What's up everybody? Welcome to a brand new episode
of Part of the Problem. I am thrilled to have one of my
favorite people to talk to. Obviously, he's been on the show
many times before. Keith Knight.
He is the managing editor at the Libertarian Institute.
He's also the host of the Don't Tread on Anyone podcast.
I, in my opinion, one of the absolute best and brightest
voices in the liberty movement today.
How are you, Keith? I am doing very well, Dave.
I've been loving your peers. Morgan appearances, dude, you've
been knocking them out of the park.
I'm so happy we're reaching those people.
Well, thank you very much. It's uh yeah, it's always good.
It's always good to get in front of a new audience.
And Piers Morgan has been very kind to me.
I do think there are far too many people on those panels, but
I do enjoy doing them. And so that that has been a lot
of fun. Anyway, so we, as I mentioned, I
had Scott Horton on the show recently and we had mentioned
that the Libertarian Institute, which of course was Scott
Horton's creation, along with a few other really great people
like, well, Greg and Sheldon Richmond, they have their annual
fundraiser going on right now. Of course, this is the institute
that is produced enough already. And Fool's Errand has Scott
Horton's new book Provoked coming out, which I'm so excited
for everybody to read because I don't know if you've got an
advanced copy, but it's just incredible.
I'm sure you have. And of course, your fantastic
book Domestic Imperialism was was published by the Libertarian
Institute, of course, Tom Woods, if you guys are familiar, where
if you remember when I debated Chris Cuomo, the book that I
gave him was Diary of a Psychosis by Tom Woods that was
also published by the Libertarian Institute.
Just an incredible organization. If you can give money, this is
like the best thing to give money to.
So anything else you want to say about that?
And then we'll get into the episode.
But what do you have to say about the Libertarian Institute?
Anyone who makes a donation can get any of those books as a
gift. My book Domestic Imperialism is
also one that you can get there, but I love Tom's book.
It is full of tons of empirical evidence, principled arguments,
and Cuomo's best argument was just to call you Legion of Skank
like 6 times. He goes if I get it in a
seventh. Maybe this will really take
Smith down, but when you're armed with Tom Woods's COVID
book, nothing is able to compete against it.
So yes, Scott Horton, very wealthy in knowledge.
However, when it comes to monetary wealth, Scott and I do
need funding for our next books. I'm working on two more myself.
We have a Waco project in the works constantly trying to hire
people so we can be the libertarian educational website.
So you can go to our search engine, type in minimum wage,
Winston Churchill, agricultural subsidies and get the
libertarian position on those. Progressives say we want to give
you a free education. By that they you mean 10s of
thousands of dollars a year. Or they'll property tax you and
then give you a complete shit education.
We actually want to provide a free monetary cost education at
libertarianinstitute.org/donate. Please go there to help us out.
Yeah, Isn't it so weird? By the way, just as you brought
this up, I'm not even like, I wasn't planning on talking about
this, but isn't it crazy that As for me, I'm a little bit older
than you, Keith, maybe a year or two.
But I remember when I, you know, kind of when I was a kid, it
being somewhat plausible that you're like, hey, you know, you
need an education and maybe you need some help financially
paying for that education. And it is so wild.
I was just talking to my wife the other day and we're talking
about our kids, who, you know, my kids, I have little kids.
I have a 5 year old and a 2 year old.
And we're talking about like when it like, do you think
they're going to go to college? And like, you know, I was like,
I don't know. And I guess there's, there's
some argument that if one of them really wants to be a doctor
or something like that, that, hey, you have to get this piece
of paper in order to be able to do that.
But isn't it crazy that not just like what I do on my channel or
you do on your channel, but if you really want to be educated,
it's amazing how the market has already provided a free
education that is better than any state school could have ever
imagined. Like more resources than when I
was a little kid. And like, no, no government
school could have possibly said, I have every book that's ever
been written and and I have a lecture on that book by the
smartest person, like breaking down exactly what that meant.
Obviously like it in 1985, if you could have said, well, what
if I had that? Everyone we've got, well, yeah,
OK, if you had that, then you wouldn't need us anymore.
And now we have that and they're like, no, you still need us
because you need a gender studies degree or something like
that. It's pretty unbelievable.
Yeah, and even if the state coercively funded and taxed
people to pay for it, again, still not free.
The state paying for it is somehow free.
They see it obviously when it's like, well, the military spends
a lot of money, but then again, it's free because government
pays for it. It's like, no, that's, that's
money and resources, but even the opportunity cost, 4 years of
your life to learn about this bullshit food pyramid and these
bullshit mask mandates, that's what they talk to you about.
So yes, too high in opportunity cost and monetary cost.
So yes, that's why we are building the Libertarian
institute to not just say the school system sucks, but to
create an alternative. And the places you mentioned,
YouTube, Odyssey, Khan Academy, Wikipedia, Mises Institute, Did
I say Internet? netarchive.org.
Those places are just treasure troves of private, voluntarily
funded educational sites. So yeah, but we got the
arguments for private education as well. 100% by the way, I'll
tell you that I I always get asked.
