Guest: Jeremiah Hardin - Part 2: Culture Wars & The Price of Capitulation

Welcome, welcome, welcome, free time manager.

I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to ride. I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians. Music. And the crime in the street. All I know is that first, you've got to get mad. You've got to say, I'm a human being. God damn it. My life has value. You want answers? I think I'm entitled to you. I want the truth! You can't handle the truth!

Hello again, Freethinkers, and welcome back to the Freethought Project podcast. My name is Jason Bassler, and joining me once again is the Freethought Project contributor, Don Vai Jr. So guys, we are back for round two. And for those of you who missed last week's episode, this episode might be a little confusing for you.

So I'd highly recommend you go back into our archives check out the previous episode we recorded last week and that will give you a lot more context provide a lot more uh i guess information to make today's conversation a little more relevant and i think we highlighted some excellent points about the the state of the libertarian party and the current direction of libertarianism in that episode and we're planning on doing even more deep diving today but before Before we do our plugs

and jump into today's conversation, I did want to ask Mr. Don Vi Jr. How he's doing today. And man, are you ready for round two? Oh, yeah, man. You know, super excited. Always great to have a conversation with Jeremiah. The dude's a wealth of knowledge. And I think today's show is going to be really good. I'm right there with you. I'm definitely excited to get into this again today. And yeah, we did leave a lot on the table last week.

And we should have a little extra time today as well to talk about a few of the things we didn't get into last week. However, we are now 22 days away from Christmas, guys. And I know we've been plugging our new children's book, Extra Hard, the past few episodes, but that's because it's something that we're extremely proud of. And it's one of the only revenue streams we have left for the Free Thought Project.

Which, you know, obviously helps the show continue. But in case you guys missed it, earlier this year, we did publish a children's book entitled Little Free Thinkers Know Your Rights. Matt and I actually started working on it in 2022, but we really hit like every bump in the road and experienced multiple delays getting it published. But it's finally out now, and it's an excellent way to teach kids about their constitutional rights.

I know the Constitution's rights is difficult to explain to kids, but we did try our best to make it fun and easy with our book. And when children are young, it is really the best time to share these ideas with them. Now, it's been a labor of love creating this book, and I think your family will really enjoy it. So check it out, guys, at littlefreethinkers.com.

And one last thing here before we get back into the thick of things, please, Freethinkers, take a moment to like and share this podcast with your friends and family.

Also, take a moment to rate and review it. It really does help us out so much. It's really crucial to the survival of our show, and it is a no-cost way that you could help us get this podcast into more people's ears. So with that said, Jeremiah, we are back again today, man. And we did already go through your introduction and the last episode, so I suppose we don't need to worry about that.

But first and foremost, how are you doing? And are you ready to get into this again today yeah and so the general thing like last time for for those of you don't know we we went into a lot of stuff about the trump stuff and the lnc the libertarian sort of selling out to trump and we also went out like over a lot of the stuff surrounding that and like there's a lot here because there's like a whole cultural force and a whole like like added layer to this.

So I'm looking forward to getting into a lot of the finer details because some of this stuff, like, I can make broad-based statements that are relatively effective, but in the end run of it, there's a lot of really fine stuff that needs to be explained to provide context. So I'm definitely down. Yes, yes. This will be the too long, didn't read version of the podcast today. And we will be getting into those nitty gritty details.

And I should also mention, man, damn, the haters really came out of the woodwork to leave prominence on the last episode and not surprising, right? Like, I mean, these are the people who are calling you mentally unstable while their comments literally prove that they're the mentally unhinged ones. And of course, you know, they didn't actually engage in any of the arguments or points that we presented in the podcast. But hop on Twitter, guys, and check out a couple of the posts that we made last

week if you want to reference what I'm talking about. It was certainly obnoxious. And yeah, man, I don't know how you've seemed to create this fervor, but you certainly have a lot of people who aren't really happy with you.

And maybe it's not necessarily happy with you, but their cognitive dissonance is going through the roof well so i don't want to get too much into that because this isn't like keemstar like this ain't a drama channel but like what i will say is that there are i have been at this long enough and been sort of i mean i'm a fucking asshole about a lot of stuff and i don't i don't necessarily blame some people for disliking me but like

there's also a strong contingent of people who I have pissed off over the years, usually by being right. Sometimes I've been wrong and needed to correct myself later. But a lot of the time, these people have no actual argument against what I'm saying. So instead, what they try to do is they try to tear down my character. They try to do some character assassinations. they'll show up wherever I am, wherever somebody posts about me, wherever.

And there's even some people on the Instagram versions of this post. And so it's something that I've had to get used to. I'm a Nazi, a commie, whatever the people want to call me at the time in order to justify disliking me.

I've had false accusations of a ton of things. And it's because, like, you know, A, it's not exactly like I project the most stable image online. So it's sort of easy to come at me about that sort of thing. But I do that on purpose, because I don't want the kind of person who does that. To be the kind of person in my audience.

I want the kinds of people in my audience to be the critical thinkers, the ones who have enough brain cells to rub together that they can actually form a coherent response, or the people who aren't actually evil, who are pushing for freedom and not more tyranny.

And so the kinds of people who level those sorts of attacks, i don't need them and so i don't care that they're not there and the fact that they're like you know posting those kinds of things that's all the evidence somebody needs that they like they're on the losing side logically they need to pull shit like that because they don't actually have anything on me right and that's exactly what i've noticed man and you know i want to be

clear here guys like a few people online was we're even making the assertions that we hired you with the free talk on him. I don't really understand where that came from. But to be completely clear, I don't really know Jeremiah that well. I mean, we've had a few back and forth and conversations online, but I don't have any particular allegiance to Jeremiah. I'm not here to put him on a pedestal and prop up his perspective and point of view on things.

What I brought Jeremiah on was to talk about the facts of the matter. And of course, there's some speculation, there's some opinion in there, but I brought you on because you're... Capable of creating these arguments in defense of liberty. And there's not enough of that going on right now. And I'm not here to defend you, but I'm not here to participate in the character assassination either.

And what I saw consistently online and on Twitter, and I guess it shouldn't be much of a surprise, was people attacking your character, not engaging with the arguments. And so I did gently push back like, okay, if you have something to say, your personal opinions, moot, go ahead and address the arguments that are being made. And nobody did that. So I think that speaks volumes. And that's why we're here today. I don't care about personal opinions. You like apples. I like oranges. Cool.

Where does that get us? That doesn't get us anywhere. We're talking about truth claims. We're talking about facts. We're talking about morality. And so I think that should be the basis.

And that has been the basis of what we're trying to do with this conversation yeah and and you know like the other half of that is if anyone out there actually has an argument against what i have to say please prove me wrong i'd love to be wrong i think we're all gonna fucking die under an impressive ai and techno fascist surveillance state and i think that this is going to be a significant problem going forward that's going to like

lead to the manifestation of the worst dystopias combined that every fiction has been warning us about And so for me, for my money, I'd love to be fucking wrong. Please prove me wrong. And a lot of these people, they'll dislike what I'm saying because it affects their brand. It affects what they're trying to accomplish with what they do. And less because they actually have an argument and more because they're brand preserving.

There was this video from this ex-anti-SJW, anti-woke kind of person called Dark Matter on YouTube. And I used to follow this guy for his like atheism content because I went through like a basically a sort of Reddit atheist phase but. But like this, like guy, Dark Matter 2525, his YouTube, I saw the thumbnail and I had to watch the video. I'll watch his content anyway. But the thumbnail was like, are we the baddies Nazi skit?

