Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton - EP:12 - The Assassination of Charlie Kirk: America's Fractured Discourse

Episode Date: September 13, 2025

In the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination, Scott Horton and Daryl Cooper deliver a profoundly important conversation about the state of American political discourse and what happens when words are replaced by violence. This episode captures a raw, unfiltered moment as two thoughtful commentators process a national tragedy in real-time. "You either use institutions as a way of peacefully hashing these questions out or there's violence underneath it," Cooper observes, crystallizing the fundamental choice facing American society. Kirk, regardless of one's opinion of his politics, embodied a commitment to civil dialogue that makes his violent end particularly troubling. He was, as Cooper notes, someone who "deserved it a hell of a lot less than many of us." The conversation explores how political violence has become normalized, with both hosts examining the dangerous territory America enters when citizens no longer believe in resolving differences through debate. They challenge listeners on both sides of the political spectrum to resist calls for escalation or authoritarian crackdowns that would only exacerbate divisions. What emerges is a powerful reminder that beneath our political differences, Americans remain deeply interconnected. "The left half of America ain't really going anywhere," Horton emphasizes, making peaceful coexistence not just desirable but necessary. The hosts also tackle other pressing issues—including mental health crises (with 26% of young Americans having considered suicide), economic instability, and what true freedom of speech requires in practice. This episode serves as both a warning about where America might be headed if we continue dehumanizing political opponents and a call to recommit to the principles of civil dialogue that Kirk himself championed. It's an essential listen for anyone concerned about the future of American democracy and our capacity to live together despite our differences. Chapters: 0:00 Reacting to Charlie Kirk's Assassination 10:37 The Civil Veneer of Politics 22:33 Democracy's Violence Problem 36:24 The Root Causes of Social Breakdown 55:01 The Truth About Cultural Degradation 1:09:24 Civil War Fears and Political Reality 1:24:45 Protecting Free Speech Culture Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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all right aren't you guys welcome the show it's provoked i'm scott horton from the libertarian institute and uh soon the scott horton academy and this is my buddy darrell cooper he's the most important historian in america and of course hosts the martyr made podcast how you doing bud doing all right man it's been a it's been a uh a rough week i think for a lot of people a lot of shocking, a shocking week. So I'm doing all right. Yeah. All right. Well, so obviously the big topic is the murder of Charlie Kirk, his political assassination there. As of the time we're

recording this on Thursday night, there's pictures of the suspect out there, but nobody knows his name and he's not been arrested yet. So that's the news as of the time we're putting this together here um nobody knows exactly i guess the wall street journal said that um shells of the bullets you know still in the magazine in the rifle had um trans and antifa propaganda written on it the new york times is saying that their sources say that's not true so i don't know i guess we'll see how that shakes out but i guess i'm interested first of all in just your reaction darrell and then secondly what your prefrontal cortex actually reasons about all of this And so the floor is yours. I'm really interested to hear what you have to say.

You know, it's a reminder in a way that that beneath the veneer, the civil veneer, you know, of politics lies violence, you know, and there's a, you know, the institutions that we use to mediate our disputes, to find point. of compromise and to make decisions that may not be embraced by 100% of the population, but we decide as a people need to be done. You either use those institutions as a way of peacefully, you know, hashing these questions out, or there's violence underneath it. And that's it. You either talk or you fight. Those are the two options. And Charlie was a guy who was trying to talk, you know, say what you want about, I mean, whatever, it doesn't matter like what you disagree on because the thing is, whatever you disagree with him on, no matter how hard you disagreed with him on it, he would have sat down and had a civil conversation with you

about it and tried to convince you of his perspective. And if he couldn't, he couldn't. But that was how he approached things. And for a guy like him to meet and end like that is, it's unbelievably tragic, you know, he deserved it a hell of a lot less than many of us do, you know. And I talk about myself when I say something like that, you know, just in terms of just the irresponsibility of inciting rhetoric and things like, you know, he's just not that guy. He was never that guy. He's a genuinely good dude. I only talked to him one time, but I know a lot of people who knew him very well and he was a genuinely solid dude who uh you know for all of the the hate he gets from the other side uh he was a guy who was genuinely focused on trying to de radicalize american

politics like that was his real goal you know uh at least for for like recently and in right now you know it was not necessarily to put over this or that policy or convince people of this or that change that we need to make. It was really to bring down the temperature and show people that you can't actually just talk about these things. And, you know, our heart goes out to his family. You just can't imagine, you know, something like that happening. You know, it's just the kids and his wife. It's terrible. And it's just awful. And there's really, I mean, about the act itself, there's not a whole lot else to say about it, you know? Yeah, it's horrible, man. And, I didn't know the guy.

I think maybe we tweeted back and forth a couple times. I know quite a few people who knew him. And, you know, one or two people considered him to be a good friend, you know, and are really hurting now. So that completely sucks. And yeah, you're right that his whole stick, more than any of the points he was making was that we can all talk about this. That was his real point.

So then, you know, there are a lot of people now, obviously in reaction, who are saying, okay, well, you killed the guy who wanted to talk with you. now you got to deal with us who won't even pay you that respect or this and that and are kind of reacting in the way that one might presume the murderer would have wanted them to react, right, which is to sharpen the contradictions and make everything harder when, in fact, the left half of America ain't really going anywhere. So the cooler the right plays it, the more people from the left are going to move to the right and strengthen their dominance anyway.

they blow their whole wad trying to crack down and lose all their legitimacy they're only in powering their enemies you know that's sololinsky page 75 the action is in the act the reaction of the opposition that's the whole point of doing an asymmetric attack like that yeah i mean i learned that for being a commie i learned that from the birchers by the way thank you very much but that's the footnote i mean all you really have to do is look at the the way the democrats and just the regime in general treated the January 6th protesters, the way they went after Trump and the people around him using the legal system, just went totally him and figure we're just going to use all the power at our disposal to shut these people down and we'll clean up the mess afterwards if there's

public relations fall out. And we see how that's worked out for him. It is not worked out well. Right. And yeah, I think you make a really good point that those people who are responding that way, like that's the natural response. It's the predictable natural response to something like this, especially when this is not the first time and when it is never treated the same by the mass media. It's never treated the same. You know, it's just radicalizing for people when they see that clip that came up, I think it was yesterday when he had been shot, but the news hadn't come out that he was killed yet. And, you know, they, somebody was trying to have a prayer for him on the floor of Congress. I saw that.

Yeah. And the Democrats are hooting and hollering and booing and shouting and trying to break up the moment of silence. And it's like, you know, that kind of thing is exactly what Charlie Kirk was trying to fight against. Not that they didn't want a prayer going, but just that kind of attitude toward your opposition, you know. I mean, we should all be inspired a little bit. I certainly should, because I don't have this ability, you know, at least I pretend I don't so that I, you know, can disavow my own responsibility for it. But, you know, he would sit there and talk to people who were just, who would insult him, who were clearly, like, considered him

a monster, an enemy, you know, and he would sit there and maintain his composure and just talk with these people about whatever they wanted to talk about at these events, you know? and um you know i think you're right that this these kind of things are there's a lot of people on the right who are who are saying that you know the rights failure to respond in kind to this kind of thing and not necessarily with political violence but you know just again you just why are we not sending the FBI or some new task force that we just created for this purpose around all the Democrat cities and rounding up all the Antifa people and everything. I mean, there's a lot of people on the right right now who are pushing the line and really believe it and have a case to

make. I mean, like, you know, I don't agree with them, but they have a case to make that a culture of just total impunity has reigned for way, way, way too long, where, you know, people feel like, I mean, you remember during the Trump administration, when you had, you know, a bunch of, when they had the COVID state of the union address, I think it was, might have been the Republican convention, and it was one of those events. And it wouldn't have been COVID State of the Union because that's January, but it was some event. And all of the Congress people and senators and stuff were coming out and they were walking out of the place. And they were getting pushed around, screamed at people in their face, throwing stuff at them.

And, you know, when you see things like that, when you see the total non-response in the media, or even, I mean, if you've seen some of the clips on MSNBC of people, not celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk, but certainly saying that, you know, you play with fire, don't be a, you know, don't be surprised. And one day I got fired over it. Yeah, that's good. It's, you know, there's this prevailing feeling that things are spinning out of control because we're not doing enough to keep them under control. And so that's what we need to do. We need to use whatever powers at our disposal to put things back in order.

