Most people think of distributive justice when they hear social justice.
14:48. I want to get back on the Justice thing. I've diverted us a little bit. A false assumption about this is that in a purely private society that we would have to pay exactly the same amount for poor relief that we're paying now, but the bureaucracy, I know for years that the statistic was at 70% of your dollar going through the federal government relief system was getting eaten up before it gets to anybody. So only 30% is getting there anyway. So right off the bat, it's just 30%. Secondly, I do think it's the case that when some anonymous distant institution sends you a check with your name on it, you know, there's no shame associated with that. I don't think you feel overwhelmingly compelled to get your act together and get off of that. But when there's people in your neighborhood, and you know they're not doing that great either but they're pitching in for you, well, unless you're a complete and utter deadbeat, you would feel a compulsion to pull your weight, and figure something out come what may. It's interesting. It's not to deny that people have hard times at times, but you know, as having grown up in a neighborhood where I saw one of the stuff going on, people would be out of work and then suddenly it would turn out that they weren't really out of work. They were just being paid under the table. And then when the unemployment benefits ran out suddenly they were employed legitimately. My point is that the amount that you would actually have to raise to make life livable for these people is much much lower than what we're spending now.
16:40. One more point that has to do with reparations because I think it's linked to what you're saying, the way the whole reparations debate has proceeded people are assuming it'll be personally in that way. That if you're a black person, you will somehow see that your white neighbor who is struggling more than you is paying you reparations. That's what people imagine because they say, you know, why should a white person, who is struggling, have to pay to a black person? But, of course, that's not what's going to happen because I used to ask the same question. I used to say, "Wouldn't black people feel ashamed of having reparations when they can see their white neighbors struggling? So they're getting money. So let's take the example of people who are getting $220,000 to buy a house. How would you feel knowing that your neighbor has to struggle to get their house when you just got free money off them to buy yours? But, of course, that's not how it's going to work. As you said, they're just going to get a check from the government, so it's coming out of taxes, reparations are coming out of taxes. It's not coming out of communities helping each other. So it's such a good example of what you're describing
we hear in public health circles that "We need to restore faith in Public Health." He says, "I don't want to restore faith in public health." He said, "Public Health deserves to be distrusted." --Dr. Vinay Prasad of the University of California San Francisco
01:40. Our topic today: when I heard that we were going to be Loosely basing the talks around the theme, "Our Enemy, the State," I came up with a title, "Our Enemy: Public Health," because, I think, since 2020, any thinking person is now aware with some of the problems with so-called, "Public Health." As a matter of fact, just days ago, Dr. Vinay Prasad of the University of California San Francisco was speaking about this theme we hear in public health circles that "We need to restore faith in Public Health." He says, "I don't want to restore faith in public health." He said, "Public Health deserves to be distrusted." Good man.
02:20. Public Health in general is an intellectual train wreck. It's a wholly politicized branch of so-called medicine that involves a seemingly endless series of false claims and ideological gobbledygook. I mean remember racism is a public health issue as justification for why otherwise you have to be locked in your house, but you can go out to protest what happened to George Floyd. No self-respecting discipline speaks or thinks that way. Now we should have denounced public health sooner and written books about it sooner, and I think before COVID we just didn't pay enough attention to it. We certainly weren't paying enough attention as much attention as it deserved. Now that's partially because its overreach wasn't quite so great in those days, but also because we have a lot to criticize. We have the Fed, we have the IRS, we have all the cabinet departments, we have civil liberties violations. I mean it's exhausting being us. You can't do everything. So let's not reproach ourselves too much. But beyond all this, they also want to impose their plans on you without having to deal with such mundane things as judges, courts, and laws. So, for example, you'll recall how unhappy Anthony Fauci was when a federal judge overturned the mask mandate on planes. By the way, the reason they were unhappy that the mask mandate on planes was overturned was not that they thought we'd all get sick. The reason was that they knew we wouldn't get sick. And then we'd start wondering, "I wonder what else has been pointless that they've been pushing on us." That is a very important question to start asking. But he was very unhappy . . . he said, "This is a matter for public health to decide and not properly a matter for the Judiciary." You know what, Tony, nobody actually consented to a dictatorship run by, I shudder even to think about it, public health officials, whose 24/7 barrage of false claims survives only because no mainstream media outlet bothered to question them.
04:35. Now let me read you a passage from a book you may not have read but whose author I am sure you know.
We believe that an insidious agenda is being pursued in the name of public health, the use of the coercive power[s] of the state by special interest groups who use health issues for two broad purposes. First, public health matters are a smoke screen to camouflage self-interested behavior, or what economists call rent seeking. Put simply, health activists lobby for legislation, primarily tax increases, that are earmarked for their particular causes and regulations at all levels of government that benefit them financially. Second, health issues are used to advance an ideological agenda, an agenda which without exception fosters an enhanced role for the state in every aspect of our lives and in our lifestyles. Every government bureaucrat is inherently an empire-builder, and fabricating public health scares has become an ideal technique for garnering political support for bureaucratic empire building, and increased budgets to alleviate the crisis.
05:50. Now the book in question is called From Pathology to Politics: Public Health in America, James T. Bennett and Thomas DiLorenzo, 2000, and it sounds like it was written last week, but, in fact, it was written a quarter century ago and it's co-author is our own Tom DiLorenzo. When Tom is not busy predicting the future, he is president of the Mises Institute.
After COVID and the magnifying glass we've had on public health establishment, we are much more aware of, shall we say, its Imperial intentions. And that it foolishly considers itself qualified to weigh in on every issue under the sun that might potentially impact Health but here is what Tom was already writing a quarter century ago about the American Public Health Association, APHA, I'll make a future reference to it, the trade association of the public health movement has used its resources to develop a platform for the promotion of government-controlled medical care, the abolition of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, a governmental takeover of child care, and expansion of government's role in economic planning and other social and economic issues. The public health movement is no longer interested in primarily in the eradication of disease it claims to offer expertise on virtually every social issue from poverty to human rights.
