Well, what's up All of our liberty loving friends.
This is Good Morning Liberty. We are at Freedom Fest in
Memphis, TN. I'm Nate, this is Charlie and we
are sitting down with Keith Knights.
Keith, how you doing? I'm doing very well gentlemen.
Thank you guys for having me. I appreciate you waiting on our
very unorganized nature and unprofessionalism beforehand.
Just so you know, he's a very kind and patient guy sitting
here with with this great book that I need to check out right
there, The Voluntarist Handbook. Yes, Sir.
What's that all about? So these are the 50 essays that
took me from being a progressive to being a voluntarist.
I wanted to buy the copyrights for all of them and then make a
free PDF available to anyone at libertarianinstitute.org.
You see, the progressives will tell us so.
We believe in free education, and also we want to take 30% of
your income every year to fund it.
And textbooks are $500.00. At the institute, we really want
to provide the free education progressives pretend to provide
people. So what I do is I.
Start the book out by just listing off the definitions of
the word so we can at least be on the same page with people.
So when they say capitalism is greed and profit seeking, I
don't know anything greedier than give me your property or
we'll put you in a cage and shoot you if you resist.
So greed is in no way unique to capitalism as far as making
profit. The state profits very heavily
when it collects money coercively.
When, not to mention all the soldiers who make money, all the
cops who make money. Teachers aren't unpaid
volunteers. Again, we have profit seeking.
So if you think things like the free market or capitalism that
unique aspects of those things are greed or corruption or
profit, you're not going to be able to see the situation
clearly. So what I start off by doing is
I define communism as the abolition of private property,
as Karl Marx did socialism. As the institutionalized
aggression against her interference with private
property and capitalism as a social system based on the
explicit recognition of mutually beneficial voluntary contracts
between private property owners. Once this consistent layout is
given, then I have essays from 1850 going back to Frederick
Bastiat, early 1900s Auburn Herbert, who really founded the
current movement of volunteerism, and we also have
original articles by former Marine.
Like Shane Hazel, who ran for governor in Georgia, and
Shepherd, the volunteerist who was a police officer in Montana
or Wyoming. I believe so.
Yes. These are the essays that I want
people to check out. I have a collection of quotes in
here from The most Dangerous superstition, Economics in One
Lesson, Lysander Spooner's Constitution of No Authority.
It's the one book that I want to give people to introduce them to
our ideas and really make the case that it's not about.
Big state, small state. That or it's not even about the
black verse, white man versus woman fake divide that the media
and politicians are always pushing.
A true divide that we can have in society is people who achieve
their ends peacefully through mutually beneficial voluntary
exchanges and those who do so violently.
Those should be the villains, not the rich or the whites or
the men or any other fake thing. That's why I think the book is
important. That's really cool, Milton
Friedman said. It's always the other fella
who's greedy. Never us, Right.
Never us. OK, so you mentioned something
at the beginning of that, which is that these this is a
collection of essays you put together because you went from
extreme progressivism to volunteerism.
Walk me through that. Like, what did this start out in
college? Were you in high school?
What kind of led you down this path to?
Want to learn more? I was so young.
I would go to Sedona to see my grandparents and you can't
appreciate the beauty of Sedona when you're like 12.
And they were big advocates for Barack Obama.
And it I had just seen that the divide is between people who
want to give us stuff for free and then there's other people
who don't care if you go without the stuff.
So Obama is obviously a guy who's somewhat of an Angel.
He's able to provide things for free.
No one else is able to do this. This man is literally Santa
Claus. This is terrific.
We got to get this guy in the White House quick.
So once you have that fake divide, you assume.
The people who want others to go without, well, that's evil and
greedy. And how could you not support
this? So Obama gets elected.
We're all very excited. And then I was thinking, how
could you not support someone like this?
Well, it's got to be, obviously, because he's black.
Turns out they were. They hated Clinton and Joe Biden
just as much. It never occurred to me to say,
can I apply this criticism to the previous Democrat?
I hadn't read Thomas Sole yet, so I was like, OK, this guy,
Glenn Beck, I guess, is like the lead Klansman who's really
rallying all these people to hate a man who's just nice for a
living. And Glenn Beck had an
interesting objection to the Affordable Care Act.
