Welcome to Keith's night. Don't tread on anyone in the
libertarian Institute. Today.
I'm joined by Blake Masters. The chief operations officer of
teal Capital, president of the teal Foundation.
He's also running for Senate in Arizona, in the 2022, election
against Mark, Kelly is at Accurate.
That is right. We are is the best place for
people to find where you stand on the issues and your website,
just Blake Masters.com. The government is Justified and
man. An dating lockdowns and vaccines
to stop the spread of a deadly virus.
How do you respond? Not this virus?
You can imagine if covid-19 a thousand times worse or was the
Bubonic plague or something, but we have so much data on this.
Now. We know it's, you know, the flu
or two to three times worse than the flu.
It's no picnic. You don't want covid, but I
really think if we surrender, all of our civil liberties, all
of our personal freedoms to the public health bureaucracy, not
That not warranted here. We'll just never get those
freedoms back during a supporter of the, right to bear arms to
fight against. Tyranny.
What metric can we use to determine whether or not tyranny
exists in America? I mean, I think you have to use
every metric, right? It's not just about tax rates.
Although, if a lot of people are paying more than half their
income to the government. Every year.
That's not a good sign, right? It's not just about lockdowns.
Although yeah, if the government can our But rarely close your
business at any time or arbitrarily enforced, you know,
curfews stay-at-home orders all of a sudden we start to look a
lot more like Australia, you know, which is having the
military and police basically enforce stay at home, quarantine
orders on people. It's not just, you know, can you
speak your mind freely in the Public Square, or in the new
digital equivalents, like, Twitter and Facebook, but we're
seeing increasingly. No, you're not allowed to speak
your mind in all these places. Get censored and canceled and
all this stuff. So there's no one metric but I
don't think we're kind of when you take a totality of the
circumstances approach. I don't think we're doing so hot
on this. I think it's we're sliding in
that direction for sure. Is there a general philosophy or
set of ideas that guides your decision making?
Yeah, I mean, I've always been a conservative person with
libertarian instincts. I probably used to be a lot more
libertarian than I am. Now the one sort of animating
force behind all my political thinking, as early as I can
remember, that's never changed. Is this sense of anti
progressivism? I think progressivism capital P
as a political ideology is Coccyx is viewed as corrosive,
to get corrupts, almost everything it touches.
I think it's, you know, it wants to throw out all of our history
at wants to throw out everything real, that our ancestors built.
It is basically the ideology of bolshevism, you know, and, and,
and just Communist Revolution. And it may look a little
different today, but I think it's no less dangerous.
So, I think the progressive capital P answer is sort of
always always the wrong one as concerns.
Serves as Libertarians, we want progress in society, you want
things to get better and better. But you do that, you know,
almost slowly more humbly over time by doing the right thing by
making investments in the future.
You don't do it with this sort of burned, all down
revolutionary mindset. Sure.
There's a quote, from a book hate Incorporated by Matt
Taibbi. He says so long as the public is
busy hating each other and not aiming it sire at the more.
Next financial and political processes.
Going off camera. There's very little danger of
anything. Like a popular Uprising.
Is that your read on the situation that we are
experiencing some sort of bread and circuses and false divided
amongst the populace I think. So, I mean, I do think that's
what the the sort of the lead or establishment is up to when for
instance. They just try to stoke the
Flames of racial division, you know stuff almost seems
AstroTurf and engineered To divide people.
I think most white people are good people.
I think most black people are good people.
I think there's, you know, some some people who aren't so good
or who let the evil in themselves predominate sort of
from every category, but I think most people want to get along
right in America. Is this Grand experiment?
And can we all have rights. Can we all have freedoms?
Can we all get along? Even though we're all we don't
all have the same background and so when I see this media Elite
and when I see a political Elite that wants to is Zoom in on and
obsess about you know, alleged differences between people and
sort of fan the flames and get people to hate each other.
And you know, it's this political interest group versus
that. You start this identity politics
stuff. Like it doesn't seem very
natural to me. It seems like it is what the
elite wants us to focus on whether it's some Grand
conspiracy, you know, to distract everybody.
From what's really going on or whether that's just functionally
how the fault lines of our modern politics go.
I think it's some kind of intentional strategy and I think
it's bad. I think most people just want to
get along and they want to focus on real problems and we don't do
that if we're just focused on you know.
I'd say identity politics. What do you think about the this
claim the masses in every nation are by every metric rationally?
Ignorant about politics. We need less people voting not
more. What do you say to that?
Well, I want more people voting if and only if they're like, you
know, informed and know what's going on.
I'd rather have fewer people vote, but have those votes, you
know, sort of be informed and intelligent than just more
people, so that we need to get more people voting no matter
what thing that. It doesn't make a lot of sense
to me. I think you want more people to
vote and you want more people to be informed and ideally those.
Go together in practice. I think, with ballot harvesting.
And a lot of the democratic operative tricks.
They don't want them to go together.
They just want the raw number of votes because it gives them more
more ammo. But no, I think what ultimately
matters is that you have the right policies in place.
