Held here entire — 222 passages across 12 chapters and 2 named voices, set down from the first word to the last.
- 0:00Defining Betrayal & PatriotismIan Malcolm and David kick off the discussion by defining what it means to betray the citizenry.
- 3:56US Dependence on IsraelDavid argues that the US government is beholden to Israel, citing specific examples of Trump's actions.
- 7:00Founding Fathers' Vision vs. RealityThe discussion turns to how the Founding Fathers would view the current state of American governance and individual freedom.
- 14:18The Nature of Political EvilDavid explores whether political leaders like Trump are genuinely misled or knowingly betraying the public.
- 20:22Morality of Opposing LeadershipIan poses a moral dilemma: is it treasonous to oppose elected leaders if one believes they are betraying the nation?
- 25:48Virtue as a WeaponDavid asserts that truth and virtue are the most powerful tools against tyranny, not pragmatic dishonesty.
- 30:27Defining Good and EvilThe speakers discuss how individuals can define good and evil, even without a religious compass, through inherent moral sensibility.
- 36:57Happiness: Pleasure vs. JoyThe conversation shifts to the nature of happiness, distinguishing between fleeting pleasure and lasting joy.
- 40:20Challenging Jewish SupremacyIan and David discuss the challenges and personal costs of speaking out against Jewish supremacy and Zionism.
- 43:23Trump's Betrayal: A ContinuationThomas joins the discussion, arguing that Trump's administration continued policies detrimental to Americans, despite promises of 'America First'.
- 51:13The Cost of Foreign PolicyThomas details the immense financial and human cost of US foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East.
- 53:29Kant's Moral PhilosophyJoanne asks about Immanuel Kant's moral philosophy and its relevance to contemporary issues of justice and leadership.
The Transcript
Ian MalcolmWell, good morning, good evening, good afternoon, wherever you are in the world, and welcome back onto X, onto this space, up with this panel, and for the conversation ahead. I'm very humbled, and it's my pleasure to present both David, and we're also going to have Thomas up here momentarily, and going to be discussing a couple different things at the
Ian Malcolmrecommendation of not only you, the listeners, who recommended these two lovely individuals for a space, but also on this subject, which Thomas was very interested in bringing up in this concept of not only Trump perhaps being at the behest of a foreign nation, but perhaps being a, let's say, an accomplice in the great betrayal of the American people.
Ian MalcolmSo not only the suggestion, again, that that he is essentially, let's say, indifferent to, but that he is directly opposed to perhaps the lifestyles of the American citizenry. And so going to be examining that. But first and foremost, prior to doing so, I was also going to ask David just to kind of tee him up here for a little bit of his thoughts on what exactly is the role of the.
Ian Malcolmindividuals within either the executive or the legislative branch of the government, right? What, what is their purpose? What is their intent? What is their duty in terms of their righteousness or lack thereof? So how would we define what it means to betray the citizenry? And then of course, based on that, we could then look at the behaviors of the Trump administration and determine if they are indeed doing precisely that.
Ian MalcolmSo both the conversation around the, let's
Ian Malcolmand the tangible fruits of this administration, but also a little bit of a theoretical discussion on what it means to be a patriot, what it means to be a traitor, and what it perhaps means to, again, betray the citizenry. And so going to unpack all of these things. Excited to have Thomas come in here once he is available to.
Ian MalcolmBut in the interim, as a segue, would love to first and foremost. not only welcome to the stage, but also to provide an opportunity for Mr. David to provide a background on himself. I think one of the wonderful speakers on this application, so humbled that he's here with us, would recommend or ask if you're in the listeners panel, if you wouldn't mind sharing out the space just so that we can get a more sizable audience here for these two individuals.
Ian MalcolmAnd with that being said, I'll turn things over to David and see if he's got some introductory words for us here.
Speaker 1Thank you, my friend. I would say, though, that Let's not forget that up until the Civil War, you could probably walk up to the White House, knock on the door, and someone would answer. Because the president presides. That's why we call him the president. He presides over what? Our speech, every moment of our life, our sports?
Speaker 1No, just over a government that had a postage stamp-sized dominion over people's lives. And look at what it's grown to now. So I would say, and especially now, you know, the 20th century started out with a pragmatist in Teddy Roosevelt, a populist, and now we have another one. And the problem with populism is that it tends to become unmoored from principle.
Speaker 1Well, that's not always a bad thing. populism can move you in the right direction if the person just has good instincts. However, it goes in a really bad direction when they make obeisance to a foreign nation, and in this case, Israel. You know, the reason why that I wrote a declaration of independence from Israel is simply to explicate for everyone, gosh, you know, our country was founded upon independence, and the idea that we're not dependent anymore, the idea that we're being told
Speaker 1That we have to. You heard Roseanne Barr just recently say, gosh, if America isn't the slave of Israel, then your bad things are coming for you, folks. You know, just think about how far we've come. And the fact that our president, I can't think of two better examples that have happened recently than the pedophile that was allowed to run back to Israel.
Speaker 1I mean. Trump could obviously easily call that guy back saying, we're going to end all aid to Israel. We're going to oppose you in every, we're not going to give you any money, any military support or anything if you don't send that guy back. And then the other one was when he was trying to make peace talks with Iran and lo and behold, Israel just unilaterally attacked them right in the middle of those peace talks.
Speaker 1We could sort of see, you know, who was boss there. You know, it's very different. You know, the checks and balances, you know, the three branches of government that were designed by our forefathers, you know, the architect, let's not forget if the Constitution was James Madison, and the whole concept was to create this sort of Indiana Jones set of trips and triggers and traps to stop tyranny from getting in.
Speaker 1So our forefathers had examined, and especially Thomas Jefferson, all the governments in history, and they realized, gosh, they start out really well-meaning. and then they end up really bad, very nightmarishly bad. And so this is what they try to design. But I'm sorry to say, you know, Friedrich Nietzsche was right when he said the precursor to all covenants is balance.
Speaker 1And these three branches of government really don't check each other very much. In fact, they defend each other. Against what? Against our desire to be free. The Declaration of Independence wasn't just a declaration of our independence. from England, but it was also a declaration of the independence of the individual, that the idea was that the quality of a civilization, and people have lost this idea now, is predicated not upon the number of things that you can vote upon, but the number of things you can't vote on.
Speaker 1The idea that you can't vote on telling people how to raise their kids or how to educate them or where they can go, with whom they can associate, what they can think and say. Well, of course, now, We see the political state is trying to inspire dependence. Well, there's nothing more evil than that. And they do this by victim vending.
Speaker 1You know, they create more victims. And of course, the state's supposed to come in there and rescue them. Essentially, they're going to break your legs, give you crutches and say, see, without me, you couldn't walk. Well, what's worse than that? That's a kind of dependence from which it's very hard to extirpate ourselves.
Speaker 1And I am sorry. But once we see it, we can't unsee it. We see that our whole political state, the apparatus, especially across the middle of the spectrum of our political state, is run by a foreign country, is run not by people who are indifferent to us, but people who really don't like us. And so I would say, I don't know if that answer is good enough for you, but that's where I stand on the matter, my friend.
Ian MalcolmNo, it's so well stated, David. And maybe one of the great... little supplements that we could ask for you to offer here. And I just love the way that you position and frame kind of the present would be perhaps to look at the past, right? You were talking about the Declaration of Independence from the British Crown. And I'd be curious for your thoughts on the founding fathers, some of their thoughts around what it means to be not only like you were suggesting, free of this foreign empire, but free for the individual.
Ian MalcolmAnd I say that because there's a lot of A lot of quotes that are thrown around. I've seen many from Thomas Jefferson on this platform that talk about a certain group of people. There's quotes that some loosely attribute to Benjamin Franklin. There's one in particular that basically says, if you don't ensure that these people do not have the reins of power of your nation within 200 years, your descendants will be enslaved to them.
Ian MalcolmAnd a lot of these quotes... Some of them I've certainly validated, and Grok will even recognize many of them. But others are, I don't want to say that they're lost, but they're questioned in terms of the validity or the certainty of them. And I would just be curious for your overarching thesis on what the Founding Fathers would have thought about today.
