advantage of other people, hoaxing other people, defrauding them.
That's a real badge of honor, sort of like the Axelrod character in that series Billions.
So just take it away and tell us, where are we in the West?
Where are we where philosophy is concerned?
Or is it just an arcane study now, just known to only a few?
Well, that's a great question.
So we're currently on a rapid downward path, but I don't discount the possibility of a bounce, which is kind of what we need.
It's happened before in history.
There has become a very strange thing that has occurred in the world, in the West as a whole.
Which is somehow to upset people, to be triggering them for them to find you outrageous or upsetting, to be offensive and so on, has somehow become a disproof of the value of what you're saying.
Now, the entire modern world was built on offending people.
The sensibilities of just about all of human history.
Throughout all of human history, you had brutal child abuse.
You had rape as a weapon of war.
You had slavery.
You had the subjugation of women.
You had mass brutality, mass starvation, no free markets, no property rights, and no free speech.
So when the first people who came along said, you know, maybe we should have some property rights, Maybe we should be allowed to trade freely.
Maybe we should have free speech.
Maybe citizens should be allowed to own guns or weapons because governments are historically, they grow like cancers and usually with the same effect on their societies.
So everything that we have that is the modern world was founded upon offending the moral sensibilities of the old world, the Middle Ages and so on.
And now, suddenly, we've kind of reversed course.
And now, if you upset people, if you're considered offensive, if you're triggering, then somehow you're wrong, you're bad, and you shouldn't be allowed a voice.
In other words, we've taken the entire propulsion that gave us the modern world and turned it and reversed it upon the modern world.
And if we don't find a way to embrace what people call offensive and upsetting, we are going to lose the modern world.
I mean, boy, you can see this happening in Minneapolis over the last couple of days.
is like, it's going to get bad because people think if I'm upset, that means someone's wrong.
But given how corrupt modern thinking is, how corrupt academia is and the media and Hollywood and you name it, I mean, if you're upsetting bad people, you're a good guy.
But of course, bad people want to say, well, hey, if we're upset, that means someone's wrong and should be silenced.
But that only serves the bad actors.
It only serves those with ill intent.
And I hope, I hope, I hope this is just coming out today.
I just did a live stream on this on my channel about Donald Trump putting an executive order out, which is really a shot across the bowels of the social media companies saying, hey, if you guys want to start filtering based on content, if you want to start monitoring and approving or disapproving what people say, guess what?
You're opening yourselves up to losing the immunity from lawsuits for content that you've had since the dawn of the Internet, which is really the only reason you've grown as companies.
And I hope it's going to be enough of a shot across the bow to get social media companies to withdraw from the great temptation.
You know, wherever there is power, there is corruption.
Wherever there is power, there is temptation.
And the one thing we know about human beings is we are really, really bad at handling power.
It is too great a temptation.
Excessive power appeals to the mammalian Nietzschean will to power a model grasping for resources that characterizes our harsh evolution as a species.
And if we can find a way to...
To get people to pull back from those giant levers of social media, to promote certain viewpoints, to discount or demonetize or suppress certain viewpoints.
You talk about suppression, man.
I've been about as suppressed as the back heel of the floor shines under Michael Moore's foot.
And it's pretty brutal.
And I just want... Listen, I don't want other people suppressed.
Let's just have an open exchange of ideas so that the best ideas win in the long run.
Because if we lose that, man, we're going to lose everything that we built.
Sounds wonderful. But how do we arrange a...
What forum is this discussion going to take place within?
In other words, I heard a fellow named G. Edward Griffin one time say, we're looking for the 3% that will change the world.
And you know, statistically, that's a pretty solid number.
Even as rudimentary as an example as I can give by way of my observations in traffic.
The average speed down Interstate 30, which connects, it goes for a long ways, but primarily, in my reality, it connects Dallas and Fort Worth by about 20 miles.
And a lot of people travel this thing.
The average speed, Stephan, is 80 now.
And there are people driving 85, 90, 95.
The cops aren't doing anything about it because COVID-19.
They don't want to pull somebody over for a speeding ticket and risk infection.
And it's probably not them individually, it's probably their superiors are saying, unless somebody's doing something really bad right in front of you, don't engage.
Put your mask on, which of course, anybody who knows anything about viruses knows, a paper mask is not going to stop a virus.
So, about 3% of the people out there are just, they're going with the flow, but they're Keeping their own countenance.
They're not being wild at the wheel.
And it's about 3% who are not wearing masks at all in public.
People just walk around. I mean, they're walking their dogs out in the neighborhood with a mask on like the virus is going to get them at any moment.
So they've swallowed this whole COVID-19 narrative hook, line and sinker.
And all they're doing is distancing themselves more and more and more from other human beings covering their face, We're good to go.
Say, why don't we study philosophy anymore?
Why is it you have to seek this out on some university campus and wind up in some leftist classroom talking about how most of the Western philosophers, that stuff's just rubbish, it's touchy-feely, that's not reality.
How do we get this thing, how do we get this boulder moving?
It's an interesting question, and I have some more sympathy for masks, particularly for older people, but there really doesn't seem to be much evidence of outdoor transmission.
Wearing masks at the beach seems to me worse than useless.
Plus, of course, you're then breathing in your own CO2, which ain't that great for you either.
So one of the things that has been really influential for me is manual labor, which sounds kind of odd.
So after high school, I worked up north as a gold panner and a prospector and did really, really hard manual labor in a place where you had to take an ice plane out for half a day just to get to this remote location where the gold was supposed to be.
And working hard with your hands for a long time gives you a great respect for nature and It gives you a great respect for reality.
If all you do is sit in books and talk to people and manipulate people and you can talk people into and out of anything, then you get this kind of loosey-goosey subjectivist worldview because you're surrounded by the infinitely malleable human mind rather than the not-quite-so-infinitely-malleable human mind.
And so one of the things that I look for when I'm looking for a serious thinker is, and it's not the most sophisticated argument, but I found that it really, really kind of holds true, is has that person ever worked a job where a part of their body aches at the end of the day?
For, you know, more than, I don't know, I helped someone dig a well at a cottage once.
And so I think that the one thing that's going to come out of this This is COVID-19 crisis and so on, is that I think a lot of people are recognizing that reality isn't quite as manipulative, as manipulatable as you want it to be, right? Because politicians, what do they do?
Well, they make all these promises and they don't have to raise taxes to pay for them because they can just borrow and print and all of that.
And G. Edward Griffin, who I've had on my show a couple of times, is fantastic with regards to this.
And I highly recommend his book, The Creature from Jekyll Island for this.
They can just type whatever they want into their own bank account.
They don't have to deal with reality.
They don't have to deal with limitation.
They don't have to deal with math or facts or all of that.
And so we've kind of drifted off into space.
We've disconnected ourselves from reality because we can just make up the money.
We can just make up the language.
We can just, you know, you can be whatever you want to be.
You can self-identify as whatever you want to be.
And we've lost the basic empirical Aristotelian reality that was the common sense foundation of the Western world, of Western empiricism.
And so the one thing people can't just will away is, okay, this China, well, however the source of the virus originated, I don't think we'll know for sure, but I certainly suspect the bio lab.
It's here. It's something that can't be willed away.
There is a limitation on people's reality.
And so it's woken them up to the fact that you can't just wish something away by printing money.
And also what it's done is it's really fast forwarded people's perception of how dangerous the state can be.
Because this, you know, this slow creeping socialism that was happening, you know, it's one thing if it's like, OK, well, you know, there's a little bit more debt every year and a couple of tiny restrictions here and there every year.
And people I don't like get deplatformed, but it's not really affecting me.
But then when it's like, well, wait, what do you mean I can't go to the beach?
What do you mean I'm going to get arrested if I open my barber shop, even if I take sensible precautions?
What do you mean I can't have a normal life until this fantasy vaccine that probably will never emerge because we've been fighting coronaviruses for 100 years.
We've never come up with a vaccine for one.
So what's happened is people are like, whoa, the government has a huge amount of power.
Wow, they're willing to exercise it at the drop of a hat and for extended periods of time.
So I'm hoping... That the limitation on reality that's showing the mask is on the people, but the mask is off the state, how much they can do, how much they can control, how much they can bully and control your life, and they can just snap their fingers and put you in house arrest for a crime that China did, and I think people are going to wake up to that.
