Timcast IRL - Timcast IRL #294 - WWE's John Cena Apologizes To China In Creepy Video, Gets SLAMMED w/Scott Horton

Episode Date: May 26, 2021

Tim, Ian, and Lydia join libertarian commentator, author, and host of the Scott Horton Show, Scott Horton, to look at John Cena's ill-advised apology to China for calling Taiwan a country, the media's new struggles to rationalize their response to the 'lab leak' theory that they said was a conspiracy theory, the censorship that has resulted from the 2016 election, the Abraham accords, and the woke infiltration of the Federal Reserve. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So John Cena really stepped in it. Apparently he was doing an interview and he referred to Taiwan as a country, which he probably knows almost nothing about, and this triggered a major backlash in China. You see, WWE, NBA, a bunch of American companies have been expanding into China, making tons of money. And so they're very concerned about losing that money. We saw this with the NBA, with LeBron, with Steve Kerr, with Mark Cuban. Now it's WWE.

So John Cena puts out this very weird video where he's like trying to speak Mandarin, apologizing, saying he just didn't know, you know, that Taiwan is not a country. The interesting thing about this is that, well, to Americans, Taiwan is. And there's serious questions about the lengths Americans are willing to go to do something about China and what it could ultimately lead to. And there's fear of war and something called Thucydides Trap, which we reference a lot, actually, which means, if you're not familiar, as a rising power comes to displace the reigning economic power, war breaks out. And that's something we really don't want. We've got a couple other stories. Rand Paul is calling on Republicans to leave Twitter

because these lefty personalities, these Democrats, have been mocking and encouraging, essentially, these attacks by praising the guy who attacked him. It caused very serious injuries to Rand Paul. And so we're going to get into this. Also, we've got talk about Israel, obviously, and we're being joined by Scott Horton of Antiwar.com. Very happy to be here. Thank you for having me. You want just a real quick introduction, who you are, what you do? Sure.

I'm the editorial director of Antiwar.com. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, which is me and Sheldon Richman and Pete Quinonez and Kyle Anzalone and a bunch of great writers and podcasters over there. And I host the Scott Horton Show. I've got 5,500 interviews going back to 2003, all at scotthorton.org, and I host anti-war radio on Sunday mornings on KPFK in Los Angeles, 90.7 FM,

and I wrote two books, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and then the brand-new one out this year is Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. Right on, man. So we're going to talk about all this stuff. And we got Ian. Yes, Ian Crossland up in here at iancrossland.net and at iancrossland on social media. Great to see you, Scott. And I am in the corner pushing buttons.

I'm really excited for this conversation. I'm ready to get educated about foreign policy. We're going to have a really great, I think, we got a bunch of news to go through, but there'll be a really great philosophical discussion about war and conflict and all that stuff which i think will be really really interesting but check out timcast.com become a member we will have an exclusive members only segment after the show where we say the things youtube doesn't let us and we swear a whole lot so if you're interested in seeing something like that go to timcast.com support our work and in actuality we're trying to build the site because every membership we get from

you guys is money that goes towards expanding. We're looking to hire journalists. We're looking to bring in more talent, do more shows. We've got the paranormal show. We've got this political show that we're planning on doing. It's about the collapse of political institutions and civil wars and things like that. So please consider becoming a member to help support that expansion let's jump into this first story and it's silly and

it's stupid it's also kind of creepy from the south china morning post wwe superstar john cena is very sorry to chinese fans for referring to taiwan as a country in fast and furious 9 promotional interview. Isn't this a ninth Fast and the Furious movie you guys do? I've long said the FFCU, the best cinematic universe. Anyway, John Cena said on Taiwanese TV that it would be the first country to watch the film. American quickly, the American quickly backtracked on Weibo saying he made one mistake after doing a lot of interviews.

It's kind of creepy. He said, hi, China. I'm John Cena. I'm in the middle of a Fast and Furious 9 promotions. I'm doing a lot of interviews. I made a mistake in one of my interviews. Everyone was asking me if I could use Chinese. Staff gave me a lot of information.

So there was a lot of interviews and information, said Cena, who started learning Mandarin to help his wrestling promotion integration in China. He has since gone viral many times for his enthusiastic Mandarin speaking abilities. I respect him for trying. Absolutely. I made one mistake. I have to say something very, very important now. I love and respect China and Chinese people. I'm very, very sorry about my mistake. I apologize. I apologize. I'm very sorry. You must understand that I really love, really respect China and the Chinese people. My apologies. See you. All I heard was please keep giving me money. Please

keep giving me money. I don't want to lose money. There are more than 5,000 comments on Sina's Weibo apology. Quote, please say in Chinese that Taiwan is part of China. Otherwise, we won't accept it, wrote one Weibo user. Weibo user, the message has over 3,200 likes. Then you should say Taiwan is China's, wrote another user.

What you have said in the video is nonsense. You can't take benefits from China. But in the meantime, do things to harm China's interests. Others supported Sina with one person writing, I like you. I think you truly love China. Don't talk carelessly again about China's interests. Others supported Sina with one person writing, I like you. I think you truly love China. Don't talk carelessly again about China's territory and sovereignty. So of course, it's a silly story in a lot of ways. I'm not sure how much it really matters, but it's a grain of sand in a bigger heap of many companies, sports. We had the NBA, you couldn't put free Hong Kong

on a jersey. They wouldn't allow it. It would say error. You couldn't put Free Hong Kong on a jersey. They wouldn't allow it. It would say error. You'd make a custom jersey and you have to put Free Hong Kong. No, can't do it. We've seen in many e-sports, people have said Free Hong Kong out. And so it's curious. We had Cassandra Fairbanks on, and she made really good points about not wanting to go

to war with China under any circumstances, even the things we're seeing that are bad. And there's some deep philosophical questions here. The big thing I take issue with, with things like John Cena being deferential to China, is that there's clearly American interests. Is he more interested in making money by expanding his business into China, which means supporting Chinese interests against American interests? I don't think there's a way to to play both sides on this one. Right. In America, we as a country, we respect Taiwan as a country. We do. So, you know, people are right, are allowed to have their own opinions. John Cena wants to be I guess he wants to be in line with China because he's got money to be made there. And so what ends up

happening is China doesn't tolerate the free speech in the same way the U.S. does. John Cena can say this. What's the worst that's going to happen? We're going to insult him. Maybe if he says something truly egregious, we'll boycott him. In China, he has to come out and apologize. In the U.S., he wouldn't do it. So that means so long as they're more authoritarian in their speech, or I should say more collectivist, then they're going to keep winning a lot of these corporate battles, which means a lot more resources will flow towards China away from the U.S., and that will incentivize the political class to continue extracting resources through sending out our manufacturing and things like that.

But in terms of the broader point, which is Thucydides' trap, you're probably familiar with this, Scott, which is are we heading towards war with China because of their economic expansion? I'm curious, just is your thoughts, I guess. Is it a good thing or a bad thing? My personal opinion, I think it's really bad because I think a lot of what we're seeing with these corporations going to China is bad because I'm concerned about individualism, liberty and what happens to the world if China becomes a superpower that supplants the U.S. and starts doing what the U.S. is doing, but with Chinese communist

authoritarianism instead of classical liberalism, I understand, from a historical perspective, not from the current American perspective, but the very least we have a constitution, right? Sure. So I'm curious. What do you think? Well, listen, I mean, I think you're on to something that it's a real worry when American, you know, media characters and companies are so heavily invested in China or so heavily dependent on on Chinese money that then, you know, it undermines American values like free speech and things like you're talking about there. We saw this with. And, you know know we're at the humorous stage of this right it could get a lot worse you know john cena and some basketball players and stuff right the one that i thought was really funny was when they remade red dawn in which yeah i'm an 80s kid so i

love the original red dawn in fact i just watched it recently and it's just hilarious and wonderful um but i watched the remake of it and it's just an and wonderful. But I watched the remake of it, and it's just an absolute catastrophe. And the movie, I guess it came out pretty near after the 08 crash. And so the idea was that the American government, clearly after George W. Bush, was so irresponsible and had run America to the ground so badly that then the Chinese were going to take the advantage and conquer North America, which is about as silly as the Russians doing it back in the 80s, by the way. But it was North Korea, wasn't it?

Yeah, well, they switched it, right? So this is what happened. When they filmed the movie, they had, I remember there's a lady named Karen DeCoster that wrote for lewrockwell.com that was talking about how they were filming the movie in Chicago, and they had big red Chinese flags hanging down and all these things. She's like, oh, they're remaking Red Dawn, and it's China this time. But then by the time the movie came out, it wasn't China anymore. Now it's North Korea. And so if you watch it, then the beginning of the movie is like a 10 minute or like a little 5 minute news montage to try

to explain the story of how North Korea ended up conquering all of Asia and then came across the Pacific Ocean for us next. And it's just the most ridiculous thing. And the movie was just terrible anyway. It had no redeeming quality anyway. But it was just the fact that they had to change it from something that was mildly plausible, right? Like China is somewhat of a... They got to sell the movie in China?

Yeah, they have to sell the movie in China. So they had to change it. And so I think that could be a problem. But I think, look, overall, the more investment that we have in China and the more investment that they have here, the better off we all are and the safer we are from violent conflict. That's the famous quote from Frederick Bastiat, where goods do not cross borders, soldiers will. And so we're better off.

If you remember when China shot down the spy plane in 2001 and Colin Powell made peace real quick, said sorry. And then I forgot if they got the plane back or not but but they resolved it really quickly and that was because of wall street and and the amount of investments that they have in china dictated that we keep things cool but now there's a there's another major competing interest in corporate america besides you know, Walmart and all those guys. And that is the shipbuilders and the long-range bomber manufacturers. They have a major interest in pursuing Cold War with China and ratcheting these things up. So what we have in a way is a war between big business factions in America, those who want to import and sell cheap crap or whatever it is,

versus those who want to sell weapons to cheap crap or whatever it is versus those who want to sell weapons to the captive market that is the pentagon and those are huge big ticket items when you're talking about the next generation long-range bomber that's a trillion dollars no i think i think i think it is true right trade lines make it harder for there to be war the problem is everybody thought that with with opening up trade to China, they would start to adopt more of our values. And it seems like that's not happening. They're actually, the Chinese Communist Party is still very much ideologically driven and in control of most of these companies. And it seems like it's actually just resulting in the extraction

of American manufacturing. Wealthy elites have found a path towards extracting the labor from the U.S., making money by shipping things overseas. And there is very much that idea. I think we saw this with a lot of the establishment Democrats 10 years ago, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, this idea like, oh, okay, let's give them a bunch of stuff with this trade deal. It'll make it harder for there to be war. But the TPP was nightmarish. Trump was

like, I got to shut this down. Ian often brings it up that the corporations in foreign countries could then sue Americans. Yeah, the investor state dispute settlement clause in the TPP said that if we wanted to not buy Malaysian oil for some reason, they could sue us for discrimination, and then the taxpayer would have to fund the lawsuit. What ends up happening is, while it may be true that in many circumstances you'll get some crossover where people might actually come together, that means we have to start adopting Chinese ideological, I should say the Communist Party's ideological values. Well, it doesn't mean that, right?

I mean, for example, these basketball stars or whoever could go a lot more broke crossing the American people and selling out our values of free speech than pleasing the Chinese, right? I mean, is John Cena going to sacrifice his American audience for a Chinese one or he wants to have it both ways? But this is the issue that I was mentioning, that the ramifications from the American audience who aren't paying attention to politics is that they're going to shrug and say, I don't care. Whereas the Chinese audience is very much heavily invested and very, very, you know, pro China. So John Cena could come out and say, you know, look, it's it's it's where's the most damage? If he says Taiwan is a country, then he loses tons of money in China. If he says Taiwan is a country, then he loses tons of money in China. If he says Taiwan is not a country, then nothing's going to happen to him in the United States.

So he defers to China. That's a grain of sand. You do that over and over again. Eventually, you have this heap where you look at the companies that want to be in China. Google, for instance. In order for a company to operate in China, they have to have a Chinese Communist Party member in that company, in that office, in the country. So now Google starts – you start seeing protests in the U.S. when Google was developing a Chinese censored search engine. People protested. Google claimed to shut it down. I guess – I'm not sure.

We have to have the experts back on. But there's rumors that Google just decided to just give in and start doing what they wanted. The American people, too many of them don't care and don't pay attention. And so because of that, these companies are like, what's our risk? You can piss off Americans, but Americans don't pay attention. So they probably won't do anything anyway. But these other countries that are much more invested in their country will get mad. So let's just make sure we're keeping them happy. And then over a long enough period of time, it seems like we're becoming too deferential to China because our business

interests are. Yeah. But then again, look at all the backlash against the NBA stars who, you know, said everybody be quiet about Hong Kong or whatever a couple of years ago. And I don't know exactly the backlash against Sina, but there's,

there's a substantial one about this, right? He's be clowning himself, selling out, selling out, you know, what he obviously obviously thought as you just said all i hear is money money money right which by the way you know the situation with taiwan is very complicated after the civil war the nationalists escaped to taiwan and then the americans sailed the seventh fleet in there I guess, and prevented Mao's forces from following them and conquering them.

And then from 1949 through, like, 74, America only recognized Taiwan as the official legitimate government of China, even though they really only ruled this tiny island, and all of mainland China had been under the rule of the maoists for by that time like 30 something years and so nixon and kissinger in a move that was really made to one screw the soviet union and to kind of ameliorate from the fact that he was pulling us out of vietnam by saying well don't worry about the domino effect because we made friends with the mouses so now that we're friends with china it doesn't matter so much that we're losing in vietnam and so they recognize china as you know the the communist government in beijing as the official government of china which was only

reasonable but then they adopted this policy of strategic ambiguity when it comes to the fate of taiwan and so america has no treaty with Taiwan, and we're not sworn to protect them. But since Nixon, and various presidents say this in different ways, Trump almost accidentally changed the doctrine in the way that he stated it, but then his State Department walked it back. But essentially the position is that there is one China,

and the government in Beijing is the official government of all of China, including Taiwan, but that America will always oppose the reunification by force. But then in what way will we oppose it? Will we sell F-16s to Taiwan? If so, how many? And then if that doesn't work, then what? And this is the real crisis now is let's say that the Chinese decide that we're taking back Taiwan next year. What's America going to do about it? Joe Biden? Well, what's any American president? What's your favorite American president going to do about it? He's going to get into a nuclear war. He's going to lose Tokyo and Honolulu and Los Angeles in exchange for Taipei. And what do we get out of that?