Ian MalcolmWould they have looked around at the power dynamic and said, see, we told you? Or do you think perhaps the Founding Fathers maybe... might have even been in bed with some of the bankers and some of the ideologies that have landed us where we are in the present.
Speaker 1Well, I do think that it's a mistake to think that we can roll back the tape and assume the movie's going to end differently. It's very important for people to understand that our founding documents were all... The Enlightenment had just happened. So everybody from... You know, people that were born in the actual 17th century that wrote such great things in the 18th century, like, you know, Voltaire, who I believe was born in 1694.
Speaker 1And then, of course, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who said man is born free, but everywhere in chains. And then, of course, we had John Locke and Bishop Barclay and David Hume and Immanuel Kant. All these people were fleshing out what it means to be a human. And of course, by extension, what is our nature? And our nature, of course, is volitional.
Speaker 1That which constitutes our nature is to make choices. And of course, then it becomes immoral to violate our nature. Basically, if a bird's main means of defense is its talents and its capacity to fly, then that's its nature. It should be able to live according to its nature. And a human being, our forefathers understood, should be able to live according to their nature, which is to make choices.
Speaker 1You cannot make choices just in your mind. You have to be free. When people say, oh, I want to be free in the bedroom, you should be free on the sidewalk. You should be free out in the community. You should be free to make mutual exchanges by mutual advantage and mutual consent. So I would say that our forefathers would be abhorred about what they see now.
Speaker 1When Joseph Brand famously said, you were against taxation without representation, how do you like it with representation? Well, of course, King George looks like an absolute libertine pothead who doesn't care at all about violating our freedom compared to what's happening now. And why is that? Because it really is a dialectical evolution of thought.
Speaker 1The people that wish to rule you, the people that wish to gain dominion over your body, they figured it out. They figured out how to get in, how to get bypass all those trips and triggers that I mentioned, the Indiana... you know, formed government, Indiana Jones formed government, and they figured out how to game the system.
Speaker 1And how have they done that? Well, because taxation is not only theft, but slavery. And if you have an entity that we call our government that's able to extract our wealth to the tune of trillions of dollars, and you are surprised that the thieves didn't get in on that, then I would say that you're the world's dupe. Because it's inevitable, right?
Speaker 1They're going to go, you know, Bastiat said in the 19th century that when you make plunder more or easier than hard work, then, of course, you're going to have an unjust society. And when you have legal plunder, meaning when the government actually steps over its responsibility of defending your rights and starts violating them, then, of course, you're going to have disequilibrium in society.
Speaker 1That's what we have now. And we must rid ourselves of these people. First, you have to see the con. And you have to understand how human consciousness works. You have to understand how human nature works. And it is just the nature of this. If you create this large daisy chain of thieves and parasites, if you make it where they can resource all of this money, these trillions of dollars, then bad things are going to happen.
Speaker 1And so we have to somehow, I would say our forefathers led us out of the cage. onto a long leash, but now we must cut the leash, get up on our hind legs, and walk out into the world, walk out basically into the future totally free and not under anybody's thumb. What is the argument? The argument is that we have to have a gun pointed at the head of every man, woman, and child every moment of their lives in order to have a harmonious society.
Speaker 1That's ridiculous. only sociopaths are going to rule in that situation, and only sociopaths do rule. So I really think it's funny when people sort of idealize our politicians when the truth is that the barista down at Starbucks is probably a much nicer, better, and higher quality person. I really don't regard these people as even human.
Speaker 1You know, the voting booth... and the state itself inspires a kind of sociopathy, the individual would never do these things. The individual would never bomb schools and hospitals. The individual would never do these things. But somehow when they put their hand on the Democratic Ouija board and go vote, they call these people their representatives.
Speaker 1They participate in these mass exterminations and these pogroms and these, you know, Tuskegee experiments like they did with COVID, where they kill all these people, and they take no responsibility, even though they call themselves, they call them their representatives. So yeah, I think our forefathers would be absolutely disgusted and amazed.
Speaker 1They would be, during COVID, imagine our forefathers saying, did you really think that when we wrote all that, that we were saying, oh, if people get sick, then all this is over, then there's no freedom. Yeah, our forefathers would be absolutely amazed. They just wouldn't believe they'd want to go back, I think, and amend all their documents to stop it from happening.
Ian MalcolmYou know, and that's one of the curious pieces, right, because the irony of that reality is that in essence, the founding fathers in their attempt to ensure both those, let's say, the checks and balances, like you were saying, almost the Indiana Jones type booby traps that they. tried to place into these various divisions and separations of power to ensure that no one group was allowed to push any type of totalitarian oversight.
Ian MalcolmThey almost threw their tolerance and willingness to compromise and cooperate and to limit their authority. It appears like they almost, in essence, because they weren't totalitarian in nature, they opened the door perhaps to this type of long game subversion, which brings me to one of the questions, which is, We find ourselves in this strange predicament where, in my assertion, it feels like to be a patriot today almost would, according to power, label you as perhaps a racist, an anti-Semite, xenophobic, right?
Ian MalcolmIf you want to try and stand up and suggest that the nation should have borders, the Democrats will claim that you're xenophobic. If you cry out that perhaps America is ruled by... Israel and Jewish supremacy or an anti-Semite. It seems like they're trying to use these slurs while they are simultaneously grabbing all these levers of power that, to your point, the founding fathers almost never could have imagined.
Ian MalcolmAnd the thing that I'd be curious about is, is this merely the ethics of the people today being completely indifferent to the ethos of those of yesterday? Or do you think that it's possible in some kind of perverse rendition of logic that Donald Trump that Joe Biden, that Kamala Harris, that they actually believe themselves to be patriots trying to make the world better because they believe that whatever this entanglement is that we're aware of is somehow of benefit to the average, either American or to the future of the American people?
Ian MalcolmOr do you think that they are truly, back to the title of this space, that they are truly just not only betraying their people, but also betraying the ideals of the nation itself?
Ian MalcolmJoanne, are you there? David, are you there?
Speaker 1Yeah, I had to. I basically got blocked off and then I had to come back.
Ian MalcolmCan you explain what you mean by that? Did the app close on you?
Speaker 2It just completely went silent. I mean, I literally could hear nothing and I had to go out and come back in. Wow.
Ian MalcolmWell, I did receive a couple messages of individuals that are having difficulty with the audio, so not sure if X is trying to meddle with us. Joanne, are you able to hear both of us? Is it working for you?
@joann_marieYes, but I see David as listener. And I'm just so happy you're doing this space, Ian, and everyone, thank you so much for being here. Please repost this space, follow Ian and David, and I hope Thomas gets here soon. And yeah, if you guys go to it, I will also repost it, and this is such a great topic, Ian. Thank you so much for your spaces.
Speaker 1But I did hear the gist of your question, though, and I just... I want to impress everybody with this idea because I am very positive about how the future will unfold, which is, you know, you've heard me say before that the truth spoken but once can shatter a lie spoken a thousand times. Well, why is that? Because the only function of the mind, the only work of the mind is to conform to reality.
Speaker 1And that's why people feel defensive if they're contradicting themselves. You know, it's just inherent in our nature. This is the function of consciousness. It's just the way it works. And the reason why is because it's how you get out the door. It's how you drive your car. It's like the way that your mind basically takes inventory, the volitional choices that you're making every second of every day is so innumerable.
Speaker 1It's just a function of consciousness. And so I do believe that there has been an intent an intent to deracinate our morals. I mean, this is how ignominy, ignobility, this is how tyranny works. Of course, you'd want to deracinate morals, but that's a very hard thing to do, you know, because your morals are how you govern yourself.
Speaker 1They're the normatives by which you proceed forth. It makes it easier for you to live. You know, morals are not a burden. They're actually a benefit. They're a benefit to you. You know, if you're operating purely in your self-interest, you would have morals. You would try to achieve goodness. Why? Because the ultimate direction of self-interest is towards happiness.
Speaker 1And you can't really be happy without morals. The idea of being evil and happy, you know, you look at all these serial killers before they're killed or when they're sitting in prison, they're always like, I don't know why I'm like this. You know, they are exiled unto themselves. Self-knowledge, self-awareness, self-discovery is the direction in which the mind goes when it wants to be happy.
