← Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton
Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton
EP:12 - The Assassination of Charlie Kirk: America's Fractured Discourse
01:36:40
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- [00:00]
Scott Horton
For a limited time at McDonald's, get a Big Mac Extra Value meal for $8.
- [00:05]
Daryl Cooper
That means two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a.
- [00:09]
Scott Horton
Sesame seed bun, and medium fries. And a drink.
- [00:12]
Daryl Cooper
We may need to change that jingle. Prices and participation may vary. Martha listens to her favorite band all the time. In the car, gym, even sleeping. So when they finally went on tour.
- [00:25]
Scott Horton
Martha bundled her flight and hotel on.
- [00:27]
Daryl Cooper
Expedia to see them live.
- [00:28]
Scott Horton
She saved so much, she got a.
- [00:30]
Daryl Cooper
Seat close enough to actually see and hear, sort of. You were made to scream from the front row. We were made to quietly save you more Expedia made to travel. Savings vary and subject to availability. Flight inclusive packages are at all protected. All right. All right, you guys. Welcome to the show. It's provoked. I'm Scott Horton from the Libertarian Institute, and soon the Scott Horton Academy. And this is my buddy Daryl Cooper. He's the most important historian in America and of course, hosts the Martyr Maid podcast. How you doing, bud?
- [01:09]
Scott Horton
Doing all right, man. It's been a. It's been a. A rough week, I think, for a lot of people. A lot of shocking. A shocking week. So I'm doing all right?
- [01:19]
Daryl Cooper
Yeah. All right, well, so obviously the big topic is the murder of Charlie Kirk. His political assassination there. As of the time we're recording this on Thursday night, there's pictures of the suspect out there, but nobody knows his name and he's not been arrested yet. So that's the news. As of the time we're putting this together here, nobody knows exactly. I guess the Wall Street Journal said that shells of the bullets, you know, still in the magazine in the rifle, had trans and antifa propaganda written on it. The New York Times is saying that their sources say that's not true. So I don't know. I guess we'll see how that shakes out. But I guess I'm interested first of all in just your reaction, Darryl. And then secondly, what your prefrontal cortex actually reasons about all of this. And so the floor is yours. I'm really interested to hear what you have to say.
- [02:16]
Scott Horton
You know, it's a reminder in a way that, that, that beneath the veneer, the civil veneer, you know, of politics, lies, violence, you know, and. And there's a, you know, the institutions that we use to mediate our disputes, to find points of compromise and, and to make decisions that may not be embraced by 100% of the population, but. But we decide as a people need to be done. You either use those institutions as A way of peacefully hashing these questions out, or there's violence underneath it, and that's it. You either talk or you fight. Those are the two options. And Charlie was a guy who was trying to talk. Say what you want about, I mean, whatever. It doesn't matter, like what you disagree on. Because the thing is, whatever you disagree with him on, no matter how hard you disagreed with him on it, he would have sat down and had a civil conversation with you about it and tried to convince you of his perspective. And if he couldn't, he couldn't. But that was how he approached things. And for a guy like him to meet an end like that is. It's unbelievably tragic. You know, he deserved it a hell of a lot less than, Than many of us do. You know, and I, And I talk about myself when I say something like that, you know, just in terms of just the irresponsibility of incite, you know, inciting rhetoric and things like, you know, I. He's just not that guy. He was never that guy. He's a genuinely good dude. I only talked to him one time, but I know a lot of people who knew him very well, and he was genuinely solid dude who, you know, for all of the. The hate he gets from the other side, he was a guy who was genuinely focused on trying to de. Radicalize American politics. Like, that was his real goal, you know, at least for. For like recently and in right now. You know, it was not necessarily to put over this or that policy or convince people of this or that change that we need to make. It was really to bring down the temperature and show people that you can't actually just talk about these things. And, you know, our heart goes out to his family. You just can't imagine, you know, something like that happening. You know, just the kids and his wife. It's terrible and it's just awful. And there's really. About the act itself. There's not a whole lot else to say about it, you know.
- [05:03]
Daryl Cooper
Yeah, it's horrible, man. And I didn't know the guy. I think maybe we tweeted back and forth a couple times. I know quite a few people who knew him and, you know, one or two people considered him to be a good friend, you know, and are really hurting now. So that completely sucks. And yeah, you're right that his whole shtick, more than any of the points he was making, was that we can all talk about this. That was his real point. So then, you know, there are a lot of people now, obviously in Reaction who are saying, okay, well, you killed the guy who wanted to talk with you. Now you got to deal with us, who won't even pay you that respect or this and that, and are kind of reacting in the way that one might presume the murderer would have wanted them to react. Right. Which is to sharpen the contradictions and make everything harder, when, in fact, the left half of America ain't really going anywhere. So the cooler the right plays it, the more people from the left are going to move to the right and strengthen their dominance anyway. They blow their whole wad trying to crack down and lose all their legitimacy. They're only empowering their enemies. You know, that's Saul Alinsky, page 75. The action is in the act, the reaction of the opposition. That's the whole point of doing an asymmetric attack like that.
- [06:19]
Scott Horton
Yeah.
- [06:19]
Daryl Cooper
I mean, I didn't learn that from being a commie. I learned that from the Birchers, by the way. Thank you very much. But that's the footnote.
- [06:26]
Scott Horton
I mean, all you really have to do is look at the. The way the Democrats and just the regime in general treated the January 6 protesters. The way they went after Trump and the people around him, like, using the legal system, just went totally ham and figured, we're just gonna. We're gonna use all the power at our disposal to shut these people down, and we'll clean up the mess afterwards if there's public relations fallout and we see how that's worked out for him. It has not worked out well. You know, and I. Yeah, I think you make a really good point that those people who are responding that way, like, that's the natural response. It's the predictable natural response to something like this, especially when this is not the first time. And when is never treated the same by the mass media, it's never treated the same. You know, it's. So it's just radicalizing for people when they see that clip that. That came up. I think it was. Yes. Yeah, it was yesterday when he had been shot, but the news hadn't. Hadn't come out that he was killed yet. And, you know, they. Somebody was trying to have a prayer for him on the floor of Congress.
- [07:37]
Daryl Cooper
I saw that. Yeah.
- [07:38]
Scott Horton
And the Democrats are hooting and hollering and booing and shouting and trying to break up the moment of silence. And it's like, you know, the. That kind of thing is exactly what Charlie Kirk was trying to fight against. Not. Not that they didn't want a prayer going, but just that kind of attitude. Toward your opposition. You know, I mean, we should all be inspired a little bit. I certainly should, because I don't have this ability, you know, at least I pretend I don't, so that I, you know, can disavow my own responsibility for it. But, you know, he would sit there and talk to people who were just, who would insult him, who were clearly like, considered him a monster, an enemy, you know, and he would sit there and maintain his composure and just talk with these people about whatever they wanted to talk about at these events, you know. And, you know, I think you're right that this, these kind of things are. There's a lot of people on the right who are, who are saying that, you know, the right's failure to respond in kind to this kind of thing and not necessarily with political violence. But, you know, just, again, you just. Why are we not sending the, the FBI or some new task force that we just created for this purpose around all the Democrat cities and rounding up all the antifa people and everything? I mean, that there's a lot of people on the right right now who are, who are pushing the line and really believe it and have a case to make. I mean, like, you know, I don't agree with them, but they have a, they have a case to make that a culture of just total impunity has, has reigned for way, way, way too long where, you know, people feel like, I mean, you remember during the Trump administration when you had, you know, a bunch of, when they, they had the COVID State of the Union address, I think it was, might have been the Republican convention, It was one of those events and, and it wouldn't have been Covid State of the Union because that's January, but it was, it was some event. And all of the congress people and senators and stuff were coming out and they were walking out of the place and they were getting pushed around, screamed at people in their face, throwing stuff at them. And you know, when you see things like that, when you see the total non response in the media or even, I mean, if you've seen some of the clips on MSNBC of people not celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk, but certainly saying that, you know, you play with fire, don't be, you know, don't be surprised.