He said, well, there's economic costs and benefits, like there
aren't anything. But what this bill has is
something called an individual mandate, which requires you by
law to purchase something whether or not you actually want
it. And at that point, I said, well,
then I wouldn't support this law because people should have
health insurance and people should read books and they
should listen to Good Morning Liberty.
But. The question is not should they.
The question is, should they be forced to?
And that's when I did not support the Affordable Care Act
anymore. Took me 10 years to apply that
principle consistently and become like a voluntarist.
But that was the defining moment that made me say, well, does
this just apply to Barack Obama's healthcare law?
It actually applies to Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security
and compulsory education. It's like.
When am I going to be willing to put someone in a cage and shoot
them if they resist? Slavers, Murderers, Kidnappers,
rapists. Absolutely.
People who don't chip in for a welfare state they think has
cost that exceed the benefits. I go okay.
Well, maybe shame, maybe do a better job at making the welfare
system beneficial so people want to brag about funding it.
But I wouldn't be willing to cage the person and shoot them
if they resist. Once I started seeing things
through that lens, I was just Ron Paul all the way.
And that's what introduced me to guys like Stefan Molyneux and
Larkin Rose and Kerry Weddler. That was the origin of when I
said, you know, I might be wrong about everything, that that was
really it. Supporting Obama and the
Affordable Care Act individual mandate so that that right there
when you said, well I might be wrong about everything.
There are a few people who have the ability to even consider
that as an option because the pride or they don't want to feel
bad that they were wrong. Having some introspection.
You know their own self esteem. And I'm assuming that you're
someone who's always been willing to question things
clearly, and you've always, you know, look for the truth and
they can. Is that the case where you
always like that? No, what happens, what happens
is, is there are some places in life where you give yourself a
really nice green light and you say, I'm totally open to being
wrong about this, usually at the expense of a lot of other
things. I was a drug addict at the time,
and if I was really willing to question things and see things
clearly and just care about the truth, I would have been able to
see that objectively. We all have tons of blind spots
and that's why it's up to, you know, people like you guys to
show people. You know, I'm not saying you're
a bad person. I'm not saying you're ignorant.
I'm not saying you're stupid. I'm saying you might have a
blind spot. Doesn't mean you're a terrible
driver. But in every car there more or
less is a blind spot where you just can't see.
Same exact thing happens with the human brain.
On another big red pill moment that stood out to me was reading
George Bush's speech from September 20th, 2001.
Bush is talking to Congress first time since the attacks.
And he says Americans are asking why do they hate us?
They hate what they see in this chamber right here, a
democratically elected government.
Their leaders are self appointed.
They hate our freedom of religion and our freedom to
disagree with each other and our freedom to vote more or less.
And I had just more or less believed that.
And then I came across two books, Al Qaeda in Its Own
Words, published by Harvard University in a book called
Jihad Interviews, Speeches and Declarations by Osama bin Laden.
And it turns out there was a much more reasonable explanation
for why people are willing to die, just as after 911 Americans
were willing to die in defense. Turns out that it was a response
to a murder campaign that took place in the late 90s under Bill
Clinton in Iraq. Just as we see the the States of
America as different parts of our family, the Islamic world
sees the different Islamic countries as extensions of their
family. So bin Laden was able to recruit
people by showing them at the sanctions that killed Iraqis
throughout the 90s after the first Gulf War, the bombings
that killed innocent women and children, the occupation of the
land of the two sanctuaries known as Mecca and Medina, where
they were stationing the troops to bomb.
And just as Democrats flipped out over, there was Russian
interference in the election. Of course, that was all fake.
Imagine if Putin had troops stationed in America because
Donald Trump told him to. Well, that would be such a huge
interference. People would see it as a
violation of independence and be willing to go to war over it.
And then the third reason was that the power of the Israeli
regime and the Israeli Defense Forces.
Committed a number of atrocities against Palestinians, especially
the economy massacre in Lebanon of 1996, which is what got
people like Muhammad Ada to sign up to be a Mujahideen fighter.
So it was actually reading the words and saying.
You know, it turns out that as bad as you know, as bad as these
atrocities are, it's not. It does not happen as a result
of too much libertarianism. And we just sat back and this
happened to us. Turns out the opposite.
This is referred to as blowback terrorism.
Another case is July 12th of 2016 man named Omar Mateen
murdered 49 people in the Orlando Pulse nightclub, injured
53 and held the survivors hostage and called 911 himself.