Nothing. And what do we really care if the Chinese conquer Taiwan? What difference does that make to you or me at all? Other than we're against war, we don't want to see anybody violently killed. But in terms of the American people's national interest, there's not one town, much less major city, we should be willing to trade for Taipei.

And by the way, if we got into a nuclear war with China over Taiwan, they'd get Taiwan at the end of the day anyway. We'd end up losing L.A. and San Francisco and getting nothing out of it in exchange. Already, like in my mind, I can see like the path of like the conflict and the arguments over for and against that I hear so often from, I wouldn't necessarily say the pro-war people, but the like, I don't think, well, there's probably people say they're pro-war for sure, but most people try to pass it off like it's war essentialism. Like, I wish we didn't have to have it, but we do. Well, see, this is what you're talking about with the, I always forget how to pronounce

it, the great trap there. Thucydides trap. Thucydides trap. Thucydides trap. Thucydides. Thucydides. I can never say it right. He was a guy. He was a guy.

He was a guy. The thing of it is that if America would just renounce our world empire, which we're not supposed to have in the first place. That's right. Then it wouldn't matter that China is the rising power. The reason this is a trap is because America has declared that the entire Pacific Ocean is an American lake and we won't settle for only 99 percent. All of it belongs to us or we'll go to war over the idea. But that's not legitimate. So if China becomes, again, the dominant power in East Asia, as it's always been for thousands of years, then we have to go to war against that or we have to recognize that this is the middle part of North America.

And that sounds to me like Japan and Korea and Vietnam's problem, not mine. Yeah. I mean, if you look back at the the I would assume a lot of the intent of the founding fathers was not to do any of this. But at a certain they warned us explicitly against foreign engagement like this, entangling alliances, whether with European powers or anyone else you could imagine. And foreign intervention altogether. World War I, I think, it changed everything. That's right. All of a sudden, yeah, all of a sudden now it was – every war was our responsibility.

We became the world police. So – but let's get a little philosophical, I suppose, if so we've had different experts, you know, on talking about China. Sure. If if Biden can't defend Taiwan, then we can already see China's expansion. The claims of the South China Sea, the attacking of the Vietnamese fishing vessels, they'll just expand and exert influence and take over. And so the fear is what happens if the u.s does nothing do we eventually have a china that does what the u.s does and do you want to think so i don't think so but look at the initiative they would be insane to look at what america's done for the last 20 30 years and say let's replicate that we'll build 800 bases all around

the world and then we'll kill 2 million iraqis and syrians and the world, and then we'll kill 2 million Iraqis and Syrians and Yemenis, and then we'll blow our own brains out, and our civilization will collapse. Why would they do that? Could they possibly be as dumb as the Bushes and the Clintons? They're building their bases on nuclear submarines, so they're mobile and underwater. They are expanding the atolls,

but I will say this. I do think there is a certain efficiency in the Chinese Communist Party's authoritarianism. I'm not saying it's a good thing. I'm saying that you rule with an iron fist. They dictate and they have a plan for what they're going to do. Whereas in the U.S., we have regime change every four years almost. Like one guy wants to go blow up this country. George W. is mad about, you know, Saddam and his dad's fight. So he wants to bring it back. Then Obama's like, I guess's money to be made so joe biden gets his brother some contract deals in iraq what you look at what's happening in the u.s it's the extraction of value for personal gain yeah and it leads us i i look at what what the authoritarian uh you know the chinese communist party what they do is it's rigid it's constructed it's controlled there's a plan there they they're very rigid and i look at the u.s and it's chaotic exploitation by the elites. They don't care about you.

They don't care about us. But you really think the Chinese plan is world empire rather than just shoring up their own area? I mean, this is a desperately poor country with millions of hungry people. But look at what they've been doing in Africa, South America. Was it the Belt and Road Initiative? That's what it's called. But that's all men with briefcases, right? That's not militarism. I mean, they have a tiny little That's all men with briefcases, right? That's not militarism.

They have a tiny little military base in Djibouti, right? Otherwise, they traipse across Africa. We got special operations forces in more than half the countries in Africa. They've got guys with briefcases doing capital investments. Which is interesting because

it's a Chinese Communist Party using capitalism, using capitalist enterprise to gain control. They're buying up tons of our land. So my fear is I would not want to live the way people in Hong Kong are currently, you know, with all the changes and the people being arrested and in mainland China. I like being able to tell, you know, I don't care who the president is, you know, to F off or whatever. But there's been direct economic competition between China and the US. I don't necessarily think warfare needs to always be hot with guns. And so what happens when, yes, through economic exploitation, we end up

deferential to the Chinese Communist Party? I'm not in any way advocating for what the US's stupid plans with sending guys with guns all over the place, because you can clearly see that China, using investment, is doing way better in many ways. We are wasting time and money because we have corporations, we have big military industrial companies that just want to expand and make more. Even when Congress says, or even when the Army's like, we don't need any more tanks, Congress is like, eh, rubber stamp it, and we just make them. It's good for the economy. China's more strategic. So they've got a longer plan than us.

And I do think I'm not going to be happy. I think most people wouldn't be happy if they had to live the way people in mainland China do. I mean, it's kind of a leap, though, from John Cena to all of us having to apologize to the Chinese all day for this, that, or the other thing. Of course. I mean, frankly, their military doctrine, our government's acronym for it, or the way they call it, I don't know exactly the Chinese term for it, is anti-access area denial. In other words, it's purely defensive. Their entire military strategy is about keeping the United States out.

Keeping us away. But it's not a blue water navy. I mean, you talk about nuclear submarines. We have 22 aircraft carriers, 11 on station around the planet at all times. The U.S. Navy rules all the oceans and the seven seas.

The question here is do we rule all of the south china sea or does china have influence in the south china sea and think how absurd this would be if we were talking about china's influence in the gulf of mexico right right and the atlantic ocean is now a chinese lake i i it'd be absolutely absurd in the same way that our claim to the Pacific Ocean and all of those territories is absurd.

And so, yes, we are in a trap. If we are pledged to defend the Koreas and Japan and Laos and Cambodia and Vietnam and Australia and every other, and what, Myanmar and every other country in Asia

from China, then yes, we are and every other country in Asia from China, then yes, we are definitely in a Greek guy trap, and we're going to have a war. Greek guy trap? Thucydides. But the reality is that that's not in the interest of the American people whatsoever. So if the Chinese, like you're talking about the difference between the people that run the American government have all these very narrow interests, and the Chinese government seems to have kind of broader plans. I don't think that makes them necessarily

any more of a threat. You know, the defensive pact of World War I is basically what started it. Someone had a pact with, I don't know, was it the Austrian-Hungary, Hungarian Empire or something? Yeah, the Germans and the Ottomans and the Austro-Hungarians. So someone got invaded, then there was a defensive response. So like if Taiwan was invaded and the

American defensive response would kick off a bunch of nations joining and defending each other and then a world war. But when you look at World War Two, Hitler invaded Poland. And if we had not done anything, they set up basically they used the conquered area of Poland to build more military. They were using their industry. So it was they were planning to invade Russia. So at what point, if you see a foreign invasion, do you intervene? That's the deep philosophical debate when they attack you. But what if they attack everyone around you and start building more weapons with that industry?

Well, look, France is not around me. And this was the lie of the 1930s and early 40s was that, look, France is our eastern frontier. Well, no, it's not. It's like 5,000, 6,000 miles away. France is not part of America at all. And it's not our frontier at all. These are all just figures of speech, right? In fact, if the British hadn't given a war guarantee to Poland, then Hitler would have never turned west against France and Denmark and Belgium and England and the Western democracies in the first place. As you say, they split Poland.

He split Poland with the Soviet Union and made a peace with them because he knew that he was going to have to fight them sooner or later. But the British and the French were insisting on fighting him. with them because he knew that he was going to have to fight them sooner or later but the british and the french were insisting on fighting him so he decided to turn against to make a peace with stalin and fight and destroy all the western democracies first and then move into the soviet union so if the british had just stayed out of it once he went into poland the war between nazi germany and the so Soviet Union was inevitable. And he would have never felt like he had to attack the Western democracies at all. The whole thing would have been in the east, which would have been a catastrophe for the people in the lands between Germany and the Soviet Union, but not for the Western democracies.

And it was it was this all was self-inflicted. In fact, if you read Pat Buchanan's book, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, they talk about when Neville Chamberlain, everybody always makes fun of Neville Chamberlain for making peace over Czechoslovakia, right? But he's the one who, he gave the war guarantee to Poland. And as soon as he did, Lord Gray, the foreign minister, said, Oh my God, what are you doing? They should lock this man up in a mental hospital.

Are you crazy? Why would you give a war guarantee to Poland? We have no ability to defend Poland. All you're doing is guaranteeing that we're going to get into a war with Germany, that we're not prepared to fight yet. And meanwhile, what does any of this have to do with FDR and the American people back home? Other than his New Deal failed for three administrations in a row, and so now he had to get us into a war.

So why did Hitler attack the UK? Because they declared war on him first. Is that what happened? That's what happened. Yeah. And listen, when that war was over, when that war was over, Winston Churchill said, you know,

I guess we stuck the wrong pig. Well, didn't Germany... Yeah, really, huh? Germany had a military force in their west preparing to invade France regardless I think they were ready to go when France declared war they went like two weeks later they went into Paris with tanks well I don't want to do it do like it is because I want to have a belligerent that is going to invade at what point do you say I need to declare counter

war the philosophical question that I wanted to get to before the – But when you have a belligerent that is going to invade, at what point do you say I need to declare a counterwar? The philosophical question that I wanted to get to before we started going off on the history stuff is I guess the philosophical argument for those that are war essentialists is that, well, if we don't do it, they will, and I'd rather be on top of the mountain than the bottom of it. And that's like a very nightmarish prospect. But I think – I don don't know do you cross your fingers and hope no one's going to do it yeah i think they would though no i don't think they would you think only america is the country that wants to have these bases well look the american people are the only ones who can afford it and we can't even afford it yeah yeah the chinese can't because of the petrodollar it's all the reality is we had in the Cold War with the Soviet Union this bipolar world where it was really America ruled two-thirds of the planet and the communists ruled one-third of it, right?

And then when all that fell apart, this is what Charles Krauthammer, the neocon, called our unipolar moment. spend the next about 20 years making the world exactly how we want it before not that america will get weaker but before the rest of the world starts getting rich and their power starts becoming more equal to ours and then so this has been seen all along as an eventuality that what we'll have is a multi-polar world where it matters what beijing thinks and it matters what new delhi thinks it matters what london thinks it matters what sao paulo thinks and so what rio is the capital of brazil so what you're saying is that john cena a positive china will kick off world war three i'm kidding but let's talk about uh so so i we'll get we'll definitely start you know keep the conversation going on the on the philosophy of war as we move on but let's talk about the media because we have this other story from the Hill.

The memo, media face hard questions on Trump and the Wuhan lab. I don't really need, I'll use the article as a reference, but I don't think I need to actually pull anything up because we all know what happened. Donald Trump very early on said, the Wuhan lab, lab leak, we should investigate into it.

The media went nuts, said it wasn't true. Fauci said it was likely not true. He said, no, I don't think so. Everybody said Trump was a conspiracy theorist. Vox.com said theory debunked. And somehow, for some reason, all of a sudden, the media's flipped on this. And my first point is like, hey, it's about time people are taking this seriously. And also, wait a minute. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What happened? I don't just believe all of these different media institutions and political establishment elites just decided now. Oh, I just realized maybe it's true. Is there perhaps an agenda behind why all of a sudden they've decided to say, yes, let's investigate wuhan i'm not sure about that i think i doubt that the democrats in the overall you know media consensus is we want to toughen up on china and demonize china worse now i'm not i'm not saying like they've they've coordinated anything like the media i think

is just deferential to what the the establishment elites say to me, what made the change was a guy, I forget his name, Sims maybe, who had been the New York Times science reporter for like 30 years. And this is not the guy that got fired over saying the N-word. This is a different guy. Different guy. Okay, not the N-word guy. And that story was completely ridiculous, by the way. Yes, it was. Anyway, so this is the other guy.

And they wouldn't publish the thing at the New York Times. He just published it at Medium.com. But it's, I don't know how many words it says at the top, 47-minute read. Wow. So it's like a 20,000-word article or something about how, geez, guys, we don't have the proof. But it really does look like it was the lab. But that means man-made or manipulated. Like Fauci said he wasn't convinced it was

naturally occurring right so that's the great that's it and this is the deal it's this gain of function research where they deliberately make viruses more and more deadly on the theory that they can keep it locked up in the lab and that then they can anticipate future viruses if we're going to engineer a virus that attacks the ace2 receptor on your lung cells and then we're going to engineer a virus that attacks the ACE2 receptor on your lung cells, and then we're going to figure out how to kill that virus so that then if a virus similar to this ends up breaking out into the public, we'll know how to fight it. So that's the theory. But, of course, it's really dangerous work because what they're doing is they're deliberately evolving these viruses to be more and more contagious, more and more transmissible, because otherwise it takes too long to go through the steps. So you have to make it as infectious as possible so you can hurry up and do the next stage of the experiment.

But they were doing it in a lab that we had repeatedly heard warnings about for having lax security procedures. Well, and Obama outlawed it. It was the Obama White House requested that congress outlawed this and they could have done it just by executive order or something i guess they had congress pass a law and and ban this but the law has a loophole that says that if the proper authority determines that there's a national emergency then you can go ahead and it was fauci who signed off on the national emergency but we can't go ahead here but we can finance this group that's financing the research in Wuhan.

President Stubbs is still, it's a national emergency. We've got to slow down. And we jumped the connection. Okay. The U.S. was providing funding to this lab. Right. So can you explain? Yeah.

So it was under the National Institutes of Health. Then there's a subcontractor. I'm sorry, I forgot the name of the company that's the subcontractor. It's like EcoHealth or something. Yeah, exactly. Something like that. And then those guys were actually the ones in charge of the investigation as to what happened. Everybody took their word for it.

I love it. Found ourselves innocent of any wrongdoing. That's right. But by the way, so at the beginning, when you said everybody denounced Trump, that's not exactly right. The head of the CDC at the time, the bald guy with the beard the beard i'm sorry i forgot his name uh that's not redfield is it yes yes redfield said he thought that it was that it must have been engineered in a lab and the guy and the the famous and nobel laureate virologist said the same thing luke what's his name i don't remember his name he was called the conspiracy theorist that it was he was he was nuts

but see you also they're like oh well fauci said it so well and you also have josh rogan who is you know very close to the war party and writes for the washington post and he's just put out a new book about this as well that says like we don't have the proof but boy does it sure look like this must be what happened but i don't so a lot of people have mentioned this this medium post and there was one viral tweet that was like think about that the only reason the story is getting out is because someone wrote a story on medium because our media establishment wouldn't accept it not the new york times wouldn't publish their own science reporter but but right right right but we had we've had whistleblowers we we had a a researcher out of the university of hong kong saying looked like a lab

leak and they knew people who were involved in it. And that was all rejected. All lies, all conspiracy. Trump said without evidence. Trump said without evidence. Right. All of a sudden now this guy writes this medium post. So here's what it is.