So that has actually been going on for a long time. It didn't just start in the past 5 years now I have bad news Tom's book is out of print so you have to buy my book Diary of a psychosis which is available over on The Book Table I had to get a used copy for $40 so I got to sell a whole bunch of these just to break even.
07:50. Now several months ago, our Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared, "Firearm violence is a Public Health crisis in America that poses a serious threat to the health and well-being of our country." He then proceeded to lay out every debunked claim on behalf of gun control that you've ever heard, but as Tom pointed out in that passage just a moment ago, this is nothing new for Public Health. It's just that a lot of us haven't been paying attention. We haven't noticed because we've been busy.
Now let's take a brief look at the theme of APHA's annual convention in 1996. I guarantee you would much much rather be at the Mises Summer Institute than be at that thing. Their annual convention was called "Empowering the Disadvantaged: Social Justice in Public Health." Now was the keynote speaker a physician? Maybe a professor at a medical school something you might think would belong there? No, guess who the keynote speaker was. The president of the AFL-CIO, John Sweeney, told everyone there that he wanted them to "help us rejuvenate the labor movement." Now that is a bit far of a stretch to attach that to Public Health but that is what it's about, and incidentally, the conference also called for "radical redistribution of wealth," because "Living in an unjust society damages physical health." These people are crazier than you thought. Tom [DiLorenzo] also found in the August 1996 issue of Health Education Quarterly, widely circulated within the CDC, . . . this quotation, "Policy advocacy skills for creating social change must be provided to community groups rather than, for example, providing individuals with skills so that they can make better personal choices." So in the old days that was more or less what they thought their role was: we'll try to give you the information you need to be informed and make good decisions about your health. Well, what we need to teach now is how to agitate for political change.
One of the things that public health has claimed to really be oh-so concerned about is children, your children in particular. They care so deeply about them. Nothing concerns them more than the health of your children. Now I will say in parentheses there was a moment over the past few years when there was a desire to get parents on board with getting the COVID shots for their kids up insanely during that time. We began to hear a report, and this was echoed by the White House, by professors at Harvard, by the Surgeon General, everybody was repeating it, that COVID-19 was a top five killer of children.
35:50 What exactly is the causal mechanism that connects social media with this tribalism?
35:55 Great question.
38:25 The period we're living in right now is most akin to when the printing press was invented. When Martin Luther wrote his 95 Theses, whether you're Catholic or you're Protestant, most historians would agree that Martin Luther's ideas were not actually new. They'd been promulgated by prior thinkers like John Wycliffe and others. The difference was that previously, those ideas could be snuffed out by a very potent gatekeeper. Once the printing press came out, you now had the ability to disseminate and promulgate ideas before the gatekeepers can catch them, and it resulted in this very chaotic time where basically the worldview of Europe was settled at swordpoint because there wasn't this gatekeeper anymore. I think we're living in a very similar time like that where the gatekeepers are toothless. On top of that, because we use social media. A lot of mechanisms we have in our minds that make us self-censor.
16:20 If you're in the educational system at all, you know there's an entire industry based on training and methods, and there's a large amount of money that goes into people developing whatever new, Kagan, whatever new disciplinary educational strategies are going to do everything. And these things are always promised to fix the promise specifically, now, of course, the most important problem they can fix is the gap between minority students and other populations. That's supposed to be the thing that they're always selling. Over and over, these methods are failures, that actually the oldest methods, things like direct instruction, are actually the most effective method.
Leaders had to invoke a divine right because people had a problem understanding the authority without a connection to the metaphysical. It just didn't make sense, and it still doesn't. People still operate in our background, like we're still deeply religious and spiritual creatures. No matter how you feel about that particular software program, it continues to run. And so we end up in a scenario where people who go in and try to make highly rational decisions on a regular basis in politics lose, and they can't figure out why. Political commentators need to spend more time at WalMart,
Just because a judge says it doesn't make it law; just because a jury says it doesn't make it truth; just because a cop or prosecutor says it doesn't make it fact. --Robert Barnes
14:35. I think that the even if this lunatic corrupt judge whose family is enriching themselves off of this case, something else we've never seen before at this scale in America, the normal sentence is probation under these circumstances, for this kind of first time offense, this category, this defendant, this situation, etc. But if this is the same New York that's busy releasing murderers and rapists and child abusers and everything else on a routine and regular basis, if they decide to use this case to try to set a precedent of an extraordinary incarceration at Rikers Island of Donald Trump, I believe that even the Appellate Court of New York, and if necessary the Supreme Court of the United States, would step in and stay the case pending appeal, or what sometimes is called within the state system bail pending. So I don't think Trump will ever serve anytime at Rikers or anywhere else on this case. I think ultimately it will be vacated. There is only any risk because you've got a trial court judge that's made clear his bias and prejudice against President Trump.
26:30. They can make up a charge. They can drum up a charge, and you can be the former president future president billionaire, and we can still railroad you. And that's the point. They are showing their raw power but what you also realize is when they start asserting their raw power, when they get to roll out the tank and threaten the guy standing in front of it, then the system knows that it's losing credibility. It's losing the capacity to control the populace that they are having to resort to these extreme remedies for someone who's just mostly a nuisance to them, not someone who has actually tried to take them out or destroy them but someone who just says "You know, well I'm not going to do everything you tell me to do just because you tell me to do it," and they are so outraged, so enraged by that that they demand that he be made an example of to terrify everyone else. The same reason why they are obsessing over Julian Assange after they've tortured him for a decade anyway by the number of years that he's been stuck in isolation: because they want to set . . . they don't want anyone else to think "Hey, I would like to be Julian Assange." Same with Edward Snowden. Why you can maintain this after everything that Snowden said proved true about the corruption of the system, such that he couldn't blow the whistle internally without ending up Hillary Clinton someplace. And they are really shoving it in our face by the people who are involved in it are often criminals themselves. They're often doing to Trump, accusing Trump, punishing Trump for their crimes that they've projected onto Trump. It's like what Solzhenitsyn said, "You know they're lying. We know they're lying. They know we know they're lying, and that's the point," and there's a part of that that's definitely true. But I think their problem is at the fifth pillar of power is the perception of power and they are unmasking themselves so badly like something out of V for Vendetta that they are risking a massive political and public backlash that could destroy their institutional credibility and power forever.
