Cody Wilson is the founder and director of Defense Distributed, a non-profit organization that develops and publishes open source gun designs, so-called "Wiki Weapons" suitable for 3D printing. He's been called one of America's 30 influential pro-gun rights advocates, and one of the 15 most dangerous people in the world.
00:00:30.000This is Radio 314 on the Red Ice Radio Network.
00:01:00.000We'll talk all about it, including his battle with the government.
00:01:05.960Cody is the founder director of Defense Distributed, a non-profit organization that develops and publishes open-source gun designs, so-called WikiWeapons, suitable for 3D printing.
00:01:18.020He's been called one of America's 30 influential pro-gun rights advocates and one of the 15 most dangerous people in the world.
00:01:25.960Defense Distributed gained international notoriety in 2013 when it published plans online for the Liberator, a functioning pistol that could be reproduced with a 3D printer.
00:01:36.340You can see this gun in action and more on Cody's YouTube channel, Defense Distributed.
00:01:41.720But Cody is interested in much more than guns, with a philosophical and inquisitive mind.
00:01:46.560Not only does he share some of his political motivations, but I ask him about censorship, PC hacktivists, modernity, liberalism, culture, the alt-right, and much more.
00:02:04.520Well, when I told my listeners that you'd be coming on the show, they asked me to thank you for promoting solutions to our centralized system of control, which we need so badly.
00:02:12.120So thank you for everything you're doing.
00:02:45.020So I'm a little bit more than raised Christian.
00:02:48.020In fact, I'm quite exposed to the work of G.K. Chesterton and N.T. Wright, who is second only to Paul in my father's estimation.
00:02:58.660And I think I'm quite conversant with modernist Christian theology, but also a sincere strand of traditionalist understanding of Christian theology.
00:03:33.740I mean, yeah, dispositionally, I consider myself a libertarian.
00:03:36.720I was just invited to speak at a libertarian party conference, and this is an easy criticism to make.
00:03:43.580But, I mean, the point that there's a libertarian party is proof that, you know, the movement has died on the vine.
00:03:51.900I believe that, like, politics like anarchism are more useful than talking about libertarianism as an ethics or as a set of political principles.
00:04:02.160I mean, a more complete thought system is something like anarchism.
00:04:07.040So I tend to describe myself more as an anarchist than anything else.
00:04:11.140Well, it's funny, too, because I noticed this new breed of libertarians.
00:04:21.380Well, you know, I've noticed a tendency like this, too.
00:04:23.660I mean, thankfully, I'm too busy to just participate in university discourse for the rest of my fucking life.
00:04:29.620But, yeah, I've noticed that, like, a leftist anarchist critique has slowly kind of sauntered itself into discussions of privilege,
00:04:41.820mostly, I think, as a way of being a kind of entree to a class of liberal that normally isn't exposed to anti-state thought.
00:04:49.720And while this might be a short-term intelligent decision, I think long-term it just simply further obscures the actual potency of that discourse
00:05:01.660and then lapses libertarian thought into just, you know, the culture wars and this kind of pathetic university discourse about, you know, relativistic individual privilege.
00:05:40.460I, it's so hard to say, but, I mean, I've, antecedents like WikiLeaks, I mean, WikiLeaks was the most important thing in my thinking at that time.
00:05:51.360I mean, Ben Dineo, my co-founder, and I were absolutely fascinated by CableGate and what Assange had done.
00:05:56.860Not so much in, like, his thinking, but in how he had negated this entire kind of whitewashed system, this agreed-upon consensus about how diplomacy, formal diplomacy works, with this disavowal of certain, like, public conversations and knowledge.
00:06:14.300And he had just kind of thrown and opened all that stuff up and thrown it into the commons.
00:06:19.800And I'm only just appraising it here just for what it was.
00:06:22.320I mean, I don't even mean to attach any other greater significance ethically to it or morally.
00:06:27.060Just how one man was able to negate this entire system, which had pretty much operated since the, I don't know, conception of the modern, like, Westphalian state system.
00:06:37.600Look what the internet was allowing this guy to do.
00:06:39.320And then Bitcoin, he was breaking the blockade with Bitcoin.
00:06:43.840So that was the hottest stuff in the political to me since 2009, 2010.
00:06:52.200Into that environment, into that kind of garden of thought, we just stumbled one day on a phone call onto, you know, what is WikiLeaks for guns?
00:07:05.700Does the internet allow not just the transmission of cables and communication, but also, you know, the data, the constitutive data for creating articles?
00:07:16.600And that's how we discovered the whole conversation that had already been happening for many years about 3D printing and digital fabrication.
00:07:22.940So we discovered 3D printing via a conversation about WikiLeaks for guns.
00:08:22.780But the State Department, their Bureau of Political Military Affairs interfered with my operation
00:08:32.420and then basically made me bend the knee and forced me to get out of digital publication.
00:08:36.840And I had to—it took me two years to raise the money to fight them on that.
00:08:40.800And I'm now suing the State Department in federal court.
00:08:44.720Is that the lawsuit I was reading about?
00:08:46.280I know you can never trust what's on the line there, but the DDC is claiming you violated their arms export control.
