Anarchonomicon - May 20, 2025


Ep 12 Cody Wilson


Episode Stats


Length

2 hours and 30 minutes

Words per minute

140.78

Word count

21,147

Sentence count

473

Harmful content

Misogyny

6

sentences flagged

Toxicity

25

sentences flagged

Hate speech

51

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 They will chain you, like Prometheus, to a rock, where the memory of your own greatness
00:00:15.080 This will gnaw you.
00:00:29.080 The battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena.
00:00:35.080 The video drone.
00:00:37.080 You look around, what do you see? Businessmen? Teachers? Lawyers? Carpenters?
00:00:42.080 The very minds of the people we are trying to save. 0.97
00:00:45.160 But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy.
00:00:50.600 No, we're not doing that.
00:00:52.640 You're getting called a slur.
00:00:54.640 After all, there is nothing real outside our perception of reality, is there?
00:01:02.040 You can see that, can't you?
00:01:04.660 Tribal people, one of their main kinds of sport is sort of butchering each other.
00:01:10.100 So, you know, it's a full-time sport in Trump's societies.
00:01:13.540 You, my children, are the water.
00:01:16.880 They will wash away all that has gone before. 0.98
00:01:21.840 The gleam in the eye of sex.
00:01:24.520 It's very simple.
00:01:26.220 The message is force is more effective than voting.
00:01:29.980 Elections change nothing.
00:01:31.640 But I had some ideas we got global and tribal.
00:01:34.120 We, you know, we were going to become...
00:01:35.320 The closer we got together, the more you like each other?
00:01:37.460 Yeah.
00:01:38.180 There's no evidence of that in any situation that we've ever heard of.
00:01:42.300 Major Lennox answered with his life, as you should have done if you had any sense of honor.
00:01:46.460 You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged.
00:01:51.820 And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.
00:01:58.740 He who saves a nation violates no law.
00:02:03.900 all forms of violence are a quest for identity when you live out on the frontier
00:02:11.120 you have no identity you're a nobody therefore you get very tough you have to prove that you 0.99
00:02:18.380 are somebody and so you become very violent i'm coming to kill you for greater safety please 0.99
00:02:25.980 avoid the english language please do not translate this message and so identity is always accompanied 0.95
00:02:36.860 by violence this uh seems paradoxical to you it works violence works therefore television is
00:02:46.440 reality and reality is less than television were you listening to me neo or were you looking at
00:02:53.760 the woman in the red dress. It's just a grotesque postmodern psyop and anyone who's fallen for this
00:02:58.720 is brain damaged. Hello, hello, hello, glorious listeners. Welcome to another exciting episode 0.93
00:03:04.480 of the Anarchonomic On Podcast. Today we are joined by the one, the only, the inventor of
00:03:10.920 3D printed firearms himself, Cody Wilson. Good afternoon. Ms. Kulak, this is our first time
00:03:18.740 speaking i think right yes exactly uh so so i wanted to to start with i wanted to kind of bring
00:03:33.240 our listeners up to speed we have some listeners who know nothing at all about homemade firearms
00:03:38.740 and kind of the revolution gunsmithing that that's happened over the past 10 10 13 years because of
00:03:46.120 so so in so we start with the liberator your first 3d printed firearm this is the big news
00:03:55.720 item that everyone will remember from way back when during the like uh cyperpunk bitcoin days
00:04:02.700 when we had crypto um we had crypto we had had dark markets like like um like salt road coming
00:04:14.560 online we had encrypted messaging apps which some of them turned out to be honey pots and then we
00:04:20.700 had 3d printed firearms come into the world all within like five years of each each other like
00:04:27.800 these exploded onto the public consciousness and then you were the last one left standing really
00:04:34.740 uh natoshi satoshi nakamoto disappeared ross olbert was arrested uh the encrypted messaging
00:04:44.040 apps were backdoored and like hunted down down completely blackberry had a indigenous uh
00:04:51.920 encrypted encrypted messaging app so they were like basically bankrupted and of all the like
00:04:58.640 kind of crypto revolution types i can't stop the signals it was cyberpunk uh cultural figures you
00:05:05.740 were the only one left standing down in austin texas um and the story there is going to be very
00:05:14.380 interesting for leader lester's because i as far as i can tell it's because you
00:05:21.900 were a lost in not even that you had like good lawyers blackberry had good good lawyers but uh
00:05:28.640 you were you built your career around the your kind of education and career around the legal
00:05:35.520 fight your plane to ever seem to but uh i i'm i'm rushing ahead i'm i'm rushing to ahead
00:05:42.660 so the liberator take us back to it uh look that's
00:05:50.040 sorry you edit this too right
00:05:56.360 oh no not really this is why they're here no it's fine this is that's a pretty good history man
00:06:05.400 although you know i'm not going to claim more credit than i should in in some respects and
00:06:09.880 i'll also point out that assange and albrecht you know they they made it if not worse for where but
00:06:17.120 i mean they made it they got they got through um but i i think i know what you mean like those
00:06:23.360 projects as embodied by those people were stopped and in an important way like ours wasn't and and
00:06:30.900 agree with you it's not because i'm like particularly intelligent or like um had the
00:06:35.520 kind of magic words as an attorney or a law student i think personally when i when i meditate
00:06:43.240 and i look back at it it's it's because there was an aspect of cold war politics in the
00:06:49.820 administrative state that's just a quirk of history a quirk of luck you know and you can
00:06:56.200 explain it like in you know schmidtian terms or something you can explain why it worked and i think
00:07:01.160 it's simply like that's how large the blind spots are when there really only is one like superpower
00:07:08.540 in the nomos of the earth if you will so that and i can go into that later and we can take it back
00:07:15.800 to liberator i'm just saying i think it's almost like an accident of of cold war politics that i
00:07:20.380 was able to kind of escape justice in the first 10 years of 3d guns no uh yeah i i very much see
00:07:31.460 that but i also see like um looking back at it you did have it's at your coin press and how much
00:07:39.480 of the groundwork you have laid to um kind of force the state into a like challenging legal
00:07:48.060 fight from the start like uh like Julian Assange and Julian Assange obviously was like
00:07:57.420 trying to like always had a legal argument a journalistic argument but he was he was a foreign
00:08:06.500 actor he was based out of the UK which is like not a a like if you're going to take on the
00:08:15.700 bureaucrats the uk is not the place to stage your last stand and and it just like he had all these
00:08:25.720 interesting plevers at his disposal but he was ultimately set up for like cyber security more
00:08:34.880 the legal fight obviously um ross albert uh with with uh silk road uh he his wasn't his security
00:08:46.880 was entirely opsec base you know he was explicitly running a cartel or like a spinoff of what a
00:08:56.520 cartel is uh that's controversial but those were the charges from the start he knew those would be
00:09:02.320 the charges from the start start and yes moto uh you know his plan was to disappear disappear
00:09:11.880 whereas um you you chose your ground very very well you chose austin texas usa and you chose to
00:09:20.560 immediately like have press releases even before the liberator was was released the liberator for
00:09:27.380 those of you at home was the first 3d printed firearm basically basically a zip gun like uh
00:09:34.100 in terms of firearms mechanics it's like not not revolutionary aside for the fact that it's 3d
00:09:41.000 printed and it was more a in a lot of ways it was more of a publicity stunt than a like real
00:09:49.360 tech demo because of course you can get hype and make make a single shot firearm you know
00:09:55.860 These have been made since like 1100 AD, but the staging and the plotting of it, the kind of legal, political, media campaign was actually, take this how you will, but like any like civil rights lawyer in the future should be studying your campaign as like one of the really brilliant Supreme Court.
00:10:25.860 lauded campaigns thank you and it's that's very kind and it's an interesting time for you to say
00:10:34.180 that because we just lost uh our first supreme court case uh last week uh that was a the ghost
00:10:41.120 gun case you may have seen in the news um so there's like you know there's obviously the
00:10:46.980 campaign to get to the supreme court and the attempt to within to operate within the american
00:10:53.120 legal system and structure. And then the kind of knowledge that, you know, you know, they're
00:11:00.080 always going to invent some reason why, uh, you know, they don't, they don't have to get to the
00:11:04.180 merits of the decision, which is what, again, what the, even the Supreme court did here, this is,
00:11:08.840 this is also like the, just the facts of our, our litigation in the past 12 years.
00:11:14.100 We always have these great merits questions because like you said, we've posed them in
00:11:18.580 really difficult ways, which actually do appeal to the tradition of American
00:11:23.480 jurisprudence, things like the Second Amendment, the First Amendment. And so it becomes almost the
00:11:29.700 reflexive exercise of these courts, courts of appeal, and now the Supreme Court, to find some
00:11:34.220 way that they can avoid those ultimate judgments. If you don't mind, I'd back up again. And I think
00:11:41.860 a way to thread, to characterize these projects and to differentiate, let's say, Liberator and
00:11:48.200 what became defense distributed from the Toshi, you know, Assange, and I was able to meet Assange
00:11:54.700 over the years. Again, I think what differentiates the projects is they fortunately or unfortunately
00:12:01.000 had to define themselves as outside the United States. And I mean that like in a legal, legal
00:12:07.540 fact as cultural fact, they, they were define themselves as outside in cyberspace or, you know,
00:12:13.400 julian's case of course he was relying upon european ideas of the law um of course he was an
00:12:21.240 australian the liberator project defense distributed tellingly knowingly right begins with an american
00:12:29.140 idiom and says first and foremost of course this is the logical historical result of the second
00:12:35.540 amendment and so you're you're asking the government to go to war with itself basically
00:12:41.300 when you do the Liberator Project
00:12:43.500 from within the United States.
00:12:44.720 That was a huge advantage.
00:12:46.720 And again, it's relatively historical,
00:12:49.000 like accidental,
00:12:49.940 but it was still a conscious choice
00:12:51.240 to not lead with pirate utopias
00:12:55.280 and cyberspace as like the defining elements.
00:12:58.640 Even if that was the truth of the situation,
00:13:00.720 you know you're using the internet
00:13:01.720 for your tactics.
00:13:03.520 But we always led with this expectation
00:13:07.840 that this would have to be reckoned with
00:13:09.260 in terms of American law.
00:13:11.300 and historically justified.
00:13:15.360 Yeah.
00:13:17.160 The specific laws, actually,
00:13:22.300 you chose it very, very well
00:13:25.020 because, of course,
00:13:28.660 the question of speech as a munition.
00:13:33.340 So for those of you at home
00:13:35.180 who are wondering where deep in the weeds,
00:13:38.160 uh the real legal challenge to cody was not that he built a 3d printed firearm
00:13:47.080 uh if i recall uh from reading your book you had an ffl like you're perfectly licensed
00:13:53.580 to make a firearm you were like you're licensed to make a firearm out of metal you're licensed
00:14:01.620 to make a firearm of plastic you were licensed to you know there are some restrictions on what
00:14:08.060 can be made you can't make a short barrel rifle and there's tons of finicky things but
00:14:13.340 the actual manufacturing of the liberator pistol this um model i think 3d printed
00:14:19.820 hunk of plastic that that a round would go through and not blow off your fingers
00:14:25.400 hopefully uh uh that was perfectly legal the the thing you did that started like a decade of legal
00:14:35.380 challenges is you put cad files on the internet like uh like the core crime that mr wilson here
00:14:44.100 committed is not that he built a firearm with the 3d printer and designed designed a file to do it
00:14:53.440 it's that he then uploaded that file to the internet and of course immediately it was then
00:14:58.260 like scraped and put on torch sites so as soon as it was out there it was out there it's it's gone
00:15:04.400 To this day, there are websites online where, in spite of your legal fights, you can get designs for basically every type of firearm under the sun off one of these file sharing platforms or off a dedicated site.
00:15:23.920 If you're not in the U.S., you have to use, like, a VPN or you have to use a burner laptop with a VPN, but these are, like, really trivial to get, and yet that was a crime.
00:15:36.660 That was the thing they fought you for and are still fighting you for is putting a string of code on the Internet for others to see it.
00:15:47.640 And that's an interesting legal challenge because, of course, there's already a legal fight in the 90s about can you put proprietary code and information on the internet when pretty good privacy, original encryption in the 90s.
00:16:14.160 There's the entire cypher wars over was the code to run like a cryptographic cipher,
00:16:23.840 like a public cryptographic cipher to have like secure communications.
00:16:28.900 What that we now all use, like your emails are encrypted,
00:16:32.380 like HTTPS on every website is a layer of encryption.
00:16:38.700 That was a controlled good in the 90s.
00:16:40.920 code to do that was was like consider a military secret and people were putting this
00:16:48.500 this out there and they were being taken to court over it and um the legal cases were actually very
00:16:56.260 interesting because you're forbidden from like transparent code well code is just a string of
00:17:03.900 figures what if you put print a book with that code in it and that was one of the famous legal
00:17:09.560 challenges is that someone had printed the code for an encryption sniper in a book and published
00:17:15.560 the book book that you know you'd have to use machine learning or you have to hand copy it
00:17:21.040 put in a computer but it was out there in a book and i was concerned a munition um a t-shirt was
00:17:26.520 printed this t-shirt is a controlled munition and cannot be exported because they put the code for
00:17:35.000 the for the for the encryption encryption program like the encryption key on the t-shirt
00:17:43.460 so this question of what is ironically this question of what is a weapon and what is speech
00:17:51.220 uh you made it very explicitly a handgun gun and a cad file that is that a weapon or is that speech
00:17:59.820 Can the government control that or is that First Amendment protected?
00:18:04.540 This is already happening in the at the extreme definition of both speech and weapon with cryptographic files in the in the 90s, which is part of the reason I find it insane that they like challenged you over it in 2012, 2013.
00:18:26.420 Well, you know, that's why they did it.
00:18:28.340 I mean, you look at it correctly, but that is why they did it because there was this
00:18:31.460 precedential value and basically when the national security council met about what to
00:18:37.300 do about liberator and the other files that were popping up on the internet, they had,
00:18:42.020 they had this fight fall back to and look to.
00:18:45.300 And of course there's, you could say the state department, right?
00:18:49.700 Like in your, in your theories of the state, the state department runs the show anyway.
00:18:53.940 And so it was the state department's preference to make this an ITAR fight.
00:18:58.340 And they had a strong hand to do that.