28:39. Do you think at this point in the short run we are going to start seeing states trying to disqualify him from appearing on the ballot?
28:46. No. Because of the Supreme Court's decision earlier this year. The Supreme Court's decision was so broad that it will be pretty much impossible to do so; merely being convicted has no impact on the ballot. The presidential qualifications for the ballot are controlled by the US Constitution; states can't add to that. Supreme Court said they don't get to interpret the 14th Amendment to keep Trump off the ballot. To give people an example, Eugene V Debs, while convicted for sedition no less, ran for president in 1920 from his prison cell. So even if they locked up Trump, Trump can be elected president from his jail cell, like Eugene V Debs could have. So they won't have any success on being able to strike him from the ballot. They're hoping just to damage him enough in the court of public opinion that he doesn't win the most votes.
29:45. After this New York thing he is out of the headlines, is he facing anything else, is anything else pending against him?
29:50. Probably not because the Supreme Court's . . . the quickest case could be the DC case, but the Supreme Court is likely to rule the DC Court was wrong about how it interpreted presidential immunity under Article 2 in the impeachment clause, and either require dismissal of that case or require the case the court to go through and analyze what's okay in the indictment, what's not, what could be evidence, what's not. And that makes it highly unlikely that that case reaches trial before election day. The Florida case is going nowhere at all, the documents case; same with the Georgia case. So it is highly unlikely Trump faces anymore trials between now and election day.
30:31. So are you telling me there is a possibility that yes obviously he's suffered financial and reputational damage that I don't want to overlook but he could nevertheless somehow come through this?
30:47. Yeah, indeed he may be the ultimate Teflon Don, like the old joke years ago, "I could shoot somebody in the middle of the street and still be fine." Here they had to make up crimes to try to get him, exposing the criminal justice and Civil Justice systems in the process, especially in New York but across the country. And I think at the end of the day, Trump will never serve any time in jail. All of these cases will end up being dismissed or vacated, and he will end up back in the White House in January 2025 where the people around him and hopefully he himself motivated to realize we need real institutional reform. As he said at libertarian party convention, "I wasn't always a libertarian, but then they indicted me 91 times." So let's hope that unleashes the libertarian side of President Trump because once he gets back into the White House where I think he'll be in about 6 months' time.
Appeal grounds for #TrumpVerdict: 1/ #1stA violations in selective prosecution; 2/ #5thA due process violations in conflicted prosecutor, compromised judge & prejudicial jury; 3/ #5thA due process violations in conviction on an unidentified crime, without unanimity or beyond…
— St. Michael, the Archangel (@aveng_angel) March 29, 2024
Performance Evaluations.
Who is doing the evaluation? And what’s the purpose? The purpose is to defend the company against lawsuits primarily. Because of that external legal environment with labor laws and so forth, if a company fires someone there are any number of characteristics about that person that [the employee] can claim that they’re being discriminated against, that their firing was immoral or incorrect; then they could file a lawsuit for hundreds of thousands of dollars against the company. And so performance evaluations are partly an effort by the company to determine who deserves to be promoted and who should go up by looking at everyone else’s evaluation of them but is mostly about establishing a record so that you can eliminate people that you think are the worst performers without running into a lawsuit issue. So after several negative evaluations which are done by this long and complicated process, you have a record showing, “Oh, well, we’ve decided that this is not a good employee, so we fired them because of that, not because of their skin color, age, or whatever.” The objection primarily is that it takes so much time. You’re taking the decisions out of the hands of the managers who understand what their team members have done and can easily figure out how to reward them properly without the help of Performance Evaluations. But because of the legal environment, all of the employees, the managers, and everyone else spend a great deal of time going through the motions of evaluating each individual employee. Then they get down to the meeting where they’re deciding what to do about them, the manager games the system essentially to get what they wanted in the first place. So the entire exercise is a waste of everyone’s time. No one enjoys it. And just like deciding on salaries or budgets every year, it’s a huge part of a manager’s job performing Performance Evaluations. Companies that experimented with eliminating them entirely and just letting the manager do what they think is right for the employees and for the company discover that the result is just as good, and no one has to spend the time on it. And so the problem is the lawsuits.
WOODS: Well, now look, there's got to be a way, if these HR departments are doing
such a terrible job, there's got to be a way to do an end-run around them. I mean, it's
your own company. If I'm running a company and I've got some department that keeps
bringing me terrible candidates, isn't there some way I can disrupt this or intervene?
KINNISON: Exactly, of course, there is. And the reason why it doesn't happen very often
is that it's a long-term thing. The HR department is there; it exists; it does what it's
doing. If you want to change it, it's going to be a lot of work. It's going to be a lot of
political trouble with people within the company. And why would you do that when
everything seems to be working and it's fine? Well, the answer is if you don't do it, in
the long run, your company will be hobbled. It's best if you start out with an HR head
when you're growing as a company who has the attitude of getting the business going
and reflects that in all of the people that he hires, so your HR department is not your
internal enemy. That's the best thing.
But if you're coming in to a large organization and you discover that HR is about socialjustice-warrior happy talk, and they're trying to make a social culture camp out of it,
you need to do something, and you do that by changing your head of HR, giving that
person the mission of setting a new culture for your HR, and working hard to keep
people who've been programmed by labor activists and diversity activists from being
important. That of course is difficult. You'll get a bad reputation.
What was his name? T.J. Rodgers at Cypress Semiconductor is a fine example of
someone in the '80s and '90s who resisted these efforts to make social justice the
thing. And, of course, he got a reputation for it. He went really public with it. And it's
one of the things you can do is to be a hard-nosed hard ass about certain things and
just stick your ground and don't try to deflect and don't try to defend yourself from
these accusations. Just say, 'This is what it is. We're a company that's trying to make
money doing great products for people. We do more good in the world by doing that
than by grooming our employees and making it a great place to work that people are
happy with but they don't actually work very hard." If you get that kind of reputation,
you will be attracting the kind of employees that you want.