But instead, it's like, are we the triggered? And the whole thing is about how a lot of these anti-woke people, they'll make their brand into the same kind of thing that the left was allegedly doing, that they were against, but from a right-wing perspective. Like, they'll do the same sorts of identitarian nonsense, you know? Oh, I'm a straight, white, non-trans man, and this is my identity. And that's sort of what these, like, the two primary people against you were,

like, for having me on, were doing. Like they are, you know, sort of hyper conservative. They support Trump. They're like trigger the libs sorts of fake anarchists. And they have a lot of sort of stake in maintaining that brand and that image and maintaining the idea that like anybody who disagrees with them is just a shrieking liberal.

And so you know i just sort of i know those people i know that like the kinds of mentalities that those people have it's kind of a sad thing they uh they don't have a whole lot going for them so they find people online to target and like that's their life and it's a sad life so it's it's you know i i can go against them i can spend all my time wasting my time engaged with them, but it doesn't actually help.

It doesn't move the needle forward. It doesn't give us more liberty for me to pwn these people any more than it gives, like, makes more liberty for these people to, quote, own the libs online. It's all performative nonsense. So I mostly ignore them. Well, I'm glad that you do that, man. And yeah, we certainly are knee deep in those types of people. And it just feels like there's not a lot of people out there that embrace logic.

Embrace intellectual integrity so I that's why I wanted to have you on the show man because I don't see you pulling punches when it comes to that stuff And yeah, your hair might be long your beard might be a little bushy But like as far as it comes to logic and reason and evidence, I think you're spot-on So why don't we go ahead and move forward here because one thing I did want to touch on was the the false hope savior complex that we're seeing,

right now on full tilt with both the right and right-leaning libertarians, which seems like kind of the majority of libertarians these days. And I would usually make a, wouldn't make a claim such as like false hope, you know, because Trump hasn't even entered office yet, you know, and again, I should say, but we did witness four years of a Trump presidency, which, you know, some might argue pushed the needle ever so slightly from the status quo, like globalist march to a new world order.

But he also did fall flat on quite a few issues. I mean, he never lived up to dozens of campaign promises. And of course, he ushered in Operation Warp Speed and the largest wealth transfer in the history of mankind. So I think it's safe to say that. But I will echo my sentiments from the previous episode that I am trying to remain optimistic and I'll attempt to moderate my language. But I also do see a savior complex that has arisen even greater than his first four years.

And one of my issues with the Trump worship syndrome is that it neglects numerous other ideas that don't involve compromise or participation with the war criminals in the state. And those other ideas are agorism, voluntarism, mutual aid. I mean, really, there are endless ideas of how to create a free society outside the state's scope of control.

But I fear that when we focus all of our energy on this political solution, which libertarians have been doing for the past year or more now, people lose sight of these other options and start believing that voting is all that they need to do to move the ball forward. And to me, that's just the least effective route. Voting is always speculative. And what could occur depends on the candidate and the party. And to me, that just makes me very skeptical of the whole process and just the

unwavering faith in Trump. And he's become a demagogue. But I think it's the organization that you're associated with, Agorist Nexus, made a post a few, maybe it was a week ago or so, but it basically said that Kamala would have been better for the liberty movement in the long term because she would have pushed people towards libertarianism, but now Trump will silence the potential Republican dissidents.

So can we maybe riff on that a little bit? Yeah, well, so, all right, let's start with something that's routine trope among right wingers, right? Pride flags on drone bombs. It's the idea that as long as you're branding the same sorts of things like the military industrial complex, et cetera, et cetera, as inclusive or whatever the branding that you can, you know, sort of pacify a lot of people who are allegedly on the left.

That's true to a certain extent. As long as they feel represented, a lot of people will sort of be pacified and join the system. It's like that CIA ad that showed up like a year or two ago, which was like this woman talking about how she grew up poor in a minority household, and now she gets to serve her country. And it's like, shut the fuck up. You're helping bomb brown people. You're not minority representation.

And so it's that mentality but flipped i it's why it's why i wanted to start by encouraging people to watch the dark matter video so like that video it really and it's it's it it says something that i've been saying for like years but it's it's pretty concise it does it well i've been saying for years that there's something that i've been terming the anti-woke grift and a lot of these people do the exact same thing that the wokes allegedly do, but then it's the anti-woke side of it.

So we're pushing back and it doesn't matter that we're doing the same thing. You know, it does. And a lot of people in the Trump camp fall into this category and a lot of them will like be totally fine with the same kind of thing as long as it's serving their agenda or they'll ignore actively what Trump did while claiming certain things are bad. Like, oh, you know, your candidate wore a mask to a family gathering.

He's disqualified. Your candidate supported vaccines, you know, voluntarily canceled, you know, or something like that. And it's like, but Trump was warp speed. Trump was the architect of the vaccines to the point where when he was starting his campaign off this latest term, he brought the Johnson & Johnson CEO onto his campaign stage and told his audience to stop booing. That's that's who Trump is. Trump. Oh, we we hate Fauci, you know, fire Fauci, jail Fauci, Fauci sucks, Fauci bad.

Trump hired Fauci first, you know, like and Trump knew everything about the, you know, Wuhan Institute of Virology stuff when he hired Fauci because that was part of his credentials.

Trump knew that Trump's team knew that so when these people claim this moral consternation over certain things like that they're like but then they're totally fine with the guy who was responsible for locking down the country who said wearing masks is patriotic and posted a fucking you know like virtue signal on Twitter with a mask on these people tip their hand they show you who they are because it's like the action isn't what bothers them as long

as it's the trump brand version of the action it's totally fine with them they're totally fine with overlooking the military industrial complex when trump says to netanyahu that i'm basically offering you a blank check you can do what you what you need to and we'll we'll provide support that they're totally fine when trump and elon musk are on a on a call with zelensky uh talking about strategic planning to to like you know bolster ukrainian support they're totally

fine with like you know they'll they'll call like apac an organization organization like blood soak blah blah blah blah and that's true but then they'll say that.

It's totally fine that trump has miriam miriam adelson. And a bunch of other Zionists that he made Mike Huckabee an avowed blood-soaked Zionist, just complete endorser of the Israeli war machine genocide, the ambassador to Israel. He's surrounded by the same sorts of people these people claim to hate. He hires neocons. He has like, you know, he was briefly considering Matt Gaetz. That's fucking hilarious.

It's just the mentality of these people that as soon as you slap their branding on it, they're totally fine with it. It's the tipping of the hand. It's not that they oppose these things. It's that if the guys doing it are their guys, then it's totally okay. He's putting neocons in every major position. He wants to grant police immunity. These people are like, oh yeah, I'm going to post a First Amendment audit. I'm going to post this incident of a police officer raiding a family home.

And I'm going to talk real mad smack about a dead squirrel in New York. And then I'm going to talk to the guys who are going to give them immunity and say, yes, please shove it down my throat this time. I love the fluids. It's fucking atrocious. Right. And the thing, it's so just cringe to watch. And ultimately, it comes down to it's an absolute lack of logical consistency. And of course, we see that on both sides of the spectrum.

But sort of with the way that we started this discussion, talking about the savior worship, savior complex, all that sort of stuff. In my observation has been sort of the epitome of this, the cult of politics sort of merged with the cult of personality that is people like Trump to get people to fall in line with these sort of things.