Speaker 1The pathologies are the things that prevent people from doing so. And so the thing of getting people to believe, for instance, that mutilating children in the name of transgenderism or something... the the attempt to get people to believe that well you notice this kind of collapse in the long stretch of time these things fail you know because humans are just naturally have endemic to themselves this moral sensibility so i think that the that the politicians are not representative of where human consciousness is and i think ultimately there is a reset so that's the hegelian dialectic i think that's happening here and out of curiosity so
Ian MalcolmI always like to at least extend the benefit of the doubt to those that I don't understand and perhaps think that maybe they are just misled, misinformed. I don't necessarily think this to be the case with those in charge. I think they're very well aware of what's going on. But I'd be curious, David, for your thoughts on, you mentioned the serial killer that says in prison, hey, I'm just the way that I am.
Ian MalcolmI can't tell you. And as a result, perhaps it's a different level of consciousness. or something else that's going on upstairs, I'd be curious, would you be at this point willing to give the benefit of the doubt to Marco Rubio or Donald Trump or any of these other political leaders and say, you know, maybe they know something that we don't?
Ian MalcolmMaybe this entanglement with Israel is of benefit in some way that we can't comprehend? Or do you think it's just as simple as the world's richest people that are part of either a blackmail, either financial entanglement, or perhaps... threats on their life that are, let's say, motivating them to behave in a way that obviously is antithetical to the benefits and the lifestyles of the average American person?
Speaker 1Well, I don't give the benefit of the doubt, especially to neocons. I think when you participate in evil, you become evil, I mean, over time. I don't think that's true. We're talking about serial killers. There are people who kill someone, and then for the rest of their life, they feel incredibly ashamed of it and, you know, badly affected by it.
Speaker 1Well, that's because they have a conscience. You know, when you read Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov spends the whole novel, I hope I don't give too much away here for everyone, he spends the whole novel after he kills his landlady based on total nihilism, totally, hey, I'm smarter, why I should have her money instead of hers, the world would be better off.
Speaker 1And then throughout the novel, he feels more and more guilty about this until he turns himself in. Well, what is the story? What is Dostoevsky, this great philosopher and novelist, trying to convey to us? That we're better than we think. That we have this moral sensibility in us. But the people like, let's say Jeffrey Dahmer or a better example would be Ted Bundy, the people that start to like it, the people that do it over and over again and lose their moral sensibility.
Speaker 1Well, how does that happen? Because shame is the last vestige of virtue. It's a thing, it's that last little light. when you're deep in that mind, when you're deep down, that calls you back and beckons you back towards some kind of goodness. And if you ignore that, then there is a point of no return. And I think that that is true of the Marco Rubios of the world.
Speaker 1I certainly think it's true of the Mark Levins of the world. I think it's true of the whole neocon movement. I'm sure that Dick Cheney is looking up at us right now and agreeing with me. But, you know, as far as Donald Trump, I think Donald Trump himself is a pragmatist. I think he's kind of an anti-war guy, but Solomon's choice was offered to him and he didn't cry out for freedom.
Speaker 1If he says, well, we can't show you how bad israel is we can't show you how much dominion they have over us because if we do it threatens their entire existence and maybe maybe maybe they're going to do horrible things and then it'll ruin my administration that is simply not a choice that he should have made and so i don't it's hard for me to impute all the negative motives upon him but all i can say is the output is very bad
Ian MalcolmYeah. And that's what brings me to the next question, which is really and for everybody that is not familiar with David and his work, I couldn't be more humbled and grateful for him to be here because the way that he sees the world is so rich in its, let's say, the fullness with which he answers these questions with both a political and then also a philosophical lens to them.
Ian MalcolmAnd this question that I have, David, I was thinking a lot about, you know, what I would want to ask of you. with the blending of those two pieces that you focus on. And where I arrived at is this next little topic, which is, okay, so if Donald Trump, whether it's due to either a moral failing or perhaps an intellectual error, regardless, the fruits of the labor seem to be the detriment of the average American people, as well as their fundamental rights and liberties, which brings me to a weird fork in the road.
Ian MalcolmBecause if leadership is acting in a way that's detrimental to others around myself, well, then the call to action would, of course, be to reject that thing that is infringing upon the rights of the people. But that then perhaps requires that I do that, which is ultimately undermining the very people that are elected to represent us.
Ian MalcolmAnd as a result, I would be undermining their leadership and their direction. which they could then define, I suppose, as treason, right? Because if I'm doing that, which is, again, at the detriment of the senior most individual of the political machine, well, then aren't I, in essence, undermining prospectively his desired direction for the nation at large?
Ian MalcolmBut at the same time, if I'm not doing that, and I believe that that individual is behaving like a traitor, then doesn't it make me treasonous for merely looking the other direction. And so I'd be curious for your thoughts on the morality, right, of this conundrum, which is simultaneously, I'm going to undermine the very thing that is elected to act on my behalf, but I'm stuck in this, again, this fork where either direction I'm going to be labeled a traitor or I'm going to be in my own mind anyway, morally conducting myself.
Ian Malcolmas a trader would by accepting that which I think is treasonous. And so I'm kind of curious how you would try and deal with that or tackle that issue.
Speaker 1If you're always, if your fealty is always with your principles, with your morals, you know, the political state is always trying to inspire you to simply turn off the moral machine, is simply to defer it, is simply to default and let them be the moral engines of your soul. Where does that lead? Well, it always leads straight to hell.
Speaker 1That's, of course, a Faustian bargain where there's really no real payoff. You know, it's funny because when people used to swim to their freedom from Cuba, Castro would call them traitors to the revolution as though they had taken some oath, as though they had taken some oath by their own volition. And I, my fealty is in the state, and Thomas Jefferson and our forefathers knew this.
Speaker 1You know, they expected a vigorous debate of ideas. It was Thomas Jefferson who said the tree of liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of tyrants and martyrs, something like that. And it absolutely is true. Well, why? Because we might remember when they wrote the Second Amendment, they wrote it after they had overthrown their government, not having come back from a hunting expedition.
Speaker 1You know, but now our victory, our win, What we're trying to achieve is just to get the truth out there. The truth will win the day. I am so tired of people saying, oh, well, you know, what is, we're just talking. Oh, you don't think they're afraid? Then why are they trying to censor us? Why are they trying to, you know, Socrates, you know, was killed by the vote.
Speaker 1And Thomas Jefferson really didn't like that. He really didn't want. a pure democracy, which is why we're a republic. He really understood that if 51% of the people can do whatever they want with 49% of the people, that would be a bad thing. Well, why? Because truth isn't up to the plebiscite. Morality isn't up to the plebiscite.
Speaker 1And therefore, yes, you should have fealty to your principles, to your morality, to your God first, and no man, no man should equal that. No man should, you shouldn't have no man in that standing. And I assure you, if you do, he will let you down.
Ian MalcolmAnd so then based on that, is it is it rational, not only from a, let's say, emotional framework, but also an intellectual one to then stand in opposition to to not only try and intellectually reject, but also prospectively to do that, which is undermining the very power of that executive branch. And I say this because, you know, I'm kind of curious that the founding fathers would have been viewed, of course, as traitors to the crown.
Ian MalcolmSo what would the founding fathers think of the conversations that we're having, the actions that we're taking, trying to bring attention perhaps to the foreign subservience that not only exists today to, let's say, England, but rather to Israel and to this hegemonic group that we're, of course, dealing with here?
Speaker 1They would make everybody that stands up for us look like feeble Ophelius. They would so object to this. You know, there's this great line in the movie. starring Mel Gibson, The Patriot, where he's sort of dragging his feet on getting involved in the revolution. And he asked the question, why should I exchange one tyrant 3,000 miles away for 3,000 tyrants one mile away?
Speaker 1He was making the case for Americanism, which is we don't want to be ruled by anyone. You know, Proudhon was right in the 19th century when he said, any man that calls himself my ruler is my enemy. And our forefathers would have hated that. You know, you're not, you know, Lao Tzu said in the Tao Te Ching, I think 2,500 years ago, you know, he said a great ruler, people wouldn't even know his name.