- [10:12]
Daryl Cooper
I got fired over it.
- [10:14]
Scott Horton
Yeah, that's good. It's, you know, there's this, this prevailing feeling that things are spinning out of control because we're not doing enough to keep them under control. And so that's what we need to do. We need to use whatever powers at our disposal to put things back in order. And I sympathize with that impulse, for sure. You know, that might. I'm somebody who, you know, as you said before, the show, is not a libertarian, but, you know, I value liberty, and I'm somebody who thinks that. And maybe this is what separates me from, at least on a policy level, from a lot of libertarians, that for liberty to exist, you have to have order first. And if people feel vulnerable and if they feel like they're in a chaotic environment, they're not going to want liberty. They're going to want stability and control. And, you know, the tools that we have at our disposal, unfortunately, are, you know, are sledgehammers. And the problems a lot of times are, you know, are surgical. And so, yeah, it's a. It's. It's just an awful thing, man. Like, it really is. I mean, you watch that and, and you just realize that, I mean, it could be. It could be any one of us, because nobody deserved it less than Charlie Kirk. And, you know, it's. It's. I think. I think that we've probably entered a difficult and dark era, and we're gonna have to work our way through it. It's not going to be. There's not going to be a de. Escalation phase anytime soon. I think. I think over the next days and weeks, we're going to start to see things that, you know, that are gonna. That are gonna shock and. And maybe worry a lot of us. Even those of us who are entirely on the side of hoping that, you know, whoever did this gets, you know, strung up from the nearest lamp post. So.
- [12:14]
Daryl Cooper
Yeah, well, yeah, step one is real accountability for everyone involved in this thing, Anyone and everyone involved in the thing and. And all that. But then, yeah, it can be that. Like, oh, after Columbine, now we just have school shootings now. Well, now after Charlie Kirk, everybody just kills each other's guys when they get on stage. Now, I mean, Lord knows there's plenty of countries around the world where they don't have free speech and all that. And free speech isn't just the First Amendment. It's people tolerating each other, you know, doing things just like this. So we can just have it where. Yeah, okay. The American tradition of political speech is canceled. Now, you can blog from the safety of your house, you can do your YouTube shows, but you can't go out and participate in any kind of public conversation. Or we could not go that way and we could recognize it. Same for dealing with China Or Iran or Russia or something that like, this planet has got to be big enough for the both of us. The left half of the American political spectrum ain't really going anywhere or only on the margin they are. And for that matter, the political left is like roughly 100 million people or something, right? And then so there's a pretty broad gray scale of who counts as a liberal or a progressive or a leftist or this or that kind of breakoff. And if you ever seen, like, a family tree of all the leftist groups of who's a Maoist and who's a laborer, this and whatever that, there's a million of them, and there's so many factions and different sets of beliefs there. And it ain't right that. Oh, yeah, they all did this any more than every right winger did Oklahoma City or anything like that, you know, which, of course, that was a bunch of FBI informants, but still, you know what I mean? So. Yeah, no, and what's funny is, so I've just always been a libertarian, so my dream is to always try to get the best of the left and the right all on the same page. That what we got to do is roll back the national security state. First and foremost, that's the major threat to our liberty, is central banking and war. War and central banking, man. Eye on the ball, everybody. And all the best right wingers and all the best left wingers who understand me, agree with me, that's the name of the game, dude. That's the corruption of the republic right there, and that's the what needs to be challenged. But could I get everybody together? You know, we did that, that Rage against the War Machine protest at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. And it was a libertarian left kind of coalition. And I was pushing for, like, yeah, we got to get some right wingers to come. But then it was so clear that, dude, if we brought any prominent right wingers, it would have blown up the whole thing. Libertarians can do a thing with left wingers, and libertarians can do a thing with right wingers, but not at the same show. We can't. You know what I mean? It's just we. We can't do it. And then. So now I'm willing to settle for, like, y' all just not kill each other or me or us or anyone. You know what I mean? But, like, never mind. A real realignment where it's the people versus the War Party, right? That's what it should be. It should be the Democratic Republicans versus the War Party of taxes, tyranny, Death and Israel. Right? The bad guys, the. The people with power versus all everybody else. And anyway, I. I've always known that's what is supposed to happen. I've always known it never will. But. But, yeah, I've got to do my best to encourage. What would Charlie Kirk say? He would say, everybody chill out. Everybody prove each other wrong by arguing instead of shooting each other. That is what he would say, even in reaction to his own murder here. We can all be sure of that. So, like, what the hell? And because the future's always coming, what are you going to do? I hear people talking about, oh, well, the Rubicon is crossed now. Well, what are you saying? You're like, getting your Kevlar and going to war? No, we're not doing that. That's the other thing I wanted to rant about. This whole thing about civil war. Like, what are you going to do? You have Williamson county versus Travis County. No, you're not. The liberals from the cities aren't coming outside for the country folk. And the country folk aren't all, like, forming up militias to go and invade the cities and depose all their blue mayors and whatever, right? This is all nonsense. No, this is happening. Americans haven't fought over the Mississippi river since 1864. Right. Or maybe 65. So.
- [16:28]
Scott Horton
Well, Americans don't. We don't know that.
- [16:31]
Daryl Cooper
We. And we don't need any dirty kidnapping and murder wars either. Right? Like, everybody chill.
- [16:35]
Scott Horton
Please say, like, we Americans don't know what a civil war is because we didn't really have one. We kind of split into two countries and then had a regular war.
- [16:44]
Daryl Cooper
Yeah, that's a good way to put that.
