00:00:38.000We've heard Faith Goldie's take, Jira Taylor, my take.
00:00:41.000I want to pick your brain, see what you're thinking.
00:00:43.000I know you're north of our border, but I'm sure you've got an opinion on that.
00:00:47.000And then I'd like to get into that Cato Institute article earlier this week about human progress.
00:00:53.000And I think it'll be a good conversation because you are an atheist, you are a scientist, and I'm obviously a Catholic, a religious person.
00:01:01.000And so I think it's interesting to see both coming from a right wing perspective how we view human progress.
00:01:08.000Before we get into any of that, this article should transform you into a libertarian, Nick.
00:01:19.000Yeah, I mean, that was really before I got religious.
00:01:21.000And it's funny because in high school, I was known as like the Zionist, the free market guy.
00:01:28.000I don't even want to get into it because it's embarrassing, frankly.
00:01:31.000But before we get into any of the news, I just want to say, you know, we've had this little controversy with Patrick Little, and people will tell me.
00:01:40.000Because of my response to him, because I won't have David Duke on the show and these kinds of things, they say I'm cucking.
00:01:52.000But I'm here to tell you that my constant selling out, my constant optics cucking for monetary gain has finally paid off.
00:02:01.000We've talked all the time on the show about the only lobby I would ever sell out to, the big water lobby, because I'm an avid water drinker.
00:02:11.000And today I'm proud to announce America First has our first ever water sponsor of Big Water.
00:03:52.000And so we've seen a number of things happen this week.
00:03:54.000We saw the very astroturfed media campaign, which is to play the clips of the children crying and the pictures of the cages and all these kinds of things.
00:04:05.000We saw the response by Trump, which was the executive order.
00:04:09.000And then today he rolls out the victims of the illegal immigrants and their families.
00:04:13.000And so, just for starters, just a brief overview, what is your first takeaway from this kind of situation?
00:04:59.000And he says, with this executive order, we're not going to separate parents from children.
00:05:04.000The typical conservative response to that kind of case should have been very simple.
00:05:09.000He goes out in the media and he says, hey, we're not going to leave children in an incarcerated environment.
00:05:16.000We're not going to leave children in jail.
00:05:18.000And so I don't care if CNN, Fox, and everyone coordinates and decides to make stories about it, I will never leave a child with a person suspected of a crime or being prosecuted for a crime.
00:05:34.000Now, Trump, instead of doing that, he gives the leftists what they wanted, which you should never do because they will never be happy.
00:05:43.000And Trump, as I discussed with Mark Colette just before coming on this show, it seems that Trump tries to apply his deal mentality to politics.
00:05:55.000But politics is a handless hole of people wanting more and more and being unsatisfied with you.
00:06:02.000He's not win one voter with this executive order.
00:06:06.000Would you agree with me on this, Nick, that this executive order didn't win him any ground on the left?
00:06:58.000The people that voted for Trump for strong immigration, all the rest.
00:07:03.000Very well, you could lose a few voters there.
00:07:05.000So, you know, I thought the biggest fumble was really the messaging.
00:07:09.000The executive order didn't really change the equation in terms of immigration.
00:07:13.000It sets a bad precedent for the debate.
00:07:15.000But, like you said, the biggest fumble was the messaging in the sense that he could have come out there and said, the problem is we can't incarcerate children with the parents.
00:07:24.000You know, I mean, this is the most clear example of people just not understanding what they're talking about, where the alternative to what we're doing is to lock kids up in jails for adults where you have smugglers.
00:07:36.000Human traffickers, drug abusers, asylum seekers, you know, and all the rest.
00:07:40.000And yet Nielsen, who came on, the DHS secretary, said that actually 10,000 of the 12,000 kids were sent across the border with strangers.
00:07:49.000So the messaging could have been so much better on this.
00:07:53.000Do you think that was the big concern, or do you think the EO was bad as well?
00:08:17.000In terms of fundamentals, when you're a leader, and Trump has made a success out of Convincing people that he was a leader, that he wouldn't bend the knee in front of emotional blackmailing.
00:08:33.000And people who vote for conservatives, they are very sensitive to that kind of messaging.
00:08:40.000They want a leader who's able to take the decisions that are in the short term emotionally negative, but in the long term make sense at a moral level, at a deep moral level.
00:08:52.000And what makes sense at a deep moral level is not to let Children who are potentially victims of child trafficking in many cases never let them with their parents.
00:09:02.000I know it breaks some arts, but it's okay to break some arts to follow the true moral path that you've set upon.
00:09:09.000Now, Trump has demonstrated with his executive order that he didn't have what it takes to step over this emotional blackmailing.
00:09:17.000And ultimately, I'm not sure that Trump did it for the children.
00:09:21.000I think he did it for his own image with the leftist media.
00:09:25.000Trump doesn't like having the leftist media.
00:09:29.000And that's not even morally noble, if you will.
00:09:35.000I would push back on that a little bit only because I saw that executive order more as a tactical decision.
00:09:43.000Because, you know, if you look at the content of the executive order, I wasn't happy that he tried to accommodate the left or because we see the crying and the tears and all this.
00:09:53.000And once the left gets the idea that they can, like you said, emotionally blackmail the president, where does it end, essentially?
00:10:00.000And once you concede to that, We've lost a lot of ground.
00:10:03.000But I will say that I read the content of the executive order, and what it actually does is, in a de facto way, closes the loopholes in the sense that whereas before the children were being detained separately from the parents with HHS, and then they went to foster care where they hoped they could be eligible for DACA or amnesty for DACA recipients, now they're being detained at the border with the parents.
00:10:27.000And so, and they've also shut down this whole conversation.
00:10:30.000I think now you see things are coming out about that Time Magazine cover, things are coming out about.
00:10:36.000How basically all the pictures of the caged children were fake, and Trump had that big thing with the illegal immigrants.
00:10:44.000I think it was kind of fumbled originally, but now I think since the executive order, surprisingly, I think it's gotten a little bit better.
00:10:51.000I don't think the motive was Trump trying to look good for the leftist media because he came out today with the illegals and totally flipped the script.
00:11:00.000I mean, do you think that was at least an effective thing?
00:11:03.000If you think he did it for the leftist media, do you think that bringing out the families of the victims of illegals was like a good play?
00:12:20.000It has to be framed in some way as a reaction to leftist media, not as a reaction, in my view, to the fundamental issue there, to the fact that the children were being separated from their parents.