00:08:52.080Is that what you're involved in right now?
00:08:54.060Yeah, that's—so the Director of Defense Trade Controls was put up to this by the national security staff of the Obama administration,
00:09:00.660which I think recognized, like, the problematic and embarrassing nature of just how much we were winning on this public narrative about the digital future of guns.
00:09:11.260Of course, this gets into, like, my philosophical interest.
00:09:14.000You know, we kind of de-eventalized the horizon of gun control in May of 2013.
00:09:22.780And of course, the public ideology, I mean, it's still there, but, you know, we're doing a good job any time we get to talk about it.
00:09:30.660Making it obvious that the Whig history and progress of gun control are not as simple as they appear to be.
00:09:41.600Like, even though it happened in symbolic terms, it had to be dealt with in symbolic terms.
00:09:45.340So even though there was no way of kind of immediately putting me in jail, they had to kind of contrive this way of stopping me.
00:09:50.640And they basically ended up using this Cold War export regime and then kind of re—like, forcing interpretation of it that blocks public speech,
00:10:03.500which it had never in history before been used to do.
00:10:06.560And so now we're going to court, and we found all these old affidavits and all the old—basically, like, an entire history of communications and intentions of this agency
00:10:16.540showing it had never before tried to affect public speech this way.
00:10:21.120I don't mean to get too into the weeds here.
00:10:23.160We can go as deep into that as you want.
00:10:26.040But basically, yeah, it was the use of the State Department to now stop public speech about a problematic political concept.
00:10:34.060Yeah, I was reading somewhere that the government's claiming basically that the Internet is available worldwide,
00:10:38.620so posting your blueprints is like—it's deemed an export?
00:11:55.020I enjoy the absurdity of it, and I believe that this is a kind of ladder by which to further, I don't know, gain spiritual authority in this.
00:12:04.460I mean, this sounds kind of indulgent and arrogant.
00:12:07.160I just mean that, like, I could have only imagined—like, I could have only dreamed of a conflict like this.
00:12:12.540Because by the law and by, you know, the ethics and other things, I mean, we win so handily that I kind of want to see how forced a panel of judges is, you know, to create bad law out of this.
00:12:27.520Because there's—I mean, I'm skeptical that they'll let me win just because, you know, it's the government's court talking about the government's powers.
00:12:34.380But, I mean, we win so many different ways on this, and their position is so tortured that I'm really curious to see just, you know, how quickly we can make them kind of create a suicidal and untenable position.
00:12:46.660Think they'll try and put you in jail in the end?
00:13:10.840When, in 13, I was doing a lot of our liberator work, like our printed gun work, I thought—like, I knew no matter what, that they would try to stop what I was doing.
00:13:22.720And the people at the ATF, the enforcement potentials at the ATF are so much more likely than some of the other laws I was looking at.
00:13:32.200So I at least came up with a narrative for how if I had a federal firearms license, I could say, well, look, I'm taking advantage of 922E and all these other things.
00:13:43.460So I knew that, like, if they gave me trouble, I'd at least be able to kind of grind it out in the courts and I wouldn't immediately go to jail.
00:13:48.720So I got an FFL just as a way of an insurance scheme, you know, a grand kind of CYA.
00:13:54.660And that's really how I've approached other things I've done in my activism, if you want to call it that.
00:14:00.240I just—you don't give them the easy way to play.
00:15:35.480I had, by the way, like, in June, I was sitting in court and listening to the state attorney lie about how I made one of these guns and, like, lie about the materials that I was using.
00:16:18.140Yeah, like, I've almost lost contact with it.
00:16:20.060Like, it's almost like me talking about someone else doing it instead of myself.
00:16:25.540But basically, we used a set of printers from the early 2000s by Stratasys.
00:16:30.640We used their Stratasys technique, which is called Fused Filament Modeling or Fused Deposition Modeling.
00:16:36.200It's kind of like an elaborate hot glue gun with a really fine degree of resolution.
00:16:42.140And you draw the part up from this, like, molten solidifying plastic in these many, many layers that your computer interprets for you from, like, a tessellated model that you can design in computer-aided design software.
00:16:55.900And I guess I just made it sound really complicated.
00:16:59.000Of course, most people who've been exposed here at this point know that it's really not.
00:17:04.100The design of the Liberator pistol only took a few weeks in the end.
00:17:08.660The real tricks were just coming up with printed springs that maintain the right spring tension.
00:17:13.680And the real, like, I'm going to, like, get off topic now.
00:17:20.200But to me, like, the real performance was always the bureaucratic, regulatory, and political performance, much less so, like, the actual physical creation of the pistol.
00:17:49.460I don't think it's, it's not like chemistry or other places in the physical sciences.
00:17:54.760I don't think there are, like, sensitive but unclassified guidelines about providing, you know, like, data to the government about what people are purchasing.
00:18:02.900It's mostly just plastic that you're purchasing, and there's no import restrictions on buying your filament from China.
00:18:08.640I mean, like, there's so many producers.
00:18:10.580So, no, I don't really feel like I'm purchasing into any kind of network that's reporting back to the feds.