- [16:45]
Scott Horton
Yeah, that's not civil war, man. Like, from Northern Ireland to Sarajevo to Beirut, just pick up any book you want. And believe me when I say you do not want any part of a civil war. Because civil war means you don't know if you can trust your neighbor. And so you better join the group that's going to go into his house and kill him and his family before they do the same to you. Because you don't know. And it, you know, it doesn't. It doesn't get settled on battlefields. It gets settled in damp basements with pliers and blowtorches, you know, with someone tied to a chair. Like, that's civil war. Civil war is random people getting shot by snipers as they walk down the street. You don't. People. People. And especially, I mean, the idea, like, what are the. What are the organization like, organizing principles of a civil War in America. Like, nobody's organized for anything like that. Like. And so it really does just. It really would just. Even that movie Civil War, which did a decent job, like, portraying the. The sort of fog and chaos of something like that. You know, this whole idea of, like, in the mountain, if you saw it, but in the movie, there's a Western alliance of California led by California and Texas, and they're marching on Washington. That's not. That's just totally ridiculous. In the United States. Like, the way it would look is like you have a big swath of the country where nothing's going on, but then this swath of the country over here that's more ideologically mixed are just randomly killing each other. They're. There's no battles, there's no nothing. There's no marching on cities. It's just violence and nihilism and chaos, because that's what Civil war always is. The same as how Americans don't, you know, we don't really understand revolutions because we think we had one when we really didn't. We really. Kind of a similar kind of thing. We, like, seceded and then had a war against the British. You know, it wasn't like the French or the Russian or any other revolution where you're proscribing every enemy of the regime and, you know, any potential traitor that you can root out. So what revolution usually is. And when people say that they want that kind of thing, like, I, you know, I always try to, A, tell them it's unrealistic that, you know, to even expect that, but, you know, but B, that they don't want it nearly as much as they think they do. Because, you know, all that does is. All it ever does, is empower the people who are already organized and ready to take advantage of the situation. And that ain't us. Tell you that, like, it's not us. You know, you and your neighbors with your AR15s are not, you know, you're talking about. There are. There are massive interests out there. Government institutions, organizations, military organization, just all kinds of things. And you would be about whatever. Whatever networks you're part of. Not you, Scott, but just anybody who's thinking this way. Whatever networks you think you're part of, add them all together and they are one thing thousandth on the list of likely winners in any scenario like that. You know, 99% of people in scenario, in those kind of scenarios are just victims, and that's it. And we don't want that. You know, we have to preserve what's left of our civility here. And I think now the question, though, and the people who are pushing for a harder response to this are gonna. Are gonna say this is, you know, like, I agree with what you said about, you know, the way. The way war has normalized a lot of things domestically and made a lot of things possible that, you know, repressive things that. That wouldn't be. And kind of soured our. Even our. Just non. You know, forget the government, just our interpersonal relations with each other and region. All that's true. But I also think, I mean, there's a lot of people that, you know, that. That would say that you just, like, you look at the social chaos that we have allowed to just take over this country really since, like, the late 1960s, where, you know, people are just looking around and they're like, you know, they remember when they were kids and the country they lived in, and nothing was perfect. Nothing was ever perfect. Obviously, people think the 90s were perfect. You mentioned Oklahoma City. They weren't. But when you have, you know, just regular political violence happening as a matter of course, I mean, you go back, remember the 2016 election, every rally Trump held, there were mobs of people waiting to attack his followers, his supporters, like, as they went to their cars. And the media just treated it like it was just a normal response to a fascist trying to run for office or something. You have these killings. This is, you know, Charlie Kirk's the most high profile one, but it's not the first. First one. And then you just have a lot of the, you know, I mean, people look around and they say, I used to walk down this street with used bookstores and boutique cafes when I wanted to take a girl on a date. And now. Or take my daughter, like, you know, out for ice cream. And now if I want to do that, we have to avoid, you know, getting too close to the alleyway so somebody doesn't jump out at us and we have to step over somebody smoking crack where that book story used to be. And a cop is like, two blocks down just doing nothing about all of it because he's been ordered not to, or he's afraid of what will happen if he tries. And people look at this and they're like, you know what this is? We need to do something to reverse this. And the only. The only thing that people really know how to do, because the cultural questions, you know, the cultural forces that are leading to all this degradation seem way too big for anybody to deal with, and maybe they are. And so the solutions people look for political, which means, you know, they're violent. That's the violent solutions is like. Is all people feel like they have recourse to, to try to reverse what they see as really the destruction of their civilization. I mean, that's what they think they're witnessing. And I mean, I don't think they're crazy for thinking that, you know. And so the question is, like, when you talk about threat. Hang on one second. Like when you talk about like threats to liberty, I mean, the war, all of those things, those are all threats to liberty. There's a lot of threats to liberty. One of the biggest ones though, and you could end all the wars tomorrow and everything. But if people feel like their society is falling apart and they're becoming more vulnerable and their neighborhood is going to shit and girls are getting stabbed in the neck randomly by dudes who have been arrested 70,000 times on a train in Charlotte and they're moderate centrist, right? Political, you know, organizer that they like to follow is getting shot and MSNBC is like making, you know, rationalizing comments. Dude, people, that's a threat to liberty. Because people are going to say, you know what? Like, we can't, we can't go on living like this. And so we don't know necessarily how to fix it. And so what we're going to do is we're going to put in power somebody on our side and tell them we're going to look away for a while and you just do whatever has to be done to put this to bed. I mean, that's, that's where we're headed. If things don't stabilize, if, if the spirit of Charlie Kirk when he was alive and the things that he was trying to push, if that, if that doesn't prevail, then that, that's the direction we're headed, you know.
- [23:58]
Daryl Cooper
Well, first of all, the thing is, is everybody knows their vote don't count. That's the main part of it. Like you're saying is they got all these problems and they know there's nothing they can it. Even though this country is supposed to belong to them, they can show up and boat harder and it just becomes its own joke, right? It doesn't do anything. And so that's the reason people are so frustrated, right? Then they protest and people crack down on that. So they, they get driven to violence from there is because as you're talking about, politics is the game of who gets to control the power of the violence of the state. So we're all supposed to wear ties and be nice, gentlemen, while we fight over who gets to sit in these chairs and make these decisions about who gets exploded to death or locked in a dungeon, you know, so then, yeah, it's a life or death struggle. And the game can be dressed up as polite, but it can also get, you know, very ugly. I would point out that all those social problems that you cite are the state's fault, right? All of those are because of the welfare state, because of the warfare state, because of inflationary money. I mean, people are, you know, you hear, I see, you know, I quit Twitter because I. I can only abuse it, not just use it. So Now I abuse YouTube instead. And I look at all the stupid YouTube short videos or whatever, and I see random people of all walks of life talking about how their lives are destroyed because of the. The