Here's what it is. It's not so much about why are they open to the possibility now as much as why did they refuse to discuss this possibility all last year and you already hit the key there because it was trump that said it yeah and they had an agenda to hang the virus around his neck no matter what so and frankly you know his leadership on the issue the first few months there was not so much to be admired and so this was the thing that they're going to use as the millstone to hang around his neck now if the virus came out of the lab in china china china jana that fits in with his narrative and is handing him a point maybe a few points and now what's interesting though right is that they could have turned it

right back around again although they would have had to sacrifice their boy Fauci. They would have had to say that actually it is Trump's fault because Trump wasn't doing his job preventing Fauci from signing this emergency authorization to allow this virus to go on. So they could have still made it all Trump's fault anyway, but they would have had to go around the long way yeah and it was easier to just say well it came from nature and this guy just did nothing but sit on his hands and that's why everybody's dead and there's no way they were going to let this complicated story break out in the summer there's become a real topic of conversation if they could squelch it and they did squelch it they did not want to give trump an opportunity for a win period so no matter what he said it was bad and so the media was just their bread and butter the whole time now cnn's ratings just on fire msnbc everyone's in the gutter because it was just that's what they were living

off of anger at donald trump but let me tell you it's really easy to criticize the media i think most people get it at this point i'll tell you what's shocking to me this story which just went up uh like what was it like now 40 minutes ago from fox news senate advances measure barring taxpayer funds for china's wuhan institute of virology amendment added by gop senator joni ernst of iowa to the endless frontier act which seeks to counter china only now it's been a year and a half almost a year and a half of the already had a law like this why don't they just take out the part that says that fauci can sign an emergency authorization yeah that's all they gotta do is why didn't they fire that guy you know i will say i would love to see one if there was one debate that i could see between

you know a couple people would be faucici debating Fauci with Fauci stepping in. Because Fauci's been anti-mask. He's been pro-mask. He said go on cruises. He said cruises are dangerous. He said it's not going to be a big deal. It's going to be a really big deal. He said two masks, it's just common sense.

He said two masks, there's no evidence suggesting. And then he said CDC guidelines say you should wear two masks. He's just like Trump. He's on all sides of every issue so you can pick and choose and if you want to like him then you can go i agree with half of the stuff this guy says that's pretty good we need it we so i i know like you mentioned the other day uh lydia that crowder had a uh you know fauci debating fauci but we need an updated fauci debating fauci because boy part two yeah he can really debate himself so you know why he you know why he was first

famous was because when the aids epidemic was first breaking out in the 1980s he was the guy who pushed that no we must only fund vaccine research and we must do everything we can to thwart people who are trying to come up with medications to treat it now here we are in the year 2021 there's no aids vaccine yeah there's no vaccine for hiv there never has been they you know tried working on it from time to time um they never came up with one the reason well i don't know but the reason that people survive with aids now is because of the drugs that fauci suppressed and you, I saw on Twitter, someone showed an old sign of AIDS rally and from like 1984 or 1985. And the guy says, the guy's sign says, Dr. Fauci,

you're killing us. Wow. Really? Yeah. I just, I, we got this next story from CNBC. And it was AZT was the big drug that he was trying to suppress. And that was the first big breakthrough drug that helped AIDS patients. Wow. Wait, AZT? Yeah. Is that the same drug that's was trying to suppress. And that was the first big breakthrough drug that helped AIDS patients. Wow. Wait, AZT? Yeah. Is that the same drug that's been brought up as a, as a thromycin or no? I don't know.

No, I don't know. Well, so they made a Matthew McConaughey movie out of this, the drug buyers club or was it the buyers club? Oh yeah. Dallas. Dallas. Dallas. Dallas.

Dallas. Dallas. Dallas. Dallas. Yeah. Where this is, it's AIDS patients and Dr. Fauci won't let them buy medicine. So they got to go down to Mexico to get the medicine. That's who this guy is.

40 years he's been entrenched in this industry at least. And seriously, let's just entertain the possibility for a second because it's not proven yet. Okay, but let's just say that he signed this emergency authorization that allowed the money to go to this subcontractor to continue pushing this research at Wuhan. Fauci just killed a couple of million people, including about 600,000 Americans. I don't know what was the last count of number of Americans who died of this thing, but I guarantee you it's higher than the official count. The excess death rate is much higher.

Let's do some math and be fair, all right? If everybody wore a mask from the get-go, according to the CDC, that would have helped prevent the spread. So they say, okay, well then if everybody did, there'd be a lot less debt, right? Well, in the beginning, Fauci said not to wear a mask because he wanted to make sure the doctors got it. He later admitted that, that, well, you know, we said that because we were worried the doctors wouldn't get it. As I pointed out yesterday, the reason the doctors need the masks is because people aren't wearing masks. It's because people don't wear masks, get sick, and then go to the hospital, and so the doctors need to wear them too.

If everybody was wearing masks, you'd have a lot go to the hospital and so the doctors need to wear them too. Right. If everybody was wearing masks, you'd have a lot less people in hospitals. Doctors wouldn't need as many. Fauci lied and people died. And he could have just said, listen, please,

for the love of God, everybody, save the N95s for the doctors. Yes. But wear two bandanas or something. Yeah, he could have said wear a scarf.

I mean, people walk around with masks, they take a handkerchief. He could have said, you don't need the N95s. Just pull your shirt up and put something over your face. Instead, he lied because he was worried that people would buy up the medical supplies. Although, you know, at this point, and honestly, I don't read up on the germ nearly as much as I was a year ago. So I am behind on this.

But it really looks like the masks are red herring because, you know, Tom Woods sends out his daily email. And one of the things that he's constantly doing is comparing the states with the different levels of mask mandate at the same time. And the curves are always the same. Well, this just got I think they have studies that say that, like, if you and I are wearing masks, we're less likely to transfer it to each other here and now in this room. But if you try to extrapolate that out and say you have to, everyone in Virginia must wear a mask, it doesn't work. It doesn't make a difference. You've got to wash your mask, too.

People that don't wash masks. And the reason, wait, wait, one more thing. The reason they thought the masks worked so well in the first place was because in countries like South Korea and in China and Hong Kong and Taiwan, they were all wearing masks and not getting very sick. But that wasn't what it was. It only seemed like it. It was because they have a much stronger immunity to coronavirus.

And China's numbers were. Because they're exposed to many more coronaviruses than we do. So here's the big challenge. Right now, we've seen Texas and Florida, they dropped everything. They said, we're open for business. And a bunch of Republican states did the same thing. And Joe Biden comes out, and this was months ago. He was like, we might need a longer lockdown and more restrictions.

And everyone was joking, like, go to Florida. Who's Biden talking to? The problem is YouTube, we're at risk right now of getting totally pulled off just for even bringing this up. There have been channels that have been outright deleted with no warning for simply mentioning what you just said. But what are we supposed to do

when we have clear examples in the political arena of states and then when Fauci is brought on the Today Show and they say, how do you explain this? He goes, I can't.

Then why are we listening to this guy, a TV doctor, who doesn't know what he's talking about and for some reason they act like he's an expert. They make action figures of him.

They call it the Fauci-ouchie. That is a cult. I'm sorry. This guy's not an expert. He clearly doesn't know what he's talking about. And they're acting like what he says is gospel. I like Tucker Carlson's take on this. He goes, you know, this guy with all his lockdowns and all his recommendations,

I think maybe he's overcompensating for something here. This guy, he's known all along. He's the one who did this to us. He's the one who unleashed this virus on the planet. And now he's going around talking about how you and you and you aren't doing enough to protect yourselves. I thought you were going to say something else. Hold on a second.

Do you remember the episode of The Simpsons where they – I don't know what happened. There was like a council took over, and then comic book guy is like trying to pass a law, and he goes like, as the most logical species in the galaxy, the Vulcans, mating will now be – will now take place only once every seven years. For most of you, this will be much, much less mating, but for me, much, much more. So the joke would be Fauci is like, we're going to lock down because then nobody can have – in the UK, actually, you couldn't go and have sex with somebody. They actually banned that stuff. That's where I thought you were going. I was like, Fauci's like – he's an old man.

Are there examples of gain-of-function working? I don't know. That's a good question. Like whether they actually ever preempted a naturally occurring virus because they've been doing such a good job experimenting on possible ones. I don't think so. I think we would have heard of that, right? Well, that's not how they stopped MERS. That's not how they stopped SARS.

They stopped those because you had to have a really high fever to spread it. And so they were able to just lock everybody down. And I think SARS spread to Canada and they just kept it in one city and it never worked out from there. But we're not supposed to know about what's going on in the Wuhan lab. And we don't know about what's going on in American labs to a great degree. A lot of it's just classified secret. And the American labs have better security protocols.

They better. So if this, it's looking more and more like lab leak is legit. I mean, the Wall Street Journal said three people from the lab were hospitalized, hospitalized with this, with some similar illness. And they only told us that two days ago. That's right. That's right. And they knew the reports from 29.

Was it the report was from last year, I think. Right. Yeah, it was a CIA report. And you would get banned on YouTube for saying it. You would get banned on YouTube for saying all of these things. The media is now saying, oh, yeah, I guess so. Fauci himself coming out and saying this and it's like i gotta go i gotta worry about censorship so back we were right

back to the larger point about the media right and this is a headline i actually didn't get a chance to read it yet but i saw matt taibbi's new piece it's called the death of fact checking yes that's it how is it how is glenn kessler at the washington post gonna pretend to be a fact checker anymore when he's not right. He doesn't know what the hell he's talking about. PolitiFact claimed they debunked Tucker Carlson's show because they got an expert to give their opinion. That is not how you debunk something. If someone makes a video and there is an eagle that picks up a baby and flies away, which is like it was a viral video that happened at some point. You debunk it by investigating the source material,

putting it through an analysis to track light and artifacts in the video, and then point to it and say, here's my proposal. I believe this is evidence. And then you have an expert opinion breaking down all the facts. Just having some guy go on TV and say, he's got an opinion. I got an opinion. Okay, yours is the correct opinion. Thanks. You have a nice day. That's not debunking

anything. Look, they say trust the science, but what they mean is trust the scientists that we have here saying things when science itself is nothing but a process for debunking things. It's not something to be I mean, you can trust it in the sense that it's an effective way to try to debunk

things, but it's not a set of answers in a book somewhere that you just, instead of God, we have science now. We just believe whatever he says, but right. There's no, so there we have,

we have this guy. I want to show you this Wikipedia real quick. Luke Montagne. He is a French virologist and the joint recipient of the Francois bar. I'm pronouncing it wrong. See you new and blah, blah, blah.

Of the 2008 Nobel prize in physiology of medicine for his discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus hiv down over coronavirus pandemic they say this is on his wikipedia page montagne argued the coronavirus disease 2019 was man-made in a laboratory and that it might have been the result of an attempt to create a vaccine for hiv his allegations came after the United States had launched a probe into whether the virus came from a laboratory. According to Montagnier, the presence of elements of HIV and germ of malaria in the genome of the coronavirus is highly suspect and the characteristics of the virus could not have arisen naturally. Initially, this was described as a conspiracy vision that does not relate to real science by jean-francois del delfresi probably pronouncing that wrong an immunologist and the head of the scientific

council that advises the french government on the covid pandemic however anthony fauci the director of the national institute of allergy and infectious diseases admitted on may 11 2021 and he no longer is convinced that covid 19 originated naturally this guy was called a conspiracy 2021, and he no longer is convinced that COVID-19 originated naturally. This guy was called a conspiracy theorist, and he is a Nobel Prize winning virologist. And only now, because Fauci agrees with him, we're supposed to now say, OK, no, no. When the award winning virologist comes out and says, here's what I think, we go, wow. I mean, he's the expert, right? Hey, the head of the CDC said the same thing.

Let me point this out. When Tucker Carlson has a guest on the show who can cite an award-winning Nobel laureate for his hypothesis, not even statement of fact, and Politifact says, we got some guy who gave us his opinion that you're wrong, so it's debunked. And then Vox and all these other outlets and CNN can say it's fake news now. How is it reality for these fact checkers when they don't, the experts, the actual award winning experts are at odds with them? Who are these random people they put in the news and then claim are experts to debunk what you are saying? It's fake news. They're writing fake stories.

This Vox reporter, I tweeted about this. She wrote a fabricated story. Vox.com wrote fake news. When is, what are any of these fact checkers going to come out? Any of these organizations, NewsGuard, I'm talking to you. I use you guys. I referenced NewsGuard who get, who cites. Are you going to go now to every single one of these outlets that debunked lab leak with no evidence and their debunk was an opinion from some guy and now claim they publish fake news. What if I get a former CIA official who comes and talks about some crazy conspiracies involving aliens? Well, I got a CIA official.

It must be true. They do this all the time. They pick and choose based on what they think is socially acceptable. But you know what? There's a reason why your show pulls more viewers than any show on CNN. It's because people are over it. Well, in the key demo, they got the old people. Okay.

Yeah. We got the younger people. And remember, too, by the way, I had forgotten about this, but there were two Indian virologists at the very beginning who said they thought it was a lab leak because of the presence of what they recognized as pieces of HIV. And they were told that they were complete kooks. Remember that? And some of these initial reports, these initial publications were retracted because the media said so.

Because people were scared their reputations would be destroyed. Well, this guy, this Luke Mantegna guy, he's 88. I'm sure he doesn't care much about anything at this point. He's like, I'm just going to say it. And it's this. First of all, please use this as another example. We often have many examples to your friends and family when they're like, I trust the media.