He's used to being a CEO where you hire someone, you can fire them at will, and you expect them to be loyal and their job and whole future career depends on the business they're working for and the person in charge of that business. 13:22 Of course, in government, none of that applies. In government, you have people who will stab you in the back, even if they're drawing a paycheck from you. And you have people who see their career advancement in their ability to cash in on their betrayal of you . . . Daniel McCarthy
Even if Trump wins the presidency, he'll only be in for 1 term. This makes the Vice President more important for this election.
3:27 Yeah, before I do that, I want to really emphasize what the stakes really are. Obviously, the fact that Donald Trump has already served one term as president means that he'll have at most one more term if he wins in November, which means that his vice president is really set up to become the Republican Party's nominee in 2028 and quite possibly president thereafter. Now, historically, really going back to the Reagan Administration, NeoConservatives have been extremely clever and have used the vice president's office as their power base within Republican administrations. And that's true of every single Republican administration from Reagan through to the first Donald Trump term. Think about it. With Ronald Reagan, you had as Vice President, George H. W. Bush. Now, Reagan was not a NeoCon. Reagan was somebody who believed in trying to shrink government. He wanted to emphasize cutting taxes. He wanted to emphasize freedom. And in foreign policy, even though a lot of people thought of him as being this apocalyptic, showdown with the Soviet Union UberHawk, he was, in fact, seeking genuine peace through strength. You saw that he didn't want to get us entangled in Middle East conflicts. He pulled us out of Lebanon, in fact, when American troops were murdered there by terrorists, 1983. He was very careful to negotiate with the Soviet Union he always made a very clear that the Soviet Union was morally evil but he didn't think they're going to war with the Soviet Union was going to be either the answer or necessary thing he thought instead that reaching through the humanity of the Russian people and even the humanity of Russian leaders was going to be sufficient to start to unwind the Cold War and bring us to a peaceful resolution of it.
5:00 George Bush, on the other hand, he was always from his days back in the CIA a very hawkish individual, and of course, once he becomes President after the Cold War, he embarks America on this new global mission which has become this debacle over the last 30 years. It's George H. W. Bush who gets us into . . . first we have this mini-war in Panama, 1989, then we later have this First Gulf War, which, in fact, becomes an endless war, open-ended. The First Gulf War doesn't end in 1991 with throwing Saddam Hussein's forces out of Kuwait; instead, it becomes this protracted policing effort in the Middle East. We have troops in Saudia Arabia. We have a no-fly zone over Iraq, and basically the scene is set when the Iraq War, George H. W. Bush's son, George W. Bush, becomes president. Now people know that George H. W. Bush was a Vice President who was not on board with Reagan's agenda
5:57 Did not know that Vice President Quayle, under the presidency of George H. W. Bush, had as his Chief of Staff the little kingpin of NeoConservatism, William Kristol. So Bill Kristol goes on to found The Project for a New American Century, goes on to found the Weekly Standard, and today he's running The Bulwark. Bill Kristol was Chief of Staff to the Vice President when Dan Quayle was the VP. So that goes to show how smart these people are to invest in an office that most people consider to be worthless. There's a famous historical description of the vice presidency worth "a bucket of warm spit." And you could imagine that if you're a staffer, Chief of Staffer, for example to the vice president well that seems like less than nothing you have almost no direct policy influence but in fact you are right there in the executive branch having all kinds of indirect influence and really be able to influence things powerfully. Of course, when the second George Bush, George W. Bush, becomes president after the 2000 election, he has a long-time American Enterprise Institute-connected, former Secretary of Defense intellectual, Dick Cheney, who becomes a key player in the War on Terror as it was called at the time, and generally, the expansive foreign policy, the really aggressive nation-building and world-transforming revolutionary foreign policy that George W. Bush pursues. So, once again, the vice president's office with Dick Cheney becomes the hive and the nexus of NeoConservative power. Even the George W. Bush Administration, which was already quite neoconservative, you can see that even if you have a bad president you can have an even worse vice president.
7:58. Well then finally we get Donald Trump, and Donald Trump is a complete repudiation of the Bush Legacy. He's a repudiation of George H. W. Bush and also a repudiation of George W. and, of course, he humiliates Jeb Bush in the 2016 primaries. Well, Donald Trump chooses as his vice president Mike Pence, and Mike Pence seems like a pretty typical Republican and not really any more neoconservative than the ordinary Republicans of the 2000s or 2010s. But Mike Pence's office among his staff furs there are people who actually play a very powerful role behind the scenes in sabotaging some of the better people some of the better non-interventionists and foreign policy realists for example who had a shot at getting nominations within the Donald Trump Administration. And, of course, people with in the vice presidents office are also in on the conversations about National Security staffing and other things, and therefore they're able to keep neoconservative resumes in the pipeline with the endorsement of the vice president's office, which is one of the reasons why Trump winds up being so outflanked within his own administration by people who do not agree with him on fundamental policies whether it's trade or immigration or specially foreign policy and War so all of that is a preamble to say that the stakes could not possibly be higher not only because Donald Trump's pick for vice president this time has a very good shot at becoming the Republican nominee in 2028 and becoming ultimately perhaps president but also because that person and his or her office in the next Trump Administration is going to be either a major source of neoconservative influence within the administration or for once we could have a dramatic change, where you actually have a vice president and a vice presidential staff that are loyal to the president and loyal to a non- Neoconservative agenda.
9:58. I raised an objection to you about Trump not being a good chooser of personnel. Is Trump better, worse, or the same person that he was in 2016?
10:50. Well it's not just about Trump, it's about the people around him. And Trump went into the White House in 2017 without having a network of political contacts that you need in order to fill White House offices. It's not that there weren't people out there, but there are always these filters in politics. Remember, the RNC by that point was actually quite close to Trump. You had Jared Kushner, Trump's own son-in-law, a number of people in very influential positions were able to tell Trump, "Okay, bring this person in." Trump had no idea who most of these folks were.
