I think it was Julian Assange saying how the thing that really, really affected him in the development of his political thought was seeing the massive, massive global protests against any war in Iraq in 2003. And it didn't make the slightest bit of difference. Nothing that people did mattered at all. It did not stop. This determined few that were absolutely determined to wreak havoc, chaos, death, and destruction everywhere.
And you would think again if these people, as you say, hadn't been given this special perch and we hadn't been propagandized to think of these people as being special. Like they have magical powers now because they collected a certain number of votes, and that gives them magical powers to do things the rest of us cannot do. If we didn't have that, these people would be in prison somewhere. Or at the very least, at the very least, everywhere they went they would be jeered.
They would find it impossible to function in normal society. But to this day, they're honored and welcomed in all elite circles. I mean, that is a bizarre situation. Your World War One example is so important cuz the guy George Creel, who was head of the Public information Campaign, appointed by Woodrow Wilson to get people on board with this, talks about how in his book is titled How We Advertised America, How he had 756,000 pamphlets published to make sure everyone knew to register for
the draft. 10s of thousands of speakers on street corners making the case for why the Germans are absolutely terrible and we got to take on Kaiser Wilhelm, cuz I mean taking down Wilhelm, you just take him down and then no one worse could take his place. I can't imagine anyone worse than Czar Nicholas ever controlling Russia. So yeah, let's make sure to get on board with this war. Arthur Ponsonby wrote a book in 1928.
After the First World War and said, how is it that all of these countries constantly lied explicitly? There were babies on bayonets in Belgium, there were crucified Canadians, there were mutilated nurses everywhere. And then there was nothing to back this up. And Ponce and B's thesis is more or less that in order to get the population to be willing to get the limbs of their songs blown off and devastate 10s of thousands of cities, you almost
have to lie, you have to say. Putin's going to take over Ukraine, then Eastern Europe, then Western Europe, then South America, then Mexico, and then Putin's coming to America. It has to be so sensational in order to arouse the public into justifying both the huge sacrifice in life, limb and the monetary cost. And you have to constantly vilify. The opposition has been totally deluded. You can't talk to Putin. See, we could have a formal alliance with Joseph Stalin.
But Putin is a bad guy. We can't talk to President Xi of China. He's crazy. But Nixon and Kissinger can go make friends with Chairman Mao after China explodes a nuclear bomb in 1964, proving their capabilities in every sense. They don't have the incentive to make friends with people who they obviously easily could make friends with. Not to mention they were friends with Saddam Rumsfeld shaking hands with him.
And that's why puns in these. Thesis is so important to know that that's why all of these people who are unrelated in all of these countries for so many years have engaged in wartime deception, because it's almost a requirement.
The truth about Ukraine, if we didn't go to war and we didn't take on Poland, the guy on the throne would be someone like Viktor Yanukovych. Or we could fight a huge, massive, bloody, deadly war and the guy on the throne could be Vladimire Zielinski, who recently said. That we're not sure if we're going to be able to have presidential elections in a time of war, because that's not consistent with our Constitution.
Conscripting men by the 1,000,000 confiscating property from the Orthodox Church outlawed 11 political parties. And this is NATO's guy who's going to defend democracy. So that is Ponce and B's reason for why we actually see all this. For some reason, I have this sense that he's unpopular among historians. I could be wrong about that, but. Or maybe maybe not among historians but among the fashionable people who are knowledgeable about who he is.
But if he is, it's only because he's a truth teller. It's only because he's a truth teller. The falsehoods that are told in wartime, occasionally a few of them come to light and make it into the textbooks. So we know something about what happened in Vietnam, which seems to be almost the only foreign policy adventure that bothers left liberal historians. That's the only one that really they bother to dig all that deeply into. The rest of it, I don't know. For whatever reason, it just
doesn't keep them up at night. I was wondered about that. What made Vietnam so unique? I mean, I suppose part of it is that the draft was in place at the time and a lot of people did not want to go. And after Nixon got rid of the draft, the antiwar protests basically dried up.
And so I think a lot of people's opinions about that war were tied up with their quite legitimate fears of being conscripted into it. But The thing is, there's more to the moral enormities of war than the chance you might be conscripted into it. There's also all the people who die. Exactly. Yeah. And from my grandmother's telling of this, she was completely shocked to see on her television the actual atrocities of war.
You think, gosh, there's probably some fighting, but they're also negotiating on the sidelines and well, we can't really let this one just end, cuz then the Soviets will take over Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and then they'll take over America. Once the costs are actually real to you and you actually see not just, well, there's some drone campaign in Afghanistan or Iraq. Once you see the Chelsea Manning videos of innocent civilians getting murdered, then it's actually real to you.