And I sympathize with that impulse for sure. You know, I'm somebody who, you know, as you said before, the show is not a libertarian, but. I value liberty and I'm somebody who thinks that, and maybe this is what separates me from, at least on a policy level, from a lot of libertarians, that for liberty to exist, you have to have order first. And if people feel vulnerable and if they feel like they're in a chaotic environment, they're not going to want liberty. They're going to want stability and control. And, you know, the tools that we have at our disposal, unfortunately, are, you know, are sledgehammers and the problems a lot of times are you know are surgical and so um yeah it's a it's

it's just an awful thing man like it really is i mean you see you watch that and um and you just realize that i mean it could be it could be any one of us because nobody deserved it less than charlie kirk and yeah you know it's um it's i think i think that we've probably entered a difficult dark era and we're going to have to work our way through it it's not going to be uh there's not going to be a de-escalation phase anytime soon i think i think over the next days and weeks um we're going to start to see things that uh you know that are going to that are going to shock and and maybe worry a lot of us even those of us who are entirely on the side of hoping that you know whoever did this gets you know strung up from the nearest lamp post so yeah well yeah step one is

real accountability for everyone involved in this thing anyone and everyone involved in the thing and all that but then yeah it can be that like oh after columbine now we just have school shootings now well now after charlie kirk everybody just kills each other's guys when they get on stage now i mean lord knows there's plenty of countries around the world where they don't have free speech and all that free speech in just the first amendment it's people tolerating each other you know doing things just like this so we can just have it where like yeah okay i'm the american tradition of political speech is canceled now you can blog from the safety of your house you can do your youtube shows but you can't go out and and participate in any kind of public conversation or

we could not go that way and we could recognize it same for dealing with china or ron or russia or something that like this planet has got to be big enough for the both of us the left half of the american political spectrum ain't really going anywhere or only on the margin they are and for that matter the political left is like roughly a hundred million people or something right and then so there's a pretty broad gray scale of who counts as a liberal or a progressive or a leftist or this or that kind of break off and if you ever seen like a family tree of all the leftist groups of who's a malice and who's a labor this and whatever that there's a million of them man there's so many factions and different sets of beliefs there and it ain't right that oh yeah they all did

this any more than every right winger did Oklahoma City or anything like that, you know? Which, of course, that was a bunch of FBI informants. But still, you know what I mean. So, yeah, no, and what's funny is, so I've just always been a libertarian. So my dream is to always try to get the best of the left and the right all on the same page. That what we got to do is roll back the national security state first and foremost. That's the major threat to our liberty, the central banking and war, war and central banking. man eye on the ball everybody and all the best right wingers and all the best left wingers who understand me

agree with me that's the name of the game dude that's the corruption of the republic right there and that's what needs to be challenged but could i get everybody together you know we did that that rage against the war machine protest at the lincoln memorial in washington and it was a libertarian left kind of coalition and i was pushing for like yeah we got to get some right wingers to come but then it was so clear that dude if we brought any prominent right wingers it would have blown up the whole thing. Libertarians can do a thing with left-wingers and libertarians can do a thing with right-wingers, but not at the same show. We can't, you know what I mean? It's just, we can't do it. And then, so now I'm willing to settle for, like, y'all just not kill each other

or me or us or anyone. You know what I mean? But like, never mind, a real realignment where it's the people versus the war party, right? That's what should be. It should be the Democratic Republicans versus the war party of taxes, tyranny, death, and Israel. right the bad guys the people with power versus all everybody else and um anyway i i've always known that's what is supposed to happen i've always known it never will but um but yeah i've got to do my best to encourage what would charlie kirk say he would say everybody chill out everybody prove each other wrong by arguing instead of shooting each other that is what he would say even in reaction to his own murder here we can all be sure of that

So, like, what the hell? And because the future is always coming. What are you going to do? I hear people talking about, oh, well, the Rubicon is crossed now. Well, what are you saying? You're, like, getting your Kevlar and going to war? No, we're not doing that. That's the other thing I wanted to rant about, this whole thing about civil war.

Like, what are you going to do? You got to have Williamson County versus Travis County? No, you're not. The liberals from the cities aren't coming outside for the country folk. And the country folk aren't all, like, forming up malicious to go, and invade the cities and depose all their blue mayors and whatever, right? This is all nonsense. No, this is happening.

Americans haven't fought over the Mississippi River since 1864, right? Or maybe 65. So, um, well, Americans don't, we don't know. We, and we don't need any dirty kidnapping and murder wars either, right? Like, everybody chill, please. Say, like, we Americans don't know what a civil war is because we didn't really have one. We kind of split into two countries and then had a regular war. Yeah, that's a good way to put that.

That's not civil war, man. Like from Northern Ireland to Sarajevo to Beirut, just pick up any book you want and believe me when I say, you do not want any part of a civil war. Because civil war means you don't know if you can trust your neighbor. And so you better join the group that's going to go into his house and kill him and his family before they do the same to you because you don't know. And, you know, it doesn't get settled on battlefields.

They get settled in damp basements with pliers and blow torches, you know, with someone tied to a chair. Like, that's Civil War. Civil War's random people getting shot by snipers as they walk down the street. You don't, people, people, and especially, I mean, like, what are the, what are the organizing, like, organizing principles of a civil war in America? Like, nobody's organized for anything like that. Like, and so it really does just, it really would just, even that movie Civil War, which

did a decent job like portraying the the sort of fog and chaos of something like that. You know, this whole idea of like in the, I don't know if you saw it, but in the movie there's a Western alliance led by California and Texas and they're marching on Washington. That's not, that's just totally ridiculous in the United States. It's like a way it would look is like you have a big swath of the country where nothing's going on, but then this swath of the country over here that's more ideologically mixed or just randomly killing each other. There's no battles.

There's no nothing. there's no marching on cities. It's just violence and nihilism and chaos because that's what civil war always is. The same as how Americans don't, you know, we don't really understand revolutions because we think we had one when we really didn't. We really kind of, a similar kind of thing. We like seceded and then had a war against the British, you know. It wasn't like the French or the Russian or any other revolution where you're proscribing every enemy of the regime and, you know, any potential traitor that you can root out so what revolution usually is. And when people, say that they want that kind of thing. Like I, you know, I always try to, A, tell them it's unrealistic that, you know, to even expect that, but, you know, but B, that they don't want it nearly as much as they think they do because, you know, all that does is, all it ever does is empower the people who are already organized and ready to take advantage of the situation. And that ain't us. I'll tell you that. Like, it's not us. You know, you and your neighbors with your AR-15s are not, you know, you're

talking about there are massive interests out there government institutions organizations military organization just all kinds of things and you would be about whatever whatever networks you're part of not you scott but just anybody who's thinking this way whatever networks you think you're part of add them all together and they are one thousandth on the list of likely winners in any scenario like that you know 99% of people in scenario in those kind of scenarios are just victims and that's it and we don't want that you know we have to preserve what's left of our civility here and i think now the question though and the people who are pushing for a harder response to this are going to are going to say this is you know like i agree with what you said

about you know the way the way war has normalized a lot of things domestically and made a lot of things possible that you know repressive things that that wouldn't be and kind of soured our even our just non, you know, forget the government, just our interpersonal relations with each other and region. All that's true. But I also think, I mean, there's a lot of people that, you know, that would say that you just like, you look at the social chaos that we have allowed to just take over this country really since like the late 1960s where, you know, people are just looking around and they're like, you know, they remember when they were kids and the country they lived in and nothing was perfect. Nothing was ever perfect, obviously. People think the 90s

were perfect. You mentioned Oklahoma City. They weren't. But when you have, you know, just regular political violence happening as a matter of course. I mean, you go back, remember the 2016 election. Every rally Trump held, there were mobs of people waiting to attack his followers, his supporters. like as they went to their cars, and the media just treated it like it was just a normal response to a fascist trying to run for office or something. You have these killings. This is, you know, Charlie Kirk's the most high profile one, but it's not the first one. And then you just have a lot of the, you know, I mean, people look around and they say, I used to walk down this street with used bookstores and boutique cafes when I wanted to take a girl on a date and now or take my daughter

like, you know, out for ice cream. And now if I want to do that, we have to avoid, you know, getting too close to the alleyways so somebody doesn't jump out at us and we have to step over somebody's smoking crack where that bookstore used to be. And a cop is like two blocks down just doing nothing about all of it because he's been ordered not to or he's afraid of what will happen if he tries. And people look at this and they're like, you know what, this is, we need to do something to reverse this. And the only, the only thing that people really know how to do, because the cultural questions, you know, the cultural forces that are leading to all this degradation seem way too big for anybody to deal with. And maybe they are. And so the solutions