00:12:32.000This must have been known by the agents in charge for many years.
00:12:38.000But I would grant your point that maybe the executive order will have long term benefits from an administrative perspective and from a loophole patching perspective.
00:12:49.000People, why don't we bend the knee in front of leftists?
00:12:55.000Because they will keep dragging you in the mud.
00:12:57.000And that's what CNN has been doing today.
00:13:00.000So today, they released an article saying, in one week, Trump has tied himself into an impossible immigration knot.
00:13:12.000They are an evolution in time with Trump first trying to talk to the left and say, okay, I'll sign an executive order.
00:13:21.000And today, He's reverting back to a strategy that does speak to his base, which is to prison the families that were the victims of illegal immigrant crimes, show that there is a reason why we enforce immigration laws in our countries.
00:13:38.000And somehow, what he did today is not as good as it could have been if he hadn't given the impression that he was bending the knee toward the left, bending the knee to the emotional manipulation that the media has been doing.
00:13:53.000Yeah, I definitely agree with the point that he gave in to the pressure.
00:13:56.000I definitely agree with you that it was definitely not.
00:13:59.000Well, and I don't think it was about the kids for the media or the president, right?
00:14:02.000I mean, the media brought it up to recapture the initiative on immigration and to make this point that Trump is Hitler for the midterms.
00:14:11.000And Trump caved, I think, ultimately to pressure from the media.
00:14:14.000So I definitely agree with you on that point.
00:14:17.000But I think it's just a case of him getting caught off guard.
00:14:21.000You know, I think we saw that in the initial phases, the messaging was very confused from the White House, from The administration, in terms of DHS, HHS, from the president on Twitter.
00:14:32.000You know, all the different entities were coming out with different and not totally consistent messaging.
00:14:37.000It was, well, the Democrats need to change the law.
00:14:40.000Well, actually, 10,000 of the kids were accompanied by strangers, or, well, actually, we can't imprison them.
00:14:46.000You know, and so it was such a way where the media was all day long hitting the same point, driving the point home about kids being separated, they're crying, all the rest.
00:14:56.000And Trump and his allies were kind of all over the place.
00:14:58.000But I definitely think since the executive order, we've turned it into a victory in a way where I think now that he's made the executive order, he's brought some kind of closure to that complaint where everybody was up in arms and in terms of the people were driven into a frenzy by this.
00:15:16.000I think that at least brought some closure to this idea that we're operating like concentration camps on the border.
00:15:22.000And now I think it gives us the opportunity to insert our own narrative.
00:15:26.000And I think Trump's already doing that pretty successfully.
00:15:29.000Hitting immigration really hard with the illegals, with the Europe stuff, and all the rest.
00:15:37.000I don't think this was totally a home run for him.
00:15:39.000This is the first time I think that the media kind of got one over on him.
00:15:43.000I think there were other cases I would have to rethink, but I think there were other cases of very small decisions he's done where I said, okay, he's reacting to the media here.
00:17:23.000So it's going to really come down to how well Trump is able to play to those issues trade, immigration, and non intervention in the midterms.
00:17:33.000If he can't really sell the people that even though we don't have a wall, we're still winning on immigration, I mean, that's what's going to decide the midterms for the Republicans.
00:17:44.000And you mentioned earlier that, yeah, the left is engaged into comparing Trump to the Nazi party.
00:17:51.000And there was a TYT coverage of this and a Sargon of a Cat video contesting the view that TYT was making of it.
00:18:00.000And I also responded to Sargon about it.
00:18:03.000I was wondering, what are your views on this, the comparison with the Nazi regime?
00:18:09.000You know, it's difficult to say because everything that we know about the Nazi regime is, shall we say, a little bit biased.
00:18:17.000You know, it comes from most people are brought up in the education system where you're not allowed to see an R rated movie because it swears a nudity, but from the time they're in kindergarten, They're seeing bodies being thrown onto piles.
00:18:31.000They did it exactly this way, and don't think any other way, right?
00:18:34.000So I think, in large measure, Nazi obviously is a loaded expression.
00:18:40.000But if we look at Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich as a right wing government, as an example of a government that was, there were right wing elements, certainly, although they were progressive in many ways and secular and utopian.
00:18:55.000They did embrace order, they did embrace some kind of neo tradition.
00:18:59.000That sounds kind of paradoxical, but they did try to.
00:19:02.000Reinstitute some kind of perennial tradition created by the state.
00:19:17.000It's comparable to many right wing governments.
00:19:19.000And so, in that sense, I don't want to call Trump a Nazi because, of course, any normal person hears Nazi and they think terrible, terrible, terrible things.
00:19:29.000And in some cases, it's a little bit warranted.
00:19:33.000So, I would say if we were in a totally like autistic, abstract, like political theater divorced from practical outcomes, I would say there are some similarities.
00:19:46.000I wouldn't say it's comparable to like the Holocaust or anything like that, but does Trump embrace order?
00:19:54.000Does he embrace a stronger role for the executive and the state than his predecessors?
00:19:58.000Yeah, but I think we see that in a lot of governments as well.
00:20:02.000That was my point to Sargon, which is if you remove the image as And the kind of idealized version that people have of Nazis.
00:20:11.000Technically, Cenk Uygur was correct that there are parallels to be made.
00:20:17.000These parallels are not that evocative, they're not that important to raise, but he's technically correct.
00:20:23.000Well, and I think there's also comparisons to, you can draw a lot of comparisons.
00:20:27.000The problem is just that, and this kind of pertains to the next topic we're going to talk about.
00:20:32.000I think this is a really good point to make in this conversation about how all of our Decisions and comparisons about history are colored by a very liberal, very progressive mindset.
00:20:44.000You know, we have it that everything before the UN human rights global homo government was totally wrong, totally condemnable.
00:20:56.000But after like the 1990s, after we established, you know, gay rights and freedom from discrimination and racism, you know, now we got it right.
00:21:05.000But everything that came before us was wrong and, you know, a big mistake.
00:21:09.000And once you get out of that frame of view and you think, well, It's all basically connected.
00:21:14.000We are the same people that they were, and we have the same, in many ways, considerations.
00:21:20.000And so we can look at somebody like a Stalin, somebody like a Franco, not as, oh, well, they killed people, they did bad things, but more as, well, these were statesmen making decisions about what was best for their country or their people or the apparatus at the time.