Barack Obama and Donald Trump came out and said this was an
attack against L GB T Americans. Radical Islam is terrible.
What he said is America's killing women and children in
Iraq and Syria. You have to stop the bombing,
stop collaborating with Russia. This is how we feel now.
You feel how it is. His statements couldn't have
been more clear. No hatred of homosexuals was
evident and they still lied about it.
Again, so this is a decades long line when you see such blatant
examples of there's no instant explanation for either of these
things. That's what really humbled me to
the point where I'm like, all right, I can't come up with any
more rationalization, so I'll just look humble and say all
right, I've been wrong. I hope to be right in the
future. Thanks for everything.
I want to go back to you said that.
But during Obamacare, you were listening to Glenn Beck.
Now you were you listening to him to refute or listening to
him because someone else had it on.
Like, how did you come about Glenn Beck talking about his
objection to the Affordable Care Act?
It was pure curiosity of how could it.
It would make sense if they were like 5 Republicans on the whole
planet, but the fact that there's like 10s of 1,000,000 in
this country. That just don't care if people
die. How does this work?
This makes no sense. I have to at least hear them
out. So if you want to conquer
something, you have to 1st understand it more or less it.
I just could not believe what is it that he's saying.
Well, it turns out that just giving the state a monopoly on
education doesn't make everyone educated.
You don't get universal smartness from state education.
The state coercively funds and monopolizes the court system.
You don't have a universal free justice.
But for some reason I thought they could do that with
healthcare. Again, I'm sorry.
There's something to be sorry about.
We came from the other side. I mean, we were, I would say,
hardcore conservatives. Who thought Obama was a
terrorist, by the way? Well, you're right about that.
Well, just not that well. He is a terrorist in Yemen,
Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria. But I remember being excited
when we've first bombed Iraq, like in 2003 we Is that when it
was right? Well.
There had been about 12 years of bombings before that, OK, in in
in my history, watching it on TV, in school.
We watched that and I was excited about it.
And I was excited about that for probably 10 years before I
started to question. That is probably because I was
finding some Ron Paul videos on YouTube, something like that.
And so people can change. That's an important thing for
people to remember because today when you look on social media,
you see a lot of people who are ingrained in their point of
view. And it's good for all of us to
realize that we were hardcore Right Wing.
Bomb them into the submission so they can have democracy turn.
The sand in the glass, that that kind of thing.
And then we have a Yeah. Then we have a progressive.
And now we all probably agree that something like volunteerism
is the best way. And I was going to have you tell
us why volunteerism would be better because Republicans, you
know, people would say, well, they don't care about people.
They just want them to die. OK, well, how would this society
be better? And then I want to add my own
thing. It's not that it's better is the
reason that I support it. It's because it's the only moral
system. That's why I support it.
If we could make the argument that enslaving people would make
people more prosperous, I wouldn't do it because it
wouldn't be moral. So why is volunteerism the best
way to do it? Yes, the people constantly
advocating the murder of civilians are terrified that we
don't care about people. OK, but I'm gonna pretend that
they don't believe that and try to give a straight answer.
The reason volunteerism is better.
And that's the keyword. Because for some reason, I guess
people here perfect when we say better and they go, well, what
about this shortcoming? The problem is, all of the
shortcomings that can occur under volunteerism, greed,
fraud, murder, kidnapping, those can also exist under.
State regime. The reason volunteerism is
better is it doesn't have the double standard.
The moral double standard, which says theft isn't theft if you
call it taxation, murders, not murder if you call it war.
Violently dominating people isn't terrible if you call it
regulation or vote on it first. But secondly, volunteerism
allows for the ultimate check and balance in society, which
all governments by definition necessarily neglect, which is
the freedom to disassociate with bad actors.
You want to give people the incentives and say I wish you'd
do better, I wish you'd provide better security, I wish you'd
provide a more just justice system.
But at some point you have to be willing to withdraw monetary
support as well as the support of your time and attention.
Governments necessarily rule those things out.
So volunteerism is not only the most moral system, but it
provides you with more economic opportunities than you otherwise
have and provides the proper incentives for providers of
justice and security. Just as they'll always tell us,
it's really bad if there's a monopoly in microphones, because
you'd have higher prices and worse quality than you otherwise
would. Also, the state should
monopolize compulsory education and monopolize guns and
monopolize the court system. The same shortcomings apply, but
they apply more so because they don't even have that opt out of
funding them option that volunteerism does.