Speaker 1They wouldn't feel the effect of his rulership. Well, yeah, because you'd feel like you were the master of your own destiny. And what the ruler, what the leader is doing is really protecting your freedom, really just stopping people, you know, just because we're dressed in the comely clothes of liberty doesn't mean... that people have a right, that we're just asking for it, that we're being asked, asking to be plundered, told what to do, with whom to associate and where to go and how to raise our kids, what to say and what to think.
Speaker 1So our forefathers would be, if they were here, and by the way, the people, make no mistake about it, the people that are in power today, every single one of them, they would hate our forefathers. They would hate them with a red hot passion. They would hate them so much. You know, when Donald Trump started running for governor, he was basically the Ross Perot that succeeded.
Speaker 1And the one thing that scares me about all these people is they talk about the government like a business. You know what? We need a president who can run the government like a business. And that's kind of what Donald Trump does. And he does a lot of good things in that way because he's pragmatic. However, if the government is a business, then pray tell what is your product.
Speaker 1I am your product. You are their product. We are their product. Do you want to be productized? Products are owned without exception. Do you want to be owned? George Carlin was right. You have owners and our government is owned by those people. So why in the hell do you think that our forefathers would tolerate that for one second?
Ian MalcolmYou know, it's so interesting that you brought up the Patriot because I actually sent a A note to Adam Media, who is on here and a wonderful friend to this concept of kind of freedom fighting. And I referenced just the other day that very film, but it was a different segment from it, which actually it's curious because it has to do with the British.
Ian MalcolmAnd the quote that I told him was to go look up. Tell me about Ohio is the loose quote. And in the reference. is the British who, during the war, were obviously having great difficulty with the Swamp Fox, which they referred to him, which is the character portrayed by Mel Gibson in that film. And the reason for it was that he was fighting essentially as a militia, utilizing tactics that were, let's say...
Ian MalcolmI don't want to call them underhanded, but they were outside of the scope of war because they were so drastically outnumbered and could never have won the war using traditional methods of kind of line up and fire across with volley after volley until one side is depleted of men. Right. So instead, they they took a approach that, according to some of the codes of conduct of war, was perhaps a little bit unethical, but nonetheless was very successful.
Ian MalcolmNow, I bring it up because the British, the other side of the equation here. the British tried to have, at least in the movie, this more noble approach to war until they started losing. And then at that point, it was suggested that they take any means necessary, including perhaps going out and burning down the homes, the villages, the men, the women, the children, to ensure that they could root out or smoke out this one man and his militia to bring an end to the problem that they were.
Ian MalcolmAnd Cornwallis says to his... one of the Calvary men, he says, basically, yes, go ahead and take these less ethical approaches to win the war. And the guy's response is, tell me about Ohio, implying if we win and we are victorious because I will now be shamed because of the conduct that I participate in, what's going to be my reward for doing so, for not being able to return back home to England?
Ian MalcolmAnd so the the implications would be he would get a big piece of land in America. And I bring this up because we kind of face a little bit of a similar scenario that perhaps the swamp fox had to take. And I'm not, of course, advocating for any kind of kinetic violence, but rather suggesting that we need to we need to be a little bit more clever in how we go about trying to undermine the massive propaganda machine that's out there.
Ian MalcolmAnd from time to time, that might involve. maybe taking approaches that are not as traditional or not as ethical as perhaps we would otherwise be inclined to pursue. And so it's kind of curious that I was just bringing this movie up the other day, David, and I'd be curious about your thoughts around that. And I'll give you a quick little case study.
Ian MalcolmEverybody, I'm sure, is familiar with the official 1984. Very big handle. He was attacked directly by the ADL. They tried to dox him. They've tried to silence him. They took away his ability to be monetized on X. He then opened up a T-shirt store online to try and make a little bit of money to care for himself. And Shopify then disconnected his ability to even sell those T-shirts.
Ian MalcolmAnd he and I had a little, not a spat, but we had a disagreement because he was basically advocating for sharing content that might go viral. and get our message out there, even in the event that it perhaps wasn't always true. And so I'm curious, David, for your thought on that. You know, if we can essentially create propaganda that might not always align with a moral compass, which I try to necessarily always align to, whereas he takes a little bit more liberal of an approach, and just to give a little bit of color, he was basically sharing a piece of news that...
Ian Malcolmwas AI generated and not necessarily aligned with accuracy, but was, you know, shock and awe. And as a result was able to quasi go viral, let's say. And so I'd be curious on your thoughts in terms of the founding fathers and their thought on this, you know, effort that we're taking, where, where do we necessarily aim for that North star?
Ian MalcolmIs it always going to be righteousness or is it occasionally being pragmatic?
Speaker 1And the reason why is our virtue is our weapon. We'll win because of that. You know, the reason why that 300 men were able to withstand, at least hold back the Persian Empire for a while at Thermopylae was because of the virtue of what they were fighting for. Same on Sterling Bridge with William Wallace. Same with our forefathers fighting barefoot in the snow.
Speaker 1Maybe 2% were actively participating in our revolution. But no, because virtue in ancient Greek is really ethos, it's habit. and if this is a worship of futurity and this is really what communism does if we stop being moral today in order to achieve a victory then we'll arrive somehow at a moral future no you will lose you have we will have lost your soul you will have become the enemy that you are hunting you will have finally vanquished him on the battlefield gone home look in the mirror and seen the one that you vanquished staring back at you we must never get give up on our virtues
Speaker 1which we must never have that kind of pragmatism. I really think that the truth is what has left the last battlefield. You know, in the censorious crowd, their illegitimacy always shows in their desire to censor us and their desire to excommunicate us. You know, they call you an infidel or a supremacist or whatever they call you.
Speaker 1It's been throughout history. The tyrants have always had their infidels. They've always had a way. to basically disenfranchise the people with whom they disagree, that challenge them on an idea level. But in the long stretch of time, we win. But we win with our virtue, we win with the truth, and our fealty must always be to it.
Speaker 1That's how we differentiate. And it resonates. It has a resonating quality. You know, the young people today that are getting so fed up with the ruling class, they know it's a giant con. Well, it's because it's a lie. You know, that's sort of, it's kind of a Holden Caulfield moment in them. So no, I would never give up on that.
Speaker 1You know, Areopetica, John Milton wrote that treatise on free speech years after he had visited Galileo in prison. And it was basically a callback to this hill in Athens, in ancient Athens, that you could stand on. and speak truth to power you could especially comedians they would stand up and they would make fun of their rulers and how they were all wrong and how they were screwing up and he was basically advocating for for free speech and why it's so important we've always yearned for this there's something about the human soul where it yearns to be free
Speaker 1And I'm sorry, but the last matrix that we have to overcome is our own acquisitiveness, is our own desire to go out in the outside world and satiate ourselves. And this is something the state takes advantage of, is our lack of dominion over ourselves. Our desire to constantly, you know, the fetish of consumerism of always wanting to buy more things, satisfy ourselves.
Speaker 1Well, this is also very distracting. Well, what does it do? It also reduces our morals. So no, anything that makes you morally stronger, makes you more independently minded, and ultimately overcomes the state or certainly the nefarious state.
Ian MalcolmYou know, it's so well stated, David. And it reminds me of another... Quote, I guess I'm just filled with the movie references. This one from Kingdom of Heaven, where one of the women in the film says to, I think it was Orlando Bloom who played the character, something to the extent of, there's a future in which you'll wish you had done some evil to be able to do great good.
Ian MalcolmAnd I always found it curious, and curiously, if I'm not mistaken, the character's unwillingness to do the little evil... is the thing that ultimately allows him not only to do the great good, but the perhaps even greater good than he ever would have been able to do otherwise. And I do feel like that is it's such a relevant point to stay away from those short term wins, because ultimately the thing that we're trying to do, it can't be constructed on flimsy short term wins.
Ian MalcolmIt has to be built on a foundation that is impenetrable, especially given the subject matter that we talk about, the group of people that we point fingers at, the proclivity that that group has, at least in my opinion, to lie through their teeth about the most mundane of statements to try and get the upper hand in an argument.