Do you have policies in place that are going to, you know,
protect private property rights? They're going to keep people
free and safe, but also kind of create.
The conditions under which businesses and families can
Thrive. And you know, if voters are
voting for tyranny, like all of a sudden voting is not so good.
Is it? You know, if voters are voting
for politicians and policies that are actually keeping people
free while keeping them safe? Then I think that's good.
So I do think the left just makes too much of raw, democracy
raw votes, and I think we need to focus on making Sure that our
public is educated, making sure that people are actually
thinking about politics, in a substantive way because just the
procedural ISM of mere. Casting votes is not going to
save us. Antonin, Scalia famously said,
the transformation of Charity into legal, entitlement has
produced donors without love and recipients without gratitude.
What is your position on this statement?
And the welfare state in general?
Yeah. I mean, I think this goes back
to Aristotle if I'm not mistaken, right?
Look, if you force someone to make a choice, say, I come with
a gun and I, you know, demand taxes from you, and I take that
tax revenue and then I give it to somebody in the neck kind of
a welfare program. Have you done a moral Act of
goodness by, you know? Having your money end up in the
in the recipient says, no, because it wasn't a choice.
And so I do think that you're to a first approximation.
Charity is better than welfare and doesn't mean we shouldn't
have a safety net and Society. I think we should but I also
think our welfare system is probably terribly bloated right
now in the Biden economy. We're seeing actually
businesses. Struggle were struggling to
restart the economy because the unemployment benefits When
combined with the stimulus checks that people got during
covid worse. Hi is to keep a lot of people
sort of at work, you know, out of work and on the Dole and I
think that's bad. I think people should work if
they can. I think we need to incentivize
people to work and then you do need some safety net.
You know, when people slip through the cracks, but the idea
is you bounce, back, and you can reenter society and too much of
our welfare program, you know, the step becomes
institutionalized and it becomes bureaucratic and sporadic and
it's very hard to pair it down or get rid of it.
And so, I think what the left wants to do is keep people on
the Dole Do you know the left? They don't want to healthy
middle-class where people are looking out for themselves.
They want a thin slice of elite at the top that they get to
control. They want a hollowed-out middle
class and then they want underclass like a permanent
underclass of people on the Dole whether that's welfare.
As we know it whether that's Ubi or stimulus checks.
They want a whole host of the populace, you know, basically
just dependent on their good graces.
That I think that's how left-wing politics works.
When we look at the political Spectrum in general, if we just
take a bite and I'm sure this applies to almost all previous
presidents, but he does not run his Twitter account.
If you follow it, that's certainly not his words.
He's got a lot of speech writers on multiple occasions.
He's referred to as notes in QA. Press conferences, saying, I
have a list of who to call on here and it's not like he writes
the laws. So who is in charge in
Washington, d.c. Who calls the shots?
They're so fascinating question, right?
Where is the seat of power in our own government?
And, you know, I mean, I still think the president.
The presidency is pretty powerful, but Biden, I think
with his Advanced age and unfortunately, I think
obviously, you know, sort of mental, incapacitation races,
that question, right? It's not him making the
decisions. Is that the staff around him,
you know, I don't I don't think it's It's Obama, just
puppeteering everything. I hear that a lot.
Although I'm sure he's not without influence.
I think it's diffuse. And I also think that's
dangerous. I think there's a permanent
bureaucracy, you know, there's this sort of a temporary staff
in the White House that sort of managing Biden, handling him, so
to speak. But there's a permanent
bureaucracy in d.c., you know, parts of the Civil Service that
we can see. And I'm sure some parts that we
can't. And I think that's a problem
because this is a bureaucracy. I think that His left-wing
especially over time. I think they're pretty hostile
to the to the ever flowing changes in electoral politics.
And I think it's a big problem, you know, the answer should
clearly be what's laid out in the Constitutional design.
The president has this set of power Congress has this set of
power. Everything else is reserved to
the states. And instead.
I think we know the power resides in d.c.
Partly is the president and I still think Congress is, you
know, they have some some degree of power, although they don't
seem to like to use Is it? And That just kind of means
whoever's got it. It's murky, it might be diffuse.
It's not transparent and I don't think it's being wielded well or
wisely for the American people. So many people were humbled
after they saw the results of the 2016 election.
And after the 2020 election, there was a lot of humility
among people saying that Trump Trump's black votes increased
after four years of the media on top of him.
What are some main lessons? We can learn from 2016 Trump and
the 2020 election specifically. Yeah, I think Trump, I mean he
came on the scene and and busted up the establishment in 2016.
You know, he was saying this left wing it.
I was meant does not work and this center, right, you know,
Republican establishment. It doesn't work.
I think we had Decades of bipartisan failure to get us to
that point. But Trump was able to come along
and say, true things that sort of already knew and felt were
true. But you weren't quite allowed to
articulate because they contravene the CNN, or MSNBC
narrative, you know, Trump was one of the first candidates to
stand on stage and say, like, I think the Iraq War was a giant
mistake and he defended that and And that was where the American
people were, but that wasn't where the politicians were.
