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- [00:00]
Keith Knight
Foreign.
- [00:07]
Dave Smith
Hey, what's up, everybody? Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem. Very quickly, before we get started, just a reminder, I will be in Boston, Massachusetts at Laugh Boston with Robbie the Fire Bernstein. That's coming up in a couple weeks. Comicdavesmith.com for ticket links. Very excited to get back to Boston, one of my favorite comedy towns in the world. And then, of course, a reminder, there are still some seats left. I will be debating at Alex Nortesh at the Soho forum. The Soho forum.org is the website that's the debate series run by the great Gene Epstein. If you're in the New York City area, make sure you come by. It's going to be a lot of fun. All right. Always a good day when I am joined by the great Keith Knight. He is the managing director of the Libertarian Institute. Also, he is the author of Domestic Imperialism. Phenomenal book. I highly, highly recommend it. And of course you guys over at the Libertarian Institute, we mentioned this when Scott was on last week, but you guys are in the middle of your, your fund drive, so why don't you, real quickly, before we get into the show, tell people about the institute and the fundraiser and how they can help.
- [01:14]
Keith Knight
Well, as much as we love complaining about the corporate press and the state education system and how horrible the universities are, we actually want to create an alternative for people to go to@libertarianinstitute.org use our search engine to type in any historical issue, any economic issue, any philosophical issue, and get the idea of how society should be organized through social cooperation as opposed to coercion by the state. So that's what we're trying to do at the Libertarian Institute. Create a free online educational archive for everyone. You can write off any donations on your taxes, and if you pay 50 bucks, you can actually get a physical book in exchange for a donation. So check it out@libertarianinstitute.org yeah, dude.
- [02:01]
Dave Smith
I mean, I've, I've been saying this at this point because me and you both, like, we've, we've known each other for years now and I've known, known Scott for years and I knew, I remember when Scott was first starting up the Libertarian Institute when it was just an idea and then kind of watching it get bigger over the years. And at this point it really is like, people will ask me like, oh, what's a good reading list to get started? And I've been more and more finding myself going, just go look at the books the Libertarian Institute has published. I mean, they really are like, like, I Your book Domestic Imperialism was phenomenal. The. The best book on Ukraine. The best book on Covid that. I mean, like, literally, like, I'm not exaggerating. If there was one book to the Ukraine war it's provoked. If there was one book to read about the COVID crisis, it's Diary of a Psychosis by the great Tom Woods. And that's just. Those are just three of the list of books. What is that? It's got to be 20 books, something like that at this point, that the institutes put out. And they're just. Every last one of them is phenomenal. So the best organization you can support, if you are in a position to do it, please go. Please go help those guys out so we can keep doing all this cool stuff. All right, so me and you had talked the other day about doing this show, and we were talking about, like, maybe doing an episode on kind of the woke left. And then this argument now over the woke right. And it just weirdly, we plan this, I promise. You have to take my word for it. But we were planning this before. I got in a little bit of a Twitter back and forth with Constantin Kassin last night, and it was just maybe part that kind of informed me, because that was in my mind, too, but it really was. We'll get back to that part. But it really was just like, I just. It was one of those moments where I just found myself being like, but how can you, the same guy who said this now, be saying this and not have any type of, like, you're not feeling like that. That cognitive dissonance vibe in your mind, like it's not vibrating right now, and you're going, huh? Well, I can't. I can't really say this because my entire identity was that. And so anyway, this is. This is wild to me. It's been an interesting kind of online debate. I'm not sure if the term woke right can be, you know, revitalized or if it can be appropriately applied, but I think it's an interesting conversation to have nonetheless. So you want to start with the woke left, maybe, and then we'll get into the woke right divide or how do you. How do you want to do it?
- [04:23]
Keith Knight
Sounds good. Let's give the OG wokists their respect before moving on to the new term.
- [04:29]
Dave Smith
Please, just. By the way, we could. We could argue this in a second. I'm not sure they're the OGs, but, yes, what everyone thinks of as the OG woke us.
- [04:40]
Keith Knight
The ones who popularized the term in my generation at least so when it comes to the woke left, this would be anyone who assumes that disparities in wealth are proof of exploitation in the economic realm and anyone who sees disparities in outcomes between groups as proof of discrimination. So when it comes to the economic side of things, if they see some people with wealth in a a certain country and other people in another country that have less wealth, this must be the result of colonialism or imperialism. It doesn't occur to them that what happens first is countries get wealthy and then engage in imperialist or colonialist actions. When it comes to wealth between individuals in a society, they assume the very wealthy exist and the very poor exist. The wealthy must have taken that wealth from the poor who also work there, who work at factories employed by the wealthy. It doesn't occur to them, I guess, that there is also a disparity in productivity levels between these individuals. So we should always assume that because there are so few Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs's and LeBron James's, that those people will one get a disproportionate amount of attention among the population and that will correlate to a very high level of income because they're just so much more productive, they can acquire such a higher social status as opposed to everyone getting access to things equally. They don't account for the fact that entrepreneurs take the initial risk in investing in a startup business. The entrepreneur comes up with the idea of what to sell, which is extraordinarily difficult. They start the business with investments which may or may not pay off. They have to find out where to market their product, they have to engage in web design. All of these extraordinarily difficult things the average person doesn't have the time for, doesn't want to take the risk. So you have a very small number of people who are willing to engage in those activities. Most of those people do not succeed. The ones who do end up with a disproportionate amount of wealth. The woke leftists in the economic realm has to ask themselves why we don't see 100% of people getting paid the minimum wage, because that's legally all you have to pay. Everyone could just earn the minimum minimum wage. Immediately you see that as a causal result of capital investment, which makes workers more productive. Once they get access to telephones, computers, machinery. As far as agriculture goes, each worker becomes more productive and they're competing with other employers for the best employees. This is what raises wages. So it's capital investment along with competition which increases the likelihood that people will acquire wealth, it is not the result of exploitation.