people look for are political, which means, you know, they're violent. That's the violent solutions is like it is all people feel like they have recourse to, to try to reverse what they see is really the destruction of their civilization. I mean, that's what they think they're witnessing. And I mean, I don't think they're crazy for thinking that, you know? And so the question is like, you mean, there's no accountability. Hang on one second. Like when you talk about like threats to liberty, I mean, the war, all of those things, those are all threats to liberty. There's a lot of threats to liberty. One of the biggest ones, though, and you could end all the wars tomorrow and everything. But if people feel like their society is falling apart and they're becoming more

vulnerable and their neighborhood is going to shit and girls are getting stabbed in the neck randomly by dudes who have been arrested 70,000 times on a train in Charlotte and their moderate centrist right political, you know, organizer that they like to follow is getting shot. And MSNBC is like making. you know, rationalizing comments. Dude, people, that's a threat to liberty because people are going to say, you know what, like we can't, we can't go on living like this. And so we don't know necessarily how to fix it. And so what we're going to do is we're going to put in power somebody on our side and tell them, we're going to look away for a while and you just do

whatever has to be done to put this to bed. I mean, that's, that's where we're headed if things don't stabilize. If the spirit of Charlie Kirk, when he was alive, and the things that he was trying to push, if that doesn't prevail, then that's the direction we're headed, you know? Well, first of all, the thing is, is everybody knows their vote don't count. That's the main part of it, like you're saying,

is they got all these problems and they know there's nothing they can do about it, even though this country's supposed to belong to them. They can show up and boat harder and it just becomes its own joke, right? It doesn't do anything. And so that's the reason people are so frustrated. right then they protest and people crack down on that so they they get driven to violence from

there is because as you're talking about politics is the game of who gets to control the power of the violence of the state so we're all supposed to wear ties and be nice gentlemen while we fight over who gets to sit in these chairs and make these decisions about who gets exploded to death or locked in a dungeon you know so then yeah it's a life or death struggle and the game can be dressed up as polite, but it can also get, you know, very ugly. I would point out that all those social problems that you cite are the state's fault, right? All of those are because of the welfare state, because of the warfare state, because of inflationary money. I mean, people are, you know, you hear, I see, you know, I quit Twitter because I can only abuse it, not just use it.

So now I abuse YouTube instead, and I look at all the stupid YouTube short videos or whatever. And I see random people of all walks of life talking about how their lives are destroyed because of the cost of living is just through the roof. And it means that people can't afford school. They can't afford food. I mean, hell, I'm doing okay. I'm doing better than I've ever done right now with my book sales and whatever as things are going and whatever. I can barely afford to feed a very small family here. And people are just hurting like hell out there.

They're living in the Walmart parlorant. They're living in the alley that you're talking about because their rent doubled. that's why they're out there and you know I read this great thing about how I might be repeating myself it was about how a lot of homeless people they start out they got jobs they're still living outside

they're still trying to go to work and they end up getting hooked on drugs after they're homeless and it's so they can stay awake at night so they don't get mugged and killed and then but so now there's a meth head and so now good luck getting back on your feet now that you got a drug problem

in order to try to stay alive after the Federal Reserve System kicked you out of your house and and then and that's during the good times that's when that's the inflationary bubble before the crash when everything gets 10 times worse and people got to survive the recession or the depression somehow and end up blowing their damn brains out you know again the welfare so you talk about the cultural left and degradation from all that george w bush was president and invoked all of cultural christian conservatism in order to launch an aggressive war or three and torture

100 people to death, tell lies from morning to night for eight years straight, and completely crashed the entire planet's economy with his phony paper money system. And that's why even after eight years of Obama, the cultural left was still in charge through four years of Trump, even though the pendulum then swung, uh-uh, because the right had completely blown their credibility by lying and murdering and torturing people to death and having no credibility. left to stand on while people were moving to the left. And especially when they're destroying the economy, when it's Republicans destroying the economy through their rigged socialist games, crony capitalists and socialist, you know, money printing and the rest. And then people move

hard to the left and become more and more socialist in reaction, blaming, like pretending George Bush was Ron Paul and that it was free markets that caused the crash of 08. So now we need, remember FDR, merge with Obama on the front of time magazine. Like now we need a whole new deal. So, and of course, welfare paying single mothers to be single mothers, which has been going on for generations. I think I told you, Daryl, didn't I, about how I saw that documentary that was made by leftist black radicals in like 1970. And it was about how the great society had come and destroyed their entire civilization and forced all the men out of their women's homes, out of their family homes. This is the only way to get welfare.

And the government agents went door to door to door, telling everybody to kick their husband out so they can get a bunch of free stuff and it had completely destroyed their society. And they saw the results of it within two years. And they made a documentary about it about how these, oh, these well-meaning liberals came and they sure helped us good.

And then they didn't change the policy. That was 50 years ago, 55 years ago, and they didn't change it. They've been paying women to kick their men out of the house ever since then. They've been printing money and waging wars and doing all this ever since then and then yes people and and look sorry one more when i was in 1996 97 when i was in junior college toby the manager of my sub shop said to me

he goes man don't you understand the cops and the in the prosecutors in the state and all of them they need crime of course they let all the rapists and the murderers and the criminals out and keep the cells full of drug dealers oh because that was probably what caused the conversation as i complain, my friend Darren was doing years in the penitentiary for selling pounds of Mexican dirtweed and watching real criminals, armed robbers and rapists and killers, come and go through the system while he was sitting in his cage. And Toby says to me, yeah, and he's not a libertarian theorist. He's just the manager of a sub shop. And he goes, Scott, listen, it's a very small number of people who commit the crimes in society. The cops know who they are. And they could just lock

them up and the rest of us would be fine. But they need crime so that we need. them. And so of course they let out all the worst criminals. When Obama people came and in the aftermath of Mike Brown and all of that stuff in the beginning of Black Lives Matter, there was a huge outcry and including from libertarians that, yes, we need criminal justice reform. People are tyrannized to death by the state in this country. Find and feed to death. I just today, Darrell, finally got out of a 12, 13 year vendetta by the IRS against me, that I finally only am under out from under now where they just made up a bunch of numbers of taxes i could never have possibly owed right and and i'm just one guy i'm not even complaining they do this to

a million other people every year year in and year out it's completely persecute and destroy people and then from all that pressure against all that tyranny what do we get they legalized murder and armed robbery and and and shoplifting up to a thousand dollars and and uh camping on on the streets no matter like with drug use and and uh you know feces everywhere and and whatever camping you know in downtown in cities they did it in austin too um and so they legalized the worst crimes and meanwhile they cracked down even harder on all those petty off fences oh you got caught walking somewhere with a gun off to the penitentiary with you you know or there's a thousand there's a million other offenses where people get completely destroyed by the state,

get on probation, try being on probation for 10 years and not get revoked and not have to go to the pen anyway and all of this. People live just desperate lives under the tyranny of this regime. And then they legalize the worst crimes. And then understandably, like you're paraphrasing a lot of people and sympathizing with them. And I sympathize too. You want to see the state crack. down, but they're not going to crack down on real crime because they need you to keep wanting

them to crack down. So they're going to crack down on you instead. That's what they always do. What's the answer then? I don't know. Well, first of all, take as much power away from Washington as possible and revert all power to states, have hard money, completely abolish the central bank and abolish the empire, insist on hard money and an end to inflation.

So, but the response, the revival. everyone's going to give to that is um okay so we just we just accept this and deal with it until no i mean by all means vote for republican judges no no no by all means vote for republican judges but i'm just saying like even then if you want republican judges to sentence violent criminals to extremely lengthy impunitive prison terms you should also insist that they make sure they got the right guy because of course we have a huge epidemic of people who get the entire book thrown at them when they didn't do anything. We have an entire criminal justice system where you don't get a fair trial like on Matlock at all. They threaten you with 99 charges and you plead

guilty to 16 of them so that you only get 10 years instead of 55. And everybody knows that that's how it works. 99.99% of people don't get a fair trial at all. They get completely gangsterized. And it's because they're 10,000 law. 10,000 offenses. These aren't even crimes. They're just offenses against state edicts that people have to go through the court system for. So you, you get rid of all of that, you have a bare criminal code. And obviously you need a civil code for separate court system, civil code for like, you know, doing business and lawsuits and whatever. But as far as a criminal code, you have a bare criminal code and then you make sure that it's enforced fairly. And yes, by all means, violent criminals should only get one chance, maybe two. But like,

I don't know. However exactly you want to divvy that up, but like when it comes to premeditated murder or whatever. I'm not for mercy, but I'm just saying how many times they got the wrong guy. It's a lot. They really do get the wrong guy a lot. You can't trust a prosecutor or a judge because they're criminals too. And so, you know, I know, what are you going to do? Give them as little power as possible, really. My, you know, an example of that, um, is this project I've been working. I mean, it's not a project. It's just me, but, um, that I've been working on for years now. Uh, and that if I can pool all the influence that I can

get my hands on in the administration sometime in the next couple years my dream is to get a white paper in front of somebody to review this guy's case for clemency or pardon this kid, he's not a kid anymore he's been in federal lockup for 14 years now from Knoxville, Tennessee