00:21:35.000And so, you know, it's unfortunate that we can't have those conversations without it, you know, turning into a pissing contest of, no, you're Hitler, no, you're actually Hitler, you know, that kind of thing.
00:21:46.000But I think there's a lot of comparisons to go around, sure.
00:23:29.000Capitalism has given us so much progress because, look, you could buy a stove for 27 hours of labor, and you can buy a nice grill for this many hours of labor.
00:23:40.000And what was interesting, I go into this website, I go into the About section, and it says, Well, this is progress, but what is progress?
00:23:47.000And they give us the Oxford English definition.
00:23:49.000They give us Steven Pinker's definition, where he says, Well, everybody agrees that life is better than death, health is better than sickness, sustenance better than hunger, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
00:23:59.000And basically says, well, progress is the material and all the rest.
00:24:04.000And of course, on this show, all the time, we talk about why this is a flawed way of thinking because, of course, you see suicide rates are skyrocketing.
00:24:12.000You know, here's an article from the CDC how they rose in just about every state by like 30%.
00:24:18.000You see drug abuse rising for every kind of drug, for opioids, it's skyrocketing.
00:24:23.000You just see profound depression and misery.
00:24:26.000And so, you know, this has been my take on this issue.
00:24:29.000We talked about it with Bourdain and school shooters, but as a more liberal humanist type person, or maybe that's my impression as an atheist, what would you say?
00:25:09.000Do you think that these material comforts constitute progress in a total sense?
00:25:18.000I mean, yeah, it's an interesting take you have.
00:25:21.000You are going across many moral dimensions, which for me, I keep separate in my brain.
00:25:27.000To me, the question of the improvement of the well being linked to objects like this, like they present a mixer, a refrigerator, a microwave.
00:25:37.000Is kind of separate from the disparate state of human beings, their suicidal tendencies, the level of depression that increases in our society.
00:25:49.000So I think that I would treat these completely separately.
00:25:53.000On the question of this article and the material well being, I would say the article is pretty fair.
00:25:59.000I mean, it's been published a long time ago, but it's now a rehash in tweets recently.
00:26:07.000It does describe the situation that I had perceived in society, which is the things that are subject to liberty, the things that are subject to the free market, they improve so much, in fact, that you can now buy a better TV today than 30 years ago, and you can buy it with less labors.
00:26:30.000That's 70 hours of labor to buy a TV in 1979, and it's 4.3 hours of labor to buy a better TV today.
00:26:40.000That we've seen, and that is a form of progress.
00:26:43.000To the extent that some of these things are needed for survival and reproduction, like barbecues, refrigerator, well, someone could argue you don't need a barbecue to survive.
00:26:54.000Well, ovens, you do need ovens to cook food in our society.
00:26:58.000At least that's what most people will use to cook their food.
00:27:02.000To that extent, yes, it is a form of progress.
00:27:04.000But I note how interesting this article is.
00:27:08.000The only things that progress in that way are things that are subject to a fully free market.
00:27:17.000Whereas the article underlines the fact that healthcare, education, most of the services of the state are actually getting worse, or they're the same, but they cost much more.
00:27:32.000And so we have an inflationary system that differs across domains in our economic system.
00:27:39.000Those that are subject to heavy competitions, like producing barbecues or refrigerators or computers, The capitalist system is well fit to improve these things constantly, so much so that you could buy 10 barbecues today without ruining your economic well being.
00:27:58.000You couldn't have done this in 1979 with a minimal salary.
00:28:04.000So, yes, there are things that improve in our lives, but there are things that are more burdensome.
00:28:10.000And the state system of education, the state system of healthcare and welfare are things that keep growing in a non productive fashion.
00:28:20.000So, there, and another thing that doesn't grow is wages.
00:28:27.000And that's an interesting thing because, yes, our lives have improved because we have access to better technology, but that is just a growth of technology that will reach a ceiling.
00:28:38.000I mean, at some point, we're going to reach the point, and I think we've reached that point in many ways, where you cannot make a better refrigerator.
00:28:46.000We've probably, we're probably creating today the best refrigerators we will ever create, the most energy efficient.
00:28:54.000At some point, Your science meets the limit that is the limit of the physical universe.
00:29:01.000There's no more things you can discover to make a better oven.
00:29:06.000And so we're starting in an era of humanity where improvements will be much slower than they were during the last hundred years.
00:29:16.000In fact, we may have been living through the most progressive part of the history of humanity in terms of technology, and we may have reached the limit of the universe in terms of how compact.
00:29:28.000We can do CPUs, efficient, we can do refrigerators.
00:29:33.000And I'm worried about what happens next because, as long as these items were getting cheaper and cheaper due to competitiveness, due to the free market, our lives were somewhat improving, although there was a big lie, which is our salaries were not improving, our state education system was not improving, our healthcare wasn't improving, or the healthcare was improving because of the discovery of new meds and new techniques.
00:30:00.000But it wasn't improving in terms of the efficiency of the use of human resources.
00:30:12.000All it has is people trying to do their best, and sometimes people are wrong.
00:30:18.000In the free market, the people who are wrong lose, their company goes bankrupt, and they are replaced by better companies.
00:30:26.000Because we don't have this for the state, we are stuck with things that will not improve, which is essentially the entire Part of the economy that is covered by the state, which worryingly enough includes the education of our children, at least for those who cannot do homeschooling.
00:30:47.000Well, yeah, I would definitely agree with you that, in the first place, I don't think anybody really disputes this that the free market is the best economic system if you're trying to get the efficient use of scarce resources.
00:31:00.000You know, I used to read all the old libertarian texts on economics, Thomas Sowell.
00:31:07.000Henry Hazlitt, Milton Friedman, and all the rest.
00:31:10.000And so I get a lot of libertarians who say, you know, Nick, what do you not believe in capitalism?
00:31:16.000So, trust me, I will definitely concede that the free market system is the best way to get cheaper products and better products and all the rest.
00:31:28.000But, my big problem, the big question in my mind as a young person who kind of made the transition from free marketer to a more traditional type conservative is can you have the free market?
00:31:39.000Can you have this disruptive force which moves people around, which has what they call creative destruction?
00:31:46.000I mean, intrinsic in capitalism is this idea of.
00:31:51.000Old things are defeated, they go away, and they just kind of scattered across, and the new things rise up.