- [07:31]
Dave Smith
That's exactly right. So it, it strikes me to get a little bit psychological with this in a way because there is something that I, I think it's kind of hard if you look at like say the young generation today. This is true of my generation when we were young too. But it's, it's hard not to see, at least compared to previous generations, how strikingly immature young people are. You know, like just, I'm just saying objectively when you look at it, you know, my. In my grandfather' by the time you turned 18, you had already been considered a man for, for quite a bit. And you, you were gonna, I mean, go fight in a war. You were certainly, if, if you had finished high school or even if you hadn't finished high school, you were gonna move out of your parents house, you were gonna buy a house, you were gonna start a family, you were gonna do what are considered adult things to do today. We see. And I'm guilty of this too. I mean I'm 40, I'm about to be 42, I'm in a hoodie right now. Like, it's just kind of ridiculous. Like what? We all are very young, we're very slow. Strike me now being you know, a father, that even as you say this, the only thing that comes into my mind is it's such a childish way of looking at the world and, and not just like child, like young for a child. I mean small children, like a 12 year old should be above. But the idea that I, like I have a three year old and a six year old and if you know, one of them gets a bigger cookie than the other one, they have an instinct in them to be like, not fair. It's not fair that someone gets more than the other. It is the. And reasonably so. It is the expectation for little children that things will be provided to them in a fair manner. And it does seem to me that this is almost what you see with like woke leftist college students. Like the idea is that everybody should get an equal amount. But this just doesn't jive with adulthood. Because the truth is that as we all know, in the same way that everyone shouldn't get the same grades at school, it's like, well, someone worked harder, someone was smarter, smarter. Someone was better at memorizing information. Maybe not even smarter, but just better at memorizing information out of a textbook. And so of course first of all, when it comes to wealth creation, no one is the grown up in this equation. No, you're the grown up, no one is just giving you the wealth. It's not as if it was just. It is created by us adults. And so of course the expectation that it would fall, you know, like into completely evenly divided categories just makes no sense. And so it's just very interesting to me like it does. I think it says something about how immature we are as a society that these ideas would ever even gain traction amongst adults.
- [10:12]
Keith Knight
And even if you give the socialist everything they ask for, there's still massive inequality. That's that which they promise to resolve. You automatically see inequality between all the democratic socialists, aoc, Pocahontas, Bernie Sanders, those people are very disproportionate in their wealth, power and influence to all of their constituents. Of course it's ridiculous to mention, but obviously Chairman Mao was not equal to the average person in China. Even in ancient Greece, the average person was not equal in power and social status to Aristotle, Fidel Castro, very unequal to anyone else in Cuba. So the equality lie seems to just be something that they play on your emotions to create this sort of tension among the masses, to see the state as the ultimate savior. Lew Rockwell famously said that the reason that they push this lie is because it's unachievable. We know in every society there's some elites and there's people with a lot less power. So they push this lie because it forever and always will be a justification to expand the state power. All right, we've done a bunch of things. Well, everyone's still not equal. Guess we need more money and power for the state. So because it's an impossible goal to reach, that goalpost is always going to be moving. It's always going to be a justification for the state to grow. As far as being immature, this is referred to as the Santa Claus principle. So you have the scarcity principle, which the Austrian economists embrace. Every second you spend doing something, that's one second you're not spending doing other things. Every dollar you spend on this, every cubic ounce of concrete you spend on this project, you can't spend on a different resource. The Santa Claus principle is, well, everyone can have everything. We could just increase the money supply and that's not going to have an effect on the value of any of other dollars in circulation. The Santa Claus principle is literally the child who believes in the North Pole. A guy makes stuff, gets it around the world at no opportunity cost. It's that ridiculous. So when they say, well, I think everyone should have health care and it should be free, as if getting the state to coercively fund something makes it free. It's as ridiculous as saying, well, the military's free government. I've never gotten a bill from the Pentagon, so it must be free. Obviously it's not free then. If you take the case of health care, housing or education, the state has producers answering to the state for whether or not their products meet consumer demand. Instead of the consumer being empowered to determine whether or not to associate with certain companies and buy their products. Kodak went out of business because they didn't meet consumer demand. Blockbuster went out of business. Sears and A and P grocers, all of these places did because they were answering to consumers. But once they start answering to the state, he who pays the piper calls the tune. Then they worry about what the state has as far as what metrics are sufficient for them to produce products and services. And they ignore customers. That's why everything the state creates is absolutely very low in quality and extraordinarily high in price. So the Santa Claus principle that the woke leftists on the economic realm embrace is primarily the cause of much lower quality and much higher prices than we otherwise would have.
- [13:36]
Dave Smith
Yeah, it does. It just seems like a lot of this stuff is not even. It's not even like the true divide ought to be left and right. It's just fiction versus reality. It's just this is what. You know, I remember there was this article, I believe it was in the New York Times Magazine. This is like a few years ago, it might have been like five or six years ago, but there was this woman from like a feminist and she wrote some article, it was like, like can we really have it all? And the title was something like that. And she was actually being somewhat reasonable in the article. Like she was basically like, look, feminists made this promise of we can have it all. You can be a working mom and have all the benefits of being a full time mom and blah, blah. And she's like, yeah, you know, we have to kind of re question that. So like the article wasn't even unreasonable. It's just like how are we even having a conversation amongst adults about whether or not you can have it all? Like what, who gets past the point of like 10 and doesn't realize that like yeah, no, that's not life. And that as, as the great Thomas Soul put it, like, right, all of life is trade offs. You know, I say this is somebody who's like a big believer in marriage and having kids, but they are trade offs. You are like by, listen, kids give you a lot of Joy and a lot of meaning and you get to like have, you know, feel like you have the next generation to pass things down to. But you're going to have less disposable income, you're going to have less free time, you're going to have more responsibility. You know, like there's just, there's nothing in life where there isn't some degree of a trade off. And a lot of that is because we. The number one scarce resources you pointed out is time. You can't do everything. You can't, you know, you only have one life that you can live and in that life you could either. You know, if we had infinite lives, I guess we could have it all. But we don't. And it does seem there's there again there's a striking immaturity about this view. And it does when you really think about it. I think a lot of times when people see the woke left, they just focus on the kind of crazy social stuff, understandably. But there are these, these kind of deeper priors that they have, which is why they get everything wrong. This is why their conclusions are so ridiculous.
- [15:51]
Keith Knight
Yeah, the foundations are all completely backwards. If you just look at the feminist issue in the case of having it all, the sitting president of America actually came out and said this would have been, I want to say in like 2015 or something. Obama came out and said the wage gap is not myth, it's math. Apparently a Harvard graduate believes in the gender wage gap, but as you said, you can't have it all. The reason men make more is one, they work different jobs and have different skills. The same reason 20 year olds make a hell of a lot less than 40 year olds. Not because we need equal age or anti age discrimination. Because they have different jobs, they have different skills. Men are much more likely to die at the workplace. Men are much more likely to move to get work. The most dangerous jobs, the lumberjacks, those are all men. That's why I want to say OSHA says about 91% of workplace deaths are male. This is because men are willing to take more risk. And the vast amount of homeless people are also men. This gets into the woke aspect of disparities between groups or proof of discrimination. They never mention the inconvenient disparities that only one gender has had to register for selective service slavery, the draft in American history. They don't mention the fact that it's totally legal to genitally mutilate a baby boy, whereas to do so for a girl is justly illegal. And A crime that you would be in jail for. They assume that if there's more men represented at a place of work, that's discrimination against women. Even though something like 89% of elementary teachers are female, the vast majority of nurses are female. The vast majority of babysitters are female. Not because men are being discriminated against, because women work better with people and men tend to work better with things. Men are higher risk takers. The reason 95.5% of people killed by the police are men is not because of a huge sexist issue against men. When it comes to the police, men are much more violent. Younger people are more likely to get killed by the police than older people because younger men have higher levels of testosterone and are much more apt to commit violence. So we see these disparities everywhere. You would also think in the dating market it, that if men just had all the power, that women would be constantly going up to guys asking, can I please have sex with you? And if I have sex with you a few times, maybe I could convince you to take me out to dinner. It's the opposite. It's the guy begging for the woman's attention saying, I'll take you out a bunch of times, and maybe in exchange, we could get intimate together just every aspect of life. This is not even close to resembling reality, where the men have all the power and the women just have no institutional power at all.