Ian MalcolmAnd as a result, we have to just always lead with the most honest presentation of our ideas, of our ideals, and ultimately to align those with not only the vision that we have for the long run, but each and every short little step that we take in pursuit of that. And so really, really well stated there, my friend. And I'd be curious as a last little comment, and then perhaps I know we've got some wonderful other speakers up here.
Ian MalcolmI would love to see if they've got some questions for you, David. But on this idea of the righteousness and what is righteous, I'd be curious for our own ability to even define some of these words, right, that have done you know, some evil now to do great good in the future. Well, how do we even determine what is the good?
Ian MalcolmWhat is the evil? And perhaps how do you try and arrive at that yourself? Is it a sense of religion? And perhaps if it is or if it's not for anybody that's listening that might not have that religious compass, what would you look? Or what would you suggest those individuals look to, again, if not a creator, to try and orient those very basic definitions that you and I might be able to agree loosely on, but that are ultimately kind of nebulous in nature.
Ian MalcolmSo if we strive to them, it can become something that is much more art than it is science in terms of its definition.
Speaker 1Well, I believe in the divine spark. I believe that any sort of enlightened soul feels that within himself, irrespective of whether... of whether he identifies with as a Christian or a Buddhist. Listen, admittedly, I'm radical in this way, in the way that I think. However, the golden rule applies here. We do have a sense of what is right and wrong.
Speaker 1And of course, when we are inconsistent, even the tyrant, even the leader of North Korea wants to be free, he is. He has great freedom. He has lots of freedom. He kind of gets whatever he wants and nobody tells him what to do and that sort of thing. Well, of course, it's a tremendous hypocrisy. All tyranny is predicated upon moral inequivalence.
Speaker 1The idea that you have it coming. When communists describe our way of living as the law of the jungle, it means they think that we have no moral sensibility and they need to... convey that to us because they are our betters. Well, that is moral inequivalence. And what do they prescribe? The law of the cage. Why we all have to be controlled.
Speaker 1We all have to be cajoled, told what to do and with whom we dissociate because we're not good people. We're not good, but they are. Now, the guy who robs you in the alley is also proclaiming moral inequivalence. He's saying, you're better than me. I know it. You know it. And I'm going to take this money from you. But you see the golden rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Speaker 1This is something that is intuitive within us because we're all constituted the same. There's volitional beings who can make good choices and bad choices. We all have a sense of biophilia, by the way. Like the average person does have an appreciation, an understanding of the consciousness of other human beings. And of course that golden rule applies.
Speaker 1You know, I think maybe the greatest moral philosopher, practically speaking, that ever lived was probably Confucius. Because when Confucius came to existence, he looked at a feudal world where people were, and he thought this was absurd and pathetic. They were just killing each other and feuding almost for no reason. And he elucidated a moral philosophy that was custom.
Speaker 1And he said, customs make us better, laws make us worse, whereby people should govern themselves. In other words, you have to have at least the pleasure of agreeing with yourself that this is logical, that this idea exists in a logical space. And morality is no exception to this. And after Confucius' ideas ruled the day, 100 years later, all of a sudden you had this incredible equanimity.
Speaker 1So I give him tremendous credit. He was almost a contemporary of Socrates who did somewhat of the same thing in ancient Greece. So it really is the golden rule. I think it's within us. I don't think it's hard for us to know. And I'm sorry to say, even for Christians, it's unreasonable to think. that before Moses came down with the Ten Commandments, we all thought that it was okay to lie, cheat, and steal.
Speaker 1No, it's from the beginning. It's never been okay. And I do think that anybody that tries to, the political state, coming back to this, is always trying to confuse us and inspire us with the thought that there is no morality. So the devil's ruse is that he doesn't exist, and the political state's ruse is that morality doesn't exist, that it's all just...
Ian Malcolmup to the vote or based on the win more based on the opinions of the majority soul bullshit we all know what right and wrong isn't i think it's pretty obvious you know absolutely and and you know it's very curious i've i've always thought that idea of of right and wrong uh... it whether you or not you take a religious spend on let's say that the terms that i'm about to start to utilize uh... their implications or uh... the ramifications of them
Ian Malcolmwill occur regardless of if you agree with the terminology that I think I'm about to describe. And what I mean by that, David, and then I'll throw this question to you and then we'll bring Thomas into the mix. But this idea of heaven and hell, right, of good and evil, I'm convinced that ultimately the world rewards those that do things that are aligned with, let's say, heavenly behavior, not only prospectively in the afterlife, but in this one and vice versa.
Ian MalcolmAnd what I mean by that is... if you are an individual that lies, cheats, steals, is harmful to others, ultimately, whether or not you end up with a bunch of riches, it doesn't really matter because the riches will likely be meaningless because you're probably, even if you've got everything, right? We see the video of Bill Gates and his $645 million super yacht.
Ian MalcolmBoy, doesn't he have everything? And it's like, no, actually, I'd be inclined to say that he probably doesn't. He probably lives a... a life that is rather meaningless in spite of all of the things that we would think would give him meaning via materialism. And that similarly, if you align yourself to the good and you try to treat others nicely, right?
Ian MalcolmIf you do unto others as you'd like to have done unto yourself, regardless of any material that you may or may not have, that you're ultimately going to find yourself with friends, with family, with people around you, with a community that values you for you. It's like the monks of old or the priests that would have had nothing, but they would feel like they had some kind of enlightenment or higher power or connection to something that is kind of the ether.
Ian MalcolmAnd so I'd be curious, kind of David, last little question here. And then, like I said, we'll go to Thomas for some of his thoughts on this. But this idea that ultimately you find yourself in heaven or hell on earth based on the behavior that perhaps you take in the first quarter, first third, first half of your life, and that you ultimately have to make the bed that you
Speaker 1guess morally uh kind of lay out for yourself at you know throughout points of your life and that you're ultimately left with the consequences of those indifferent of the materials that you may accumulate along the way you know my grandfather was a minister and he was very happy when i sat down and decided as a late teenager to read the bible straight through and i did and then i read it straight through again and then i decided i wanted to really read all the other religious works
Speaker 1the Tao Te Ching, the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, the Vedas, all of these things, the Koran. And he wasn't so happy about that. But I started going to the library, by the way, and getting them out. Library is an amazing place. And I was amazed to find one line that kept coming up. It's better to rule yourself than a thousand cities.
Speaker 1But I love this line. You know, when Jesus said, look not here or there, but the kingdom of heaven is within you, well, so is the kingdom of hell. And self-rule, self-dominion, not chasing after your wants, which makes you insane, the capacity to have dominion over your thoughts, you know, the Buddha's famous for saying, a man is as he thinks.
Speaker 1All of these things involve being happy. You know, I'm a eudaimonianist, so Aristotle and I have that in common. Of course, he inspired me to think that way. But the idea that happiness is an ethical value and is integrally related to our morals, to our ability to be good, decent, kind, loving, peaceful people. You know, I've said this before.
Speaker 1If you were to visit all of the monastic, you know, if you visit Benedictine monks and then, and Thomas Merton did this, by the way. I think he was a Benedictine monk. And you visited, let's say, Hindu monks. monasteries you listen visit all these different religions in their monastic iterations you'd find that they were all really similar people because they had stopped being acquisitive they'd stop thinking that their life is defined by acquiring things but rather by having dominion over their own souls and so they were very giving and kind you know there's a famous uh story in the way of the sufi about jesus uh this islamic world came up with this
Speaker 1the story where he's walking down the street and his friend is with him and someone yells at him and he responds with kindness and uh after the man goes away that his his companion said why did you respond that way when he was so mean to you and i'm paraphrasing and jesus replied it's all i had in my purse basically if you have goodness and kindness within you that you're sort of
Speaker 1in heaven now you know it's what i love thomas aquinas defining eternity is the everlasting now well if if eternity is the everlasting now you'd want to be comfortable with yourself right you'd want to be you'd want to be proud of your virtues you'd want to feel good about the way you extend yourself the way you connect yourself with other people
Speaker 1So I do think this thing with the yachts that you just mentioned, I love that. With these people that have all of these things, I think that that fetish is going to go away. I think 200 years from now, that people will no longer be so inquisitive where they think, gosh, if I just have another mansion, if I just have a yacht.