00:31:57.000And my question has always been can you have this kind of free market progress where things are getting cheaper, you have all these consumer goods, you have these kind of perverse incentives of maximizing profits?
00:32:10.000And I understand the utility of that in an economic sense, but these incentives of maximizing profits, selling as many consumer goods as possible, but also retain a society that can.
00:32:21.000That can give you all the more meaningful things, which are tradition, which are community, which are some degree of religion.
00:32:29.000You know, we look at how progress has gone up, up and away in terms of globalization, cheaper products, and all the rest.
00:32:36.000And inversely, or rather, in a very big, there's a big correlation between that kind of progress and the rise in suicides, the rise in drug use.
00:32:45.000You see, people are being driven out of their communities.
00:32:49.000You see, people are being scattered all across the country or all across the world in some cases.
00:32:55.000Go to school, they get picked up by a firm in Los Angeles or New York, and then they beat it.
00:32:59.000And you see the hollowing out of middle America, the hollowing out of rural America.
00:33:03.000And so I guess the question then becomes can you have the best of both worlds?
00:33:10.000Can you have consumer goods, material well being, which we want on a material level without sacrificing order, without sacrificing community?
00:33:21.000You know, the Catholic Church says that we should embrace distributism, where we have markets, but we also have.
00:33:27.000And understanding that the point of markets is not just to get the cheapest gadget, not just to get the cheapest widget or whatever they use in economic examples, but to serve the well being of the people, which ultimately is virtue, communities, the rearing of families, these greater ends.
00:33:45.000And so I guess the question is they are separate value judgments, progress determined from a material perspective or from like the ultimate objective of a society, which is the betterment of its people.
00:33:57.000Do you think these are irreconcilable?
00:34:03.000I mean, what do you think is the future for that kind of dynamic?
00:34:08.000So, I don't think that they are irreconcilable.
00:34:11.000And in fact, I believe that if you look back in the history of America, it used to be that the transmission of values and the transmission of a sense of identity, as you describe it, was indulged privately, was indulged through a libertarian system, I would argue.
00:34:28.000There were communities, they were getting together on Sundays at a church.
00:34:33.000They were contributing with their money, and the church was giving back to its community in the way it was first offering the service, but it was also offering all sorts of bonding opportunities within the community, even business deals being done between churchgoers.
00:34:51.000And so, to a certain extent, what I think describes well what we've done with values in America is we have delegated a value system that used to be.
00:35:04.000Traded at the individual level and in a libertarian way, and we've dumped its responsibility on the state.
00:35:12.000And the common observation that I will do between barbecues and the state value and the education of people and their sense of identity is that what we've dumped as a responsibility to the state failed.
00:35:27.000Because the state has no incentive to get better at doing it.
00:35:32.000The state is a monopoly, and as such, it is not getting selected.
00:35:37.000As part of a wider system where you would have the choice between different states, and eventually people would converge toward the states that give them the meaning in their life that they need.
00:35:49.000And so I say we need to forget the idea that the state is good at anything, whether it's making barbecues or making good education.
00:36:00.000And we have to take back into our libertarian ends the education of our children as well as the development of a sense of identity.
00:36:10.000The state has shown that it was failing in the long run.
00:36:14.000It was failing at anything it would do.
00:36:17.000Yeah, I mean, I definitely agree with you on the premise that the state has ruined healthcare, that the state has ruined education.
00:36:25.000And I agree with that just because, you know, like I said about the free market with consumer goods, you have to have those incentives.
00:36:32.000I mean, of course, if you look at, for example, the Chicago public schooling system, there is absolutely no incentive for anybody to do their job, you know, because you look at teachers, you look at administrators.
00:36:45.000The money comes in and it always comes in.
00:37:03.000But I look at the United States, I look at Western Europe, where we've had free markets to an extent.
00:37:11.000I want to say relative free markets because then I get people in the comments saying, it wasn't a real free market, though, because, you know, this, that, or the other.
00:37:17.000But You did have relative laissez faire under Reagan, under Thatcher in Western Europe.
00:37:24.000And we saw what that has wrought in this country for like 38 years.
00:37:27.000You wake up and it's like you have to watch an advertisement to brush your teeth and you have to watch an advertisement to get on the bus.
00:37:33.000And it's Globo Homo Bank, you know, the feminist Star Wars movie brought to you by gay sex, right?
00:37:40.000And you look at that and then you look at Eastern Europe.
00:37:44.000And I'm not saying Eastern Europe is like an ideal place to live.
00:37:48.000Because people always remind me as well that you have abortions prominent in Russia and there's a lot of violence that goes on.
00:37:55.000But nevertheless, you see in a country like Poland or Hungary or the Czech Republic, these post communist countries where communism took a nasty toll on their material well being.
00:38:07.000They're a lot poorer than Western Europe.
00:38:09.000The conditions aren't as great, all the rest.
00:38:12.000But what they have been able to preserve with communism because they didn't have people coming in, because they didn't have plutocrats investing in legislatures, buying politicians.
00:38:24.000So now people actually want to go to Hungary.
00:38:26.000Now people actually want to go to Poland, as opposed to the UK or France or the United States, because as bad as communism was for the material well being, it was brutal and suffering.
00:38:38.000It was not as destabilizing and disruptive as capitalism in scattering and displacing all these traditions, all these people, and all the rest.
00:38:47.000And so I'm just trying to find a middle ground because at once, you know, I acknowledge that people want to be.
00:38:55.000Safe and happy and well fed, and all the rest.
00:38:58.000But at the same time, can we have that kind of mass consumer economy?
00:39:02.000Can we have a total free market without state rules or some kind of pumping of the brakes without just having a completely disordered society?
00:39:12.000I mean, I just don't know the answer to that because, on the one hand, private activity did build the United States.
00:39:20.000Tocqueville wrote about this how the civic, non state Republican institutions, small R Republican institutions, built the country, the church, some of these fraternal organizations, all the rest.
00:39:53.000You come really at it from a different perspective than I do because it seems that you are, there's some values you're not willing to abandon.
00:40:03.000And as a nihilist, I'm more like, okay, I'm willing to take anything and see what's best.
00:40:09.000You are trying, you're essentially trying to say there is a form of tradition that I'm not willing to give up on, and I'm looking for the best system that will inculcate this tradition into people.