- [18:49]
Dave Smith
Yeah, no 100%. And, of course, it does seem that we've. In the moment we're living in now, it does seem like a lot of this stuff is being rejected. And I don't know. You know, I'm very pleased with that development. It's. It's really hard to overstate how much. Just a few years ago, it seemed like this was just the dominant trend, and we were never going to get away from this. You know, I remember thinking I was very wrong. This is one of the predictions I was very mistaken about. But I remember thinking when Covid first hit, I was like, this is going to be the end of wokeism. Because now we got, like, real. That we got to deal with. Like, people aren't gonna. You know what I mean? Like, all this, like, me too. Stuff that dominated the previous two years, I go, that's not. We're in the middle of lockdowns now. People are scared of the virus. Government's going totally totalitarian, all of this. I was wrong. The wokeism continued somehow past that. It does seem like now there's just. And. And I don't know. Exactly. I mean, I think part of this is like exhaustion on the WOKE left itself.
- [20:02]
Keith Knight
It.
- [20:02]
Dave Smith
It is, it is hard to maintain we're living in the, you know, early 30s, rise of the Nazis forever, when there's just nothing to back that up around you. I also do think it's a. It's part of the dynamic at least, is that the anti WOKE crusaders be those kind of right wingers, libertarians, the people like us who have been, you know, talking about this stuff for a long time, they just came with such better arguments over and over again that eventually the WOKE were just destroyed. I mean, look, it's kind of. It's a joke when Matt Walsh can. Can destroy your entire world view by asking you what a woman is, you know, how long can you keep going? And in some sense, there is something encouraging about that where. I'm not saying it's the entire. The entire reason that we're where we are, but there is something, I think, to the fact that logic still has some power, the truth still has some power, and this group of people who were just armed with zero arguments just could not survive.
- [21:07]
Keith Knight
It definitely happened in the academic realm. In 2017, a gentleman named Roland Fryer at Harvard University, happens to be a black economist, published a paper titled An Empirical Difference in. Oh, gosh, what was the title? An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force. He studied a number of cities across America to say, look, a lot of times when BLM makes their claims, they use anecdotal evidence. In a country of 350 million people, they refer to one person or a second or a third, one of which happened to be Trayvon Martin, who was not killed by an actual officer. But there's just a number of anecdotes. So he goes, what we at Harvard need to do is come up with empirical evidence to support these anecdotes, to which his conclusions were there was no difference in police use of force when it comes to shootings when contextual factors were taken into account. So just as I mentioned, yes, men are more likely to get killed, but men are also more likely to resist the police or initiate violent encounters with the police. In the academic world, this was a very big thing, which drastically increased the amount of insecurity among academics who were much less likely to start indoctrinating their kids and their students with all of this nonsense because they knew this guy was going around. So they ended up getting him fired over a completely fraudulent sexual harassment lawsuit. All of the text messages since he's been fired have been Released. This guy is totally innocent. So I almost know that it was happening in the background. But you have other academics, like Dr. Wilfred Riley at Kentucky State University, who said, you know, lynchings, Absolutely terrible. A quarter of people lynched in American history were white. In 23 states, more whites were lynched than blacks. The biggest white lynching in American history after the Civil war was the 1891 New Orleans Lynchings, where all the victims were white. So something that was actually a result of mob violence was later seen through the lens of only something racial, just like slavery. If you think the problem is the skin color, well, what's your objection to the slavery mentioned in ancient Mesopotamia in the Code of Ur Namu or the Code of Hammurabi or Vladimir Zielinski, enslaving people to fight a war against their will, kidnapping and conscripting soldiers to go die on the front lines, when the average life expectancy in places like the Battle of Bakmut or four hours, they have so little that when all you focus on are arbitrary differences, you can never really get to the root of the issue. Not to mention the fact that Larry Koger, another academic, came out with a book titled Black Slave owners in America, 1790-1860. This caused another uproar. So it seems like the academics had a significant amount of insecurity created in them. They stopped pushing it. Even when I was at Arizona State, I could see it actually dying down a little. So, yeah, hopefully it is gone for good. But you never know. A lot of times when they're always pushing this racism nonsense, though, they'll always use the anecdotes. They never mention Justine Damon getting killed by a black Somali officer in Minnesota after she called 911 to report an assault. They don't mention Ashley Babbitt, unarmed woman, getting killed by a black officer. Tony Tempa was actually getting suffocated to death on camera by the Dallas police for, I believe, 14 minutes. Same thing as George Floyd. It's all on camera. And they were never prosecuted. You have white men like Kelly Thomas getting beaten to death by the police, and this is never taken seriously. So, yes, they have so little ground to stand on. I think it might be dying down. But they have poured so much gasoline in the minds of so many people throughout, you know, the last 20 years that I think, like, the right political arsonist could still come around and inflame the passions, like Jasmine Crockett's always trying to do.
- [25:14]
Dave Smith
Yeah, there's still. There's some of them out there who are still trying and you know, one of the things to me, what I always. I remember, it's. It's interesting to think about how much like, different mood the country's in right now. Like I. Your point is well taken. You never know what's going to happen in the future. And there are. The foundation has been laid for this stuff. It could make a comeback. But I just remember, like, even in our kind of like libertarian world, first of all, if you take like say Chase Oliver or someone like that, who. Or, or you know, Kamala Harris is the same way. But you just know, like, if they were running in 2017, their message would have been so much woker than it was in 2024. It was almost like they were walking away from that stuff. Like, they didn't exactly want to throw it under the bus because they don't want to piss off their own base either. But they're not like, like running on this stuff as aggressively as they would have. I remember getting a lot of flack from libertarians in the summer of 2020 because I was so outspoken against the, the riots, which I just, you know, again, it was like stunning to me. It was like, we're libertarians because we believe in private property rights and voluntary peaceful interactions. And I see a mob destroying private property. What, what about that is supposed to at all jive with my worldview? But I remember making the point and really taking some heat for this. But I was like, look, of all of these, the Black Lives Matter's kind of like poster boys. All of their, their cases that they love to talk about, many of which I'm pretty much on the side of, this was messed up. Like, it doesn't give you permission to go burn down to Wendy's, but like, I, I do, you know, like, I do. I don't think that cop should have sat on George Floyd's neck neck for nine minutes. And I certainly think the Breonna Taylor case was an outrage, but there was just not one shred of evidence that either of them were racial issues. Yeah, there was never nothing. There was never even like a case presented as to why we think this happened because the officer was white. I mean, even though all the guys around Derek Chauvin were like an Asian and a black guy and all that. But it's not as if he said some. It's not like while he was doing it, he was like, yeah, you take that, you black. You know what I mean? Like, it wasn't like, like there was like a racial aspect to it. It was just like, oh, well, the victims are black, and therefore, this must be a racial issue. And that just doesn't make any sense. Just like on a very simple common sense test, like, if you. If there was a bar fight down the street and it was a white guy got in a fight with a black guy, you wouldn't just immediately go, well, it must have been racism. It's like, maybe they were fighting over a girl. Maybe one of them bumped into the other one. Like, there's a million different reasons why. And the fact.