Similar to how I know we mentioned before the broadcast, our colleague Carrie Webler really hit the nail on the head when she pointed out that the whole Trump MAGA movement is really just the Obama hope and change 2.0 flipped to the other side of the dichotomy. It's essentially the exact same playbook.

And this is what we get when we see politics turned into sort of a cult of celebrity when we have these these echo chambers of political identity created around as you mentioned branding as opposed to any kind of objective analysis of data and policy and the realistic implications that these things have you know it's very similar you know to how you said you know they'll talk all sorts of shit about peanut the squirrel and the raccoon and all this sort of stuff,

and then simultaneously fly their thin blue line flags like tread on me harder, daddy. It's like, what's going on in the brain that has led to this insane amount of cognitive dissonance?

And I think it really comes down to, for anyone that's read the book Propaganda written by Dr. Edward Bernays back in the 1920s, it is the epitome because if we remember, for For those that have read that and have sort of looked into Bernays' work and the way it's been utilized by the U.S.

Government, especially the way that Bernays' work was utilized by Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister of the Third Reich during World War II, the way that they used Bernays' work for the Nazi propaganda machine to convince the German people into following their bullshit. And then the way that the U.S.

Government did the exact same thing post-Operation Paperclip after we brought all the high-ranking Nazis over here and put them in the OSS and the CIA and the State Department is the way that they used – and by they, I mean the social engineers around Bernays when he crafted these strategies –. Use them for branding for tobacco corporations and jewelers, K-jewelers and De Beers and just all of these sort of things. Torches of freedom. Yeah. And then switched it onto the political side of things.

Oh, we can use the same corporate branding tactics that we can use to get people to consume, consume, consume, consume for politics.

So now it's not, oh, your policies objectively are bad and this person's policies objectively are good we can just cram the same old shit down everybody's throats with both versions with both sides of the paradigm because we can create a brand around them that defeats the need for objectivity and and you know it enacts the cognitive dissonance where we have this sort of now you know branding cranked up to 11 that defeats any kind of intellectual scrutiny.

It's like this. Speaking of Brandon, Biden is a similar thing. You could follow a direct line from his promises to his eventual breaking of all of them if you follow it far enough back. He was already lying about his his bona fides. He was like, you know, making up his past in order, like he would straight up plagiarize other people's speeches so that like he could sound like them. He would have their air of nobility. And like he was straight up plagiarizing them.

The news covered this in like the 90s, 80s, something like that. He was crime Bill Biden, though. He was he was locking up minorities. He was supporting like the prison industrial complex. He said, if you've got a dimes worth a crack, you should be locked up. Even, you know, he was the guy that drew up essentially what the foundation of the Patriot Act was before the Bush administration inactively. Yeah. And, and, and like, and, and that's like, you know, he, he also like, he was segregationist.

He was, you know, a big, like he, he, he eulogized an ex Cyclops for the KKK. And you can say, well, the guy was reformed maybe allegedly, but why pick that guy to eulogize then? And also, like, just in general, just like surrounding himself with a bunch of terrible people and like sort of the same Democrat lockstep racism saying bring them to heel.

They're super predators like this mentality followed by where it became clear to anybody watching that he was like, you know, an ingenuine activist for social change, you know, saying shit like, you know, if you if you don't vote for me, you ain't. black. Well, congratulations, you lost the black vote this year. Like when he's saying shit like that, when he's, when he's, you know, performatively woke, he's not actually woke.

He's not actually trying to bring social justice. He's not actually doing any sort of meaningful change. You can tell that what he says is what he thinks he needs to say in order to get support for him and his party. And now that he does not need like that support anymore, because he's obviously not going to be in the next four years, he just like, oh, yeah, you know all that stuff I said about not pardoning Hunter Biden? Yeah, that shit's gone now.

And it's the same thing. Like, people can know that Biden was going to break that promise. I knew he was going to break that promise. I was already saying that. Like, because of course he's going to break that promise. Even if he did get voted in at that point, like, he wouldn't need to keep his promise. He'd pardon his son and it'd be totally fine because he is in. So whether he's in or he's out, campaigning, you want to look good.

But during the actual, like, process of your power, you can do whatever the fuck you want. And that's the same with Trump. I know that might have seemed like a schizo sidebar, but I'm trying to emphasize I'm not team blue. I'm not team Biden just because I'm opposing Trump. But also, if you oppose Biden, on the same grounds, you should oppose Trump

because he talks a big game about free speech. But then part of Agenda 47, if you watch his videos, is you can't even classify something as misinformation. That's what he wants to do. He wants to ban that. He also wants to jail flag burners. He called anarchists directly in, like, 2019 Department of Defense report series. He compared them to terrorist threats and said that they should be monitored and profiled. The police should be given additional protections and powers to deal with them.

You can look this up. It's all public record. It's essentially the same playbook that we've seen with the Republicans where, remember way back when, where it was like, oh, if you have a Ron Paul bumper sticker, you're a potential domestic terrorist.

And that's the shit that was happening in 2009. exactly and and now he wants to like he he does that he wants to crush protest like he said that we should have one good hour where the police can just do whatever the fuck they want he wants a modern day american version of kristallnacht and this is the libertarian support. And like that, oh, we want to end the Fed. The Fed is bad. The Fed is the worst thing ever. Sure. He printed seven point eight trillion dollars worth of debt onto like this.

This and like, oh, you know, Second Amendment extremism. Biden's going to come grab our guns. I like taking the guns first and doing due process later. That's a Trump quote, motherfucker. Biden never even said anything remotely approaching that. And he wants to do that.

He like he's doing all these tariffs that everybody in the actual Mises Institute, not the fake ass Mises caucus, but the Mises Institute knows is like a really bad thing for the economy and for economic freedom, for for trade like efficiency. And see, he wants to do that because it makes his like murica rah rah like aesthetic, but it's not actually good for the common person.

Like, and just to be clear, as a nice little cherry on top, you know, people talk a big game about how Biden said he was going to, you know, make Saudi Arabia a pariah because of what happened to Jamal Khashoggi. Good. That's a good thing. Saudi Arabian government should be a pariah. We should not work with them. And that's a good promise to make. But it never actually happened. And Biden was totally content to give them arms sales.

And then lately, people are pointing out, like Jon Stewart pointed out, that he fist bumped Bonesaw Salman. And he did this. Right? As like sort of a final parting gesture that he never like was honest. And that's truly bad. It's truly bad that we had somebody who's like this much of a snake in the White House for four years. But you know who else was schmoozing with MBS? Motherfucking Trump, who is hosting Saudi government sponsored golf tournaments at Mar-a-Lago, motherfuckers.

It's all a big club and you ain't in it. Yeah. Well, he changed his rhetoric. At one point before he was elected in 2016, he said that Saudi Arabia is one of the biggest threats. And he changed that to Iran within a couple of years, shifting the goalposts. But I want to back up a little bit because if there's one thing that I just can't stand, it's freaking bootlickers. But if there's something else that's even worse, it's the hypocritical bootlickers who are logically inconsistent.

And boy, let me tell you, we've been in the police accountability realm for, what, 12, 13 years now. And when I started to see all these peanut memes being shared around social media, I mean, they were viral. And for those who don't know, it was kind of a short-lived social media phenomenon.

But Peanut was a squirrel who became internet famous, internet sensation, and who was euthanized by the New York state government because I guess he was illegally, I don't know how they classify it, but apparently the owner wasn't supposed to be. The owner wasn't supposed to have them, more or less. But what's ironic about that, it was mostly the right and the right Trump supporters who were gung-ho about supporting this meme and sharing it everywhere.