00:19:01.760 At the same time, in 2013, even after the results of the Bernstein and Zimmerman fights that you're referencing, PGP and RSA and all that, it had never been conceived.
00:19:16.420 by 2013 it had still never been conceived that people would develop these technical data related
00:19:22.620 to munitions and then just share it on the internet for for social reasons uh it's still
00:19:31.360 not really been imagined in the law and even i remember um stuff in 120 in the cfr like discussing
00:19:38.040 how you know the practicalities of itar some of that stuff hadn't been updated since the 1980s
00:19:44.900 and it had not even contemplated the fact of an internet.
00:19:48.620 So we were talking about just this huge exposure
00:19:50.800 where, you know, like in the cultural theory
00:19:53.780 of Baudrillard or something,
00:19:55.540 of course they had to go back to ITAR and State Department
00:19:58.260 because they couldn't admit
00:20:00.540 that there was like not even black letter on this topic.
00:20:04.460 You know, the power had to show up here
00:20:06.020 because that's most where it was absent
00:20:08.460 and caught lacking, in my opinion.
00:20:11.780 And so it was a retread of this fight in the 90s
00:20:13.800 And it's more than a family resemblance to that fight.
00:20:15.760 We ended up sharing the same attorneys.
00:20:17.740 We involved the Electronic Frontier Foundation 0.66
00:20:19.800 out of San Francisco, Cindy Cohn.
00:20:23.000 We did add a new set of attorneys to it, 0.95
00:20:25.060 like that group of attorneys and interest groups
00:20:27.420 who had minted themselves after the Heller,
00:20:30.060 the first great Second Amendment decision,
00:20:32.460 decided to join this too.
00:20:34.240 Because of course, this is equally,
00:20:35.620 not just a First Amendment and Second Amendment case.
00:20:37.880 You don't know what the court's going to like.
00:20:40.100 Will the Supreme Court ultimately decide
00:20:41.440 this is a speech case or a gun case, right?
00:20:43.220 Like you had to have both kind of groups along for the ride.
00:20:46.760 And this was before the Great Reckoning that Trump forced.
00:20:49.440 So we even had attachment from, you know, like journalist committees for, you know, the Free Press and the ACLU.
00:20:58.020 I mean, it was a strange time when kind of everyone, even if progressionally, even then, was along for the ride because it just affected too many things to get it wrong.
00:21:11.040 Yeah.
00:21:11.520 Um, so, so obviously there's been, uh, dear, your listener, if he, the Cody Wilson's book,
00:21:22.280 uh, come and take it again, Printer's Guide to Thinking, Thinking Free.
00:21:26.900 I have a review of it on my site.
00:21:29.520 Your book just covers one year of your, your side.
00:21:32.880 It covers basically from when you decide to start, um, defense district or the precursor,
00:21:40.580 uh i'm not sure if it was named and it's attributed at that point up till the liberator was
00:21:46.380 was printed and that's a book-like story that and it's insane story it's a it's really one of like
00:21:54.260 the crazy cyber thriller story uh real life cyber thriller stories of our time but that's one year
00:22:02.260 of the scythe you like uh the the legal madness since then uh uh spanning multiple contents and
00:22:13.180 at this point and you know german east german police assassinating one of your um
00:22:21.100 call spiritual colleagues peers uh jay stark right uh like like this has been insane
00:22:29.900 story sorry so so what is the state of the law now because we know the practical reality is 0.89
00:22:39.260 you can't really stop this um you know rohingya muslims and and buddhist militias are now 3d
00:22:49.560 printing firearms in the myanmar civil war um you know 3d printers are being used to like 0.77
00:22:56.620 make parts for like fpb direct homebrew fp3 fpb drones in both syria and and ukraine like this
00:23:07.440 genie is out of the box there's some 3d printer in like one of the deepest tunnels in gaza uh
00:23:14.400 printing off parts, in part because of this revolution, in part because that's what everyone
00:23:23.200 else is doing. If you didn't do it, someone else would have. But the legal battle, though,
00:23:33.860 what is the state of law right now? You just lost a case at the Supreme Court. Take us into that.
00:23:38.620 What was the operative question? I did. That case had two questions, or at least we all thought it
00:23:44.160 did. That's how the Supreme Court defined it. And these are secondary questions. They don't
00:23:51.920 necessarily touch on 3D printing per se, but those questions are, as presented to the Supreme Court
00:23:57.040 most recently, what's the definition of a frame or receiver? And is the ATF exceeding its authority
00:24:02.960 by trying to expand the statutory definition of frame or receiver or weapon as defined in the
00:24:10.180 1968 Gun Control Act by kind of lumping these new ghost gun kits and unfinished receivers within
00:24:17.380 that definition. I didn't say that as cleanly as I could have, but that was, you know, this was
00:24:21.940 the so-called ghost gun case. And ghost gun has become a term with some currency in the past few
00:24:26.660 years, especially during the Biden administration. No doubt you've probably heard the term.
00:24:31.840 It's one of the emanations, one of the practical, like screenings that the popular press and,
00:24:38.360 you know, political actors have done in the post 3D printing gun moment, they've said,
00:24:44.040 well, certain guns are, are now ghost guns and we can come up with new theories for how to regulate
00:24:48.660 them, um, by their stage of completion, by their ability to be readily identified by how many
00:24:57.280 components are sold within a kit. So it's, it's kind of like this second generation of gun control.
00:25:03.140 And I would say that we've lost the first important fight before the Supreme Court.
00:25:11.320 All right. So for you listeners at home, who I imagine the majority of our listeners probably don't know how to disassemble a firearm.
00:25:22.340 I have a lot of international listeners.
00:25:25.980 A receiver, the main receiver, the primary receiver of a weapon is what in the U.S. and most of U.S. associated states, Canada has similar laws that kind of overlap, kind of don't.
00:25:44.320 But a receiver is what's considered the heart of the firearm.
00:25:47.420 In an AR-15, which is maybe the easiest one to conceive, there's two receivers, the lower receiver and the upper receiver.
00:25:56.540 The lower receiver, which houses the trigger, the magazine release and feet, feet ramp, holds the bolt carrier when it's in.
00:26:12.600 This is considered the beating heart of the firearm.
00:26:15.860 This is, even without all the parts in it, just the chunk of metal that is the lower receiver, this empty shell of metal that has some holes drilled in it, it is considered a firearm, despite the fact that it's, like, actually one of the simplest, most easy-to-built parts in a firearm, compared to, say, the barrel, which has, like, pressure durances, or the bolt carrier, which has, like, all these finicky little parts and extractors.
00:26:45.860 Extractors, compared to the trigger group, which is like this little kind of cloth work device, the receiver, this hunk of metal that is very simple when left out its own, it's considered the fire.
00:27:01.340 so trigger groups you can buy
00:27:03.940 separately you can't
00:27:06.040 although the ATF 1.00
00:27:07.840 tries to regulate the seers
00:27:09.740 of trigger
00:27:11.840 groups which is insane because you can make
00:27:13.900 an auto seer out of
00:27:15.980 like a
00:27:16.660 coat hanger
00:27:18.680 very deal
00:27:20.860 yes
00:27:21.460 I would say it's important off the bat
00:27:25.500 not to I don't mean to interrupt
00:27:27.480 but autism can get in the way
00:27:29.440 in these analyses
00:27:31.280 Because ultimately, regardless of the technical justifications or definitions, this is all historically contingent in the law.
00:27:40.340 Like you point out, there's no real guideline rule about pressure-bearing components necessitating definition as a receiver in the United States.
00:27:50.280 Although there was something like that in the past.
00:27:53.060 You have something like that in Europe.
00:27:54.560 the United States, it's almost entirely accidental and just a feature of where people in OEM
00:28:01.760 manufacturers began just stamping serial numbers for arms and commerce. And then you get these
00:28:08.400 post hoc justifications through, you know, layers of regulatory decision in the 20th century that
00:28:15.320 end up becoming justified in court and stuff as like, well, you know, this is why the lower
00:28:21.000 receiver of the ARs. This is why it's important. And again, it's not true, but okay, this becomes
00:28:27.380 glazed over again with even things like Supreme Court decisions like we've just gotten,
00:28:31.940 making it all somehow make sense since the 1960s. It's just important to know that
00:28:36.180 it's all entirely contingent. Nevertheless, the accident of, for example, the AR-15 receiver being
00:28:43.660 a regulated component, it is just a fact of the way that gun is built with new materials and stuff
00:28:49.420 that you could make that lower receiver out of plastic.
00:28:52.280 And that ends up being one of the most important facts
00:28:54.460 of 3D-printed guns and ghost guns.
00:29:00.180 Yeah, the, so this is one of the things
00:29:05.300 where if you're not a U.S. citizen,
00:29:07.800 it's actually like considerably harder
00:29:10.180 to get into 3D-printed firearms
00:29:13.700 or home-made, amateur home-manufactured firearms.
00:29:17.400 Aside from the legal side, 0.98
00:29:18.660 If you're willing to break every law, it's actually more challenging as a non-American,
00:29:23.760 because in America, everything that's not the receiver is largely unregulated.
00:29:31.100 Like, you can order, even as a convicted felon and preacher,
00:29:34.880 you can order basically all the parts of a firearm except the receiver.
00:29:39.660 Like, if you're ordering, like, handguards or trigger groups or whatnot,
00:29:45.400 that's considered just another object in the world.
00:29:47.920 that's a doohickey that's a party that's a that's a screw screw which is part of the interesting
00:29:54.980 fact about firearms is compared to say swords or spears or or like most historical weapons which
00:30:02.980 are monolithic or like very obviously have a monolithic core part of it the the head of the
00:30:10.280 spear, spear, say, or the blade of the sword. Firearms are assemblages of hundreds of individual
00:30:18.660 parts, which all wear out, which all have to be replaced at some point, or can break ran wear,
00:30:24.720 or can be swapped out to achieve this or that. The modern AR-15 is basically a Lego set
00:30:32.700 set that you assemble your own way and many people own like dozens of individual parts that
00:30:40.440 are not on any individual firearm because they want to swap it out for something something else
00:30:46.220 that the idea of trying to regulate the object of a firearm itself has always been a little
00:30:52.900 quixotic and now that we're at the point of complete interchangeability is like
00:30:58.500 well you can see it in your case in the current state of the law that it's
00:31:03.220 that um the idea that the firearm itself is an idea or the firearm itself is a set of knowledge
00:31:13.260 or the firearm itself is a a like abstraction like uh that seems you know to the listeners at
00:31:23.920 Well, that might seem like a very quixotic, like philosophical interpretation, but no.
00:31:28.640 In terms of like the firearm itself, the firearm itself is a hundred individual pieces, almost none of which are actually controllable or regulatable.
00:31:38.860 You know, Vietnamese guerrillas in caves were assembling little bamboo barrels to with nails that they used as traps to set off to set off priors out fire one shot into the foot of a GI.
00:31:58.860 Like firearms are that abstractable.
00:32:03.620 Yes. Yes.
00:32:05.040 and our case represents something of the embracing from institutional side now of
00:32:12.460 kind of post-structural intuition you're you're explaining here like okay if firearms are to become
00:32:18.680 more digitally you know liquid okay if they're to be really um kind of ephemerized or something
00:32:27.540 there's now they're just so many components the atf doesn't come in and says it doesn't come in
00:32:34.020 and say, well, we regulate all these components, which is kind of a fever dream of the regulatory
00:32:38.960 state anyway and not achievable. It gives itself the latitude to say, oh, we'll know a firearm
00:32:47.520 when we see it. And in fact, a firearm can be a certain combination of parts that we don't have
00:32:51.880 to define. It depends on how it's marketed. It depends on how people talk about it, how they buy
00:32:55.940 it, how they buy it over time. And even in relatively unfinished condition, all of these
00:33:04.080 things can now also be firearms for purposes of the law. And again, we don't need a statutory
00:33:09.280 definition. We can give ourselves like our opponent, like our criminal opponents, we can
00:33:16.780 give ourselves a certain fluidity of meaning. And the Supreme Court said, yes, you can.
00:33:22.120 so that's troubling although it's not it's not totally unexpected or like incredible it's just
00:33:29.700 you asked me to give the state of a law you know i mean you could rapid fire i can tell you
00:33:34.260 exactly where things are broken down but this is a strong signal um at the federal level and it's
00:33:40.580 already happening at the state level that guns are essentially now whatever the regulatory power
00:33:44.740 says they are and that's a problem and to give listeners a feel how incredible this is
00:33:53.400 remember these are the two rights in the u.s constitution that still like have like fairly
00:34:00.140 absolute teeth to them like the first amendment of the u.s like um as much as we are in a like
00:34:07.940 global censorship regime as much as um you know we found out with the the declassifications of
00:34:15.520 USAID and the defundings that basically every social media platform every news organization
00:34:21.920 every newspaper internationally was accepting funds from like some level of government or non
00:34:28.920 or this third-party pass your organization that even financial institutions,
00:34:38.820 which, of course, we can—I might ask you about a hatrium layer and that development.
00:34:47.860 Censorship through financial institutions, censors through advocatizer boycotts
00:34:56.040 boycotts that are in fact directed by like state state level actors uh in spite of this vast
00:35:03.300 censorship regime the u.s first amendment in the way that a a like you know 18th century person
00:35:12.880 would understand the u.s first amendment is one like the most expansive institutions in the world
00:35:18.760 is fairly close to absolute.
00:35:22.280 As a Canadian, I can't, I struggle to wrap my mind around an institution
00:35:27.780 that functions that well.
00:35:29.300 It's security, liberty.
00:35:31.100 But for how absolute the First Amendment is
00:35:37.100 and for how cut and dry the Second Amendment is supposed to be,
00:35:41.960 the Supreme Court in your case has pretty much given the ATF
00:35:47.320 the power to define, define firearm in such a way that not only tramples the Second Amendment,
00:35:56.100 but, but gives it wide latitude to define speech itself as, as firearms, not even with
00:36:05.540 a kind of dry definition, but with, um, whatever standard they wish to apply. And if, if you,
00:36:15.240 If they decide to completely trample your rights with that, you know, have fun with a 10-year legal battle, the ACLU isn't going to come along for you now.
00:36:28.900 Certainly not on the gun side.
00:36:30.560 And look, I don't want to be accused of overstating the problem, but speech is certainly now inclusive within the definition of a firearm after this case.
00:36:40.980 And the Supreme Court would tell you, hey, we didn't decide a Second Amendment case.
00:36:44.060 that wasn't the question presented. This was an APA case about, you know, can an agency define a
00:36:49.660 term that it's charged to define under the statute? You know, can it define it? Was it outside of its
00:36:54.740 power to do that? Okay. They ducked that direct question and said, okay, well, here's a test.
00:36:59.720 We all celebrate the end of Chevron deference, for example, if we follow Supreme Court and if