cost of living is just through the roof. And it means that people can't afford school, they can't afford food. I mean, hell, I'm doing okay. I'm doing better than I've ever done right now with my book sales and whatever, as things are going and whatever. I can barely afford to feed a very small family here. And. And I know people are just hurting like hell out there. They're living in the Walmart par line. They're living in the alley that you're talking about because their rent doubled. That's why they're out there. And, you know, I read this great thing about how I might be repeating myself was about how a lot of homeless people, they start out, they got jobs, they're still living outside, they're still trying to go to work, and they end up getting hooked on drugs after they're homeless. And it's so they can stay awake at night so they don't get mugged and killed. And then. But so now there's a meth head. And so now good luck getting back on your feet now that you got a drug problem in order to try to stay alive after the Federal Reserve System kicked you out of your house. And, and then, and that's during the good times. That's when. That's the inflationary bubble before the crash, when everything gets 10 times worse and people got to survive the recession or the depression somehow and end up blowing their damn brains out. You know, again, the welfare warfare state. You talk about the cultural left and degradation from all that George W. Bush was president and invoked all of cultural Christian conservatism in order to launch an aggressive war or three and torture 100 people to death, tell lies from morning to night. For eight years straight and completely crash the entire planet's economy with his phony paper money system. And that's why even after eight years of Obama, the cultural left was still in charge through four years of Trump, even though the pendulum had swung because the right had completely blown their credibility by lying and murdering and torturing people to death and having no credibility left to stand on while people were moving to the left. And especially when they're destroying the economy, when it's Republicans destroying the economy through their rigged socialist games, crony capitalists and socialist, you know, money printing and the rest. And then people move hard to the left and become more and more socialist in reaction, blaming, like pretending George Bush was Ron Paul and that it was free markets that caused the crash of 08. So now we need, remember FDR merged with Obama on the front of Time magazine, like now we need a whole new deal, so. And of course, welfare paying single mothers to be single mothers, which has been going on for generations. I think I told you, Darrell, didn't I? About how I saw that documentary that was made by leftist black radicals in like 1970 and it was about how the Great Society had come and destroyed their entire civilization and forced all the men out of their women's homes, out of their family homes is the only way to get welfare. And the government agents went door to door to door telling everybody to kick their husband out so they can get a bunch of free stu stuff and it completely destroyed their society and they saw the results of it within two years and they made a documentary about it, about how these, oh, these well meaning liberals came and they sure helped us good. And then they didn't change the policy. That was 50 years ago, 55 years ago, and they didn't change it. They've been paying women to kick their men out of the house ever since then. They've been printing money and waging wars and doing all this ever since then. And then, yes, people, and, and look, sorry, one more. When I was, in 1996, 97, when I was in junior college, Toby, the manager of my sub shop said to me, he goes, man, don't you understand? The cops and the, and the prosecutors in the state and all of them, they need crime. Of course they let all the rapists and the murderers and the criminals out and keep the cells full of drug dealers. Oh, because that was probably what caused the conversation was I was complaining my friend Darren was doing years in the penitentiary for selling pounds of Mexican dirt weed and watching real criminals, armed robbers and rapists and killers Come and go through the system while he was sitting in his cage. And Toby says to me, yeah, and he's not a libertarian theorist, he's just the manager of a sub shop. And he goes, Scott, listen, it's a very small number of people who commit the crimes in society. The cops know who they are and they could just lock them up and the rest of us would be fine. But they need crime so that we need them. And so of course they let out all the worst criminals when the Obama people came and in the aftermath of Mike Brown and all of that stuff in the beginning of Black Lives Matter, there was a huge outcry and including from libertarians that yes, we need criminal justice reform. People are tyrannized to death by the state in this country. Fined and feed to death. I just today, Darryl finally got out of a 12, 13 year vendetta by the IRS against me that I finally only am under, out from under now, where they just made up a bunch of numbers of taxes I could never have possibly owed, right? And, and I'm just one guy, I'm not even complaining. They do this to a million other people every year, year in and year out. They just completely persecute and destroy people. And then from all that pressure against all that tyranny, what do we get? They legalized murder and armed robbery and, and, and shoplifting up to $1,000 and, and, and camping on the streets, no matter, like with drug use and, and you know, feces everywhere and whatever, camping, you know, in downtown, in cities. They did it in Austin too. And so they legalized the worst crimes and meanwhile they cracked down even harder on all those petty offenses. Oh, you got caught walking somewhere with a gun off to the penitentiary with you, you know, or, or there's a thousand, there's a million other offenses where people get completely destroyed by the state. Get on probation. Try being on probation for 10 years and not get revoked and not have to go to the pen anyway. And all of this people live just desperate lives under the tyranny of this regime and, and, and then they legalize the worst crimes and then understandably, like you're paraphrasing a lot of people and, and sympathizing with them, and I sympathize too. You want to see the state crack down, but they're not going to crack down on real crime because they need you to keep wanting them to crack down, so they're going to crack down on you instead. That's what they always do.
- [31:44]
Scott Horton
What's the answer then?
- [31:47]
Daryl Cooper
I Don't know.
- [31:48]
Scott Horton
Well, because first of all, take as.
- [31:50]
Daryl Cooper
Much power away from Washington as possible and revert all power to states. Have hard money, completely abolish the central bank and abolish the empire. Insist on hard money and an end to inflation.
- [32:02]
Scott Horton
So, but, so, but the response, the reply everyone's going to give to that is, okay, so we just, we just accept this and deal with it until.
- [32:12]
Daryl Cooper
No, I mean, by all means, vote for Republican judges. No, no, no, by all means vote for Republican judges. But I'm just saying, like, even then, if you want Republican judges to sentence violent criminals to extremely lengthy and punitive prison terms, you should also insist that they make sure they got the right guy. Because of course we have a huge epidemic of people who get the entire book thrown at them when they didn't do anything. We have an entire criminal justice system where you don't get a fair trial like on Matlock, at all. They threaten you with 99 charges and you plead guilty to 16 of them so that you only get 10 years instead of 55. And everybody knows that. That's how it works. 99.999% of people don't get a fair trial at all. They get completely gangsterized. And it's because they're 10,000 law, 10,000 off. These aren't even crimes. They're just offenses against state edicts that people have to go through the court system for. So you get rid of all of that. You have a bare criminal code and, and obviously you need a civil code for separate court system, civil code for like, you know, doing business and lawsuits and whatever. But as far as a criminal code, you have a bare criminal code and then you make sure that it's enforced fairly. And yes, by all means, violent criminals should only get one chance, maybe two. But like, I don't know, however, exactly, you want to divvy that up. But like, when it comes to premeditated murder or whatever, I'm not for mercy, but I'm just saying how many times they got the wrong guy? It's a lot. They really do get the wrong guy a lot. You can't trust a prosecutor or a judge because they're criminals too.
- [33:45]
Scott Horton
And so, you know, I know.
- [33:48]
Daryl Cooper
What are you going to do? Give them as little power as possible. Really.