And they seemed genuinely pretty outraged about it. But then just in May of 2024, this year, Trump literally said at a rally that we're going to give our police their power back. We're going to give them immunity from prosecution so they're not prosecuted for doing their jobs. And he's made this claim a couple times, something just, you know, subtle variations of it. But, you know, he doesn't explain how he's going to do that.

But we know he is very much a supporter of the police and in law enforcement. And to me, this is, man, they clash up against both these ideas just clash so hard with each other. I really have a hard time taking these people seriously, you know. And again, I think what you're saying about the brand, as long as it's in the orbit of the brand, the Trump brand, it doesn't matter if it's true or if it's not true, people are going to support it.

And that's just blind faith, guys. And we really have to be doing much better than that. And I did want to kind of move forward here a little bit because I think we talked about Chase Oliver and how he fit into all of this last week.

And I know you kind of just referenced him a little bit here, but I do want to talk about chase oliver because i feel like this is a big piece of the puzzle when it comes to the lp, and i don't think it's been a secret that you know chase has been the butt of jokes he's been misrepresented he's been smeared he's been bashed repeatedly. But I think he deserves some credit for taking it all in stride. And he was a Libertarian Party candidate.

He was essentially abandoned shortly after winning the LP nomination and never really given the backing that he needed. And say what you will about his personal opinions, which I personally, I don't know a lot about them. I know that in his past, I don't know, he supported transing the kids and he wore some masks during the COVID lockdowns and whatnot. I think he said something about Ron Paul, like not supporting Ron Paul.

I haven't scoured Twitter seeking out his old tweets, but as far as his positions on libertarianism, he's been spot on. I've heard Chase speak numerous times.

In fact, I've done spaces with him. I've heard him in debates. He is grounded philosophically with the libertarian point of view. And what I think really was what the right didn't like was their interpretation of his views on the culture war issues. And so, you know, I'm not suggesting the LP and the members blindly back him, but I'd only imagine how much more success he would have had if he did have some backing by more prominent libertarian influencers.

And on a spaces a couple of weeks, or I guess it was last week, Clint and Dave and Angela all spoke about how Chase didn't go on any big shows like Dave's podcast or Tim cast. Well, yeah, like he didn't want to get crucified, you know, like they were obviously, uh, the cards were, you know, stacked against them. So that makes sense to me. It wasn't a welcoming environment at all, you know, and not to say it has to be, but like, are you going to go onto a

podcast just to get skewed skewered? You know, like, I don't think most people would do that.

So do you guys think that things would have been considerably different if Angela and big name podcast podcasters actually did invest energy into helping chase with more exposure well i'll let don reply first because i've got a shit ton to say on this so if you've got something you want to say then now you can go for it so my whole position on it is i don't necessarily think it would have been a big difference essentially because. I think it was already given out the get-go.

We could see the writing on the wall with the way that the Mises caucus was going that they were going to at the very least tacitly give the nod to Trump and sort of with the whole sellout that we've seen. I don't think there was ever going to be any kind of scenario where the Libertarian Party, as it is now, wasn't going to throw their cards in to back a Trump candidacy.

Because unfortunately, as we discussed in last week's episode, it's gotten to the point where they're choosing brand and aesthetic and essentially, quote-unquote, the cool kids club over actually maintaining some sort of principle. And it's unfortunate that Chase didn't get the kind of backing that he should have, or maybe, I don't know. I'm not going to say should have because I'll be completely honest.

I haven't really looked into him or his history or where he stands on things at all, but also it sort of goes into that vein of I think that national elections are bullshit anyway, sort of on par with my closing statement from last week's episode, is that once we get to the point of the national stage, anybody that is allowed to be on that literal stage on primetime television talking about being installed in the Oval Office has already been hand-shared.

Chosen by the powers that shouldn't be behind the scenes, the intelligence community, the banking cartel, Bilderberg, Bohemian Grove, so on and so forth. So anybody that does end up on that platform has already been bought and sold, in my opinion, anyway, and therefore anything they say wouldn't matter, even if their tongues were notarized.

So uh sadly sadly even if chase did get to that stage i wouldn't trust it simply on that reasoning alone yeah well so okay let's start with something here and i think it's valuable to start here because we talked about edward bernays for a bit and the torches of freedom are an example of what what what he was capable of he had a bunch of women throw out you know like put put a bunch just cigarettes in the air. And they were smoking. It was a big parade.

It was a big thing in magazines and newsprint. It was like, oh, the torches of freedom. These daring women are standing up for their ability to be less traditionally blah, blah, blah, blah, because of their smoking. And woo, that's scandalous. Men are smokers. Women have to be dainty. But no, oh, actually, we're standing up. We want to smoke, too. And then cigarette sales shot through the roof.

And it wasn't actually torches of freedom. In fact, smoking like cigarettes, especially, but anything really sorry to those of you out there who think if you breathe a certain type of smoke, it's not bad for you at all. It absolutely is. It always is to some extent. But like the tobacco industry, especially with the fillers they put in there are like especially egregious and especially with some of the stuff that's in the filters that, you know, oh, you think it's filtered.

It's safe, right? But it's not. The filter, in fact, includes a lot of whole airborne particulates that can get in your lungs as well. So it's not a good thing. Don't smoke.

That's the message. but the general thing is first off uh just just as a brief aside the libertarian, party and like message has long been co-opted and so sort of a bunch of conservative stuff has long been co-opted by the tobacco industry we could do a whole episode on that if y'all want to do a deep dive at some point into tobacco oil banks and the libertarian uh message and movement but like the general thing that i could bring up in this regard is that's the

power of branding it's the power of having a banner behind which to rally and so Trump to his credit.

And if anyone wants to read this they should read the art of the deal he literally tells you his whole strategy right there in his book you can get it as a PDF online right now do it right now do your homework this is going to be the president for the next four years, Trump to his credit knows how to build a brand he's really good at it And so when Trump built his brand, he would take the worst elements. And, you know, I do this as well because it works.

He would take the worst elements of what people criticized him of and he'd be like, yeah, sure. And and so, like, for instance, when Hillary called him, called him and his supporters a basket of deplorables, they all started to call themselves deplorables. It's sort of like how there are a bunch of people who, like, try to, for instance, use my mental illness against me. And I'll just be like, yeah, sure. I'm a mentally ill furry. So what?

Or like they'll claim that any friend of mine has to be in a cult. So I'm like, yeah, sure. I'm a cult leader. So what? Like, I lean into it because it's funny, because their words have no power over me. And that's exactly what it is. It's like you take the label back. And like Trump did that with deplorable. That is his brand. So Michael Rechtenwald was the Libertarian Party's darling. And he, at least on the Mises caucus level, and he is unapproachable.

First off, if you watch a video with him in it, you'll see that like he can't go more than like seven seconds without licking his lips.

It's weird and lizard like and I cannot see past it. And if you didn't notice that before, you will now notice it. I am sorry to curse you with this information. It's like Rocco's Basilisk. It's an info hazard. Now you'll see the licks wherever you go. You'll see them before you go to sleep tonight.

But michael rechtenwald used these labels he was part of one of the original anti-woke rifts he called himself the unwoke professor on twitter for a long time until that account got suspended and he was saying some truly atrocious atrocious shit including the fact that he hoped that trump's first election would have would have like the liberal students everywhere something like that jumping out of their windows. Basically like, yeah, kill yourself if you don't like Trump.