Say, here you go. Here you go. Fauci is now admitting they called the Nobel Prize winner who discovered AIDS, a conspiracy HIV, sorry, a conspiracy theorist for saying, in my expert opinion, having discovered HIV, this is what I think about this. They were like conspiracy what what he didn't he didn't say it was a conspiracy didn't he he didn't suggest a group of people came together to commit a crime in secret he's just like people do gain of function

all the time in fact if you go back a year what they would say about this always in fact i remember tucker carlson refuting the debunking of his show is they put words in his mouth that he said it was a biological weapon that had that was being used deliberately i never said anything about a weapon nobody ever thought nobody ever claimed that if somebody's working on germs in a laboratory that that's biological weapons research what we think may have happened here was somebody accidentally got infected which happens and then they spread it and it got out to the world you saw this and they go oh no you're debunked the stephen king novel they made a movie to stand and they were working on a virus in like

florida and one of the go watch the emergency and then everyone's like freaking out one of the employees is like i gotta get out i gotta save's freaking out. One of the employees is like, I got to save my family and get out of the city. They lock the whole city down, and he escapes and gets his family and flees to Texas, gets to a gas station, and spreads it to eight people,

and then that's how. Or like in 28 Days Later, when they have the chimp infected, and they're doing experiments, and then the eco-animal activists free it, and the zombies spread or whatever. This is what the fact checkers do. It's in people's mind.

That's why they're so afraid of this idea of a lab leak is because of movies like that. This is what fact checkers do at these organizations like Snopes and like PolitiFact. They'll say something like, oh, you know, Scott Horton's here on the TimCast podcast. And fact check. People have claimed on Twitter that Scott Horton appeared on the TimCast IRL show. Question, did Scott Horton appear on the TimCast IRL podcast, dot, dot, dot, with ice cream? False. And then it's like no one ever said he had ice cream, but they add that tiny little bit that makes no sense.

And the whole thing becomes fake. And then at the bottom they'll say, you know, they'll give you a bunch of verbose garbage you don't want to read where it'll be like in 20 you know in 2017 tim pool you got the idea for putting a show and we'll talk about all this nonsense and then right at the bottom in one sentence while he did appear on the show he did not have ice cream so people see these fact checks and they screen cap and they share with their friends see it's false it's not true actually read it why don't you that's what the media does You lie to people so many times in a row You radicalize the hell out of them And make them mad as hell

This is the deal You can't just keep doing the same thing Over and over and over to people Because it stops working I hope that Fauci will be One of the greatest tools In waking people up to the lies Of the establishment and the media

just we need just like a 30 second clip of fauci contradicting himself in really dumb ways and you can be like which really proven that he did this if that this really does come from his signing off yeah right so what the what the fact check said is well you know so so rand paul questioned fauci in in this congressional hearing and Fauci denied providing. We never funded any of this. You are wrong. And that's not true. The funding was provided.

But what was really funny is PolitiFact said, well, they were technically doing gain of function research, but there's different definitions of what that means. So it's not necessarily true. But what really happened is that, yes, there was money provided by the NIH, but it was kind of like a general pool. It wasn't allocated. So even though they used some of it for gain of function, we don't – it's like did they really – basically what they're saying is, well, they didn't explicitly sign off due gain of function research. Therefore, Rand Paul is wrong. So like if you were building a skate park. But they did it. If you were building a skate park and I was like, well, here, let me allocate a bunch of money to you to do whatever you function of research. Therefore, Rand Paul is wrong. So like if you were building a skate park, if you were building a skate park

and I was like, well, here, let me allocate a bunch of money to you to do whatever you want with it. And you're like, okay, I'll build a skate park with it. And I'm like, well, I didn't give you money to build a skate park.

I gave you money. You were building a skate park and you used it to build the skate park. So we'll break it down. Ian puts a million dollars up. Tim Pool built a skate park with that money. And then when someone says, Ian, you funded the creation

of this skate park. He goes, no, I didn't. And then the fact check says, false. Ian provided a million dollars for general purposes. It wasn't to build a skate park. While it is true

that Tim Pool built a skate park, and there it is. Yes, the money came from the U.S. government from this source. Yes, it went to Wuhan. Yes, they did this thing. But they didn't mean to. That's the media. That's the game this source. Yes, it went to Wuhan. Yes, they did this thing. But they didn't mean to?

That's the media. That's the game they play. The weird thing is I am more comfortable and at ease with this whole thing knowing it's from a lab than thinking it just came from nature. Well, you don't know it's from a lab. Assuming that it – thinking – if I could pick, thinking that we were working on a virus that infected some people and it is way easier and like good, okay, at least we're trying on a virus that infected some people and and it is way easier and like good okay at

least we're trying to do something as opposed to just naturally some random virus came and started destroying humanity in fact the SARS and MERS were like the two novel viruses from the last 20 years and luckily and they were very dangerous but they were only very dangerous to a small number of people they were able to contain them so them. So this is actually one of the hypotheses, is that they were bringing bats in because they were doing experiments on COVID, on the bat coronavirus, because of how dangerous it was. And the gain-of-function research was an attempt to create a vaccine. I'm not saying that's true.

These are some of the theories that are in some of these mainstream publications talking about what may have happened. And then it leaked from the lab. There was a story about – we covered this. We talked about it on the show that one of the people got sprayed with, like, bat urine or something. Someone got bit. So these stories were already out there. But you run the risk of Google banning you if you dare bring it up.

The double standard. The media is allowed to claim everything is a conspiracy theory. They're allowed to determine what is or isn't true and google just allows it they censor and suppress we gotta go back to 2016 this is all because of the giant fake russia hoax all of this comes from the lie that donald trump and the russians colluded to steal the election of 2016 and then how do we get from there to there? Because all of this censorship comes from that. Whatever you're saying that disagrees with the party line, this is Russian disinformation. You're not just wrong, this is dangerous. And you're a de facto agent of a foreign power. So this is when they

really started deranking people from Google searches, when they really started kicking people off of Twitter and Facebook, and just like with the germ here, for getting things exactly right, for saying that the Russia hoax was absolutely a hoax. Carter Page wasn't a traitor. He was a loyal American patriot. And let's talk about exactly right. When Tucker brought up lab leak, he didn't definitively state it was or wasn't.

He said these are interesting questions. He was exactly right to ask those questions, which are now being admitted to by Fauci. But the media said it was a lie. You can't trust these people. And so, you know, I know a lot of people, they love watching this show. There's a biased fact checker thing that people are posting. And it was really funny. It said that on Twitter, Tim Pool has a right-wing blind spot, meaning most of the stories I tweet about are from the left.

But it's because mainstream media is the left. So I use NewsGuard, which I referenced earlier rather angrily. They certify what is or isn't factual news. They'll be like, oh, this website has bad standards and has good standards. Daily Wire is rated as having bad standards. It's a conservative opinion website. What they report on is fact-based. It's just their opinions and their opinions can be wrong. Media Matters, which is just activism, is rated green across the board. So it's not that I have a left bias. It's that the organizations and the institutions have an institutional left establishment bias. A liberal bias, right?

They hate the left. They'll go after and persecute real leftists. They'll use them. Yeah, once they started kicking all the right-wingers off of Twitter, then they went, well, no, but, and de-ranking them on Google. They said, no, but we're being fair because we're also picking on the left too. And they went after Truthdig, Truthout, the World Socialist website, which is the Trotskyites, and they threw Antiwar.com in there,

even though we're libertarians. I guess they just assume we're leftists. So we got deranked by Google along with everybody else in the name of fairness because they're picking on these people. But they didn't kick the liberals off. They kicked the leftists off. Occupy Wall Street activists got banned. I saw you guys got listed in, it was a blacklist of some sort, probably Google.

And I remember talking to a bunch of conservatives being like, dude, they're going after the people who oppose the establishment. It's not they'll they'll gleefully use the leftists. And unfortunately, a lot of a lot of these young leftists don't know who these people are. They don't they weren't they weren't around in politics when Joe Biden was vice president. So they think he's the hero. Or to be fair, the DSA types in their early 20s think, sure, he's bad, but he's not a fascist. And I'm like, I got news for you about the Obama years and what Biden was doing with his brother. So sure, call him whatever you want. Crooked.

How about that? But they weren't around for it. So they vote for this guy. They get exploited. And that's why Democrats love younger voters. A 16-year-old doesn't have the memory of what they did 10 years ago. Exploitation. That's the name of the game.

So they'll censor everybody. But here's what ends up happening. Trump was very powerful in terms of upsetting the establishment. Trump's followers were very prominent and influential. They had to get rid of those people. They cut it, they smack it from the middle, and then Trump loses a lot of his core evangelizers, these prominent personalities. That means less grassroots people rising up. They ban subreddits like the Donald, this massive subreddit where people are posting memes and having a good time.

They cut it out from the ground up, and then Trump falls. They had to go after him with all of their force. That means the conservatives were getting the brunt of the censorship, but there were very much so many leftists who are anti-establishment as well and screaming and saying F you to the Democrats the whole way. And they got nuked too, but there were, there were fewer of them. So what ends up happening is the whole narrative becomes conservative. The liberals end up just saying it's fake news. Conservatives are lying. It's a private company.

And then many leftists who get banned apparently weren't loud enough because leftists are always fighting with each other as well. A lot of leftists decided to align themselves with Democrats because, as they described it, it's easier to overthrow a feeble old man than it is a fascist. So they decided they were going to support Joe Biden. For some reason, they didn't then speak up for their own. Or if they did, and this is the problem, a conservative gets banned, the leftist laughs. The leftist gets banned and then demands the conservative stand up for them, and the conservative does. Some conservatives started saying, you know what? Screw you. I'm going to laugh as you get canceled. But this is the problem of censorship.

It is the Democratic establishment and the old neocon establishment, which got fractured as soon as Trump stormed into the party. But all those people, the Lincoln Project people, are very much still aligned with all of the Democrats. They've become one big – they've always been one big uniparty. But now there's like real opposition fomenting. And ultimately, I think the censorship will get worse i think it'll impact us we've talked a great deal about it the the lab leak theory we weren't allowed to talk about you know we were to be very careful in talking about it and now here we are with fauci himself deciding it's okay and now now it's okay yeah well you know i think it's really one of the major crises of our era is the left, the further left, really giving up on freedom of speech and bringing the liberals with them.

You know, it used to be the liberals were the ones who would go to court to fight for your right to say whatever you want that they disagree with. But they really don't. Yeah. They've taken really much more of a totalitarian uh sort of a left you know my friend anthony gregory says it used to always be the best thing about the left was that they weren't the liberals and the best thing about the liberals was that they weren't the left yeah because you need them both right because the liberals have made their peace with capitalism and and guns and i mean they're not coming for no

no the liberals are the anti-gun ones the leftists love guns yeah i don't know the traditionally the liberals have they have their background checks and so forth but they're not taking them the left i disagree man listen listen right now the leftists on twitter are posting carl marx under no pretext shall arms and ammunition be surrendered. The workers must frustrate this by force if necessary. The liberals literally banned a bunch of my guns. Well, that's true that there are some leftists who are good on guns. But I think that those kind of quotes are pretty rare among the real hard left.

But especially on things like speech and war. So it used to be that you could rely on the leftists to be against imperialism, to oppose the FBI and the CIA and all these things. And you could rely on the liberals to essentially support capitalism and not be the worst on... But like neoliberal capitalism. That's right. Yeah, absolutely right. Crony corporate garbage.

The Hillary Clinton compromise. Yeah. So, yeah, we're talking about we're not talking about libertarianism. We're talking about the center left Democrats. But then what happened was Trump was so polarizing that he pushed the leftists and the liberals together, but only for the worse. Right. So the liberals abandoned their belief in free speech so that they could collaborate with the leftists on kicking everybody else off. And then the leftists abandoned all of their opposition to not all, but they're in large measure, their opposition to imperialism and to the federal police agencies.

Because who's protecting us from Donald Trump, the FBI and the CIA? They love it. And so everybody rally around John Brennan and Robert Mueller because they're protecting us from the big bad fascists. This is what I said because I know all of these Occupy people, these leftists. I said it was the greatest de-radicalization

in the history of the United States when I see the far leftists from Occupy cheering for the FBI. And that's all they would do. So I'm on Facebook and I see this hacker guy, this guy who's like literally been to prison of opposing and fighting, you know, and being a far leftist. And then he's like, the FBI has raided Giuliani's office. This is amazing. He's like, finally, justice. And I was like, I'm so happy to see that you stepped back from the edge

and you've come towards liberalism. now you accept the fbi and the federal government as your saviors and you're no longer on the side of committing crimes then another hacker comes in and and she's saying she's like yes finally and i'm like wow i am so impressed i remember you sleeping on the floor of that hacker collective talking about how you hated the federal government and imperialism and now here you are cheering for it i'm just i'm so impressed with your willingness to finally see the light and step away from this and they don't know you're being sarcastic they're like yeah thanks they're like wow myself on the back too well no they're not all that dumb but it's like my point was made and one guy's like well i were allowed to be happy when our enemies are getting hurt and i I was like, right. You support fascists when they're doing things you like. That makes you a fascist sympathizer. There's the door. Don't say that to

me about Donald Trump when you scream fascism. And the moment you come in and defend authoritarian measures from the government, I'm supposed to act like you're special. No, no, no, no. Yeah, you don't get to play that game. Donald Trump was a human Molotov cocktail. He got thrown in the room. He was a bull in a China shop. He was a bone ivory tower, whatever, whatever, whatever you want to say, you know, call him. But these people got so wrapped up in media propaganda, they went insane. They were probably already insane. Like being re-radicalized is easy if you live in hate. Like if they hated the government and wanted to tear it down without like a new creation system that they had in plan, then it's easy to take those people and re-divert their hate towards something else.

Like the media pushed us towards Trump. They tried so much. So then they just used the hate. The establishment hated Trump. But I will say one thing, too. What you need to keep in mind about the left is that while many of these leftists that I'm talking about are my age, a lot of the support they get are from people who are 20 who don't know anything about this.

They were 10 years old during Occupy Wall Street. they don't know so donald trump comes along they're teenagers and everyone who was before they were born that's right that's right and uh their babies you know when all this stuff is going down uh when when a lot a lot of these people were babies or toddlers or kids even if they were alive they didn't know anything about it right so i'm like what what makes you think voting for joe b going to make things better? And we actually had a conversation with this guy. And his response was, oh, I was like a little kid. I was like a teenager during Occupy. I don't know anything about it. I'm like, so when Joe Biden takes over overseeing the Iraq war, and then all of a sudden his brother starts getting the contracts, not suspicious to you.