That was just my wife literally was just telling me literally
today, earlier today, she was like, I think you need to do an
episode where you just go through your recommended reading
list because she was, you know, she manages a lot of my like
e-mail and social media accounts and stuff like that.
Not my Twitter. My Twitter is all me.
I do that. But everything else you're
talking to my wife. So if you, if you send me a
message on anything else, you're just sending my wife a message.
But that's OK, That's she'll get it to me.
But she was like, you know, people ask about like what your
your recommended reading list is.
And she's like, maybe you should make an an episode.
And I was like, that is actually a good idea.
I probably should do that. But I will say that when people
ask that the Libertarian Institute's list of published
books is a great place to start. And I'm not just saying that
because you're on the show or because I love you and I love
Scott and a lot of people over there.
It, it's genuine. It's genuinely like true.
Like Sheldon Richmond's book Coming to Palestine is an I
always recommend that for someone.
If you, if you just like don't know anything about the Israel
Palestine conflict and you want to get started, that's a great
one there. There's just so many great books
that you you guys have have published.
So it's the the best place to start your reading list, and the
best place to donate your money if you can, is the Libertarian
Institute. Thank you so much, Dave.
Greatly appreciate it. OK, so for today's episode, now
I'm, I'm going on vacation in the morning and I just recorded
with Clint Russell. Now I'm recording with you.
I'm trying to get some episodes in before I leave.
But what we wanted to talk about today was a speech that you
gave, I think a little over a year ago, and it's called the
State is the Health of War. Now, when you gave that speech,
did you realize that you got the order wrong, or was that
intentional? That was intentional.
So originally war is the health of the state was coined by
Randolph born this would have been in 1918 during the First
World War. His general thesis is that when
a population is terrified of an external threat, that government
of the domestic population is able to get away with rights
infringements they otherwise would not be able to get away
with in a time of peace when people were not terrified out of
their mind of an external threat.
What I wanted to do is make the case that the way that wars are
generally funded, what makes what gives wars their health is
the state's ability to have access to a central bank where
they could print money and fund these things without having to
allow people to to opt out. Not to mention taxation.
They get to coercively fund their operations.
This makes the likelihood of people engaging in warfare much
more likely because you're lowering the cost of the people
engaging in the activity. Governments frequently have
educational monopolies with regard to compulsory education
laws, or as Kamala Harris likes to call them, truancy
enforcement laws. So when you control the minds of
kids ages what, 5 to 18K through 12 in America, they're able to
see the state as a much more virtuous organization.
So any fights that they're engaged in must be desirable.
They must be fought for virtuous sense.
Another thing that may that's unique to states, which makes
more and more likely is the ability to conscript and force
people into funding into fighting these wars.
Of course, they think they're so cool.
They brag about, well, forced cotton picking is immoral and
I'm against it. It was 150 years ago, but I'm
taking a stand. And even though no one's asking
me to take a stand on this, but Vladimir Zelinsky enslaving all
men ages 18 to 65 to fight in his military and get their limbs
blown off so we could make sure that he stays on the throne in
Kiev. Well, that's not immoral.
That's unfortunately just something that has to happen.
And then finally, there's a blatant legal double standard
when it comes to states that are allowed to engage in mass murder
without almost ever fearing that they themselves will go to jail.
General Curtis Lemay famously said to Robert McNamara during
Operation Meetinghouse, the fire bombing of Tokyo in March of
1945, that, you know, if we lose this thing, we'll all be tried
as war criminals. McNamara tells the story in the
fog of war. So knowing that they won't face
any legal repercussions, those are the five reasons states are
much more likely to engage in warfare than other
organizations. And my general solution is to
privatize security. We could talk about that at a
different point. Sure.
No. And McNamara, of course, went on
to be the Defense Secretary during the Vietnam War, so I
guess he did learn some lessons from that conversation.
But isn't that interesting to think about just that right
there that had America lost World War 2 or had America lost?
I mean, OK, the Vietnam War, it's it's a little bit tougher
to see a scenario in which we're like kind of totally dominated,
but that we clearly could have been tried for war crimes and
that like our people could have been held like, you know, the
Nuremberg trials could have happened to the United States of
America after World War 2 or after Vietnam or after Korea or
after Iraq or any of these. And what what really would the
arguments have been against that?
It would have just been like, well, we thought we were going
to win. And by the way, if you actually
listen to the the Nazi arguments in the beginning of the
Nuremberg trials, that was essentially it.
Ah, we thought we were going to win, so it would be OK.
Well, uh, you know, uh, there's an amazing part of the fog of
war where McNamara on I'm working on a transcript for
this. So the book right here, McNamara
says proportionality should be a guideline in war.
Killing 50% to 90% of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then
bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional in
the, in the minds of some people to the objectives we're trying
to achieve. He was, he has these numbers
because he was collecting statistics in 1945 for the US
military. So This is why historical
narratives are so vitally important, because the narrative
is, well, America was attacked out of the blue for basically no
reason at Pearl Harbor. So look, don't bug me with any
of this. Killing Japanese civilians is
bad. They started it as if the people
getting killed in Operation Meetinghouse in Hiroshima were
involved in Yamamoto's decision to attack Pearl Harbor.