- [28:03]
Keith Knight
And.
- [28:03]
Dave Smith
And it's. It's. Something was crazy that the official movement, it seemed like, never even had to present an argument as to like, well, this is why it's a racial issue. All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is sheath underwear. I've been telling you guys about them for years now, and I will tell you, sheath underwear came on. It was almost four years ago when they came on as a sponsor, and they sent me a couple pairs of their boxer briefs. And I put them on, and I was like, man, these are, like, the best pair of underwear I've ever owned. So I got rid of the rest of my boxer briefs. I ordered a bunch more sheath underwear. And I will tell you, I still have those pairs that they sent me when they first came on. I still wear them all the time. They still feel like new. If you love this show, support our longtime sponsor, sheath underwear. And while you're at it, get yourself the most comfortable pair of boxer briefs you will ever put on your body. Go check them out right now@sheath underwear.com and make sure to use the promo code problem for 20% off. Your order. They ship anywhere in the world. Sheath underwear.com promo code problem for 20% off. All right, let's get back into the show.
- [29:06]
Keith Knight
Yeah, you would think that. You look at the police and you say, all right, they have the right to arrest citizens. Citizens don't have the right to walk up to cops and arrest them. They can, you know, stop and see if you're suspicious and maybe search through your car. You don't have the right to do that to them. They have the right to put you in jail if you violate one of their rules, but you don't have the right to do that to them. They have a monopoly on violence. People look at this and say, all right, they have a monopoly on violence. They give you orders. You must obey them. They're like, there's got to be a racial aspect to this. It's like, do you think the same thing. There's a much more plausible explanation for these things. What Wilfred Riley did at Kentucky State University is commit the ultimate thought crime. And he basically says he has to sort of gradually introduce his students to this. He goes, look, men are much more likely to commit violence against a person than a woman is. This is not me hating men. But statistically that's true. Whether it's murder, rape, kidnapping, the perpetrator tends to be male. As things are now, it roughly is about a 13 to 1 ratio when it comes to black on white violence. When it comes to race, rape, murder, assault, burglary, robbery, 13 times. Every 13 times a black person does it to a white person, a white person statistically will do it one time to a black person. This 13 to 1 ratio is what got him a lot of heat. This was in a book titled Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me. But this is a reality that people need to know about, so when they see disparities in prison, they don't flip out. Imagine you, you have mentioned that you have a son on your show. Would you want your son to be raised to just say 95% of people killed by the police are male. You are just discriminated against because you're a boy. So don't bother working hard, don't bother showing up on time. Don't go to a job and ask for on the job training. That's all buying into the system. You need to start a Male Lives Matter movement. Anytime a man is hurt, you need to start organizing with your friends, rioting, looting, focus on protesting a lot. Everything else is just buying into the system. You would be hurting your own son doing that. That is how Democrats are trying to raise black America today. Even when all of these statistics, not to mention competing anecdotes, are completely against their narrative. That's the reality that they're just unwilling to. To address. And that's why I'm really hoping to see an end to wokeism. When it comes to disparities between groups. Our proof of discrimination. I'm really hoping that this goes away.
- [31:49]
Dave Smith
Yeah. And of course, because it really is. Well, first of all, it's incoherent, obviously, as you've kind of very beautifully laid it out. But it's also, as you mentioned, as Lew Rockwell was getting at, it's an attack on liberty. It's an attack on a free society. Because even though the government doesn't actually bring any more equality, in fact, you could argue that they bring a more drastic inequality because they have a higher authority than anybody else. They have more power. So inherently it's more unequal. At least the balance of power is. But the solution is always more government intervention. The solution is always some type of government problem. And as we know, with any degree of freedom, it brings disparate outcomes. That's the very nature of freedom, is that we can choose different paths and then we're going to end up in different places. And there's no like why we would ever have the expectation of equality in outcomes makes absolutely no sense or equality of opportunity for that matter. It just makes no sense. It's like the truth is that, you know, you. We have lots of Irish people go into being firefighters and lots of Asian people go into engineering and lots of Jewish people go into like, like literary works or, or banking or whatever. It's like these are just that we see all around us that there are these different groups of people that tend to go into different areas and it just seems like why would we. There's something really anti human about all of it because it's like, oh, so you want to extinguish our differences. But that's the beauty of life is in differences. The beauty of life is that you are not just a carbon copy of me. Like even two guys like me and have very similar political views. What would the point of me having you on my show be if you didn't have a different mind than me and kind of add something else and have some other information in your head that I didn't have in mind? And then we like it's to try. It's so anti human to oppose. It's essentially a war on uniqueness.
- [34:08]
Keith Knight
And it doesn't even properly reward the ambition which any sane society would like to reward. In civil rights rhetoric or reality, Thomas Sowell uses the example of Japanese Americans who came to America, didn't speak English, and by 1945 they are in Franklin Roosevelt's internment camps. From his executive order, by 1959, they had incomes that equaled white incomes. And by 1969 they were earning 33% more than the average American family because they are extraordinarily ambitious. Even today, whites do not earn more than all the other groups. You have Vietnamese Americans, Pakistani Americans, even Nigerian Americans, Filipino Americans, Chinese Americans, Taiwanese Americans. I believe according to the 2018 U.S. census, where I last looked at these numbers, whites are like 11th or 12th on the list of ethnicities when it comes to income. So you're not even rewarding the very minorities who've engaged in very ambitious activities in the first place. So it's so detrimental. It's not just like this homicidal of, I hate these people, I want to push them down. It's even like, suicidal. I don't even want to be part of a society that rewards good behavior. Those people can go somewhere else. We don't have meritocracy here. You're even hurting yourself in the long run. So that is what I see as the ultimate case against the WOKE racist left and the WOKE economic left.