11:30. How do these people get into his Circle they don't just come out of the sky.
11:35. His son-in-law had been part of the family so that's a special Vector of influence when you're running for the Republican nomination As Trump was in 2016 try to not try to pull the rug out from under him which I thought they were going to do now the head of the Republican National Committee at that time to my surprise actually gave Trump a fair shot he didn't completely sabotage Trump as I expected in the primaries and then subsequently at the convention itself that earned a certain amount of respect from trump it was rather short-lived because Trump realized very soon that the RNC was actually quite a problematic Institution but at that time he thought well you know they've given me a shot and remember Trump is by nature very transactional and he's actually quite he could be loyal to people who are part of a coalition that is invested in him, so if he gets the impression that these people are supporting him he will actually be quite willing to give them a certain degree of support in return. The other thing about Trump, one of his advantages, but also his disadvantages, is that he's not ideological at all. He has pretty sound personal instincts. He has a pretty common-sense view of the world, but he doesn't really doesn't spend his days and nights thinking about who's a conservative or neoconservative, who's a paleoconservative or a fusionist. So he's quite naive, I think, about these inner workings of politics. He's used to being a CEO where you hire someone, you can fire them at will, and you expect them to be loyal and their job and whole future career depends on the business they're working for and the person in charge of that business.
13:22 Of course, in government, none of that applies. In government, you have people who will stab you in the back, even if they're drawing a paycheck from you. And you have people who see their career advancement in their ability to cash in on their betrayal of you, or their previous connection with you. They don't feel any sense that their prosperity or doom depends on their loyalty. So they have terrible incentives
Grand management that provides consulting services that review client lists because they say the wrong the things, and wrong thinkers, which is the root of cancel cultures. Policies enforced by private companies.
12:00 We know that she's a malicious actor anyway, but her charity's bureau, which is responsible for these persecutions, and that we'd be turning information over to, it has a track record of releasing confidential donor information. They did this from Nikki Haley's campaign. And we know they would be all too happy to do it with anybody who's worked with VDARE in the past. Unfortunately, we've not experienced success in federal courts. The courts in New York are not . . . are they corrupt, they're certainly corrupt in terms of justice and in terms of law. Why that is
13:00 The state court has allowed to proceed, so we're fighting both state and federal court cases in parallel over the same issues, which means we get to pay double the lawyer fees and at the end, they may have conflicting results, which would be that we don't know how to remain on the side of law when one judge tells us to do one thing, and another judge tells us to do another. Of course, they should both agree in the end that we should not have to turn over the names of our pseudonymous writers
24:11. That's where we are. Now, this is not going to happen this time. If we become embroiled in a war in the Middle East that involves Iran and other states, as I pointed out and it will, you're going to see terror acts here in the United States. You even have the director of the FBI, who I don't think very highly of, because I think he's more concerned about harming Americans than he is anything else, but he did point out you know we've got a problem. 9 million people have poured into this country. We don't know who's here. Hezbollah has a huge chapter in Mexico, so does ISIS. How many of these people are here? What could they do? What could happen to our power grid? What about our nuclear power plants? What about our military installations? What about our population? There are all sorts of terrible things that could happen. Nobody seems to be thinking about that in Washington DC. All they can think about is let's get this war with Iran started. Maybe they think it's 1991 and that we are the preeminent military power in the world. We aren't. We just demonstrated that conclusively in Ukraine. Our equipment has not performed well. Our technology has not performed well, and our advice from all of our wonderful Generals, who've delivered nothing but defeat for 20-plus years, was terrible.
WOODS, 25:35. I understand the United States has had a bellicose posture toward Russia for quite some time, but do the Europeans really believe the propaganda that the Russian bear is coming?
COLONEL, 26:02. Many do. In fact, in many cases, the Europeans are even more slavishly devoted to inhaling the lies and fiction than we are. You would think that after the Trump Administration, the riots of 2020, the elections, and so forth that Americans would question a great deal that comes out of Washington and New York City, which is the hub for all the news.
WOODS, 28:12. Is the US in fact in some way winding down its intervention or involvement in Ukraine?
MACGREGOR, 28:16. Inevitably what did we do at the end of the Vietnam. We just walk away when things don't go our way we pack up and leave for how long do people insist that we were "turning the corner." How many times did we "kill the insurgency in Iraq" before we finally left in the middle of the night? The first time we thought about leaving, we found out that everybody that we were working with in Iraq was ratting us out. In other words, so when we finally left Iraq in 2011, we didn't tell anybody. We went out in the middle of the night. That's a great victory, isn't it? But no one ever goes back and tells the truth because again these are things that happen overseas. Americans have a bad habit of dismissing what happens beyond their borders as "Okay, that's fine. It's not a big deal. We move on from here." How many strategic failures do you have to have before someone wakes up and says enough and every year we have a bigger defense budget and the bigger budget for the intelligence organizations and special ops. You're spending over a trillion dollars a year now, and roughly a trillion is what we pay to service the national sovereign debt. I mean Good Lord! This is insane. And everybody says, "That's not a problem. We'll print more money." Well, you can print until you can't, and we're rapidly approaching that point as I think people will find out the hard way this spring.
WOODS, 30:00. The America First alleges that threats to the US are overblown, and the interventions are unjustified. But they change their tune when it comes to China. They say, "China is the real threat." In what sense is China a threat to the US or otherwise?