00:18:16.800And, anyway, I know that, like, there's already some superintendent surveillance happening.
00:18:21.720I mean, regardless, like, they don't need a reporting network of suppliers.
00:18:25.440They just kind of can tap my Google account if they want to see what I want to do.
00:18:28.880But, yeah, like, I mean, I've bought a host of materials, and I've got to experiment with a whole range of printers over the years.
00:18:37.280I don't know, by the way, if you've seen our Ghost Gunner project in any of your reading about what we've done.
00:18:44.120That's kind of this whole other chapter of, and really, like, we've learned and had much more conflict in that project with suppliers and business partners and things.
00:18:55.860But, no, in the printing days, I mean, I just think it was so outside of most standard, like, police structures that, no, I think I was largely left alone.
00:19:14.440You know, a bullet is typically just considered the projectile part of the cartridge.
00:19:18.000Yeah, you can print it, but, I mean, in terms of, like, the standard printable materials, it's not, it doesn't have, like, the requisite density to be an effective or lethal projectile or bullet.
00:19:31.060Now, if you want to print it in metal or use some other digital fabrication, like, yeah, okay, go for it, do it.
00:19:37.640And plenty of people have, since I've been working in the years after, published into the public domain the schematics for commonly available NATO cartridges and other cartridges.
00:19:53.880But when we talk about printing, it's really more of, it's just a bit more complicated than, and by complicated, I mean it's both, like, it is less than the sum of its advertised parts.
00:20:06.440You know, in terms of its material actuality, like, what it can achieve.
00:20:10.740And then it's more evocative of a kind of coming capability.
00:20:14.820But as it is right now, like, commonly available 3D printing, especially consumer printing, was oversold.
00:20:20.740And, I mean, I was a part of trying to, like, transubstantiate it into this, like, nightmare scenario.
00:20:27.720And I believe that it served our ends.
00:20:29.220But really, from the beginning, as a consumer phenomenon, it was always oversold in its capabilities.
00:20:36.440Now, another big question people always want to know, are you worried about your plans getting in the wrong hands?
00:20:42.800I'm so, it's so interesting that you asked me that.
00:20:47.820No, I don't believe that we can even deem wrong hands, frankly.
00:20:54.940And especially now that I have to kind of listen to these noxious bumper stickers from the government in their briefings and before the judge about world peace and national security.
00:21:47.000God, you know, I familiarize myself with the blooming security state of New South Wales only after the experience of this project in Australia.
00:21:55.940And, yeah, look, plenty of people are doing the work out there.
00:21:59.500And, in fact, you know, most recently in Australia there was an arrest when they, I don't know, they served some kind of drug warrant and they found parts for a 3D-printed Derringer, which was, you know, really amusing.
00:22:11.620And, of course, set everybody off down there.
00:22:29.420And I'm aware of, like, the extreme allergy that these authorities have for it.
00:22:33.220In fact, through other channels I've got contact with, you know, you could call them the head of the Australian ATF and stuff over there.
00:22:40.720I mean, you just have to, to those governments, I represent something more of an existential threat to their politics.
00:22:49.180I mean, not an existential, you see, like, I represent something of a necessary contact more than I do in the United States where I'm seen as just a kind of annoyance and something to be kind of critically disposed of when it's convenient.
00:23:01.060But to these other governments, they, I think, feel the need for, like, a contact and a dialogue because they have no other way of, like, feeling that they can mold events.
00:23:12.880I know that EU's become so totalitarian.
00:23:15.340I don't know how much you follow that.
00:23:16.640And there's people in Europe that just feel like sitting ducks, not being able to get guns for protection because now they have mass immigration, which is leading to all this conflict.
00:23:24.560But it seems only the foreigners are getting guns on the black market, whereas the natives don't know how and where to get guns, you know?
00:23:39.840I mean, I've followed Farage since I was in college, you know, and kind of watched that whole anti-EU movement there with, I think, the expectation that it would translate over here to, if not like a new conservative politics, like a new independent, you know, independence, anti-globalist politics.
00:23:56.180And, I mean, I think to a degree it's happening, especially, like, maybe we'll get to talk about Trump.
00:24:01.340I mean, there are all the signs of it happening here.
00:24:05.360Or at least something, a kind of nascence.
00:24:10.020But Euroskepticism and, you know, like the failure of the European project is its own thing.
00:24:18.760You know, like, I guess the most interesting thing right now happening is Corbyn as a symptom of all this, of, I mean, like, of new labor and socialism's, like, ultimate kind of terminus.
00:24:30.800Like, where did, like, an age of Corbyn-style governance send us?
00:24:36.220Or does it just enable, you know, globalist Cameron-style, I don't know, neoliberal management until the end of time?
00:24:46.620And, of course, the migrant crisis on top of all of this, does it end up enabling, like, total police states even faster?
00:24:53.040Or does it end up creating a kind of tribalist nativism, which at least, like, can restate a, like, national purpose in a way that hasn't been done yet?
00:25:02.660I'm all about, I think tribalism would be great.
00:25:05.700Decentralizing, breaking up into, you know, little areas with your people, choosing how you want to live, you know.