Whatever. OK, you're a psychotic
collectivist. Either way, the Pearl Harbor
story is a complete myth. The best evidence for this?
There's a number of things. Probably the best evidence that
Pearl Harbor was actually intentionally provoked is
Secretary of War Henry Stimson. There are a collection of
reports on the Pearl Harbor investigation focusing on
Admiral Richardson and Admiral Stark.
And on page 177, Stimson actually said on November 25th
of 1941, the President Roosevelt brought up the event that we
were likely to be attacked perhaps as soon as next Monday.
For the Japanese are notorious for making an attack without
warning. And the question was what we
should do. The question was how we should
maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without
allowing too much danger to ourselves.
Realize this was Roosevelt's policy and we didn't find it out
until 1972 when the British War Cabinet papers of Winston
Churchill were finally released to the public.
If you look up an article by the New York Times, this would have
been January 2nd, 1972. What's called war entry plans
laid to Roosevelt and Churchill and Roosevelt are meeting in
August of 1940. And Churchill says the president
was sure they could come in. The president was going to be
more and more provocative in hopes of in of engaging the
Germans or Japanese. Everything was to be done to
force an incident. We can also know this is true
because after Pearl Harbor, it wasn't.
Oh, I'm so sorry. I meant to keep us safe.
Government did not uphold our end of the social contract, so
we're going to return everyone's tax money because that's why you
have to pay, because we keep you safe so we don't hold up our
end. We got to give everyone refunds.
No, there was no apology. There was give us more money,
more power, and now we get to kill with impunity.
So realizing the Pearl Harbor myth is so important because the
lack of empathy people have for mass murder, arguably genocide.
Tucker can't even bring it up without getting hassled by the
Daily Wire crew. It's just terrible.
And then they the the nail in the coffin was in 1999,
Robertsonnett published a book titled Day of Deceit where he
cites the McCullum memo which says, I don't know if I have
that here. The last line in this memo
written in October of 1940 says if by these means he lists 5
things that the US could do, Japan could be led to commit an
act of war, So much the better. At all events, we must be fully
prepared to accept the threat of war.
So the state did not not have the incentive to keep the peace.
The state is the health of war and had every incentive to
provoke an incident to justify a mass murder campaign, knowing
their social status and power would drastically increase if
the nation was involved in war. With the idea of collective
punishment or holding a group of people responsible for what
their government does in an act, let let's just say it's an act
of aggression. You know, it's like, imagine if
anyone were to say to the American people, you know, like
you, Keith or me, Dave, you're responsible for the Inflation
Reduction Act and you'd go, wait, wait, what?
Like I, I mean like literally forget even like us, grab
someone who's not political at all, go to you like your kids
Little League game and grab a random parent and go, hey, how
about that, the inflation reduction act?
What did you do right there? And they'd go, I don't even know
what you're talking about. Like they don't even know that
the government did this. And there's tons of like drone
strikes and, and military campaigns that like our, our
people don't even know about. Imagine holding you responsible
for something like that and then you know, that's it.
It. It is the same logic as holding
the Japan, some random Japanese guy.
And this isn't even like today in the information age.
This is like, you know, you're bombing some village in Japan.
They may not even have known that Pearl Harbor even happened.
They have no idea. They're like, dude, I'm fishing.
What are you talking about? I have no idea.
It's just some random dude who got caught up in some
international dispute and powerful people over here, we're
trying to take over and they just, it's like, Yep, you got to
be incinerated in order for us to take more power.
The the real history is that. And Brian Kaplan makes the
excellent, concise argument in a book titled How Evil are
Politicians. Spoiler alert Barry, he says the
problem with war, The costs are extremely high, the outcomes are
extremely uncertain, and with the nuking of Japan, the
greatest bulwark against the Chairman Mao I.
I forget what Mao's title was at the time when he was fighting
Chiang Kai Shek's army, but that was one argument for not
completely destroying them with unconditional surrender. 2 They
occupied Vietnam since September of 1940 and had Korea as a
colony since 1910. So once the US took down those
damn Japs, we inherited 2 conflicts in Korea and in
Vietnam that otherwise would not have happened.
But it's very hard to foresee those things.
So this is the ultimate contradiction that we always
hear. If you're unhappy with the way
your government's doing things, make a sign, persuade your
neighbors, but don't really get physical.
You can't even go inside the Capitol building.
We'll blow your head off if you try to do that without a
permission slip. So if government violates your
freedoms, try to persuade yourself out of it.
But if any foreign government potentially might in the future
threaten your freedoms, we must go to war.
We must kill 10s of thousands of civilians.
We must advocate turning places into glass publicly.
That's what we do when there's a potential threat of our freedoms
from anyone else. But when this domestic regime
takes all your freedoms away, well, you just got to lay down
and die for it. So the fact that the vast
majority of the educated elite population believes in the two
things which are are completely opposed to one another, they're
right. The cost of engaging in violence
are extremely high and the outcomes are extremely
uncertain. That's why war should be
avoided, and that's why State is the ultimate culprit when it
comes to war, because the cost of them going to war is much
lower than any other organization who has to
associate freely with fighters and has to fund it out of their
own pocket. Yeah.