It's a sudden shock to the system.
That it's going to be pretty hard for people to recover from.
So the next time the government promises you something, it'll be like, oh yeah, I remember on the other side of that gift is a mailed fist that can punch me back into a Middle Ages level of human rights.
Well put. That's quite well put.
I thought it was interesting that President Trump is throwing out of the countries, deporting them as we speak, thousands of grad students and undergrad students that are all connected to the Chinese military, every one of them.
That has been a huge impact on academia.
I mean, the level of visceral dislike I have for academia could probably fill up the rest of the show, but may not be particularly engaging for your listeners.
But yeah, we've got a lot of Charles Lieber and a whole lot of people are being scooped up because they have been hiding...
Funding from the Chinese government for research.
And you've got Chinese researchers being caught at airplane security with viruses stuffed into socks.
And yeah, there has been a wholesale pillaging.
And of course, this woman, the bat woman, as they called her, the woman from Wuhan who was doing the gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses to have them better plug into the ACE2 receptors of...
Human tissue. She did this work in America to begin with.
And then Obama shut it down and she buggered off to China to continue her work.
And then, oh, look at that. Out of one of the largest countries in the world, 900 miles from the closest horseshoe bat sanctuary.
The bats somehow flew from deep within the caves where human beings couldn't even get.
And they flew 900 kilometers across China to one of the most polluted places on the planet just so they could go and bite someone right next to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
And that's what we're supposed to believe is the origin.
It's like some IQ test.
Like if you believe that, I don't even know what to tell you about probability and understanding of things in this world.
It's interesting.
Is philosophy...
Still widely taught at university?
No, no. The opposite of philosophy is taught.
So postmodernism, subjectivism, and relativism.
So what's happened is...
The objectivity that philosophy pursues, right?
So philosophy was responsible for the foundation of the scientific method because there's two basic approaches to philosophy.
Ooh, and it's so great that I get to talk about this stuff on the show because it's kind of rare.
So two basic approaches to philosophy, and they both have to do with the validity of our concepts, right?
So, you know, you and I have the concept of time.
You know, we're meeting at a particular time in the afternoon.
We have a concept of a chair and a microphone and a human being and so on.
And so the big question is, okay, where do these concepts come from?
And there's two answers in philosophy.
So one comes from Plato, although he's not the only one, obviously, who originated it.
It's generally associated with Plato, and it's called Platonism.
So Plato, and it sounds like I'm dragging on a bong and paraphrasing here, but this is literally how it goes.
So Plato says, okay, so you and I look at a chair.
We know it's a chair. How do we perform that feat?
Well, I'll tell you, man. Okay, so before you were born, you were floating in another dimension, and that other dimension was full of perfect concepts.
You saw the perfect chair.
You saw truth. You saw justice.
You saw virtue. You saw the perfect woman.
You saw the perfect table.
And then you hold on to this memory, and then you squeeze out through your mom's snug harbor, out into the world, and you have this vestigial memory of these perfect forms, these perfect concepts you saw before you were born.
And then... You look at a chair and it connects in your mind to your pre-life concept of the chair that you saw for real, not like a concept like an idea.
But you saw the perfect chair and you recognize a chair or a table or justice or virtue.
You recognize those because you saw them before.
Now, that's a pretty wild concept.
It's not overly scientific.
And it's contrasted with what Aristotle said.
Now, Aristotle said, okay, like...
Good try. Nice try, man.
But if I'm not smoking what you're smoking, I don't see the perfect chair before I'm born.
The way that you figure out what a chair is, is you see something with a flat spot for your butt, four legs to raise you to a comfortable sitting position and a backrest for your back.
And you see this being used, you see this being built, you see this being deployed.
And after a while you're like, okay, I get what a chair is.
And it's different maybe from a stool and it's certainly different from a table and plates and so on.
So it's repeated exposure to the same empirical data and its purpose that gives you the concept of a tree or a chair, right?
You don't see these things before you're born and have a perfect memory of them buried deep into your neocortex.
You just, over repetitive use and language and seeing how they are built and what they're used for, you develop these concepts.
Now, this all sounds very abstract, very, very concrete.
So, if you look at society...
Then society is composed of individuals, and individuals pursue their own happiness sometimes at the expense of other individuals, right?
I mean, there was some other guest who might have come on today.
You chose me, which I appreciate.
The other guest is quite sad and is probably crying in a corner somewhere.
And if somebody's watching your show rather than somebody else's show, that other person is unhappy.
There's a lot of win-win in society, but there's an immediate win-lose that goes on if you...
Try and get a contract. As a business person, you get that contract.
Everyone else who wanted that contract is kind of unhappy.
So if you accept that we're composed of individuals, then there's no such thing as the common good.
There's no such thing as the social good that exists abstracted from the happiness of particular individuals.
That's why the Founding Fathers talked about the pursuit of happiness.
And by that they meant each individual should be free to pursue his or her bliss And there's no collective good that can overcome and undermine our individual pursuit of what we want to do to make us happy.
For instance, during the next hour, 20 minutes, hour, 40 minutes, we have a two-hour conversation.
This is what I want to be doing with my life, is having this conversation with you and your listeners.
If I wanted to be doing something else with my life, I'd be doing it.
So this is my greatest pursuit of happiness in the moment.
Now, other people who wanted me on their show, well, I guess they don't get me, at least not now.
So if you're looking at philosophy, the philosophy of individualism, which is where, well, what is society?
Society is a group of individuals, all of whom are pursuing their own happiness, sometimes at the expense of each other.
Now, some of that is illegal, right?
Like you murder and theft and assault and rape and so on, and that's wrong.
But, you know, a lot of it is just kind of soft and intangible.
I win, you lose, and so on, right?
But there's no common good, there's no social good that overrides the freedom for happiness of each individual.
Right now, if you look at censorship, censorship is the idea that if you upset certain groups, certain people, certain others, then you're bad and you should lose your right of free speech.
It's the concept of hate speech that in every country except America has been formally inscribed into law and so on.
In other words, there's a collective good called not being upset that trumps your individual right to free speech.
speech.
That's the concept of a collective being more important than the individual.
Now, in the Aristotelian universe, there's no such thing as a concept that trumps the individual.
Like you can't say lizards are cold-blooded and then throw a duck-billed platypus in there that's a mammal and say, well, we're going to throw that in there as well.
Because it's like, no, the concept has to be rigorous.
It has to be absolute.
And you can't have a concept that overrides the rights and possibilities of any individual.
That's called an individualistic society.
Now, in the Platonic universe, the concept of the social good Can absolutely override the property rights, the free speech rights, the liberty rights of the individual.
You must be sacrificed for the greater good, the collective good, the social good, whatever it is, because concepts are more important than individuals because there's perfect concepts and then there's just bad individuals that may or may not reflect to some degree but don't really matter relative to these perfect concepts.
And so philosophy in the modern world Has said that individual reason is impotent and what we need to do is surrender ourselves to larger collectivist movements.
So in the Marxist analogy or in the Marxist view of society, individuals don't matter.
What matters is the class and they call it class consciousness, right?
Which is that if you're poor, you think a certain way.
If you're middle class, you think a certain way.
If you're rich, you think a certain way.
And your individual thought patterns don't matter because what dominates your thinking is class collective concepts.
And this is why you can't negotiate because reason can't find a meeting ground between opposing economic strata or opposing economic groups.
They do this with racism as well, that the races are somehow conditioned by particular thought patterns and so on, rich and poor and men and women are...
Conditioned by particular thought patterns and if you don't fit into those categories, you have a false consciousness, right?
So if you're poor, but you don't mind rich people and you're ambitious and you want to get out of being poor and you're confident you can do so, which was kind of my history, well, it's called false consciousness.
You're just wrong because you don't fit into the collectivist mindset that the Marxists have prescribed for you.
So individual reason, individual thought, objective reality, That is the hallmark of philosophy.
That is the great gift that philosophy gives to the world, is for us to reason together, to resolve our disputes.
But modern philosophy, this social justice, this collectivism that has occurred, We're good to go.
With each other and all that's left really now is brute bullying, deplatforming political power and the slow decay of civilized conversation.
So I believe that philosophy which used to be an antibody to an illness has now turned into the most virulent illness in society and has taken down what used to be a methodology of reasonable discussion.
How do you reverse such a thing after at least two generations of indoctrination in the public schools?