MACGREGOR, 30:24. If you look at China today which is in a very serious economic crisis. Its shadow banking system has finally been exposed, the corruption has engulfed everyone in China. That's why Xi spends all of his time imprisoning them. That's why he's imprisoning all sorts of so-called corporate leaders. China is a mess. A lot of the people that are now pouring into our country are single young men from China, while large numbers of them were wanted by the authorities inside China for embezzling, stealing, and cheating on a whole range of topics. China has always had the problem of being too large, too big to govern. They can't barely manage themselves. Historically, the Chinese are not a great military power. Military power and the military profession are not really held in high esteem. What they want is a force that can protect them. They think they deserve that, but as far as invading somebody else's country, no. They tried that against the Vietnamese after the Vietnam War, and what happened to them? The Vietnamese crushed them. The Japanese, the Mongols, the Tartars, all of these people historically, and Europeans have crushed China mercilessly. There's no threat from China. If we leave China alone, there are enough other actors in the region that the Chinese are not going to put themselves at risk.
MACGREGOR, 32:10. Japan is an enormously powerful state that never gets any attention in the United States. The Japanese armed forces are superb. I would argue better than our own. So the bottom line is, no, there is no threat from China. However, if you are in Asia and you ask the Japanese, the Koreans, the Vietnamese, the people that border China what the threat from China is, they'll say it's Chinese. If you let the Chinese into your country, they come in they colonize you. They take over your business sector. And then they bring in women, and they peddle their women to the locals, and suddenly, within a generation, you're no longer Vietnamese, Japanese, or Korean; you're just Chinese. In other words, they fear the population overwhelming them in the region. So you look at the border between North Korea and China, the Chinese want to keep the North Koreans out, but the North Koreans don't want anything to do with the Chinese. They're afraid that if the Chinese into their country again as they did during the Korean War they'll never leave they'll have millions of Chinese and they will cease to exist. The Manchus were a Mongol Turkic people. In Manchuria, they ceased to exist because they had been Sinofied. This is not a new phenomenon. This is how China has expanded. You move in and your population overwhelms the indigenous people, destroys ethnicity, destroys their culture, their identity. That's the danger that people in Asia fear. They Don't Fear the economic danger they want to be part of the Chinese market they want to do business with them they certainly don't fear the Chinese military.
WOODS, 35:50. Asked David Stockman how he felt about the Cold War. At 16 over the summer, Woods read Nixon's book, No More Vietnam, 1985. And it convinced him that Vietnam was necessary and just. He was an interventionist for several years. Where did you stand during the Cold War?
MACGREGOR, 36:39. He went to VMI, Virginia Military Institute, in 1971. His mom believed that they should support the troops in Vietnam. His maternal grandfather, who had been in the First World War and hated Woodrow Wilson, concluded early on that that war had been a total mistake. He'd turn to her and say repeatedly "Well, if you want to support the troops, get them the hell out of Vietnam and bring them home. He was right; we didn't need to fight in Vietnam. And you'll listen to people who will argue until their death, "Oh, if we hadn't done that, all of Southeast Asia would have be communist." Doubtful. I don't think so. There was this assumption about communism that it was monolithic. It never was. Stalin's famous comment on the Chinese after spending time with Mao is, "These people are red onions: they're red on the outside, and white on the inside. In other words, they act like communists, but they're really a bunch of capitalists. Of course, he was right. The Cold War is something that was very different because it began in a very different environment. Everybody runs around and talks about our great victory in the Second World War, but truthfully, by the 1950s, people realized we had not won the Second World War. We advanced to the middle of Europe and stopped. And Europe was divided. Half of Europe and all of Asia had been conquered by Soviet communism, and so people said "My God! What did we do? You know you can go back and read [George] Kennan and he talks about the fact that we moved so slowly out of France and into Germany and we took horrendous casualties while we were moving by the way so it didn't save us in terms of American lives very much. And by the time that we arrived, the game had been called. The Soviets occupied Berlin, Prague, Vienna, and Warsaw. Remember Churchill and FDR promised the Poles high in the sky you will be a free and independent democratic state; that's why we're fighting this war. Didn't work. Was a complete failure. So the aftermath of World War II was a little different from what everybody thinks today. There were lots of people that said "Gee, you know this hadn't worked out well. It could have been a lot different; could have been handled better. The aftermath of World War I was much more clear-cut because people all knew that we shouldn't have gotten into the war. We made a mess out of Europe. I urge people to do this. Warren Harding's inaugural speech [1921] is worth reading because he makes the argument for no more alliances, no more commitments to anyone, that America's future should not be hostage to another country's interest. We have no interest in becoming part of other people's Wars, well, until 1929 and the Depression struck. That was the attitude. The Depression changed everything. It suddenly propelled FDR into power, who was by standards today and neocon trying desperately to embroil us into war. He worked tirelessly through the 30s to get us into war against the Germans and refused to see the danger presented by Stalin. We could go on and on and on.
MACGREGOR, 40:13. This is 2023. Have we had enough?. How many American lives have been sacrificed how much treasure has been wasted we were talking about the thousands of hospitals that could have been built with half of the 14 trillion lost on the last 20-plus years on these interventions what kinds of things could we have done for our own country in our own population? People need to start asking those questions and they need to understand that we have one existential threat today that emanates from the southern border. Someone who says it's not an invasion has lost their minds. We are being invaded and our own government is helping it. 9 million have come in since Biden became president, but there are probably another 20 million illegals already in the country from the 1990s and during the. Bush and Obama Administrations. This is a catastrophe for us. We can't absorb these people. And thanks to President Obama who announced that there was no requirement for anyone to assimilate in order to be an American citizen, how many people are running around with American citizenship are just here because it's a ticket of admission to the great consumption machine. What's happened to our national identity, our culture? Well, that's being erased. Finally, some people are standing up. They're standing up down in Texas, thanks to Governor Abbott. Maybe this is a turning point. Maybe finally the American people . . . . That's the real danger, and, again too many people inside this country with uncertain origin and uncertain interests. We don't know what that means for the future, but it doesn't mean much good. Somebody said to me the other day, "Well, you must be a racist. You don't like Mexicans." I said "No, of course not. That's got nothing to do with it." He said, "Well then what do you think we should take from Mexico? I said I'll be happy to bring in every Mexican who speaks English and has a degree in Applied Mathematics engineering or science this guy says well that's not going to happen I said well that's what we should demand now we can be selective we don't have to take everyone.