00:37:05.460 we're kind of right-wing affiliated or something, we might say, okay, you know, the advent of Trump,
00:37:10.480 of the Trumpian revolution, the end of Chevron deference, hey, it represents some major setback,
00:37:14.660 at least conceptually for the administrative state, because now with Republican lawyers and
00:37:18.960 federal judges, we're not bound to defer to agency interpretations of statutory definitions or
00:37:25.940 something. But what the principal in our case just decided is something worse than Chevron,
00:37:32.880 which is like, well, if you can imagine application of this administrative rule,
00:37:38.000 which reaches at least one actual object, uh, well then, you know, the, the rule is presumptively
00:37:47.220 valid. And, and how did the court do that? In our case, they said, well, look, we don't have
00:37:51.660 to go through the record and do a bunch of line drawing. You know, we're not going to settle what
00:37:55.100 is and isn't a firearm today, but we're going to, let's look at this kit that this company
00:37:58.960 Polymerati sold. They named their kit buy, build, shoot. And really other factors aside, it's all
00:38:05.480 in the name and so because they decided the name of that um for sure this kit among others is
00:38:11.260 definitely regulated by the statute and therefore the statute is presumptively valid but you can see
00:38:15.520 how the speech the marketing the commercial speech at least about this product was a determinant
00:38:23.340 in deciding whether it met the gca definition of a firearm that's that's nuts man
00:38:29.620 yeah and was was that mentioned in any of the dissents or was that just like um
00:38:36.740 completely washed over by by the yeah i mean alito has this kind of grousing
00:38:43.600 it's almost a concurrence but it's a dissent where he's like ah the majority just kind of 1.00
00:38:48.140 invented some shit here they just pulled this out of their ass this is a dumb test um 0.99
00:38:52.640 alito basically says as much as that but this is a 7-2 case man i mean this was not hard 1.00
00:38:59.600 in some I don't know what the different majorities might have looked like in this case but they give
00:39:04.300 it to Gorsuch maybe as a way of narrowing decision and kind of styling this thing as a conservative
00:39:12.300 victory but these conservatives on this court they are always are outsmarting themselves and
00:39:17.480 and this is a nightmare and we're critics of the administrative state you could see how this is
00:39:21.880 this is incredible not just for gun cases or speech cases but Jesus Christ this is like
00:39:27.000 basically high pro for the administrative state trump moment or not it's like okay i guess every
00:39:35.040 rule under the salerno test is invalid unless an agency is so crazy that they write a reg that
00:39:41.280 doesn't even correspond to any given reality i mean that's a crazy test any for those of you who
00:39:49.700 are listening and completely lost uh the death of chevron doctrine um i can't recall the specific
00:39:56.180 case name but chevron doctrine is this policy from the 80s that said uh regulations that were
00:40:04.020 written by regulatory agencies not laws uh clarifications of laws so congress writes a law
00:40:12.620 you know schoolhouse rock rock it's supposed to be it goes through the three branches of
00:40:17.620 government it gets written down it gets passed and that's where the law is it's in a bill that
00:40:24.500 you can read. What has been happening with the administrative state is agencies have been
00:40:30.940 empowered to write interpretations of laws that might be dozens or hundreds of pages long that go
00:40:38.880 into incredible minute detail and are maybe quite irrelevant to anything that is written in the law.
00:40:48.420 And of course, their regulations are not laws. They do not pass the three branches. They were
00:40:53.400 not voted on uh they were just some guy who was never elected in a in a suit in a building in dc
00:41:02.380 uh decided to interpret a law in such a way that now his whims are getting the power enforcement
00:41:12.180 of whatever penalty congress put down down for it and what was supposed to have happened this
00:41:21.000 was supposed to be the great victory of trumpism this was supposed to be on paper the mechanism
00:41:26.560 whereby like elon and doge could start winding back the entire uh deep state the federal monstrosity 0.98
00:41:35.220 administrative beast um you know fdr's bastard child who's now grown to the size the size of 0.83
00:41:43.180 the earth uh uh what the repeal of chevron doctor was supposed to do is say no the law is the law 0.92
00:41:53.000 some interpretation written by some bureaucrat in dc is not presumptively valid valid you know
00:42:03.040 you get to to go to court and debate the law as it is written and if it's not written in the law
00:42:11.840 You know, you can't be held accountable because you didn't pay attention to what some random bureaucrat wrote in his dream diary.
00:42:22.080 But we understand certain facts about the federal judiciary, right, and the elite bar.
00:42:26.460 And, of course, they socially, culturally, they all skew toward this weird civic, aggressive civic religion.
00:42:35.440 And so, you know, even a requirement that they are basically saying, hey, they don't have to defer.
00:42:40.580 It's like, well, OK, but they still can and they still will. And when you look at the history of these cases, it's like, OK, well, such a victory we have where, OK, they're no longer required to defer. But of course, they can still choose to defer. Right. You know, it's this this is what we're sold as as earth shattering stuff in the circles of Republican and professional lawyers in this country.
00:43:04.300 And now there's a new thing that we have in the administrative wars, which is Vanderstock. And I can't know that Vanderstock will be abused this way, but I've seen my other cases abused and they've certainly not been as significant as this one.
00:43:20.480 yeah the um i i've often said that the judicial class is the true enemy of the the people that
00:43:31.300 um not just judges but um the class that they identify with the lawyers throughout the bureaucracy
00:43:36.840 of dc the lawyer the lawyer guild of people who who get into some institutional opposition because
00:43:45.280 they're writing regulatory fine or because they're writing their participating case law
00:43:51.360 because they're participating in the regulatory process um basically the judiciary because that's
00:43:59.300 that that's their class that's uh when they retire and go to work at a law firm that's that's what
00:44:07.220 they get paid paid for that's their connection that's that's their guilt now this priest has
00:44:15.100 taken over america like as badly as any monastery ever took over henry the it's england like uh
00:44:23.380 this is this is like the eunuchs in charge of manchu china or this is the you know this is the
00:44:32.020 poisoners and court women taking out emperors uh in in ancient rome like this is the class of 0.78
00:44:41.840 people who have like really usurped the public in a in every way and this from an institution
00:44:49.160 that like like originally the supreme court itself was not to have a significant interpretation power
00:44:56.460 like uh like marbury b madison is something that was just like made up by the u.s supreme court
00:45:05.400 like the founders themselves do not even conceive of the supreme court deciding constitutionality
00:45:10.600 Or if they thought that the Supreme Court could refuse to enforce laws or like do things on the basis of constitutionality, they would have assumed that that was just like part of the oath that you had to refuse to do unconstitutional acts.
00:45:27.180 And it was distributed throughout the entire federal government, like everyone who took that oath from president to congressman to to like military officer to like postal worker was he had the same power to interpret and refuse to do unconstitutional things.
00:45:47.480 Well, I mean, constitutional review itself, as you pointed out, might not have been.
00:45:52.500 What was exactly conceived in what we built.
00:45:55.620 and of course i i'm not an originalist on this i don't know i mean i've read edwin ludlow on this
00:46:00.980 a little bit where hey you want a supreme court as like a check on you know in a theory of
00:46:06.680 republican checks and balances okay that but that doesn't mean that constitutional review
00:46:12.060 of the decisions of the other branches was exactly what was supposed to happen there um yeah and
00:46:18.660 And instead of like, and what the judiciary has really stolen for itself, is a monopoly on review.
00:46:28.720 So, of course, there's a massive incentive for the judiciary to torture what words are.
00:46:34.380 Because if you have a monopoly on review and interpretation, and you can make words and language and law as complex and ridiculous as possible,
00:46:46.700 and you can like basically everyone in america is a post-water modernist now like uh this was
00:46:54.520 uh kurdish yorban and like the uh what was the project erbit like uh this was like half the
00:47:04.640 vision of like that which i'm not sure how far it's gone ahead and fallen up that project but
00:47:10.700 Like, the pitch was, what if law was written in code that, obviously, the English language has gone from something that was, like, fairly solid in terms of meaning to now, like, if you're allowed to interpret words, you can, you know, whether you take a law class or an English lick class or, like, a psychology class, you know,
00:47:39.040 you will be told that words can mean absolutely anything no matter what and in meaning is
00:47:45.380 inherently meaning meaningless so or a logic clash you know we're at the point of so many
00:47:51.400 contradictions that any contradiction implies absolutely anything and it's opposite so the
00:47:57.300 the fact that judiciary is at this you know as if there isn't contradictions in the u.s legal
00:48:04.360 But of course, I of course, I agree with you. It's just neither, though, am I trying to say it's certainly a fact of just reality testing that, OK, you understand progressives want to more or less siphon the power, the legislative power from Congress and give it to the administrative state.
00:48:22.480 Okay. And it seems to me like the kind of counterbalance to this in the power process is Republican lawyers and professionals who want to take power away from the executive or Congress and then more or less give it to the judiciary, if only for the reason of just empowering the Republican lawyer profession.
00:48:42.220 um that sounds like really cynical for me to say that i'm going to keep participating in the
00:48:48.320 process don't get me wrong but this also is like an accurate description of what is going on
00:48:53.780 yeah the like it's full
00:49:02.780 it's as corrupt as like uh the catholic church right before the reformation like uh
00:49:12.220 You know, you can interpret you can interpret divorce solvents as a form of indulgence, even that the sinnings of acting against your wife are now resolved in in the American legal system by giving money to lawyers.
00:49:27.740 Yes. And then, of course, you need. Right. I agree with it.
00:49:32.560 uh you know inflicting emotional strain on on a woman in the workplace is now
00:49:39.800 now resolved through the american legal system and employment well like there is an actually a
00:49:46.620 factor of life that cannot result in lawsuit lawsuit or some other suit where basically
00:49:53.620 the judiciary is in power power in a godlike manner which is like part of the reason why
00:49:59.620 I love your project because ultimately, like, I don't think this problem gets solved without, like, a Henry VIII-style solution.
00:50:07.560 Like, I assume the system's just going to keep decaying and keep decaying until, like, such a point as it collapses due to the violence of, like, another class of people.
00:50:18.680 I think so.
00:50:20.380 I mean, there's also, if we are all postmodernists now and there are postmodern intuitions here,
00:50:25.880 I mean, you, I take this decision from the Supreme Court as a kind of escape. Like they
00:50:34.260 didn't want to decide a difficult question. They didn't want to draw any lines. And so fine,
00:50:38.080 I'll draw the lines, right? We only were waiting for permission to do that line drawing. And the
00:50:43.080 court is saying, well, it's not something we're going to do today. Okay, I'll do it. And I think
00:50:47.500 it's unlikely, given the prevailing political climate, that the Trump administration would
00:50:54.020 challenge me now that it runs the DOJ, supposedly. I think it would be difficult to bring me back to
00:51:00.060 the Supreme Court. And so it's like you have to take these. I mean, that sounds, again, very
00:51:05.600 cynical. And yet it is a fact. There's almost permission to do whatever you want now because
00:51:11.360 the court has given the government a certain meta-philosophical permission, and yet none of
00:51:17.260 the actual mechanics for how they're just to do their work anyway. And I know that I'm protected
00:51:24.320 by something like the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has become the new renegade
00:51:29.040 Court of Appeals in the United States. Like it was the Ninth Circuit, now it's the Fifth,
00:51:33.760 and the Fifth just does whatever it wants. So you can kind of chase this legal cultural
00:51:38.500 balkanization in the united states as we descend into something like um legal school or again i
00:51:44.980 think there are certain protections yeah like it's so big it's so moving if you can afford
00:51:52.160 to play there there are still a bunch of protections available yeah and and that's where 0.66
00:52:00.000 where uh trapped is an interesting involvement not a black girl not it not necessarily a white
00:52:06.800 filled but a very very strange cult uh where you know for for all the developments on the legal 0.51
00:52:14.480 front and for all the like horrifying authoritarianism authoritarian absurdities that we're
00:52:20.740 seeing out of the administrative state even under trump like um of those people i listed at the
00:52:27.620 start of start um kind of in your cohort of um your rebellious period of like 2008 to 2015
00:52:37.400 gainish uh my assange was effectively pardoned was like plea deal by biden to just like get the
00:52:48.240 issue out of politics like uh that as long as he that he gets to like be in australia like
00:52:57.620 free although not free to really be a political actor uh olberg did is fully pardoned like uh
00:53:06.160 like trump didn't even commute a sentence he gave him pardon ross olberg can go and buy a firearm
00:53:10.700 at like a local local gun dealer um ross olberg i think in the list now if you wanted to although
00:53:18.140 he might be too old uh you know he could he could try to get a commission in the u.s military right
00:53:25.480 now, I think, is the legal
00:53:27.360 status of Ross Ulbricht.
00:53:28.940 Like, the
00:53:30.200 sheer level of
00:53:32.440 just political whim,
00:53:35.520 kind of the
00:53:36.420 madness of crowds and
00:53:39.440 administrative machines and
00:53:41.220 political realities and the lines
00:53:43.140 forming, like,
00:53:45.300 I've just been reading
00:53:48.760 the Aussie, it's very much
00:53:50.360 as random 0.99
00:53:52.100 American life
00:53:54.900 legal life now is as random and unpredictable as like the agency i agree and you need to for your
00:54:03.420 own safety achieve some kind of profile right like no one was going to care about ross without
00:54:08.400 his mom's campaign to make him to like tie him to the fate of bitcoin or something so it's almost
00:54:13.680 like if you're going to do something in american life you have to understand one you have to do
00:54:18.640 it posthumously because everything is going to be criminal at some level of resolve and then two
00:54:23.400 you have to achieve a certain kind of profile in self-defense like in future self-defense so that
00:54:29.440 somebody rescues you you know rescues you from the lyclops cave or something when it's your turn
00:54:34.580 um yeah i mean i like the analogy and it's funny if you want to throw it back to classical thinking
00:54:41.020 i mean this is so far removed from this is why you had sophists you know in like athens i mean
00:54:46.600 they knew not to let lawyers get involved in this stuff you know there was like a ban on