00:25:11.220Yeah, I wanted to know your opinion of, well, I call them, it's an invasion, they're really not refugees coming in.
00:25:17.600I saw that you posted a video, footage from Europe of these people trying to get into Hungary.
00:25:23.360And you mentioned the phrase cultural terrorism once, and that's how I see what's happening in Europe.
00:25:27.660You know, I live there some of the time, and it's utterly being transformed for the worse against the will of the people, and this is the government doing it.
00:25:34.640Unless they're, you know, ethno-suicidal, like, Swedes or Germans, they're just calling out for it because they have some sort of strange guilt over something that never happens.
00:25:43.200So are you one who values culture, folk, and ancestors?
00:25:46.540Because a lot of anarchists tend to not care about that.
00:25:50.060I think a lot of anarchists tend to not care about it in that where anarchists are in their lives, when they claim anarchism, is often tied to youth culture.
00:25:59.840And I'm not trying to denigrate anarchism by that.
00:26:02.440There's still a rich tradition of, you know, labor relations and a focus on workers' rights and syndicalism that just kind of, for the time, negates tradition and community, at least in their stabilizing roles and influences in a society.
00:26:17.000Because, you know, in an anarchist's mind, my goal is to overcome tradition, right, to kind of break that down and create something new, a break with what has come before.
00:26:27.760So I understand at least, like, the modality there that an anarchist would—I agree with you in part.
00:26:32.440An anarchists would tend to ignore these things, one would think.
00:26:36.560But, I mean, I come from, I think, a tradition that—well, whatever.
00:26:40.640I'll lay claim to a tradition which is, I think, looks like the thought from Hoppe, which is something like, well, why anarchism, right?
00:26:54.240Well, because we want to create, kind of like you've expressed, this potentiality for new political and social ways of being.
00:27:03.240And it's okay with me that they look like traditional forms.
00:27:08.240It's okay with me that they have stabilizing influences and that ultimately we can reproduce some of the traditional cultures or, you know, that we idealize or identify with from the past.
00:27:20.320I mean, just the allowing something new to happen, a break, you know, a fracture from hegemonic modernity, you know, which is the dominant culture, this multicultural consumer society.
00:27:34.160I mean, everyone's equally allergic to it.
00:27:36.080It's okay that we all have ideas, different ideas about what can be the kind of fruitful produce after it or between it.
00:27:43.460And I'm not saying, like, I don't believe in the overcoming of that order in total.
00:27:47.020I just believe that the only thing worth doing is preserving humanity and fighting for spaces where we can just have novel forms of political and social life.
00:28:41.120Yeah, and I think there's a lot of energy with the alt-right.
00:28:43.520And, you know, this is why the work of, like, Sam Hyde and others is so great.
00:28:48.120And we can effectively diagnose what's happened in Europe and what is happening here.
00:28:54.040You know, there's just the legacy of, like, the failure of conservative revolutionaries and basically, like, the reaction to, or let's say, like, what's developed as,
00:29:04.780the kind of anti-fascist consensus politics of democratic capitalism has just produced not only, like, this just, like, extreme banalization of life,
00:29:14.680it's reduced or eliminated all political principles.
00:29:19.480So now, you know, I see a picture of a dead Syrian toddler, as Sam Hyde would say, like,
00:29:24.160now anything can be done to me politically because there's a dead Syrian toddler.
00:31:01.300And it's also, we can't just point a finger.
00:31:04.540America itself, though, is, I mean, there's something amazing about American political life.
00:31:10.640It may no longer be as true as it was, but it's always resisted, I think, radical influences.
00:31:16.800Like, I still don't believe, and maybe this is just my naivety showing, but, like, I still don't believe you, there's even a path to get to a Bernie Sanders presidency.
00:31:24.460But, you know, I mean, that, you know, I could definitely see how in 20, 25 years with demographic shifts and, like, the extreme ravages that, you know, this over-articulated welfare state does.
00:31:42.560I just think that there's something mitigating about the American experience that has always kind of, I don't know, look at me being, like, optimistic.
00:31:53.880Well, no, I'm with you, and I think generally, you know, it was a melting pot of Europeans, and we value things like non-aggression and rights, and a lot of Europeans that fled were also fleeing persecution.
00:32:06.060You know, half of the people died to come here and set up, and they sacrificed to start something new.
00:32:10.640I mean, these ideas are really a European people thing, so I just wonder, how's it going to work if we're a minority with a majority who's more collectivist?
00:32:18.060So we may have these kinds of utopian ideas, and we like the non-aggression principle, but how's that going to work with this incoming population?
00:32:27.720See, yeah, like, when you ask that question, I think that's a genuinely felt and, like, real political question.
00:32:34.040I think it's a disservice when people, like, dismiss that question in its terms, because, of course, like, the other side of the coin is always accepted.
00:32:42.660I mean, we're hearing about all the time about how demographics are going to change politics in the country.
00:32:46.780Well, okay, what is this country like?
00:32:52.720Let me just engage with the question on its own terms.
00:32:54.720I think a majority-minority country, a United States as a majority-minority country, like, simply has to fracture.