Just like they will say, well, few million people died in the Second World War, but we had to do it. But watching Tony Tempo gets suffocated to death by Dallas police officers while he's begging for his life. After he called the police that wakes people up, the Eric Garner situation really woke people up to this is the life of a
peaceful person. You just had Maj. Torre get arrested on your stream the other day and we can actually see a peaceful person getting aggressed against and that makes it so much more real to us then all of these abstract figures. But it's still important to know that the wars are still empirically based on lies.
Right now, I sent out a note to everybody in my School of life program and tell them what happened when I had Mahjon and all of a sudden we lost the feed and we had seen that he was being accosted. But we could also see because we've been watching the video, he wasn't doing anything wrong. And I'm quite sure they did not count on who he was talking to. And yeah, the running video and how many people were
eyewitnesses and everything. But anyway, the world we live in is crazy, and you and I have at least some of the answers and nobody wants them. Is the same thing open? He really seems to water. If I could just end on a white pill. Kaiser Wilhelm wrote the Kaiser memoirs and says, look, we lost this thing because of propaganda, the British. Their tanks were good, but the propaganda machine, that is really what killed us.
So I was on the lookout for who our best propagandists can be and I came across an article from The Independent by Skyler Baker Jordan, she says. I went to a right wing libertarian conference as a socialist. I was pleasantly surprised by what I found, she says, quoting Dave Smith. We are libertarians because we love liberty and we hate injustice, comedian Dave Smith said in remarks on the opening night.
The reason we are libertarians is because governments destroy innocent people's lives and we hate that. Smith went on to speak against the Patriot Act and imperialist wars such as Iraq and Afghanistan and in favor of civil liberties, the exact issues which motivated me to get involved in left-leaning politics in the early 2000s. Dave Smith, the comedian who headlined night one of the conference, pointed out that it was we progressives who oppose the Bush era wars and Patriot Act.
I myself. Was dismayed when liberals on Twitter demanded January 6th insurrection of suspects be added to the No Fly List. I'm old enough to remember when the left opposed the No Fly List, and I still do. Indeed, my principles have not changed much since 2002. American politics, however, has. So I think the best thing we can do is find our best propagandist like Thomas Soul says culture is changed by people who are willing to take a big risk.
Be courageous. And in a way that makes you sort of envy them and make them very likable. Get them in front of the masses and then people will say, hey, it's OK to be a libertarian. That's why I was cool with being a libertarian after I saw OBGYN, Ron Paul, Vietnam Veteran say things in this very nice way. And it wasn't just someone online or some hippie from Woodstock saying or is terrible and it's all about money. So finding our best
propagandist. I think might be our best strategy and he does well on Rogan every time. Well, I agree with you on Dave's extremely strong. Dave is extremely effective I think and it's interesting the sliver of people in what we might broadly consider our movement who are critical of him. Not one of them could do 100th of what he does like, not one of them is a better communicator, is able to attract that big of an audience, not one of these people.
So anyway, let's end by promoting because people should be reading you because you are a great young up and Comer. I hope you don't think that is patronizing. It's the truth. I mean, you are beyond it, up and Comer. You're already here. You've arrived through your hard work and your effectiveness as a
communicator. Tell us briefly about the Volunteerist Handbook, which I will link to at thomas.com slash 2356. The Volunteer First Hand Book is a collection of 50 articles excerpts from books. The things that took me from being a progressive to being a libertarian, the wide variety of authors is, I think, what makes
it so important. You have people from the right, such as Joe Sobran making the case in The Reluctant Anarchist for why things like the Myth of the Rule of Law are things that pulled him away from being a statist. And we have people on the left, left, libertarians like Sheldon Richmond, making the case that libertarianism far from being every man for himself. Is actually more accurately defined as social cooperation between a wide, interconnected
web of people in society. Even though I'm sitting in this room alone, I'm using a microphone someone else made Internet, someone else gave me a house that someone else built. Air conditioning that other people built were constantly socially cooperating, and we should see that as a great benefit as opposed to cooperating where one group has the right to coerce another. So those are the things that really got to the heart of what changed my mind about the world.
It's 318 pages, but you can find a summary of the book in the two introduction pages and the two afterword pages. Cause I know that's long and you can get it on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Or, if you don't trust me that it's going to be good, go to libertarianinstitute.org and get yourself a free PDF.