Those are the main issues. And even when it comes to
something like security, we had a terrible breach at work where
an engineering company had a ton of ransomware.
All of their property was stolen and encrypted, and they didn't
know what to do. None of them are volunteers, but
none of them said we need to call 911, we need to call the
FBI, we need to call the CIA for the violation of their most
valuable private property. They went to private security,
Google who backed up their stuff, private security at
PayPal, and a private antivirus organization called Sentinel
One. We see private security all
around us when we go to shopping malls, when we go to sporting
events. When I was at the Slipknot
concert, this is where there's a lot of danger and a very narrow
area. You'd think if there's any time
we need a state, it's there. Turns out that it's actually in
their incentive to provide a safe environment for customers
to be so they can get investors to invest and they could get
fans to be there in return. We see private security all
around us. It's always going to exist
because there is consumer demand for having things safe and
secure. Your body, your time, your
property. So that's why voluntarism is
more moral and that's why it's more economically desirable in
all aspects of life. Real quick.
I know you have a podcast. Also, you said don't tread on
anyone. Yes, right, Okay, could you tell
everyone about that? That's listening.
This is a podcast that I started because I felt that my time was
rather disrespected in school. I don't know how many times I
heard about Pythagoras theorem, but it seems very unproductive
and what I wanted to do was provide a place where people can
go to my odyssey page or YouTube or Spotify, click on anything
and Start learning immediately. Some of the videos I did one the
other day called the Gender Death Gap in hopes of refuting
number of social justice assumptions about the world.
Some or two minutes. Others.
I have one called the Ultimate Red Pill, which is five hours
and 15 minutes. So I only put stuff that's a
book. That's not a podcast.
Yeah. Really.
I know if someone wants to make a transcript of that, we don't
believe in IP, so take it away. I would appreciate it.
The whole thing is to give people a place where anyone can
click and Start learning about history, economics, agriculture.
This is also the goal of the Libertarian Institute and why
Scott Horton was kind enough to bring me on board.
Because we want people to be able to go to this place and
type in Winston Churchill, Ukraine, agricultural subsidies
and get the freedom position, because we have centuries that
many people have not been introduced to, centuries of
thought. That are really vitally
important, especially at a time like this.
It turns out people like Pat Buchanan.
In 1999 he wrote a book titled A Republic Not an Empire, where he
said the most dangerous thing would be expanding NATO up to
Russia's border. This could potentially provoke a
Third World War with the country who we just avoided.
A huge potential nuclear conflict with the Soviets
finally fell because. That stupid empire got bogged
down in an unwinnable war in Afghanistan in the late 70s.
What empire would fall for such a thing?
Those stupid Soviets in Afghanistan?
I can't believe it. So once you get introduced to
that thing, the work of Scott Horton, John J Mearsheimer and
Pat Buchanan, you see there is no innocent explanation for
these conflicts that that that we're getting into.
Now you see Lindsey Graham in 2017 going to the the fighters
in Ukraine to say 2017 will be the year of offense.
We're going to Washington to make the case against Russia
enough of Russian aggression. It's time for them to pay a
heavier price. These people are constantly
provoking the world wars. Even though the right says thou
shall not, murder is the center of my religion.
They support people who are responsible for more mass murder
than anyone else. The left will say we believe in
antigreed and we believe in equality and dignity.
The mass murder campaigns at the warfare states have given us
make them. The most likely to commit the
very thing that they say that they're terrified of occurring.
Yes, low wages are bad. Murdering those people is far
worse. So we want to make this
education free for basically anyone.
Check it out at libertarianinstitute.org, where
you can also find my podcast The Don't Tread on Anyone podcast.
I was about to ask you that you know I'm converted.
You converted me right now and where to sign up and you knew
exactly that it was time to give the URL.
So thank you. Thank you, Keith.
Pleasure to. Meet you guys.
Thank you so much for having me on.
I would argue that pragmatism is not always practical in the long
run. If playing everything by ear on
a day-to-day basis makes people conclude that you don't really
stand for anything. Or at least not for anything
that anyone can figure out and depend on.
Moderation is all right if it's not carried to extremes.