- [35:33]
Dave Smith
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. All right, so let's move over now to this term, the woke. Right. Now, I will say I've mentioned this on the show before. I do think I was an early adopter of this term. I started using this like, you know, I had made the point, I think, substantially before October 7th. I think that, you know, the fir. I remember saying this with friends, but I think I. I definitely remember. At least there was one Ron DeSantis press conference that we covered on the show. There's got to be at least a couple years ago where he was just going off about antisemitism and protecting Jewish students and Jewish kids from dealing with anti Semitism. And I was like, man, this. This was my first kind of like, thing where I was like, isn't it interesting when the topic of Israel or Jews comes up that these. These crusaders against wokeism almost immediately borrow not just like their talking points, their entire set of analytical tools, if you can even call it that, but it' way we are going to talk about this is, you know, this. This constant concept creep between legitimate criticism, bigotry, and violence. They all kind of get mixed together in one bag. Then we are going to, you know, pretend that a group of people who are not marginalized or victimized in society are under this constant threat. We're going to invoke, you know, injustices in history to explain why the current. We're going to have speech laws, we're going to have our own set of political correctness. I was like, everything about this just seems to be like the exact same thing. And then after October 7th, it was just like, obvious to me, this is their entire argument. You know, it's all wokeism. And then a different group of people, you know, I guess, notably Constantine Cassin, who I was just arguing with on Twitter, James Lindsay, who, you know, full disclosure, I don't get along with very well. And some of these guys, they started using the term woke, right, to attack Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and Daryl Cooper and myself and some others. So what do we at this point, I almost feel like the waters have been muddied a little bit. But what do you. What are your thoughts on the woke? Right. Who fits into that category and how would you assess it?
- [38:09]
Keith Knight
So I want to start with James Lindsay's definition on trigonometry, which he gave to Constantine. Kissing, which kiss. And appear to agree with. Here's what Lindsay says. There's the philosophical, deeper aspect. Why woke? What does it mean? Woke up to a structural politics that marginalizes people like me. And we need to band together in solidarity, no enemies to the right, in order to be able to create a powerful enough oppressed coalition to flip over the power structure by putting ourselves at the center and claiming power for ourselves. This is explicitly woke having a critical consciousness about the way the world is organized. The reason that this is such a horrible definition, even though I do like James Lindsay to a very high degree. He's been on my show twice, and him and I got along. But after reading this, this actually applies to quite literally every single political movement that I have come across. Even researching books like the Origins of War, where there were people in these primitive societies who felt like they were getting a raw deal, they resisted. There's. There's chapters of the Bible where it's like these people thought that they were getting mistreated by this pharaoh, and they did, you know, thus. And so they were trying to increase the amount of power they had in opposition to people over them. So I just don't see that this is a definition. It's like, well, people on the woke. Right, Right. Believe that the sun is really hot. Okay, yes, they do. But that applies to everyone else. So it's not a unique definition. What I'm looking for when it comes to the woke, right, Is the woke concept of ignoring very plausible explanations and primarily focusing on the potential motives of the person presenting the evidence. So when I say the Jewish Chronicle released a document published by the Hamas media office called Operation Al Aqsa flood our narrative. And it basically says we are opposing the Israeli government, the Zionist Crime Organization, I believe they call it, because of the blockade they've had on us since 2004, the crimes going back to the Ergon Stern and Haganah, which have killed not only Palestinians, but if you look at the SS Patria, even the original Zionist organizations were targeting Jews trying to flee Palestine because they wanted to say the world is unsafe except for Israel. For us Jews, the world is unsafe except for Israel. So everyone has to come here. This was a guy named Zvi Abotinsky's. Plan in a paper called the Iron Wall, written I want to say in the 1920s. He wanted to say the one thing we want is the one thing the Arabs don't want. Jewish immigration. That's what we got to focus on. So these groups are trying to do that. So this document from Hamas mentions that. They also mention the number of mowing of the lawn oper. They mention things like Operation Cast Lead, Operation Pillar of Defense, where a number of Palestinians have been killed. They say, well, we're not subject to fair trials. If you look at the entire list, it's nothing about they don't obey the Quran, we hate the Talmud, you know, we hate Hollywood, which is run by the. It's none of that. It's all criticisms of what the Zionist government has done to them. And all of these explanations are things we would obviously see as illegitimate if done to us or even if they were done to another country. Israel gets a 20 year blockade on Gaza, but we say that even if China potentially threatens a blockade on Taiwan, we might have to go to nuclear war. So there are very plausible explanations for things. But the woke, right, the Constantine Kissens, the Douglas Murray's, the Ben Shapiro's, completely ignore that and say, well, you must be an anti Semite. We're saying, you know, this issue in Ukraine, this war, according to the former US Ambassador to Russia, William Burns, is more or less taking place as a causal result of NATO expansion. Just as we wouldn't allow Soviet missiles in Cuba, they're not going to allow NATO on their border. You, wow, I can't believe you like Putin, wow, you're against democracy. This is just the typical emotional response. Even some time ago if you said, you know, this mass murder campaign in Vietnam is unjustified and we shouldn't be conscripting soldiers to fight into it, well, you must be a servant of the communists. It's like not necessarily at all. In fact, this could empower the communists because it makes the capitalist west look totally evil. Or if you say, you know, bin Laden said in a Harvard publication titled Al Qaeda in its own words, bin Laden said that 911 was happened as a result of sanctions on Iraq in the 90s, support for Israel, especially in Lebanon and against the Palestinians and occupation of the land of the two sanctuaries in Mecca and Medina. And to which the woke, right, will say things like, wow, you're saying we deserve 9 11. You're saying you hate America. Anytime you criticize a law, they say, oh, you must hate the cops, you must hate the country that you live in. So it's all boring and predictable. And this is what I'm saying is the key to wokeness. Ignoring very plausible explanations and replacing them with question answers. Thing the motives. And we can get into the kissing issue specifically later, if you want to specify.