00:40:22.000But I think that along the way, you are making an observation that is incomplete.
00:40:26.000When you say, you put it to Hollywood and you say, okay, everyone is good and everyone loves everyone, and we need to respect all sorts of lifestyle, including the gay lifestyle.
00:40:38.000I don't put it on the back of the capitalist system.
00:40:42.000I think that Hollywood is definitely a capitalist entity.
00:40:46.000But ultimately, Hollywood has nothing more than the grab that it can get on our brains.
00:40:53.000And I believe that why we are subject to the propaganda of Hollywood right now is that we've been miseducated.
00:41:02.000We've essentially opened the brains of our children to bad moral, uh, control.
00:41:10.000And that I've always been alarmed about it.
00:41:12.000I've even been alarmed back in the 90s in Canada when I saw In my schools, that they were starting to do propaganda for recycling.
00:41:21.000And it's not that I disagree with recycling.
00:41:23.000I think you should recycle your stuff.
00:41:25.000Of course, don't pollute the planet for no reason.
00:41:28.000However, I was very alarmed at the way teachers were doing that in school.
00:41:34.000They were essentially brainwashing children.
00:41:36.000And I was worried that by not cultivating a sense of questioning in children, by just saying that's the right thing to do and you should do it, not giving them a Process, not giving them a reason, not teaching them to adhere to that view, but just teaching them that view.
00:41:54.000I think that we've trained brains through the state education system at being subject to moral subversion, whereas religion was doing, was essentially training our brain not to be subjected to moral subversion of any other kind than the one that was approved in the Bible or in whatever book people were using for their particular religion.
00:42:20.000And so I think that we've opened, essentially, Hollywood penetrates an open door that we've opened ourselves.
00:42:28.000And so I don't see just the symptom of Hollywood and the symptom of leftist propaganda in these movies as something we need to hit with a hammer.
00:42:37.000I see the source, the causes of this, and I see it also in the state.
00:42:45.000Now, I think you bring some very interesting points about Eastern Europe.
00:42:49.000What was different there that makes these countries?
00:42:53.000Now, pleasant places, and in fact, places that people consider to be potentially the last stand of Western civilization, which I wouldn't have thought 10 or 20 years ago.
00:43:29.000But I know that the door was opened in our civilizations through an abandonment of the transmission value system to the state.
00:43:40.000And the state found itself farming human beings who had no interest in transmitting values that would allow them to become accomplished adults with a sense of who they are and with an ability to question the things that come from Hollywood, question the things that come from state media in Canada through CBC.
00:44:04.000We forgot to raise questioning, self reliant, and intelligent adults.
00:44:11.000And that's the world we live in right now.
00:44:14.000Yeah, no, I mean, that's the biggest problem.
00:44:17.000I definitely agree with that in the sense that you look at people today, and these are not critical thinkers, these are not really well educated people.
00:44:26.000And a big part of that is actually technology.
00:44:28.000You know, when you think about an iPhone, for example, many people think of it as.
00:44:32.000We're actually smarter than people thousands of years ago because we can bing bing bong, we put into our phone, and you've got the world at your fingertips.
00:44:41.000But if you think about it in terms of our human capacities, the more that we kind of shirk, the more that we pass off these responsibilities and aptitudes and intelligences to machines, the more we atrophy ourselves.
00:44:56.000You know, I was reading a book, what was it called?
00:44:59.000It was called Moonwalking with Einstein.
00:45:08.000And what they said in that book was that in like Greek times or in the medieval times, people would be able to memorize whole books.
00:45:16.000They'd be able to memorize thousands of pages and like perfectly, memorize lots of things essentially.
00:45:23.000But because we've been able to write things down, and you know, if we don't want to forget something, we can write it down or now we could put it in a phone or whatever.
00:45:32.000So I think, you know, in many ways, you look at that as a problem of modernity, as a problem of It is this ever increasing march towards technology.
00:45:41.000So, I definitely agree that that's a big problem.
00:45:43.000But I just think that the biggest problem with libertarianism, if you read Mill, if you read Adam Smith, if you read any of these guys, John Locke, who's a favorite of Sargon, if you read any of these guys, to me, the fundamental misconception is that we don't know what's best for people.
00:46:00.000You know, I mean, time and again, when I listen to Ben Shapiro or Milton Friedman or Thomas Sowell, it really comes down to human action, something Mises wrote a lot about, which is to say that.
00:46:11.000Man acts, only an individual acts, and only he knows what's best for him.
00:46:16.000You know, if you're talking about the intelligence of all the consumers in the country, as opposed to having, you know, people in a Politburo deciding prices, you have all kinds of people who have their own specialized knowledge about their own wants and resources and needs and cost saving capacity that they're going to make better decisions for themselves than any kind of regulator, than any kind of state person.
00:46:43.000People in the state are not intelligent enough.
00:46:45.000They don't know what's best for people.
00:46:47.000Only people know what's best for people.
00:46:48.000And so if people want to try out, oh, you know, the latest, greatest thing, if people want to try out this technology, this lifestyle, this service, well, then, you know, by all means, go for it.
00:46:59.000But I'm coming to reject that premise.
00:47:02.000You know, when you look at IQ, when you look at hierarchy, when you get into a position where you believe in objective truth, I think maybe that's where we disagree on the fundamentals.
00:47:13.000If you believe that, like, for example, God is real and he laid out these rules and this tradition and that's the truth.
00:47:20.000Well, then, this idea of, well, you know, it's got to be a neutral space where people can be free to, oh, do I want to do this?
00:47:28.000It kind of becomes a place where, of course, evil is going to triumph.
00:47:32.000Of course, evil is going to triumph in Hollywood or all these other places.
00:47:36.000If you take out a positive moral content and say, okay, this is now the neutral, contentless space where everybody can try it out, well, the natural introduction will be of evil, of satanic, disordered, perverse kinds of activity.
00:48:03.000And of course, I think that betrays the fundamental differences of opinion that we have about the world, where you say you're a nihilist and you're a relativist and you don't really believe in objective truth, I think you said in the Jay Dyer debate.
00:48:43.000On your perspective, I will not convince you.
00:48:45.000Of course, if you start with an axiom in your thought where you say there are some things that are evil, some things are good, I will not offer you a thought system that would allow you to change your mind on this.
00:48:59.000The greatness of Catholic civilization was partly due to other considerations than just that.