00:33:08.100It simply has to break apart, and I think this will happen sooner rather than later, right?
00:33:13.460Illinois is basically circling the drain of some type of structured bankruptcy invention, and, you know, there's Puerto Rico now, and, of course, there's going to be a string of municipal bankruptcies.
00:33:23.040I mean, thankfully, this federal system of, like, massive wealth transference is just going to outstrip itself and really break, and then we'll have to basically have more communities of interest and regional purpose that band together and represent their own interests.
00:33:44.260Maybe this democratic super state, as Hoppe says, is just an extreme failure mode, and we're just watching what the failure looks like.
00:33:55.080I mean, I don't think that there's any problem at all of large communities of people, especially in a welfare state scenario, wanting to preserve, like, their demographic ratio, wanting to keep out, basically, illegal immigration and abuse of their systems.
00:34:11.280But they can't, and they don't have the political will, or they don't have the political opportunity to do so.
00:34:23.600So, yeah, I don't see anything but reasons for an evaluation of degradation and destruction of this system based off what you're describing these trends to be.
00:35:02.280They deny you now, too, based on, you know, hate speech or violence or racial intolerance.
00:35:07.080They're cutting people off from using certain things.
00:35:09.140These capitalists have basically become the moral police, and they're enforcing things for the government.
00:35:14.120So where do you think this is heading?
00:35:15.220Yeah, like, especially what I've seen in my experience and with what you've described, there is, I mean, this huge artifice that drives, I don't know, conformity is the right word, but it's, like, homogeneity as well.
00:35:31.220I mean, everything's being condensed both in, like, its functional power.
00:35:36.280There's just, like, a universalization of, and condensation of the functions of power through these networks of banking and political relationships, and then also, like, a condensation of thought, like, conformal thought.
00:35:50.760I just got rejected yesterday by another payment processor.
00:35:54.420This one, First Data, an ISO of a Texas bank, and they said, this is great, right, because I've spent, like, years, I know how to play this game at this point,
00:36:03.560and so I have jurisdictional documents from the State Department and counsel's letters about ATF law and stuff.
00:36:09.220I mean, I'm just showing them that, like, all of the stuff that I'm doing, like this ghost gunner mill that I sell, is completely legal, completely unregulated.
00:36:17.020And, in fact, you know, basically, I have, like, state jurisdiction to even sell it overseas, all this stuff.
00:36:23.040I give them these documents, and these credit departments and these banks, they come back, and it's, like, because they can't tell me that it's illegal, they go, well, you know, one day it'll be illegal.
00:36:31.520And, also, we don't want to do business with you.
00:36:35.140It's just, there's a society here that, or there's, like, a tendency here that you can't even have, look, what I argue to be, like, a traditional idea.
00:36:45.880You know, if you can't make guns in the state of Texas or make a machine that can make a gun in the state of Texas and sell to Texas residents, you know, what do you have here?
00:36:55.480This is, like, this is something else entirely.
00:36:57.860And to get to the broader point of your question, I mean, there's a, there's the diagnosis of governmentality, which I think I have more exposure to than, than, okay, so there's the diagnosis of governmentality, and then there's what you've mentioned about, like, the culture of social justice warriors and university discourse.
00:37:15.200I think these are two different things.
00:37:16.340But governmentality is the operation of states as states with each other and how that affects, like, the public.
00:37:21.880And I have come into direct personal contact with this in a way that most people just, you know, the operation of states as states simply is just beyond most people's daily lived experience.
00:37:31.340But basically, there's this need with Wassner and these other, you know, the UN Arms Trade Treaty and, like, this condensation of internationalists and global legal structures to completely prevent certain technical and political forms of life and experience.
00:37:50.400And they, they have articulated this structure since the Cold War, especially in the United States, which is, like, equivalent to military urbanism, but in information control.
00:38:00.460They do not believe, I mean, they believe that certain forms of data just at their birth are already the exclusive property of this government and are therefore, you know, are therefore controlled.
00:38:11.580And you automatically have to buy into a licensing regime paying $2,700 a year to even ask them if you can speak about these things or give that speech to somebody else, share that with someone else.
00:38:22.520This is not an outgrowth, by the way, of, like, the new left.
00:38:26.700I mean, this is an outgrowth, I think, directly of the Cold War experience and Cold Warrior administrative ideation.
00:38:34.900I mean, this is, this is still to oversimplify it, but I mean, it's also, like, an example of, I think, Foucauldian, the Foucauldian boomerang.
00:38:43.960You know, as we tried to grade information in the nuclear age and the computer age, which kind of, you know, they developed together, we created a system of protecting and defending a certain, like, monopoly and, I don't know, privileged position of technological development against what we perceived to be a large global enemy.
00:39:03.080But when that enemy dissipated, those structures, those administrative and defensive structures, the articulation of a defense industrial base, like, those things remained and then became, still became, like, the scaffolding of how our Mandarin class understood that data then with its own public and then with the operation of the rest of the states that exist in the Westphalian system.
00:39:25.920So, something was, like, what am I trying to say?