To start with, they don't teach home economics, they don't teach Greek, they don't do any of those things.
You know, the original Holy Scriptures were translated in Greek first.
I don't want you reading that.
It just seems to be part of a grand design to separate the human being from the human being's creator and to mock And otherwise criticize and just dispose of any record we have regarding our actual purpose of existence in this reality so that it's all centered on them and the only thing you have to concern yourself with is obeying the next order or responding to the next emergency.
I saw this coming A lot of people saw it coming, but not enough to stop it.
And look what's happened in the mainstream media yesterday, I think it was.
catchphrase of the day was, yesterday or the day before, we've reached a grim milestone, the 100,000 fatalities from COVID-19.
And yet it's well known that even people who have died from a gunshot wound wind up on the COVID-19 victim list.
And it's insane that The insanity has been put on full display as if It doesn't matter what you show them now.
They'll buy it. No matter how ridiculous it is, they'll buy it.
I think they want to get rid of the older people.
That's what COVID-19 strikes the hardest.
I mean, this is just a theory.
I may be wrong, but it's my theory.
Get rid of the older people, indoctrinate the younger people, and vaccinate the hell out of the ones in the middle, thin them out a little bit, shorten their lifespan, and you have a brand new, fresh crop.
Of people who will march in lockstep to what's effectively, even the Soviets laughed at Marx.
They knew he was a freak.
But we don't know as much about Marx as the Russians did.
But he was a Satan worshipper and he was just all kinds of twisted.
Yeah, that's great.
It's a great, wonderful philosophy.
Just go with this and we'll give you some money.
You know, maybe. Well, okay.
So, I mean, the theology of this I find absolutely fascinating because the question is relative to God versus the devil, right?
So, to me, the devil is that short-term mammal thinking, right?
If you look at animals, right?
They don't usually plan that much for the long run.
I mean, I guess you've got a couple of squirrels buried.
That's for the winter and so on. But the mammal, the animal pursues Lust, usually without a sense of consequences.
It pursues hunger without a sense of empathy.
And when it's tired, it sleeps.
And when it's horny, it has sex.
And when it's hungry, it eats and so on.
So all it does is serve appetite with no particular higher purpose or abstract reasoning or ethics or morality or anything like that.
Now, what separates us from the animals is our capacity...
For reason, our capacity for abstractions.
And the left as a whole, by separating man from God, by separating man from virtue, by separating man from abstractions, unfortunately we can't become animals.
We are human beings, so we can't become animals.
All that we can become is inhuman.
Because when you take away the seed of reason, when you take away the abstract philosophy, when you take away The virtue that characterizes or the capacity for us to understand and transmit and act according to virtue.
When you take that away, we become far worse than animals.
Because animals aren't sadistic.
You don't end up with animals trying to impose socialist or fascist dictatorships on each other and slaughtering each other by the tens or hundreds of millions based upon ideology.
When you separate us from reason, when you separate us from virtue, it ends up in a cacophony of brutality.
I mean, just look at the 20th century, 100 million killed under communism.
You look at the 20th century, 250 million people killed by their own governments outside of war.
This is outside of war. They're simply slaughtered by their own governments, a quarter of a billion people.
You never see that.
In the natural world, you never see concentration camps among the apes.
You never see that level of brutality and sadism based upon ideology.
So the greatest wreckage that can be performed upon human society is to separate us from our...
Greatest human characteristic, the one that separates us from everything else in the universe that we know of, our capacity to compare proposed actions to ideal standards.
If those ideal standards are good, we get a wonderful world, we get a wonderful society.
If those proposed actions are bad, if they centralize We're good to go.
And the godhood within us, the fountainhead within us, the divine within us, which says you must sacrifice some of your mammalian animal pleasures for the sake of virtue and transcendence.
Those two particular poles are very powerful.
We are pulled to the mammal, but we reach for the divine.
And severing the capacity for us to climb out of the pit of evolution, out of the amoral powerlust, Of the war of all against all, the Hobbesian world, severing our capacity to climb that silver cord up to where our real humanity is, is in the process of causing an intense decay in human society.
And you combine that with the fact that, as we all know, governments promise what they cannot pay.
And when governments face the bill coming due, what do they do?
Well, they start wars.
When you can't pay your bills, you start a war.
Now, nuclear war has made inter-country war largely unfeasible.
So now they push for internal wars, they push for civil wars, they push for race wars, they push for left-right wars and conflicts because they can't come up empty.
Because when they can't pay their bills, they need us to attack each other rather than blame the state.
I've never heard it put as well.
Never. I've talked to a lot of people.
My compliments on that one.
That is absolutely right in the X-ring.
Thank you. So, what do you make of this?
I'm calling it a pandemic now.
This COVID-19 thing.
What is this liable to do by way of further damage to the possibility of a return to even basic philosophy among the people?
I mean, the ones who are the most susceptible to this sort of propaganda are the ones that are least inclined to pursue philosophical study.
I just wonder, how can they be salvaged?
And what do you make of this operation, or whatever you might call it?
It's the biggest crisis for communism since Nikita Khrushchev revealed the personality cult and Gulags of Stalin, right?
So this is the root of the modern world, the postmodernism is, you know, it happened in the 1950s, early 1960s, because prior to Nikita Khrushchev revealing the endless crimes of Stalin, and also Solzhenitsyn with the Gulag Archipelago and other works, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and so on, he revealed the brutality of the Soviet system.
So what happened was the Marxists were revealed.
And through that whole process, you had the rise of Austrian economics and von Mises' criticism of socialism and communism, which have remained absolutely solid to this day.
We can go into more details if you like.
Marxism lost its intellectual and economic credibility.
The predictions of Marx had not only not come true, but the opposite had in fact come true.
And the Marxist dictatorships were revealed as brutal, blood-sluicing, disassembly lines for innocent human beings.
And so what happened was because reason and evidence had disproven the value and virtue of the Marxist system, the Marxists had to get rid of reason and evidence, which is the whole point of postmodernism and everything subjective and you believe what you want to believe and nothing is true and so on.
And there's no such thing as right and wrong and good and bad and truth and falsehood.
So they had to get rid of all of that.
And then, of course, they went to immigration as a means of maintaining socialism rather than – because they lost the argument.
And so because they couldn't convince Western populations anymore, they simply aimed to replace them with masses of people from other cultures and other countries who were much more sympathetic to and friendly towards socialism.
So this was rigging the whole system as a whole.
Now what's happened is China is absolutely responsible for the world's widespread of this virus – Absolutely, 100% completely and totally responsible.
Forget the origins. The origins is a question that will probably never be answered empirically because China refused to let people in and China has destroyed the evidence.
They have gotten rid of samples. And this is not my theory.
This is openly what China has said.
So the origin question is probably something that will never be answered empirically, but we don't need that because we know for a fact, we know for a simple, basic fact, That China, after it knew of human-to-human transmission and sealed off China from Wuhan, allowed millions of people to fly out of China to the rest of the world, thus deliberately In fact, in the rest of the world, because they knew how dangerous it was.
They knew they'd sealed off Wuhan from China, but they let it spread.
Now, this is in direct contravention to the solemn treaties.
The most important treaties in the world are not peace treaties.
The most important treaties in the world are pandemic treaties, which state that if you have a health emergency, you must notify the world community within 24 hours.
And China, of course, as we know, waited weeks and weeks and weeks, worked with the World Health Organization to suppress the reality of human-to-human transmission, which Taiwan had repeatedly warned the world and the World Health Organization about.
And the only reason, the only reason that China was allowed into the world community was as the result of signing this treaty in particular.
That's what got them into the WHO. That's what got them into the World Trade Organization.
That's what allowed the normalization of relations which have not occurred with places like Cuba and North Korea.
So China... 100% responsible for the spread of this disease.
Now, if it does turn out that the facts come out, as they possibly could, who knows, right?
That China also cultivated and either accidentally, I assume, or even remotely possibly on purpose released this virus.
And they certainly are taking every advantage of the spread of this virus.
They're making strong moves to swallow up Hong Kong.
They're making strong moves to destroy Taiwan's independence and so on.
And they are really moving aggressively around the world as a result of this virus.
So if you release a virus and then you use it to your own geopolitical advantage, it looks pretty bad.
But what's happening, of course, is that the world is seeing the effects of communism sped up.