That's what you want to come in. I take the crazy orange man, because at the very least, the Abraham Accords, I loved it. He wasn't perfect, firing Tomahawk missiles, very bad. John Bolton, very bad. Trying to any degree to get troops out of the Middle East, I was like, I'll take what I can get. Instead, we get the neocon establishment again, this time time which is biden he's sitting in his little wheelchair with his blank on his lap going as they just pull the trigger for him and they just what as soon as he gets in what do we get missile strikes in syria unsurprising but anyway i want to uh well let's fight about the abraham accords you don't like

the abraham accords no not at all why not well first of all they're not any kind of peace deal they're economic deals yeah the uae and bahrain and sudan and morocco none of them were at war with israel uae and and sudan declared war on israel in 67 but didn't send any troops but so these aren't really peace deals. What these are is sell out the Palestinians on the American taxpayers' dime deals. But weren't you saying before that the trade deals with China would be beneficial and help keep things simmered down and prevent conflict? Sure, except there just hasn't been any conflict to prevent between Morocco and Israel. It's not just that. And so what's happened is it's planes

flying over israel and flying over these countries to and from i mean it's it's it's normalizing economics it's like the first step towards stabilizing the region yeah but you had to buy a bunch of f-35s for the uae in order to get them to do it and the real purpose of it is not generating peace and these guys have all been working together with the Israelis all along anyway, unofficially. What it really is, is they're selling out the Palestinians. Because the Palestinian, the deal had always been that these Arab states would not normalize relations with Israel until they gave the Palestinians an independent state or equal rights within Israel. And they didn't do that. And then what happened was Jared Kushner went over there and said,

what's your price? I have the American people's money in my pocket. I can spend as much of it as I want. So what will it cost, Tim, for you to sell out the Palestinians? And they said, well, we'll take some F-35s and we'll take some more of your tax money. Why should I care about Palestine? Well, Mohammed Atta crashed Flight 11 into the North Tower as revenge for what the Israelis were doing in Palestine and in Lebanon, which kicked this whole damn terror war off.

It's an argument for us to not be involved. It's an argument for us absolutely to not be involved. But the thing is, we are involved. The U.S. backs everything that the Israelis do and always have. I mentioned this when you know cassandra came on the show uh came on the show country fairbanks she's very anti-war and she was like you're going to hear a lot of propaganda about why china's doing this that or otherwise and we should not go to war it's none of our business and i'm like you know it's like

i don't really have an argument for that it's like are we going to get involved in every single conflict so for me it's like what can we do to remove ourselves from the situations to a greater degree? As soon as Biden gets in, the funding for both sides to various degrees resumes and conflict lights back up. And that's good for imperialism for the United States. It's an excuse now to put more military into the Middle East. Oh, no, it's destabilizing. Oh, there's war and conflict. Instead, we should just be like, sure, maybe it costs money. Maybe we provided weapons and stuff. I don't know the answers, man. I just know under Trump, we were closer to getting out of these wars, no new wars, and Trump actually trying to pull troops out. And it was the establishment cronies lying to the American people about the troops in Syria and trying to stop this from happening. So I look at it like trade normalization, peace deals, recognition of Israel, the less conflict, the better, and get our troops out and be done with it. I think you're conflating separate things together. Him trying to get out of Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan is one thing. His Israel policy was absolutely horrible and made everything that much worse. He recognized Israel's absolutely illegal seizure of the Golan Heights

and their illegal annexation of it in 1981 and said, just on a whim, I recognize it officially now, it's fine. Then he moved the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which is an important symbolic move, meaning that America now recognizes all of Jerusalem as a single unified city under Jewish control when the law says that East Jerusalem is illegally occupied by the Israelis. And Trump just said, well, screw that. And what that did was it negated even the possibility of there being an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its

capital. And it also raises the very important question of whether Jewish extremists are going to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque and rebuild the Third Temple and start sacrificing animals and start World War III. I think Trump didn't care at all about any of it. Well, he cared about Sheldon Adelson giving him money for the Republican Party. But Sheldon Adelson gave him what? Like $50 million? That's chump change to Donald Trump.

He could have paid for his own entire re-election and the entire Republican Party's re-election and told Sheldon Adelson to go to hell. He said it was a mistake for him to hire John Bolton. John Bolton called him from Sheldon Adelson's office in Las Vegas and said, guess where I am right now? I want a job.

And Trump gave him the job. That's right. He should have told him to go to hell. Absolutely. Who showed him, Adelson? Well, he's dead now, thank goodness. But he was an extremely important mega donor and hardcore Zionist in America. He said his only regret was that he joined the U.S. Army instead of the IDF.

He said he's the one who publicly said that Obama should drop a nuke outside of Tehran as a warning. And if they don't obey after that Obama should drop a nuke outside of Tehran as a warning. And if they don't obey after that, he ought to nuke the capital city. And John's a total nut. And John Bolton was the guy who said this time next year we'll be celebrating in Tehran. So the dude wanted to just invade. And people don't understand. You can't.

Iran is not some tiny country. People don't understand the geographics. But I don't understand the the geographics but but uh i don't uh i don't have all the answers so that i don't i i don't know everything about all these conflicts well take a take a look at what they did with morocco for this abraham accord as they call them all the abraham accords i think it's originally only bahrain and uae but then you lump in sudan and morocco well morocco has been illegal occupying the northern part of Western Sahara for like 20 years. And Trump went, go ahead.

You can have it. Right. So this is the liberal. But hold on. Hold on. Rules based world order that America is supposedly enforcing. But the rules don't apply to us. They don't apply to our friends.

We do whatever we want. The Israelis are in violation of the fourth Geneva Convention by transferring their civilian population into occupied territory. Oh, well, what's a Geneva Convention? So this is this is the problem. Then should the United States just said we're done with all of it. We're out. Bye bye. Yes, absolutely. And it seems sorry for backing these criminals against these helpless civilians.

This population that has been occupied for 54 years longer than the soviets occupied and trump doesn't care about those other countries that's right so there's no going to trump and being like all he cares about is america all he wants is that is is the border secured and factories back in america to make america great and so when you say yeah but these people i don't know or care about any of that sign the deal get it done and get us out of there. We're out of it. No new wars. Trying to withdraw our troops, and they lied to keep them in place. True. But Trump also deliberately escalated the war in Afghanistan. He deliberately escalated the war in Syria until they finished Iraq War III against the Islamic State there.

But escalated the war. Escalated the war in Somalia. And he took wherever there's the war in Yemen and the war in Somalia, he made official there's um at the war in in uh Yemen and the war in Somalia he made official areas of active hostilities which under the law means that now the military and the CIA can kill far more people than in more restrictive circumstances where it's covert action only increase in drone strikes right massive increase in in arikes, drones and planes in Afghanistan and Somalia and Yemen. And he delegated the battlefield authority for the right to call in a strike as far down the chain of command as he possibly could. Because when he came in, there are all these checkboxes that Obama and his lawyers had added.

And they killed tens of thousands of people with their drone war. But they had added all these bureaucratic checkboxes. But Trump was raised on the myth of vietnam and hw bush talked about this during iraq war one as well as this was i don't know if you're familiar with this but this was a big deal when i was growing up that lyndon johnson tied the hands of the generals behind their back nitpicking and pouring over the map in the white house and picking the targets himself and controlling the policy and if and if he hadn't done that then the generals would have just done the right thing. So Trump said, that's never going to happen to me.

No one is ever going to say that I didn't let the military have carte blanche to do whatever they think is right in whatever area. And so when he came in, he said, I want out of Afghanistan. This is in March of 2017. And when they were doing a review and trying to get him to push to escalate. And he said, I hereby order all American troops out of Afghanistan and out of South Korea. This is in the newest Bob Woodward book, Rage. Trump said this.

Trump said this. In three months into power. Two months into power. And James Mattis, the secretary of defense that he hired, said, belay that order. We're not leaving Afghanistan and we're not leaving Korea. And I don't give a damn what the president said. And then it was three months later,

Trump announced he was sending another 10,000 men to Afghanistan and massively escalating the air war. Absolutely was one of the biggest problems with Trump is that he hired a bunch of morons and didn't fire the other morons. John Bolton, obviously. And yes, I think the problem was clearly, it sounds like Trump just said, I want out, the American people want out, but he was surrounded by people that he should not have trusted. And he gave them power. Including Bannon, including his own people.

He obviously could not trust McMaster and Mattis, but he couldn't trust Bannon either. And this is in, I forget if this is in Fire and Fury or Fear by Woodward, one or the other of those. I don't necessarily trust the guy. Well, no, but it's horse's mouth stuff. So it's like when Mattis tells Woodward, and that's when I said, don't do what the president said. You can pretty much believe that. You know what I mean? Is that treason?

Well, certainly it's criminal insubordination. I don know exactly what you know which law in the military code of uniform but see bannon made the deal bannon made the deal with mattis that listen we'll shut up about afghanistan if you guys promise to get worse on china and then mattis goes well sure we wanted to build up against china anyway and in exchange for, you're going to shut up about Afghanistan? Deal. And so it was Bannon that sold out Trump on Afghanistan just three months into the thing. And then they got rid of him by, what, July? And then in August, they announced the big escalation. And then, you know, there's a story in the Post. This also comes from Mattis straight out of the horse's mouth.

In the Washington Post, Trump complained complained why are we in somalia i don't even want to be in somalia where is somalia what are we doing in somalia and james mattis told this ridiculous lie that well we're trying to prevent a time square attack well the time square attack of 2010 was direct retaliation for the drone war in Pakistan. Had nothing to do with the Somali. And drone strikes didn't prevent it. Drone strikes caused it. But wait, it gets better. Then Trump said, no, but I don't care.

I don't want to be there. I don't understand why we have to be there. And Mattis told Trump, quote, you have no choice. And then what did Trump do? He obeyed the Secretary of Defense. Instead of saying, actually, I do have a choice. You're the one who doesn't have a choice, Mr. Secretary. He said, okay, fine.

Escalate the war. What do I care if they kill another couple of 10,000 Somalis? Trump should have, for one, fired a lot of morons, not hired a lot of morons. And he should have just done, why didn't he just go on public TV and say, this is the plan, we're doing it? Look, I mean, the truth is, it's because he doesn't read. He doesn't know anything, right? If he knew anything at all, Tim, he would have gone to Cato and he would have gone to the national interest. And he would have said, I want all of the most credentialed anti-war right-wingers

that you guys can line up for me. Let's do think about how close we were honestly if trump in the first three months says out out out but he was too busy surrounding himself by bad people and special interests and he was too busy complaining about his crowd size at his inauguration and every other stupid thing that didn't matter at all and selling weapons to saudi arabia to fund the yemen yeah and so genocide basically yeah we'll get to yemen in a minute. But, I mean, when he came in, Bannon said, here's our deal, okay? We want to end all the free trade agreements.

We want to halt immigration from Mexico. And we want to end all the wars. Well, guess what? Trump has total power over one of those issues. The wars, right? And that's all he had to do was say, I really mean this this i'm really sticking with this we are ending these wars and if he'd done that it also would have been absolutely

brilliant politics throwing a nuclear hand grenade into the democratic party and making the liberals attack him from the right for ending wars and convincing the leftists well they never hated liberals so much they did that right the media absolutelyists that they never hated liberals so much. They did that. The media absolutely did that. They were claiming that Trump was, you know, leaving was irresponsible and it was a gift to these dictators and ISIS and clearly trying to negotiate peace was just him appeasing dictators and all that stuff.

Appeasing Putin. That was, you know what? I love this one. You can check this in the Washington Post, everybody. Go check in the washington post everybody go check in the washington post everybody in june it was june or july of 2017 trump ordered an end to the cia program backing the al-qaeda terrorists the al-nusra front aka hyatt tarir al-sham in syria and the washington post headline reads in move sure to please vladimir put, Trump orders end of covert action program in Syria. So they accuse him of treason for stopping a program of arming al-Qaeda terrorists, suicide bomber, head chopper, murderers in Syria.

We've definitely established in this episode, don't trust the media. Don't trust them, man, especially not the Washington Post. I do have to do a hard segue because we went a little long on this one. We've got to talk about Ian's favorite subject. Yes. So this might be probably the scariest story I've ever seen, the one that truly freaks me out the most. Wokeness at Fed's regional banks puts central bank independence at risk.

Fed is supposed to operate free from political influence. Okay, okay. I love it whenever anybody types that with a straight face. Oh, the Federal Reserve? Yeah, no, they don't engage in politics at all. Right, right, right. Why would they? So they say, Federal Reserve banks in Atlanta, Boston, Minneapolis recently dedicated resources to social policy,

reflecting the political leaning of officials who are neither elected nor confirmed by the Senate. The Federal Reserve's mission statement mandates central bank to achieve maximum employment and stable prices while being free from political influence. Experience has shown that countries with independent central banks achieve better outcomes. Pursuing a highly politicized social agenda unrelated to monetary policy is inflicting reputational damage on the Minneapolis, Atlanta and Boston Fed banks and the Federal Reserve as a whole. The first thing I'm scared of, but hold on, there's some good news here, is that the Fed is the machine by which they control things and extract research,

like essentially hidden taxes on people printing money, borrowing money, and then your savings become worthless and then they can use it to fund war and other things like that. Getting woke just means creepy dogmatic authoritarianism. However, it is also instability. It is, wokeness is meritless. It is about instituting policy on the basis of what feels good in our emotions and our ideology as opposed to what works. So it's kind of like, well, we've seen wokeness destroy institutions, right? We say, get woke, go broke. So it's kind of like, well, we've seen wokeness destroy institutions, right? We say get woke, go broke. So it may be scary what happens when the Federal Reserve starts instituting policy at a very massive level. But at the same time, what if the Fed gets woke and goes broke? What happens?

What would happen? I don't know if the Federal Reserve Board could be any worse at their job, frankly. And these guys have caused nothing but booms and busts and catastrophes, artificial booms and very real busts and catastrophes my entire lifetime. Well, I mean, in the 1980s, I'll never forget that in Northwest Austin, they had built entire neighborhoods and entire shopping malls, but it was just the roads and the foundations. And then it stayed like that for 10 years. It was another 10 years before they built Lake Line Mall.

And we used to just go out there and camp and get drunk and skate. Dude, I love it when you find those like the old slabs. Just like pre-constructed buildings that are left for a long time. And it was just like that for something like 10 years. And then we all lived through the dot-com massive crash at the end of the Bill Clinton years. Where instead of cashing our peace dividend and bringing the troops home, instead they printed a bunch of money, inflated the money supply. See, here's the thing about inflation, too. Is, as you say, it's hidden taxation, right?