And he did this. And then like when that account got banned, he called himself the deplorable professor going with Trump's branding because it's what worked.

And he also then would go on to make books against COVID after a significant amount of the COVID stuff had already started up, you know like anti the anti-covid like lockdown stuff had already been going for some period of time before he started to come out with his stuff and like, That's one of the things like I criticized him recently for a book he wrote. And he said, actually, that book came out in 2020 because I thought it was a new book because he's shittling it on his newsletter.

You know, he said, no, that book came out in 2020. What were you doing? Cowering in a corner. And this is the same thing Dave Smith said when I was on that spaces. And I did the same thing that I did with Dave Smith. I'm like, no, actually, in like the first month of the hysteria in January, I was already speaking out against it. And like by March, I was already writing like articles, like calling out all of this stuff, like that are published on Agoras Nexus.

You can go see that when it's Panopticon rising COVID-19 and the AI surveillance state, something like that. And so like that like thing where like Michael Rechtenwald was trying to claim that anybody who didn't like him must aw shucks have bought into it. That's what people do with Chase Oliver. People who supported Michael Rechtenwald do the same thing to Chase Oliver, where they're like, well, he bought in. And so it's like, yeah, maybe, maybe he bought in.

But the point is, is it worse to have bought the propaganda? Or is it worse to have been the person who created the propaganda to begin with. If Chase wearing a mask makes him such a bad person, then we should also say that Trump saying wearing a mask is patriotic and telling every American to do so like is bad as well. Not just Chase saying, I'm going to do it at my family gathering and still have it even though I'm breaking your petty little regulations.

He was actually resisting a certain amount of the COVID hysteria. He was saying, I'm still going to have my family gathering even though you're telling me not to. And we're going to do it allegedly right. We're going to go with your program, but I'm not going to not see my family because they were telling him not to.

That's like resistance. It's not as much resistance as maybe some libertarians would prefer, but it's certainly more resistance than saying mask wearing is patriotic and getting your a tweet liked by hundreds of thousands of people while you pose in a mask as the president of the fucking country.

Additionally, Trump had no problem with vaccine mandates on an employer level, and he encouraged employers to do so, even helping with incentive structures for that purpose so that warp speed could look good and improve the quality of his brand. So when Chase says that, you know, a company should be able to, like, you know, mandate vaccines because it's their business and it should be their choice and not up to the government, that's kind of, you know, a libertarian position.

Now, to me, I like I don't support mask mandates, vaccine mandates at all. I think that, like, especially given the fact that a lot of these corporations are bought into the state, it's a lot more nuanced than just saying they're a business. They should be able to do what they want. Because these businesses a lot of the time rely on the state in order to get what they have. But that's a separate subject.

The primary thrust is Chase was doing a much milder version of what Trump is doing, and they're saying it disqualifies him. Now, transing the kids, he specifically says he doesn't support surgery until they're 18. And he also specifically said that any other of decisions should be between a doctor.

A parent, and the child, and not the government, which is a lot different than saying, I think, you know, mandatory hormones for all kids who like pink, you know, the hysteria around the trans issue is something to behold, because it's one of those issues where they're clutching their pearls, and conservatives are being very much the same sorts of identitarian whack jobs that the anti-SJW crowd claimed the left were for so long, But now it's for the whites, the straights, the Christians,

even though Trump is anti-Christian as fuck. You know, like they'll they'll pull that they'll claim that like, oh, we're such under attack. There's been a push, maybe, but like it's the same kind of push as left handedness, like left handedness saw acceptance as well after it was no longer considered like you were part of Baphomet, Satanism or whatever.

If you were left handed, like once once like that was a serious panic for a long time, you got you got called like, you know, evil and, you know, sinister and whatever, whatever. if you were left-handed. And then when that stopped being a thing, people were like, oh yeah, you know what? I can be left-handed and not be like practically burned at the stake. Great, I am left-handed. And a bunch of like charts show a spike and then a plateau of left-handed people.

And so you see that plateau with the trans issue because they're finally allowed to be themselves in public to a certain extent in certain states, void where prohibited, your mileage may vary. Okay. And they can finally be themselves. And this is causing a bunch of people to say, oh, there must be a push. It must be this universal push. There must be an agenda, maybe in certain areas. But really, it's just the fact that they're no longer being persecuted as much as they were.

And a lot of conservatives want to reverse course on that. They want these people to be pushed back in, which is why you'll see a lot of the hatred against Chase directly because he's gay, or because he posed with a pride flag, or because he went to a pride event. So the fuck what? Additionally...

When these people who claim to be libertarians but clearly want to control other people's sexual habits and lifestyles and orientations and whatever the thing is, when these people do this, they're also falling into that same sort of thing.

The Libertarian Party Muses Caucus was supposed to avoid culture wars, but then they fell face first into this. Jacob Hornberger, who was also a candidate and who has like a huge amount of knowledge, I might recommend having him on at some point. He did these car rants after certain appearances at libertarian events that I found very, very effective at delivering actual libertarian messaging.

And one of the things that he said in one of these car rants that really stood out to me, because it's the same thing that I had been saying for a while was, and it was vindicating to hear somebody like in the official libertarian circle say this was for him to say that like.

The branding for all of this stuff for like the the closed borders the you know the the the the deplorable stuff the you know the sort of anti-woke sort of whatever the the the cultural conservative thing if you want that and you have a choice between dr rechtenwald and trump Trump you're picking Trump because he already has that branding and he already has that like established credentials those like the the feed in the door he's already the person

who is associated with like kick the migrants out he was doing a denaturalization program he's the border hawk he's the guy who's like unwoke he's the guy who Mike Rechtenwald wanted to try to be Mike wasn't coming up with his own branding wreck the regime is as close as he got and that was basically it he had nothing else wreck the regime was the only like original branding he did the rest of it his whole life was adopting other people's branding trump

his whole life to his credit has been building his own brand his own way of approaching thing his own culture his own identity. And Michael Rechtenwald had always glommed onto that. He was like, finally, a guy who speaks for me, his site, LegitGov, run with Lori Price, his previous campaign manager, will not shut the fuck up about how awesome Trump and, by the way, Putin are. And this site is set up specifically to run that sort of messaging. And so.

He's he's glomming on to bigger figures. He's glomming on to people who have the established branding because he doesn't want to try to establish his own branding. And in doing so, he is ceding all the territory to Trump, because if you're going to vote for somebody, somebody like Trump, why would you vote for Rechtenwald? He's like he does not look good. He does not sound good. He does not present himself well. He does not have like coherent, like sound policy prescriptions.

At this point, he's full mask off anti-Jew motherfucker who's just constantly talking about how they should be expelled, how they run everything, how the reason his book didn't get published, how blah, blah. It's it's embarrassing. So if you have like the option to choose between him and Trump, most people are going to go with Trump. Most people don't know who this guy is. Most people aren't going to take his like messaging of, oh, well, yeah, but I'm I'm a professor who got jammed out

of the political establishment. It's like, yeah, Trump got multiple assassination attempts. Trump got like, you know, the fucking book thrown at him. Trump got a mugshot. What do you got, Mikey? Nothing. And so like the street cred is not there. The verifiability is not there. So the question is, how does the Libertarian Party pose an actual alternative in Michael Rechtenwald? Well, the answer is they don't. And Angela knew this.