00:39:30.980There's still a grand Cold War experience happening at the level of fundamental technology and invention that I'm just not able to communicate to people and is so far outside of most people's daily lived experience that, you know, most people want to fight the culture wars or, you know, they want to understand things that are more relatable to their experience.
00:39:47.900But, like, there's something really terrifying happening in the operation of states as states and the 3D printed gun was just a way of me being able to see that and be a part of that.
00:39:57.100But I definitely want to talk to you about the social justice experience as well, which is a more kind of reflexive, automatic, social signaling politics.
00:40:06.200You know, it's, I mean, deeply, deeply conformist in its attitudes and is a way of, I mean, what's, its internal irony is, in the name of free speech and protecting the speech of minorities and, right, we have to appeal to large, predominantly white police structures to police speech.
00:40:23.400You know, it is its own internal contradiction, especially in the university context, like UCLA and these other places.
00:40:29.940I mean, let's, let's please get the evil racist institutions to come in and police the evil racist speech mores.
00:41:23.080There's a certain bent to hacktivism, which, especially in Europe, and I'm very friendly with a group of hackers across Europe called the UnSystem.
00:41:31.220I'm friendly with Jarmil and Dine.org.
00:41:34.680And so I'm sympathetic to their aims, which I believe are harder for me to identify with because they still come from, you know, this European tradition.
00:41:41.960But, I mean, setting all those qualifications aside, yes, there is this tendency, which I find to be lazy and not academically rigorous and not really even politically rigorous, to just identify with the speech codes of the cultural left and the cultural left's youth culture.
00:42:00.280Really at the expense of meaningful political discussion.
00:42:06.140And still there's a kind of enforced policing of attitudes, which prevent, like what you've said, right?
00:42:13.920I mean, when we want to drill down to like, well, what is the KKK in operation in America?
00:42:18.060I mean, mostly like what I've seen about neo-Nazis and the penetration of white naturalist movements by the FBI and police.
00:42:36.200Like, you know, when I grew up, when I learned about all these things, you know, I learned about the militia movement being thoroughly compromised from the beginning.
00:42:44.840I mean, you can't talk about Ruby Ridge.
00:43:08.320So, I'm always annoyed when I hear Europeans commenting on the American political process, especially like in the South or like Trump or, you know, they just don't understand those trade wins.
00:43:23.880But then, I mean, that critique would have to apply to me as well.
00:43:26.320I can't be as annoyed as I want to be, I guess, with the kind of what I see as the collectivist tendency in European anarchist politics.
00:43:43.980I don't find, I don't find hacktivist politics to even be well-read.
00:43:48.920I find it to mostly be just a more technical extension of the social and university signaling that is just kind of the mode and fashionable and not really informed by anything other than a commitment to the preservation of the structures they supposedly critique, right?
00:44:07.500I mean, they are imminently safe, like you said, completely safe, not really meant to do anything other than just position themselves.
00:44:16.140I just wonder, too, I mean, where's some of our people on our side that want to start, like, a new version of PayPal or banks or, you know, just high-tech stuff that's, you know, that isn't owned by the establishment?
00:44:29.260Do you think that these people will arise out of the woodwork, or are they fighting with a monopoly in order to try and get some of these things done?
00:44:36.180I've got to have my eyes on this just a little bit to the point where, okay, fine, maybe I have a good understanding of it.
00:44:42.680I mean, I think the reason Coinbase as a Bitcoin exchange and provider was able to survive was because of its connections to Silicon Valley Bank and its connections to board members at JPMorgan Chase.
00:44:57.160And so, you know, a lot of the people that got into Bitcoin and the new payment startups people, they understand that their survival is still based on, you know, blowing kisses at and making ties with the legacy banking structures.
00:45:09.700So, morally and politically, they're compromised, in my mind.
00:45:15.620I don't, look, the people I've met trying to do supposedly new payment systems or other things, like, they're not mature enough about it.
00:45:25.460They don't realize how deeply entangled and complicated and difficult it is.
00:45:31.380Or if they do realize that, they find that it's easier just to, I don't know, become a personality or do something like that's not as difficult.
00:45:40.180So, I don't see people building infrastructure.
00:45:42.540And I'm glad that you've asked about this because, you know, I'm trying to build infrastructure.
00:46:26.480And, of course, of the ones I've lost, I've been rejected by many, many more just in applications.
00:46:30.560I mean, just to even get to a place where you can acquire capital as, let's call you, like, a radical industrialist or radical technologist of, like, an alt-right or anarchist persuasion.
00:47:02.600Even if I do offshore payments processing.
00:47:04.420I mean, you're constantly, like, running like a fugitive, like a marginal, hoping that you don't bring enough, like, scrutiny on what you do or people find out your critical relationships.
00:47:13.580And that doesn't just apply to payments.
00:47:53.200But, like, you have to have these legal and business relationships.
00:47:57.860And because they're all so intimately tied to the consensus capitalist system, I think the only hope that we've got, and this is going to sound terrible and boring, but, like, the only hope we have is in, like, actually building our own infrastructure.
00:48:12.380In the abstract sense, but, like, do you know of any alt-right, like, insurance providers or payments processors right now?