00:54:53.940 on having professional lawyers in court like you had to have at least the
00:54:58.500 de minimis skills of rhetoric defend yourself and your case in a real or something like a
00:55:04.560 people's court as like make sure politics wasn't fake and like politics is simply
00:55:11.120 uh a media production and so so it is in the courts man if you don't have hundreds of thousands
00:55:16.780 of dollars you don't even get to have the the twist ending at the end like i love i love the
00:55:22.640 ending this case in the supreme court where the court goes hey guess what all the parties and
00:55:26.440 the judges got it all wrong i know you guys thought you knew what you were litigating this 0.98
00:55:30.660 whole time but actually you're all a bunch of boneheads and really the question presented you 0.96
00:55:35.380 all forgot and missed and here's where we you know that's crazy like that is a truly 0.87
00:55:41.380 i don't even know what to you know like let's what are the categories here there are no stable
00:55:47.800 ontologies in this situation yeah and like um yeah basically one has to be a conspiracy theory
00:55:57.080 theorist about everything now so like why did gors gorsuch or um ex-justice join the majority
00:56:04.060 opinion well was there another opinion that was like five to four that would have been like more
00:56:10.040 horrifying that they watered down or was there there's something else they're trying to achieve
00:56:15.240 or are they setting up something else for x or y like um one has to have sympathy for
00:56:22.180 not sympathy but uh a systemic understanding of the q people that basically it's obvious that 0.52
00:56:31.540 everyone we're in the dark force now everyone's acting with hidden motives on every everything 0.99
00:56:39.340 even the stuff that they're very open about about uh yeah yeah and you know what like you ask these
00:56:46.520 questions not for answers okay there are good reasons to ask these questions but you're
00:56:52.120 definitely not hoping to get an answer and i know that sounds insane and but that's it like i mean
00:56:58.140 this case was remanded and a lot of the plaintiffs can't go anywhere or the questions were
00:57:02.520 exhausted but we maintained a couple of questions and the supreme court signal is also a signal
00:57:08.180 outside of the four corners of the document they produced it's to also say hey we're not gonna we're
00:57:14.420 not gonna do these like kit guns okay that's not gonna happen uh don't make it easy and don't ask
00:57:20.900 us again. And that's a strong signal to the other players, the judiciary, you know, it's supposed
00:57:28.220 to administratively terminate so that we don't have to go back to the Supreme Court and ask for
00:57:32.100 line drawing. But I hope the Fifth Circuit is kind of antisocial enough or oppositional enough
00:57:38.100 that, again, I know I can't return to a world of buy, build, shoot kits and polymer 80 and stuff.
00:57:43.040 That was a weird, exciting thing to live through. But there's something you can get. And again,
00:57:48.140 it's not necessarily an answer to your merits question, although you have to pose that question
00:57:52.440 very well so that you can do this exercise justice. But what you end up getting is some
00:58:02.360 kind of like, I don't know, you achieve strange commercial monopolies. You become the only person
00:58:08.680 for a limited period of time who can participate in the market. You're kind of given an immunity
00:58:13.700 against, like, the ATF task forces or the DOJ.
00:58:17.560 I mean, this is what you're playing for now.
00:58:20.160 And I think that's still a valuable thing to play for.
00:58:24.060 Yeah, it's...
00:58:27.020 So much of American life now just seems...
00:58:31.460 Rolling the dice to see which results you get,
00:58:35.420 and it can vary from, like, you know,
00:58:39.480 completely horrifying, like, Nat won.
00:58:41.700 uh your entire fleet is wiped out to to like like a complete gift for no reason
00:58:50.760 you know the random number generator of the adventures on the seas i link this to
00:58:56.880 like nft culture from a few years ago and of course everybody's doing their little
00:59:02.900 coin drop and now of course okay you know it's it's whack-a-mole like you can't if you drop
00:59:07.860 your coin early enough, it's legitimate and you're, you know, it's Ethereum and you're
00:59:12.760 Vitalik Buterin, you're like a world thought leader. If you drop your coin late enough and
00:59:17.100 in the wrong state, you know, you're just going to go directly to jail. And the only difference
00:59:21.640 there is about five years and some legal, you know, cognizance. And Bojard, for example, says
00:59:28.900 like this overregulation, like this situation of the Aegean, like you say, this actually is the
00:59:35.160 secret impulse of american life this is in fact the thing that produces the technical separation
00:59:42.780 the innovation the fourth order simulacra like we need it in fact and so i'm trying to stay
00:59:48.360 you know if this if this appearance on this podcast is just cody wilson's bitching about
00:59:53.320 losing the supreme court well i don't i don't mean to i simply want to like stay where we are
01:00:00.200 so that you can understand the decisions that we make after.
01:00:03.500 Because I'm trying to live in postmodern America.
01:00:06.880 I'm trying to act in it.
01:00:08.040 And again, I can only respond to and only build products
01:00:11.200 based on knowing that this is a fact.
01:00:14.520 Anyone who comes to the Supreme Court with these classical ideals
01:00:17.060 of even something like the Second Amendment
01:00:19.100 is hopelessly, not just naive, but lost
01:00:21.940 and will be destroyed.
01:00:25.360 no uh the you know you can just do things also the consequences will be completely random
01:00:36.040 like uh right right like uh like um you know keeping it on the
01:00:48.200 quote a ghost guns but completely uh back to to a topic my readers know well
01:00:55.040 Like, uh, Luigi Mangione, uh, whether or not he would have gotten caught or whether they would have, like, thrown every resource at him is, like, completely random depending on, like, who he went after, why, why, etc.
01:01:10.940 uh even which jurisdiction he went to after afterwards so it's probably some stay in the
01:01:16.720 union where he just randomly like would not have like put an effort for a new york
01:01:22.960 new york investing ever quest and and like uh depending on whether you get the complete iron
01:01:33.140 sorrow and treatment like them pouring through every piece of facial recognition tech uh going
01:01:40.800 to mcdolls and asking them to use their uh in-store facial recognition technology to track
01:01:46.720 you down or whether um or whether you know the vast majority of murders in the u.s the majority
01:01:54.160 now are unsolved and like basically get no resources dedicated to them that's basically
01:02:01.160 random you know you know obviously mangi only like knew he was like kind of he was cooking the
01:02:09.400 I've heard that, like, actually, even something of that scale would have been, is, like, increasingly random.
01:02:19.120 You know, none of the people who went after Trump are really being investigated that intensively.
01:02:24.420 Their ties are classified as being sheltered by various administrative assets.
01:02:28.860 not even because the administrative assets were involved but because they just ideologically
01:02:33.720 don't want to investigate ties to ukraine or ties to another agency see um and it's just
01:02:44.820 increasingly random right you know what damn i'm i'm i totally forgot to this exact moment but
01:02:52.200 Remember, like Trump V1 begins with Paul Manafort, who, you know, I mean, we have Ukraine to thank for that, you know, like I know it's it's a little bit of an overstatement. 0.85
01:03:05.260 But, you know, Manafort was like a kind of king, a kind of king of graft in in Ukraine.
01:03:10.660 And of course, that's that's ancient history now, right?
01:03:13.620 Like now we we think of the Biden's graft as overriding that somehow.
01:03:19.000 I don't even know the Manafort story.
01:03:21.000 This is, I was statistically involved in 2016.
01:03:29.240 Is that right?
01:03:30.960 Yeah.
01:03:32.080 You needed to only go back one more year and you would have seen some really, I mean, Ukraine was just known as this place in Europe that you go for the money.
01:03:40.280 And that was just how politics worked in, you know, the mid 2000s.
01:03:46.280 And everybody knew it.
01:03:48.000 I didn't like I can't I can't recreate that like pastiche because like too much has happened.
01:03:56.120 But, you know, we all take sides on the Victorian Newland thing and I mean, fine.
01:04:02.360 Grand strategy on Ukraine is impossible to understand anymore. 0.79
01:04:06.600 And that's by design, too. You've got these Bene Gesserit plots all over the thing.
01:04:10.680 You know, the best you can hope for in this situation is like instead of being a Mangione, 0.91
01:04:14.660 just hope for some Bene Gesserit support of whatever you're doing anyway, some plans within
01:04:19.900 plans. I've seen evidence of that in our own stuff. When you asked me about, well, tell me
01:04:24.220 about the state of the law. Intentionally, the law stays away from some of the 3D elements
01:04:28.920 and likes to hue to the more kind of traditional, well, tell me about the nuts and bolts. Tell me
01:04:36.640 about the physical components. And I know that's not an accident. And it gives me great pause to
01:04:43.880 Like, I have been exposed now over the years to the ins and outs.
01:04:47.280 I've seen discovery of what the of the discussions within among senators and regulators.
01:04:53.460 Chilling stuff, man.
01:04:56.480 Really?
01:04:57.240 So like the 3D, the 3D printers themselves, they seem to be trying to avoid.
01:05:04.740 In large part, especially the feds.
01:05:07.460 And of course, some of this is about intersection with big this is big politics, right?
01:05:12.160 This is China.
01:05:12.760 this is economic policy so much of what 3d printing is now is a part of chinese state policy
01:05:20.500 um this is i mean this is difficult to you know polymakers here in houston and
01:05:29.000 but where could i oh my god man there's so much here but let's say if if the original 3d gun fight
01:05:36.200 starts with just a few lawyers in the state department like in the political military
01:05:41.000 Bureau of Affairs of the State Department. It's no longer there. They know not to take it there.
01:05:46.480 And in fact, even after export control reform in 2018 and, you know, trying to move nominal
01:05:52.700 jurisdiction of some of these files to the Commerce Department, there is no enforcement effort. There
01:05:56.800 is intentionally not an enforcement effort. And it seems to be some aspect, some involved aspect of
01:06:02.480 these great planners, fourth generation warfare strategies. They're just kind of leaving it
01:06:08.860 alone. Interesting. So there's some, some element of the state wants to be able to ship
01:06:21.460 thousands of 3D printers at the drop of that without having it tracked.
01:06:27.560 I know that's part of it. That's probably even too crude, you know, and too simple a description,
01:06:34.040 but, you know, it's, it's the state governments, the naive state governments that are trying to
01:06:38.420 have their way regulating printers for example california has had two different bills trying to
01:06:44.200 regulate printers and then they always give up on the printer part because of course the guiding
01:06:48.340 hand comes in so california had to settle for a cnc bill for example or they just regulate cnc machines 0.83
01:06:54.220 and okay fine i have to eat shit on that one i'm and i'm being sued in california on that bill 0.93
01:07:00.140 right now oh you can't sell a cnc in california you know if people can make a gun with well god 0.99
01:07:04.560 damn it you can make you can make a gun on every cnc ever made you know um but this is almost again
01:07:11.160 to like hide the fact that there isn't major action in state or federal on the 3d printer question 0.99
01:07:15.820 and okay so you're you know i'm a casualty of that in the opposite direction it's like well
01:07:20.760 we have to kill him on the cnc thing to to preserve the 3d printer thing i mean it is wild dude okay
01:07:28.460 Well, again, you know, I, uh, I didn't mean to like step on the point, but I have felt 0.97
01:07:36.040 it in a very real way.
01:07:37.080 Like few people find few people embody their ideals, but fewer, um, engage constantly with
01:07:44.260 the state about them, you know?
01:07:46.460 And to me that the strangest features of this fight is like, you watch how it's when they're
01:07:51.560 in the kitchen and it's some rep like Gibson who, you know, doesn't have like a fifth grade
01:07:55.860 education.
01:07:56.360 well you can see where they start and where what they want to regulate and then you can see what
01:08:00.320 like they're allowed to get when it comes out of committee and to the floor and everything and to
01:08:06.100 the governor and it's never the thing they want and of course you could say well that's politics
01:08:10.700 cody but i i have watched this now in new york and these other states and i have watched it stay
01:08:15.460 out of the federal conversation and i know that that's not an accident there is a guiding hand
01:08:21.800 hmm so so we have to speculate whether that's whether that's some agency whether that's some
01:08:31.280 corporate interest whether that's um look it's a little that's any
01:08:36.620 the biggest for example okay when polymer 80 which became really big in the ghost gun context
01:08:43.580 became like a 40 million dollar company or something shipping all these kits all over the
01:08:47.500 country. Oakland, Baltimore, you name it. All right. Paul Moretti takes all these lawsuits and
01:08:53.720 basically they go out of business the last few years and they really are like the central point
01:08:58.140 of resolution of the ghost gun question. But in the meantime, while this is before the Fifth Circuit
01:09:02.280 and on emergency appeal at the Supreme Court, a player comes in and basically snatches up what's
01:09:08.540 left of the market. They're called Geisler. And this is an Israeli state firm. And they continue
01:09:16.380 to sell and there's no i mean there is no action on this geysler kit and it is just kind of like 0.99
01:09:23.200 it's a stunt it's just straight stunting in the space where okay you know some black budget groups
01:09:29.660 need to make a little extra scratch and of course there's like huge unmet 0.97
01:09:34.100 untapped demand and so you know we just get to watch massage like stack fat bricks you know of
01:09:43.080 cash while we're all fighting this thing at the supreme court and you know the media's not going
01:09:47.360 to talk about it and it's just like one example man oh dear listener israel the source of and
01:09:57.600 solution to every total tearing modern problem like i'm sure that i'm dealing with this problem 0.77
01:10:04.220 in part because of the jewish state and yet i got i gotta also watch them become an entrepreneur in 0.91
01:10:09.200 the middle of it and like make a ton of money it's just it's wild it's wild and look there's
01:10:14.380 some elements of the mormon mafia i mean everybody's getting their bequet i'm not trying to
01:10:18.540 just single out the jewish state but it is like it's just this extreme and obvious example of like
01:10:26.400 the intentional oversights in the process and i include that within the media too
01:10:32.580 now uh the extent to the extent to which modern democracy like every power faction
01:10:41.580 just operates as a mafia in modern democracy is very hard to overstate like this is honestly
01:10:50.640 the mistake of the italians is that they they kept doing like neighborhood numbers rackets 0.95
01:10:56.380 uh well past the point where like like you know they should have been in elected office at that
01:11:02.220 point you know sure to some degree they were right i mean there were these i don't know if you
01:11:10.360 take any of these histories of the mob seriously but well i mean like the pelosi's are obviously
01:11:17.740 like basically a mafia family like right next to their their connections um you know i'm i'm all
01:11:26.600 certain the you know not just the uh the obvious uh insider trading but like you know there's
01:11:34.940 obvious almost certainly like some boiler room type activity they've been doing at various points