So, OK, so the idea that war is the health of the state, I think
has been pretty fairly established over the years, and
that it's like, obviously after 911 and we're like, hey, we're
at war now because this enemy declared war against us, I
guess, as the official narrative.
Then of course, you're going to have the creation of the
Department of Homeland Security, and you're going to have the TSA
under that, and you're going to have the Patriot Act and you're
going to have all these things. So I think people recognize that
when you're at war, the state has to grow.
But I think the point that you're making about the state
being the health of war is something more like, OK, if you
have a state and you like, if if a state already exists and you
recognize that war is the health of the state, then wouldn't it
follow that if the state already exists, they'd want something
that is the health of it? So wouldn't they be looking for
something that could make them stronger and richer?
I mean, look like I as as I'm a, a person with a family.
And if you were to say that something is the health of this
person and family, then I'd probably be looking to create
that thing that is the health of my family, right.
So if you're the state and war is the health of the state, then
wouldn't as a state you always be looking for more war?
Exactly. Even the most defensible
examples I do want to touch on, I have one more thing on
Churchill, but the the one that people might be most familiar
with is on this would have been I think September 20th of 2001.
George Bush is speaking to Congress and says Americans are
asking why do they hate us? They hate what they see in this
chamber, a democratically elected government.
Their leaders are self appointed.
They hate our right to vote. Our freedom of speech and our
freedom to disagree with each other says something to to to
that extent. Now the point of terrorism is to
have a shortcut to fame, to bring the world a message.
And you can read bin Laden's own words in anything that he's
published since his letter to King Fod in 1995, but most
famously in tactical recommendations.
He says the Americans are occupying the land of the two
holy sanctuaries, Mecca and Medina.
And just as we were able to drive the Soviet empire out,
we're going to drive the Americans out.
The Americans are starving kids in Iraq.
He uses the number of 2 million to rile his troops.
The number is not 2 million, but that's what he uses.
And then says that Israel is basically AUS creation going
back to Harry Truman and is ultimately responsible for the
plight of Palestinians in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank.
So it's the three things that he talks about non-stop.
You can read a collection of his work.
It's titled Al Qaeda in its own words.
It was published by Harvard Universe Varsity.
This is what his actual gripe was.
So after September 11th, after Bush did not keep us safe, his
approval rating went to 91%. Jeb Bush once on the
presidential debate stage against Donald Trump said, say
what you want about my brother, he kept us safe.
And Trump says 911 happened under your brother.
Apparently the crowd was very offended for Trump saying that.
I don't know, but it's absolutely bizarre.
So the Taliban was not allied with al Qaeda by any means.
There did not have to be a war over something like this.
In fact, October 14th of 2001, the Taliban's Deputy Prime
Minister, Haji Abdul Kabir came out and said we don't want war
with America. We're power hungry.
You could just hear him saying, look, we just want to violently
dominate the people of Afghanistan.
We don't want to have to fight the Americans here.
We'll hand over bin Laden over to to any third country.
So we're not, it's not directly to America, not to Israel, but
any of these potential third parties.
And then immediately Egypt. Well, then he's on a plane to DC
for some Nuremberg type trial. George Bush mentions this in his
book Decision points in the chapter titled Afghanistan,
where he says the goal of telling of demanding the Taliban
to hand bin Laden over was a method of showing their
defiance. So he goes, my plan is to show
their defiance, hand him over to which the Taliban says we'll
hand him over to any third country to which Bush says and
NATO, they have their first Article 5 declaration of war. 20
year war leads after 11 days. After the 20 year war the
Taliban receives is Kabul. This was NATO's first
declaration of war and now there's nothing to learn from
that. But I guess we might have to
start going after Putin and expanding NAO even even more.
So this is the psychopathy. Even the Afghan war is a
completely unjust, justifiable when you look at the cost to
civilians. And even under Donald Trump, the
Watson Institute at Brown University found that under
Trump, civilian deaths in Afghanistan increased 330%.
It's totally evil. This is the pro-life movement
that we have. This is the head of the pro-life
movement, Donald Trump justifying mass murder of
civilians. So the state continues to be the
health of war, even in the best examples.
Yeah, jeez, it really is something.
And to see, like, even think, if you think about the fact that
the Taliban was essentially the landlords, you know, like they
were essentially like they rented out some land to a group
that, you know, like, imagine going to an apartment building
and someone in the apartment building was accused of murder
and going, I'm going to hold the landlord responsible.
And the landlord goes, oh, hey, if one of my tenants killed
someone, go, you know, I'd love to help you investigate that.
And they go, no, no, no, you're the bad guy.
We're going to fight A20 year catastrophic war to make sure
that you don't own this building anymore.
Against your other tenants. Right.
And then you fail and you leave that landlord with more weapons
than they've ever had before. And then you still go back and
go, all right, what's the next one?
What's the next war we're going to fight?
That's what. We're talking about.
Of pause and reflection in Scott Horton's book Fool's Errand, he
has a source that Al Qaeda on September 12th of 2001 was
roughly 400 fighters. Decade or two later, the Islamic
State of Iraq and Syria had 10s of thousands of fighters in
multiple countries. So yes, it is this old 10 -, 2 =
20. You do create more terrorists
when you engage in in these activities.