You know, the old saying, you can vote your way into communism, but you're damn well going to have to shoot your way out.
So what people are seeing is grandma died because China lied.
And China is the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party.
And so this is a huge crisis in world philosophy, in world political philosophy, because everyone's been told, of course, oh, the big danger is Russia.
Well, the danger wasn't Russia when Russia was atheist and communist.
The danger now is Russia, according to the mainstream media, because Russia is nationalistic and Christian again.
And Putin calls out his enemies pretty clearly.
So everybody said, oh, you see, Russia is the big danger and China is fine and we should trade with China and China should take over the vast majority of our manufacturing, the vast majority of our medical manufacturing.
85% of prescription medication in America is manufactured in China.
And so the mainstream media is facing a huge crisis because the boogeyman they painted turned out to be nothing and the people they painted as friends turned out to be geopolitical enemies of the first order.
And so the media is in crisis with credibility.
China is in crisis.
Communism is in crisis with regards to credibility.
And so there is a huge scramble that is going on now.
And you can see the mainstream media repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly blame Trump, blame Trump, blame Trump, blame Trump.
Because they've been saying Trump is the enemy.
Trump, of course, was one of the Western leaders who acted the fastest, who closed down trade travel with China by the end of January at a time when the Democrats were calling him and the mainstream media was calling him racist for doing so.
That he put a task force together in early January to try and get into China to figure out what on earth was going on and was refused repeatedly, who talked about the dangers of China and has talked about the dangers of China for 30 plus years.
You can see him back in speeches in the 80s and 90s talking about how dangerous China is, how China is ripping off the U.S., how China is a geopolitical enemy.
And now it's come true.
And it's come true in a very vivid sense.
Like you lose your job in the Rust Belt because it gets shipped out to China because, you know, hyperregulation and over unionization and preferential trade policies and their buddy, buddy, buddies and so on.
If you lose your job, that's kind of hard to tie to communism.
It's a whole bunch of steps, you know?
It's like the price goes up at the local grocer.
It's hard to trace that to Federal Reserve interest rate and monetary printing policy.
But here, you got grandma dead in an old-age home Because of communism.
In other words, the murderousness of the communist regime, or communism as a whole, has now become very vivid to people before communism has gained power in America.
Now, once communism were to gain power in America, which is one of the reasons the left hates Trump, because they were just about to snatch...
Their power with Hillary and with Biden, we'll see.
But they hated Trump because Trump is explicitly anti-communist.
He knows the score.
He is anti-communist to his core.
And so now you have Trump who's been fighting the deep state like crazy.
You've got Trump who's been warning about China.
And now you've got the mainstream media who've been saying, Russia, Russia, Russia, and China is our buddy.
And now China has killed grandma.
Communism has killed grandma.
That's a pretty vivid way to wake up to the dangers of communism before communism has its direct steel-toed boot on your neck.
And so it's a huge crisis.
all of the academics who are full of communists.
I mean, there are thousands and thousands of outright communists indoctrinating the young all throughout American universities, tens of thousands of these sons of witches with a capital B throughout the Western world.
And people are waking up to the dangers of infiltration.
They're waking up to the fact that McCarthy was much more right than even McCarthy knew, and it's much more dangerous now, half a century on.
And this is a huge, huge crisis for communism, for the mainstream media, for academia.
And so they're scrambling.
That's why the New York Times is printing 100,000 We're good to go.
And we are revealed as the prophets who've wandered in the wilderness of isolation and exclusion, lo, these many decades.
And we were right all along.
Our credibility goes way up.
And the credibility of those who oppose us goes way down.
So of course they don't want people to hear the truth that we have been yelling into the wind for many, many years.
Because our credibility will be escalated to the point Where we will gain control of the narrative and we will turn this thing around.
This is a very, very desperate moment, which is why I'm so happy to be talking about it.
Once the turnaround begins, it should be fairly rapid as well.
You know, I got thrown off of a big-time talk radio show for using that phrase.
You're seeing the resurgence of global communism and where...
President number 44.
It disgusts me to even speak his name.
It really does. I said, well, if you were to ask me if I believe that he was fathered by, mentored by, raised by, educated by, and funded by, and then shepherded by communists, I would say, yes, he was.
His father's Frank Marshall Davis.
It's obvious. You just have to look at the picture of the two of them.
He looks nothing like a Barack Obama senior.
He looks everything like Frank Marshall Davis.
And then, of course, you had John Brennan here, a CIA director who was and probably still is a communist.
I understand that Lisa Page is his niece.
Well, and I just wanted to point out that for your listeners and for yourself as well, you'd be well advised and I think it'd be very helpful to get, if you haven't talked to her already, Diana West, who wrote The Red Thread, which details all of the communist infiltration in the CIA, in the FBI, in the State Department, and how the Trump derangement syndrome, the anti-Trump movement, is pretty explicitly established.
The fact that he's thwarting or delaying a communist takeover, and that's one of the reasons why he is so hated and so attacked.
And, you know, they're attacking him, but they're really coming for everyone in America and, by proxy, everyone in the West.
I've spoken several times to Diana West.
She's brilliant. I really like her work.
I admire her very much. But I'll tell you this, people couldn't believe it because it goes back to the old kill a commie for mommy thing from the Vietnam era and all of that, and it just became sort of a joke, like there aren't really any communists out there that are waiting to get us.
And of course, my questions were followed with another question.
Who said it was all right to do all this business with the communist Chinese?
What are you thinking?
And all these characters run around and say, oh, you need to have, this one guy in particular said, you need to have your children learn Mandarin.
I said, why? He said, because China, they can just hold on to it forever.
I suspect China has bigger problems than we think.
I suspect there are many uprisings and rebellions and powdered glass and the laundry and everything else going on on mainland China, but we're never going to find out about it through state media, certainly.
They don't tell the truth about anything.
Remember, recently they floated out the idea there that Looks like the United States actually created the coronavirus.
Well, maybe some Americans had a hand in it, but you're the ones who released it, okay?
What do you think we are, a bunch of imbeciles?
We're not. Well, and of course, we know this, that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had had significant incidents, and before there were virology labs in China that had to be shut down because of unspecified emergencies.
We know that China suppressed social media postings, disappeared doctors, threatened people who talked about it, and...
It's brutal. Now, of course, why trade with China was promoted?
Well, because it harms America and it benefits China.
And if you are a communist and you have influence in America, you want to harm America and you want to benefit China.
And so you will promote Chinese interests.
You will talk about China being the red dragon and teaching people that the future is Chinese and you've got to learn Mandarin because if you can get manufacturing shifted from America, To China, then that swells the coffers of the Chinese.
And then the Chinese can, of course, come to the West, as they do.
And again, I'm not talking about individual Chinese citizens.
I have great sympathy for them laboring under this dictatorship.
But I'm talking about the political and economic leaders in China who are relatively corrupt, to put it mildly.
So if you can get a significant share of America's GDP shifted to China, then China can use that money.
Chinese people, leaders and business leaders can use that money to go and buy massive amounts of companies, massive amounts of land, massive amounts of real estate in the West.
And when I was doing a speech in a series of speeches in Australia about two years, close to two years ago now, I was approached in the sort of post show discussion period that we had a post speech discussion period.
I was approached by a lot of people from Australia saying, good heavens, like China's just buying up half the country.
And so it's a fantastic way to help spread communist China's influence to get manufacturing and economic potential and execution spread to China, gives them the wealth to spread into America and to corrupt American academia and to corrupt gives them the wealth to spread into America and to corrupt American academia and to I mean, the old movie, it's not that old a movie, I guess, now, but World War Z, that movie originally had the virus originate in China.
And, of course, the Chinese government said, nope.
And they're like, okay. And I think they made it to South Korea.
Couldn't make it to North Korea because North Korea is also a communist country.
So you have all of these subtle layers of gaslighting, befogging brain programming that is occurring.
And listen, as you and I know, most people are relatively helpless in the face of propaganda.
And there are so many things that we have to take on face value just to function in society.
And so people are like, well, this is what everyone in authority says.
This is what everyone with a PhD says.
This is what everyone in the media says.
I don't really have the time, the effort, the energy, the resources, or maybe even the personal stamina to just dig through all of this crap and try and find the truth.
And of course, if I find that the truth...
It's in opposition to the vast majority of social programming that I've received that puts me on a collision course with my society, my friends, my family, my husband, maybe my children, my children's teachers.