Speaker 1But think about it. If you had a 20,000 foot mansion, you would never live in it. You would just be a little occupying a little few cubic feet. wherever you were, and you'd be living in that moment. And are you happy with yourself in the shower, in the bedroom, in your living room? When you're making food, you're never occupying it all.
Speaker 1At once, it's just a big space. It's the inner space that makes you happy, not the space within which you occupy.
Ian MalcolmAnd ladies and gentlemen, that is why David is one of my favorite voices, like I said, on this entire app. I couldn't agree with you more. And the wild piece is, I think if you talk to any of these individuals that have the mansions, they've got the private jets and the half billion dollar super yachts. If you ask them the thing that they're excited about, it's the next thing they're going to consume.
Ian MalcolmRight. What they have is never the thing that makes them happy. It's the pursuit of more, of more, of more, of more. There's actually a wonderful video and I'll see if I can't find it and put it into the purple pill. George Lucas and he was speaking at a commencement speech and he basically said that within the realm of happiness, if you think of that as the macro level, you have pleasure and you have joy.
Ian MalcolmAnd he went on to say that pleasure is something that's self-seeking and that it constantly requires that you have more and more and more of the thing that brings you pleasure. It doesn't matter if it's supercars or if it's drugs or if it's women or whatever. but that joy was something that was not for yourself, but rather for those around you, for your community, for your loved ones.
Ian MalcolmAnd that while it was not nearly as high of an excitement of happiness necessarily, that it was much longer lasting. And he basically ended by saying, if you seek joy, you will find everlasting happiness. I thought it was a beautiful message, a very interesting man. And curiously, if you look at the... Let's say the portion of the Star Wars empire or franchise that he was involved in had a lot to do with this idea of your inner self, of good and evil.
Ian MalcolmAnd if you then contrast it to what has been pushed out, let's say, by Disney in the aftermath of his selling it to it, I feel like the movies essentially went from joy to pleasure. It went from meaning to instant dopamine. Not sure if you want to comment on that.
Speaker 1Think of it this way. And I'm going to go back to my friend Aristotle. So pleasure is good. So this weekend, when you navigate yourself through the weekend, Aristotle said, pleasures and pains are not in and of themselves good or bad, except to the degree that they extend themselves towards your happiness. They lend themselves to your happiness.
Speaker 1So a wise man holds his current actions in the context of his long-term life. Are you becoming better? Are you growing as a person? Are you becoming happier? So let's give an example of a pleasure that lends itself to your happiness. Reading. I like to read. It's pleasurable for me. And it lends itself to me becoming happy.
Speaker 1I like to make food. I really like to cook. My wife and I like to cook. And it lends itself. Make this great food. It's really just nutritious and healthy and it's enjoyable to make. But it lends itself to me being happy. Now just imagine a pain. like exercising. It might be kind of painful. It takes effort. It might be a little bit painful, but it also, it's a pain that lends itself to me becoming more happy.
Speaker 1But what about doing heroin? That might be pleasurable. Does it lend itself to my immiseration or my happiness? So as you go through your day, your week, your month, your life, if you just always ask yourself, is this a pleasure that lends itself to my long-term happiness or takes me further away from it?
Ian MalcolmIt's so well stated, David. And look, I think that has to do with ultimately the conversation at hand. And I say that because for anybody that has followed either of the paths, let's say, of the speakers up here that have obviously been challenging, critiquing and outspoken against Jewish supremacy and Zionism. Well, you know that there's not a lot of short run pleasure in that one.
Ian MalcolmYou will be met with countless calls of the right of anti-Semitism, of bigotry. And what I will tell everybody is that in the event that you do post about this subject, one of the best things that I think you can sincerely do is to block individuals that are bots or let's just say low follower count trolls. And they are certainly out there.
Ian MalcolmAnd I suggest blocking them because all they do when they spam your content is, of course, to hurt its placement in the algorithm. But for those that are perhaps... let's say real accounts, they're just blinded by whatever their loyalty is, whether it's through either ignorance and or some kind of benefit that they're receiving from shilling from Zionism and Jewish supremacy, just mute them.
Ian MalcolmAnd I say this because it'll make your experience on this application far better when you can basically participate in good faith with those that are trying to seek the truth. And that's why for what it's worth. Individuals that want to advocate or speak on behalf of Zionism or Jewish supremacy, including the likes of Mitch and some of the others that I've regularly debated with rather frustratingly.
Ian MalcolmSo I will not mute or block them because I will engage with them because at least it seems like it's coming perhaps from a place. Maybe it is subversion, but I think it's genuinely just ignorance and or a moral compass that couldn't more so align with mine. Oh, go for it, David.
Speaker 1I would say, though, that I don't really impute. negative motives upon the person I'm talking to. I will just, you know, you can see I was just before we got on this space, I was going back and forth with Matt Taibbi, the great journalist. And I was sort of like, hey, you know, like, why aren't you following the Epstein-Massad connection since Charlie Kirk said it was there and we have all this evidence.
Speaker 1And he's like, what evidence? And I gave him a bunch of evidence and we went back and forth. But I never, I defended him when people sort of imputed his motives and all you're getting $7,000 and all this sort of stuff. I can't do it back. I can't out-hate you. I can't out-shout you. I'm not going to do these things. I'm not going to basically discombobulate my own soul.
Speaker 1I'm going to be an advocate for peace and equanimity. Unfortunately, when we talk about Jewish supremacy or Israeli supremacy, I have to say it. I have to go where my mind, and maybe I'm wrong. And also, I give absolution to anybody that believes in peace and equity. My Jewish brothers and sisters, my Muslim brothers and sisters, my brothers and sisters all around the world.
Speaker 1I'm trying to inspire human solidarity, and I don't think I can do that by imputing the motives, which is an ad hominem attack, as well as just attacking the person, imputing the motives of the person with whom I'm talking. So if I'm going to engage them, I'm going to engage them honestly on the strength and merit of their ideas.
Ian MalcolmYeah, it's so well stated. And that's the reason, actually, for... recommendation that i made there around muting and blocking because individuals that just come in with the ad hominems uh that that are constantly deflecting uh and every now and then i'll respond to the trolls just for the the humor of it but you know and actually it occurred in the last 24 hours where somebody just came in oh you're lying and i said well can can you show me a lie
Ian MalcolmAnd they shared a screenshot that I was able to easily defend the accuracy of. I actually did it with Grok, which was rather humorous. And so from time to time, I think that is a good thing to do. And it's also for what it's worth. And with Matt, because I had seen that you had gone back and forth with him and he even quote tweeted you.
Ian MalcolmAnd for what it's worth, folks, this is a guy with two million followers, if I'm not mistaken. The irony is I just and I do think this is a good thing to do is to in a carefree fashion, just throw in a little quip. I try to substantiate it with background information. In this case, it was about Jeffrey Epstein and this guy suggesting that it wasn't perhaps or maybe it was loosely tied to Israel, but clearly not with Donald Trump or other high ranking members of the Washington elite.
Ian MalcolmAnd the irony is just by simply asking, are you clueless or lying? And then I just shared the video that I put together of the five Epstein facts that link him clearly being Epstein clearly. via one or two degrees of separation from both Trump, Biden, Kamala, essentially all the way back to Clinton. And the irony is that my post there in response has one thirty third the views, but it has one third the likes.
Ian MalcolmAnd I say that because these people are so unpopular. And David, like you've always suggested, the lie has to be repeated millions of times. The truth just has to be shared once. And once those people see it. They're so inspired and excited and encouraged to be able to get behind those. And it's why, you know, you mentioned William Wallace earlier.
Ian MalcolmAnd William Wallace did not win, quote unquote, right? He didn't become king. He didn't make millions of dollars back in the day, whatever that would have been the equivalent of, right? But he did inspire a people that ultimately was able to result in a far better, freer society for his people and his followers. And that's what we're ultimately doing.