I've been out there I've talked to his parents, talked to his family, talk to all of his friends. I mean, dozens of people. This dude is doing life plus 70 years in federal. And I'm 99.9% sure he's innocent of all the charges that they brought against him. And I'm 100% sure, basically, that he's innocent of everything except selling a little bit of weed. And this guy, you know, the life plus 70, we'll talk about this case one of these days because it's something that like, I'll get worked up every time I talk about it because there's just, it's an insane case. But, you know, he got life for selling the drugs, which if I told you

the whole story, we'd take up the whole episode. But like, it's just, it's an insane story. Like, you could tell like reading through the trial transcript, which I've done a dozen. times that his own lawyers, and I talked to his lawyers, actually. When I went, I went to Knoxville, I talked to all these people, got his permission to talk to his lawyers. Even they were, I want to say they were taking it easy, but they were almost like, oh, this is the easiest case we've ever done. Like, this is easiest acquittal, like we've ever come across in our lives. You know, they were kind of treating it that way. And they gave this kid life plus 70 for a first time nonviolent offense with no, no violence, no threats, no nothing.

even remotely involved in the case, and they tracked him for a year and a half, tapped his phones, followed him, everything, never caught him with drugs, never found him talking about drugs, never got him anything, right? And this kid's got life plus 70 years. And these are feds or state cops? Feds. And because you know how it is? Like, you know, it's just exactly what you said. Like, they take it personally if you make them go into court and actually go through all that. They're like, all right son of a bitch you know you're going to make us go to court we'll show you and and that's why everybody you know who's ever been in a federal case their lawyer tells them no matter what you got to cut a deal because there's a million there's a and um so anyway the point i wanted to make though

is this guy was he was like a classic gun collector he had like you know like a like a like a old world war two browning uh like machine had all the licenses all the special things and everything he had this old like World War II tripod mounted like a browning machine gun with like the ammo cases that were still sealed and waxed and he was never going to open because there were collectors items all that kind of stuff well they said that well since you're a drug dealer yes all of these guns are legal everything was bought legally your names on all of it's all fine but because we got you on this drug thing we're going to say that these guns were like there to yeah we never we never found you using them in the commission of a crime or whatever but

anybody who came to your house, they would have seen those things, and they would have felt threatened by them, and they would have thought this guy's dangerous. And so therefore, we're going to give you firearms charges as well, and they tacked on 70 more years for that. First time offense, this kid had never been convicted for jaywalking. Okay. And Christian family, churchgoing family, like from the west side suburbs of Knoxville, Tennessee. His dad has acute clearance, works at Oak Ridge national labs, you know, just his father and mother, he's a black guy, his father and mother of these older folks who were born in like the 40s in Tennessee, right? So they're living under Jim Crow for the first early part of their lives. His father volunteers to go to Vietnam.

He didn't get drafted. He volunteered and he went to Vietnam and fought. A guy who, if he had any excuse not to want to go serve his country that guy had an excuse not to want to do it you know but he did and they raised up a nice kid a good guy um and he's doing life plus 70 unless somebody can get him out of there just sorry you you brought that subject up and it gets me but like um oh i wanted to say you're talking about welfare and i'm going door to door telling people to throw their you know throw the baby daddy out of the house and i do it's so much worse than that actually and i found all this out when I was doing all my research on New York in the 1960s for a couple of my podcast episodes is when John Lindsay was mayor of New York, New York City and state introduced a whole bunch of

new welfare reforms where they literally came out and based on this study by these two professors at Columbia, they decided there's not enough people on welfare, that there's a lot of people out there who, because there's still this sort of social stigma to it. You know, it's this old depression era, sort of, it was, you know, and, and so they said, we got to get rid of that. We got to, we got to get people to the point where they don't feel that kind of stigma when they're taking money from the state. And so there was big advertising campaigns, door to door knocking campaigns to tell people like, hey, this is your money. You deserve this. Like, don't, you know, to get as many people on it as possible. Well, here's the crazy part. The two kinds of

me professors from Columbia. I can't remember their names right now, but I mentioned them in the podcast. They had written articles like in the last couple years where they lay out in explicit detail that, okay, here's the plan. And I'm not exaggerating. They say we need to get as many people on welfare as possible, especially black and Puerto Ricans, because they're in New York City, because what that's going to do is it's going to increase racial polarization. It's going to give us a population of people that are dependent on the state and therefore can be used for various ends and this will help push us toward the revolution. They were open about it, these two professors who were literally brought into the New York City government to advise and run this program

basically. They weren't like the managers of the agency, but they were the people who were there sort of providing, they were consultants who were leading the thing. And so it's like a lot of this stuff was done for the explicit purpose of pulling the cord on this thing that we're doing, you know? It's so bad because it's built in anyway. You know, it's in the incentive anyway. I had a friend of mine, I used to know a long time ago when I was a kid, like before I, you know, was interested in these kinds of things.

And I hadn't known her for a very long time. So when I talked to her about this, she wasn't like telling me, oh, you're Mr. libertarian guy. So let me tell you this libertarian story. It had nothing to do with that. She's just telling me a story from her life. that she had no idea why I would be even interested in this topic as a topic. She just told me a story.

Her husband, who's a good guy, father of her four kids, he was doing tree trimming work, but it was just a slow summer. They had very little work. So she thought, well, we'd get a little help with the groceries. She goes down there, and the ladies at the counter, they tell her, look, you have a husband in the house? She's like, yeah, father, my four boys. And they're like, well, we can't do nothing for you.

But if you can get rid of him and come back, then we'll be able to buy you all the groceries you need and all the time. But she only needs help for a couple of months here. You know what I mean? They're telling her to essentially get divorced or at least separate from the guy, separate him from his sons. And the thing is, is the ladies behind the counter, they're just some idiot ladies from her town who worked there at the government office.

They didn't go to communism, destroy America College or whatever. They don't know nothing about that. Just their job is, in order to sign up for this, you have to not have a husband. husband in the house. So what you do is get rid of your husband and we'll give you the money. In fact, all you got to do is just phrase it differently. We'll give you this money to get rid of your husband. You know, to get rid of him is what they're doing, whether they understand that or not, it's clearly what they're doing. You remember last week we were talking about, I used the example of what my friend who had been on the LAPD told me about the interrogation room and how

cops and suspects both kind of adopted a personality that they learned from TV on how to deal with that. But then a generation of them passed and like they're still doing that, but none of them realize they're doing it now. They're not like, it's the same thing. Like those ladies, like all of this stuff started by a lot of people who were like crazy revolutionaries who saw very clearly like the destruction that this was going to wreak on our, none of the people doing it now, none of the institutions doing it now are aware of any of that. It's all just built into the structure of the system now and keeps rolling without anybody having to know what's going on. It's just, you know, the purpose of a system is what it does. And those systems were built and put

in place and given power. And, you know, we're sort of like in this weird, we're in this weird place right now where we aren't, people are starting to see all this, but they're not sure how to shut it all down without, while staying within the realms of what's politically permissible. you know what I mean like and sort of like and you know I think about for example like if you go back to the Kenosha right where Kyle Rittenhouse killed killed those people um you know I did an episode on that and you look into the whole thing and you look at the things that are being said by politicians and by news agencies you know 24 hour cable news channels and so forth just media people influencers but people and including people in government you know when that in the least

lead up to that. That you, you know, you look at that and you'd be justified and saying that this was not like, this was not a riot. This was an attack on an American city that was, that involved a ton of people from outside the area that was essentially encouraged and incited by members of our government, people in the media. And, you know, there was a, there was like this supply truck that went out there that called itself riot kitchen that was, you know, would go around to these things during the Floyd

riots. and they went to Kenosha, and they would serve, you know, food, drinks to the rioters. But also, they got pulled over on the way, either on the way there or the way out. And, you know, there was a bunch of stuff in there that was confiscated because it was stuff that was riot gear and things like that. They got like a $5,000 grant from GoFundMe. I mean, and then meanwhile, Kyle Rittenhouse, you know, he tries to raise a legal fund on GoFundMe. and they ban it.