It puts me on a collision course.
And it's like, what's the...
I mean, most people do a cost-benefit analysis going back to...
And four, why do people make sacrifices for the sake of virtue, as you have, as I have?
Because we know how important the abstract virtues are, and we know what happens in the long run if we lose those virtues of, you know, honor, truth, integrity, property, the non-aggression principle, you know, asterisk except for self-defense.
So if we lose all of those virtues, we know the hell that we're going to live under.
So we're willing to take the social hits in order to maintain the civilization we've inherited.
That's kind of the job of people who are outliers in their ability to process reason and oppose the mob.
Whereas for most people, the cost-benefit analysis, which is really all they have available to them because the higher virtues have been irradiated from them by propaganda, they sit there and say, hmm, okay, well, I guess there could be a lot of communists in the government.
And I guess the State Department could be riddled with anti-American people.
And I guess, you know, Justin Trudeau could be in the pocket of Chinese powers or whatever.
But, oh, man, if I pursue that, oh, you know, it's going to be really tough to have casual conversations around the water cooler.
And I'm going to be the crazy person in a tinfoil hat at the end of the Thanksgiving dinner at family gatherings.
And what can I really do to change or affect things anyway?
So once you, again, once you take away people's higher virtues and values, once you take away people's morals and their philosophy...
Then all you have is a cost-benefit calculation.
And then, because people regularly get destroyed by the media for questioning official narratives, people are like, hmm, massive downside, can't really affect things positively.
There's no abstract virtue that in a sense commands me to pursue truth and reality.
So I am just going to go binge watch Netflix and play a video game.
And that's how you get people out of the social arena that we desperately need people in in order to sway the culture.
So how does one remain free and independent?
Oh, well, so the basic freedom is not giving much of a rat's behind what bad people think of you.
That's the most fundamental freedom.
Now, I grew up... So I was born in Ireland.
I grew up in England.
Now, England is... Or was a place of...
I don't know how to put this nicely, so I won't.
Social control and subjugation.
Now, some of that is pretty good.
You know, like English people will spontaneously form into a queue, kind of like Canadians.
You know, there's this old joke about Canadians.
How do you get 500 Canadians out of a swimming pool?
You say, excuse me, would you mind getting out of the swimming pool?
Off they'll go to get out of the swimming pool, right?
So there's a lot of social conformity and social enforcement in...
Certainly British cultures in America is significantly influenced by British culture.
And so getting along with people, being part of the general social Belief system is a good thing when that social belief system is relatively rational and empirical and so on.
And so for me, having grown up in a culture where going against social convention is really...
It goes against the grain for me.
I've sort of... And again, it sounds like I'm just negative on the British experiment of social conformity.
I'm not. There's a lot of really good stuff that comes out of it.
But for me, when I first began to...
You know, as the old saying goes, you know, cry my barbaric yorps of truth from the rooftops of the world.
I was like, you know, I was raised to, you do not bear false witness and tell the truth and shame the devil and tell the truth though the skies fall.
So I was raised with all of those ethics that, yeah, social convention is really good, but there's a place in society for the eccentrics, in a sense.
There's a place in society for the mavericks, for the outliers, because if we don't have those people, society decays.
It's, you know, like if everybody photocopied everything else, like if every single birth was an exact photocopy of what came before, there'd be no such thing as evolution or progress or anything like that.
It's the same thing if all we did was photocopy old novels, there'd be no new art, right?
So there has to be a kind of wild gene in the social body that challenges convention.
And so I was brought up with a lot of social conformity, but some respect.
For, you know, the crazy people who, you know, and there was more respect, I think, in British society for the eccentrics than there is in American society where they're all considered to be, you know, tinfoil hat wearing crazy people who wear their pants backwards and yell into yogurt cups with string thinking they're talking to the president.
But so for me, the biggest release was saying, because, you know, when people started coming at me real hard, like the mainstream media and stuff like that, and this was like 2008, so, you know, it's...
If social shaming was my child, it would be hitting puberty about now.
So for me, it was like, okay, that's really rough.
That kind of goes against the grain.
It's socially humiliating and so on.
But then what you have to do, of course, is you have to evaluate your evaluators, right?
You have to say, okay, what is the nature of the people who are attacking me?
What is their history of virtue?
What is their history of integrity?
Are they reasoning with me?
Are they disproving me or are they just attacking my character, my personality, and all of this kind of stuff and calling me terrible names and so on?
Well, that's not the actions of a reasonable person.
I mean, I disagree with a lot of people in the world, but I don't just call them X, Y, or Z terrible names.
I will try and actually find reason and evidence to rebut them.
So once you recognize that the price of virtue is the hatred of evildoers, right?
Because there's a lot of people in the middle there.
There are people who are good and they're happy to listen to you.
There are people who are bad and irredeemable and beyond hope and they will simply set up their spears and try and take you down.
But, you know, there's whatever percentage of people.
I think it's like a... I don't know.
It's kind of hard to say exactly what the proportions are.
You know, 40% good, 40% bad, 20% of people in the middle.
Something like that, right? And so you're trying to reach the people in the middle.
And the evil doers are trying to keep the people in the middle from never hearing your voice so that they can maintain control and draw more people their way.
So this fight over the middle, this is where...
The true good and evil of the world reside and recognizing that it's a deadly game and you don't expect the opposing team to hand you the ball with a bow on it, you know, that they're going to fight you for every goal and they're going to fight you and they're going to fight dishonestly and dishonorably.
Why? Because they're evildoers and malicious people and so on.
So once you say, okay, it's not bad that I'm being attacked by evil people, it's actually a mark of honor.
And once you can recalibrate your...
Sense of identity and virtue to that basic reality, then it's no longer something that is unpleasant.
It's something that is inevitable and honorable.
That, to me, has given me the greatest capacity to speak my mind freely.
Because if you sit there and say, well, I'm going to get blowback for this, I'm going to get negative response for this, that, and the other, well, you've already lost.
In other words, you have the right of free speech, but you don't.
It's sort of like saying, well, I have property rights, but I'm never going to exercise them.
And stuff's just going to get taken from me and I'm never going to do anything about it.
Well, that's a very abstract way to look at actually having property rights.
It's the same thing with something like free speech.
You have to embrace the fact that the devil ain't never going to be your friend.
And that the people who follow and embrace and wish to spread violence and sub-diffusion, evil-doing, that they are never going to be nice to you.
Or if they are, that's actually even a worse sign because they think you're coming around.
That would be a terrible thing.
The moment I start getting positive articles in the mainstream media, I've got to really check the mirror and see what I'm about because I'm probably on some horribly slippery slope that's going to end with a horrible moral splat at the bottom of some forked canyon with spikes.
So to me, the real freedom emerges when you not only can survive the slanderers of the evildoers, but you can embrace them as a necessary path upon which you can guide your actions.
In other words, walk towards the fire and And whatever it is that the people who are immoral are the most mad about that you're doing is probably what you should be doing more of.
and using them as a methodology to make you a more effective fighter for virtue is the best alchemy to turn evil into good that I know of. - Brilliant.
I'm really enjoying this conversation It's long overdue.
I just wish many, many more people than We'll hear it, could hear it.
Because I think if these things are brought to their attention, this will cause them to think about things that maybe they would have and recognize now they should have.
They even could have thought about these things, but they've been distracted.
And I think all we have to do is just dangle it out there.
And I think a lot of people will pick it up because few can deny that the way that we're headed now, the direction we're headed now, We are just beginning to taste a little bit of the soul of the communist boot.
This country has been under assault by communists since the communists even existed.
This Karl Marx thing, he's just the poster boy for the philosophy.
The Soviets knew that this was not going to work in its entirety.
And at least Vladimir Lenin had the integrity to say, no, no, no, no, you can't get to communism unless you first have socialism.
And now, suddenly, socialism seems so popular among the young people sitting around the coffee shops talking politics.
Really? Or is that just the narrative that's being pumped out over the public airwaves?
Is that just the narrative that's being cranked out in the public schools?
Even Highland Park High School, number 16 in the country, when the real hard core of the Common Core began to be introduced into the curricula there.
All of the good teachers resigned.
Literally all of them.
They could not teach it.
They would not teach it. They told their supervisors, we can't teach this.
This goes absolutely against everything that we should be teaching.