00:49:06.000Uh, and some, some of which are to be understood from a libertarian perspective.
00:49:12.000Uh, people were free to go at the church and they were free to contribute to the church.
00:49:17.000And, and Catholicism has emerged and has, has created some of the best societies precisely in that state of liberty.
00:49:25.000So I would say, even if I don't, uh, convince you that some things that of my moral nihilism, I would like to convince you and red pill you a little bit about libertarianism and how the flaw that you see in libertarianism, I don't have it in my form of libertarianism because I don't believe that people are the best people to know what they want.
00:49:49.000I don't adhere to that view that the reason the state is bad is that because the state doesn't know what people want and that people actually know what they want.
00:49:58.000In fact, I state it, people don't even know what they want.
00:50:02.000The key to good libertarianism is that.
00:50:05.000It's okay that they don't know what they want as long as they pay the consequences on their reproductive success of the decisions that they will make.
00:50:14.000That's the essence of libertarianism, is that the statism will separate the decision from the individual and from its reproductive success.
00:50:24.000So, for example, a state may have interest because of its voter patterns to give welfare to everyone.
00:50:34.000However, an individual and the individual doesn't.
00:50:37.000Pay for it, of course, because the individual is a recipient of this benefactory action from the state.
00:50:43.000That's an example of a division between who pays and who benefits.
00:50:49.000And those systems are not sustainable from a purely theoretical standpoint.
00:50:53.000You can see that they're not sustainable because now you're farming in your society more welfare recipients.
00:51:00.000The beauty of libertarianism, in light of a biological understanding of human civilization, is that in libertarianism, the person who's making the error is also paying for it.
00:51:25.000I think I would describe myself more as like a Hoppe libertarian.
00:51:29.000I would kind of describe the middle ground maybe as a fusion between Hoppe and De Maestre because I agree with so many of your points about incentives, about responsibility, accountability of people having consequences for their actions.
00:51:46.000That's naturally how you create good feedback loops in the sense that if people don't have to pay for their consequences, there's a moral hazard that they're going to make risky, bad decisions in the future.
00:51:56.000So I totally understand where you're coming from on incentives and that kind of free market view of human action.
00:52:03.000My only qualm is this idea of the society has to be ordered from the top by the state, has to be ordered from the top by some kind of powerful apparatus.
00:52:14.000And if, for example, if you have like Dictator JF, Who says we're going to have this country?
00:52:46.000So I think if you fuse those two premises, I think you would arrive at a At a soft compromise between these two ideals, where at once you have a society where you have actions and consequences and incentives and all these other things, but at the same time you have basically a vanguard who is constantly in motion, constantly sustaining a society with those kinds of incentives and rules and everything, and one that has the right rules and the just rules.
00:53:15.000Because so often the problem that you run into with the libertarian paradigm, and you see this all the time with stupider libertarians, is They start saying people shouldn't have a driver's license and you should have prostitution or child prostitution or what do they call it ethical child pornography, all these kinds of things in the absence of immoral content.
00:53:35.000It's hard on first principles to say, well, these things are wrong and these things are okay.
00:53:41.000So I think if you couple the good parts of the incentives and all the rest with some sense of, well, we have to have a bedrock, we have to have rules, I think that's a fair compromise.
00:53:56.000Well, I would agree, but I don't think it's even a compromise because people, I don't even go in depth about what my libertarianism and hop libertarianism can reach, but we can reach heavily regulated societies.
00:54:13.000That's what people don't understand because there's a bunch of libertarians on the internet who have pushed this idea that, oh, libertarian societies is the nap.
00:54:22.000You can have as much immigrants as you want.
00:54:23.000There would be things like you mentioned.
00:54:26.000Ethical child pornography or stuff like this.
00:54:29.000The form of libertarian that I defend is simply a resistance to non consensual relationships.
00:54:36.000So, the state, by being there and by taking so much of my money and doing stuff with it that I don't consent to, that is a violation.
00:54:44.000Now, the libertarian states that I propose would have what Up calls covenant.
00:54:50.000There would be groups of people who decide these are the rules here and we agree to it.
00:54:58.000And of course, there are all of the rules of current societies and all of the rules that you could call moral, Nick.
00:55:06.000And that you consider come from God, I claim that they could easily be adopted in a libertarian society as long as they don't impose behavior on others and as long as they don't allow others to take from my pockets to do stuff with my money.
00:55:23.000I think that's very, you know, if I were to start some kind of Catholic covenant in a future anarcho capitalist society, I can't promise we wouldn't crusade all the others.
00:55:34.000I can't promise there wouldn't be an inquisition for all the profligates, you know, but.
00:56:14.000A subject that's very pertinent as we look at the future of the West, I think we have to grapple with these ideas of objective truth or universal truth or these kinds of things.
00:56:24.000And so when we talk about things that might just bug people, like, oh, these jag offs at Cato are saying everything's so good, but it's not, I think it's really important to explore the profound philosophical differences that underlie those things.
00:57:57.000And I think over the week, we've seen a lot of different perspectives on these issues.
00:58:01.000You know, of course, Jared Taylor is a white advocate who I'm not sure his religious affiliation, but it's about maintaining that kind of population that's conducive to society.
00:58:13.000We had Faith, who's obviously a strong Catholic like myself, and she's got her view of the world, and JF, who's the mad scientist, the evil scientist, and a very intelligent guy as well.
00:58:25.000And, you know, I really value JF because it's a view that I think many people have, but he, I think, understands and is honest about the implications of it, you know, because so often you get these libertarians, you get these punk kids where they're like 20, you know, they've never worked a job that's made them sweat in their life.
00:58:48.000They're in college and they're telling people who are driven out of work by technology, oh, well, you should learn to code, you know.
00:58:55.000So all the libertarians are usually these like greasy haired, Mark Zuckerberg types.
00:59:00.000They're either in the frat party drinking a beer or just learn to code, you know?
00:59:03.000So to have JF on to talk about what I think is a very prominent materialist, nihilist worldview who understands the worldview, the implications of it, I think it's a good thing.
00:59:54.000What are the masses saying about this?
00:59:56.000Looks like we've only got one sad Streamlab hanging out all by himself.
01:00:03.000It's all right, he's the lone fan for tonight.
01:00:06.000John Shepard Smith says, interesting discussion, guys.
01:00:09.000I wonder if monopoly isn't one of the problems here.