It's theft. It's the same reason it's against the law for you and I to counterfeit money. It's because we're stealing the value of our neighbor's dollars if we do that. But that's not the worst of it. The worst of it is that you get massive price inflation in certain sectors like housing, stocks, fuel. That's what's happening again right now yeah so after the dot-com crash of 2000 they kept inflating housing and they just poured more and more and more money into housing to prevent that recession from really kicking in and then we had the massive crash of 08 that brought

the whole dang world down with it and then what they do qe123 five and just did nothing but expand the money supply inflate inflate inflate and just as rothbard teaches they always try to somehow like prick the bubble and slowly let the air out but it's always a crash yep and in fact though what happened this time was we were due for a crash last year this year sometime here real soon but what happened was the governors donald trump and the governors did it for us and forced the recession, not through high interest rates, but just by forcing the clamp down, the lockdown on the entire economy. And so that meant all kinds of bad debts were being canceled off of bank books. Right. It's massively deflationary to have. In other words, it was it was a deliberately imposed depression or recession on the economy.

So then where does that leave us right now with the lockdowns just being lifted a massive increase in the money supply that means we're right back where we were in the year 2000 2001 right back where we were in the year 2009 just at the start of the next big bubble so we're good so now that's right we are yeah unless you're trying to to afford a place to live and you can't and which is why i don't know about around here but in austin texas there has never been a homeless crisis like there is right now and and in like it's insane oh it's just unbelievable and there's people living in tents up and down the side of the road everywhere and here's price inflation

in housing and now and the and the mortgages have gone through the roof. Now, add in Biden offering up more stimulus and more tax credits and more money for not working. And what's happening? We see these stories where fast food restaurants are saying, you know, five hundred dollar bonus, a thousand dollar bonus. Come take the job. And people still won't do it. I see from a lot of leftists. They're like, oh, surprise, surprise.

Nobody wants to work at fast food unless they're getting paid a living wage no dude you're getting paid 16 bucks an hour to not work which means i don't got to do anything why would i take 16 an hour now to work when i'm already get it to not work well but plus the cost of living keeps going up so it's 15 an hour ain't what it used to be but this is this is the problem that's a surface surface level problem what people don't see is the same problems affecting steel mills the same problem is affecting mining raw materials so while we can laugh that you can't buy your your popeyes chicken sandwich because nobody wants to work there has anyone actually looked at the raw materials that aren't getting produced because the same problem is happening or the farming that's not getting done

because the same problem is happening you got a farmer's not getting done because the same problem is happening. You got a farmer and he's like, I need someone to work the fields, to collect the crops, to pick the certain vegetables. And it's like, how much are you going to pay? I can pay 20 bucks an hour. I get 16 for nothing. So no, thank you.

I won't do it. Guess what? You go to your store, you can't find bacon anymore. You go to your store, you can't find vegetables. It's not just fast food. It's hitting everything.

And it's been happening since last year because I've mentioned this several times. I go on Amazon, I buy a tablet or I put a tablet in my cart. I forgot I didn't buy it. And then a day or two later, I get a notification. The price is increasing this product. It went up like 150 bucks. That's how it's fast. And we can talk about the Fed, the printing and all the stuff, but then you have all this spending. I think we're going to get hit real bad. And I think Bitcoin is going to through the roof by the end of the year. Don't look at me.

I'm not a financial expert. I just look at what Max Keiser is talking about. The guy's been right a lot. So when you combine all of these things – so Max Keiser comes out and he's like Bitcoin is going to be – his price point is 220 by the end of the year. Maybe not. I don't know. But Max has been right and I've listened to him in the past. I'd be very wealthy. But then I see what he's saying. Then I look at the things we're

saying. This Fed getting woke thing, the wokeness is not merit, which means you're going to have people who can't do the job that's already a ridiculous job, the Fed, which means potential destabilization on whatever it is they're trying to do in the first place is probably going to get worse. Then you have the mass printing of money. You have no one wanting to work. Seems to me like Bitcoin is going to skyrocket by the end of the year. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Bitcoin is not going to skyrocket.

The dollar is going to collapse. That's a better way to put it. I think we need to repeal the Federal Reserve Act. Yeah, of course. But we need a new system in place to withdraw Federal Reserve notes and then give you a cryptocurrency in response give people two years to turn in all their federal reserve notes and then just make them all worth nil after that so don't hoard your money turn it in let's start a new economy obviously they're going to track it if it's a if it's a crypto on the blockchain so every move you make i don't know

how they'll hide money off offshore in in panama if it's a crypto. Maybe they can't. Maybe that's the point. Or maybe you don't have a – No, maybe it's really easy to do, actually. They actually have, yeah, different kinds of cryptos, too, that really do provide a lot better security, I think. Monero, you can't track. I think Zcash you can't track. No, no, no.

Zcash has – I think I could be wrong about this, but it has shadowed, shadow accounts and visible accounts. So it works both ways. You can choose to – like a masked account or or non that's really interesting actually and look this is what frederick hayek said was rather than having i think murray rothbard wanted 100 you know by law 100 gold reserve standard and hayek just said let there be competing currencies i think this is the ron paul position just what you do is you have to repeal the legal tender laws and you have to repeal the taxes on different alternative currencies right so if you're taxing capital gains on silver and bitcoins and everything that makes it impossible to use as a currency really or much more especially if you

inflate the dollar and cause the the cost of silver to go up double right and then tax them on that increase even though the value didn't increase. They just printed twice the amount of money, so it looks like it. And then you lose a fourth of your money because they printed twice as much. And they've been printing like crazy. I have to tell you the bad news is

I talked with Robert Higgs, and this conversation is probably 10 years old now or more, but Robert Higgs is the great libertarian economist that wrote crisis and leviathan and he's like listen man forget the petrodollar forget you know any of the different kind of answers for why people are so dependent on the dollar they're dependent on the dollar because they have been the dollar's been the world reserve currency since the end of world war ii and it's going to stay that way for a very long time because what it would take to stop that would be for every central banker in the world to wake up one day and realize that all those $100 bills in their bank vault are worth nothing and try to panic and sell them all at the same time. But they're all painted into a corner if any of them ever do that then they're the one precipitating the crisis and making it worse and they're not going to be able

to get rid of the money before what if they lose hold on hold on what if all of these bankers are sitting there with a hundred dollars in their bank account and then they're like i don't want to be the one to sell because it'll cause my it'll cause my money to start losing value so i won't be able to sell fast enough and then then Joe Biden yells out, shooting on a shot, but a pressure and starts printing money like crazy. Then they're going to be like, well, he's already doing it.

So dump the dollar. People are going to want to get out before it hits because he's already tanking it. It could happen. But then there's also the question of American military power. And are you going to sell those hundred dollar bills in your vault? If we're going to kill you, if you try it,

wasn't it? You know, we had Gaddafi. What did he want to trade? In dinars? Yeah, he wanted to. Essentially, they still use the French franc in the formerly French colonies of Africa. And even though the French are on the euro, they still use the French franc.

And then he wanted to undermine that by switching to a gold-backed dinar. Yeah. And then he died. Yeah. And I'm not. It's weird how that happens, right? I'm not really sure, like, how much evidence there is that that was really the French's worry. I think Sarkozy was really worried that it was embarrassing to him that he had stood by Ben Ali in Tunisia all the way up until he was forced to flee at the very start of the Arab Spring. And so he had a public relations problem, and he was going to take it out on Gaddafi.

And then Gaddafi had also spent a bunch of money on Sarkozy's election campaign. So then he had the same problem John McCain and Joe Lieberman had with Gaddafi. They had sucked up to him and been too nice to him recently. And so now that he was a hate figure again, they had to turn on him again. It was just politics.

We can thank the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton, for absolutely destroying North Africa. Absolutely right. And look, there was just a piece the other day about the ISIS Sharia Islamist state in northern Mali, which is a direct consequence of the war in Libya. It's got a whole chapter in the book. Have you studied Sidney Blumenthal much? He basically sent emails to Hillary Clinton. This is part of her email scandal. She tried to delete as much as possible, but you can see in Podesta's, you can look them up. Sidney Blumenthal, John Podesta, Hillary Clinton,

Osprey Global Solutions, which was Sidney's company that he wanted. It's an arms running company. I think the Blumenthal emails actually were released by the State Department. I think those were not the ones that were leaked in the DNC leak and the Podesta leak. They were the State Department.

Jason Leopold sued under the Freedom of Information Act. And they are very incriminating. Yeah. I mean, he warns her that they're rounding up and murdering blacks just for being black on the false accusation that they're mercenaries. And this is in, like, April. They kept the war going another eight months after that. They could have called it off at any time.

Obama forbade Hillary working at all with Sidney Blumenthal. I thought he was bad news. And Hillary was like, okay, and then just kept working with him anyway. And he would send her battle tactics emails like, you need to invade Libya. When we get there, we'll set up my company, Osprey Global Solutions, to fund the revolutionaries, you know, basically the American-backed new military. Hillary's like, okay. She just passes it on to her military advisor.

That's the game. It's disgusting. It's disgusting. It's called arms running, war profiteering. It's illegal, as far as I know. Although maybe it's not illegal. I don't know. Can I be a war profiteer? Hold on.

We'll bring it back before we go to Super Chats. This is what the woke people realized. There's no truth but power. Oh, it's illegal? Well, they control the courts, so what does it matter anymore? Hillary Clinton, like she's going to go to jail for anything. Well, let's jump to Super Chats, my friends, if you haven't already. Give that Like button a good tap because it really does help out the show.

We appreciate it. And thank you to everybody and all the Super Chats for your opinions. Go to TimCast.com, become a member because we're going to have a members-only segment coming up after the show at TimCast.com where we say the things that YouTube doesn't like us saying. And we swear a whole lot. But let's read what we got here. 1976 says, For Tim and Ian and anyone else that writes songs,

what is your process for lyrics? Here's what I do. I'll make some riffs. I'll jam on the guitar. And then whatever the music sounds like in terms of feel, I envision in my mind like a world. I imagine a scenario and then I write a story. I visualize a story and then I write the words to describe what that story is.

That's how I do it. I turn on a video camera and then I start playing chords together and then I just start saying whatever comes out. I just start stream of consciousness riffing and I'll go back and watch the video and then write down what I said and that's usually where the lyrics come from. Do you write music? No, man. I have no

musical talent whatsoever. But you can skateboard. I can skateboard. Right on. We're going to skateboard right after this show. We are. You and I, we're going to go have fun in that. I'm going to see you hit up the six foot. That's going to be fun, dude. Alright, Jordan Jones says, saw your firearm video. Righteous bro, hear me out. Less head movement by bringing the optic to your eye and can't your rifle a little bit.

You may need to re-zero a bit, but it's good training. Right on. You know, we fired a 50 BMG, Barrett M82. It was good fun. We went to the range, had a great time. Trent Lomelino says Scott the man Dave Smith for president

Oh yeah we didn't talk about Dave Much on the show tonight You want to talk about Dave? Is it going to be a Smith Horton ticket? No it's not I think But I will be backing up

My man the whole time I promise that Smith Gabbard maybe If Tulsi can get involved Tulsi's great I love Tulsi She's an incredible military mind She's no libertarian, though.

No, she's definitely not. I know I want to bring all these people together. It doesn't matter what party we call it, but... I sure would like to see her run in the primary again. Yeah, that was great. On the Democrat side. When she just, like, mic-dropped Kamala Harris. Oh, man, that was beautiful.

And I really think they wanted Kamala to be president. Oh, yeah. Oh, so badly. You saw it in the polls, like, Kamala Harris and then Tulsi Gabbard. And remember what it was she said. She goes, this is a lady who locked people up by the thousands for smoking pot. And then when she was asked about it, she laughed. Yep.

And this is a lady who hid evidence that a guy on death row was innocent and tried to keep him on death row until finally the courts just intervened and forced her to give up. Why'd she hide it? You know, I have no idea. To protect her underling who had prosecuted the guy, I guess. And then, so this is just nothing but conspiracy to murder somebody, right? Like, how do you recover from that? And Tulsi Gabbard called her out for it, and goes yeah you got me i did do that you know called out kamala harris keeping people in prison beyond their sentences to use as slave labor to put out fires in california that lady is awful and then

after the debate was over she just stood there like an idiot then after the debate was over she goes oh yeah well you love bashar al-assad trash. And then the point went to Kamala Harris, according to TV. Oh, yeah. Right, right, right. Not according to me. They were like, whoa, she got her. Yeah, big one. All right, Adam Baker says, hey, Tim, took your advice and started to make good decisions and work hard and just got financially stable.

Working on a stand-up special to send you for your streaming service. Keep fighting the good fight, guys. Appreciate it, man. Thank you. I want to mention something because there was a thread by Taylor Lorenz of the New York Times about the housing boom. And she was referencing a TikTok meme where they were explaining how housing makes no sense. So this guy goes, he's like, I have an apple. I'd like to sell it. And then a guy goes, can I see your apple?

And he goes, no, it's an apple. You know what it is. Taking all bids. And he's like, no one's going to want to buy your apple if you can't. And then a guy goes, $5. And then some guy goes, can I see your apple? And he goes, no, it's an apple. You know what it is. Taking all bids. And he's like, no one's going to want to buy your apple if you can't. And then a guy goes, $5. And then some guy goes, $20. And then one guy walks in. He's like, $100.

I'm from California. It's the cheapest apple I've ever seen. It's like a funny joke. Right. But so Taylor points out, she's like, who has all of this money sitting around to just buy a house like this? And, of course, being from the New York Times, a lot of the responses were from the traditional establishment left liberal perspective, where it's like, well, it's all rich people and investors who are only able to buy homes. And you'd get a little bit mixed in there where someone's like, I bought a home with like only a few percent down. Yeah, 5%, I think. Yeah. Well, I mean,

in some cases, even 3%, depending on, you know, I think veterans can get zero down. But then my response was, you know, I'm not trying to be disrespectful to any of these people who genuinely don't understand. When I got a job at Vice, and Vice was paying me decently to be this correspondent traveling around, I slept on a couch for 300 bucks a month. I lived in New York for 300 bucks a month sleeping on a couch. It was not particularly comfortable. People would be coming over and my friend was doing his thing. I'd wake up at three in the morning and like, again, migraines.

But 300 bucks can't be beaten, Williamsburg. And so then all the money vice was paying me, I just go into the bank, go into the bank. And then you don't need that much to actually buy a house, like several thousand dollars. Like I think it's like five, like 5K in closing costs, depending on what percentage you're putting down. you can get a house. Young people don't realize this. I've met too many people who are like, my apartment costs three grand. I'm like, have you considered like not having a $3,000 apartment? I guess people don't, they can't fathom sleeping on a floor for dirt to save money. They can't fathom sacrificing. They believe that they should have a certain standard. And I can respect that people should have a house and like a bed and like a shower and stuff. But life isn't this like video game where the rules are equal for everybody. You know, life is,

it is what it is. Some people live outside. Some people are happy living outside. Some people have parents who pay their bills. And if you want to get ahead, that means you've got to save resources. But I just wanted to say that. Let's read some more. Ameris45 says, U.S. expat in China. This video made the rounds on WeChat. Any comments were shut down quick. People are terrified to say anything about it here.