Why are we doing this?
They were simply told, that's the mandate.
That's the Department of Education.
That's what we're going to do.
And they said, well, we're not going to do it.
We're resigning. We will not return next semester at all.
We'll finish out the term, but that's it.
We're gone. Well, okay, that was a noble gesture.
However, I don't think it helped the children at all.
I think they should have stayed and fought it and made a big deal out of it, but they didn't.
So, where do we light the fire?
Where can we light the, metaphorically speaking, of course, we'll get to the literal part if we need to later.
Where do we light the fire, really?
How can we penetrate the schools, for example?
And what? Media, good Lord, you know, you know, and many people do now, that New York Times, Washington Post, two big headliners, they give money from the Chinese.
All these Ivy League universities around the country, all setting up little Confucius Institutes, nicely funded by the Chinese.
I mean, how hard a slap in the face do people need to receive before they get it?
So I go back to the original question, as simplistic as it may be.
Where do we start the fire?
So, we are a fascinating species in terms of we love ease and we love to fight.
And we've had a lot of ease over the last half century.
Whenever we've had a problem, we've just printed money.
Whenever there's been a war, it's been distant and overseas and very few people know.
The people who are shipped back in body bags or who come back without limbs or eyes or whatever...
So we've had a lot of ease, in a sense, over the past half century.
And that gets kind of addictive.
Because, you know, there are two kinds of people in the world, the people who just want to be left alone and the people who just won't leave them alone.
You just want to control them and bully them and take their stuff and indoctrinate them and so on.
And so... I would love a life where we could talk abstract philosophy for a couple of hours and, you know, put a few finishing touches on this giant cathedral of civilization that we've been building for the past 100,000 years or so.
But this is a time where it's like suit up and shield up.
I'm sorry, this is a time not of plowsheds but of metaphorical sorts.
Now, there is great joy in combat.
There is great honor.
In combat, and particularly this kind of combat where you're not going to lose a limb.
You're not going to get your head blown off.
Well, hopefully. Anyway, I mean, certainly I've had attacks on my speeches and death threats and so on, but so far so good.
So recognizing that things are going to get infinitely worse if we don't act, and that once you get over—this is why I gave this sort of speech about learn to embrace the hatred of evildoers— That can be the North Star you guide yourself by.
And thwarting and opposing evildoers, it's great.
And it's funny, too, because we watch all these movies where the good guys take on the bad guys at far greater physical risk than what we experience in the online thrust and parry of intellectual discourse.
There is great joy and great honor and great pride and self-respect in taking on these battles.
It's something that Churchill said, I guess in 1940 or thereabouts.
He said, you know, there's something worse than losing, and that is continuing to have to fight knowing that you're going to lose inevitably anyway.
Now, if we leave it too late...
We're going to be engaged in a desperate battle that we know we're going to lose.
That is the worst kind of fight to be involved in.
Of course, the powers that be want us to surrender our pushback to the point where they have enough control that they can guarantee themselves victory, regardless of what we do.
You don't want to wake up to the necessity of the fight when the fight can no longer be won.
See, the devil, in a sense, doesn't mind you waking up to his nature, but only after you're going to lose.
Because that's the additional sadism.
It's like, oh, great, now you know exactly who I am and who's got control over you, and it's too late to fix.
And coronavirus, of course, and the totalitarianism that is spreading, right?
I said this, I think, back in February or end of January, that communism is the real virus.
Coronavirus is just how it spreads.
And this sudden acceleration, as we talked about before, of totalitarianism and the growth of state power because of coronavirus is waking people up to the necessity of a battle.
Now, a lot of people, of course, don't want to get involved in this battle.
They like things to be easier and so on.
I get that, and I sympathize with that.
And, you know, it would be fun as well to plan trips to Switzerland rather than take on, you know, communist trolls on social media.
But, of course, everything that we have, that we treasure...
We have inherited from men who fought the good fight.
You know, why do we have a society with liberties?
Because men fought and fought hard and under far worse circumstances than we have to fight now.
Why does America have a republic?
Why do we have property rights?
Why do we have relatively limited governments?
Why do we have the rule of law to some degree?
Why do we have free speech?
Because literally countless men, mostly men, some women, laid down their lives, choked out their blood, cried for their mothers, hanging on barbed wire in order to, shaking bloody hand, deliver to us the golden gifts of liberty, the remnants of which we still enjoy.
Now, I don't know about you, man, but my family on both my Irish and my German side have been fighters, soldiers.
I mean... The majority of the males on my father's side died in the First World War.
Now, I'm not saying they all died to hand me these liberties, but this battle has been ongoing since the days of Socrates.
Did Socrates take his hemlock for nothing?
Did Plato have to flee after he attempted to get involved in politics and ended up being sold as a slave and only redeemed by accident?
Did Aristotle have to flee?
The mob saying he would not allow Athens to sin against philosophy twice?
Did all of the people who fought hard and given us these incredible gifts, if we abandon this fight, they all died for nothing.
And we will, at some point, look back and say, now that it's too late, by God above, I wish I had fought earlier.
By all that is holy and virtuous and good, I wish with all of my heart and all of my soul that I had fought before.
It was a desperate battle called too late.
So the suffering is coming.
We can embrace a small amount of it in the here and now when we have a chance to avert disaster.
Or the suffering will be inflicted endlessly upon us at a time where no more pushback is possible.
And pulling people away from their distractions, having them honor the gifts their ancestors gave to them, and having to take the small pain now and the great glory and self-esteem and self-respect that comes from taking that small pain now, rather than the escalating avalanche of statism burying us all alive down the road, it's a pretty easy calculation to make once you truly understand the variables.
You have some ideas on, you know, the old expression you can do pretty...
The song, Blue Suede Shoes, substitute my money for my blue suede shoes, and you can do pretty much anything that you want.
Don't mess with my money, but people's money is being messed with here pretty bad.
Do you have some ideas on how to get through this, just the financial component of this crisis?
I mean, the stimulus checks are going out.
Mine hasn't showed up yet, but that's fine, whatever.
What would I do with it anyway?
Buy TP and storable water, I suppose.
Get ready for the next one. No, seriously.
Are there some things to keep there?
I keep hearing the expression, mental health crisis, mental health crisis, being confined indoors.
There's a component for a mental health crisis.
Oh yeah, you don't have any money anymore.
You have no job. It won't be waiting for you when this is over.
How do you keep your head steady?
Okay, so this is another thing that is a great gift of coronavirus, and I'm very much one for trying to judo the momentum of a bad thing and turn it into a good thing, because that's the best way to transmute evil to good.
So first of all, this atomistic, hedonistic society, people have got a real brush of what it's like to have no community, to just be a solitary person.
Like, it's one thing to be quarantined with your family, as I am.
I mean, it's actually quite a lot of fun in a lot of ways, but if you're a Solitary person, you live alone and you're quarantined, man, that's bad.
Isolation is as bad for you as smoking.
And not just smoking one or two cigarettes.
It's as bad as pretty heavy smoking.
And so I hope that people recognize that the distracted hedonism of media consumption, of fairly vacuous travel and so on, and burning up all of your resources in...
Transient pleasures for yourself and not laying in the foundations of having a community, of having people in your life who love you, who are going to have your back no matter what, that you have loyalty to.
That is really, really important.
So people who are alone, how many people are calling you and checking up on you and seeing if you're okay and offering to Skype with you or whatever it is, right?
If you don't have people...
Who are calling you up to check if you're okay during a time of crisis like this, you gotta look in the mirror and say, what have I been doing wrong that nobody really cares about me enough to call me up when they know I'm isolated and alone, right?
You gotta stop The narcissism of petty differences that blows up so many relationships and people just walk away all the time.
Sit in your relationships.
Reason with people. Try and find common ground.
And if you do have really bad relationships where you can't find common ground, don't rest until you find a better community of like-minded people who are going to have your back in a time of crisis.
Because as you know, the stimulus checks are going out.
$2 trillion has been burnt through in the last month or two.
That's insane. I mean, that is so beyond insane.
I don't even know how to talk about it.
Every dollar that you're getting is going to be taken back multiple through inflation.
Because the U.S. didn't check behind its couch and find $2 trillion sitting there in Bitcoin, right?
They don't have the money.
They've created the money.
They've borrowed the money. They've printed the money out of nothing.
It's vaporware. It's garbage.