It it's also funny because in that Afghanistan chapter of
George Bush's book, he says that terrorism came from these
Mujahideen fighters who originally were engaged in
resistance actions against the Soviet occupation from 1970, 79
to 89. So he admits that this terrorist
issue is a result of empires occupying your land and you see
it as a resistance opportunity. This is what Ronald Reagan
understood, I want to say in 1983.
Group that later merged with Hezbollah.
They had killed I believe 213 Americans in Beirut, in Lebanon.
So according to neo con theory, Lebanon is going to take over
the world if we don't declare war on Lebanon.
Ronald Reagan pulled the troops out and no war.
Followed. We're still waiting.
The yeah, that he sent a bunch of Marines in and then he pulled
them out. And I believe, if I'm not
getting it wrong, his quote was we do not understand the
irrationality of Middle Eastern politics.
And man, if people had just listened to Ronald Reagan on
that. And OK, I know, I know.
Ronald Reagan also wasn't perfect on any of that, but that
was that not the perfect, the perfect summation of all of it
was like, you know what? We do not understand what's
going on there. And they are not operating on
the same system that we are. So let's just divest.
Let's just not be a part of this.
Man. We would all be so much better
off if we had heated Ronald Reagan's words of advice on that
one. And his actions, I want to say
also in 1983, the Soviets shot down the Korean Airlines 007
flight, which had a number of Americans, including a sitting
member of Congress. And Ronald Reagan did not
declare war over this. I'm told today I got to declare
war against China because there was a balloon in the sky which
had 0 casualties. The Soviets killed a sitting
member of Congress and a number of American civilians on this
flight. Ronald Reagan did not declare
war and within a decade the Soviet Union came crumbling
down. That's because they over
expanded themselves in a war in Afghanistan.
What empire would do such a thing?
Yeah, really. All right, So we've established
that war is the health of the state.
Obviously if there's a war breaking out and you're, you
know, on a whatever your, your, you know, whatever your taxes
are, if a war breaks out, we're going to go, hey, we got to
raise your taxes and you're going to say, OK, well, sure,
our boys are out dying in this war.
I'll pay a little bit more taxes.
But for the idea that the state is the health of war, let's say
you have you have an income tax, you have a central bank where
you can print money. Why would you want to start a
new war? I'm sorry, are you asking me
this one as a question? Why would they want to start a?
New Why? Well, why would a country want
to start a war? What would benefit them?
What benefits them is they're able to mobilize the passions of
their population by creating the external threat that I am here
to protect you against Xi Jinping, against Vladimir Putin,
against Kim Jong Un. So they eventually have this
rally round the flag effect where people will associate
sitting politicians with the country.
When hearing the country is under threat from foreign
entities, they will most likely rally around that person and
justify the state taxing more, printing more, increasing
defense obligations. The purpose of talking about why
these wars are based on lies is to show that these are wars of
choice. That is easily the best
indicator that states are more likely to engage in activities
which lead to the mass murder. You know, of course we're evil
by advocating voluntary exchanges between capitalist
acts, between consenting adults. But the state mass murder
programs? Well, it's not an incentive
problem. Maybe we just have to elect
better people. They never get to the root of
this issue at all. That's why anti war progressives
absolutely need to improve and basically just concede that
libertarians have been right about their genuine analysis of
the state. So states engage in war because
they are able to get away with things that in a time of peace
they'd be less likely to get away with.
The wars are generally not in the interest of the masses, so
they lie and say that these threats are not coming from the
state that takes 30% of your income and claims the right to
conscript you and indoctrinates your kid with the food pyramid
making them 400 lbs when they're 10.
No, that's not a threat to you. The threat is if Xi Jinping
controls just this area or this area plus this area called
Taiwan. So that's why governments do it.
It increases the amount of power and influence they have.
There's no market check and balance that exists in the
market where people don't like what you're doing.
They can voluntarily disassociate with you.
They can stop funding you. That doesn't apply to the state.
So they engage in all these wars for choice, which but where the
costs, even in the best examples, don't.
OK here, here's where we can bring Churchill back in.
He wrote a My point was the costs seldom outweigh the
potential benefits. September 1st of 1939, Hitler
goes to reunite a 95% German city, Danzig.
That's according to Encyclopedia Britannica.
It was 95% German at the time. So he invaded Poland on
September 3rd. Neville Chamberlain, who we're
told is like this dumb dove who never did anything.
Neville Chamberlain declares war against National Socialist
Germany as a result of this invasion because they promised
to give a war guarantee to Poland.
It was not a war guarantee because the Soviets invaded on
September 17th of that year and there was no declaration of war
against the Soviets. It was trying to provoke a war
with Germany. So notice the independence of
Britain is already violated. The decision to go to war for
Britain is now put in the hands of Polish colonels.
That's a violation of independence if I have ever seen
one. So the war ends and Churchill
doesn't just thank everyone for all the taxes and apologize for
all the deaths and how we could have done this peacefully.