You say you can't do that here. And it's like, these are the kind of things where people in the right are looking at it and saying, look, you know, people, this is the way people are looking at it. And this is an extreme way to look at it. But they're saying the people who shot Charlie Kirk,

they control all of our institutions right now. And so the idea that like, well, we just need to vote harder. We just have to like have conversations. Like, this is crazy. This is what we've been trying to do. and it's not working and things are only getting worse for us and for the country. And, you know, and that's, this is not even getting into, they don't know who, they don't know who did this yet, obviously.

But you had that, that, that, that, that, I think it was an internal memo or something that Stephen Crowd released, supposedly from an ATS, someone inside the ATF, who said, what now the FBI itself is saying, that they had found the rifle wrapped up in a cloth in the woods and that the bullets and the rifle had engravings of like antifa and or anti-fascist and and trans ideology stuff like engraved on it. And so who knows if that's true, but that's that it would track with things that have happened recently. There have been several, you know, murders by by trans people, politically motivated murders in recent months and years. And, you know, I think that we, um, over the last, especially over the last five years

since, since, since like 2015, 2016, especially, um, we've driven a hell of a lot of people crazy in this country. And we're going to be living with the consequences of it for a long time, man. Like when you look at, uh, you know, this was, this was three or four years ago. Now, they do it every year. I haven't checked back on the numbers. But, um, a few, years ago, the CDC did their annual mental health survey. And this is a huge survey, 600,000 people from, you know, that they go through and make sure they hit every demographic, every region, every, you know, all these different things to try to, you know, to try to get a general sense. A big, well-funded survey they do. And I'll never forget this because, I mean, it's when

you just stop and like take it out of the, just, you know, it's hard. hard to shock us with anything anymore, but if you just imagine that you're coming, you're reading about this in a different civilization. You're reading a history book, right? And you're reading about this civilization. According to the CDC's mental health survey a few years back, they asked the question, in the past 30 days, have you seriously considered committing suicide in the last 30 days? And the word seriously was in there. Of people aged 16 to 24, of all races and both genders combined, 26% said that they had seriously considered killing themselves in the last 30 days. One out of four people aged 16 to 24. And you read that and the

first thing I thought was like, why is there not a special session of Congress being called over this? How are they not, you know, for like, we should have just every media channel should be required to give up two hours every evening until like we get this dealt with and worked out. So this is a massive crisis. Like a quarter of our young people are seriously thinking about killing themselves in the last 30 days.

Like this is, but it was just, I don't even think it made the paper. You know what I mean? Like, and that kind of stuff has been going on and spreading under the surface, man. There's a lot of these, like, look, man, I'll tell you this. I don't have any sympathy for the trans movement.

I think it's grotesque. I think that they are, they're enabling and encouraging people to go deeper into their mental illness in ways that are incredibly destructive to those people. That's the movement. The people themselves,

there's a lot of these people that are victims of all this. There are a lot of people out there walking around whose health is destroyed, whose bodies are mutilated, who are mentally just completely deranged at this point, because they believed what all of the elite institutions in our society were telling them.

And they have to live with that now for the rest of their lives as they're starting to realize that, you know, well, they're just, they're starting to realize that either they got sold a bill of goods and now they're just feeling the consequences of their decisions now and they're just looking for somebody else to blame because they don't want to, you know, they don't want to blame it on that. but there's gonna there's a lot of these people who i i and i mean we're seeing this i mean there's been there's been a lot of these incidents um where we're just we're going to be living with this for a while man and the thing is the psychiatrist could have said all along that look if you want to live as a woman that's fine but what they did they go no you really are one and you got to fight everybody who disagrees just now you have to just make this complete break with reaction as you're saying, you know, plunge the depths of your psychosis now. No, you really are a girl.

You just got stuck in the wrong body. The doctor assigned you the wrong gender at birth or like all of this just insanity. And then, yeah, it could be pretty hard to climb down from that. You could see, you know, the trans shooter at that school from a couple of years ago. That seemed to really be the problem, right? Like big promises made, but none of this really makes sense. And then, you know, he or she or whatever. was lashing out at all the people who had told her no before yeah and like you know you were talking

earlier just about people who are looking at their life who are just sort of realizing now is there 35 or something that they're just they're they're they're never going to own a house they're never going to you know people judge like their their relative standard of living everybody talks about keeping up with the joneses and all that i don't think that's really like the standard, the reference point for most people. I think for most people, it's how they grew up. You know, if they look at it and they're like, I'm never going to, I'm never going to live in a house as nice as the one I grew up in. I'm never going to have the kind of financial stability that my parents had when I was, then they feel poor. Even if they're not poor, even if they're still

middle class, you know, and still can live and survive and, you know, and all that, they're going to feel, they're going to feel poor and they're going to feel trapped. They're going to feel that shame, that sense of failure of letting their parents down, all these kind of things that build up into really toxic emotional mixes. And when people feel that way, and you, I mean, this is the thing about, you know, I really think like the poison pill in democracy is that not everybody is emotionally and psychologically cut out to be involved with politics. democracy demands that everybody be involved with politics all the time. You know, and you see it

now, dude, like after this assassination happened, you go online and it's not just, it's not just like crazy anonymous people with like, you know, 18 followers or whatever. You have like these, you have major accounts, people who have huge platforms using their own face, who are just out they're like saying with no evidence that this was Charlie Kirk was assassinated by Israeli intelligence. And when you ask them, as Dave Smith did, when somebody posted this, he just all Dave said, he said, well, what's the evidence for that? And dude, if you want your freaking blood to curdle and you really want to get blackpilled about the state of our society, go read the replies to Dave. Just for asking, well, what is the actual evidence? I mean,

they're, like, you know, people, most people, first of all, like, you have, you know, I think we may have talked about this before, but politics, A, there is always violence at the bottom of it, and people on some level sense that. And so they know, like, the seriousness of the, of the, you know, activity that they're engaged in when they're being political, that they're doing something that's a proxy for for violent conflict basically. And it makes it, it makes it sharper than it would any, you know, another kind of activity. And so you have that pressure put on it. But then, you know, you know, you bring in the fact that, you know, what that does is it means there are always enemies out there. There's always opposition. There's always somebody who's trying to do something to control

you in a way that you don't want to be controlled or to change your life or your environment in a way you don't want it changed. And it encourages very sharp us versus them thinking. It encourages you to look at your fellow citizens as potential enemies, you know? And it's a, I mean, look, if democracy dies in this country, it's not going to be because it's not going to be because some military dictator just overrides the will of the people and takes over and says, If you don't like it, that's too bad.

It's going to be by acclamation, just like it was with Caesar, with the Romans, where the Romans were ecstatic when Augustus finally stabilized the situation they've been living through for the, and what it really comes down to is people are just like, you know what, I'm just tired of arguing with people about all this shit. Like, can somebody else just deal with all this so that I don't have to argue with my neighbor and him think I'm a terrible person? Because these decisions are taken completely out of both of our hands. that's why it's going to fail when it fails you know because people just get sick of it all right wait so

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October 10th through 12th there and so and now I want to change the subject back to actually what you're saying which is something that I think is very reasonable or potentially very reasonable in response to this that government could do that like all other things being equal my anti-governmentness would not necessarily object to which would be well first and foremost

how about we have Tulsi Gabbard and everybody we have Cash Patel release the Antifa files and let's see everything that the Justice Department and FBI have internally on Antifa and for that matter the state police agencies

let's do a global FOIA on every document about this because I'm very suspicious to this thing and I used to know like some black block you know earth first anarchists back like in the days of Seattle 99 which I didn't go to but I knew some people who did and they're sincere

like anarcho syndicalist whatever things they weren't controlled or bribed by anyone powerful whoever they were a few people you know on free radio Austin way back then but um so I'm like familiar with the type but then see there's this article which I'm sure you're familiar with Mr. Darrell Cooper, which the audience may be familiar with.

If you're not familiar with it, even if you are familiar with it, it's worth rereading. It's just such an insightful article. It's at Time Magazine, and it's called the secret history of the shadow campaign that saved the 2020 election. And it's about how they rig the election for Biden, but it's all in the guys of how they saved it from Trump, right? Because that's their point of view, so they just tell the story. And there's a lot of aspects to the thing, and I only remember a very small percentage of

them. I owe the article of rereading myself, in fact. But one of the things that's very powerful in there that I really took from it and never forgot was how easy it was for the very most powerful Democratic Party apparatchiks to turn Antifa on and off like a light switch. We want them to show up here. We want them to show up there. We want the police to stand down here and let them right there. I guess, you know, I don't think they talked about who was delivering the pallets of bricks, but still, one of the things that they pointed out was that where were all the commies on January 6th? There's all right wingers and no leftists. The only leftist there was Max Blumenthal out in the yard going, hey, I ain't falling for this.