Angela said she breathed a sigh of relief when he lost and when Chase was the guy because at that point she veered straight into and she admits this she was meeting with Trump before all of the before the nomination even happened she got to veer directly into supporting him as a spoiler candidate against Biden and she got to veer hard into that saying we're gonna chase Biden out and you know, we're not supporting Chase because we like Chase.

I'm going to put a clown nose on like the bitch I am in my fucking endorsement video. We're going to, you know, have this like rollout of this massively, weirdly homophobic campaign against Chase himself. We're going to very specifically get him only on the kinds of podcasts that would turn him down, except one of them. Like she said, that's one of the things, oh, he's not going on podcasts. He would, he will go on this podcast, I'm assuming.

But like he he would he would go on podcasts, but the podcast that she invited him on, she said that every one of them turned him down except one. And that was Tim Pool. And the day Tim Pool said that he would have him on, which, by the way. Have him on a segment called Culture War that eventually turned out to have been paid for by the literal Russian government.

And the day that he agreed to have him on, the motherfucker was like very conspicuously needing to be in a state filling out certain paperwork and getting on certain ballots. He couldn't show up in person. He couldn't go to Tim's compound. And Tim doesn't do tele interviews, so he couldn't show up.

It was not possible for him to be there. and i think somebody probably knew that when they double booked him for that day so that they could play this big campaign of he's not going on podcasts yes he was he went on a lot of pot he went on reason he went on john stossel the news show he went on like multiple appearances on a variety of podcasts that were smaller i forget exactly which they were you did for equal debates several times yeah and so he was he did media he was not disinterested in

doing media but they had to play it up like he was because it's like oh this liberal's running away he can't handle debate but it's a fucking lie let's get down in here yeah one thing like if we had the time i'd like to pivot just ever so slightly because one of the big things that i've seen recently.

Not even necessarily recently, but especially more so recently in the cognitive dissonance of this, the, the cult around the Trump brand is, you know, as you mentioned, you know, Donald Trump is very, if you analyze it objectively, very anti-Christian.

And I would really like to sort of zone in on that and then have you elucidate a little bit more on the specifics of that, because we've seen, you know, this huge, you know, it's, it's the evangelical Christian conservative national sort of like this melding of a bunch of cultural or different sections of of culture behind sort of the right wing ecosphere and as someone you know such as myself. Who has been for nearly a decade now a very devout Norse pagan.

So religious minority down here in the South, and sort of watching this fervor where you have evangelical Christian nationalists who, and specifically when I say Christian nationalists, I'm talking about groups like Ziklag, which for people, if they haven't read it, we actually republished an article from ProPublica on the Free Thought Project a couple of months ago about this very shady.

Self-admitted Christian nationalist supremacist group that is backing the Trump campaign and a couple of these other folks, and just these movements in general sort of like, oh, Trump is Jesus, things of that nature. I've literally seen people making comparisons like, well, Trump is the savior and Jesus is going to come back and all this sort of stuff.

And it's like, if you actually knew more about what this guy's positions were, you would recognize he is not a friend of the christian people so with myself as a pagan who typically you know gets a lot of shit from you know the quote unquote and i don't mean to like rag on religion too much but from the you know supposed loving portion of the religion that seems oh so tolerant until you happen to have a different view of a view or that is different than theirs you know,

to see them just embrace this guy, whereas our community has been so consistently shat on for just existing has been mind boggling to me. So, so if we could, if you could elucidate a little bit more upon, upon that, just to sort of, you know, get those points out there for people who may not know, you know, that would be, you know, really good. So I might actually be uniquely positioned, because I'm literally a trained preacher in Christianity.

But the general thing is, first off, he's friends with Jeffrey Epstein. You cannot really be friends with Jeffrey Epstein and a Christian or anti-groomer, so they can abscond with all that garbage. He sexually objectified his own daughter. If you look on another woman with lust, you have committed adultery with her in your heart. That is a Bible verse. You're not even allowed to look at a woman with lust. And he looked at his own daughter and said, yeah, that chick's hot.

If I weren't her father, I would fuck her. That's fucking insane. He murdered a ton of civilians. He's lived by the sword when he was in office. He talked about grabbing them by the pussy. They just let you do it. He helped genocides. He lies constantly. You're not allowed to lie. You're not allowed to bear false witness. And he constantly surrounds himself with this sort of person. You're supposed to have kindness for migrants.

You're supposed to have kindness for people who hate you, for your enemy. They're supposed to do good to your enemies and to those who hate you. Like if one man like strikes you on one side of your cheek, you're supposed to turn the other so that he can strike the other. The point is to be radically like, you know, accepting because your reward will be in heaven. So you don't need to have a perfect life here.

And this radical acceptance is the kind of way that Christians can reach people because the people will be like, well, fuck, my hate didn't have any power over you. Let me try your love. Maybe I'll get the same kind of power you've got. And so the good Samaritan story, like the Samaritan was like, saw the, I forget exactly who, but basically a traveler from an enemy tribe on like the road beaten up. And he took him in. And in that act of kindness, basically made a convert, right?

That's the thing. You're supposed to be a good Samaritan. But Trump just says, yeah if you're not fucking born here you know and if you're not fucking born here under the right circumstances get the fuck out we'll denaturalize you you've gone through the naturalization process you've done the perilous journey of getting here you filed all the proper legal paperwork get the fuck out of here uh that's a bad samaritan that's not what you're supposed to do.

And just to be clear, every piece of evidence seems to suggest that he raped Elizabeth Jean Carroll. So he's probably like a fucking actual rapist. And like also, he's selling signed Bibles, which is hilarious. If you want to spend, I think the full personally signed Bible is like $1,000 was anyway. It's a collector's item now. It's probably being sold for a shit ton more. You can go get your $1,000 signed Trump Bible because that's what it is.

It's a brand. he serves mammon he's right there on the side of wealth he's constantly was talking about like all of his opulent parties and making more and buy my gold sneakers so that I can keep my properties and like the Jesus I know told the rich man to sell all he had and follow him the Jesus I know would have a problem with somebody claiming Christ while talking about who he wants to fuck and how young they are and how he has the same taste in young women as Jeff Epstein.

And he would also tell that rich person that it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. He would tell that man that. And then that man walked away distraught because he's like, well, I don't want to fucking give up all my shit. I guess fuck this Christianity thing. And that's the kind of thing. Trump is anti-Christian. He's the opposite of humble. He lives by the sword. He worships mammon.

He worships at the altar of his own like idolatry, selling NFTs that artificially make him look more awesome than he is. You'll notice whenever one of these Trump supporters makes an AI image of Trump, they always make him real like ripped, even though Trump doesn't work out a day in his fucking life and he spends more of his time golfing than he does swinging a weight.

Like let's be super clear here trump is a hypocritical murderous adulterous gluttonous greed-soaked pig he is anti-christ if anything but hey you know it's fine because the antichrist was only described in the bible as somebody who would appear to you as an angel of light that's not at all what trump oh wait so it's like it's fucking stupid like these people don't read the Bible.

I have read the Bible so many times that I knew as soon as this evangelical garbage was starting up, Trump is a false prophet. You can maybe say that this false prophet will result in a better environment for your religion, but maybe not, because now your religion has a bunch of false prophecy as its prime political movement, and maybe that's going to result in more money changers in the temple. As it were. And Jesus kind of had some whips and some table overturns for those sorts of people.