00:48:18.440No, because people aren't willing to, like, actually make that their life.
00:48:22.540They want to engage in the more, like, romantic aspects of, like, critique and, you know, everybody.
00:48:27.120This is something a lot of us are talking about right now, you know, and as more people are coming in, there's more people with money that are also being drawn to this.
00:48:33.660So I think it's just in the early phases of organizing something and that it will transpire into actually even a separate system.
00:48:40.680It's almost outside of the system, almost preparing, like, a separate nation altogether on the outskirts.
00:48:47.340Well, right, and that's one of the big ideas that's realistically being executed in San Francisco right now, right?
00:48:54.200I mean, there's seasteading and the real ideas of, like, actual secessionist fever, technologically mediated secessionism.
00:49:00.620And I know it's being worked on, and I'm sure everyone's having the comfort.
00:49:05.100I'm so disconnected from anything that you could call a movement.
00:49:08.660I mean, I'm out here in my own radical alienation with my own people and employees, and we're just trying to build our own thing, right, and defend against attacks.
00:49:16.320And, like, I don't have much time to poke my head up.
00:49:18.080So I don't know what's going on, and don't allow me, just by my offhand comments, to discount the work that you're a part of.
00:49:29.860I have—I've got a new thing I'm launching at the end of the year, too, and it's mostly just for the gun industry, which has just been so completely ghettoized.
00:49:36.760I mean, like, there's not more things happening in weapons and weapons startups just because it's been so consumed by the defense industrial base, DARPA money, DOD money, and, like, that's the elevator.
00:49:48.200You're not going to be, like, a private startup in gun stuff that's fucking crazy because you'll end up having to do things like I did, spend your life in the wilderness.
00:49:54.880Every spare money you get, you know, all the spare money you get, just throwing it, just, like, trying to stay in the saddle.
00:50:01.000But I've got a set of banking relationships.
00:50:04.360I have an insurance entity, and, like, I have some other, like, strong legal relationships that it took me years to build, which I will now use as infrastructure for onboarding other people.
00:50:17.420But, like, I've finally built some of that infrastructure for myself, and I want to start sharing it with people.
00:50:22.020So I'm really glad you asked the question because, like, I am trying to, like, at least do my part to allow people to create these, like, worlds that they've imagined for themselves if they're serious about it.
00:50:32.940Of course, that's where my mind is now.
00:50:34.640I don't know how many people in the end were really that serious about it.
00:50:37.420It takes self-sacrifice and putting every day being obsessed with it.
00:50:54.840Wow, that thing is so much more complicated.
00:50:57.320Yes, of course the government can spy.
00:50:58.860I mean, the whole idea is can you, oh, man, can you basically create enough joins and can you do it with the right addressing to elude triangulation of identity?
00:51:16.600It's a matter of, like, who's participating.
00:51:18.760It's a matter of pushing your activity to the very margins of the network, but also pushing it broadly.
00:51:25.960And, yeah, I mean, it's a huge political problem.
00:51:27.780Can the government spy on what we're doing?
00:51:29.200Well, I mean, technically they can't in the ways that you mean if the dark wallet is used to properly, like, shield transactions.
00:51:39.540But I want to tell you just, like, at the level of organization and development, I mean, the dark wallet has been in a bit of a crisis for the last, like, six months.
00:51:46.200Its lead developer has just gone and we can't find him.
00:52:15.820It's still in, like, alpha eight right now.
00:52:17.260And it can do some of the things you're talking about and we can have the conversation.
00:52:20.300But I feel so guilty when I have the conversation because I know that it's not, I know that it isn't where it needs to be to actually be the tool that we want to talk about it as.
00:52:28.860Well, tell us about Defense Distributed, your website, and how people can go about getting blueprints.
00:52:54.840But that sounds more and more like parody because, like, I haven't really published software in such a long time.
00:53:02.300And, of course, what really makes us money now is manufacturing and hardware.
00:53:06.560And, you know, I am trying to create a legal zone to where I can publish to the Clearnet blueprints for these gun files.
00:53:15.500But let's be honest, if you want blueprints for gun files right now, you can simply go to, like, grabcad.com or any of these other CAD repositories for 3D printing.
00:53:25.600And there's plenty of CAD there, some for printing, most not for printing.
00:53:31.040But if you want to get into getting weapons blueprints, you don't go to my website.
00:53:34.160You don't look at my work anymore because my work is completely about, what am I trying to say?
00:53:41.420My work is, at this point, a completely abstract, agonistic practice involving just ungodly amounts of money just being thrown at the legal system for no other reason than just to highlight the conflict for when it becomes opportunistic.
00:53:56.680I'm no longer the software company that, you know, I want to be.
00:54:00.520So the Internet is still full of these blueprints.
00:54:02.900There's still DIY gun communities like Weaponeer.net and CNCguns.com.
00:54:09.400And, of course, I do sell a mill that will help you make your own AR-15 for yourself.
00:54:14.680But, no, if you want gun blueprints, you need to go to the CAD repositories like GrabCAD or the Torrent sites and start kind of doing this research for yourself because there's really no purpose-built site at the moment that does what I have been trying to do.