Ian MalcolmAnd I think if we if we stand in opposition to the tyranny, regardless of what it means to us monetarily or materially, it's going to leave us again feeling spiritually and morally in a much better place. And so with that, I'll actually I would love to introduce Thomas, who just joined as well. Would be curious if he wouldn't mind maybe giving a little bit of an introduction for anybody that's not familiar with his work.
Ian MalcolmAnd Thomas, we were discussing kind of the morality of standing in opposition to. tyranny or treason, if we can define it as such. And I think David did a really wonderful job of being able to define some of the behaviors of the current administration. And we don't know exactly the why they do what they're doing, but the fruits of their actions certainly seem like they are detrimental to the American public.
Ian MalcolmAnd as a result, perhaps the morality that is standing in opposition to that type of regime. And I'd be curious for some of your thoughts here on the subject and your perspective accusation that Donald Trump is not only maybe misinformed or acting in a way that's detrimental to, but perhaps is a complete betrayal to the American public.
Speaker 3Yeah, thank you so much, Ian. Great space. And David, amazing. You know, one of the best. contemporary philosopher you can find anywhere, especially here on this platform. There's a lot of fools and jesters, and David is a truly intelligent human, and it's a pleasure to hear him go off on any of his tangents. And I'm glad you did this, Spacey, and I know we were talking about this, and I think several people in this space, I see a lot of mutual followers who have spoken to the corruption and the stuff that's going on with this administration.
Speaker 3It's really bad, right? He's ushered in an era of technocrats and people who are behind some of the most egregious policies that we were all protesting when Biden was doing it. This Warp Speed, all these people like Alex Karp and Peter Thiel, the Palantir Technologies were what helped usher in the COVID vaccine. A lot of people were hurt by that overreach.
Speaker 3It was mandated. You can look at people like Sean Hartman, who is a young young man who died after taking the vaccine. And his father, Dan Hartman, is involved in the only active lawsuit against Pfizer in North America. You know, and you see right now this administration with Robert Kennedy Jr., you know, saying that they don't recommend the vaccine for children or pregnant women in May of this year.
Speaker 3And immediately after that, Moderna has given the green light to give this vaccine to children six months old. It's on the current vaccine schedule. You know, you see just what we've done with farmers is a good example of this administration kind of betraying their promise. This Argentina bailout is going to hurt a beef industry here that has been suffering for decades and go back all the way to the 1970s with policies with the girl butts.
Speaker 3who it's been a long chipping away at the middle class and farmers in particular. In the 1980s, they subsidized, they seized like millions of acres of American farmland. And you look at the NAFTA agreements where, you know, Ross Perot ran for president here as an independent. He spoke to the, he called it a giant sucking sound that you're going to hear of industry moving south.
Speaker 3And that's what happened. And what they've done now, on top of that, you also saw a large sucking sound move east, right, to India and China and all these different countries that became manufacturing leads. What we see now is this administration saying that there's not American talent and that we need, after decades of policy of moving industry and opportunity and job losses,
Speaker 3Now we have to bring the laborers from the companies that we moved overseas back and pay them less. So we're driving down wages. We're doing all this stuff, H-1Bs. Trump was actually right about H-1Bs. On the campaign trail, he spoke against the H-1B program. It's fraught with corruption. And again, it's exploitative in that it drives down wages.
Speaker 3And I speak about this because I've been in the trades for 20 some odd years. And this is something I see personally. And I see how the Biden administration, again, I bring all this up because I spoke a lot. I became very aware politically during the Biden administration because of what was going on. I just saw it. It was just a gut punch, what was happening to the American economy.
Speaker 3And then when you saw what happened in Gaza, what happened internationally under the Biden administration, all of that has continued. Like the 50,000 tons of armament that went to level Gaza has now evolved into we're supporting a policy of ethnic cleansing and rebuilding. We're going to rebuild a resort. It's going to be a technocratic police state.
Speaker 3You can look at the Abraham Shield project and how that is going to be rolled out. A governorship with Tony Blair. Very interesting. He's going to be involved. given that his son has rolled out this multiverse, which is the UK's digital ID. And I bring up the digital ID because that is rolling out right now in Texas. And again, you just see all of these different parallels, all of these different same players.
Speaker 3And Trump, we were promised America first, and we were promised the middle class first. Again, with this big, beautiful bill, you're seeing for the middle class, 2% sunsetting capped tax breaks. This is all the, you know, no tax on tips. They spoke about these doge checks or any of this. He dialed that back and said that's going to be a part of these 2% sunsetting capped tax breaks, which is just a slap in the face.
Speaker 3So you've got what they're doing with farmers. You've got what they're... what they're spending with these wars. HR 4779 has continued to flow aid to Ukraine. So we're continuing to fuel a proxy war with the nuclear power at the detriment of Ukrainian and Russian lives. We're facilitating more egregious human rights abuses in Yemen.
Speaker 3Again, we bombed water facilities at the beginning of this year and left 50,000 Yemenis without water. And it's just like we keep on seeing these things. And I'm glad that David, he's great to speak on this, the morality of this thing. And I think that it's important to not appeal to authority and to call out these things when we see them.
Speaker 3And that's why I've become very animated with speaking out against the Trump administration, what they're doing, because I just see it as a continuation. And I mean, you know, morality is like the immune system of the human world. I think that, you know, society's raw, you know, from within long before any external enemy arrives.
Speaker 3And that's why it's so important to call out these things and what we're doing in Gaza or what we're doing to American farmers or how we're ignoring, you know, when we deploy to Venezuela to address seemingly fentanyl, that's a good indicator of the many betrayals because, you know, Venezuela does not create the precursor chemicals
Speaker 3involved in manufacturing fentanyl, these come overwhelmingly out of China, with a small degree India, maybe like a 10% from that. And what you saw during Trump's first administration, just to give it a context for the issue, when Trump took office for the first time, there was Americans dying from the fentanyl coming in at a rate of 50 a day.
Speaker 3And by the time he left office, it had doubled. to 100 Americans a day. This is like 20-20 levels. And then when Biden took office, there was more blacks, border, you know, they're just completely just... That administration was one of the worst in modern history by far. Obama and Biden definitely hurt the American people and hurt our international image in ways I don't think we can even really, you know, realize yet.
Speaker 3But this, they...
Speaker 3The way that they did all this, I'm sorry, I kind of lost my train of thought. But I've been working a tremendous amount. But it is the fentanyl that doubled under Biden. It's gone down again under Trump. But this move into Venezuela is not going to address that. And it's obvious that that is another attempt at some regime change.
Speaker 3We've been doing this since 2002. We've created a huge economic crisis with the way we've operated in South America. And there's decades of corporate and economic greed that has led that. This goes all the way back to the Banana Wars and the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. This goes back a long, long time. During that time, the U.S. Marines invaded Honduras and Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic over a dozen times to safeguard United Fruit Company plantations.
Speaker 3This all involved bribing officials, toppling governments that dared to tax or nationalize American assets. And Taft even gave like a dollar diplomacy that funneled bribes to military officers and basically turned sovereign states into fiefdoms, right, for this U.S. agribusiness. And we were warned about this by Smedley Butler and even Dwight D. Eisenhower spoke about how these corporate interests have commandeered our officials, the apparatus that kind of drives policy.
Speaker 3what we see is that the, that like with Trump is a good example of this is like, we've, he's become this kind of corporate sock puppet that he, you know, he was supposed to be, uh, an opposition to, but it's, I think it's, it's really crazy what, um, the, I think on the pre policing scale, you look at like how in, in Florida, there was a man who was arrested, um, for, it was a 93% match through an AI program that they found him guilty of child sex crimes.
Speaker 3And they arrested this man on a warrant that was released after this information. It was completely false. And these are the pre-policing technologies that they're rolling out with Palantir all across the United States. You have Gideon being pitched by former IDF. It's going to do the same thing. Just, you know, sweep the Internet 24 hours a day looking for...