- [33:51]
Scott Horton
My, you know, an example of that is this project I've been working. I mean, it's not a project, it's just me, but that I've been working on for years now. And that if I can pull all the influence that I can that I can get my hands on in the administration sometime in the next couple years. My, my, my dream is to get a white paper in front of somebody to, to, to, to review this guy's case for clemency or pardon this kid. He's not a kid anymore. He's been in federal lockup for 14 years now from Knoxville, Tennessee. I've been out there, I've talked to his parents, talked to his family, talked to all of his friends. I mean, dozens of people. This dude is doing life plus 70 years in federal, and I'm 99.9% sure he's innocent of all, all the charges that they brought against him. And I'm 100% sure basically that he's innocent of everything except selling a little bit of weed. And this guy, you know, the, the life plus 70. We'll talk about this case one of these days because it's something that, like it. I'll get work. I get worked up every time I talk about it because there's just, it's an, it's an insane case. But, you know, he got life for selling the drugs, which, if I told you the whole story, we'd take up the whole episode. But, like, it's just, it's an insane story. Like, you could tell, like reading through the trial transcript, which I've done a dozen times, that his own lawyers. And I talked to his lawyers. Actually, when I went, I went to Knoxville, I talked to all these people, got his permission to talk to his lawyers even. They were, I want to say they were taking it easy, but they were almost like, oh, this is an, this is the easiest case we've ever done. Like, this is the easiest acquittal, like, we've ever come across in our lives. You know, they were kind of treating it that way, and they gave this kid life plus 70 for a first time nonviolent offense with no, no violence, no threats, no. Nothing even remotely involved in the case. And, and they, they, they tracked him for a year and a half, tapped his phones, followed him, everything. Never caught him with drugs, never found him talking about drugs, never got him anything right. And this kid's got life plus 70 years. And these are feds or state cops? Feds. And because you know how it is, like, you know, it's just exactly what you said. Like, they take it personally if you, if you make them go into court and actually go through all that. They're like, all right, son of a bitch, you know, you're going to make us go to court. We'll show You. And, and that's why everybody, you know who's ever been in a federal case, their lawyer tells them, no matter what, you got to cut a deal because these. And so anyway, the point I wanted to make though is this guy was a. He was like a classic gun collect. He had like, you know, like a, like a, like an old World War II Browning, like, machine. He had all the licenses, all the special things and everything. He had this old, like World War II tripod mounted like, Browning machine gun with like the ammo cases that were still sealed in wax that he was never going to open because there were collector's items, all that kind of stuff. Well, they said that, well, since you're a drug dealer, yes, all of these guns are legal. Everything was bought legally. Your name's on all of. It's all fine. But because we got you on this drug thing, we're going to say that these guns were like, there to. Yeah, you never, we never found you using them in the commission of a crime or whatever. But anybody who came to your house, they would have seen those things and they would have felt threatened by them and they would have thought, this guy's dangerous. And so therefore we're going to give you firearms charges as well. And they tacked on 70 more years for that first time offense. This kid had never been convicted for jaywalking. Okay. And Christian family, church going family, like, from the west side suburbs of Knoxville, Tennessee. His dad has a Q clearance, works at Oak Ridge National Labs. You know, just his father. And he's a black guy. His father and mother, these older folks who were born in like the 40s in Tennessee, right. So they're living under Jim Crow for the first early part of their lives. His father volunteers to go to Vietnam. He didn't get drafted. He volunteered. And he went to Vietnam and fought a guy who, if he had any excuse not to want to go serve his country, that guy had an excuse not to want to do it, you know, but he did. And they raised up a nice kid, a good guy, and he's doing life plus 70 unless somebody can get him out of there. Just. Sorry, you. You brought that subject up and it gets me, but like, oh, I wanted to say you're talking about welfare and I'm going door to door telling people to throw their, you know, throw the baby daddy out of the house and all that. Dude, it's so much worse than that, actually. And I found all this out when I was doing all my research on New York in the 1960s for a couple of my podcast episodes is when John Lindsay was mayor of New York, New York City and state introduced a whole bunch of new welfare reforms where like, they literally came out and based on this study by these two professors at Columbia, they decided there's not enough people on welfare, that there's a lot of people out there who, because there's still this sort of social stigma to it. You know, it's this old depression era, it was, you know, and so they said, we got to get rid of that. We got to get people to the point where they don't feel that kind of stigma when they're taking money from the state. And so there was big advertising campaigns, door to door, door knocking campaigns to tell people like, hey, this is your money, you deserve this. Like, don't you know, to get as many people on it as possible. Well, here's the crazy part. The two commie professors from Columbia, I can't remember their names right now, but I mentioned them in the podcast. They had written articles like in the last couple years where they lay out in explicit detail that, okay, here's the plan, and I'm not exaggerating. They say we need to get as many people on welfare as possible, especially black and Puerto Ricans, because they're in New York City. Because what that's going to do is it's going to increase racial polarization. It's going to give us a, a population of people that are dependent on the state and therefore can be used for various ends. And this will help push us toward the revolution. They were open about it, these two professors who were literally brought into the New York City government to advise and like, you know, run this program. Basically, they weren't like the managers of the agency, but they were the, the people who were there sort of, you know, providing. They were consultants who were, who were leading the thing. And so it's like a lot of this stuff was done for the explicit purpose of pulling the cord on this thing that we're doing. You know, it's so bad because it's.
- [40:57]
Daryl Cooper
Built in anyway, you know, it's, it's in the incentive. Anyway. I had a friend of mine I used to knew, used to know a long time ago when I was a kid, like before I, you know, was interested in these kinds of things. And I hadn't known her for a very long time, so I, when I talked to her about this, she wasn't like telling me, oh, you're Mr. Libertarian Guy. So let me tell you this libertarian story. It had nothing to do with that she's just telling me a story for her from her life, that she had no idea why I would be even interested in this topic. As a topic. She just told me a story. Her husband, who's a good guy, father of her four kids, he's doing tree trimming work. But it was just a slow summer. They had very little work. So she thought, well, we'd get a little help with the groceries. She goes down there, and the ladies at the counter, they tell her, look, you have a husband in the house. She's like, yeah, father, my four boys. And they're like, well, we can't do nothing for you, but if you can get rid of him and come back, then we'll be able to buy you all the groceries you need and all this. But she only needs help for a couple of months here. You know what I mean? They're telling her to essentially get divorced or at least separate from the guy, separate him from his sons. And the thing is, is the ladies behind the counter, they're just some idiot ladies from her town who work there at the government office. They didn't go to Communism, destroy America college or whatever. They don't know nothing about that. Just their job is, in order to sign up for, you have to not have a husband in the house. So what you do is get rid of your husband and we'll give you the money. In fact, like, all you got to do is just phrase it differently. We'll give you this money to get rid of your husband. You know, to get rid of him is what they're doing. Whether they understand that or not is clearly what they're doing.