Journalist reporting, right, not participating. But all of the leftists, the agitators all stayed home. Why? Because they all got a text message that said, don't go. And they all obeyed it because there's somebody in command of this thing. and then what do they all say over and over they go well there's really no such thing as antifa it's not really a organization it's really just like a set of ideological guiding principles about how the thing and whatever but that's just straight out of the nED and the usaid and the ndi and i ri and george soros

and his organizations and how they do the color code of revolutions man it's how they've done it since albania well i don't know about albanian 97 i know they they did intervene heavily in albanian 97, but definitely in Slovakia in 1998, in Croatia in 99, in Serbia, 2000, as we all know, Georgia in 2003, Ukraine in 04. They tried in Belarus, succeeded in Kyrgyzstan, failed in in Lebanon, all in 05. And this is, you know, usually what they do is dispute an election. And, you know, if they lose it, they say that our exit polls say that we should have won and you're the one who cheated and refused to accept and this kind of thing. But it just seems very clear. to me and that

and I don't know who and I'm probably ignorant maybe someone has done real good work on this and I just am too stupid to know who they were but I sincerely believe that the and I'm no reason to claim this I'm not trying to argue the case for I just it seems

to me like it ain't a coincidence that it was the Democratic governors that locked their states down the hardest for COVID and exploited that thing I'm not saying they released the virus on purpose or whatever I don't think they probably would go that far But certainly once the thing was out and they had the excuse to lock the country down, I think they did that as a destabilization campaign against Trump, just as well as it was, you know, centrally decided that they're going to make George Floyd. Cops kill people every day, pretty much, you know, every week.

And but they decided they're going to make this one a huge cause and they're going to have these huge protests and riots and all this. And you can see there really is a centralized control. Now think of what, like, I mean, never mind everything that the Doge released about USAID. Just think about what we already know from my book that came out last year. But then we have everything that Doge released about USAID and there are ties to all of these NGOs. I don't know if anyone, even Mike Benz or Jesus or from a cloud or anyone could actually perceive the forest of NGOs and the level of control that exists, you know, through the Democratic Party and all of their allies in this country. all the cronyism and all of the payola and everything built into that thing. And so you know what?

If Donald Trump wants to do a RICO case on that and show me the George Soros in that, I mean, I'm just so, oh, I meant to wrap up on the COVID thing. Any governor that does that, of course, was risking their own governorship. But that would be worth taking the hit if we can bring down the president, right? And which was the point, right, was to really destabilize the country. remember Trump tried to run ads where it was showing the burning riots and he said this is Biden's America and it was like actually you're the one sitting there right now and but it was his own regime was either aiding and abetting it or at least we're turning the other way and allowing

all of this to happen really to I think almost certainly to get him and so no I don't want to see like you know whatever a new national police force to round up all the hippies and persecute But if there are specific people who need indictin, especially the powerful ones who have been behind organizing these networks, you know, if Antifa is really nothing different than Opore or one of these other groups, or, you know, they have, as I show in the book, there's a million. There's one for every one of these tulip revolutions. They have these youth groups where they go out there. They get all of this money and go out there and cause whatever level of crisis is needed to destabilize the country and force the regime change. and so yeah and then here's another thing that would be perfectly acceptable for any anti-government person or any right-winger too um like a pro-government right-winger is

let's defund from all public funds from all from all states all liberal arts departments in every college i mean i'm for abolishing all government school of any kind but whatever if you people want to leave math and science and engineering or whatever fine but why in the world should we be forced to pay for people to be taught to hate the country and try to destroy it and to never get a job? We should not be doing that. I mean, there's a libertarian solution to that. Like, there's a libertarian solution to that problem right there.

And you don't have to go around banning programs or anything. All the federal government has to do is say, we're not going to guarantee loans anymore. Right. And so, or, you know, or make the schools themselves put them on the hook for part of that, part of that money. if you do that, then all of a sudden they're going to say you want $200,000 to go to school. Great. What are you studying? Oh, you're an engineer. This is your high school GPA. We think you can probably get through school. Great. Here you go. Here's 200 grand. You want to study what? No, no, you're never going to pay us back. You're crazy. You're not getting it.

99% of those would go away overnight. You'd have a few boutique programs here and there for rich kids who want to go, you know, do whatever. Like we always had that kind of stuff. That would solve the problem like literally overnight you know i remember of all the things same thing that molly ball article from time magazine that's exact if i remember one thing from it it's that exact part because it hit me the hardest is it was a combination of two points that were related is one as they said throughout the summer throughout that entire period there were weekly calls being held that had all of these media people people who uh were in local and state government um people who were organizers of black lives and the protest during the George Floyd riots.

And Democrats leaders, of course, all of these people on weekly calls to plan and talk about, like, okay, like, you know, how can we use COVID this week to get a certain message across? Or how can we take control of the narrative this week and turn it to our advantage? And one of the things that they said was what you said. They said they had it all prepared that if Trump won the election, They had in 400 American cities and towns, I guess it must be towns too, because you get to the 400th biggest city and you're talking about a town, they had protesters ready to go organized by the same people who organized the protests over the summer. So that means they had riots ready to go in 400 American cities.

And the fact that they were able to just call them off, you know, because, I mean, it really does go to show you the, the level of control that that somebody somewhere has over these things. Because the thing is, if these were just hardcore true believer types, I mean, look, Trump didn't win the election that night, but he didn't concede, you know, he went out there and said this is a bunch of crap and we're going to fight this and we're not going to let this happen. And so if those people were just true believers and not members of like a sponsored fight club, you know, they would have gone out the next day to protest, this fascist guy who's saying he's not going to accept the results of the, but they didn't. You know, and it's because somebody out there

can pull that string or not pull it. And that's the kind of thing that, I mean, you go back. I mean, everybody loves like, you know, reading Tom Wolfe talk about this and everything, but you go through like back in the 60s and 70s, you have these crazy situations, whether you were talking about like Lincoln detox in the South Bronx where, you know, you have this essentially like section of Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx. It's just taken over by a bunch of plaque and Puerto Rican radicals who were using this like a drug lab and a radicalization center for drug addicts. I mean, and all funded by government money, all funded by grants from the city. Even as like, you know, when they try to reduce the grant one time, a bunch of the employees

went down to City Hall and trashed a bunch of offices and stuff. I mean, and these are, are like government funded programs in people. I mean, you would, there were times where you would have organizations that were funded with city money that are rioting at city hall. And, you know, when you like, that's why people look at it and they, you know, and they look at stuff like in that Time magazine article, realizing that riots in 400 American cities, which means, I mean, if you look over the course of the summer, we see what that means. That means dozens of people killed potentially. You know, it means people losing their livelihoods, their homes, their businesses, all that, that that was on tap and that people, I think, like, here's the crazy

thing. The phone calls, according to that article, where these things were being decided and organized, had local and state government officials on those calls. You had Democratic Party apparatchiks on those calls with the protest organizers, you know. And so these things that were being organized at the highest levels. I mean, and when people, this is the kind thing that when people hear it, they say, well, okay, yeah, and you want us to deal with this with what kind of like mittens on? No, we need to deal with this with a mailed fist. That is the only way that this kind of thing has ever been fixed and solved. And, you know, we need to find out who's responsible for this. And there's not going to be any legal loopholes. There's not going to be,

you know some some way they can slide out of it if you're doing this kind of thing and it's leading to this then we're just we're going to deal with you I mean there's a reason that the you know the Uncle Pinochet memes are so popular on the right these days you know the like communist

free helicopter ride stuff and it's because people don't see a peaceful way to deal with people and to deal with forces that that don't seem to care about the rules like it's just the idea that Like, if you play by the rules, you're not going to be able to beat people who don't.

And that's where people are at right now. And I honestly don't know, I don't know what to tell those people. I tell them, I don't want them to go down that road. But when they challenge me, honestly, I just sort of sputter at them. Like, I don't have a good, I don't have a whole lot of good arguments to make torn these days, you know? Yeah. So something that's really important that's worth mentioning here in this, you know, better be obsolete by the time this video comes out, but by the time we're recording this on Thursday

night, the cops let the guy get away. And they let some idiot divert them, which was really weird. I don't know if you saw the original footage of the old ball guy saying, I have the right to remain silent, right? He wasn't saying, hey, you got the wrong guy. He went that way, right? He was like, which maybe it was already understood before that clip that the cops knew good and well. And he knew that they knew that they knew that he knew that everybody knew that. Of course, he didn't have a gun and didn't do it. They were just arresting him for something else, obstructing them or, you know, yelling in their face or doing something. You know what I mean?