And so, I think there was a tremendous amount of bravery and
good timing, and he just came and you could just tell, right.
He was saying what he thought he wasn't trying to listen to
consultants and just give bullet points.
He was actually just going to speak his mind and so whether or
not people agree with them or disagree with, and it was just
so refreshing. I think to hear a politician,
someone running for president who he didn't need to be doing
what he was doing. And he just, he was clearly
Being honest. And I think that's why he took
everybody by surprise, because we just had a shockingly low
amount of honesty in the system and in 2020, you know, I think a
lot of the powers that be that were surprised in 2016.
They, they knew President Trump was the president, and they
didn't want to be surprised again.
And so, I really would, you know, you look at the obvious
censorship that Facebook exhibited leading up to 2020.
I mean, I think just three weeks before the election, right?
Hunter, Biden, and the laptop story.
The New York Post Facebook stripped it off the platform.
I think again Facebook, you know, they got criticized in
2016 for not doing enough to stop, you know, the Trump
campaign. And so I think they massively
over corrected and censored the hell out of that story and more
or less handed the election to Biden when they did that.
So that was a 2020 election was a Messin in many different ways,
but I think one lesson is You come along, you say true things
that very few people have heard even though everybody into its
them to be true, powerful stuff. And then that pisses off
powerful people. I think have had a lot of
enemies in 2022. Took him deadly.
Seriously person 2016. They were just laughing.
Yeah. Certainly.
He said that his comments about the Iraq War were in South
Carolina to Jeb Bush. So it's not like, you know, he
said it in California as like, you know, some softball to the
Out. He actually really got stood up
and I remember Russia gate, 2.0 and 2020.
When political said, 50 Intelligence Officers have
confirmed the hunter. Biden story is Russian.
Disinformation. Now we knew face when You Face
something like that and in 2016, the lie was 17 intelligence
agencies. Had confirmed it.
Hillary Clinton said this on the debate stage, 80 million people
watching, but they never saw the June 29th, 2017.
Retraction by the New York Times.
X. How is it that we can get people
to stop seeing the news as a source of Truth and see them as
we would see, tobacco executives.
It's a great question. You know, I think it's
happening. I mean, not to be too optimistic
about this, but I think one of the greatest gifts that Trump
did give us, is he massively D legitimate at the mainstream
media, you know, which I think was bad for a while before 2016,
but it wasn't until you had a guy brave enough to go and
basically win and then do battle with the mainstream media like
every day for four years, which you really did.
And so, yeah, CNN still exists, MSNBC still.
Just too many people, watch them.
Unfortunately, if that's all you watch.
I really do think your mind turns to mush.
So that's not great. But I also think now more than
ever especially, you know, one or two years into this, you
know, so called what everyone called covid, pandemic that the
left never wants to admit, you know, has ended, or will end
people know that like the official sources, right?
The media, dr. Fauci, the public health
bureaucracy, the official sources more often than not get
it wrong and they're all too happy to lie to you.
You know, these things are functionally become.
In terms of the democratic party.
And so I do think that the amount of skepticism now is
higher than ever and that's good, you know, maybe it's tough
because, you know, it's hard to know.
What's true. And we live in this crazy
information Warfare environment and maybe you can't just accept.
One Outlets reporting is Gospel, but maybe you never could write.
And now this is a little bit more transparent and public and
people have to piece together, information and decide and think
for themselves. And I think it a republic that's
really healthy. Even if it feels kind of crazy
right now. Assume that poverty is my
biggest issue. We can forget about relative
inequality. If I just care about absolute
poverty in Arizona. Why should I vote Masters
instead of Kelly? Well, I think Kelly in the whole
Democratic regime are interested in keeping people down while
promising to lift them up. You know.
Again, that's the that's the sort of electoral strategy of
the left. I actually just want as many
people to rise up into the middle class as possible.
I think in America Gotta you ought to be able to afford to
raise a family on one single income.
And if most people can do that, you know, we used to have an
economy where that was possible and then that's not really
possible anymore. So I think it's an interesting
question, like, what happened and why?
And can we reverse that? But that's really what I care
about. Can can the average person look
forward to a well-paying job? And can they look forward to
buying a house getting married and having kids?
And that's the litmus test. It's like, if your Society is
delivering that to people, Well, you know still being sort of
respectful of people's Liberties and basic in a right to be safe
and secure then I think you're winning and I don't think the
Democrats are interested in that which is why they shrieks so
much. Every time I say that they're
interested in making, sure people are running as hard and
hard on the treadmill as possible just to stay in the
same place while they call Republicans evil, so that they
can control people. So I think it's just isn't right
there in the economic policies, you know, you get into all sorts
of cultural stuff. But like right there in the
economic policies. I want people.
All to rise into the middle class and have a set of economic
policies that I think actually makes that happen.
The Dems. Don't want to do anything.
They just want to give people checks occasionally so that they
continue to vote Democrat and keep people down.
Well, even Paul Krugman has admitted that this is a pattern
going back to Otto von Bismarck ushering in this welfare, state
to secure, the role of the Kaiser.
So, some might say, well, the Kaisers illegitimate, but then
again, half my income for reliant on them.