- [42:34]
Scott Horton
You remember last week we were talking about. I used the example of what my friend who had been on the LAPD told me about the interrogation room and how cops and suspects both kind of adopted a personality that they learned from TV on how to deal with that. But then a generation of them passed, and, like, they're still doing that, but none of them realize they're doing it now. They're not. Like, it's the same thing. Like, those ladies. Like, all of this stuff started by a lot of people who were like, crazy revolutionaries who saw very clearly, like, the destruction that this was going to wreak on us. None of the people doing it now, none of the institutions doing it now are aware of any of that. It's all just built into the structure of the system now and keeps rolling without anybody having to know what's going on. It's just, you know, the purpose of a system is what it does. And those systems were built and put in place and given power. And, you know, we're sort of like in this. In this weird. We're in this weird place right now where we. We aren't. People are starting to see all this, but they're not sure how to shut it all down without. While staying within the realms of what's politically permissible. You know what I mean? Like, and sort of like. And, you know, I think about, for example, like, if you go back to the Kenosha riot where Kyle Rittenhouse killed. Killed those people, you know, I did an episode on that, and you look into the whole thing and you look at the things that are being said by politicians and by news agencies, you know, 24 hour cable news channels and so forth, just media, people, influencers, but people, including people in government. You know, when that. In the lead up to that, that you, you know, you look at that and you'd be justified in saying that this was not, like, this was not a riot. This was an attack on an American city that was. That involved a ton of people from outside the area that was essentially encouraged and incited by members of our government, people in the media. And, you know, there was a. There was like this supply truck that went out there that called itself Riot Kitchen that was, you know, would go around to these things during the Floyd riots, and they went to Kenosha and they would serve, you know, food, drinks to the rioters. And. But also they got pulled over on the way. Either on the way there or the way out. And, you know, there was a bunch of stuff in there that was confiscated because it was stuff that was riot gear and things like that. They got like a $5,000 grant from GoFundMe. I mean, and then meanwhile, Kyle Rittenhouse, you know, he tries to raise a legal fund on GoFundMe and they. They ban it. You say, you can't do that here. And it's like, these are the kinds of things where people in the right are looking at it and saying, look, you know, people, this is the way people are looking at it. And this is an extreme way to look at it. But they're saying the people who shot Charlie Kirk, they control all of our institutions right now. And so the idea that, like, well, we just need to vote harder. We just have to, like, have conversations like, this is crazy. This is what we've been trying to do, and it's not working, and things are only getting worse for us and for the country. And, you know, and that's this is not even getting into. They don't know who, they don't know who did this yet obviously. But you had that, that, that, that, that. I think it was an internal memo or something that Steven Crowd released supposedly from an ats someone inside the ATF who said what now the FBI itself is saying that they had found the rifle wrapped up in a cloth in the woods and that the bullets and the rifle had engravings of like antifa and, or anti fascist and trans ideology stuff like engraved on it. And so who knows if that's true, but that's. That it would track with things that have happened recently. There have been several, you know, murders by, by trans people, politically motivated murders in recent months and years. And you know, I think that we, over the last, especially over the last five years since, since COVID but really since like 2015, 2016 especially, we've driven a hell of a lot of people crazy in this country and we're going to be living with the consequences of it for a long time. Man. Like when you look at, you know, this is three or four years ago now, they do it every year. I haven't checked back on the numbers, but a few years ago the CDC did their annual mental health survey and this is a huge survey, 600,000 people from, you know, that they go through and make sure they hit every demographic, every region, every, you know, all these different things to try to, you know, to try to get a general sense of big, well funded survey. They do. And I'll never forget this because I mean it's when you just stop and like take it out of the, just, just, you know, it's hard to shock us with anything anymore. But if you just imagine that you're coming, you're reading about this in a different civilization. You're reading a history book, right? And you're reading about this civilization. According to the CDC's mental health survey a few years back, they asked the question, in the past 30 days, have you seriously considered committing suicide in the last 30 days? And the word seriously was in there. Of people aged 16 to 24 of all races and both genders combined, 26% said that they had seriously considered killing themselves. In the last 30 days. One out of four people aged 16 to 24. And you read that and the first thing I thought was like, why is there not a special session of Congress being called over this? How are there not, you know, for like we should have, just every media channel should be required to give up two hours every evening until like we get this dealt with and worked out. So this is a massive crisis. Like, a quarter of our young people are seriously thinking about killing themselves in the last 30 days. Like, this is cr. But it was just you. I don't even think it made the paper, you know what I mean? Like, and that kind of stuff has been going on and spreading under the surface, man. There's a lot of these, like, look, man, I'll tell you this. I don't have any sympathy for the trans movement. I think it's grotesque. I think that they are, they're. They're enabling and encouraging people to go deeper into their mental illness in ways that are incredibly destructive to those people. That's the movement, the people themselves. There's a lot of these people that are victims of all this. There are a lot of people out there walking around whose health is destroyed, whose bodies are mutilated, who are mentally just completely deranged at this point because they believed what all of the elite institutions in our society were telling them. And they have to live with that now for the rest of their lives as they're starting to realize that, you know, well, they're just, they're starting to realize that either they got sold a bill of goods and now they're stuck this way, or they're just feeling the consequences of, of their decisions now, and they're just looking for somebody else to blame because they don't want to, you know, they don't want to blame it on that. But there's gonna, There's a lot of these people who I, I. And I mean, we're seeing this. I mean, there's been, there's been a lot of these incidents where we're going to be living with this for a while, man.
- [50:11]
Daryl Cooper
And the thing is, the psychiatrist could have said all along that, look, if you want to live as a woman, that's fine, but what they did, they go, no, you really are one, and you got to fight everybody who disagrees. Now you have to just make this complete break with reality as you're saying, you know, plunge the depths of your psychosis now. No, you really are a girl. You just got stuck in the wrong body, the doctor assigned you the wrong gender, birth, or what. Like all of this just insanity. And then, yeah, it could be pretty hard to climb down from that. You could see, you know, the, the, the trans shooter at that school from a couple of years ago, that seemed to really be the problem, right? Like, big promises made, but none of this really makes sense. And then, you know, he or she or Whatever was lashing out at all the people told her no before.
- [51:04]
Scott Horton
Yeah. And like, you know, you were talking earlier just about people who are looking at their life who are just sort of realizing now as they're 35 or something that they're just, they're, they're never going to own a house. They're never going to, you know, people judge like their, their relative standard of living. Everybody talks about keeping up with the Joneses and all that. I don't think that's really like the standard, the, the reference point for most people. I think for most people it's how they grew up. You know, if they look at it and they're like, I'm never going to, I'm never going to live in a house as nice as the one I grew up in. I'm never going to have the kind of financial stability that my parents had when I was a kid. Then they feel poor. Even if they're not poor, even if they're still middle class, you know, and still can live and survive and you know, and all that, they're going to feel, they're going to feel poor and they're going to feel trapped. They're going to feel that shame, that sense of failure, of letting you know, their parents down. All these kind of things that build up into really toxic emotional, you know, mixes. And when, when, when people feel that way and you, I mean this is the thing about, you know, I think, I really think like the poison pill in, in democracy is that not everybody is emotionally and psychologically cut out to be involved with politics. And democracy demands that everybody be involved with politics all the time. You know, and you see it now, dude, like after this, this assassination happened, you go online and it's not just, it's not just like crazy anonymous people with like, you know, 18 followers or whatever. You have like these, you have major accounts, people who have huge platforms using their own face who are just out there like saying with no evidence that this was Charlie Kirk was assassinated by Israeli intelligence. And when you ask them, as Dave Smith did when, when somebody posted this, he just all Dave said, he said, well what's the evidence for that? And dude, if you want your freaking blood to curdle and you really want to get black pilled about the state of our society, go read the replies to Dave just for asking, well, what is the actual evidence? I mean they're like, you know, people, most people, first of all, like you have, you know, I think we may have talked about this before but politics a. There is always violence at the bottom of it. And people on some level sense that. And so they know, like, the seriousness of the. Of the, you know, activity that they're engaged in when they're being political, that they're doing something that's a proxy for. For violent conflict, basically. And it makes. It makes it sharper than it would any, you know, another kind of activity. And so you have that pressure put on it, but then, you know, you bring in the fact that, you know, what that does is it means there are always enemies out there. There's always opposition. There's always somebody who's trying to do something to control you in a way that you don't want to be controlled or to change your life or your environment in a way you don't want it changed. And it encourages very sharp us versus them thinking. It encourages you to look at your fellow citizens as potential enemies. You know, and it's a. It's a. I mean, look, if democracy dies in this country, it's not going to be because it's not going to be because some military dictator just overrides the will of the people and takes over and says, if you don't like it, that's too bad. It's going to be by acclamation, just like it was with Caesar, with the Romans, where the Romans were ecstatic when Augustus finally stabilized. The situation they've been living through for the. And what it really comes down to is people are just like, you know what? I'm just tired of arguing with people about all this. Like, can somebody else just deal with all this so that I don't have to argue with my neighbor and him think I'm a terrible person because. Because these decisions are taken completely out of both of our hands.