WOODS, 42:32. Why doesn't that guy ask the Mexican Government why it's so stingy about allowing immigration. There's almost like a double standard. I want to make myself two people everybody hates. You mentioned Warren Harding. He also has a fantastic speech when [1920] he accepted the Republican nomination for president. It's interesting these presidential speeches that we're all supposed to read in school are all the terrible Messianic ones that we should ignore. But Warren Harding actually gave great speeches
Thursday, January 18, 2024
3:22. To get to the book to the heart of it Donald Trump is not a conservative in any way shape or form economically.
WOODS. If I were to pick Trump out and say he's no good on these issues the whole Republican party is bad on these issues and even if you bring out a Paul Ryan well the difference between Paul Ryan and Trump is Ryan wants to hire commission to look at into it and then they'll ignore it with the commission said I don't think Trump is alone in this
4:30. I agree with you and unfortunately, the Republican Party in the last half-decade has drifted further and further away from the fundamentals of fiscal rectitude but partly because it has been "Trumpified." Trump insisted stoutly while he was in office for 4 years that they were going to touch Social Security that was a half-hearted effort and didn't pan out and no political capital was really spent, but since then he's become even more militant on insisting that those huge entitlements, the whole transfer payment budget, is sacrosanct. If he is renominated and the Republican Party is led by Trump again for the next 4 years, I think it's all over except for the shouting.
5:34. Any voices in the party that might want to face these fiscal facts have been totally smothered. You remember when they passed a huge CARES Act sight unseen in March 2020 after the lockdowns were proposed, it was 2.2 trillion dollars. No one even read 180 pages. The one guy who opposed it was the congressman from Kentucky, Thomas Massie. He got denounced and shouted down by Trump and Trump even demanded that he be purged from the Republican Party so that's what we're up against but I agree with you without Trump we still have a real battle in front of us but at least there's some hope the Republican Party can come back to its senses.
6:32. Let's dig into some statistics. The problem is that the Republican base doesn't seem to have much interest in this you know they say they do but I don't think they do. For example, the TEA Party was a brief flash in the pan, but even they were willing to make the kinds of cuts that would be necessary. I highly doubt it. It's easy to go after work leftist or ANTIFA criminals or whatever because everybody understands how crazy that is but people like getting checks in the mail with their names on them and that's a very very hard addiction to break.
7:26. I agree with you and the worst episode of that was the so-called Stimi's in response to the lockdown in which everyone got a check except maybe the top 10% of households up to $150,000 we're getting those steamy checks of $1,200, $1,400, 500 for the kids. After that first act during the summer and fall of 2020, if you were a family of 4 with two wage earners and got laid off, you got all the stimmy checks in child care credits; you were all so eligible for the unemployment topper on top of which was a $1,000 a week; on top of the state benefits, it could add up to $30k, $40k, even $50,000 a year of handouts from the government. That happened on Trump's watch he signed it it was the worst excess of that thing that we've encountered yet and it's another reason why I think he's already prove he's not even remotely the right person for the job.
8:50. So what you're doing in this book in part is going through the Trump record and arguing that it was not all it was cracked up to be in terms of economic performance. . . . Even though the President doesn't really have that much control over monetary policy, the president does nominate someone for Fed chair, and I would like for the president to be sensible enough to choose a decent enough Fed Chair. I mean I'd be very very happy if Jim Grant were chosen to be Fed Chairman because maybe something might happen. But no president has actually been serious about making the dollar worth something again and keep an eye on rising prices and really crack down, I don't know of anybody. So are we being unfair to Trump?
10:10. I don't think we are because these subsequent presidents you don't like Reagan was a pretty stout Defender of what the said needed to do and what Volker was doing to bring down that double digit inflation we've inherited and the other Republican politicians around him in the white house and on Capitol Hill we're constantly pushing you've got to tell Volker to take his foot off the neck on the economy Howard baker said that but he really didn't yield and after Volker one he should have been reappointed in 1987. Stockman convinced Reagan that volcker wasn't reliable and Alan Greenspan would make a wonderful replacement. The presidents since then, the Bushes, have been lukewarm tap it on the monetary issue they didn't demand that the FED open up the spigot and print money like there was no tomorrow but they didn't demand a solid money or sound money policy either the problem is when Trump got in he leaned way the other way he was constantly on the case going after interest rates which were about zero effectively when he got there and the belated efforts of the FED tried to get interest rates moving back into some semblance of rationality he constantly thwarted and opposed now this is important in 2017 after we were well after the Great Recession sort of conservative/ Keynesian Friedman Heights that had dominated the Republican Party always believed that when you got into the middle and back into the business cycle to sober up should be to be to get back to Market rates of Interest to get the budget balanced even a surplus Trump went the other way when they tried as you remember to begin raising interest rates and then they went into QT in 2018 and 2019 Trump was all over the case of the Fed and blaming them you know for even trying to get interest rates within the range of something meaningful in real terms after inflation so that's why I think the indictment is so strong it came at the wrong time and it was really the wrong message utterly wrong as I say in the book I think he was more irresponsible Reckless on monetary policy then William Jennings Bryant you can't have someone back in the Oval Office who is going to be on the feds case to ease money to lower interest rates to buy in which is what he would do predictably if he gets a second term.
13:54. I am going to ask you later on a couple of good things about Trump. He speaks as if there is no downside to lowering interest rates and of course we all like lower interest rates so the only obstacle is a lack of political will or dummies on the Federal Reserve board? There like there are no economic consequences there is no meaning to interest rates they can just be arbitrarily set wherever we like. Like you know he wouldn't even pause to wonder you know like, "I wonder it means if it seems . . . . There's absolutely no reason not to do this, but there must be some, you know, I wonder what it is."