It's Weimar. It's toilet paper.
And so recognize that whatever you can do right now to transfer the monopoly money of the Federal Reserve into an actual hard asset, whether that's food, whether that's weaponry, whether that's real estate, whether that's land, whatever you can do to take that money and transmit it into something that actually has tangible value, I would consider to be Not the dumbest financial move that you could possibly make at the moment.
I'm a big fan of cryptocurrency.
I've been talking about Bitcoin since like 2012.
So cryptos may be worthwhile.
Food, absolutely. But there's an investment in Tribal capital.
You know, tribal like have people who care about you in your life.
If you're not having a great time in your marriage, don't just get divorced and walk away.
Find a way to work it out.
If you're having conflicts with your sibling, find a way to reach out to connect with that sibling so that you have people in your life who are going to be there for more than just the fun times, more than for karaoke nights and travels to Bali and so on.
You know, those things are great. I love karaoke.
I've never been to Bali. Here it's really nice.
I'd love to go one day. But we've got to have relationships based more on virtues and values and a true connection rather than, ah, we went to the same university together and we both like...
Nirvana or some less dated reference or something like that.
So take this time to invest in yourself, to invest in improving your skills, to invest on perhaps that entrepreneurial dream you've had for so long and make sure that you bind boon companions to you with hoops of steel because the time of hedonistic isolation is gone and it may come back for a little while But so much wreckage has been done to the value of currency through this crisis that you've got to be laying in your nuts because winter is coming.
Yes, it is.
Yes, it is. Now, you have a site up here about Hong Kong.
I think, I'm afraid Hong Kong's gone.
What do you think? Do you think it can happen?
I mean, it's really sad.
This woman, a young woman, posted a video, I don't remember who it was at this moment, saying, you know, we were going to show them that we can live democratically here, but they're not having it.
That was her message. And then what happens?
Once the Chi-Coms take over Hong Kong, I wonder what happens to the world's financial stability then.
Yeah, I think it's the third biggest stock market in Asia.
And it's brutal.
I went to Hong Kong last year in September and shot a documentary.
It's called Hong Kong Fight for Freedom.
Good luck trying to find it on YouTube or Google.
They won't show it to you to save your life or to save the life of Hong Kong.
But you can go to freedomain.com.
There's a tab called Documentaries and you can find it there.
And it's free. I encourage everyone to watch it.
It was an absolute labor of love.
I interviewed Daniel Lee, who wrote the Basic Law, who wrote their constitution, who has since been arrested.
It was this elderly, honorable gentleman, a lawyer, and so on.
I marched with the protesters.
I took a couple of facefuls of tear gas and faced down the really brutal police system that's out there for a peaceable assembly.
And I strongly would recommend people watch the documentary because in it, of course, I talk extensively and interview people extensively about the enormous danger that China represents to the world.
And this, of course, was last year.
I've got shows going back almost a decade talking about the dangers of China.
So, you know, philosophy means always being sorry that you're right, as I said before.
And so I really, really hope people will watch that documentary.
Again, it's free, and I think it's very well done.
It was shot by the same guy who did Hoax, or it was half of the team who did the Hoax documentary, which I would also recommend to people that you watch at hoaxmovie.com.
And so, yeah, with Hong Kong, Hong Kong is a lab experiment that is extremely humiliating to communists, right?
Because you've got a tiny section of China that was carved off through a series of historical accidents and retained greater freedoms than the West retains now.
Because it was kind of carved off as a little cyst of 19th century British liberties with regards to economics and politics.
And so, yeah, it has massive free trade.
It is no welfare state.
It is a very small government.
And you can see the enormous productivity and happiness and passion for liberty that Hong Kong people manifest.
And I was incredibly moved to tears by the marches against communism, the deep understandings of the dangers of communism.
Because it's like a twins experiment, right?
That's the biggest way that you figure out genetics for environment as you look at twins experiment, right?
So here you have two people, the Hong Kongers and the mainland Chinese, genetically indistinguishable, just as the North and South Koreans are genetically indistinguishable and therefore the changes in the outcomes must be due to the presence or absence of political liberties and economic freedoms.
Small government and free market, those are the differentiating factors between North Korea and South Korea, mainland China and Hong Kong.
And when you end up with South Korea being 30 plus times wealthier than North Korea, when you end up with Hong Kong having rights of free speech and political independence and economic liberty, vastly outstripping those on the mainland, then that is as close to an experiment like East and West Germany that you can get to with a genetically identical population.
That end up in completely different places because of the presence or absence of political and economic liberties, which is the philosophical application of the universality of property rights and the non-aggression principle.
Philosophy is manifested in these countries in ways that cannot be denied by any even remotely reasonable or empirical person.
And so places like South Korea, places like Hong Kong exist as a perfect petri dish repudiation And that is why they must be destroyed.
They must be destroyed as evidence of the horrific criminality and brutality of communism.
And so, of course, the idea was, in 1997, was, okay, well, we'll have some path towards reintegration of these two countries, but don't worry, Hong Kong will liberate China.
Which is a complete misunderstanding of the purpose of communism.
The purpose of communism is to allow sadism and evil full reign.
It's not an economic system.
It's a system of brutality and terrorism masquerading as an economic system.
All it does is remove any legal or rational or moral restraints to the free exercise of brutal power and wealth acquisition.
It is The massive subsidization of free evil.
It turns evil into omnipotence.
That's what it's for. It's not a political system.
It's not an economic system. It's a system of free license to evil to act as it sees fit, which is why it doesn't matter that people get destroyed.
It doesn't matter that people get destroyed under communism because that's what its purpose is for.
Its purpose is to bully, to intimidate, to terrify, to subjugate, to give people the dopamine rush of power and control and...
Dominance, right? Political dominance is something we're actually addicted to.
And it's not just my theory.
You can see this dopamine release in bonobo monkeys where they climb up the political hierarchy in the tribe.
They get additional dopamine. And if they drop down, they get depressed.
Political power is a physical addiction more strong than heroin, more strong than cigarettes, more strong than cocaine.
This is why people can't give up on it.
They've hollowed themselves out through controlling others.
And there's no identity left to return to if they lose their power, which is why they fight to the death.
To maintain it. So a place like Hong Kong must be destroyed, must be destroyed by the communists, otherwise it stands as a perpetual empirical reminder of what happens when you have a free market and personal liberty versus what happens when you have totalitarianism.
So Hong Kong, unfortunately, is in the sights of China, and America's capacity to retaliate against China is weakened at the moment because of internal dissent, the media, of course, being relentlessly pro-communist.
The coup attempt, the straight-up coup attempt of the Russia collusion conspiracy theory pushed by mainstream media outlets and academia and Hollywood in America for the past couple of years.
America's capacity to respond in a muscular fashion to encroachments of communism has been so crippled by internal treason and dissent that it's going to be very hard for America, which would be the natural ally of Hong Kong.
Well, England, of course, would be the most natural ally of Hong Kong, but England is dealing with its own internal catastrophes to the point where they can't even prevent hundreds of thousands of little girls being raped by immigrants.
So the natural allies of Hong Kong are few and far between, and the strength of China has been vastly increased over coronavirus and internal dissent and contradiction and treason.
In Western countries, China, of course, does not have any military strength or power.
And in fact, there's a garrison of Chinese troops right in the Particularly good.
My guess is that there will be some kind of takeover, which will be followed by a desperate guerrilla battle that will be an attempt to weaken the Chinese government, which will be followed by massive repression, which will be followed by additional sabotage and, you know, this sort of Vichy which will be followed by additional sabotage and, you know, this sort of Vichy France resistance to Hitler's troops in 19, well, May And this kind of guerrilla war is probably going to go on for quite a long time.
And at some point, of course, as is always the case, the Chinese communist system will collapse and will be replaced by hopefully something that we're talking about and generating right here.
Well, well, all the links, the links to the...
Just to restate that thing, YouTube will not show us which movie at all.
So the documentary that I filmed is called Hong Kong Fight for Freedom.
That's Hong Kong colon Fight for Freedom.
And you can type that into various search engines into YouTube and you won't be able to find it.
And that tells you quite a bit, of course.
But you can go to my website, freedomain.com.
There's a documentary tab.
You can find it there.
I see it. I typed in the fdrurl.com slash Hong Kong, and it took us straight to freedomain.com.