01:11:41.620 but like uh and look it's not there was the delano family before the italians i mean well
01:11:47.460 obviously time families become important political families in this country especially
01:11:52.640 yeah the and i don't know we we have to blame the wasps and the germans for 0.75
01:12:03.200 for tolerating it because they they did have the um they did have the like political levers
01:12:13.440 of power and then just like let it slip to their hands okay sure if if we want to go with like
01:12:21.200 demographic decline or something but i mean the history of this crazy universalist
01:12:27.880 hegemonic moment it starts with english freebooting and that weird species of like
01:12:34.000 english anarchic republicanism i mean this has always been an anglo orientation and you know
01:12:42.840 globalism is just a result of like unchecked anglo total war you know that's fair enough fair
01:12:50.400 enough uh but i mean the sentence of liberty were smuggler rights so yeah i'm dealing with
01:12:59.280 well i mean dude there's i hate to relativize the moment because of course we want to have
01:13:05.380 handles to hang on to the situation and to know how to operate uh and and of course like i have
01:13:10.720 a big problem with the methodist church for example in the history of american gun control
01:13:14.960 it doesn't help me anymore you know if i was to if we were to destroy the methodist church today
01:13:19.960 i can't i could get no further with like gun rights you know yeah no the uh
01:13:28.880 i i'm very curious what's going to happen in the next 10 years just because
01:13:37.280 centralized narratives like uh like the entire moral panic machine is um basically dead right now
01:13:48.280 like uh legacy media you know burnt out the very last of their their credibility in
01:13:57.020 on covid and basically they still have um you can see this in canada now where
01:14:04.780 they managed where panic over trump has managed to swing the country to voting for
01:14:10.620 what looks like will be a literal wef central banker who never sent for election before
01:14:17.980 is the next prime minister of Canada.
01:14:20.520 But the value of centralized media institutions,
01:14:29.900 the kind of institutions that you manipulated,
01:14:33.700 both the inter-media institutions like CNN, MSNBC,
01:14:41.140 Fox, even outer media institutions like Reason Magazine,
01:14:46.780 Which certainly had its role as being the outside-the-box box, where the dangerous ideas could be spelt, but only so dangerous and not touching on any actually dangerous topics.
01:15:05.380 uh that ecosystem is completely dead in the water and and the kind of consensus systems
01:15:15.800 of society are fully decentralized now like uh the over the over 70 nevorathic is really the
01:15:24.840 only ones that are still still controlled by any of these institutions and they're
01:15:30.720 they're expiring every day so there's a real question of what happens in the next five years
01:15:38.440 like i don't think there could be a moral panic over 3d printed firearms today or and certainly
01:15:45.800 not five years from now no in fact if there was if there was going to be it would have been
01:15:51.960 mangioni was the touchstone like the he was the match point moment and instead there was almost
01:15:58.120 this every time 3d printed guns touches the news but especially with mangioni it's not even
01:16:04.260 bewilderment there's a kind of bemused reaction where it's like it's almost funny it's it almost
01:16:10.260 delivers the point that the hit was crankish the fact that it was done with the 3d gun
01:16:16.060 and still 3d printed guns stay outside of certain mainstream apprehension it's like every time
01:16:22.800 they're talked about it's the first time they're talked about um and I these are not these are more
01:16:29.440 than just like um I don't know sketched remarks I mean I was talking to the during the Mangione
01:16:35.500 thing I was talking to everybody in what you would describe as intermedia and even those
01:16:40.260 journals were handling it as kind of like well the 3d part isn't really the most important part
01:16:44.380 of this and that's it's almost kind of silly and I'm surprised by that you know I didn't not not
01:16:50.280 Like, I thought there'd be two or three moments like Liberator going forward, but there's
01:16:56.120 just like an ennui.
01:16:57.180 There's a cultural ennui about that fact, which it's hard for me to, it's always hard
01:17:02.540 for me to predict because I think it's more significant than it obviously is.
01:17:06.800 Yeah, no, I can, you know, if you're in certain industries and some news item hits, you know,
01:17:14.640 there's been sketches at this point about Hollywood, how every time there's a mass shooting
01:17:19.820 you know someone's movie project gets canned and that if you're in certain industries like a new
01:17:26.260 story like that is just like panic inducing so a fortune 500 ceo actually like a fortune five
01:17:37.860 ceo being shot with a 3d printed firearm you know i'd expect that to be like a nightmare for anyone
01:17:46.160 anywhere near the 3d printing business and there was nothing like that you know there's more
01:17:54.040 there's more talk about like social media censorship and how you know people posting
01:18:01.120 tiktoks about how luigi is cute cute there's more there's no more legacy media panic over that and
01:18:11.020 that he was like being turned into a folk hero
01:18:13.260 than over the fact
01:18:15.260 that his firearm was
01:18:17.060 three printed, which on the face
01:18:19.280 of it is actually kind of insane because he had
01:18:21.000 no priors. Like he could have just bought
01:18:23.020 a like
01:18:23.860 proper
01:18:26.380 like a factory
01:18:29.180 made handgun that probably would have
01:18:31.060 run better than
01:18:31.960 whatever side problems he had.
01:18:35.960 Yeah, yeah. If you look at the
01:18:37.200 documentation for the
01:18:38.520 the suppressor he may or may not have printed but used it says that you can have cycling
01:18:45.420 problems and it seems like he had at least experienced enough of those to like compensate
01:18:50.180 for them yeah but it's strange and again when I read profiles of Mangione one that sticks out to
01:18:57.700 me is that I guess it was like a medium post about how he was morbidly concerned with being
01:19:02.840 like an npc or becoming one um anyway i i'm relatable well sure yeah of course but i find
01:19:14.140 his use of a 3d printed gun is more to like he was just taking extra steps to confirm himself
01:19:20.200 as like uh his executive capacities with within the act you know it's like well i'll print the
01:19:27.740 gun too because you know it's like even that is just part of like shoring up his uncertain
01:19:32.600 you know socially mediated identity yeah and like actually this 3d printed firearm
01:19:42.360 probably did him like a fair bit of harm he just got with the firearm and the suppressor
01:19:49.480 on his person if uh the report is to be believed which lots of conspiracy theorists will say no
01:19:55.680 they planted whatever but uh like if he had been if he'd use a regular firearm and had been caught
01:20:03.740 with a regular firearm in a backpack as like someone without a criminal criminal record um
01:20:09.940 obviously he presented a an illegal fake id to a cop which you're you're getting arrested for that
01:20:17.720 bad i don't know why he thought it would work but uh but uh like if he had just been caught with
01:20:25.180 like an ordinary handgun in his backpack like uh it actually might have been like a bit of
01:20:32.120 leal wrangling for them to test the ballistics on ballistics on the firearm and try to match it
01:20:38.940 to the firearm that shot that shot thompson like uh him choosing to use a ghost gun actually made
01:20:49.440 him, like, significantly more identifiable than if he had just, like, had an ordinary
01:20:56.000 handgun.
01:20:56.940 Same with the 3D-brand suppressor.
01:20:58.520 If he didn't have the suppressor, like, there might not have even been much of any legal
01:21:03.700 grounds to test a handgun that he had legally on.
01:21:08.000 I mean, I think we're almost saying the same thing.
01:21:11.000 Like, this is someone who wanted to be identified and wanted to solve the problem of identity.
01:21:16.760 And, okay, like you said, it's very relatable.
01:21:19.020 I mean, he, when you look at his little manifesto, it's not even, it's not even one, right?
01:21:25.400 It's this kind of absent-minded thing where it's, it's, it's like summary and after the
01:21:29.820 fact, I mean, he simply needed to, just my opinion here, obviously we have to discount
01:21:34.680 what he did too. 0.95
01:21:35.960 And there's this discourse about him being like, like mentally ill. 0.96
01:21:40.680 Okay.
01:21:40.980 So that's always a factor, but you know, this, this was not someone trying to achieve something
01:21:47.060 political.
01:21:47.440 Like, I don't even think he meets any modern definitions of terrorism.
01:21:51.800 Like, he easily could have, you know.
01:21:55.800 That's part of what's strange about it to me.
01:21:59.880 Yeah, especially for someone like, he had a good reader view of industrial society and its future.
01:22:11.860 uh like he had read tag kaczynski's manifesto though and you have that four stars out of five
01:22:18.340 on goodreads so for him to like not even like bother with a manifesto as like a fairly the
01:22:26.540 highly educated guy who's like actually doing some fairly advanced um offset techniques like
01:22:34.500 they did not have his identity even after the yacht bath back to his hotel that he had managed
01:22:40.660 to book a hostel without using an identifying credit card
01:22:46.300 or any identifying ID, which is impressive.
01:22:50.460 Yeah, it is.
01:22:52.580 In spite of all that,
01:22:57.200 in spite of that sophistication,
01:22:59.860 this is where I'm very empathetic to the conspiracy theorist
01:23:05.700 because the manifesto does not match the sophistication of the crowd.
01:23:10.200 the manifesto like uh you know the natalie rutnow the uh fem cell shooter who wasn't actually a
01:23:18.020 fem cell uh like her manifesto was more in-depth than complex yeah yeah more more depth of feeling
01:23:26.980 more more more scope that's the one that the tennessee star put out right uh so it was um
01:23:34.680 it was originally picked the originally there are leaks that said she referenced rad femme hitler 0.87
01:23:41.840 on twitter which uh she did not that was faked and then um oh the okay the fem cell shooter is
01:23:49.280 not the same as the trans tennessee shooters am i bad no no no this was like a 15 year old girl
01:23:55.480 in um wisconsin who was obsessed with like uh obsessed with other mass shooters which is like
01:24:02.480 actually i i need to write a piece on it and like how it relates to like uh you know conceptions of
01:24:10.200 like media and how the mass shooting itself has become like and the manifesto has become like a
01:24:17.040 form of like media and message in the modern world and how like it like uh we now have had a generation
01:24:26.760 of mass shooters who have been like almost possessed or like haunted by the ghosts of
01:24:32.880 the shooters who went before which is you know ellie rogers ghost it appears in people's dreams
01:24:40.000 100 and look if you're going to study shooting school shooting you're going to study columbine
01:24:46.940 it's almost like required reading right it's the it's the literature of school shooting
01:24:51.860 um and we find that all these people do in fact engage with the columbine history materials um
01:25:00.080 so i agree with you there's like a there's a discourse yeah honestly i think part of the
01:25:09.660 reason they all engage with columbine is because like klebold and um and harris were like very
01:25:16.420 plainly hotter. That's like
01:25:18.440 all the school shooters
01:25:20.340 that came after. They had that
01:25:22.040 90s Americana
01:25:24.060 build and look to them
01:25:25.900 sense of fashion
01:25:27.280 that
01:25:28.160 somehow stopped
01:25:31.900 existing in the mid 2000s
01:25:34.100 which is fascinating in and of itself.
01:25:37.680 But
01:25:37.700 I agree there was like a
01:25:39.660 yeah there was a
01:25:41.660 1999
01:25:42.300 aesthetic
01:25:44.300 that they at least complimented, you know, that...
01:25:51.100 You know, a Columbine way could be a musical style.
01:25:56.960 Like, it was a very distinctive, distinctive aesthetic ballet. 0.56
01:26:04.800 Ballet displaced men and girls become obsessed with.
01:26:08.840 But, uh, but within the 3D printed space, um, obviously you have been following this much closer than I am. I sadly cannot play with this stuff at all being in a legal regime where, where like, that's basically entirely illegal and, you know, I'm politically exposed. If I get raided for something, I say a line, uh, I don't want.
01:26:37.560 yeah yeah i can't have anything found in my apartment but you know it's what's funny is
01:26:43.180 the state of the technology now you know canada kept it legal longer than i was just saying
01:26:49.460 canada kept it legal longer than you might you might guess uh but you're you're still right to
01:26:54.540 say it's we're closed to you now um the state of the law this is a complicated thing and it's
01:27:02.180 always complicated with guns and gun law in the united states because there are the federal rules
01:27:06.560 which have their notable exceptions and then there are the state laws which sometimes ignore
01:27:14.360 the federal laws uh and then there are the the court the court precedents which you should
01:27:20.260 consider as well and when you're in frontier activity like 3d guns all this stuff is being
01:27:25.380 determined in these marginal places so there are states which have just tried to outright ban the
01:27:31.180 activity. Like, um, in this case, I mean, New Jersey always pops up in these lists, but
01:27:35.560 you know, you think of New Jersey, Nevada to some degree, like in vaguer terms, more vague terms,
01:27:42.780 California, Washington, they're, they're really trying to make sure that the activity cannot
01:27:46.540 happen. Um, now California is not the same situation as New Jersey, but, uh, and then
01:27:53.580 there are States that are just trying to include the activity within and try to make it make sense
01:27:58.540 with or comport with like standard gunsmithing or commercial gun activity to some degree that's what
01:28:04.980 the the biden ghost the biden era ghost gun rules were doing they redefined like at the beginning
01:28:10.420 of this podcast you you you had a taxonomy of rifle receivers and the biden era rule
01:28:17.540 was an attempt to again redefine and recreate that taxonomy so now we have two families of
01:28:24.620 receivers in the United States. We have rifle receivers. There can only be one. And we have
01:28:31.520 handgun frames. And these can have complete and incomplete variants now, which according to the
01:28:37.180 Supreme Court, either of which at any time, depending upon manifold circumstances, can still
01:28:42.220 be considered a firearm. So we discussed some of that. So the federal rules now, especially after
01:28:48.200 the Supreme Court decision, are more expansive. And in anticipation of those federal rules being
01:28:53.760 backed up a lot of states have adopted the same definitions of frame and receiver and they've
01:28:59.840 carbon copied the old school what's called the undetectable firearms act as a way of basically
01:29:05.400 giving them backup firepower for if people are to 3d print guns that can pass through metal detectors
01:29:09.940 which used to be one of the only ways of of regulating the activity and then there are some
01:29:14.520 cities like philadelphia who are outliers that have just kind of gone out of their way to say
01:29:18.560 you're never going to make a gun here with a 3d printer or a mill or anything else
01:29:22.160 And, you know, they see they see the fact that, like, people can make guns and they're like, oh, yeah, you can't do that here.
01:29:28.480 So the state of the law is unevenly distributed across these, like, different levels of jurisdiction.
01:29:34.540 And we all look to the federal system to tell us what's going on.
01:29:38.140 And even if Congress can't do anything about it, the court, the Supreme Court is saying it's a free for all.
01:29:43.120 And you can basically do whatever you want.