Exactly. And that's always been so like for the folks that don't know, because I don't I know I've mentioned it on my show, The Rundown Live. I don't know if I've ever mentioned it on the Free Salt Project before. For those that don't know, I have a very long background academically of studying of history, not necessarily since that I went to school for it. But I've literally been studying history and specifically the intersections between history and theology since I was eight years old.

So literally every day for 20 years now, I'm pretty sure I could have a Ph.D. at this point. So when I've always been fascinated with particularly with religion and history and the way these two things intersect, I've just studied history in general. I've read the Bible front to pack multiple versions of it multiple times, the Mahabharata, the Bhagavad Gita. The Norse pagan scripture, pretty much any possible religion because it's fascinating to me.

And we can sit here, I'm sure, especially with your religious training, Jeremiah, and speak for an entire episode about this modern-day contemporary Christianity versus actual first-century Christianity comparatively with the Gnostic Gospels and the Dead Sea Scrolls and the people like Marcion of Sinepe, who arguably wrote the very first Bible, quote-unquote.

And just how vastly different actual first century Christianity in its actual context is compared to this very commercialized, contemporary, Americanized nonsense that it's absolutely, you know, so completely disconnected from it. But I sit here and I see these Christian groups backing Trump, and of course, a lot of it plays into the whole Zionism as well. The whole evangelical Christian to Zeno-Zionist pipeline is a very real thing.

So we see this falling into the support for Israel because it's, quote-unquote, the Holy Land, even though they have no historical conceptual understanding of the Ashkenazi invasion of Israel and then the creation of the Zionist government and have absolutely no connection to the historical Jews of the kingdom of Judea or any of those sorts of things. And we see in the genocide currently happening in Palestine.

Actual first century Christian temples and churches in Palestine being destroyed by the Israeli government, Christians being murdered by the Israeli government. But over here in the U.S., we have them say, yeah, bomb them more, kill them, wipe out the Palestinians.

And it's like what the fuck are you even talking about like do you not see that they're killing your own people they're that you know you know it and it's it's so wild to me well you know it could be argued that they not see quite a lot they're acting quite a lot like them yeah i was gonna make that comparison as well well i mean there's also the fact that you know he dropped 73 000 bombs in four years which was nearly double of what bush

did and close in comparison to what Obama did in eight years. Don't forget his administration between 2016 to 2019 increased Afghanistan civilian casualties 330%. And don't forget he vetoed the bill to end the sanctions on Yemen and aided a genocide by starving millions. I mean, maybe not millions, at least thousands, hundreds of thousands. I think it was 300,000 that died. Right. I mean, I don't know if that's just, yeah, I'd have to look at those

stats even closer, but it was an atrocity when it happened. It's still an atrocity now. And then also, don't forget the Blackwater contractors that he pardoned who killed innocent Iraqis. I mean, the list goes on and on, guys. And yeah, that's a facade. And we know Trump has really no moral foundation. He says what he has to say to get elected. Waivers in the wind with his positions. And there isn't really any strong backing when it comes to his ideological position on things.

But with all that said, we are a little low on time. Unfortunately, my day has shifted and we did get a little bit late of a start today.

So I did want to start to wrap this up. But every time we do an interview with somebody, we always try to end the conversation with a white pill. And considering we didn't get to that last time, everything we discussed today could seem very pessimistic. And maybe some people could even interpret that as that we're choosing to be black-pilled about this stuff. But I think that's void of any nuance.

So maybe for contrast, we could talk about a few things that maybe might potentially be optimistic about Trump's election win? I mean, I know this is kind of a tall order here. But I mean, what can we look forward to over the next four years? I think maybe some people are speculating that there might be some lower taxes, less regulations. Some people are speculating he might end the war in Ukraine. I know he's talked about that. At the very least, hopefully he stops funneling

billions and billions of dollars to Ukraine. I know that Biden just a couple of days ago requested another $24 billion for Ukraine. Although he could all send all that money to Israel instead. And he might fix the regulations and lower taxes, but I don't know, how's that going to balance out with the tariffs intervening in the economy? So it's all just kind of a wash. And again, this is all speculative because when you vote, you're voting for an idea.

You're not voting for the outcome of what's going to transpire. You're not voting for what's going to manifest for certain. So anyway, is there anything Jeremiah that you feel like we could be optimistic about considering the next four years well. I'm not going to say optimistic because I am not an optimist. Anybody who's followed me for any length of time knows I'm a pessimistic fuck. I'm not going to do any hopium either. I'd love for Trump to make good on some of his promises.

Some of his promises actually seem to have some merit this time. And it would be authentically good if certain things that Angela McArdle thinks she got as concessions for seats at the table came to pass, right? I'm not going to say that, like, oh, if he does anything good, I'm going to, like, shit on that. But, like, instead of being the hopium with the Trump campaign and Trump specifically, I'm going to do what Trump supporters don't do.

I'm going to do what a lot of people in, like, these circles don't do. And I'm going to be very specific and say don't ever, and this is a Bible verse even, Don't put your faith in man. If there is a silver lining, if there is a white pill to take here, it is not going to be found in Trump. The white pill is. Here's a hard pill to swallow. Trump is a strong man. He is a fascist, brutal dictator, demagogue, who is totally fine with his government enacting violence on the common person.

He is an absolute monster. And being certain of that is the thing that leads into the actual silver lining. I think that. That the Biden administration acted as a pacifier in certain ways for certain radical elements of anarchist circles and anti-fascist movements to say that, oh, it's fine if he's doing X, Y, and Z as long as he's not Trump. Well, now we have Trump. And now all of the groups that suddenly go dormant while somebody like Biden is in office are going to need to be activated.

Now, those groups that go dormant when people like Biden are in office should be ashamed of themselves. They're part of the reason that like people like Biden lose is because these people are totally fine with like making concessions and playing good doggy when somebody is in charge that's more closely aligned with their particular aesthetic. I mean, I won't even say values, but those people are going to be active.

There's going to be a whole lot more anti-fascist fervor because there's a fascist in charge who's like just real overt about it. Project 2025 is an objectively evil document. And the general thing that I could say in the be positive sphere is a lot of people are going to have a lot more reason to get active in anarchist and libertarian ways. Be there for them. Be there to catch them, and we can get a movement up in this motherfucker.

Because the threat is going to be real clear, glaring, positively, like in your face. So people have now a real concrete, solid thing to point at and say, that thing's bad. That's bad. That's some bad shit. We should do something. And then you say, yes, we can do something. And then when it comes down to it, like, this is our chance. They always ask, oh, libertarian anarchists, blah, blah, blah, blah. Who would build the roads? Well, we would. Who would take care of the people who need food?

Who would be there for those who are in need? We would. Who would help the common person secure their home? Who would help the common person learn to shoot? Who would help the person when their kids needed babysitting? Who would help the common person when their husband was in the hospital? Something like that. Be there for people and build up your network now. Actually practice the kinds of things that anarchists constantly talk about like, oh, we would solve these problems.

Well, now's your chance to prove it. Because with Trump gutting things like healthcare, with Trump gutting things like public infrastructure, watch Argentina. Watch how Malay has affected their economy. Watch how poverty is above 50%. And there are a whole bunch of people who relied on the programs that he cut that now no longer have a foundation to stand on while the billionaires flood into the country so that they can take advantage of shock doctrine like Naomi Klein brought up.

It's friendly fascism like Bertram Gross wrote. And like, this is your opportunity. The white pill is in you.