He says on Page 3, the the preface of his first Second
World War memoir. He says the human tragedy
reaches its climax in the fact that after all the exertions and
sacrifices of hundreds of millions of people and the
victories of the righteous 'cause we have found neither
peace or security, and we lie in the grip of even worse perils
than those we have surmounted. Meaning we declared a war for
Polish independence. You can read the text of
Chamberlain's Declaration. Poland then ends up under Soviet
occupation. Churchill brings this up to
Stalin at the Yalta meeting. He says, look, we fought a war
for Polish independence. 8 million Poles have been killed
from that favor. We were doing them.
Can we have elections in Poland? You got to host those to which
Stalin says, oh, free elections like in British occupied Egypt.
And that was Stalin's response to Churchill.
This is according to a book titled Stalin's War by Sean
Mcmeegan. So that was just looking at the
costs and benefits. Not to mention the Soviets
occupied half of Europe on the east.
So that is just looking at Churchill, who by the way,
Churchill was not elected, Chamberlain was elected and then
kicked out after the Narvik debacle.
So the fight for democracy had unelected Winston Churchill,
unelected Joseph Stalin and like 20 term President Roosevelt of
right, Right. It was 4 terms.
So it I'm going to stop there and see if you have to comment
on anything. This Churchill myth is so
deadly. People say, oh, he's a hero.
The modern day Churchill is this guy.
So let's just follow him and do whatever he does.
Well, it does seem like the idea of democracy has become the
modern justification for statism in general.
And look, I, I think that if you look at it from kind of a more
broader, you know, reaching perspective from pre democratic
norms up until today, you'll get a clearer picture of what the
state really is. So you, you know, like today,
people kind of cling to democracy as this thing that
makes the state legitimate. But even like today, you know,
look Kamala Harris at is she where she is because of some
democratic norm? You know, no, I mean, I, I don't
know, the whole Democratic primary just on on the side of
the capital D Democratic Party was no, they wouldn't even allow
a real, you know, democratic process.
And they just, but then you'll hear people today, like 18
million people voted for, you know, Joe Biden, you're like,
OK, well, I, I thought you told me 75 million people voted for
him. OK, whatever.
But they voted for him. Yeah.
Some people within his party decided he was too old and they
kicked him out. Seymour Hersh has written a
really interesting piece about this lately.
Is so OK but so democracy has nothing to do with.
But really, you'll recognize democracy has nothing to do with
anything. This is all just an excuse for
why it is OK that this government rules over you.
And particularly if you look at governments of the past,
obviously it says that has nothing to do with it.
It's just that these were the strongest people with the most
guns and they were able to take control of their people.
That's all it is. Democracy is the sales pitch
that works, and the way they really get their sales pitch was
summarized perfectly by Thomas Sowell when he said these issues
are seldom, if ever discussed empirically or economically or
on principle. What people are looking for are
people to vilify and hate and heroes to admire.
So that's why the Churchill myth gets so heavily circulated.
It was the Churchill cabinet which on May 15th of 1940
initiated the bombing of civilians in Germany and the
Blitz didn't happen until September of 1940.
So this policy was summarized by a science advisor to the war
government, Charles Percy Snow. He gave a series of lectures at
Harvard called Science and Government.
And here's how Snow summarized the paper.
The paper on bombing went out to top government official
scientists. It described in quantitative
terms the effect on Germany of a British bombing offensive in the
next 18 months. The paper laid down strategic
policy. The bombing must be directed
essentially against German working class houses.
Middle class houses have too much space around them and so
are bound to waste bombs. Factories and military
objectives had long since been forgotten except in official
bulletins since they were much too difficult to find.
The paper claim that given a total concentration of effort on
the production and use of bombing aircraft, it would be
possible in larger towns of Germany, those with 50,000
inhabitants, to destroy 50% of all houses.
These are the fighters for democracy.
They are so worried that you won't get a one in 10 million
vote to determine which. Fire sits on the throne next,
constantly justifying mass murder.
This is the actions of the heroes of democracy.
I'm not even pointing to well, Napoleon did well, actually,
Napoleon was after the French Revolution for liberty,
equality, and fraternity. So whoever they think the
villains are, are, let's just say, villainous.
The heroes of democracy are constantly engaging in the most
evil crimes. There's a book titled The
Complete War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle where he actually says
that Winston Churchill one night was shaking his first at the sky
saying why won't they come? De Gaulle looks at Churchill and
says are you really? Are you not having any patience
to see your cities get destroyed?
To which Churchill responds, according to Charles de Gaulle.
You don't get it. Once the Americans see Oxford
and Coventry getting bombed, they'll have to come in.
The state will even justify the mass murder of its own civilian
population, which it pledges allegiance to defend.
They will justify them getting killed.
The case is with Pearl Harbor. The case is with the British
getting bombed. Churchill even authorized
Operation Catapult, which was killing 1200 French servicemen.
And and his justification at the International Churchill Society
is, well, if we didn't kill him, those Subs might have gotten in
German hands. So these are the crimes that
people will justify engaging in when they have a legal monopoly
on printing money, conscripting people, and they control the
education system, which is how they're able to hide these
things for so long. Yeah.