- [55:09]
Daryl Cooper
Right?
- [55:09]
Scott Horton
That's why it's going to fail when it fails, you know, because people just get sick of it.
- [55:14]
Daryl Cooper
All right, wait, so we got to change the subject. But first we got to do some business so that we can continue to change the subject. First and foremost, I am a coffee. There's this great company. It's really great. And I don't just say that because I gotta deal with them. It's really, really good coffee. Best coffee I've ever had. It's Moon Dose. Get it? They hate Starbucks, so it's Moon Dose Artisan Coffees. If you just go scotthorton.org Coffee, it affords you on to mine, which is half Ethiopian, half Sumatran, and it's really dang good. And everybody in my email box says that they like it. A lot and keep buying it. So check that out. Scott Horton Show Supreme Breakfast Blend there at Mundo's ArtisanCoffee. Scott Horton.org coffees and then, oh, I guess Chris said he wants me to break him up, but I already put it off so long. Maybe I'll just do the. The other ad. Mikkel Thorp Mikel Thorpe. He's a really good dude, man. I went and I toured Mayan ruins with the guy down there in Mexico and he's a really good dude. Him and his wife. She's a lady. He's a dude. And, and what he is is he's a real expert on how to be an expat. And if you want to get the hell out of here and or even just be able to have dual passports potentially or own property in other countries for a potential place to bug out or potential place to just diversify whatever wealth you've got and invest it in a wide variety of spots that you might want to visit. And the guy's a real expert. It's none of this, you know, it's not like some ridiculous infomercial thing or whatever. And in fact the whole thing is free. They obviously have some upsells for you. But it's from October 10th through the 12th, it's at expatmoneysummit.com and he will teach you step by step exactly how to do this. The different rules for the different countries and how to protect your wealth from the tax man. And not by gimmicks and tricks and get yourself thrown in jail, but very carefully and legally protecting yourself from taxes. And so if you're the kind of person interested in that kind of stuff, this is where to start is with the expat Money Summit and that is@ExpatMoneySummit.com this October 10th through 12th there. And so and now I want to change the subject back to actually what you're saying, which is something that I think is very reasonable, potentially very reasonable in response to this, that government could do that. Like all other things being equal, my anti government ness would not necessarily object to. Which would be, well, first and foremost, how about we have Tulsa Gabbard and, and everybody, we have Cash Patel, release the Antifa files and let's see everything that the Justice Department and FBI have internally on Antifa and for that matter the state police agencies. Let's do a global FOIA on every document about this because I'm very suspicious of this thing. And I used to know like some black block, you know, Earth first anarchists back like in the days of Seattle 99, which I didn't go to, but I knew some people who did. And they're sincere, like anarcho, syndicalist, whatever things. They weren't controlled or, or bribed by anyone powerful, whoever they were. A few people, you know, in Free Radio Austin way back then, but. So I'm like, familiar with the type. But then, see, there's this article which I'm sure you're familiar with, Mr. Darrell Cooper, which the audience may be familiar with. If you're not familiar with it, even if you are familiar with it, it's worth rereading. It's just such an insightful article. It's at Time magazine and it's called the Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that saved the 2020 election. And it's about how they rigged the election for Biden, but it's all in the guise of how they saved it from Trump. Right? Because that's their point of view. So they just tell the story. And there's a lot of aspects to the thing, and I only remember a very small percentage of them. I should. I owe the article to reading myself, in fact. But one of the things that's very powerful in there that I really took from it and never forgot was how easy it was for the very most powerful Democratic Party apparatchiks to turn antifa on and off like a light switch. We want him to show up here, we want him to show up there. We want the police to stand down here and let them. Right there. I guess, you know, I don't think they talked about who was delivering the pallets of bricks. But still, one of the things that they pointed out was that where were all the commies on January 6th? There's all right wingers and no leftist. The only leftist there was Max Blumenthal out in the yard going, hey, I ain't falling for this. Journalist reporting, right, not participating. But all of the leftists, the agitators, all stayed home. Why? Because they all got a text message that said, don't go. And they all obeyed it because there's somebody in command of this thing. And then what do they all say? Over and over? They go, well, there's really no such thing as Antifa. It's not really an organization. It's really just like a set of ideological guiding principles about how the thing and whatever. But Daryl, that's just straight out of the NED and the USAID and the NDI and IRI and George Soros and his organizations and how they do the color coded revolutions, man. Man, that's how they've done it since Albania. Well, I don't know about Albania. 97. I know they, they did intervene heavily in Albania. 97 but definitely in Slovakia in 1998, in Croatia in 99, in Serbia, 2000, as we all know, Georgia in 03, Ukraine in 04. They tried in Belarus, succeeded in Kyrgyzstan, failed in, in Lebanon, all in 05. And this is, you know, usually what they do is dispute an election and you know, if they lose it, they say that our exit polls say that we should have won and you're the one who cheated and refused to accept and this kind of thing. But it just seems very clear to me and that in I don't know who, and I'm probably ignorant, maybe someone has done real good work on this and I just am too stupid to know who they were. But I sincerely believe that the, and I have no reason to claim this. I'm not trying to argue the case for it. I just, it seems to me like it ain't a coincidence that it was the Democratic governors that locked their states down the hardest for Covid and exploited that thing. I'm not saying they released the virus on purpose or whatever. I don't think they probably would go that far. But certainly once a thing was out and they had the excuse to lock the country down, I think they did that as a destabilization campaign against Trump just as well as it was, you know, centrally decided that they're going to make George cops kill people every day, pretty much, you know, every week. And, but they decided they're going to make this one a huge cause and they're going to have these huge protests and riots and all this. And you can see there really is a centralized control now. Think of what, like, I mean, never mind everything that, that the DOGE released about usaid. Just think about what we already know from my book that came out last year. But then we have everything that DOGE released about USAID and their ties to all of these nos. I don't know if anyone, even Mike Benz or, or Jesus or From a Cloud or anyone could actually perceive the forest of NGOs and the level of control that exists, you know, through the Democratic Party and all of their allies in this country, all the cronyism and all of the payola and everything built into that thing. And so, you know, what if Donald Trump wants to do a RICO case on that and show me the George Soros in that? I mean, I am just so. Oh, I meant to wrap up on the COVID thing. Any governor that does that, of course, was risking their own governorship. But that would be worth taking the hit if we can bring down the president. Right. And which was the point, right, was to really destabilize the country. Remember Trump tried to run ads where it was showing the burning riots and he said, this is Biden's America. And it was like, actually, you're the one sitting there right now. And. But it was his own regime was either aiding and abetting it or at least we're turning the other way and allowing all of this to happen, really to, I think almost certainly to get him. And so, no, I don't want to see like, you know, whatever, a new national police force to round up all the hippies and persecute them. But if there are specific people who need indicting, especially the powerful ones who have been behind organizing these networks. Treat, you know, if, if Antifa is really nothing different than OTPOR or one of these other groups or you know, they have, as I show in the book, there's, there's a million of them. There's one for, for every one of these tulip revolutions, they have these youth groups where they go out there, they get all of this money and go out there and cause whatever level of crisis is needed to destabilize the country and force a regime change. And so yeah, and then here's another thing that would be perfectly acceptable for any anti government person or any right winger too, like a pro government right winger is let's defund from all public funds from at all, from all states, all liberal arts departments, in every college. I mean, I'm for abolishing all government school of any kind, but whatever. If you people want to leave math and science and engineering or whatever, fine. But why in the world should we be forced to pay for people to be taught to hate the country and try to destroy it and to never get a job? We should not be doing that.