01:29:47.780 Interesting. And the state of the technology itself.
01:29:52.160 Like, I've seen stuff that, you know, even pressure-bearing barrels that I saw a video online of a guy using removal electrolysis in, like, a bathtub to, like, convert a piece of piping into a rifled 9-millimeter barrel.
01:30:16.960 Barrel with, like, a DC battery.
01:30:22.160 uh what is the state of the tech technology itself now like uh like um obviously
01:30:31.380 obviously 3d printed receivers have been a thing for a decade now but in terms of like
01:30:38.940 the home firearm manufacturing industry uh sobby industry etc etc um i know basically for everyone
01:30:48.220 outside the u.s um within the u.s it's easy easy to order parts of you know uh trigger drippings
01:30:58.460 barrels any basically any part of a firearm except the receiver or you know make sure that sear
01:31:08.020 will not fire full off auto when you buy it but basically aside from that you could order in the
01:31:14.460 u.s in the in europe or like much of the world though you cannot order like a part for for fire
01:31:22.000 hardly at all or like you need special licensing permitting and stuff and this was g start's real 0.72
01:31:28.800 achievement is that his um fgc9 uh the fucking control 9 it was and pa ludy before him who was 0.66
01:31:39.220 also hounded to death, that their product was to design a firearm that could be built 0.89
01:31:47.280 entirely from, in J-Star's case, 3D printed parts and common hardware store devices and
01:31:56.300 equipment.
01:31:59.040 What is that at now?
01:32:00.480 Can you, like, if you're in, like, the most restricted country in Europe, if you're in
01:32:04.820 britain because you like manufacture a air 15 technologically setting aside the legal question
01:32:12.960 or is that like still very much beyond us yeah for an air 15 look you need a full machine shop
01:32:21.180 if you're if you're really going to do it an air 15 but at the same time the fgc9 like you pointed
01:32:25.840 out and its precursors like the ap9 still built with air 15 mechanics and fire control groups
01:32:34.100 in mind. And really like the genealogy of that gun still begins with design of the AR-15 and
01:32:42.760 being able to reproduce as many of those parts as you can. It's funny you mentioned Ludi. I mean,
01:32:48.300 Ludi, SMGs are the beginning of a strain of pure DIY because of politics efforts. And in fact,
01:32:57.660 we translate Ludi in our original Lucky Weapon effort. Like we wanted to make a gun and liberator
01:33:02.260 that anyone in the world could make because we, you know, we were trying to make a global
01:33:06.700 statement and like whatever inculcation. And okay, it's the retranslation of the liberator ethos
01:33:13.240 in FGC-9 that makes that project so successful. There had been another more hobbyist gun that was
01:33:19.320 being worked on by a different group of people in let's say the FOSCAD era. And one of its last
01:33:26.160 versions was called the ap9 j stark's contribution was to take that more americanized ap9 and bring
01:33:34.160 it back to pure commercial off-the-shelf components that anyone in europe could could produce so this
01:33:39.740 actually represents the two major strands that still exist in in what we call gun cad or 3d gun
01:33:45.620 culture there is an express obvious commercial subculture right it's impossible to make anything
01:33:54.080 online not not a commercial culture at this point or like, you know, productized. And this culture
01:34:03.280 really makes it has no pretenses about even being political. This happens a lot in gun culture on
01:34:07.960 the Internet where they're like, hey, no politics, please. I just like my guns. And it's something of
01:34:12.040 like an engineering ideology where they just exult in the product and the hobby itself and
01:34:19.520 disclaim any political consequences or motivations. That's still happened in 3D guns. And a lot of,
01:34:25.500 maybe even most of what you see on Foscad, like the subreddit or other places are
01:34:29.580 people without much of a political orientation, a nascent one, maybe just building the guns
01:34:36.520 because they're cool and available. And these guns include pistols, printed pistols, which are very
01:34:42.100 popular of polymerity rail type designs or what's called the FMDA pattern. Mangione's pistol was an
01:34:48.280 FMDA pistol, for example. And then more extensive or more involved projects are like building pistol
01:34:56.400 caliber, sorry, pistol caliber carbines like the FGC-9 or versions like the DB-9. Again,
01:35:03.820 the biggest group of these people doing this would call themselves hobbyists and at least pretend
01:35:08.780 that they don't have politics or at least nothing outside of standard American Second Amendment
01:35:13.640 politics and then i'm sorry no keep going this is excellent i thought i heard you um the you know
01:35:23.460 the second and you could say it's a still a minority culture within 3d gun culture a minority
01:35:29.940 subculture is a group that disclaims any commercial purpose even if it still has to make uncertain
01:35:37.100 alliances with like industrial sellers of kit parts and within that camp there is okay still
01:35:44.820 a political mission that political mission is still disoriented it has a kind of it suffers
01:35:51.580 like any online leftism of like a you know it can't commit itself to certain
01:35:57.780 metaphysics but it's absolutely dedicated to like leftist normativities like
01:36:06.620 you know diversity inclusion you know reaffirming online profiles and like minority sexual identities
01:36:14.300 and stuff this is just like what it is to be on discord you could say or what it is to be on
01:36:18.460 twitter and so there's a confusion of the medium and the message but still within these communities
01:36:23.400 there is the most virulent and i think virile form of 3d young culture it reproduces itself
01:36:29.760 and teaches people the actual design of these objects and acquisition of the of these projects
01:36:36.420 worldwide so the most effective and important projects being worked on are still within this
01:36:43.820 this culture but again it's kind of unmoored from its truly post-modern origins um so 3d guns are
01:36:52.860 still like a kind of a cringy difficult twitter mediated project of like uh basically a zoomer
01:37:01.720 culture, um, that needs to constantly be reminded of what it's actually meant to be doing. 0.96
01:37:08.520 Hmm. More, more black trans political prisoners. Uh, yeah. Yeah. And some of this is a, of course, 0.99
01:37:16.780 the consequences of like online anarchist discourse, but you know, it all just gets so
01:37:21.400 easily captured, um, by what, by what it is by, uh, you know, I, I read Hans George Mueller,
01:37:28.260 for example and profile politics end up always getting in the way of the actual manifest 3d gun
01:37:35.040 politics and the more interesting like media consequences of these things like well you know
01:37:40.660 are they are they guns or not and we should always stand the idea rep the idea that these aren't guns
01:37:48.120 and yet can become them but people bring back all the consequences of in the old fights of the 20th
01:37:56.680 century where they want to you know reimpose things like patent copyright you know they want
01:38:01.340 to bring they invite the state back into both like the economy of 3d guns and also its its core
01:38:07.840 its core definitions that's a mistake but it's also unavoidable fair enough and as for
01:38:15.920 we we discuss how 3d printers briefly how 3d printers have been like the spotted printing
01:38:25.480 off of weapons in like Myanmar and elsewhere. Have you seen any developments in kind of the
01:38:36.120 use of them on the czar world of the modern battlefield or? Yeah, we have. I mean, people, 0.93
01:38:45.000 that Myanmar story is the big one. Everyone points to that. Even the State Department points to it
01:38:49.960 the redefinition of some of its ITAR controls. And so it's the most, what, salient example.
01:38:57.320 And yet, you know, where 3D printed guns really seem to have a true life is in European criminal
01:39:05.480 cultures and kind of other non-American criminal cultures. And even then it's as almost an ironic, 0.54
01:39:12.780 more like statement of fashion you know there's there's this ironic relationship that even the
01:39:20.300 criminal element has with it which i find fascinating where like the law enforcement
01:39:26.860 and like surveillance institutions are kind of like over committed to treating the threat
01:39:32.920 seriously when you know what's funny about the phenomena is that it's um it's not all that
01:39:39.000 serious and yet can be airsoft conversions represent something similar to me like you know
01:39:44.600 these things are toys and yet like yeah you can still kill people with them yeah even 0.80
01:39:51.560 like the insane thing about europe and them trying to control firearms is that like they have
01:39:59.140 immediate like unsecured borders with with both both like the russian steppe and like north
01:40:08.880 africa like uh the the idea that they're going to stop or limit the transfer of firearms across
01:40:18.380 across the continent when they don't even have internal borders to the eu
01:40:22.620 like uh you can drive from france to estonia or even finland without passing through like a
01:40:32.500 checkpoint which i euros are poor they don't have cars but like you could you know if you're
01:40:39.360 smuggling guns and you'd have the money to afford a car in europe uh that that the the fantasy of
01:40:47.940 the gun control state is like this bizarre legal fever dream of like uh you know maybe it was
01:40:57.840 feasible in like the 80s and 90s maybe but not really even even then and like now it's like uh
01:41:08.900 like the very idea of like banning firearms like
01:41:13.060 like it seemed to have been like a product to go after dissidents in the nine 1.00
01:41:18.760 90s that like they propagandize like like uh old female boaters enough who like now live forever 0.98
01:41:27.540 forever so like the propaganda you give like a woman in her 50s in the 90s is still like being
01:41:34.860 voted on 25 years later and yeah i i mean i like the characterization at the same time
01:41:43.700 there is some currency with like linking this activity in europe with the right
01:41:51.440 and and there's some truth to it too but what's funny is from my perspective it's funny so a few
01:42:00.760 people share my perspective about this you know like the only real gun control state in in europe
01:42:07.780 is you know technically not europe it's the uk and they they feel really injured by the phenomenon
01:42:12.360 of 3d guns no doubt and they like to hyperventilate about guns already anyway and so they don't shut
01:42:17.740 up about the 3d gun threat but it does seem to me that like the eurozone proper basically
01:42:23.780 can't can't complain that loudly about it especially with the ukrainian situation and
01:42:29.600 you know if you remember before ukraine really as like a conflict
01:42:33.680 there did you ever see like uh the last panther or anything like that um
01:42:38.420 i'm trying to think of specifically european productions um oh no i uh aside from large
01:42:47.380 I don't get much European cinema in my diet.
01:42:50.860 It might have been called The Last Panthers or something.
01:42:53.320 But there's this like idea that Europe's margins are it's almost like that movie, The Prophet, too.
01:42:58.820 Like, well, European Cold War boundaries culturally are in somewhere like around Belgrade.
01:43:08.360 And, you know, anything can can flow back to Europe.
01:43:11.260 I mean, you know, anything like ethically, materially will flow back into Europe as like the consequences of Europe's brother wars or something.
01:43:21.840 And that was that was like the European gun control imaginary. 0.69
01:43:26.600 And then I think Ukraine just completely scrambled all that. 0.85
01:43:29.580 Like anybody can get anything they want in Europe right now.
01:43:32.520 you know you know cartney thinks the reason um europe is freaking out about the prospect of like
01:43:42.280 ukraine losing or negotiating it's just because they know the second war ends like everyone
01:43:49.060 funding an army in ukraine is going to turn into like a cartel leader like funding whoever in
01:43:57.400 western europe you know some some like far-right extremist in germany like has a friend or a buddy
01:44:03.940 in ukraine or like went to volunteer was encouraged by their government and then they
01:44:08.360 and then like some of those guys didn't die some of those guys are going to come home
01:44:12.980 and you know we're up in the odyssey already pride canada's like but uh you know i'm thinking
01:44:24.660 this bill i guess when trudeau is still still in power they announced like the kind of well
01:44:32.580 follow-up to the all the gun control they've been doing and they said like hey you know all these
01:44:36.140 new rifles you gotta turn them in and by the way um they're going to a good place we're gonna send
01:44:41.760 them over to ukraine no um all right so canada's gun was that you you you've led me into talking
01:44:52.740 about them the thing about canada that you have to understand is that like our police like
01:44:58.700 have never had enforcement capacity um like canada despite being on paper one of the most
01:45:06.760 totalitarian places in the world and like um has like a really totalitarian playable culture 0.77
01:45:13.100 enforced by all these old presbyterian women um like canada canada has like both the most 0.96
01:45:21.380 authoritarian population on earth and like the least authoritarian setting possible like uh
01:45:30.100 like uh to understand the state of like canadian policing you understand that like
01:45:38.140 the manhunt like the five-star gta like um like all assets like the entire state turning on one
01:45:47.020 individual manhunt was invented in canada in the 30s to hunt down a guy called them
01:45:52.880 called um robert johnson the mad trapper of rat river who like shot several cops and like
01:46:00.500 led a 50 day like 40 below foot chase across the arctic and and this was the first time air assets
01:46:12.520 were brought out to track an individual and he was used to track this guy at minus 40 like he
01:46:17.560 crossed mountain ranges that were thought to be impassable in summer in the dead of winter like
01:46:23.240 trying to escape these people and and this is like above the arctic circle this is like
01:46:28.520 like you know polar bearers you could stumble upon them during this this event and they finally
01:46:35.140 found him got him shot him and then they realized they had no idea who he was the mystery of him
01:46:41.160 like still still wasn't solved when like the last of documentaries were made some people insist that
01:46:46.960 like oh they know who he is now and i have looked looked into it but um canada has had like insane
01:46:53.960 stuff like that but on and off forever like this wasn't even the first story like this in the
01:46:58.360 arctic there were ones going back to like the 1890s of like these cat and fever cases or like
01:47:04.040 guys going nuts and then with their hunting shotguns going after like police officers and
01:47:09.780 stuff so you have this like inherently insane population like like who's already who's in
01:47:18.100 conditions that like are not set up for like human survival or sanity you know like in places where
01:47:24.100 like in the dead of winter night might be like 18 hours longer like total total like the hundreds
01:47:30.880 of kilometers from like a police detachment and people who self-selected for that like people who
01:47:38.160 said i want that i hate my fellow man that much that i will choose that and and so you have this
01:47:45.960 like presbyterian like school marm like government that's being voted on by all these old school
01:47:52.820 marms in like ontario and like like the quebecois who will always vote as left as they can pretty
01:48:00.780 much and then you have this like vast expanse of like you know at the mountains of madness
01:48:06.900 level insanity that like just cannot be policed so like um canada functionally has like more free
01:48:15.600 speech than the u.s like despite the fact that on paper um canada has like no speech rights like
01:48:24.000 it's all subject to a reasonable limit and like every judge in canada will say the reasonable
01:48:28.620 limit is whatever the government wants functionally you have insane free speech rights because