And doesn't. Isn't that something that people
should keep in mind today when our, our ruling elite are
advocating for more escalations in the war in Ukraine, more
escalations for the war in Gaza? You know, that like, I feel like
there's a a sense amongst Americans that like, yeah, but
we're doing this to make sure that our people don't ever have
to die. It's like, Nah, I don't think
that's actually true. Oh of course it provokes a war
which makes it more likely. And so if you look at the cases
of the First World War, Germany gives Austria a blank check to
declare war on Serbia and fight the Russians.
And this favor to Austria was so nice of them led to the death of
1.1 million Austrians. Sir Edward Gray in 19 O 5
pledged a war guarantee to France against Germany.
So they did them a very nice favor.
Those French First World War against Germany led to 1.3
million French deaths. They have to pay the price.
So when you're not being Mr. Nice Guy, when you say we're
going to give a war guarantee to Ukraine, we're going to give a
war guarantee to Taiwan, that makes you nothing but a
psychopathic prick because we have historical references to
see what actually happens in these cases.
That in no way makes you the good guy to just issue war
guarantees and put the obligation to offend people.
The the obligation is put on all Americans to defend who sits on
the throne in Kiev or in Taipei or in Tehran.
This psychopathic amount of just comfort with putting massive
deadly obligations on people. It would just never occur to me
to say, Dave, I hate the current governor of my state, so you're
going to battle, buddy Dave? My, my independence is being
violated by the current politician who needs to rule me.
Your kids got to get drafted, Your towns might have to get
bombed, but my independence is being violated.
It's completely sick. Yeah.
So, OK. So given the current situation
that we have where we have a pretty dangerous war brewing in
Ukraine and a pretty dangerous war brewing in the Israel Gaza
situation, what would you say is a what's a sane policy given all
of this theory, what's a sane policy to have going forward?
So let me first quote a another book that I would recommend
reading. It's called A Promised Land by
Barack Obama. So to understand maybe all of
the examples I'm using are historical 'cause I have no
examples in the present of this. Here is Obama stating the nature
of Vladimir Putin's gripe with America, the US.
This is on page 464. The US decision 7 earlier seven
years earlier to pull out of the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty
and its plans to house missile defense systems on Russia's
border continue to be a source of strategic instability.
The admission of former Warsaw Pact countries into NATO during
both Clinton and Bush administrations had steadily
encroached on Russia's sphere of influence, while US support for
the color revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan
under the specious guise of democracy promotion had turned
Russia's once friendly neighbors into governments hostile to
Moscow. So in other words, according to
the former president, Russia's gripe is not, well, we're taking
over Hitler's failed plan to take over the world.
According to twice elected president, those are Putin's
gripes. NATO expansion, color
revolutions and getting out of now Open skies as well, but
previously the Anti ballistic missile treaty.
So looking at history, what I think we should advocate for the
present is constant negotiation. This is Robert McNamara's first
lesson in the fog of war. Empathize with your enemy.
The examples that you can look to are Nikita Khrushchev earned
the title The Butcher of Budapest in 1956, and in 1959 he
was at the White House shaking hands with General Eisenhower.
In 1962, Kennedy and Khrushchev were sending letters when the
Soviets had I think 90 nukes in Cuba, which Castro apparently
told Khrushchev that he wanted to use.
But through the process of talking, the amount of empathy
between the parties increase and they were able to deescalate the
situation. Basically, Castro ordered these
armaments as a result of Operation Mongoose, the CIA's
attempt to assassinate Castro. You can read about all their
assassination theories before they ever went into practice in
a 1953 document titled A Study in Assassination, which they
used in 1954 when they assassinated officials in
Guatemala. So more talking, more empathy,
more Donald Trump shaking hands with Kim Jong Un.
I mean, literally, I am told that we can have a formal
alliance with Joseph Stalin, have the Alta Conference, but we
can't talk to Vladimir Putin. Putin, did you know he's a bad
guy? He did bad things in Ukraine.
I have. I've heard that.
The Holodomor took place in the 30s.
After that there was a formal alliance with Joseph Stalin to
give him half of Eastern Europe. But you know, can't, can't talk
to Putin in 19, I want to say 64.
The Chinese Communist Party had Project 596, which was their
capability display of showing that they had nuclear weapons.
So Nixon or LBJ and then Nixon could have said, well, we're
going to have to go to war with China.
It's just too powerful. Instead, within a decade,
Kissinger and Nixon are shaking hands with Chairman Mao, but
can't talk to Xi Jinping. XI Jinping's a bad guy.
They have, they have two positions.
They say, well, if China invades Taiwan, then we might lose
access to our semiconductors. But on the economic realm they
go the problem with China's we trade too much.
Well then wouldn't we just keep trading even if they did take
over Taiwan? Can't these things just be built
in America? A real tough on China policy is
decriminalize all capitalist acts between consenting adults
to drastically make America the only superpower.
Because that's how an economy grows with more social
cooperation, less barriers to trade and more innovation.
So that is the lesson that we can have for today.
More talking, more empathy, less vilification of large
populations. I think Donald Trump the other
day said, well, if it was Iran who tried to Take Me Out, we
might have to wipe them off the map.