So this is probably as good as it's going to get.
So it almost Stops them from seeing the state or the regime
as more legitimate than than they.
Otherwise would a lot of people are worried about inflation,
which I'm just glad that people are noticing it.
Do you have any Theory as to what causes inflation and what
the Cure might be? Well, I mean, it can be a
complicated question, some of the details but I think the
simple answer is printing money right by definition.
Get out creates inflation, right?
We're just expanding the money supply and delivering the value
of a dollar and usually you can get away with that.
If you do it slowly enough, right?
I think the dollars lost like 98 percent of its purchasing power
since, you know, 1913 or whatever, but when you print
five or six trillion dollars in the last 18 months like the
federal government is done. This is what happens.
So this this seems like a clear cut example, I think it is
Biden's policies at this point. They'll try to blame Trump.
But again, maybe some of the early stimulus stuff was
necessary. If you were going to lock people
down. We shouldn't have had any
lockdowns, but given that we did, you know, sort of mid 2020.
Yeah, that was that was an emergency or we thought it was
an emergency, but then you can't keep doing it for like the next
year, but I didn't, you know, sending stimulus checks out as
late as summer of 2021. And when you do that, when you
print trillions and trillions of trillions of dollars that you
should expect to see some inflation.
And so I think unfortunately all the inflation that we're seeing,
now, we're just getting started. I think it's going to get a lot
worse. One of the great contradictions
of the progressive world view. Is we have someone like, you
know, Woodrow Wilson or even Teddy?
Roosevelt is Glenn Beck has argued was a progressive first
time. They'll say they monopolise are
terrible. If you have a monopoly, you get
worse quality in higher prices than you.
Otherwise would also government needs to monopolize the money
supply. Well, in that sense, you're
going probably to get worse quality and a lower purchasing
power. Then you otherwise would what do
you think about things like cryptocurrency or Bitcoin as
Alternatives that people can do to hedge themselves.
I'm asking the president of kill capital for a reason.
But what else can we do to fight against inflation?
Please work. Cryptocurrency into the answer.
Yeah. I think I'm look.
I'm Pro cryptocurrency. I think it's fascinating.
I think it's fascinating at the technological level and it's
fascinating at the Monitor and level.
And I've been into it for a number of years.
So I totally support crypto. I don't think the government
should Look to ban it or anything like that.
I do think, you know, there's ways to spin it where, you know,
Bitcoins really bad for the US dollar and this is existential
and this is a threat to the, to the regime or whatever.
And this is, this is kind of the line that you see from Hillary
Clinton or Elizabeth Warren, you know, I think there are fearful,
they like, their government Monopoly money supply, right?
And they're fearful of anything that might disrupt it.
I'm, I would Disagree with them I think.
But I also have a different take where I think Bitcoin could be
the best check that we have on the FED like you could actually
help the dollar because right now, right?
We just have a completely undisciplined monetary policy
whenever politicians can sell it or wherever the FED can do it,
you know, they have the capacity and they actually do just print
trillions of dollars just to create new money and and that
has the effect of diluting everyone else's savings.
It's basically just Taxation by another number means, right?
And they can do that because of this Monopoly Dynamic that you
articulated because it's not a snow free and open exchange.
The dollar is the reserve currency of the world, you know,
all debts are denominated in dollars in the United States and
you have to pay your taxes in dollars.
So there's no way out of the system and they can make the
system worse and worse with Bitcoin and the technological
inability to ban it. I think, you know, it may
actually They do what gold was supposed to do.
It may just be the safe haven, you know, it's 21 million
Bitcoins assume one or two are lost forever.
So there's only 19 million. You can never make more.
It's the hardest money imaginable.
And so if the government knows that Bitcoin exists, which
obviously does maybe in the next 10 years, they won't be able to
get away with printing as much, right.
Maybe people will invest your smart money, big money.
A lot bigger than what we've seen so far.
We'll just flock to Bitcoin. And when you have a nun
cancellable, you know digital money that's just super hard.
I think it really could impose a sense of discipline on the FED
that basically nothing has been able to in the last hundred
years. So I'm a little bit more
optimistic. Certainly from the individuals
perspective. I think it's a godsend, you
know, like if you just keep your money in a savings account,
earning less than 1% a year. You're going to get destroyed by
inflation. If you keep some of in Bitcoin,
as a I think that is an innovation that's now accessible
to you, that wasn't 10 years ago.
And I think that's amazing. I think it's just good for
individual investors, the PHD Economist Thomas Soul, wrote in
reality. Most of the great Fortunes in
American history, have resulted from someone's figuring out how
to reduce costs. So was to be able to charge
lower prices and therefore, gain a mass market for the product.
Henry, Ford did this with automobiles?
Rockefeller with oil Carnegie with steel and Sears Penny
Walton and other department store.
Chain's founders with a variety of products.
How can we take this lesson? Apply it to the healthcare
industry and have affordable health care for all Americans
totally and you start by asking that question, which I don't
think too many policymakers. Do I think people have basically
internalized this view where the costs of everyday essentials
Healthcare housing education just get More expensive every
year, right? We tend to assume that because
that's been the case for 40 or 50 years.