01:48:33.880 cops will just not go around to knock on doors over like a social media post they like the idea
01:48:41.040 like in in britain they like you know they'll knock on your door over a tv license a license
01:48:47.460 but uh the but like uh cops will like do everything they can to not knock on doors here and
01:48:56.760 kind of always have because they just like they don't want to see what's in the soul of people
01:49:03.640 in the dead of winter on a dark February night.
01:49:09.340 So, basically, that ethos that, like, you know,
01:49:16.260 you can basically post whatever you want on social media in Canada,
01:49:19.360 and, like, the government will encourage the social media companies to ban you,
01:49:23.520 but, like, despite the fact that they legally could,
01:49:25.700 they're not going to come and drag you away like they wouldn't win Britain.
01:49:29.020 that's been applied to gun laws where um like every single gun ban that has ever happened in
01:49:35.800 canada the gun has been banned and then nothing has been done to try and take it back you know
01:49:42.480 it's just it's banned and when you die of old age you know your your niece or daughter might like
01:49:53.500 feel very nervous about the fact that it's banned and she doesn't have a firearms license
01:49:58.460 and turn it in like that's how canadian gun laws are enforced there's no effort to take them back
01:50:04.620 you know if you're caught committing another crime crime they'll hit you with it as an enhancement
01:50:10.600 though like canadian law like doesn't have long sentences you know you can be running like a
01:50:16.600 heroin smuggling operation get like three years in canada you know you can be caught with like
01:50:22.020 20 illegal guns and get, like, five years. Five years. Like, there's no real, like, I knew a guy
01:50:31.480 who, well, I didn't know the guy, knew the girl who he murdered. The girl was murdered by
01:50:39.620 her boyfriend, ex-boyfriend. There was, like, a story there I'm not gonna repeat, but
01:50:47.180 murdered like an underage girl got 14 years like that's how insanely low canadians
01:50:56.760 sentences are so like there's no real penalty and they are going to enforce it so like um
01:51:03.760 i know guys who are like legal gun owners have all the licensing and stuff and have like um
01:51:11.700 The trio pass these gun bans, like, making all these firearms prohibited.
01:51:17.300 Though the thing is, like, there's still guys with prohibitive licenses that they don't issue.
01:51:22.460 There's no legal way to get these licenses.
01:51:24.200 They're just eternally grandfathered in because they don't want to deal with it.
01:51:28.840 But there's still guys who legally have, like, German World War II, like, heavy, squad-heavy machine guns,
01:51:37.140 like whatever the German equivalent of a .50 Cal is.
01:51:39.960 and has like the tripod and a volley fire sighting system like a little little um whatchamacallit
01:51:49.420 uh analog german computer volley firing a machine gun it just has this like in his basement and it
01:51:57.720 works and he has the ammo for it for it and like um like that's technically legal legal and everyone
01:52:09.360 knows that if he dies there's going to be breaking out of his house and that's going to
01:52:13.040 disappear somewhere else and no one's going to investigate too closely and that's like every gun
01:52:21.860 that has ever entered canada there's like a fear the one percent of these firearms is like ever
01:52:28.900 recovered except at a crime crime scene once it's out there and like basically even illegal firearms
01:52:36.520 that are floating around like don't wind up at crime scenes because why would you use a legal
01:52:40.800 firearm it can be traced somewhere and was like probably like exotic in some way as opposed to
01:52:46.440 like you know it's trivial to cross the border and just get like iffy handguns from like any
01:52:53.280 stay in the u.s you know you can knock across the border bring over whenever you want so all the
01:52:59.760 like gun bans and stuff in canada um are profoundly toothless like um to the point where
01:53:09.420 uh i know some guys who like run ranges and they were asking you know what happens if someone
01:53:17.520 brings one of these now illegal guns and fires them at the range and the range officers and the
01:53:23.480 police are saying oh you do not have a responsibility to be aware of the legality
01:53:28.400 of the guns being fired at your range you know that's on the individual like range member or
01:53:34.300 whatnot yeah so like if someone shows up with like uh anything really and fires it at like a shooting
01:53:44.340 range like uh as long as because like all these ranges are in the middle nowhere and have like
01:53:53.040 one shooter at a time you know use like just a sign-in system like a shoot paper like uh
01:53:59.480 there isn't even a way to like stop people from like recreationally firing these these like now
01:54:06.320 illegal fire arms that uh and there isn't like well you'd think it'd be like oh but this gives
01:54:16.240 them like a mechanism if they ever want to go after dissidents and it's like yeah but they don't
01:54:21.160 even have the like state capacity to go after distance like uh like canada is in this eternal
01:54:31.640 state of hypothetically being one of the most totalitarian countries on earth while simultaneously
01:54:39.480 also being like this completely lawless like frontier and that just kind of its eternal state
01:54:48.260 like that account and i believe it of course but there are you know you mentioned state capacity
01:54:56.420 there's there's still like forms of life that this prevents forming like there will never be
01:55:06.720 the equivalent of the nra in canada at this point and i i met people who are attempting to create
01:55:13.000 something like that and i'm not saying that you need an nra for example but you know they've like
01:55:19.140 replacing whatever that original commonwealth and french canadian stock is with like this new
01:55:27.340 perfect form of metropolitan subject and i do believe that like at least in the cities and
01:55:35.420 the places that matter the gun control will be effective is effective i suppose we you know we
01:55:42.300 differ on what effective means well like canadian canadian cities are like
01:55:49.060 increasingly lawless directors for international crime like this is the the dirty secret canada
01:55:55.700 is that like um basically the the entire economy of canada is a money laundering scheme for like 0.85
01:56:01.920 ccp um like dirty funds or like indian organized crime and stuff like the canadian housing market 0.97
01:56:10.500 is not the most expensive housing market in the world
01:56:13.520 because the Canadian economy has fundamentals
01:56:16.660 or even due to scarcity.
01:56:19.040 It's because it's the laundering mechanism
01:56:22.160 for the world to organize crime,
01:56:24.560 which is why Canada probably won't exist in 15 years.
01:56:27.980 There'll be some crisis, some international incident,
01:56:31.080 and it'll get annexed,
01:56:34.080 and all the Canadian provinces will become U.S. territory,
01:56:38.460 and they might stay in territorial limbo
01:56:41.300 not as mid-ed as states for like 50, 100 years
01:56:44.560 the same way Hawaii and Alaska
01:56:46.960 did not become U.S. states until 1959
01:56:49.220 or Oklahoma didn't become a state until 1912
01:56:53.720 that just become like this non-voting
01:56:56.900 non-represented part where like
01:56:59.860 you know some of the people will be given U.S. citizenship
01:57:02.620 that doesn't translate into like
01:57:05.020 voting rights the same way Puerto Rico is today
01:57:07.840 and, oh no, it'll probably be better than the current state
01:57:12.240 or it might be a poison pill that starts the decline of the U.S.
01:57:19.320 Never underestimate Canada's ability to sow disappointment.
01:57:25.580 Well, I mean, my earliest readings of U.S. history are about,
01:57:29.880 you constantly see this expectation that Canada would follow along
01:57:34.200 and join eventually, and it never happens.
01:57:37.840 So I guess we'll watch what Trump does at Greenland, and we'll take our cues from there.
01:57:45.980 I'm very, very loosely related to the rebels of 1837 who fought an American-style revolution.
01:57:55.080 The banner that they carried of a set of liberty with two stars looks like an American revolutionary banner, but it's Canadian.
01:58:05.120 uh uh disappointed failed rebellion that went nowhere several of them were hanging several of
01:58:14.560 them were transported to australia and then within 10 years all of them were members of the canadian
01:58:18.720 parliament that like yeah not even the vengeance on them went anywhere you know yeah not even it
01:58:26.180 not even the victors over the rebels got what they wanted they're still putting up with them
01:58:30.500 10 years later they couldn't even hang them all i buy that i totally recuperated um and you know
01:58:37.940 is probably something we would look forward to here i mean of all the ever again second
01:58:44.140 amendment talk i've heard in the course of my career which is not that long but i mean what
01:58:50.420 over a decade you know it's funny to me how trump rehabilitated so much of that talk and
01:58:57.140 and really blunted it and i would say to some degree
01:59:00.460 oh i mean to a large degree like the second amendment culture is really a
01:59:06.460 it doesn't have the doesn't have the convictions of its courage
01:59:12.560 yeah the like the the valley of the second amendment is it got the u.s the point where
01:59:23.280 is today where it had where there are more guns than americans and where there's no way to ever
01:59:29.120 get those firearms back and you know the u.s the u.s can never go to totalitarian or like
01:59:37.800 have like a a communist chaos because it would turn into an all-out chaos that the administrative
01:59:47.620 state will eternally tie itself into knots to not change anything and not do anything
01:59:53.820 because the American state fundamentally like cannot change itself and cannot alter the
02:00:01.300 American arrangement because of that.
02:00:05.740 I like, I almost want to borrow from what you were saying about that Canadian manhunt
02:00:09.460 in the Arctic where I think that's one of the theses of like McCarthy's blood meridian
02:00:17.340 or something harold bloom always linked american gun culture to what was being said
02:00:23.820 in that novel and i agree with it curtis says something similar like there's just something
02:00:30.160 fundamentally violent and religious about america as an idea and the american people and okay maybe
02:00:39.700 you need frontier space something so vast as like our midwest to accomplish whatever like
02:00:46.880 the moral abandon required to preserve a gun culture but i can now look at like the gun
02:00:53.340 cultures that aren't particular to you know the white population there's an urban criminal gun
02:01:00.940 culture you know obviously a specifically african-american gun culture united states like 0.59
02:01:04.920 these things are officially illegal and yet constitutive and that is where i place my hope
02:01:15.060 right now or like there's just so much not even latent criminality but outright
02:01:19.220 ornamental criminality that requires a gun culture and um as we all begin to like
02:01:25.700 lose our demographic definition and everyone nurses like these ethnic grievances
02:01:30.800 it still seems to me like the capacity for civil war to back up that kind of rhetoric or
02:01:36.700 that kind of identity you know that's that's only because of american gun culture and therefore
02:01:42.420 will be preserved i know the it'd be interesting to imagine what the 60s would look like today
02:01:53.340 with um the proliferation firearms because of course like the 60s you know was basically
02:02:01.640 a civil war um people who read brian burrell's book days of rage know that like
02:02:08.500 2000 bombs went off in 1972 across america but uh like before that the mass rioting in like
02:02:18.160 every american city like the destruction of like a hundred different american cities um
02:02:23.620 there's a real question as to like if that could happen again today without like going immediately 0.86
02:02:31.940 hot they're like the chasing of like american whites out of the cities that they built
02:02:39.300 with like extraordinary violence against them and against their children and the complete 0.68
02:02:47.000 destruction of like the america that existed like from the founding to 1964 like this entire like
02:02:57.620 mode of urban american life like uh like the classic american like main streets
02:03:04.540 were systematically destroyed across the eastern u.s um
02:03:08.680 like with state backing like none of that would have been possible without like the advent of
02:03:18.120 like the rise of modern policing and the fact that um right the writers basically had police
02:03:25.160 to protect them from the local population it it's really doubtful if that would like work today
02:03:33.160 like we already saw with um with the summer at floyd in miniature that uh that the capacity to
02:03:41.620 like actually affect american cities from like these riding subpopulations like did not penetrate
02:03:50.780 very far out of their neighborhoods and like where it did uh you got stuff like rittenhouse
02:03:57.200 that immediately like became nationals national stories um same thing happened with hurricane
02:04:03.400 katrina where the the like wealthy neighborhoods were not looted and you had guys like confessing
02:04:10.700 to like, like shooting dozens of looters and nothing happening.
02:04:17.020 And, and the, there's a real, this seems to me, question of whether the American state
02:04:27.120 can even like do any of the moon in verse it's starkly done to like wage different
02:04:34.260 populations against each other.
02:04:35.700 nicholas johnson he's a he's a law professor um but he he wrote some books on not just the
02:04:44.560 second amendment but like the black historical experience of ownership of arms through american
02:04:49.960 history and you know he points out that not necessarily that this is by design like he's not
02:04:56.840 he's not like a marxist historicist or something but he says that basically in the in the 60s and
02:05:04.300 70s you get these municipal settlements where beforehand like even even the dudes that there
02:05:10.440 were like these uh vigilantes who protected martin luther king for example like the deacons of
02:05:14.940 defense or obviously you have the experience of the black panthers and you know you had this
02:05:19.100 increasingly like what ended up becoming pan-african theories of violence and um but before 0.63
02:05:25.780 that required uh like the negro experience to be a separate and armed form of american life
02:05:33.740 it was like the there's series of municipal settlements happened all at the same time 0.78
02:05:38.600 brokered by democrat party bosses where okay look we're going to just we're going to disarm
02:05:43.500 you but we're also going to protect your telluric forms of violence so you know even if it's not 0.52
02:05:50.460 like a direct objective license it's understood that like you know you're turning in your guns
02:05:56.100 and yet the your gangland life is still a kind of unofficial militia form of democratic party
02:06:02.280 activity um there's something sociological here which is like i'm not giving it its due but i
02:06:10.200 think you see what i'm saying in outline yeah like um this is one of the things with like the
02:06:20.920 manji only case that like basically every hood rat crime in america could be solved with like
02:06:29.520 one-tenth the effort 0.73
02:06:31.500 that was put into tracking down Manjami.
02:06:34.720 Like,
02:06:36.140 if they use, like, cell tower
02:06:37.660 analysis and
02:06:39.240 and, like,
02:06:42.640 like,
02:06:43.540 the backdoor NSA tricks
02:06:45.300 and, you know,
02:06:48.620 start doing through
02:06:49.440 CCTV camera footage
02:06:51.660 and stuff, like,
02:06:54.480 just
02:06:55.620 cross-reference, like,
02:06:56.820 yeah.
02:06:58.700 Pardon?
02:06:59.520 sorry there is reporting about this being done in chicago which you must know i mean there are
02:07:05.000 these special information war techniques and kind of extra legal methods of interrogation and
02:07:13.900 basically like municipal black sites and uh uncomfortable overlap with like nsa and deep