15:00. It's obvious that a market sets interest rates it's what allocates capital it's what allocates economic activity if we've known for decades and decades and decades the price system is fundamental to capitals prosperity and if you don't have you know at least reasonably honest quasi market prices in the financial system we're going to end up with a mess we have today huge financial bubbles we're going to be sending the wrong message to Capitol Hill in other words the FED debt doesn't matter because the carry cost on the debt actually when the when the FED finally have the interest rates down to Rock Bottom average 1.6% well the politicians are going to worry about the cost of financing the debt and the carry cost of the debt if you drive the weighted average cost of the $34 trillion federal debt that's the problem is you know if you want to turn Wall Street into a speculative casino and if you want to turn Washington into a runaway spending machine, then artificially depressed interest rates to non-economic levels and I have a chart in the book which I think is worth bringing up if you take the period between the spring of 2008 right before the Great Recession and a year ago March 2022 when the FED finally reversed direction the real interest rate if you subtract the funds rate you subtract the year over year inflation from federal funds rate was negative 95.5% of the time in terms of months elapsed of the 183 months was negative over 170 months now that's crazy for that long of a period of time you were sending a signal to both Wall Street to speculate in the carry trades to your heart's content you were sending a message to the other end of the cell you can talk about the physical problem down the road but don't worry about it today or tomorrow or next year even because the carry cost is is rounding here
A root canal with a certain tooth can indicate cancer in certain parts of your body. He thinks that a good part of your health starts with what you eat, and obviously, that has to go through your mouth. He believes that dentistry . . . .
The Wholeness of Nature, by the German poet, Goethe. He was a great scientist of his day.
What made cigarettes so addictive was that the wrapper was laced with sugar.
Creation of the food pyramid was so highly politicized.
“Once we cross that line, all sorts of unethical misery ensues. As it has. The Christian sacrament of marriage states, “Those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder!” – there is no small print that reads, “Unless there’s a nasty bug going 'round, in which case forget it.”
From Bob Moran❤️:
“Disturbingly, out of all my artworks, this is the one most suppressed by Twitter. They really hate it. Likes and retweets are regularly removed. It can’t seem to get over 10,000 likes – even though it’s had more than 1.5 million impressions. The fact that they clearly view it as dangerous disturbs me every day. But it also gives me hope. It reminds us that we have something they not only lack but which they fear. Genuine, meaningful love. Something worth fighting for. Right to the very end.
“This black and white ink drawing was done some time in 2017 I think. I just doodled it on a postcard to raise money for an epilepsy charity. Someone, somewhere owns the original. I just liked the idea of this elderly couple. Perhaps this is where they first met. Perhaps it’s where he asked her to marry him. That might be their house down in the valley, where they’ve raised a family. At the time, I was living in a town in Hampshire but I was about to move back to the Somerset countryside where I grew up. I was probably thinking about returning home and staying there. I nearly put their initials carved into the tree trunk but decided it would be a bit much. You can imagine them on the other side.
“When all of this nonsense reached a certain point: When stories were coming out of married couples being kept apart, parents being forced to die without their children by their side, grandparents kept from their grandchildren for months on end as the children were told they might kill them if they saw them – I just couldn’t believe that people were agreeing to it. This image came back to me and I decided to recreate it in color. I thought it conveyed the power and significance of lifelong love quite well. But also, had a sense of freedom and embracing life with all it could throw at us.
“Finally, I thought perhaps the tree could remind people of the fleeting nature of our lives. It’s probably been there since before these two were born. And it will be there after they’ve gone. Our lives are short and we have to live them. Not just survive and exist. This, of course, was when I was still very much in ‘optimistic cuddly Bob’ mode. I still felt that it could all be stopped if enough people remembered some vital truths about the human experience.
“Once it was finished I tweeted it and wrote,
‘Never surrender your right to be with the people you love.’I hesitated because I felt that it was a statement of the obvious. But that was the whole point. People had forgotten the obvious. I realised that this had, in the space of a few months, gone from being a universal moral truth to a highly controversial statement. It certainly struck a chord with people. It’s the most popular image I have ever produced.
“As I expected, it angered a lot of idiots on the other side. “Unless being with the people you love might kill them.” They replied, clearly feeling like they had absolutely destroyed me. This total abandoning of logic and ethics really astonished me.
“I realized that these people could not see the difference between deciding, as a family, not to see each other because you are genuinely scared of a novel cold virus, and being ordered to stay apart by the government.
“What’s more, they clearly believed that this was the first time in human history when seeing your loved ones put them at some risk of a potentially fatal viral infection. What world did they think they had been living in?
“My message was deliberately absolutist and unconditional because that is how I have felt about all of this from the beginning. No circumstances, no level of threat, no risk of death can ever justify somebody in authority banning families from being with each other.
These comments remind me a bit of what Tom Woods said, "democracy hates real friendship, because [friendship] . . . is an exclusion from the mass of society."
32:20. Best and worst case scenarios as you see them.
Well, we have a Speaker of the House who went on Hannity and urged the Israelis to attack Iran. That's not a good idea, and these guys aren't always the smartest bulbs in the bunch. And I would say definitely he's not, but like you say the world is different now. And if you have an Israel attacking Iran, the Russians now have an increasingly potent alliance with Iran, let's put it that way. Plus, the Russians feel themselves very vulnerable in Syria. They, in fact, just moved a thousand more troops into Syria. They have a base there in Tartarus and other facilities in Syria. If Israel attacks Iran, there's also going to be an effort to finish the business in Syria. That's what the neocons want more than anything else is to finish the business in Syria. So if the Israelis listen to the neocons in the US, then they're going to find the worst case scenario probably for everyone, which is getting Iran involved getting Hamas even more involved from wherever they are now and in getting the rest of the Arab world. Now, I don't Erdogan, I think there's a lot of talking and I think he talks out of both sides of his mouth, but he has an enormous Sunni constituency in Turkey. His base are religious Muslims in Turkey, and he gave a fiery speech over the weekend about you know "We need to go into Gaza and take care of these guys and save our people." Now I think a lot of it was just a lot of hot rhetoric; nevertheless, it's going to be hard to contain, as you point out, hundreds of millions of people in that vicinity that are going to be inflamed. You can't kill them all even with their nukes.