This is some iron law of physics, but it's not.
And you've seen other industries that you mentioned right?
Certainly it or flat flat screen TVs, like the costs of these
things. They just go down every year in
the quality goes up and that's pretty consumer, you know, from
the ratio Healthcare, you know, there's some ways to spend it,
where the quality goes up every year.
Actually, I think it's pretty flat but certainly, the costs
are rising astronomically relative.
To what we get same thing in education and when you look at
the healthcare industry, are you look at that, you know,
education higher education, what you see is a lot of cartel like
organization, you see a lot of giant consolidation, you know,
Hospital systems and in Burma suitable companies, you see a
lot of regulatory capture where a lot of the people running.
These companies used to work in the government or maybe soon
will and there's this revolving door and you get legislation
through. Written to protect Giant
incumbents, and keep out startup entrance.
And I think we have to go in and, you know, part of its
deregulation, part of it is just hacking away at some of the
corruption and the waste and over consolidation and figuring
out what's a more lightweight regulatory footprint.
We can take and get prices back in either.
The biggest problem with Healthcare and the costs in
America is that the costs are totally opaque.
And so, if I'm a consumer of healthcare, but I'm never
interacting with prices. You know, it's just some
Byzantine process where at the end.
I get some bill that I can't understand.
That's, that's bad. It's bad to have a system where
an EMR I can cost 600 bucks or, you know, 15,000 bucks.
Just depending on the the arbitrary flow where can get the
procedure in town. And you know, who's the
attending physician? And what had they negotiated
with which insurer, you know, like that doesn't make sense at
all. And so I think deregulating
quite a bit taking away some of the protections enjoyed by
incumbents, making it much more open and competitive and getting
pricing back into the system. Like real market pricing, I
think is just obviously the way to do it.
Yeah, I really like that answer because if you look at, you can
almost just take their arguments and just apply it to different
field. So they'll say if you need so
much as a driver's license to vote, millions of people will
not be able to have access to voting.
It's like, oh, okay. What if you need hundreds of
licenses to just start a business and then more licenses
to trade in. Then you're constantly getting
audited by OSHA and everyone else.
Well those regulations hurt those in lower income.
Brackets more than Walmart's not sweating that OSHA is coming
around, but everyone else is and the Department of Agriculture.
So, thank you for prioritizing that Elon Musk recently said
that IP legislation needs total reform.
And that's why he is making all his patents open source.
Do you think there's anything in that area that we can do to, you
know, have a more environmentally friendly
products and services? Yeah.
I mean the patent stuff is interesting, right?
Right. It's right there in the
Constitution. But of course how it's actually
implemented administrated is is a question for policymakers
today. I yeah, I'm not sure about the
IP regime, you know, people critique it from all different
ways that want to take a fresh look at it.
I do think in general. We're just drowning in
bureaucracy as a society. Everything is over regulated.
This is not to say we shouldn't have any regulation.
I mean, I think we We can and we should.
But I do think everything is and I do almost mean everything is
over regulated over administered over bureaucratized.
And so it's actually just really hard for individuals to exert
agency in our system. And you have some Herculean type
entrepreneur, folks like Elon Musk, you know, who's able to
sort of break through and actually create new and
world-changing companies, but his appetite for risk is, you
know, One in a billion and we're not for him and I think Jeff
Bezos too. But mainly Ilan, you know, we
wouldn't be able to send astronauts up into space on an
American aircraft because the government with a giant budget,
many many times, ilan's budget at SpaceX, you know, basically
was unable to innovate and unable to to build a Next
Generation rocket, and human delivery system.
So we know that most It advances come from the private sector.
We know most great advances come from the form of like a actually
serve a lone individual driving a business for driving a
scientific discovery. But in the modern world, we
become so bureaucratized. And we throw so many owners
regulations at people so many hurdles that they have to jump
over. We're just getting fewer and
fewer of those breakthrough Innovations.
And I think the result is a much more stagnant society, that
looks a lot more like Europe now, right?
It's just man. Managed to climb and then and
then becomes cultural, people, stop feeling like they have a
sense of agency, like they might actually participate and do
something great. So they don't try and then it
just becomes this feedback loop and I think that's how a rich
Society becomes decadent and an unproductive and before long it
gets sort of eaten alive from the inside.
I love your idea about being able to live and raise a family
off. One income the economics that
I've studied was mostly at the Ludwig.
Von mises Institute in Alabama. My general understanding is that
in order to get real wage increases, you would want to
competition to allow wages to be bit up.
And at the same time, having free market of capital
investment, which allows each individual worker to become more
productive over time. While you have all competing for
products and services to get lower and price, is how real
wages will grow over time. Do you, what are your thoughts
on that? And how can we make it?
So we can have this idea of yours of one income per family?
Yeah. I mean, I basically think that
approach is right, you need wages to Rising energy, costs to
fall costs, are falling in some things, as we've discussed your
TV's cheaper, your toasters cheaper, and it was five or ten
years ago, and that's not trivial.