Do not look for anybody else. Look within yourself. Ask what skills you can confer. Like, learn from people if you don't have those skills so that you can be of use. Like it's, it's like good old Sonic the Hedgehog said, you know, nothing starts until you take action. You know, if you have time to worry, then run. Actually do some shit. That's the white pill. The white pill will never be in Trump.

He is a self-serving billionaire oligarch who serves like, at best, the other people he serves are going to be the corporate and like banking and global interests that help him. Anybody who has Peter Thiel on their side, Bilderberg Peter Thiel, is no threat to the establishment. He is not with you. So do not seek the white pill in Trump. Do not seek the white pill in this modern red Congress.

You will not find it there. Instead, seek it in your knowledge of what you can do and be practically successful in doing those things so that you don't have to wonder or worry about who's in charge. Because guess what? Anarchists don't have to give a fuck about that. People who want real freedom don't have to ask permission. People who want real, true liberty, libertarianism, they don't need a party. They don't need a political process. We just say we are taking our freedom and

we don't need your fucking say-so. We don't need to lick the boot. We don't need to bend the knee and kiss the ring and to get a seat at the political table to affect change.

People throughout history have formed very successful anarchist movements under regimes such as this understand that understand that your power lay outside the political structure not within it because a whole bunch of people who thought that they had a seat at the table are now getting a rude bitch slap awakening about the bitch that they became and like you don't have You don't have to be that way. You don't have to position yourself in that position of a lapdog lackey to the

establishment just because the establishment is red now. It doesn't matter. Do better. Be better. Be who you can and be who you are. You know, like some people who are struggling now, you know, some people who are, you know, panicking about this, be there for them.

Understand that this is your opportunity for broad-based far-reaching coalitions with people you never thought you would have been able to work with before and like they broke that up they wanted to break you up that's the reason that they're pushing israel as a primary wedge issue and saying oh the palestinians those are those people the people who support palestine palestine are on the left you can't work with them,

Yes, you can. You should. You should work with those people because they're the ones who are actually opposing the primary thrust of the establishment. AIPAC bought your favorite politician with very few exceptions. And if you think the resistance movement is going to be affiliated with a man who got a million dollars from AIPAC specifically, you're delusional.

So understand that they've been trying to put a wedge between you and those terrible liberal college students who don't understand politics. No, they understand just enough and just fine to be talked to like actual humans. Understand they've been trying to divide you from the left and the right for a long enough period that people have bought into that.

And instead of realizing this for what it is and being like united against the authoritarian axis, libertarians are being like, nah, you know what? We'll be right wingers so that we can purge the left. It's the paleo strategy. It's the Portland purge moving from like 61 to 14 platform planks. It's the watering down. It's the seeding ground. It's the, you know, nationalistic garbage that leads to like demagoguery and fascism.

And we need to recognize that because the white pill is you have the power now. You don't need fucking permission. You have the ability now to resist it now. And you don't need their say-so. You don't need their authority. You don't need a position in their cabinet. Be the libertarian in your own cabinet and fuck their house. Yeah, I absolutely agree. And my little brief white pill is sort of just going to be a really layman's terms summarization of that. Jeremiah is absolutely right, folks.

Actuate your own potential and just be the change that you want to see in the world. It's really just as simple as that. I mean, we have the points that Jeremy just made. We have our colleagues like Derrick Rose and John Bush who have been ad nauseum talking about. The exit and build strategy and movement that they're really attempting to foment and actuate, which is essentially the exact same thing. Exit from these slavery systems, build parallel ones.

I mean, if anybody doesn't know about these things, just, you know, pop over to the conscious resistance dot com and just type in exit and build in the search bar and you'll get plenty of results of Derek or John or, you know, some of the other people they have on talking about actual strategies and things that you can do and ways that you can implement right now, you know, to start to start moving out of these systems, you know, and, you know, more towards liberty.

And and at the end of the day even if you're you know financially incapable of doing x y and z like jeremy said just be a little bit better you know help somebody you know let's let somebody lean on your shoulder man it really just comes down to loving thy neighbor i think that's sort of a universal concept that doesn't need to fall inside of religion you know me i've got a. Philosophy i've essentially got a three-fold philosophy be the change you want

to see in the world, treat other people the way you want to be treated and do no harm, but take no shit. And I think that that really encompasses pretty much anything. I'm not going to sit here and say everybody should believe in what I believe in, but I think if everybody followed just those three core principles, the world would be a whole lot better of a place, you know, so just lead with love. And I think a lot of other things will follow if you just do that.

Well said, fellas. Excellent answers. Very inspiring. And yes, I would second that, Don. I think the concept of love has become cliched. I don't know if it was the Beatles overdoing it or what, but I think it's important. I think it's important that we embrace that. And it doesn't have to necessarily be a new agey, hippie-dippie, woo-woo concept either. I think there's way more to it than that.

But I'm sure we could probably even do another episode of all this, guys, and the endless fuckery and the lack of integrity, lack of consistency. From all political parties. And I guess these days, it seems like many people just suggest that that's the way it is. So we should just play the game instead of spending time focusing on these types of things or morals or ethics, integrity.

But as I tweeted out earlier today, when we play the extremely rigged game of voting for the lesser of two evils is an evil, that only leads us down the same path of ignorance is strength and war is peace, the same mentality that George Orwell was trying to warn us about in his book in 1984. And while it's perhaps a lost cause, I'm willing to die on the hill of preserving integrity. Anybody could lie. Anybody could cheat. Anybody could talk out their ass like Trump does and Biden, to be fair.

But the system, what we really need, I guess, is leaders to embrace honesty and integrity because transparency and accountability is the greatest disinfectant of corruption. And it seems like we've lost sight of that as a society.

I don't know. Maybe I'm the naive one. But if we really want change, we can't continue doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results. All right, Freethinkers, this episode is nearing the end. We wanted to take this time to remind you, if you found value in this conversation, please consider hitting that like button and subscribing to the Freethought Project podcast on your preferred platform of choice.

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So, yeah, thank you guys again for joining us. And Jeremiah, just one more time, and Don, actually, go ahead and feel free to tell people where they can find your work. Don can go first. Yeah, well, you know, of course, you know, I'm a contributor and acting editor here at the Free Thought Project. Haven't had a lot of time to write recently. My show that I co-host, The Rundown Live, you can find on the rundownlive.com, although we're also currently going through like a revamping stage.

So we haven't been going live a whole lot recently because we're, you know, changing up the website and making new merch and doing what I've got. I've got a few, few other things, you know, coming down the pike as far as plans are concerned, but you just follow me on Twitter at Don by junior D O N V I A J R. And, you know, I tend to post anything that I'm up to of any journalistic relevance there. All right. And me, you invite me at Jeremiah talks on YouTube.

Insanity is free pretty much everywhere else i'm on blue sky twitter facebook gab although i don't really use that much anymore i'm on everywhere basically you find me at smilman discord there's plenty of places you can find me but basically and essentially just you know i i try to be everywhere i try to i try to be where the people who want to crush actual resistance don't want me so if you decide you want me associated with your shit

feel free to hit me up jeremiah you didn't do your demonic voice this time man i'm a little disappointed oh yeah sure yeah and you have to be demon possessed of course if you're not demon possessed you cannot support. Well uh thank you yeah i got my fix well yeah we're gonna have to have you back man i know we were talking before we got on um we'll have you back maybe in the next couple months to talk about the technocrats Trump surrounds himself with.

But until then, thank you so much for your time today, guys. Great podcast. Music.