- [43:35]
Dave Smith
Well, I just want to. You know, it's funny because I've talked about this issue before, and I think you've honed in on something that I wasn't exactly. Precisely. Maybe as focused on as I should be. But even as you're saying it to me, you know, it's like, okay, so first off, let me just say, like, look, I completely agree with you. This is what I said about it at the time. The James Lindsay and forget whatever, me and him have insulted each other on Twitter. But I'm. I have thick skin. I could let that go. It's. And we could grab a beer tomorrow. Like, I don't really care. It's just. Look, objectively, I'm looking at the argument and his definition. Like you said, it fits every political grid. It's like awoken to a structure that was unfair to us. And so we want to get together and put ourselves in power. Like. Like what? That's politics. That's literally what all of it is. It's. It's. You might be like, well, you see, what makes them the woke, right, Is that they want to run candidates for all office, and their plan is to raise money and garner votes in order to put themselves in a position of power where they can implement policies that they deem as preferable. Yeah, that's. That's all. And then I see this just like the way the tactics are used. It's like you have this very broad definition. You say the. The players are Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and Daryl Cooper. And then all of a sudden you see them start bringing up like, like Nick Fuentes or someone else, and then using that as proof that these other guys are woke, right? Even though, like, there's a huge gap between the views of this group and the views of that group. And, and it's just, it's. It's all incoherent to me. And I will say, much like when you're dealing with the woke left, it's like, look, the claim is not that bigotry doesn't exist or that bigotry couldn't possibly be the reason for something happening. Like, it is not, not impossible that Derek Chauvin could have just been looking for a black guy to kneel on his neck and happened to find George Floyd but the argument we're making is like you have to present some type of evidence for that before I'm just going to believe it for no reason. And so let's look at the evidence and let's also consider what could be alternative or more likely, you know, answers to this question, as you mentioned, like, okay, these police have these enormous amount of powers and they can wield them with impunity. That seems like a plot. And so I've just, I've found myself as I'm arguing this the other day, even as, as you're saying it, I'm like thinking about this before even the Constantine argument where there are these people. So Ian Carroll, are you familiar with Ian? Yeah. So he just went on Joe Rogan show a few days ago. This created quite a stir and I'm like arguing with people and they're like, well look, clearly he hates Jews because look, he's got all these conspiracies where at the top of the conspiracies are the Israelis. And by the way, he's put out some things that like I'm not so I'm not at all sold on. Israel did 9 11. And it certainly wouldn't like really conflict with my worldview if that was the case. It's not like some, I'm just, I've seen the evidence. It's like actually I don't think it's as strong as you guys think. You know, the major pieces of evidence I seem to say are what's. What's dubbed the dancing Israelis, which aren't. They weren't actually dancing, but that's what they've come to be known. I thought Max Blumenthal's piece on that that pretty much let you know, like ads. It's just not really that strong of an argument. There's a bit of a like huh there. But not really. We don't really know that this was any proof that the Silverstein got a big insurance policy on the World Trade Center. You know the issue. Netanyahu said something about the World Trade center coming down. The problem is, I think it might be an age thing Sometimes, you know, sometimes like I think a 27 year old looks at that and goes, no one could have possibly known known that the World Trade center would have been a terrorist target before 9 11. The problem is that the same guys had tried to knock down the Trade center in 93. It was the most high profile target for terrorism in the world. It wasn't that crazy of a thought to mention the Twin Towers coming Down when it had already been attempted. And I'm just saying I look at it and I objectively go, I don't. I don't actually think you have as strong. Okay, certainly not a strong enough case that I would be comfortable like I am with other being. Like, this is what happened here. Okay? Like, we can say this definitively. I just don't feel that way about it. Okay? But that being said, so I could disagree with this take, and someone else could have the a theory that they think Israel was behind911. I could disagree with them. But to conclude from that that you must hate Jewish people, it's like, well, wait a minute. There's all these other possible, like, reasons why you might think that. Number one, maybe you were just more persuaded by the evidence than I was. Maybe you've seen some evidence that I haven't seen yet. Maybe you've seen the same evidence and you just weren't quite as scrupulous as I was of being like, nope, I have a higher bar of what meets the ey, believe this actually happened Test. Maybe the reason why so many people are interested in conspiracy theories these days is because there's been so many real ones and the government lies to you about everything. We just lived through the country being shut down over a conspiracy. So maybe people are more open to them. And maybe the reason why people are suspect, suspicious of Israel is because, well, I don't know, we're currently, you know, funding and arming a war for them that is not at all in our national interest. Interest, we've fought, you know, like, all of these wars in this region of the world, clearly taking out one enemy of Israel after the other, and people start to get. It's just there are so many other explanations that are so much more likely. And then when you couple that with the fact that this Ian Carroll guy goes on ROGAN and like, 12 times disclaims, I'm not saying it's the Jews. I got nothing against Jews. Jews are regular people, just like me and you, man. And I'm cool with you. I got no problem. I'm saying it's this small group of people. I think, like, when you couple it altogether, it's the same. It's literally the same thing as going like, well, why do you think Asian Americans are more successful than Puerto Ricans? It must be racism. It's like, no, there's like, all these other, like, possible. And by the way, I'm not saying it's impossible that someone could say they're not bigoted against Jews, but they really are. I'm just saying why are we jumping to that conclusion and pretending that you have a certainty that, that this person is a bigot? It. Hey guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show which is my Patriot Supply. Such an important sponsor. I love that they're on board with us because they're the company that I trust to keep my family prepared. Look, we've all seen what can happen when a crisis hits and we've all seen how quick those grocery store shelves can empty. Don't be on the wrong side of that. You want to always know that your family is protected when the next crisis emerges. That's why I trust my Patriot Supply to help prepare before the next Crisis. Order their four week emergency food supplies today and get four 72 hour food kits completely free. 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- [50:53]
Keith Knight
It just happened the other day when kissing had said, oh yeah, well, Daryl Cooper, he's had the opportunity to debate Andrew Roberts, someone I've been begging to debate by the way. And you know he didn't take that. And Cooper has used, used David Irving as his source. Now this is the ultimate attempt to poison the well. This is a perfect SJW woke tactic where they say person A. Well, he's loosely correlated to person B and person B can be dismissed. So therefore I've dismissed the argument of person A. That is a totally woke tactic. It says, yeah, it's like, you know what another citation could be for? For someone you looked into and said, well, this doesn't all add up. You could read Neville Chamberlain's declaration of War on September 3rd of 1939. He says, we told the Germans to get out of Danzig, Poland by this hour. They have not. Therefore, on behalf of Polish independence, we are going to wage a war on Germany. But then the Soviets invaded Poland two weeks later on September 17, 1939 and they didn't declare war. Maybe that could raise some eyebrows. Maybe the fact that the war ended with 7 million dead poles and Poland under Bolshevik occupation. Maybe that could be a reason why someone questions the validity of the Second World War, Mr. Kissen, not just because. While there might be a connection to David Irving, who has said good things about National Socialism, that's much more plausible. How about you could use Winston Churchill as your source for