02:07:21.100 state techniques like this is all happening in chicago to like combat the problem i don't know
02:07:26.980 if you're aware of it well like the thing is it'd be like trivial to like get most if not all of
02:07:37.100 them them within like an individual area like pretty quickly what appears to be happening in
02:07:44.860 chicago is that they're using it to shape and control the chaos like you know same u.s policy
02:07:54.280 that you see in the Middle East but applied to
02:07:56.100 South Chicago where
02:07:58.100 they don't
02:08:00.080 actually want the chaos to end
02:08:02.140 because that's like
02:08:03.920 an incredibly important
02:08:07.540 political class
02:08:09.600 that ties into the control
02:08:11.980 of the city.
02:08:14.680 Like
02:08:14.700 Rahm Emanuel
02:08:16.500 could not have risen
02:08:21.560 in a non-corrupt Chicago. 0.75
02:08:24.280 Like, Chicago, the entire Chicago political class could not exist without, like, a low-level war constantly happening in South Chivon. 0.57
02:08:32.960 Yeah, yeah. 0.73
02:08:34.180 But employing these techniques, they can, like, shape and form it, and they can direct it certain ways.
02:08:40.740 They can make it not go other ways.
02:08:43.840 You know, they can stall their guys and keep positions.
02:08:47.680 that you make sure that they you know if if anyone like threatens them them they can be
02:08:57.660 taken out if anyone like like starts doing something that like generates revenue or harms
02:09:05.480 like a favor group they can be given lenient uh why a blind eye whereas any if anyone's
02:09:13.300 attacking their interests they can have like the force of the state can bat on them
02:09:17.420 like um that like there's no reason american cities like there's no reason american cities
02:09:26.420 like could not do what all salvador has done like basically entirely legally like uh the
02:09:34.700 the utter lacking like opsec that you see from so many of these like criminal underclasses and the
02:09:44.400 like layers of criminal activity and like the opportunity to just like
02:09:49.620 target and put away people with like any number of of charges like but in the u.s you can give
02:09:56.500 someone like double life plus 40 years for a non-violent offense you know as yourself with
02:10:03.500 Ulbrich on a first-time offense.
02:10:05.820 Like, there's nothing that
02:10:07.440 if they, like, were pretty
02:10:09.360 convinced someone had committed, like, a double
02:10:11.200 homicide, they couldn't put away, put them
02:10:13.320 away for life for something,
02:10:14.960 something else unrelated
02:10:17.240 or drug-related or what have you.
02:10:19.940 It's just, they choose not to.
02:10:21.760 They, they don't want,
02:10:24.660 they like, 0.98
02:10:26.020 they like there to be a war zone
02:10:27.560 part of every city that 1.00
02:10:29.420 they can wield against, like, the white 0.87
02:10:31.340 middle class, that
02:10:33.120 that you know the the suburbanites can never return to downtown and like start demanding
02:10:42.020 accountable government or like starting through through the um the spending habits of the political
02:10:49.860 class because they constantly have have to be on edge and voting and like politically organizing
02:10:55.380 around like keeping their narrow zip code uh on the right side of like school lines
02:11:01.220 yes i in general look and and i can agree with this without wanting the united states to turn
02:11:08.940 to el salvadorian methods of course we can both again expect that those methods would solve a lot
02:11:15.580 of problems that because they're not solved i agree look like requirements for uh managing
02:11:22.680 the political situations of some of these these cities and states uh you know just because we're
02:11:28.000 on the topic of Chicago, it's worth pointing out that a year ago, exactly a year ago, in March of
02:11:34.140 24, the federal judge said that under a Bruin analysis, the Second Amendment meant that
02:11:40.140 the illegal immigrants in Chicago were allowed to possess firearms. And, you know, it's the kind of
02:11:48.740 height of like this masterful, ironic relationship that the elite bar maintains
02:11:55.160 with these exact
02:11:58.220 descriptions that we're making
02:12:00.200 that they can even use
02:12:01.820 these developments in the Second Amendment
02:12:03.940 to further
02:12:04.620 improve their kind of like
02:12:07.500 gangland management
02:12:10.080 of these political conditions in these cities.
02:12:16.000 Yeah, no, the
02:12:17.460 the like
02:12:19.480 overlap of
02:12:21.540 of anarcho-tyranny in these
02:12:24.280 like
02:12:25.160 demographic divide and conquer techniques is like endlessly irateable uh you know the one wonders
02:12:36.760 uh whether the Habsburgs or or the Clintons did it better but uh it's a technique is the oldest
02:12:47.700 time to to use these exceptions to maintain a position of power um sure you become nostalgic
02:13:00.980 though for dynastic conflicts it all has a story it all makes sense like i don't know how any of
02:13:06.460 this how any of this makes sense and yet i don't i don't need it to i'm just again i'm trying to
02:13:13.340 conduct a kind of operation uh in like american media and american life insofar as that exists
02:13:21.660 i think it's been done i think we're doing it uh but you know you come into constant contact
02:13:28.640 with like uh the reality of the of these political monstrosities and you know i do this podcast
02:13:35.280 today because i'm just trying to relay something of that experience which i think is beyond most
02:13:40.080 people's day to day yeah again we are we are well past the point of like american politics or world
02:13:49.460 politics uh making center in the late to click decay uh you know where the samurai's where the
02:13:57.740 little samurai the trail stories and conspiracy theories are like uh layering up the point of
02:14:05.080 unintelligibility you know this god tricks odysseus onto this island where this group tells
02:14:12.480 him there's a cave where there's a cyclops inside where he accidentally offends by eating his sheep
02:14:18.960 and that that cyclops was the son of the sea god so now the sea god is ticked at him and that's
02:14:26.520 why there's a storm on the island of the phatians and why the phatians had to sacrifice their
02:14:32.500 process to the sea god because the god of because a wind god tricked a greek from across the seas
02:14:42.400 into eating a sheep
02:14:44.260 but uh but no uh uh it's it's certainly interesting we're we're rolling we're all rolling the dice
02:14:59.720 increasingly quickly uh so if people are interested in your in your work and your
02:15:08.060 projects where should they look you up now can you look me up we're defcad.com ghostgunner.net
02:15:16.780 ghostguns.com we run a few things online and we'll have a new product in a month from now
02:15:23.960 that will debut at NRA as a kind of follow-up to the Supreme Court's opinion here.
02:15:30.640 So maybe you'll see that soon enough, too.
02:15:34.420 And I want to recommend your book, Come and Take It,
02:15:39.180 The Gun Printer's Guide to Thinking Free.
02:15:41.940 It is a wonderful snapshot of early 2010's cypherpump culture.
02:15:49.220 uh there are about a dozen other projects of yours we could could have talked about
02:15:56.880 on this podcast obviously uh the side of patreon and like the story of you know internet financial
02:16:04.740 censorship uh uh the your dark walled project which like was kind of eaten by monero and a few
02:16:13.800 other other coin projects um uh it's one of the i strongly recommend the book come and take it the
02:16:27.060 gunfighters guys printing free it's a one-year snapshot in like the insane stories of um
02:16:33.820 the cyberpunk 2010s and and from that one snapshot you're going to get like
02:16:42.660 1% of the story.
02:16:46.440 Sorry, the absolute insanity
02:16:48.060 that has happened over the past 15 years
02:16:51.220 online and in politics and elsewhere
02:16:53.620 is like...
02:16:58.120 Someone's going to write a great book about it sometime.
02:17:00.300 Probably not me.
02:17:02.660 I think Andy Greenberg thinks he'll write the book.
02:17:06.720 You know, thank you for recommending that book.
02:17:09.460 I do think, even at the time,
02:17:11.100 I just wanted to represent
02:17:12.200 that just a kind of compilation of what it was like. And I remember reading like Benjamin's
02:17:19.460 storyteller essay. I was trying to like, just tell a story and not, you know, write a novel
02:17:27.680 or something. And, you know, my editors kept wanting to shoot everything through with explanation.
02:17:32.160 And of course, you know, I didn't have much stylistic power or control or not as much as
02:17:38.960 I would want back then. So, you know, the, the book to me still represents something of like a
02:17:42.860 compromise, but it was nevertheless an accomplishment to publish that commercially
02:17:47.720 of Mitchell Ivers at Simon & Schuster. And then to really still convey the, the message I wanted
02:17:53.540 to convey, which is a pretty triggering. Uh, and I, you know, I'm still amazed that that book is
02:18:00.060 around and um still available but thanks for complimenting no there's like you need at least
02:18:09.800 like pen books to understand what happened in the 2010s uh and half of those books are like
02:18:18.080 you know and if you if you read any of the like stories about like ross albrecht you know those
02:18:25.120 are riddled with lies but you read anything about julian assange those are riddled with lies
02:18:28.900 you know uh anything to do with satoshi nakamoto or early bitcoin it's like this intense maze
02:18:36.740 of um contradicting claims and stories and like several people have claimed to be satoshi nakamoto
02:18:44.240 yes uh several several people are speculate to have it been him they're still like
02:18:51.140 a billion several billion dollars in bitcoin that's like floating around out there we know
02:18:58.920 where the wall we know what the wall is we know where it's sitting yeah it hasn't moved we have
02:19:04.000 no idea who this like insane asset is attached to if it is attached to anyone and and then there's
02:19:12.020 your story which is actually like every everything's like barely open in the public and it's all like
02:19:18.620 been heavily documented and litigated and like what's all happening in in texas and it's as
02:19:26.640 interesting and like as revealing a story as like any of those because the fact that it was all
02:19:36.300 legal and happening in the open and in the presses and in like you know the the pages of reason
02:19:44.100 magazine like like it was all getting litigated in a way where you can see where it's one of the
02:19:52.060 few ones of these where you could actually like see in real time what the issues were and it
02:19:58.220 wasn't being obscured behind a thousand layers of of OPSEC and and you know ideological and
02:20:07.220 technological like hiding it's a it's a wonderful reference point to like like have that in the
02:20:15.820 back of your mind of like this kind of like watchdog cyberpunk funk era uh the stuff that
02:20:24.980 would go on to inspire like mr robot and so much slop but uh the like all this stuff that
02:20:34.500 was being
02:20:36.480 being litigated
02:20:39.060 to hell and 0.64
02:20:40.300 like completely obscure. Like we didn't 0.60
02:20:42.880 find out that the CIA
02:20:44.880 plotted to assassinate Sanj
02:20:46.780 until like years and years later.
02:20:49.360 And meanwhile, your story
02:20:50.700 is happening in parallel
02:20:52.480 and it's all
02:20:54.360 incredibly well documented and we all see
02:20:56.800 what was being revealed
02:20:58.800 where and when and to
02:21:00.920 who.
02:21:01.240 we had we had kim.com get hit you know the the kim.com raid and then people forget i mean but
02:21:09.020 snowden happened after liberator and 3d printed guns so there was the entire drama or you know
02:21:17.100 the dialectic is different before snowden and yeah ross ross is a part of that the dread pirates a
02:21:23.420 part of that uh the showrunners for mr robot admit that much of that show was inspired by you know
02:21:30.620 amir taki and time with me in berlin for example and there's just like i'm nostalgic for it of
02:21:38.340 course because i lived it but um early bitcoin what is amir taki up to i found he had a sub
02:21:45.460 stack yellow point and then he posted nothing to it i have no idea what that saga turned into if
02:21:52.400 anyway he and rose run what's called like the the dark phi operation so he he built this thing
02:22:02.660 called dark market which was like the first proof of like a functioning autonomous i mean it ended
02:22:09.160 up becoming open bizarre and then like it failed because they basically was a successor project to
02:22:14.300 the silk road um but it versions of that failed because people wanted to do it legally and then
02:22:20.160 he turned dark market into a crypto project which was like um both providing the anonymity
02:22:27.920 and the computing as well as the tokens you know so kind of like monero but if monero is a computer
02:22:34.600 or something like that's his project right now called darkfi and he's been working on a long
02:22:40.040 time he like re-centered himself you know around switzerland for a time he had to deal with a
02:22:44.240 terrorism investigation which was the subject of a documentary he and i were in 2017 um i mean
02:22:51.300 he has been busy and yet he's also become a kind of reactionary in bitcoin spaces because um he sees
02:22:58.520 so many of these people smuggling politics in or kind of hand-waving about the politics and he
02:23:04.620 tries to stay resolutely political about what he does hmm interesting no i
02:23:13.860 dark markets are ours i'll introduce you i'll introduce you at some point
02:23:19.940 that'd be very interesting i'd be very interested in that anyway we have gone for about two and a
02:23:27.480 half hours um i am sensitive to your time i promise i promise this would only go for two
02:23:34.020 hours so thank you for your your general save that's all good hey this is kind of a bucket
02:23:39.800 listing for me and i want to compliment you and your readers your listeners you know your real
02:23:44.880 band books list and other materials have been really helpful to me and um you know anything
02:23:49.980 i can do to support you i want to perfect thank you so much man and band book list version five
02:23:58.420 is in the works i'm not sure if i'll be a month from now or six months from now or a year from now
02:24:05.020 but uh it is out there and i have about like i have slouch for like uh 60 70 worse more books on
02:24:15.400 it then i want to be really i want to be sparing with with them find good ones because the the file
02:24:25.480 size uh virgin six is going to actually have to be a list not an image file
02:24:31.000 which will be interesting in itself there's texts i have that are only because of that list
02:24:38.540 like rhodesia accuses uh and then there's texts i have that i was happy to find on the list which
02:24:44.080 you know confirm my own baseness to me so it's a fun list for multiple reasons
02:24:49.740 no there
02:24:52.300 there's some on there that
02:24:54.820 eyes
02:24:57.880 blown away to find and some that
02:25:01.000 were like recommend to me
02:25:02.800 but like I'm pretty sure the person
02:25:04.800 who recommended them to me is the only person
02:25:06.820 who's read them in like 50 years
02:25:08.780 like yeah
02:25:10.340 I can believe it
02:25:12.260 alright then
02:25:14.340 any last thoughts
02:25:15.960 I'd say um
02:25:19.740 I'd say people have to do the kind of work that you're doing right now to be read, you know, a sub-stack and a medium.
02:25:25.920 I mean, these are the real things you have to be doing.
02:25:28.460 And so I'm grateful for your work.
02:25:33.300 Thank you so much.
02:25:34.260 And let us not forget podcasting, the ultimate discussion forum slash time-wasting medium.
02:25:42.680 many a trucker out there
02:25:46.120 who has not read a book
02:25:47.220 in a year plus
02:25:50.360 has listened to hundreds of hours
02:25:52.100 of these
02:25:52.620 not mine, but others
02:25:55.180 someones
02:25:56.900 thank you, I hope we speak again
02:25:59.200 alright, take it
02:26:12.680 Thank you.
02:26:42.680 We'll be right back.
02:27:12.680 Thank you.
02:27:42.680 Thank you.
02:28:12.680 Thank you.
02:28:42.680 Thank you.
02:29:12.680 Thank you.
02:29:42.680 Transcription by CastingWords