Well, if he assassinates Soleimani and their response is
to assassinate one person, Trump's responses to murder
potentially 80 million Iranians. Which group is the uncivilized 1
here? Or, or, or just that's right or
just. Let's say hypothetically.
Let's say hypothetically that it wasn't Iran who is trying to
take Trump out. Let's say it was America.
Let's say it was people in the United States of America who are
trying to take Trump out. Would any of us accept that
therefore we have to kill 10s of millions of Americans?
No, of course not. Because we we would all
recognize, no, it's not it. It's not innocent men, women and
children here. It's bad guys here.
So we have to take out the bad guys, right?
Like whether that's here or over there.
And by the way, with the Trump assassination, I think it's
here. So let's let's say we it, it
still doesn't justify you're just killing innocent people
anywhere. Doesn't matter.
Yep, thou shalt not murder. You don't even have to say well,
I've been wrong, Dave Smith. Libertarians have been right.
They say the Bible. You know what the?
Bible has been right. I was going to justify this next
mass murder campaign. I reread the 10 commandments.
You're not going to fucking believe what's in there, dude.
We're not allowed. It's one of the top ones thou
not murder. For progress, we're not allowed.
To for progressives who advocate equality the most unequal OK, if
one person pays another a low wage, OK, that's unequal.
If one person murders another, that's the ultimate
exploitation, the ultimate inequality.
That's why the left needs to be with us on this issue.
That's why the pro-life people on the right also need to be
with us on this issue as well. Other examples of the fucking
state in America allying with tyrants.
Mohammed bin Salman, the butcher of Yemen.
They allied with Javad al Nusra, al Qaeda in Syria to take on
Assad. It's just so sick that there's
so many examples. I could probably come up with a
lot more. But yeah, Antonio Salazar
running Portugal, he was a member of NATO.
You have the regime of colonels in Greece when Greece was a
member of NATO. NATO has nothing to do with
democracy. Szalinski didn't hold his March
31st election of this year. This is after he bombed a NATO
ally on November 15th of 2022. This is the defender of
democracy. Doesn't allow men ages 18 to 60
to leave, enslaves them in a war just so Yanukovych doesn't get
on the throne. That's the other thing they do.
This is the purpose of the war. Deception, according to historic
Arthur Ponsenby, he says, look, all the wars are based on lies.
Now why is that? The reason is that we see wars
from all these different countries through long spans of
time. You might look at it and say is
there like, is it literally just the Rothschilds running
everything it because it seems they're always lying us into
these wars. He says there's a very simple
explanation. To go to war, you have to be
asking millions of people to get their limbs blown off, to get
their sons to die. And you can't sell that by
saying, look, Dave, I'm I'm going to be conscripting your
kids and I'm going to be taking 30% of your income until my war
is over. But we'll be able to make sure
it's not Yanukovych on the throne in Kiev, it's Solinsky.
That's not going to rile people up.
You have to stay. Putin is days away from taking
the entire planet Earth over. He's going to engage in mass
enslavement. Then it's going to be mass
murder. And then he won't have a climate
change policy. And then the world will
literally end. That's what they have to do
every single time. That's why all the wars are
based on lies, because people would not be willing to engage
in this huge burden, this huge cost if they weren't scared
shitless out of their minds. For no, for no reason at all.
Now, that's exactly right, man, and that's why they have to keep
scaring us with absolute bullshit.
All right, Keith, it's always a pleasure to talk to you, man.
Thank you so much for coming on. Let everybody know where can
they find your stuff. I got to plug one other thing
while I'm here, of course. Go ahead.
For those of you who didn't see me the first time I was on
Dave's show, I was 110 lbs heavier because I was.
That is. True.
So it looked like there was like me and an elephant on the
fucking screen. So the carnivore diet is
something I think everyone should look into.
So a lot of this talk about well, I think the Federal
Reserve should do this and you know, the State Department
should do do all these things. Well, those things are really
hard to change. The best thing that I have done
in my recent life was do this carnivore diet.
The vast numbers of Americans are heavily overweight.
The carnivore diet and avoiding carbs is the best thing you can
do today to improve your life. I'm not plugging a company or
anything. It's just a meat and cheese
diet. So I just had to get that out
because I'm. So I want to sue.
I want to sue every one of these goddamn teachers who sold me
that food pyramid. Every one of these motherfucking
doctors just completed just committed fraud and said maybe
try smaller portions. Fucking assholes.
So I have to talk about that. Other than that, check out
Libertarian institute.org. You can look at my book Domestic
Imperialism, 9 Reasons I Left Progressive Progressivism.
There was a free PDF on our website of that, as well as my
previous publication The Voluntarist Handbook. 48 essays
and books that I read which turn me from being a progressive into
a libertarian. So those resources are free.
I really hope people will go to libertarianinstitute.org org
slash donate to help us really make this information accessible
to as many people as possible. And this speech that we talked
about today is also on the institute in video form.
I'm working on a transcript. We we will put it in the episode
of description. Keith, thank you so much.
You're literally you're, you're a gem dude, and it's always a
pleasure to talk to. You.
Thank you so much for having me, Dave.
Take care buddy. Alright, you're the man Keith,
and thanks everyone for listening.
Catch you next time. Peace.