being skeptical of the Second World War. Churchill wrote a book titled the World Crisis 1911-1918. So let's take it out of the Second World War and just look at Churchill when he. He's operating in a war that today almost very few defenders. Barbara Tuckman will defend the First World War, but everyone more or less looks at it and says, well, this was a mass death, which really could. I mean, as bad as Kaiser Wilhelm was, he was better than what followed. So maybe we should have just tolerated that. In Churchill's book, the World Crisis, he said that the policy that he enacted as First Lord of the Admiralty was a deliberate starvation of the population of Germany. Germany to. To push people into submission. He uses the word submission. Men, women and children, wounded and sound into submission the whole population of Germany. I don't remember the exact quote, but I know it's on page 672 of that book. He says, this is a policy among the civilian population of Germany. A very pro. Churchill historian Martin Gilbert said that There were roughly 700,000 deaths as a cause result of this blockade. Meanwhile, while Kaiser Wilhelm went to the Netherlands to retire and live the rest of his life. So it could be that we feel bad for the poor German civilian population. That could be an explanation. And then in the Second World War, Churchill writes another book titled the Gathering Storm, where he says, the human tragedy reaches its climax. That after all the exertions and sacrifices of the righteous cause, we have found neither peace nor security. And we lie in the grip of even worse perils than those we have surmounted mounted. Meaning we fought the war against National Socialism. And now the Bolsheviks control East Germany to Vladivostok and have a loose alliance with Mao in China. And they have bases, you know, very close to North Korea, later expanding into Vietnam. So you could use Chamberlain and Churchill as your sources, not David Irving. There are people in Churchill's cabinet, Charles Percy Snow, who was a science advisor who gave a series of lectures at Harvard titled Science and Government, where he said, said this was in 1961, he said, the paper on bombing by Frederick Lindemann, who was known as Viscount Cherwell, went out to Churchill's cabinet. And we found that we could use bombs to make half of the German population homeless, especially in cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants. So you could use him as a source. JM Spate said, We were the ones who authorized the initial bombing of civilians in German cities. And we knew that this would bring the war into Britain, but it was necessary because his book is titled Bombing Vindicated. So he's saying that the sooner you start bombing, the sooner you can get them to wave the white flag and surrender. So you have people. This was the air principal secretary of the Ministry saying, yes, we started the bombing. We should be proud of it. You have Frederick Lindemann himself giving a memorandum to Winston Churchill. Hill in May of 1940. This was published in a book by Max Hastings titled Bomber Command, where he explicitly says, we're aiming at the civilian population. That's a very plausible explanation. Another source you could use is Charles de Gaulle, who was, you know, calling the shots for the French government in exile. In his memoirs, Charles de Gaulle says, you know, I asked Winston Churchill why he was so interested in having having the Germans bomb Britain. And Churchill told me that once the Americans see the bombing of Oxford and Coventry, the Americans will have to come into the war. These are totally legitimate sources that you could be using as opposed to David Irving. And then there's another one, Martin Gilbert, who was the Churchill historian before Andrew Roberts became the Churchill historian. And he said, Churchill told Londonderry in 1935, we're going to have to go to war with Germany, Germany, because they're the biggest power in Europe, just as we would take on the Spanish if they got too powerful, just as we've taken on the French Empire or the French monarchy, just as we would take on any other nation. It looks like Germany is the one we're going to have to oppose now. But previously, Churchill said in an article titled Zionism versus Bolshevism in the early 1920s that the Bolsheviks were going to be the ones they might have to go after because he saw them as the competitor, potentially the encroaching competitor on the Continent at the time, time. All of these reasonable explanations and all kissing has to respond is, you probably think the Holocaust didn't happen. It is so pathetic. And then one last one. Well, one last one. On the Second World War, Henry Stimson wrote a diary. This was the Secretary of war. And in 1946, there was the Pearl harbor investigation. If you look at Stimson's diary entry, on November 25th of 1941, two weeks before Pearl harbor, he said, we met with the President On Monday we had discussions that the Japanese were planning to attack us as soon as next Monday. The question was how we could convince them to commit the first overt act of war against us in order to justify intervention. I mean, we're quoting people who are in positions to know these things. That is totally legitimate and has nothing to do with us denying the Holocaust hating Jews or loving day people. It Irving.
- [57:53]
Dave Smith
Yeah, well this is, I mean it's part of the reason why I found Pat Buchanan's book so compelling. Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War. It. And what's interesting about it is when there is the response of like, oh, what, so what are you saying? The Holocaust didn't happen? And I'm sure there are people out there who are saying that I think they're wrong. But the whole point that Pat Buchanan's making is like, no, I'm saying it did happen happen. I'm saying it happened in the middle of this war. And it's just hard, I think just like on, on almost the most common sense litmus test to go. Okay, so the results of the war were first of all, as you mentioned, British entry into the war, the official justification was to protect the independence of Poland. Okay. The results of the war were the biggest bloodbath in human history. The Holocaust and Joseph Stalin taking over half of Europe. And I mean when those are the results, it's just pretty easy for someone to go, like, maybe an alternative scenario would have been better. Like maybe playing things a little bit differently could have led to a preferable outcome. Now I understand to some degree, and this is partially because of how evil the Nazis were and partially because of years of indoctrination. But I understand people immediately going like, well if the Nazis had survived, it would have been a worse outcome. You know, like if, if the Nazi regime was still standing and Adolf Hitler was still alive, then that's a worse outcome. It's just like, that's not so self evidently clear. And, and I'm not saying it's a great outcome for, for Adolf Hitler to still be alive and the Nazi regime to have continued. But like, let's say hypothetically, the 60 million people didn't die who died in that war. Let's say hypothetically, a deal could have been worked out to, to get the Jews out of there. Let's say, Hyp, the Soviet Union didn't take over all of Eastern Europe. It's not so obvious, you know, it's not, it's not so obvious that there isn't a path that could have been or there isn't policies that could have been pursued that would have led to a better path. Now, by the way, so with the Constantin thing, because I want to just do this before we wrap up, like, the thing I was arguing with him about was Daryl Cooper also, you know, it started with that. What's his name? Niall. The guy Scott Horton debated. Ferguson. Niall Ferguson called Daryl Cooper a Nazi apologist. I took issue with that and insulted him a little bit. I feel like, you know, I'm sticking up for a friend who's unfairly being smeared. And then Constantine was like, no, he is a Nazi apologist. And so me and him started arguing, and I was like, yeah, but, dude, like, come on. I mean, he's just not like, I. I don't know. Look. Look at the guy's work. He's not a Nazi apologist. And so what Constantine's throwing at me, again, it reminded me of kind of, you know, a lot of this stuff we've been talking about with the woke on the left and the right ass. Assuming the. The motivations must be this one thing. This is the only motivation that could lead you to this place. And it was really amazing to me, especially because I think Constantine is still. Well, Trigonometry is a pretty big podcast, but at least at a point, what he was most known for was this speech where he. That he gave eviscerating Wokeism. Left wokeism. And it was beautiful. I mean, it was like, one of the most eloquent and devastating speeches against wokeism you'll ever see. You could. If you Google Constantine, Oxford Woke, you'll find it real quick. It's got millions and millions of views. Great speech. And I'm like, hey, so how are you that guy? And then we're still. And his argument to me is he's