That's not bad. Bad, but your TV was never a big
part of your budget. Anyway, your house, your
education, your kids, education Healthcare.
Those are the drivers, and those costs are rising so much faster
than inflation. Even that's a problem.
Right? It means that if you don't have
massive wage growth, and if anything we're Contracting now,
I think wages are down two percent under Biden.
Then you're just it's not even running harder to stay in the
same place. Your quality of life is actually
just Declining every year, which I think, is what millions of
Americans? Tens of millions are
unfortunately experiencing now, so you need wages to rise.
You need costs to fall, the costs.
We've discussed a little bit. I think you can you can go and
attack some of the concentration, the regulatory
structures behind, especially Healthcare and education to an
extent and housing with zoning and all that.
I meet with so many home builders and they're ready to
go. You know, they they know how to
build homes where so much more efficient at moving Earth and
big big. I was now that we were a couple
decades ago but houses cost more and more mainly because the
environmental regulatory review stuff.
It's just crazy. So I think we could do a lot
with the political will to attack those costs wages to
rise, you know, part of this is the education system that we
have in our country. It's so so bad, you know, we
pretend that everybody has to go to a four-year liberal arts
school or get a four-year, you know, BS or be a I just don't
think that's true. I think we should be
recognizing. Most people shouldn't go to
college. There's be like a thousand
different paths to the middle class.
Not just one. And we need to more heavily
actually invest in vocational training, you know, actually
start working with kids working with 12 year olds, you know, 16
year olds should know how to hang drywall, you know, you make
might do something very different your life.
But like there's no reason why you should sit in a room, you
know, from kindergarten to 12th grade and basically only receive
a certain kind of You know, mostly political and mostly not
even that great academic education without actually
learning skills that might, you know, translate to the
workforce. So there's that, you know, in
general, I'm totally with you free markets and capital so
people can attract investment. So people can can invest in
productive projects. I am a fan of tariffs to
equalize the playing field, say, between the United States and
China. Like, I don't think there's any
free trade with China, whenever we call free trade, with China,
as you Really just us not doing anything.
And then China, with the way that Society is Right communist
totalitarian dictatorship. So they've got their thumb on
the scale. They're subsidizing State
industry. They're going to dump steel onto
the US, and in theory, that's good.
For some consumers and in practice.
I think it devastates, domestic manufacturing.
So, I'm in favor of tariffs, to the extent.
They equalize the playing field, but after that, I want as much
free trade as possible. I think if you get government
out of the way, yeah. Just rise as you get
technological development, and each worker becomes marginally
more productive, but we know how this works.
And so it's so frustrating to have, you know, hundreds and
hundreds of congressmen and probably 90 Senators, not
understand the stuff. Why does the left keep winning?
I think they're deadly serious about winning.
I think the right is not to a first approximation.
There's some problem with the view of American exceptionalism
here where the right just thinks like.
Oh America is the best country that Has ever existed.
Which is true, but if you only think that and you forget that
every generation, we have to put in the work and renew, our
institutions, keep them working, right?
Keep this vision of a good Society, make sure basically the
things are in order, if you don't actually do that hard
work, you'll lose it. And what was once the great
greatest country in the world will fall and the left, you
know, I think their agenda is ghastly, you know, open borders
and And all the social movements that I think are divisive.
We talked about some of the racial agitation that I think
they do black lives matter and stuff like that.
I don't agree with the agenda. But I do at least acknowledge
that, they work hard to achieve it everyday.
I think the left is obsessed with taking one more set of
mirror, which is getting into to our institutions and taking them
over. And I think all the right has
wanted to do for decades is play defense.
We're very good at saying like oh, Oh, don't do that.
That's unconstitutional or that's illegal.
That's bad. But it's like what do we do
about it? And if you're not actually
interested in using power, intelligently and wisely and in
going on offense, then I think you just lose think the last
place to win and that's something that we need to learn
from. I went to a lot of school board
meetings in Scottsdale and Chandler and Phoenix after
Ducey, was elected. And the, I don't know what other
word besides entitlement to use was.
What was the general feeling that I got amongst the teachers
there and their supporters? Their default position is were
entitled to billions of dollars of other people's money and it
either works or it needs. More funding, there's no we need
new management or we need vouchers or we need to give
people the option to opt out of funding the school's just as you
would have the choice to opt out of funding the Catholic schools.
What do you do with such a corrupt and divisive schooling
system? I can't even call it education.
Right? Well look, I think there are
many, many, many great teachers out there and teachers unions
are horrible. And it used to be that, you
know, you weren't able to say both of those things because if
he said the second, if you say teachers unions or horrible,
you're somehow anti-teacher, and I think that was true even just
five years ago, but now it's not true.
Now. I think everybody acknowledges
this, the teachers unions have moved so far left so fast and
they've been so transparently. Yeah, entitled frankly, and
anti-child, and their fundamental orientation.
Just look at how they handled the covid pinned in it.
That, I think most most parents. Most voters now, know these
institutions exist to protect themselves, you know, to grow
and it's not about delivering the best education for the for
the child. Even though that that may well
be what's in the in the heart of most individual teachers.