01:00:12.000From JS' perspective, the state's monopoly.
01:00:16.000From a Nix perspective, corporate monopolies, pushing consumption, et cetera.
01:00:20.000We don't break up monopolies a lot these days.
01:00:26.000It's really more so about power and legitimacy in the sense that I think where the anarcho capitalist argument kind of misses the boat on this one is, and this is something I used to reject a lot.
01:00:39.000Something that Tom Hartman talked a lot about on Russia Today when he would debate Austin Peterson, which I used to watch a lot, was this premise can you really have a free market in the absence of state control?
01:00:51.000Can you really have a free market in the absence of this Hobbesian order of a 51% or 50% plus one of force in the country keeping everything else in check?
01:01:05.000Because if you read Hobbes, and I encourage everyone, it's a big influence on me.
01:01:11.000Hobbes, who wrote in the 17th century during the English Civil War, he lived through a very tough time where people are killing each other.
01:01:20.000There's no state to ensure that everybody's all right and they're able to get to work and not kill each other and all the rest.
01:01:26.000He said, in just about every circumstance, order is better than disorder.
01:01:30.000And he said, the only way that you get order, the only way you prevent a war of all against all, where life is nasty and brutish and short, is if you have a Leviathan, which is the state.
01:01:41.000Which would be a force that is more overwhelming than all other forces put against it, maintaining some kind of order.
01:01:48.000And even if there's abuses, even if there's inefficiencies, it's preferable to disorder.
01:01:53.000And so, to me, when people talk about anarcho capitalist societies, I think about the Leviathan.
01:01:59.000I think about, well, how do you have any kind of semblance of order?
01:02:18.000The idea that you subtract people enforcing the rules and you don't get people enforcing their own rules in their place.
01:02:25.000Who's to say that the private security company doesn't just decide to shake you down for a little bit more money?
01:02:31.000We're the ones with all the guns and all the rest.
01:02:37.000So to me, that's really the problem I guess monopolies may be the wrong word so much as it is about Leviathan, so much as it is about the central legitimate exercise of force and authority.
01:02:52.000Who is putting into the society positive content, you know, as opposed to liberalism, where it says the state is just there to make sure that it's a free for all, you know?
01:03:02.000The state is just the referee to make sure that we have this homosexual gladiator battle for your lives.
01:03:09.000And, you know, it's you and your poor family, your middle class family, against General Electric and 21st Century Fox.
01:03:17.000And the government's just there to make sure that, you know, they don't totally, completely steamroll you directly.
01:03:22.000You know, if that's the case, you know, I don't know if that's really ideal.
01:03:26.000The monopoly of the state should be, it's not just about maintaining a free for all that's like self contained.
01:03:34.000It's about, well, everybody has to stay in their lane.
01:03:39.000There's regulations, there's rules, and all the rest.
01:03:43.000People say we shouldn't legislate morality.
01:05:52.000Yeah, I disagreed a little bit about that, but I really wanted to focus more on modernity as opposed to technology, which is a big part of it, but that's, in fairness, a much bigger subject and field than its own, of which I'm not really.
01:06:09.000You guys know I'm not really an authority on technology when I'm taking 20 pound dumbbells and smashing my mouse because the receiver doesn't work.
01:06:18.000So, yeah, I definitely agree, though, that technology is going to take off in an exponential way.
01:06:24.000Thing is, though, we're not really seeing it.
01:06:26.000You know, everybody's like, AI is such a concern.
01:07:17.000You can predict if people are going to die to a 95% certainty.
01:07:21.000But you're telling me I can't open up my camera roll and look up cigarette Pepe and just, you know, as opposed to, well, I think I saved that before the election in November 2016.
01:07:31.000So I got to scroll past that picture of us on election night.
01:07:35.000The one with all the Pepes when I saved them all that one time, you know.
01:07:38.000So it's like the technology people, we need to figure it out, all right?
01:10:00.000To become moms, to obey their husbands, to stay in the house and take care of the domestic activities.
01:10:06.000And look, there's accommodations made in the church by myself.
01:10:11.000Look, there are extenuating circumstances.
01:10:15.000My grandmother's the strongest woman I know.
01:10:18.000What she went through, because, and I don't want to get into the personal details, but she had to raise a family in a way that many people would never understand, and an incredibly strong person.
01:10:28.000There are extenuating circumstances, and that's a testament to the strength of women.
01:11:21.000Hey, listen, babe, can I talk to you about something?
01:11:25.000Look, I know you want to go fight the Taliban in Afghanistan.
01:11:29.000I know you want to drive around in a Jeep and try not to get hit with nail bombs, but I'm a more traditional guy.
01:11:36.000I just think you should be in an air conditioned home that's bought and paid for all day playing with babies, which, I mean, we all love babies.
01:11:49.000We must really hate women that we're telling them, yeah, we'll go get exploded and like work in the factories and, you know, want to put a bullet in our head making spreadsheets and stuff.
01:11:59.000And you just hang out with your children, you know, your babies.
01:12:04.000Is there anything better than hanging out with a baby?
01:13:33.000I think that Jews have a certain history, a certain tradition, a culture that is unique to them, that's gone on for thousands of years.
01:13:42.000Part of what's made them, that's given them the longevity that they've had, is some of the things that make them somewhat antagonistic in some of the countries that they reside in.
01:13:53.000It's certainly not all Jews, but what you find is that there's a divergence between the will of the people.
01:13:59.000And the preferences and worldview of the elites, and Jews happen to constitute a big part of the elites.
01:14:04.000Now, you could say that's because they're educated.
01:14:06.000You could say that's because they're in many great cities.
01:14:10.000They're an international people because they're a diaspora people and they've been in these cities for forever.
01:14:16.000You could say it's because they're talented or because there's a degree of nepotism that they're looking out for one another.
01:14:21.000But you have to understand that when we talk about the elites, the statistics don't lie, folks.
01:15:43.000Identity politics is a vapid, empty buzzword.
01:15:46.000Identitarianism is a profound idea that's defined people for generations and will define this century as we are entering the clash of civilizations.
01:15:57.000Well, you know, what does that even mean?
01:15:59.000First name, last name says, I'm a Republican, but I can't stand the growing Jew hate.
01:16:04.000Yeah, why don't you read Brett Stevens' column then in the New York Times and then tell me why you think there is some frustration at a certain transnational group of people?