like, well, look, Daryl Cooper posted a picture with a mug, you know, like, with. With Nazi imagery on it. And he posted the thing about a Nazi, you know, Hitler marching on Paris being preferable to, like, fat trans men in dresses or whatever. And that, you know, he's got. And then. And. And so. And then he brings up the fact that he goes. He goes. Also he said Churchill was the true villain of. Of the war. And I was, like, arguing with him. And I'm like, okay, well, first of all, on your first point, what he said was, okay, so I say this to kind of rib my friends. And I'm saying this in. I'm being hyperbolic, but I like to say to him that Churchill was the real villain of World War II. And he goes, now I'm not saying he committed the most atrocities or he had the most blood on his hand necessarily, necessarily. But here's why I think he's really the real villain. And it's like, okay, well then look, if we're being fair here and we're not being woke zealots about this, instead of just like, oh, I got red meat, like, here's my conclusion. Let me work backward from that. I was like, why can't you guys ever include that in your retelling of the story? And then he responded to me and you could go look this up. This is on Twitter. He goes, dude, you're telling me that he said that on Tucker Carlson in order to rib a friend and that he was being hyperbolic. Well, he still said it. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. I'm saying that on Tucker Carlson. He said like, I'm not saying he did this to rib a friend being hyperbolic and then just said this thing on. It's like, no, that's what he said on Tucker Carlson that to rib my friend, I use hyperbole. And I say this. And so we're going back and forth on this. And then I'm just talking about like, I'm like, wait, he posted like a time or two like this is. This just sounds like what? Like first of all, why do you have to. As I put it on Twitter, I go, why do you have to very fine people on both sides them. Why do you have to pretend this thing that's on tape that anyone can go back and watch? Like it. It really does is strikingly similar to me to them saying Trump said there's very fine people on both sides. And it's like, dude, it's on. You can go back and listen to what he said. Same with Daryl Cooper on Tucker Carlson Show. And I was like, okay, so on in your corner you have that he made some off color jokes that he posted a time or two. And then I ultimately said to Constantine and this is where we stopped, stopped the interaction is that I went, fine, look, you're not convinced by me. Take my non woke challenge, okay? And here's my non woke challenge. Listen to the first 30 minutes of fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem. And then listen to the 30 minutes that he did in the addendum piece after it about the suffering of Jews during World War II. Just listen to. It's an hour combined. Listen to those two half hours and you tell me me is it possible? Like is it conceivably possible that a Jew hating Nazi apologist could have possibly ever made that content. Like, how can you square that circle together? How is it possible that is the one thing that you could, you could always count on. Any Jew hating Nazi apologist would never tell you about the individual suffering of Jewish people who had nothing to do with this bigger cabal and were just totally fucked over. And just like. So, and this is Daryl's superpower really, is that he's just like the most intensely empathetic person. So this is what people love about his work. It's all just like, oh my God, put yourself in that guy's shoes. Imagine you're here as this mob of people is ripping your kids and your wife apart and beating you to death. And you just got to watch it all and you're powerless. And it's just. And then he just responded with like, I've seen it, I've listened to it, and I still convinced. And once he said that, I was like, well, I mean, if you're sure, you know, if you could, if you could listen to that and not just be shaken of any feeling that like, this is. Ah, okay, so in my, on my corner I have here is this guy's work that he put out by his own free will where he's deeply empathetic to the suffering of Jews during the, the, the Second World War. And in your corner, you have. He posted something provocative on Twitter once. What are we even, like, what it's like arguing with a WOKE leftist who's like, that guy's a racist because he told a joke. And I was like, well, you know, he's got a black wife and three black kids, right? And you're like, no, told the joke. He's racist. Like, what are you, what are we even saying here? This is just arguing with the woke leftist.
- [65:48]
Keith Knight
Now they're so obsessed with symbology, they're like, all right, racism is a huge issue. We got to take down statues, we got to remove that. And Jemima, we got to take down the Indian on the, the butter. And we, we can't. Schools named Lee because that might be Robert E. Lee. It's like, all right, have any black kids learned to read as a causal result of that? Have any gotten on the job training skills? No. No. Okay, well then you're obviously much more focused on symbology, and it's still symbology for him to focus only on Daryl Cooper. It's like, okay, your criticism of the revisionist World War II narrative is to focus on one person why don't you take a different person? How about President Herbert Hoover in 1953 wrote a book titled, titled Freedom Betrayed where he has 18 points very clear as to how through diplomacy this world war could have been avoided. His case is basically that it was almost inevitable for the National Socialists and the Bolsheviks to collide. That in no way means Britain or the US has to make a regional dispute into a world war. He says that even if we had to go to war with Japan. He of course knows that the Export control Act of 1940 by Roosevelt was intentional done to provoke the Japanese to attack America so the Americans can take the side of the British again. Former president in 1953 was saying this. Kissing can just respond to that. Hoover goes on to say, if we didn't demand absolute unconditional surrender of the Japanese, they wouldn't have had to withdraw their colonies, two of which were in Korea and Vietnam. After pulling back their colonies, the US had to go to war in Korea for three years. We then went to war in Vietnam fighting a proxy war against the Bolsheviks. There, there. So there are very reasonable explanations for all these things from a large number of other people who are not Daryl Cooper. And kissing is still not addressing these very obvious claims. And we just know how pathetic it is when you say, well, we can never allow independence to be violated. So that means all citizens of all the 50 states need to wage a war for independence against the Washington D.C. regiment regime which claims the right to rule them. This small group of people claims the right to impose taxes, claims the right to regulate their lives in all in a large number of aspects. That's a violation of independence. Surely we're gonna have to go to war over that. Or you could say the people of the Donbass region felt that their independence was being violated by the 2014 coup in Kiev led by Arseny Yatsenyuk in his anti terrorism operation. So even the independence thing, they clearly see the costs of war are extraordinarily high and the outcomes are extraordinarily uncertain. Whenever you take it out of whatever individual frame they want to put things in because they're always. They're primarily focusing on the potential motives of the person presenting the evidence as opposed to very plausible evidence. The woke right is Constantine Kissing, Douglas Murray, Ben Shapiro and Dennis Prager and Sean Hannity.
- [68:55]
Dave Smith
Yeah, 100%. Couldn't agree more, Keith. It is, it is really just always a pleasure, always a pleasure talking to you. Let our listeners and viewers know where they can find your stuff if they want to hear more from you.
- [69:08]
Keith Knight
If you want an introduction to my work, you can check out a speech I gave titled 3 Social Justice Lies, Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia that can be found at the Libertarian Institute. If you're more interested in foreign policy, check out a book recently published by our institute titled How Washington Started the War, the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine. Long book and long title. It reads so quick because it's so subdivided in its sections. If you're interested in economics, we have a new book at the Libertarian Institute titled the National Debt and you this is by Joe Salas Mullins. You can check out LibertarianInstitute.org donate, get a copy of one of our books or just read the articles, watch one of the videos, listen to one of the podcasts. That's where you can find my work.
- [69:58]
Dave Smith
All right. Well, Keith, thank you so much and thanks to everybody listening. Go support the Libertarian Institute if you can, people no better cause that you could possibly help out. All right, catch you guys next time. Peace.