00:56:55.660Which actually made me wake up to race and all that I talk about now.
00:56:59.180But as an anarchist yourself, where are you on some of these issues?
00:57:02.440Like, I guess I'll start with the beginning of what you mentioned.
00:57:06.620At least when you first told me this, you said you had traveled and really, like, your travel experiences and being exposed to different kinds of media, which were, like, hyperventilating about the evils of white people.
00:57:16.540And, you know, the poisonous spread of colonialist modes of thought basically made you wake up and realize, okay, well, anarchism may not be enough to address what is clearly, like, a racial antipathy here meant to kind of devastate what you recognize as your people.
00:57:32.220So I, at least in my experience, what I've recognized is that people in the South are more realistic about their racial relationships just because I think maybe more black and white people, that's the American historical paradigm.
00:57:46.480But, of course, Hispanics enter that equation perhaps more forcefully in the Deep South.
00:57:51.080But black and white people are just, they live and work around each other, I think, more than in the lily white East Coast or, you know, the kind of privileged enclaves in these metropolitan zones.
00:58:05.700Even though those zones might say that, like, well, they're around more diverse people, they really kind of insulate themselves against, you know, proper exposure to working class thought and people.
00:58:19.380And so I think that the South is a bulwark against this hyperventilating.
00:58:23.900I mean, look, you've noticed, like, in the age of, like, Tarantino's, you know, revenge porn movies and the actual eclipse of white supremacy, formal white supremacy, there is the resurgence of the term white supremacy.
00:58:37.080It's like the more, the more white people, if you want to say that, have, like, strained to show themselves to not be racist or to be allies of anti-racist movements, the more the bumper sticker white supremacy is just forced and forced and forced.
00:58:52.920And this is, you know, this is, I was going to use the word feminine, but I only meant it in, like, an aesthetic sense, so I'll avoid that.
00:59:33.380And you have to more and more resurrect it and recreate it and, you know, kind of build it up and to be a bigger and bigger golem, especially as it disappears.
00:59:42.640And I've tried to explain this to people that work for me, too.
00:59:44.640That's why, like, I refuse to participate in it because it's this whipped frenzy of a politics of the dominant order, basically.
00:59:53.860I mean, and all I want to say is, like, people who actually do, people who actually have grown up around other races, live and work around other races, like, there's just a different understanding about, that's all I'm, you know, a realism, I guess, is what I would counsel.
01:00:12.400I mean, I don't let myself get drawn into these fantasies of resistance to oppression because I'm actually dealing with fighting oppressive legacy systems from the Cold War every day in my real life.
01:00:27.680I don't have to get involved in what's fashionable nonsense.
01:00:32.580And I ground a lot of my experience just based on having come up in a lower middle class southern environment.
01:01:06.240I mean, we do have to recognize that, like, the, oh, man, let's call it, like, we do have to recognize that the Lost Cause narrative, I mean, did win in the South.
01:01:17.880And, like, I'm speaking from Austin, Texas, right?
01:01:20.180If you go to the Capitol, there's a monument to the Confederate States of America there and monuments to Robert E. Lee and, I think, the Fifth Cavalry and other.
01:01:29.140I mean, down here, the Lost Cause narrative won, but there's this recriminative view of history that all narratives that are not consistent with, you know, the modernity, the narrative of progress, both ethical, material, popular progress, all narratives that don't align with that narrative must be whitewashed.
01:01:51.380Like, it's not just enough to say that it's untrue, the Lost Cause narrative of the South, right?
01:01:57.300It's important to eradicate its symbolic heritage and its thought because it's a threat to the progress of history.
01:02:06.160And so when I see, like, the elimination of a symbol, right, the elimination of, and I'm not just sympathizing with Southern white racists, right?
01:02:13.820I'm basically, like, recognizing a mode, a dangerous mode of post-politics, the need to eradicate a historical narrative.
01:02:25.060Like, not just the need to combat it, the need to make sure that, like, its symbols are gone, the way to articulate it is gone.
01:02:31.860Yeah, I felt like what happened in the South after the Civil War was kind of the equivalent of the denazification in Germany when they just decimated the people there, you know?
01:02:42.740Like, radical reconstruction was radical and devastating.
01:02:45.200And I like, man, there's this, I remember this old article on Radish Mag about the true devastation in human terms of post-slavery in the South.
01:02:56.420But, I mean, I don't want to oversimplify it.
01:02:58.300It was a human and economic disaster from all sides, from all parties, and it was a fight that was coming for generations.
01:03:29.200But, but at the same time, like, those aren't the only valid critiques.
01:03:32.720So, yes, there's a lot, there's a lot still to, there's a lot of power in the lost cause narrative.
01:03:36.260So, again, don't let me get lost in any of that.
01:03:39.000But what I, what I want to do highlight is that, like the Confederate flag, I also see that these same kind of post-political neoliberal prohibitionists,
01:03:49.880they fight the same way in the gun debate.
01:03:52.660And this is dear to my heart because, you know, I get up every morning trying to fight back against this.
01:03:57.380It's not enough to say that, well, your Second Amendment is wrong.