I don't know exactly what happened right after that. But just right before that. But it looked really weird. And then when they were marching him away, he was saying, just kill me, just kill me. Which is like, he's acting in a way. Like he's in on this somehow or something or at least. least he's trying to keep them from doing their job while the actual shooter is getting away. I don't know if that means that he knew anything about it or just being opportunists to participate

in the show somehow or whatever. But at the time we're recording this, they released a picture of a guy with a hat and glasses on and said, yeah, let us know. They don't even know his name yet. And they said they, the last thing I saw was they have a driveway camera of a guy walking by. But it's from across the street, you can't see anything. just a guy walking on the street um so i think that's amazing that for all of the surveillance and all of their powers that and of course it was the federal police there you know swung right into

action it wasn't just the local sheriff's department or whatever in charge local university police they had every jurisdiction you know involved immediately and they couldn't catch this guy he could be anywhere by now um which you know i'm sure we'll find out that he didn't go too far but who knows but it just goes to show like just how completely in common and then there's footage of the guy people saw him up on the roof and i guess didn't say to a cop like hey i think there might be a sniper up there like they just showed him to each other and then didn't do anything um yeah and for all the people there um are saying that this had to be some kind of a professional hit because of you know hitting hitting somebody that accurately at 200 yards um somebody who

has fired a lot of rifles i could teach you to hit uh a dinner plate at 200 yards in three hours so that's don't don't go down that road that's that's nonsense yeah it's people who don't know about guns who say stuff like that and just it's so much easier to just find a gun guy and ask him because if you do they'll all say exactly the same thing yeah 30 out six i mean that's what they're for is reaching out and touching things with you know what i don't know what do you think it's going to do. If you're undisturbed lying in a prone position with your gun rested on something, it's that's not a hard shot. And so, you know, this is not, this is not JFK, you know, moving target in a vehicle from a window while you're, you know, standing up or something. This is, it's not a hard

shot. You know, who knows what actually happened. Obviously, like you said, we haven't caught the guy yet. I mean, they better catch him soon, man, because like that's the worst possible thing that could happen is if people on any side start getting in their heads that you know so you're saying there's a chance like we could get away with this like that's the worst case scenario the very least the message needs to be sent that if you are going to do something like this you better be suicidal because there's no chance you're getting away and and probably the best case scenario for you is that you catch a bullet before they arrest you because um if that doesn't happen you are going to see an and a multiplication of this kind of thing yeah and look i mean it's natural and healthy to

fantasize about hurting democrats you know i can sympathize but it doesn't mean we got to go that direction uh we got to think better about that and and and look for everyone you know i don't know when i i learned this as a kid i learned just as a given right like clouds are made out of water vapor and free speech is important right these are things that people all know and understand that whether you believe in natural rights theory or whatever, we're all each individually born screaming, right? We can talk. And if it makes sense to you, as it does to me, that if you own yourself, then you must own the property that you just acquire. Then obviously you have the right to say anything you want on your own property to print anything you want and

distribute it to any willing recipient. And our tradition has been at least that the same goes for publicly owned spaces right town squares and and public streets and whatever where obviously you don't have the right to trespass on other people's property but otherwise like yeah unless this is the orient then yeah we we have freedom of speech of course we do dude so there's that the natural right of people to just say what they want and if you want your right to be respected then you got to tolerate others but then there's the utility of the whole thing which all the founders agreed that, of course, if the whole idea of this country is that the people are sovereign, they're born free and they allow this regime to exist to protect their rights, not this is

the regime ordained by God to rule this land and you people are lucky enough to suffer under it as it subjects, as is the tradition in the old world. If it's the same reason we have the right to bear arms, respect it not that we have it, that same reason they respect the right to bear arms in the Constitution. The whole premise is that, of course, we come first. We allow you to be our security force. How could you take our guns away? That doesn't make any sense, right? Same thing here. They don't have the right to limit our freedom of speech. And then, of course, it's also important for the purposes of, you know, for utilitarian purposes, right? That we have the ability to object to things that we think are wrong, especially without having to go to prison for.

it and you know in the tradition of the entire west and everywhere in the world is that treason means when you disagree with the government you know in the soviet union if you disagree the government they put you in the mental hospital and think about what goes on in there you know what i mean that's not health care you know this is that's the tradition of everywhere but here even in canada and mexico right it's here is where we absolutely have to protect freedom of speech. And that goes for the same thing. I was just thinking when you were talking about, and I guess I mentioned the word too when I was talking about the financial crash where suicide comes up. We're not allowed to ever say that word on YouTube or they'll just

censor you like right out of oblivion. Like I don't want to say just unnecessary curse words and get us deranged for that. But man, we got to be able to discuss these subjects and I don't care if they derank us for discussing that when it comes up. What are we going to do? Not talk about that when it comes up. It's ridiculous. And they better start respecting our free speech. That's what's the problem there, not we need to give in to them. They need to give in to the fact that people got the right to say what they want. Everybody needs to respect that. After all, this was the thing. The guy has freedom on his shirt, right? And then the banner on the thing says, prove me wrong. Right, when they kill them when he.

Yeah, and I think, you know, shot. And I think, you know, Charlie would have, one of the things he would have pointed out is that, you know, the government putting people in jail for saying the wrong thing is obviously one of the ways that freedom of speech falls apart. But freedom of speech is a culture as much as it's a policy, you know, or way, probably way more than it's a policy. You go back to Weimar, Germany in the 1920s.

and read the Constitution, they had basically what we would call freedom of speech. It wasn't written like the First Amendment, but it was written into the law that people could say what they wanted. But no, you couldn't. Because if you were a right-winger, you were going to have communists show up to your meetings with, you know, stink bombs if you were lucky, bullets and grenades, if you weren't. If you were a left-winger, you were going to have national socialists or somebody else show up and break up your party. And so they didn't have freedom of speech because the culture just wasn't there. And this was the part of it that Charlie Kirk really represented. He was, he understood and he looked around. And look, he could have, it is very, it is very, very

lucrative to just be a firebrand, you know, out there just, just breathe and smoke out of your nostrils and calling for the destruction of uranium. There's a ton of people out there who, who build huge platforms doing that. And especially, like, it is not always, um, It can be a really thankless position to take sometimes to do what Charlie did, where he would take it from the right as hard as he took it from the left sometimes, you know, because he wouldn't go far enough because he's treating these people with too much respect and all that. But if you care about what happened to him, and if you feel bad about that, then respond to it the way that, you know, in the spirit that he would want you to respond to it, you know. and don't really just like trash his life's mission basically in your response to this thing that happened to him, you know, because I mean, I would just say, you know, he's the one who sacrificed himself for it. And, you know, so he should be the one who really has the most say and how we respond to it. We've got enough public statements and just enough of him out there that we actually know the answer to that question of how he'd want us to respond.

to it, you know, and and locking down freedom of speech, locking down just especially, you know, using the, you know, using the state, let alone more just reciprocal political violence from right to left. These are all the absolute last things that he would have wanted to happen. And so, you know, if you're talking like that and going down that road and trying to convince other people to come with you, you're not really fighting for the memory of Charlie Kirk or anything like that. You're just fighting. And I would encourage everybody not to do that, especially right now. Because it's times like this where a lot of this stuff, a lot of things that don't make sense normally. Things like this happen, really intense

stuff's going on. And suddenly they seem to make a little more sense than they used to. But then that's going to fade. And those things aren't going to make as much sense anymore. And you don't want to be one of the people who look back. I've been there. I mean, we've all been there probably at some point, you know, look back on things you said or things you did after one of these crisis moments and have to just sort of, you know, own the fact that as the society was ramping itself up into a conflict model, that your contribution to it was to help just a little bit intensify it rather than to de-escalate and try to make things better. And that's none of us should be doing, especially if you're on the right and interested in putting over the, you know,

the policy goals and cultural and social goals of the right. You need to understand what Scott said earlier, that this is these type of things happening. This is not a show of strength by the left. This is like desperation from the left. This is like flailing because the right, I mean, it's like you said, the left is in the position of the Republicans. in 2009 now, after George W. Bush, where nobody takes them seriously. They, you know, and all the right has to do is keep their cool and keep marching forward. And, you know, that's how you can honor the memory of Charlie Kirk and just, you know, get through this in a way that preserves your own dignity and lets you, you know, really look at yourself in the mirror when it's all done. Yeah. And look, people shouldn't lose sight of the beauty of capitalism too, man. The whole thing is that as long as we're all trading with each other, then it doesn't matter what we look like and it doesn't matter what we believe in, right? We all use the same funny money and we all more or less speak English. And so we can, we do. Everybody gets up in the morning and they go out and they engage in commerce all day long with people that they don't know with people who are from different places who believe.

different things than them, who look different from them, who they might not even like at all. But this is where we get the best price for the thing that we need for the project we're doing. And that's how the world works. So that's why there's no war ever coming between Austin and Round Rock. You know what I mean? And yes, it's true. The Democrats live there and the Republicans live here. I'm in Round Rock now.