01:16:15.000Why don't you read Brett Stevens' column?
01:16:17.000What people are really sick and tired of is this double standard.
01:16:21.000What people are sick and tired of is the game that is played that Israel, and this is Brett Stevens, who wrote for the Jerusalem Post, and then he wrote for the Wall Street Journal, and then he writes for the New York Times.
01:16:32.000He writes on Israel's 70th anniversary that Israel has a right to gun down peaceful protesters because they're defending their nation.
01:16:40.000Then he writes in the New York Times yesterday that, yeah, I'm in favor of open borders.
01:16:45.000If open borders means we're going to bring in as many immigrants as possible, then call me open borders.
01:16:50.000How about Ben Shapiro, right wing guy, writes for Daily Wire, who wrote in 2003, I think, for Town Hall, that transfer is not a dirty word.
01:17:00.000Israel should, in effect, ethnically cleanse Palestine because two people who are against each other cannot be expected to change their cultures and live together peacefully.
01:17:10.000So this is Ben Shapiro's words they should be ethnically cleansed.
01:17:13.000Then he writes during Charlottesville that white nationalism is repulsive.
01:17:18.000Israel is actually a civic nationalist country.
01:17:20.000America, he doesn't care about the Browning of America, so which is it?
01:17:24.000I mean, that's what people are really sick of.
01:17:26.000There are many fine Jews, Stephen Miller, Frame Game Radio.
01:17:31.000It's not a question of absolutes, it's a question of it's a very great frustration people are feeling.
01:17:38.000Maybe you don't feel that because maybe you still have your job that hasn't been hollowed out by free trade.
01:17:43.000Maybe your kid hasn't been killed by an illegal immigrant like many people have.
01:17:47.000So maybe it doesn't hit as close a home to you, but people are sick and tired of the fact that.
01:17:52.000The people that run the country, which it is, is this globalist coalition.
01:17:57.000It's many different types of people, but there are some higher proportions than others that are running the country into the ground.
01:18:13.000We have to acknowledge reality in a way that is plain, in a way that is fair, in a way that is realistic.
01:18:20.000But this kind of talk about, you know, everybody who doesn't, everybody who thinks that if all groups are fine, they're all totally innocuous.
01:19:17.000I'm not a big apologist for Russia, believe me, but definitely you're seeing a resurgence of Christianity.
01:19:24.000It's by no means complete or perfect, but you're seeing a resurgence of Christianity.
01:19:29.000They reflect the changing world order, they are reordering their country around.
01:19:36.000Ethnicity, around tradition, around religion.
01:19:40.000All smart, forward thinking countries are doing this.
01:19:43.000China, the Koreas, Japan, the Muslim world.
01:19:47.000They're all, you know, whereas the last century was ideology, democracy, liberalism, communism, fascism, corporatism, globalism.
01:19:59.000All those countries are dinosaurs, dumb, dying.
01:20:01.000The countries that are turning back towards what defines us in a very primitive way, going back to the To history, in effect, Francis Fukuyama said it was over, we're going back.
01:20:12.000Those countries are going to be the ones that succeed.
01:20:16.000China was not affected by the fall of communism because when communism failed, the country didn't fail.
01:20:22.000They united around a more salient identity, which was a 2,000 or 3,000 year old Han culture that was there forever and tradition.
01:20:33.000That's a very resilient and durable country.
01:21:46.000But there has to be a middle ground between the free market and liberalism and, you know, this other stuff.
01:21:53.000So it's all about balance, temperance.
01:21:57.000VGEDR says, for JF, it could be interesting to explore the parallels between your concept of phenotypic revolution and the organizing of people into tribes being replaced by organizing into types of states.
01:22:10.000Yeah, well, he's not exactly here at the moment, but very true.
01:23:03.000And after World War II, you have the German people in Germany.
01:23:06.000After the fall of the Soviet Union, you have a reordering in Europe and in Central Asia of people claiming countries based on their nationality Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan.
01:23:20.000You've got all the countries in East Europe.
01:23:23.000You've got Yugoslavia, which comes apart, and Bosnia and Croatia and all those other places.
01:26:24.000Jack Williams says, homogeneity and the church is a staple.
01:26:27.000But what about living closer to nature?
01:26:29.000The countryside is your own little slice of the Wild West freedom, while many cities are high traffic hellscapes.
01:26:35.000Is it possible to have it all, or is nature escapism?
01:26:38.000Well, first of all, thank you for the big super chat.
01:26:41.000And to answer the question, I think that there is a lot of romanticism about nature, but there also is something very legitimate about this.
01:26:53.000You know, we went through a transcendental phase in this country in the 19th century, a part of the broader romantic.
01:26:59.000Kind of phase where after the Enlightenment had gotten underway, the triumph of rationalism and empiricism, we had kind of this remission where we said, well, now we're going to paint landscapes and Impressionism and we're going to get back to our roots in the countryside, away from the factories, away from the urban centers.
01:27:20.000And I definitely think there's something to that.
01:27:22.000We have to live in a way that's natural.
01:27:25.000We are organic people that come from the earth.
01:27:27.000It's wrong to take us out of our habitat.
01:27:32.000And by the way, you see this everywhere.
01:27:34.000You see that people are not built for the modern life we have.
01:27:37.000That's why we need drugs for everything.
01:27:39.000Because, for example, factory farming has drained the soil of its minerals.
01:27:46.000So you don't get the proper nutrition from the food that you eat, not like you did 100 years ago.
01:27:52.000So that's why you see so many people have all these health problems.
01:27:54.000It's because they're deficient in zinc or in iron or in vitamin C or whatever.
01:27:59.000You see people have issues with their eyes and ears because they're looking at screens all the time, they've got headphones in their ears.
01:28:05.000Or they just have noise pollution in big cities.
01:28:08.000I mean, you see this all over the place.
01:28:11.000It's like a carcinogen to live in society.
01:28:13.000And that's, you know, a certain part of that we have to live with.
01:28:17.000But there has to be some kind of a balance.
01:28:19.000You know, people who say we're just going to go off the grid and all that, it's a little bit escapist.
01:29:59.000I've been watching his stuff on JF, and it's really, really good work.
01:30:04.000You know, you need people like that that are tedious with the details, and they learn the story from start to finish and get into it in a way that you don't get from the headlines, in a way that is actually in depth and exclusive.
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