Cherish and protect free speech. I miss it. First super chat. Hey, I appreciate it. What video? This video? No, the John Cena one. Oh.

Yeah. We've got a bunch of uh uh super chats on china joel stein says normalizing relations with china didn't make them more like us it's making us more like them raise that red fist i mean that's another thing like you know the black lives matter symbol is the red salute yeah and people like i see people in my own extended family marching around raising the red salute i'm like that's that's that's scary that's creepy ideological stuff which you know when you mentioned earlier about how the idea was we send milton friedman over there to teach dang xiaoping about capitalism that they'll end up adopting a more of a libertarian social policy as well and you know

it's easy to just say well that didn't come. But I always like to start with my blame in Washington, D.C. And it seems to me like if at the end of the Cold War, we'd elected Ron Paul in 88 when he ran and we'd elected Harry Brown in 96 to see us through the end of the 20th century and into the 21st. world empire and harry brown just spent every day given the world his statue of liberty speech not killing them but constantly lecturing them on not being free enough and not doing enough to protect human liberty now i think we'd be living in an entirely different world in the muslim world and in china and everywhere else i think the the true american creed of individualism and liberty out of our declaration of Independence would have a lot more purchase. But instead, America is the most corrupt government on the face of the earth. It's soaking in the blood of something like two million dead people from the last 20 years and for nothing.

Attacking countries that never attacked us, never threatened us. So if you look at places like, say, Pakistan, where they'll stone you to death for converting to Christianity. Well, we're not really in any position to criticize them for that because you know what's the worst thing about Pakistan? American drones blowing grandmothers up. Okay? And so how can we say to them, you guys aren't doing liberty right when we're not doing liberty right and we're supposed to be the standard bearers? Do you know what the Mandela effect is?

Yeah. You know what the Mandela effect is, right? So for those that aren't familiar, it started because some people were convinced that they heard news reports that Nelson Mandela died in prison, yet he didn't. And then he was alive. And so people are like, what is this? And so a lot of people then believe that they've accidentally jumped timelines. Can we just, you know, everybody right now just wish it's possible so we can jump to the timeline where Ron Paul won in 2008? Oh, and how about in 88?

In 88. To oversee the end of the Cold War. Well, the problem is the timelines are too divergent at that point. Maybe 10 years is a leap. You know what though one of the ones that really solidified that whole theory the mandela thing i remember listening to this on art bell driving my cab around and they were like yeah you know what also i remember the soviets went to the moon i know they did i remember that and i know where that came from that's not an alternative dimension that's from superman 2 where they're on the moon at the beginning and they got a russian and that's that's that's not an alternative dimension that's from superman 2 where they're on the moon at the

beginning and they got a russian and that's that's that's really what it likely is but i want i want to point out something that's very look i remember the ron paul era and i didn't agree with a lot of his like moral positions but i did agree with him saying no and leave me alone and leave it leave everyone to their own devices and i was like i'll take the guy who says he's gonna leave me alone and leave everyone to their own devices. And I was like, I'll take the guy who says he's going to leave me alone. Because we can disagree on everything, but then he agrees to leave me alone. That's great. Dude, we should jump to the timeline when George Washington became the first American president. What?

Because Ben Franklin did not. He dropped the ball. Wait, what? George Washington wasn't the president. I think this guy's from another dimension. Yeah, we all think that. Anyway, I think we should jump to that timeline. All right, all right, let's read some more.

Nahyig says, God damn it, 2 a.m. here in Sweden, and I see that the legend Scott Horton is on with Tim. I recently got my copy of Enough already. You guys are the best. Yeah, I got mine as well, but mine's autographed. Everybody show the book to the camera. I'm going to show it again at the end of the show. That's right.

Yes. That's every war from Jimmy Carter through the end of Donald Trump. Is it possible to end war, you think, and just live in like a harmonious symbiosis? Mostly. In terms of like a magical utopia where it never breaks out ever again kind of thing? No. out ever again kind of thing no but at the same time um there are many nations in the world that just never even entertain the idea of going to war with each other you know look at all the latin america costa rica's abolished their entire military yeah they're not afraid of being

invaded by honduras honduras isn't going to invade them and they just take it easy um it's improved a lot of like literacy rates and things like that. They've invested in education. You know, there was an article in the Washington Post that said, war is good for the economy and war is great and all this. It was obviously a completely amoral take. But what he was saying had some truth to it in the sense that he was arguing that the larger the conquest, the more arguing that the larger the conquest,

the more peace and security within that conquest, the better it is for that population. So, for example, there hasn't been a major outbreak of war in the space between Canada and Mexico since the 1860s. And we've had this largely territorial monopoly on violence. And they finished killing off all the Indians after the end of the Civil War. But once they finished with the Indian Wars, we have essentially had peace and stability through this entire continent

that was won through warfare and that this has really been good for the American people overall in an amoral sense at least, just in a financial sense and in the growth of American power but the thing of it is where he the guy that wrote the article where he's making the the invidious conflation is he's comparing the size of the territory controlled by any given government with the size of the government and having a giant war and having a massive government that has this total control when in fact you could have an extremely minimal federal government in

washington dc say for example just enough to keep the peace between texas and louisiana but nothing more than that then that would really be you know all other things being equal that would be the ideal we we can't end war. It's very easy. And I have this idea. I was thinking that what we would need to do is, you know, at the height of these tensions around the world, you know, the Russia, the North Korea, the China stuff, we need to generate a fake alien invasion that unifies all the countries against it. Now, the biggest problem we're facing is that Dr. Manhattan can see into the future. So we'll need to do some Tachyon research to cloud his vision, in which case then we'll

actually be able to get away with it. Solve the Dr. Manhattan problem. Right. All right. So as soon as we solve that, we'll be able to stage the alien invasion, which will unify the planet. You know what we can do in North Korea?

Here's what we could do in North Korea. We could kill them with kindness. We could drop all sanctions. We could promise to negotiate a final peace deal to end the korean war which we have only a ceasefire left over from 1952 we could open up all trade relations with them we could send dennis rodman and all of his friends and and all of our best and worst bands and whatever and and just we have absolutely nothing to lose i think you're right.

Everything to get. Flies with honey. Let me read this, though. Dylan Keller says, stop bringing CCP shills on the show, LMAO. Although I guess it works out for you since it gets dummies like me to super chat. You're on to us. No, we bring people on the show. I mean, I'd love to have a bunch of socialists on the show.

They don't want to do it. They're scared. They're genuinely afraid of two things. One, legit leftists are scared of COVID. Like, young 20-something leftists we've invited on the show are like, dude, I'm really terrified. I won't travel. And I'm like, okay. And we've had a few that are like, oh, I'm not worried about it.

So they're scared of that. But many of them are scared of getting canceled. There's a few people I know. They do not have, look, a lot of these leftists are young. You've got 10 years on me. You know so much more than I do about this foreign policy stuff. I'm not afraid to be like, oh, I guess I don't know that. That's interesting.

But they are. They know if they come on this show and they're like 25, I'm 35. I don't know everything, but I have 10 years more experience watching all this political stuff. They'll get trounced. They'll say something about like some socialist policy, and then I'll bring up something where like it happened. It didn't work. And they'll be like, I don't know what that is. So they don't want to come on the show.

I'd love to have conflicting opinions. We try to get as many people with different opinions as possible. So but it is true that whenever there's disagreeableness or, you know, passion, people super chat a lot more. Yeah, sure. Which, by the way, the government of China, I don't think anybody argues whether it's a totalitarian dictatorship or whether the people there are free or not. The question is whether we should fight them or not. The question is whether we should believe all the propaganda

that's told about them in order to try to get us amped up to fight. The question is whether they pose a threat to the people of the United States of America or don't they, and what should our real policy be? All right. Well, let's read it. We got more. We got Brock Wick says, get Michael Bolden from 10th Amendment Center on the show.

Oh, yeah. He is an expert on states nullifying federal law regarding guns, weed, and immigration sanctuaries. Absolutely endorse that. Let me tell you something. Michael Bolden is a brilliant genius. And the 10th amendment center does such good work and because they're libertarians that you know they they tell leftists oh you don't

like nullification because that reminds you of the civil war or something like that well what do you think sanctuary cities for immigrants are and what do you think legalized pot is that's nullification and interposition straight out of the virginia and resolutions. And then he says to the right wingers, he goes, listen, you guys might not like sanctuary cities and legalized pot, but it's working. So this is what you need to do with guns. How are you going to stop their gun control? They're doing it. You do it from the bottom up. Nullification and declaring sanctuary states.

What happens if, you know, think west virginia declared a sanctuary to a sanctuary i think that i'm not sure but what happens if one of these jurisdictions everybody just says they're going to buy up nfa items the atf doesn't have the ability to go after that so prohibition doesn't work the federal government is not that strong it's only through confidence in their power that people you know abide by this stuff right that being said becomes a really interesting point for how youtube would function if west virginia says it's legal the federal government says it isn't what do you who who's the right in that regard because the states are sovereign you know the federal government is

it's a federation there it's it does you know it is supposed to supersede but then is california wrong can we can we say california is immigration? If West Virginia is wrong about guns, what is it? They have the supremacy clause, but that doesn't mean that unconstitutional federal laws override state laws, only constitutional ones. And so now the courts are always going to almost always side with the feds. But if you remember back in the 1990s, there's this guy, Sheriff Mack, sued under the 10th Amendment against the – it wasn't the 2nd Amendment. He used the 10th Amendment to sue over the background checks because it was essentially an unfunded federal mandate to the states that they had to do these background checks and pay for them all. And he said this is a violation of the 10th Amendment, and the Supreme Court upheld it and struck down the background checks on that. All right.

Let's read a little bit more. We got Daniel Maxwell says, China is fighting an economic war against the United States while trying also to keep the United States ignorant of that fact. I think so. What does economic war mean? They keep selling us microphones at reasonable prices? It means that they can have their people work in unsavory circumstances with the point of mass suicide to undercut the market, making it cheaper and more lucrative for American greedy interests to just send the factories overseas at the expense of the American workers. That sounds like a war between American big business and American workers, and the Chinese are just the useful tool of the americans well the the

chinese view it as you know we're in the we're in this for the long haul let's extract as much value from that system and enrich ourselves and it means to them make the people essentially sacrifice and that's long-term planning in the u.s you get some ceos who's like i can make more money moving the the factory over to china so i'll do it. And it's terrible for the environment. So that's the economic warfare. But it's also the Belt and Road Initiative. It's also the attempts. I'm for that.

I don't see what's the problem with the Belt and Road Initiative. They want to build a highway and a railroad line and a fiber optic line from Shanghai to Lisbon. That's the greatest invention in human history. What's wrong with that? It's just all part of economic warfare. I don't see the warfare part of it. Economics, you know, capitalism is mutually beneficial exchange. I mean, you're right that they have a government and everything,

but what threat do they pose? For example, this is part of my whole beef with this. Authoritarianism encroaching throughout the world? Yeah, but look, Kazakhstan is already an authoritarian state. The Chinese aren't making it into one. You know what I mean? People talk about

we have to stay in Afghanistan to keep China out. But China's not invading Afghanistan. If they're going to buy anything, they're going to try to buy influence in very small areas where they can make some money mining or something but there's no real security let's let's let's get more serious though do you know that one of the reasons we have a housing crisis that

china will come in and offer insane amounts of money to people selling so somebody's got a house it's worth 300k they'll be like i'm gonna sell it for 300 and then a working class family says i can afford that and then the chinese investor says i'll give you 400 on the spot working class family can't get the house then you And then a Chinese investor says, I'll give you $400 on the spot. Working class family can't get the house, then you end up with more homeless. I'd like to know more about the Chinese role in inflating American housing prices. I mean, right now in Austin, where I'm from, you have hundreds and hundreds, thousands even,

of houses being bought up at a time by Wall Street hedge funds. And they're not Chinese. They're from New York. And the thing is, the interest rates are so low they actually would be crazy to not do that they actually you know seem to have no choice but to invest in land because nothing else is paying off and so you know you can't invest in a bank cd right you can't just have a savings account you gotta uh do something with your money you got little old ladies gambling and bitcoins in the stock market because they're losing money on having a savings account.

And then they all invest in these mutual funds and these kinds of things, and they turn around and buy up all the housing. But again, it all comes from the free money, the hedge funds. Where are the hedge funds getting this money? That's not their savings. They're taking out a giant loan from the bank that got it from the Fed, gave them a license to print money. All right. Let's read this. We got Sergeant Hodel says, hey, Tim, let's all help out Project Veritas for free.

Shockingly, the woke Amazon Smile program has Veritas available as a charitable organization and a portion of all your purchases get donated to them. Cool. Absolutely. Yeah. your purchases get donated to them cool absolutely yeah yeah uh veritas posted the clip from the show where i said james needs he needs to get corrective surgery because for his back because he has too many spines or his spine is too big that was funny i thought it was funny i said it and then i heard it and i was like i'm funny i'm a funny guy it was a good show it's good to appreciate yourself all right the civic nationalist says scott and everyone go watch

t.i.k on youtube he has a lot of videos on the second world war hitler was the aggressor we were defending the polish from both the soviets and the germans also look into pax britannica don't talk about things you know so little about read churchill hitler and the unnecessary war by papu cannon we weren't defending Poland from anything. Poland belonged to the communists until 1989. The British never put one soldier on the ground in Poland to kick the Nazis out. The whole thing was a giant blunder, and it was Winston Churchill himself who said at the end of the war, ah, jeez, I guess I really shouldn't have done that, huh?

Yeah. I got one you'll like. Freeman Dye Free says, conservatives have always been wrong on foreign policy it's the libertarians turn to control foreign policy full autos for all the citizens and death to the military empire uh i'm i'm totally down you know you know why i've always said like my politics are actually like kind of left of center libertarian but i I would vote for among candidates like a Ron Paul. I think it was Ron Paul who said no one is stopping – a paraphrase. If you want to have a socialist commune in the United States, no one is stopping you.