And so I think distinguishing between teachers and the
teachers unions is very important right now because I do
think the right needs to make war on the teachers unions, you
know, they're they're teaching kids or they're seeking to teach
kids all sorts of toxic sort of left wing.
I think increasingly race-based ideology and that's bad.
But if even if you wipe that stuff away like the education
system itself, like the quality of the school and has just been
going down. It's been failing for a long
time. We're graduating kids that can't
even read or write and you know, the solution is always just
lower standards, just lower standards.
And then look look how much higher graduation rate is since
we made it easier to graduate. Well, that's actually horrible.
It's horrible for the kids, right?
I think you got a The bar High until kids to jump and go get it
and give them the support that they need to to do that.
But that that Spirit of achievement, I think is lacking
in so many of the schools and yeah, you're right.
The answer is always more money and more money just makes a bad
system even worse. There's something paradoxical in
there. I think we see that clearly but
the left still doesn't see it. I think in Arizona, we spend
north of eleven or twelve thousand dollars per student in
the public school system to educate a child.
For a whole year and that's just crazy.
You know, first of all, half that money, probably stays
outside of the classroom and goes to administrators.
You know, it ranks of the administration is just swelling
as their hiring diversity and equity and inclusion consultants
and all this crap, but I think you, I mean, you can clearly
educate a child for three or four thousand dollars a year.
I mean, 100 years ago, people did it for a lot less and the
quality of the education was just way better go look at an
entrance exam, you know, to a high school or two.
You know, to a college from like 1908 and there's nothing special
about those kids. They weren't Geniuses, but they
were disciplined. And the school's worked and the
teachers were serious and empowered to actually get
results from the students. So, I don't know, maybe it's as
simple as starting by Banning teachers unions, like I'm not
sure you should be allowed to unionize against the taxpayer or
to unionize against children, which I think that's what the
teachers unions do. About a year ago.
It was terrible to assume that someone is high up in government
as Anthony fauci would ever lie or be self-interested or not
care to give people the truth. And then one of many videos went
around primarily the 60 Minutes one in March of 2020 where he
said people shouldn't be wearing masks.
In fact, sometimes you can end up touching your face and it's
worse than it otherwise would be.
He also said, you know what, he had dismissed the lab League
theory. He had said schools.
To stay close. He had said that no prior
pandemic has ever spread from asymptomatic people.
So it's nothing. We have to worry about after all
this, the response was. Well, sometimes you have to lie
to the idiot masses because there's people who just won't.
If you tell them the truth, they quite literally cannot handle
it. How do you communicate to that
mindset? That the elites are either
right? And Justified or for god sakes.
We just need them either. Way the left stays in power.
You know, it's just really sad. I think cauchy's behaviors
criminal, I do for the longest time.
I wanted to think he was simply incompetent, you know, a
bureaucrat had lost his Edge because he was out of industry
for a while. But when you look at like now we
have enough data. All right, we've got a got many
months of pandemic, under our belt, with him at the helm and
you look at the false statements.
You look at the emissions, you look at the outright lies.
The smugness to, you know, that he carries on with makes it sort
of particularly revolting, but I do just on the lab leak stuff
alone. Like he testified to Congress
that, you know, we didn't fund the Wuhan Institute of Neurology
and then like, we actually know that know his, you know, his,
his team via the ecohealth alliance and Irish grants and
what not. Like we were involved in funding
that research and I think that one I alone like he should be
investigated. I mean, he's obviously fired on
day one, you should be investigated and if he was
actually, you know, found guilty of lying, he should be
prosecuted, but it's not going to happen because we have no
accountability for our Elites, which I don't disgusting, he can
lie with impunity and I do think that dr.
Fauci himself was responsible for the deaths of Untold people
in this pandemic. Like he gives the wrong advice.
It's politically motivated. I think it's killing a lot of
people. I really do.
Thank you so much for being generous with your time.
I have two more questions for you.
I want to get your response to this statement when antifa and
BLM Riot, they intimidate powerless innocent people, the
January 6. The Riders intimidated
intimidated. The most evil people in the
country who are also the most powerful.
There was no moral equivalence. How do you respond to that?
Well, I don't really think there is a moral equivalent.
I mean, I don't I think people were allowed to burn cities down
and Riot and loot with impunity right in the summer of 2020, and
nothing happened to them and in the off chance they were
arrested, right? Then candidate for vice
president. Senator.
Kamala Harris was ready to bail them out.
And so that contrast between all those people, right?
If you're a left wing, you can commit, whatever, sort of
violence you want. Maybe the system will Down on
you, but it'll treat you with kid gloves.
But if you stepped over that line onto the Capital Property,
I'm FBI is still hunting for people, you know, January 6th
defendants. We've heard some of the horrible
stories about these people being in solitary confinement, you
know, denied proper, access to counsel, truly barbaric
conditions for what weren't violent crimes, you know, I
think the arizona-based call them to Q Shaman or whatever
with the Viking horns. That kind of got 41 months in
jail, 41 months, whenever he clearly just needs some, you
know, some some Mental Health Resources and therapy something,
you know, some community service, you know, I'm not
condoning trespassing. I don't think you should
trespass and disrupt the Congress when they're trying to
do something but you look a lot of the video clips to yes, some
people were pushing, you know, police and you shouldn't do that
and you should be held accountable.