Speaker 3You know, things that go against the pre-prescribed narratives. Again, this administration we see with these technocrats, these people like Peter Till, Alex Karp, Sam Altman. You're seeing a rollout of all these different programs like Wise Decks and Civil Sanctuary, which are actively censoring content. You've seen a chilling of free speech.
Speaker 3You have people like Clay Higgins, you know, trying to chill free speech in the wake of the Charlie Kirk murder. And then you can get into the legal, just this whole situation with Charlie Kirk. The fact that somebody like Charlie Kirk could be murdered in front of 3,000 people and then the person, the assailant, whoever it was, gets away and isn't apprehended there on site.
Speaker 3And then just the many Epstein lies. The way that they've handled that, I think, was the straw that broke the camel's back. I think a lot of people quit. being okay with, with being lied to. I think we were, we were promised transparency in a big way. And it's, it's, I don't know. It's when you look at, and I'll, I'll kind of land here with, with like a couple more figures with, with some research I've done just to put on context on the Middle East conflicts and how that is, I mean, continuing anything, any expansion of this idea is, has, it's really, we need to turn, we need to right the ship and,
Speaker 3You can look into Thomas Stauffer, who is an economist who has written, there's a $3 trillion estimate, he says, over the cost of American taxpayers in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This was published in the Washington Report. And again, he rates $3 trillion in 2002. So when you adjust for inflation, that's actually somewhere around $5 trillion.
Speaker 3But his calculations involve all different, you know, there were these macro impacts like losses from GDP, from oil disruptions, higher energy prices, foregone trade. You have resources.
Speaker 1Higher everything prices.
Speaker 3Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I think there's a land with this, you know, like there's 275,000 American jobs are lost every year from these, you know. contract diversion.
Speaker 1Whenever we go into any war situation, I'll always ask someone who seems to be supporting this. It's just hilarious. I'll say, okay, let me atomize this for you. Tell me how a butcher's assistant in Iowa or a waiter in, I don't know, Dallas, Texas, how is their life made better by you going to war with this country? How was their life made better by you shipping all this money, all these weapons?
Speaker 1Tell me how their life gets worse if you don't do this. And they just have nothing. You know, they just have nothing.
Speaker 3There's no... What's even worse is that you see, like, there is a direct cost to you. Like you see with San Marcos, who was targeted by Greg Abbott, the governor here in Texas. They tried to embargo over $4 million in aid that was going off. And... they were threatened with their grants existing in future, that if they didn't get in line and continue to allow this aid to flow to a foreign nation, I mean, it's so egregious, right?
Speaker 3That American municipalities and people, again, like the Thomas Stauffer reports, I mean, it's estimated like 10,000 when you go per capita. It's like, that's what's been taken out of the American, every American person's pocket on this. It's insane. It's really, really, I think it's too much to accept. Again, this federal deficit, this debt that we're in, it's a moral document.
Speaker 3It's all the things that we've condoned and allowed. And at the violation of American law, like Leahy Law and international laws, like the Articles of Rome and Statutes of Rome, it's really, it's too much to accept, you know?
Speaker 1Margaret Thatcher famously said about the Soviet Union, for a small group of people to have the audacity to make decisions for everyone else is just too much to bear. Well, how's it feel? That's kind of the way we feel now, isn't it?
Speaker 4Yeah, I liked Margaret Thatcher. My family's English. My grandmother, she liked her. She spoke about her.
Speaker 1I see we got some hands, Malcolm.
Ian MalcolmYeah, and let's prospectively bring some other folks into the conversation, kind of go around the bullpen here. Joanne, quickly to check in with you, and then we can kind of bounce to the hands, but any questions or thoughts for Thomas or David?
@joann_marieOh, yes. Wonderful, wonderful space. I love all your guests, and the topics are amazing. About the topic of morality, I spent a couple of years that I was agnostic, and I would read Immanuel Kant a lot. He says that killing someone, you don't do it because it's morally wrong. It's not because God will punish you or because... Because I struggled with it a lot.
@joann_marieI would see really religious people doing the most morally... disgusting things and we all see them with the jews right now right like they say that oh god god said that this is okay and they do the most disgusting things so i just wanted to hear your thoughts or maybe david or thomas about emmanuel kant i don't know if you guys i mean probably david has read it so yes so you will never read more impenetrable prose than the critique of your reason by emmanuel kant but he basically ruled the roost of philosophy
Speaker 1ever since he wrote that, and then came along Schopenhauer and Hegel, who were sort of his progenitors, even though Hegel was more of a, he really was more of a, what's the, Spinoza. He was more of a Spinozan. So Schopenhauer said in order to be a philosopher, you had to be a Kantian, and Hegel said in order to be a philosopher, you had to be a Spinozan.
Speaker 1I agree more with Schopenhauer, but I love Ethics by Spinoza. I think it's a masterpiece. It is a masterpiece. Immanuel Kant is really, really known for his epistemology. So for everybody in the room, during the Enlightenment, the real work that the people did was sort of underneath, was just the nature and means by which we gain knowledge.
Speaker 1How do we defend the truth claim? How do we know things? And then, of course, all of them, they would sort of make moral inferences building up from the foundation of their epistemology. And Thomas Hobbes did this too, and not all of them were right, hence Hobbes writing Leviathan. but they were geniuses nonetheless. The one criticism I would say is Immanuel Kant sort of created the apparatus of the modern state by coming up with his brand of altruism, where you're supposed to operate out of your self-interest radically.
Speaker 1And that means, self-interest, I'm sorry, but altruism is just the science of hiding self-interest. And when Hegel... sort of created this idea that might is right. He never said those words, but he created that idea. He got it from Immanuel Kant. Immanuel Kant said you should operate out of your self-interest. And then Hegel came along and said, in whose interest should you operate?
Speaker 1Well, it should be the group. And who represents the group? The state. Well, of course, that's not a rational moral system. So I criticize Immanuel Kant for that. He did sort of create a more socialized version of of Confucius' golden rule, which is the categorical imperative. Just imagine whatever you do, operate as though were universal law.
Speaker 1So an example would be if you have your basket and you're in the grocery store, would it be more logical for you to carry it back and put it where you found it or the other person to have to go twice the distance back and forth? So that was Immanuel Kant. He had some good ideas about moral philosophy, but they weren't all good.
@joann_marieWhich is Spinoza. Sorry, I've never heard of him.
Speaker 1That was Kant. That was Immanuel Kant I was talking about. Spinoza wrote a masterpiece, an epistemological masterpiece called Ethics. And it was more than ethics. It was an absolute... He basically was a Cartesian guy. You know, he was... Descartes was... He was a child of Descartes. And he tried to sort of create this confluence like Cartes did between math and philosophy, which of course...
Speaker 1A lot of great geniuses do that. But I'm sorry, but Immanuel Kant was by far the greater genius.
Speaker 3Yeah, Joanne, Kant is great. I actually, one of his quotes I actually think about a lot. It's just as perishes.
@joann_marieHold on, I'm so sorry. Ian, the space is going to drop, I think. Did you guys see the thing on top?
Speaker 3I did get that.
@joann_marieYeah, please reset it. Thank you. I'm so sorry I interrupted.
Speaker 3No, you're totally fine.
@joann_marieSorry, continue. I'm sorry.
Speaker 3Yeah, no, I think about Kant. He died, what, 1804, some odd. But there was a quote that I think is really important. I think especially for this conversation, he says, if justice perishes, then it's no longer worthwhile for men to live upon the earth. It's kind of stark how he felt about leadership and morals, I think.
Speaker 3I think he depicted also that there's a radical evil in human nature, right? And we break rules because there's something in us that likes to break rules, in a way. I hate to reduce his arguments to my kind of...
Speaker 3my vision of it, but he's a great mind. We have to actually get back to reading more of these great minds. I think that's one of the reasons I love listening to David is that I learn another one of these great minds almost every time I hear him talk.
@joann_marieYes, me too. I'm going to... Oh, I'm sorry, David.
Speaker 1Go ahead. When Immanuel Kant was at Konigsberg, a young man by the name of Fichte, who ended up being the philosopher at Jenner for a while before Hegel took over... He went to Kant and he gave him his work and Kant was like, nah, go away. And then he wrote his own thing and Kant actually...