I'm from Travis County, but I've been gentrified. point is that um that we got too much at stake we're too interdependent with each other and so you don't have to like each other we don't have to all like hermitize and and separate and disavow each other's culture we are all americans we don't have to agree on everything at all um but we're not going anywhere you know what i mean it's not like the right's going to be able to get rid of the left so And I mean, and right now the Democrats, especially, and really the left generally speaking, but especially the Democratic Party is in such a position of weakness. All of their leaders are so old and decrepit and degenerate and discredited.

And they're just pathetic. And I saw where I forgot which poll it was, but the Republicans' numbers went down a little bit. And then so did the Democrats. The Democrats did not go up, you know, on the other side of the seesaw. they're just falling too people are just so sick of them and then after this i mean just this alone is going to cost them however many points on the margin right there and so yeah now is not the time to be totalitarians now's the time to conserve the revolution of 76 that's what conservatism is supposed to be about it's what liberalism is supposed to be about too quite frankly but um

y'all are all a bunch of terrible deviations from true americanism which is the declaration of independence natural rights and free markets and property and capitalism um so um so that's that and now we're so out of time and overtime but uh it is september 11th and so it seems like somebody might say something about that probably you would say something wise about it and then also um we got to talk about this that we have these drones these russian drones shot down over Poland. Let me just report to you. The Russians say, oh, come on, they jammed our drones and drove them off course. Well, Poland invoked Article 4, which is not Article 5, but it says, oh, we need an emergency consultation about what the allies are going to do about this. So they

found every reason to want to exploit the crisis and ramp things up and say, see, I told you so and this kind of thing about the war and make it worse rather than finding an opportunity to ramp things down. I guess I would just say we should leave NATO immediately, but everybody already knows that. But you see what an absolutely filthy moral hazard is built into this thing. We got the polls who they got to know there's at least a good chance the Ukrainians jam the Russian drones and drove them off course. We don't know what the percentage likelihood is. Maybe they know it for a fact or what. But there's no reason why the Russians are going to fly a bunch of unarmed drones over Poland just to get them shot down and create a crisis like this.

so they're their story doing things like that this entire war yeah yeah even when there's an accident right yeah they accidentally shot a missile a defensive missile went off course and hit a farmhouse in Poland

and they invoked article 5 and all this stuff Zelensky lied about it said it was a Russian missile we know it was so yes god dang it and then I'm sorry but then September 11th say something smart man it's been a long time and god dang the world has suffered a hell of a lot response to that thing. Yeah, I mean, you know, September 11th was kind of the, like, the way I

judge generations isn't like, you know, your Gen X if you were born between this and that. It's how do you, like, what stage of your life were you in when some pivotal civilization defining event happened or when something changed? You know, if you were a kid who was watching your parents deal with that scenario, you're a different generation than, you know, somebody who was a young adult who was dealing with it, right? And so, you know, those of us who were, who were young adults, I was, I guess I was 20 when 9-11 happened, already in the military. And so, you know, that's the culture I was in, and the stage of life I was in. And for my DOD job, you know, I would often go out to U.S. military bases for work. And it got to the point in 2019, 2020, you know,

right before I stopped working for the DOD that I would go out there and I'd meet some of these young soldiers, sailors, airmen who were 18, 17, 17, 18 years old. You can get into the military at 17, still with your parents' permission, 17, 18 years old. And I would start talking to them. This was, in fact, it was 20-20 because the election was coming up. And people would be talking about it, and I realized, like, there's going to be people voting in this election who were not alive when 9-11 happened, you know, who were seven years old when the financial crisis hit, who were, I mean, shoot, there were people now who were a voting age who were like 10 years old when Trump announced his candidacy, you know, and that stuff is, it's hard to wrap your head

around sometimes and just, you know, and realize that. And I, but I think it's important to, to realize it, Because, you know, it helps make you a little more tolerant of the way people sort of relate to a lot of these events. You know, somebody who is who is four years old when 9-11 happened is never going to relate to it the way, you know, you were if you were a young adult watching this happen on TV. And, you know, and those type of experiences and all of the things that happen afterwards, I know you've, I mean, you've banged your head against this wall so many times, like, you know, trying to get through. to people in the lead up to the Ukraine war and the lead up to this Iran war, everything. People, a lot of these people, they weren't around for Iraq. They weren't there in 2002 or they were too young to remember it, you know. And so trying to explain to some of the younger people that none of this stuff is new.

We've seen this playbook a million times and preserving the memory of that and realizing that really the people who do these things are not that creative. They just run the same play over and over because they have new batches. of people to put over, you know, to put it over on. 9-11 was, you know, it was, you hate to, you hate to say it, but like, you know, the grand, when the history books are finally written, they may, they may, they may record that Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda won the war that they declared on the United States, you know, because our reaction to that event in a weird way,

it's contributed even to the things we're talking about in this episode. It's impoverished people. It's made people just completely distrust and all of the institutions that they need to be able to have some amount of faith in if we're going to hold ourselves together as a cohesive society. It's destroyed the economy. It is just sharpened

and sort of militarized or politics to a degree that, again, if you're 20 years old now, that's the only politics you've ever known is just cutthroat. You're a Nazi. You're a communist. You're a terrorist. F you, you know, that's all you know. And so even, yeah, you know, even this stuff that we're seeing today is, in a way, it's still fallout from that. And you wonder if that blow was fatal.

And I, you know, and I hope it wasn't, but it's going to take, it's going to take real effort and sacrifice to put things back on course. And we're going to have, I mean, you said the key thing, right? Which unless you're, you know, unless you're the Israelis dealing with the Palestinians, it is impossible to indulge the fantasy that your opponents are not going to be around tomorrow. You know, they, they can indulge that fantasy if they want here in America. The people that you have, they're still going to be here tomorrow and they're going to be here the next day and you've got to live with these people, you know? And politically, I mean, I think the answer to that, you went right to it. It's subsidiarity, you know. So like let everything that can be handled at the lowest possible level be handled at that level. You know, a presidential election or a Supreme Court nomination is not as big of a deal if Alabama can have their abortion laws and New York can have theirs and everybody's just sort of accepts that that's how it is, then that by itself turns the temperature down on our politics tremendously, just because the stakes are so much lower.

And because, you know, if you don't like the policies that you're living under, it's a matter of moving to the next town or county or maybe state and not trying to find a new country to go live in, you know? And I think that the events like of this week. For a lot of people, including a lot of people who don't pay a whole lot of attention to politics, but are sort of vaguely aware of who Charlie Kirk was and everything, it's sort of torn open and spilled out onto the table, you know, the damage that we've allowed to accumulate in our society and our political system over the last 25 years. And there's a lot to clean up. And we need to

get started on that now if we're going to have any chance of it. And so, you know again like um i think to honor the memory of charlie kirk uh whether you like this not look after what's happened after where he's at now um whatever disagreements anybody had with them are totally irrelevant okay he's gone that's it his kids and his wife are who survived him and all the disagreements you had are completely irrelevant um the fact is he was a he was a nice he was a good person you know he's a good father and he was a good husband and he was a good husband and he was just a he was a kind I met like I only met him one time talked to him only for a few minutes and he's one of those guys who you know I was nobody at the time this was before I kind of blew up it was at

a conference he treated me like I was the only person in the room everybody there wanting his attention but he was talking to me at the time and he was locked in treating me like I was the only person in the room he was just a kind person a generous person and that's all that matters at this point when you think of his memory and so that's that that's the aspect of his life that we all have to try to honor and if we do that um you know we'll at least be taking a tentative step in the right direction so yeah all right that's a great place to leave it thanks darrell and thanks everybody we'll see you next week Chris, thanks, brother.

No, that's all good. I'm over here at my sister's house, hanging out with me, a mom taking care with her today. So it's all good. That was an excellent. That was awesome, by the way. Yeah, okay, cool.

I mean, I was at first, you know, yesterday, right after this happened, like I was ready to come in here just breathe in fire. But after, I'm glad, you know, I'm glad that this didn't happen this morning. I'm glad it happened today. I just had a chance to sleep on it. I was like, And it's what I said, you know, like there's just too often where I look back and I'm like, you know, like I contributed to making that situation worse, not better. And having to have to just sort of know that. And I, and I'm, you know, I don't want to do that here. So, um, I do need to, I do need to run guys. You guys can stay in here and chat. I'm going to. I got to. I