You literally can just go do it. And I'm like, I dig it. So if that guy is in charge, you can leave me alone and I'll do and I'll live the way I want to. I'm libertarian. I don't want to tell anybody. I might lean left because that means I want to have a farm with a bunch of hippies on it who share their watermelons, and we don't want to compete. But if you want to have an ANCAP or a more libertarian right thing,

you go do your thing. I'll do my thing. That's what we all agree on. Ron Paul was a candidate for that. I'll take it. In Austin, when I grew up, there was a hippie commune out east of town, out in Bastrop, called the Zendik Farm. And they had a mini ramp out there. So me and my friend John went out to skate the mini ramp.

That was probably the last time I could do Olly Blunt. Those were the days. And it was crazy. Like, you know, they had – it was just like you would expect, right? There's the big purple house where only the elite of the commune are allowed to go, right? And then you have the smaller house where the other guy and then you know there's people out there breaking their back in the field and it didn't seem very fun to me at all yeah it was ridiculous man yeah that that's that's a thing but

they were free to do it and nobody stopped them from doing it communism is the most effective form of government for five people yeah i had to pause about this for the dictator yeah no no no no him and his friends uh in in every scale so if you're just five people like it's just you and four other people communism works real great like the who said it where you know murphy jack murphy at home i'm a communist he was quoting someone else you know we we all share all the resources for everybody the kids do the chores because what they're able to do but they get food regardless and yes when you are just five people it very, very easy to have friends who work together. Instead, you know, hey, I'm going to go do the dishes.

Would you mind picking up the food? Yeah, no problem. It's simple. And then as you scale up, communism works really well for five people. Once you have a country of 300 million, communism still works really well for just those five people. That's the name of the game. I like that. All right. Creamer of the dairy squad says six super chat hope you read it hey sam got my emergency food in the mail today ian check your twitter dms message about metaphysics i like oh we got some um polycarbonate should have been here today for 3d printing yep oh cool it is here

yeah i saw it did andreas get it uh i put it outside i hope he found it it? Yep, it's here. Oh, cool. It is here. Yeah, I saw it. Did Andreas get it? I put it outside. I hope he found it. It's sitting on the... So I printed a... This is one of the coolest things ever. I've been rollerblading a lot more than skateboarding. We've been having fun with it. But there's a thing called an H-block,

which allows you to do grinds on rollerblades. We 3D printed our own. And I shattered it today. Oh, nice. It's awesome. But it was just really cool to be able to 3d print something I could practically use that, that works.

And then to break it was even better. Cause I was like, yeah, cause I printed another one. 3d printing. Did you document it yet? No, no,

I just broke. And then I popped it out and then I worked. So hopefully we'll 3d print some polycarbonate. Oh, that'd be a good video. We should. Yes. Yeah.

And it's, it's really cool. Um, I also ordered these ridiculous rollerblades they're not rollerblades they're uh two bike tires and then on the axle on the inside are foot holders what so you actually strap your feet in and you have two bike tires on your left and right legs it's the craziest looking thing ever it's going to be so much fun and they have inner tubes they're like actual bike tires we're going to get weird oh Oh, cool. And I'll be the only one

to actually do tricks on those things and people will be like, it's a new sport. And then we got to get pogo sticks. Yeah. Dude, I've seen some amazing pogo stick videos.

Wow. People do grinds on these. A guy hit a handrail on a pogo stick. They do it all the time. Yeah, I saw some insane pogo stick video about a year ago.

And it was the pogo stick itself was like a new and improved kind of version. Hitting handrails on it. Yeah, doing stairs and rails. Dude, that's cool, man. A guy, he like pogoed up, did like a pogo spin and then landed on a handrail.

That's fun stuff, man. I'm stoked to see that. It's just really cool to see people use things in ways they weren't intended. I've always been a hacker and that's the thing about hacking. Hacking is making something do something it wasn't intended to do. Skateboarding and all of these disciplines do very much of that.

It's awesome. I love it. Yep. All right, let's grab some more Super Chats here. Oh, that one got retracted. We don't have too much time, but we'll do as many as we can. IamNsanity says, been watching since 2015 and modeled my news channel after you. No cursing and article fact-based.

Would love a shout-out for both this channel, Let's Play, slash video games, and the N-Sane Report. That's E-N-S-A-N-E. News with a psychotic twist. Hey, there you go, man. Appreciate it. Good luck. Cool.

Sol Invictus says, my local news channel could not report on overnight shootings without saying it in such a way that it made it sound like a 17-year-old shot a 90-year-old. In reality, they were two separate victims. Weird. Yeah. Today at George Floyd Square, the no-go zone, there was a – like the news reporter was giving his speech or whatever, and then gunshots started ringing out like crazy. I saw that headline. Yeah.

And you know what I said? I'm looking at the story, and I'm like, that's a no-go zone. No-go zones are defined as areas where normal governance has ceased. The police, medical can't go there or are scared to go there. Regular people can't enter or can enter with only great risk. And I'm like, that clearly defines all of these autonomous zones. There's like people being shot and killed. And the people who have written about the George Floyd Square, it's not some like anarchist utopia.

It is it is violence and chaos. It is the opposite of what people, you know, it's it's the opposite of what we hear about. Like, was it Acapulco? How do you is that? Is that it? Yeah. And Acapulco and Acapulco. That's the that's the event.

Yeah. Yeah. Down there, I hear like people get along and actually what's that? What's that place in Mexico where they got rid of the police? I don't know, but I know what you're talking about. See, that's that's in the event. Yeah. Yeah. Down there, I hear like people get along and actually what's that? What's that place in Mexico where they got rid of the police? I don't know, but I know what you're talking about. See, that's that's in the West. Right. The places like that are where like actual anarchy functions when regular people just

want to be left alone. These autonomous zones are being run by authoritarians who just do whatever they want. It's just absolutely not the same thing. Sharon. Oh, yeah. Sharon. Yep. Sonny James says,

Disagree with your guest's opinion on AZT. It was recycled on AIDS patients when doctors found it too deadly for cancer patients. Fauci made money off of that. Not to mention, Kerry Mullis said PCR technology couldn't detect viruses. He wanted to debate Fauci. Interesting.

I mixed up AZT with another one then or something, because I know that the story in the 80s was he was suppressing the drugs in order to boost research into the vaccine. Interesting. All right. They never did come up with that. We have Kerry Mollis is legit, by the way. I like that guy a lot.

Yeah. Stephen Clyde says, Scott, I had a blast hanging out with you at the LP convention. Can you talk about the Mises caucus for a minute? Yeah, sure. So the Mises caucus is a radical new young faction of the Libertarian Party led by a guy named Michael Heiss. And it's basically the Ron Paul revolution has decided to join the LP. See, there's been a real problem with the Libert party because back in the 1980s the Rothbard faction and the Cato faction all fought so badly they both left and they essentially just left

kind of a husk of an LP behind and there's been no offense to long-term LP people out there I'm not trying to fight you but there's been this dichotomy where you have the people who sit around reading and caring about this stuff and then you have the people who sit around reading and caring about this stuff, and then you have the people who work together in the party, networking and doing the work and collecting the petitions and staying on the ballot and things. But those people don't read and don't know what the hell is going on, and they're not mad as hell about it. And so you get a lot of stuff like, geez, it'd be better if taxes were lower. And, you know, wars are bad. But you don't get like, hey, man, these taxes are destroying these people's lives.

And this war is bad. And this war is bad. And this war is bad. Now, hear me out, though. But this is the new invention, is the Mises caucus are guys who are principled and radical and actually care a lot about what's going on in the country now. So they could talk about libertarianism in a way that's not just abstraction, like, hey, we should be like Switzerland, neutral.

But we need to come home from Afghanistan today. Now, hear me out. What if we raised taxes to 100% and engaged in complete and total war around the planet? Oh. Well, that's what it would take, probably. And then we'd all lose. Just the opposite. Yeah, we'd all lose because there's, what,

eight or nine countries with H-bombs now. All right. What is this, Garbage Main? Tim, please tell Scott High from his favorite garbage man and skateboarder in San Antonio. Can't wait to skate that ramp again soon. Oh, yeah. This is my guy.

We're Twitter friends, and now he's coming out to the vert ramp. We skate every Wednesday and Sunday morning. Right on. Skate church, and he's going to get them both out of air soon. Danger Close says, ask this guy if it's moral to position rocket artillery next to schools and hospitals. Hamas uses the Palestinian people as meat shields. Ask him if he supports the chant, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. Hilarious.

Should Israel turn off the Iron Dome and roll over? First, ask him if it's a war crime for the Israelis to put their defense department right in the middle of downtown Tel Aviv. Because that's the exact same thing. The Gaza Strip is one of the most heavily populated places in the world. It's a concentration camp. Okay? You know, people talk about, well, what would you do if the Mexicans started firing rockets over the Rio Grande? Well, by that, you mean the Mexican military, the Mexicans, not some Mexicans.

The Mexicans means the sovereign nation state of Mexico and its military. But that's not what's going on here. These people were conquered 54 years ago. They live in a concentration camp under the total and complete control of israel so so it's not a sovereign state with hamas attacking and starting a war and the israelis defending themselves that's not it at all and there's essentially very few places in the gaza strip you could place artillery or rockets or anything where it's not close to somebody else now you want to talk about human shields just type in israeli soldiers human shields and there they tie a little kid to the uh

to the uh no they tied a grown man to the uh front of their jeep and drove around with him in 2014 use him as a human shield and then there's a picture of a little boy, probably 13, 14 years old, who for hours, they made the IDF made him walk in front of them and go in first when they kicked in doors and all these things, literally using him as a human shield, not a figure of speech, a metaphor. Well, Hamas launches rockets from nearby. I don't even know if it was Hamas that launched the rockets. Hamas was in Islam Jihad.

I don't even know what's that. I don't know if it's a false flag. It is true that Hamas was operating in the same building as the Associated Press. No, that's not true. There's no report for that. It was reported in 2014 that reporters for the Associated Press said... Yeah, but that reporter was full of it. And the Associated Press repudiated his claims

then. There was no evidence for that whatsoever. It is a total hoax story. I can't. Fake news. So this is the inherent challenge, I suppose, with all conflicts. It's based on reports. So here's what we have. We have the Israelis claimed that.

And you have the Israelis told Joe Biden, here's the evidence for it. And Joe Biden accepted it. But it's still secret. They've never provided any evidence and the ap said that's absolutely not the case but this is the problem with this conflict period is that it is it is it is the it is one of like the issues you have to choose who you trust choose if it's fake news or not i don't trust any military organization it's just like anything else though i mean what it is is choose as many different sources of information as you can and then make them fight.

You can't live your life without reading the Washington Post. You have to read the Washington Post. You also have to know that they are your enemy and they hate your guts and they lie to you most of the time. And they have an agenda. At the same time, they have real resources and important reporters who get important stories. So you have to sift and sift and sift and do your best. It's the same problem when I see videos in New York of a Palestinian activist chasing a Jewish man down the street or a Jewish guy getting beaten, attacked, or a woman getting explosive thrown at her by these pro-Palestinian groups. And then I see them telling me that they're defending themselves.

So I understand that's not the same thing as Palestine. But I see these videos coming out of activist groups that are very much... I enter this thing as like I was not alive when this thing started. And I see videos where I'm like, they're both claiming the same things about each other. Which one am I supposed to just decide is correct or right

or wrong? Hey, I got a better idea. Why the fuck are we involved in it? Now you got me swearing. There we go. It's already the after show. Yeah, I know. better idea. Why the fuck are we involved in it? Now you got me swearing. There we go. It's already the after show. Yeah, I know. We're going to get to the after show. So let me, we'll read some more Super Chats. But we'll do one last one, which is a big one.

Mark Ashley says, hey, Scott, what's your theory on why Abdul Rahman Al-Awlaki was killed? I think it was just because of what a propagandist he was, what a successful propagandist he was. This is before YouTube was kicking people off. Abdur Rahman al-Awlaki. Oh, I'm sorry. 16-year-old. The boy. I'm sorry.

Not Anwar. I think only because he knew too much. I mean, they said that they were trying to kill the guy he was with and that he was unlucky to be there, too. They bombed a civilian restaurant in Yemen. Well, they don't care about that. Right. But I think, I mean, if there was like a kind of covert sort of secret reason why they wanted to kill the boy,

it was because he knew too much about his father because he was certainly not a terrorist. He went there to find his father and bring him home. But he had to have known that he had been an fbi informant in the past and things like that i mean honestly the occam's razor explanation is they just didn't give a damn they were killing the guy that he was with and he was there now what's interesting really interesting is the i forget if it was delta or the seals i think it was the seals shot and killed alaki's daughter that's right under trump Trump. Under Trump.

Shot her in the neck. She bled out over four hours. And yeah, eight years old. Or nine. I think eight. Yeah. And again, they said, well, wrong place, wrong time. She was associated with this guy who, for obvious reasons, had been associated with her father.

And that's an American citizen who was killed without charge or trial. All three of them. All three of them. American born American citizens. And that was Obama granted us that. But that that eight year old girl was under Donald Trump. That was one of his first orders. So. But man, what an awful note to leave the show on. Well, we're going to go to Timcast dot com and have a bonus segment. So make sure you go and sign up. Follow this show on Facebook. Facebook dot com slash Timcast IRL. Share our a bonus segment, so make sure you go and sign up. Follow this show on Facebook, facebook.com slash timcastirl. Share our videos so we can leverage that network, get more people to come to the website.

And we're on Instagram at timcastirl. We're live Monday through Friday at 8 p.m., so thanks for hanging out. Leave us a good review on all the podcasts, review platforms, whatever. Do you want to shout anything out, Scott? Antiwar.com? Antiwar.com is the most important project on the internet. And I'm pretty proud of the Libertarian Institute as well. And check out the book, Enough Already. It's all the wars from Jimmy Carter through right now.

And sign up for my podcast feed. I'm at scotthorton.org. I actually have 5,500-something interviews for you going back to 03 there. Almost all on foreign policy. And I'm also on youtube.com slash Scott Horton Show. Oh, and one more thing about that. If you go to youtube.com slash Scott Horton Show, I have the

video version of that book where I basically walk through all of it from Jimmy Carter all the way through. And that's kind of a nice little primer to get you started. You can follow me at iancrossland.net and at ian crossland on social media this is it enough already time to end the war on terrorism by scott horton and scott

where's the best place people can get this uh it's on amazon but also if you go to uh libertarian institute.org slash enough already we got links to all of the different places barnes and noble and powell's books and smash words and you can even read it on Scribd and all of those things got all those options for you. You guys are free to follow me on twitter.com at Sour Patch Liz as I attempt to get more followers since our patch kids. Oh yeah. I'm at Scott Horton show

on Twitter. There you go. We will see you all over at Tim cast dot com in the exclusive members only segment. Thanks for hanging out. We'll see you there.