Yes, that's right. And you can get to the documentary from there.
But again, if you try and find it through various search engines, you won't have much luck.
I've got to tell you, it is very encouraging and comforting on some level to know that you're out there kicking A-double-S every day, getting the word out.
I do move my boot in the donkey from time to time.
You know, if not now, then when?
And if not us, if not you, if not me and others who are like-minded, then who's going to do it?
Why would you want to miss this fight?
First of all, it would be enormously shameful to not engage in these essential conversations.
And secondly, I mean, this is a heroic time.
This is the time of greatest heroism that has existed ever.
Because, look, physical courage in the face of war and wars, because they're giant government programs, often have extraordinarily doubtful outcomes.
And the virtue of many wars is substantially questionable.
But this is a battle which is mere will and intellect and courage, moral courage.
That's what it is.
Why on earth Would you want to miss this battle?
I mean, go read the St. Crispin's Day speech from what I used to call in my theater school days Hank Sank or Henry V, you know?
Who alive would not want to be part of this battle?
What else do you have that's more powerful, that's more engaging, that's more necessary, that's more honorable than engaging in a verbal, intellectual battle with some seriously bad dudes?
I mean, don't you always cheer Superman when he faces off against some giant mechanical robot or whatever goofy stuff he's fighting?
Don't you always want to cheer on the good guys who are fighting down and facing down the bad guys?
Well, why would you want to sit on the sidelines during the most essential and powerful and easy to enter and physically safe battle that has ever existed in the history of this planet?
Why on earth would you just want to sit on the sidelines when you can step into the fray, acquit yourself with honor and save the world?
I don't fundamentally understand why anybody is passing up this opportunity.
I have a feeling that a lot more people are willing to join the fight and become an Avenger.
Thank you.
We must avenge the destruction of the Republic.
We have to. I have a feeling that a lot more people are inspired to join this fight.
Your speeches have been amazing.
They really have. Thank you.
There's so much of what you've said that's resonated with me and things that I have said similar things, but I like the way that you've put them.
They go into the mind and they rest there easily.
And I really think this is going to be I think the effect of this conversation, the other conversations that you conduct in this fantastic career that you've created for yourself, based on some really, really solid human being-ism,
philosophy as the root, as the cause, as the munitions, the bombers, the tanks, all of it, using philosophy as your weapons, It's exciting.
I mean, it really is.
And it's good to be foxhole buddies with you.
It really is, so to speak. Okay?
Well, yeah. I mean, you know the goosebumps that people get when they watch some cartoony Avengers movie?
And those movies can be fun.
I'm not trying to knock them or diss them or whatever.
But that, you know, when the steely-jawed heroes square up with their shields across the Martian landscape to their...
All of that stuff is available to you.
You don't just have to sit in a movie theater and be distracted by CGI. You can actually step into the most essential battle the world has ever seen where we could win everything or lose everything, potentially forever.
Why would you want to pass that up?
I can understand if, you know, I was showing up here with, I don't know, one arm and one ear and half an eyebrow and no teeth.
Like, man, that's a rough fight, man.
But it's typing!
It's talking! And yes, you say, oh, well, you know, there could be negative consequences to it.
Yeah, okay, there could be negative consequences to it.
You might lose your job.
Do you know what happens under communism?
You're going to lose your job anyway.
Oh, people might not like you, or you might lose friendships, or your sister-in-law might think you're a bad guy.
You know what happens when communists take over?
You get put in a freaking gulag, my friend.
That's what happens. If you're concerned about your relationships, you want to keep the communists far away.
From the seat of political power, because by God, man, when they get a hold of that political power, the disapproval of your sister-in-law will be the least of your damn worries.
Trying to stay alive in a rat-infested torture pit known as a gulag will be something that will get your attention just a little bit more.
And I just, I don't know how to shock people into recognizing that that is the inevitable destination if we don't act.
So yeah, I get it.
Disapproval is uncomfortable.
Risk is uncomfortable. I get it.
Nobody wants to jump out of the plane.
But you understand the plane is heading to the mountain in a fiery...
Well, actually, that's not even a great analogy because that's a quick death.
They will round you up.
They will throw you in a gulag.
They will torture you. They will destroy your life.
We've got more than a century of absolutely unequivocal, crystal clear evidence of that.
Killing fields... The dungeons and torture chambers of Cuba.
You've got North Korea, an absolute psychotic torture pit and the largest open-air human torture chamber in the world.
You've got tens of millions of people being slaughtered in China.
You've got people being opened up Like Barbies with cherry bombs to harvest their organs live ahead of time by appointment only for people who are looking for human organs.
This is not a fantasy. This is not made up.
This is all empirically verified.
We have 100 years worth of data on what happens when these psychos gain control.
And when you get dragged out of your bed in the middle of the night and taken off to some godforsaken torture chamber where you will be caged with rats on your head Winston Smith style until you sign a paper.
Claiming that you were a counter-revolutionary who committed crimes against the state before they put a bullet in you and bury you in the backyard, you'd be sitting there saying, well, I guess I should have really confronted the negative feelings I had about my sister-in-law's disapproval just a little sooner.
That is what happens.
That is what is going to happen if we don't act.
It is as sure as sunrise.
And so people are like, hey, man, I don't want any trouble.
It's like, dude... Trouble wants you.
It's coming, whether you like it or not.
Hey, I wish it wasn't. Don't get me wrong.
I worked for 30 plus years to try and have this not come to this point.
But we've been given this incredible capacity to talk to the world.
They didn't have that in Russia in 1917.
They didn't have that in China in the late 1940s.
They didn't have that in Cuba.
They didn't have a giant megaphone where you could talk to millions of people.
The quality of the conversation is based upon the quality of the audience.
I assume your audience is stellar and virtuous and grand and great, which is why I'm willing to layer on such eloquence because I know that they will rise to the language that has been cast like a high, fiery, summoning net ahead of them.
And so... We know what's coming.
We know what happens if we don't act.
There's no doubt that it's going to be a groundhog day of brutality until you expire if we don't push back.
And right now, we have this incredible opportunity.
You think you and I, without the internet, would be invited onto big terrestrial radio or television?
I mean, good God, no.
The gatekeepers are gone!
We can speak to the world.
Forever. Not just one-time people listening to this, but it's archived.
It's there forever.
The record is clear.
Today's newspaper is tomorrow's fish wrapping or birdcage liner, as the saying was when I was a kid.
Now, we are burning the brand of the truth into the mountainside of the world for all to see forever, or at least as long as it's allowed, in which case it may have to go underground Samastad style.
But this is...
Your call to action. And we're saying this because we love you.
I don't want to speak for you, but I get the love that you have for the freedoms, for the good people, for the liberties.
We had a long time of ease.
That time of ease is now done.
It's time to suit up. It's time to suit up or you're going underground.
There's no other alternative.
And the suit up now is peaceful, it's voluntary, it's passionate, it's rhetorical.
And we have an opportunity that former civilizations that slid into tyranny didn't have.
Can you imagine? If we'd have had this platform over the course of the fall of Rome, which is a slow-motion leading Tower of Pisa-style collapse that occurred over centuries, if we'd had this incredible iambic pentameter skywriting over the planet back then Everything could have been different.
We have the tools now, as never before in history, to push back against the growing darkness.
And all those people, oh, I've read Lord of the Rings, I watched the movies, it moved me, it was so passionate, it was so powerful, the courage of these hobbits.
Nobody's asking you to walk into Mordor.
All you have to do is stand up and speak the damn truth.
All you have to do. And if you can't do that, No one alive, not even the gods, can save you from the consequences of inaction.
Extraordinarily well said.
Thank you so much for being so gracious with your time and for the words.
And I certainly hope this is not the last time that we speak.
I'd like to have another conversation with you just about any time you want to.
Thank you, Evro.
It's a great pleasure for me as well.
And I appreciate you giving an unfettered lunatic like myself access to your audience's brains.
I really appreciate that.
I do.
Thank you.
It's my pleasure. Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest Free Domain show on philosophy.
And I'm going to be frank and ask you for your help, your support, your encouragement, and your resources.
Please like, subscribe, and share, and all of that good stuff to get philosophy out into the world.
And also, equally importantly, go to freedomain.com forward slash donate.
To help out the show, to give me the resources that I need to bring more and better philosophy to an increasingly desperate world.
So thank you so much for your support, my friends.
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