I don't think it's 41 months in jail.
But certainly, that guy wasn't even charged with a violent
crime. The key was just there as a
trespasser, and that's not good. But the repercussion has been so
disproportionate and I think too few elected officials are
willing to speak on this. I really find it disgraceful and
it's only possible in an FBI and the doj that's just been
completely weaponized taken over by the left.
So I think it's basically day-one stuff.
For the next strong Republican, president in 2020, for to clean
house at the FBI and doj. Because once they're allowed to
do this, once they're allowed to turn, a blind eye, to basically
a narco tyranny and all the crimes that we saw the BLM and
antifa can do. And then just come down hard on
somebody because a pro-trump protest got out of hand.
I think if you let that kind of Gap, persist pretty soon, the
rule of law is gone and then it's just mob rule.
Yeah, yeah, excellent points, but my final thing, this one is
the most important to me just because I run into it, the, the
most often it on my screen here. I have victims of police killing
now, men, while 50% of the population are over, 95%, This
does not mean that men are discriminated against because
they have different behaviors. So when I see that blacks are
represented disproportionate Out of killings.
I don't, you know, exactly join BLM because I know that there
are different rates of crime, even when you look at in a
racial crime black-on-white, violence tends to be about 10 to
20 times higher than white on black violence.
According to a 20-18 survey by the Bureau of Justice statistics
and the National Crime victimization survey.
Even AOC and Ayana Presley's claim.
That white supremacy is everywhere White's according to
the u.s. Census of 2018 are about the The
14th highest income after Indian Taiwanese Chinese Korean
Cambodian Etc. And of course, we never hear
about these people. Tony tempeh, Kelly Thomas,
Ashley Babbitt Margarita. Brooks Justine Daymond from the
Press, even when they are the victims of these atrocities
here. So with that, how is it that we
can stop this? Terrible unnecessary division
among the Sexes and the races. Honestly, I did.
One reason why I'm running for office, you know, I feel free to
actually say the truth and to say what I think about this
stuff. I will call out the left for I
think fomenting all these fake divisions.
Like I don't think there's an epidemic of police brutality in
America. I think, you know, the police
have a really hard job to do. Most do an extraordinarily.
Well, sometimes things don't go right and we should, you know,
look into that and discipline officers, but most good police
departments already. Do you know?
And and it's that doesn't Really happen.
And when it does happen, it doesn't happen across racial
lines, you know, the left would have you think that police are
out there hunting black people and that's just not the case.
It's just not the case. And so you have to have, I think
Messengers who will actually stand up for the police and will
actually stand up for the rule of law, right?
Applied neutrally without respect to people's, you know,
race or gender or whatever and you actually have to have some
discipline and look at the data. You know, I find this.
Gun control debate all the time. I'm a big Second Amendment.
Guy have a lot of guns. I'm running against Mark Kelly.
Who's a gun Grabber, he wants to take away people's AR-15s and
there's only like 300 rifle, murders every year in America,
and you can say that's 300 too many.
And fair enough. Everyone's a tragedy, but in a
nation of hundreds, and hundreds of millions of people with
hundreds of hundreds of millions of guns.
It's actually shockingly rare, right rifle murders.
And so if you care about gun crime, fine, But it's all
handguns and then there's two specific sub problems.
One is mental health and suicide, which, you know,
Republicans get made fun of every time a tragedy happens and
we say, well, that's mental health.
That wasn't the gun. That was someone went psychotic,
and we should figure out like, what's causing that.
But that's actually, you know, a huge component of a firearm
deaths from handguns. And then the second is,
basically gang-related crime, right.
And look at what's happening on the streets of Chicago.
Is mostly young black men, killing mostly young black, men
and Democrats appear not to care about it at all. but if you
controlled for gang-related crime and suicide, all of a
sudden the the gun violence problem goes away and there's
something similar, you know, with how the left talks about
police brutality. So got to run people who are
unafraid to say the truth. And because that's the only way
we're going to actually solve some of our problems, right?
If we can actually agree on what the problems are and you got to
run people and encourage the population at large to push back
on that convenient. Bullet point that CNN wants to
feed. You actually, look at the charts
that you just brought up. No, but how many people do that?
How many people feel safe doing that?
What kind of government list do you get on by Googling for those
charts? And for how long will those
parts be available? Like those are the questions.
Unfortunately, I think we need to be asking ourselves today.
So my attitude and what I learned from President Trump,
you know, in 2016 and subsequently is just say the
truth and see what happens. But I think that's the only way
we get out of some of this slide into madness that we're
experiencing. Thank you to everyone for
watching the libertarian Institute and Keith Knight.
Don't tread on anyone. Mr. Masters.
Thank you so much for your time, sir, Keith great to see you.
Thank you.