- [64:27]
Scott Horton
I mean, there's a libertarian solution to that. Like there's a libertarian solution to that problem right there. And you don't have to go around banning programs or anything. All the federal government has to do is say we're not going to guarantee loans anymore.
- [64:41]
Daryl Cooper
Right.
- [64:42]
Scott Horton
And so. Or, you know, or make the schools themselves put them on the hook for part of that part of that money. If you do that, then all of a sudden they're going to say, you want $200,000 to go to school? Great. What are you studying? Oh, you're an engineer. This is your high school gpa. We think you can probably get through. Great. Here you go. Here's 200 grand. You want to study what gender? No, no, you're never going to pay us back. You're crazy. You're not getting. 99% of those would go away overnight. You'd have a few boutique programs here and there for rich kids who want to go, you know, do whatever. Like, we always had that kind of stuff that would solve the problem, like literally overnight. You know, I remember of all the things, same thing, that Molly Ball article from Time magazine. That's exact. If I remember one thing from it, it's that exact part. Because it hit me the hardest is it was a combination of two points that were related. Is one, as they said, throughout the summer, throughout that entire period, there were weekly calls being held that had all of these media people, people who were in local and state government, people who were organizers of Black Lives Matter and the protests during the George Floyd riots, all these. And Democrats leaders, of course, all of these people on weekly calls to plan and talk about, like, okay, like, you know, how can we use Covid this week to get a certain message across, or how can we take control of the narrative this week and turn it to our advantage? And one of the things that they said was what you said. They said they had it all prepared, that if Trump won the election, they had in 400American cities and towns, I guess it must be towns too, because you get to the 400th biggest city and you're talking about a town they had protesters ready to go organized by the same people who organized the protests over the summer. So that means they had riots ready to go in 400American cities. And the fact that they were able to just call them off, you know, because, I mean, it really does go to show you the, the, the level of control that, that somebody somewhere has over these things. Because the thing is, if these were just hardcore true believer types, I mean, look, Trump didn't win the election that night, but he, he did, he didn't concede. You know, he went out there and said, this is, this is a bunch of crap and we're going to fight this and we're not going to let this happen. And so if those people were just true believers and not members of like a sponsored fight club, you know, they would have gone out the next day to protest this fascist guy who's saying he's not going to accept the results. But they didn't, you know, and it's because somebody out there can pull that string or not pull it. And that's the kind of thing that, I mean, you go back, I mean, everybody loves like the, you know, reading Tom Wolf talk about this and everything. But you go through like, back in the 60s and 70s, you have these crazy situations. Whether you're talking about like Lincoln Detox in the South Bronx where, you know, you have this essentially like section of Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx. It's just taken over by a bunch of black and Puerto Rican radicals who are using it as like a drug lab and a radicalization center for drug addicts. I mean, and all funded by government money, all funded by grants from the city. Even as, like, you know, when they try to reduce the grant. One time a bunch of the employees went down to city hall and trashed a bunch of offices and stuff. I mean, and these are like government funded programs in people. I mean, you would, there were times where you would have organizations that were funded with city money that are rioting at city hall. And you know, when you, like, that's why people look at it and they, you know, and they look at stuff like in that Time magazine article, realizing that riots in 400American cities, which means, I mean, if you look over the course of the summer, we see what that means. That means dozens of people killed potentially. You know, it means people losing their livelihoods, their, their homes, their businesses. All that, that, that was on tap. And that people, I think, like, here's the crazy thing. The phone calls, according to that article, where these things were being decided and organized, had local and state government officials on those calls. You had Democratic Party apparatchiks on those calls with the protest organizers. You know, and so these were things that were being organized at the highest levels. I mean, and when people, this is the kind of thing that when people hear it, they say, okay, yeah, and you want us to deal with this with what kind of like mittens on? No, we need to deal with this with a mailed fist. That is the only way that this kind of thing has ever been fixed and solved. And, you know, we need to find out who's responsible for this. And there's not going to be any legal loopholes. There's not going to be, you know, some, some way they can slide out of it. If you're doing this kind of thing and it's leading to this, then we're just, we're going to deal with you. There's a reason that the, you know, the Uncle Pinochet memes are so popular on the Right. These days, you know, the, the like, communist free helicopter ride stuff. And it's because people don't see a peaceful way to deal with people and, and to deal with forces that, that don't seem to care about the rules. Like, it's just the idea that, like, if you play by the rules, you're not going to be able to beat people who don't, don't. And that's where people are at right now. And I honestly don't know. I don't know what to tell those people. I. I tell them I don't want them to go down that road, but when they challenge me, honestly, I just sort of sputter at them like, I. I don't have a good. I don't have a whole lot of good arguments to make Torn these days, you know?
- [70:28]
Daryl Cooper
Yeah. So something that's really important that's worth mentioning here in this, you know, know better be obsolete by the time this video comes out. But by the time we're recording this on Thursday night, the cops let the guy get away and they let some idiot divert them, which was really weird. I don't know if you saw the original footage of the old bald guy saying, I have the right to remain silent, right? He wasn't saying, hey, you got the wrong guy. He went that way, right? He was like. Which maybe it was already understood before that clip that the cops knew good and well, and he knew that they knew that they knew that he knew that everybody knew that. Of course, he didn't have a gun and didn't do it. They were just arresting him for something else obstructing them or, you know, yelling in their face or doing something. You know what I mean? I don't know exactly what happened right after that, but just right before that, but it looked really weird. And then when they were marching him away, he was saying, just kill me, just kill me. Which is like he's acting in a way like he's in on this somehow or something, or at least he's trying to keep them from doing their job while the actual shooter is getting away. I don't know if that means that he knew anything about it or just being opportunist to participate in the show somehow or whatever. But at the time we're recording this, they released a picture of a guy with a hat and glasses on and said, yeah, let us know. They don't even know his name yet. And they said, they. The last thing I saw was they have a driveway camera of a guy walking by, but it's from across the street, you can't see anything. Just a guy walking down the street. So I think that's amazing that for all of the surveillance and all of their powers, that. And of course, it was the federal police there, you know, swung right into action. It wasn't just the local sheriff's department or whatever in charge, local university police, they had every jurisdiction, you know, involved immediately. And they couldn't catch this guy. He could be anywhere by now, which, you know, I'm sure we'll find out that he didn't go too far, but who knows? But it just goes to show, like, just how completely in common. And then there's footage of the guy. People saw him up on the roof and I guess didn't say to a cop, like, hey, I think there might be a sniper up there. Like, they just showed him to each other and then didn't do anything.
- [72:44]
Scott Horton
Yeah, I don't know. And for all the people there who are saying that this had to be some kind of a professional hit because of, you know, hitting. Hitting somebody that accurately at 200 yards, somebody who has fired a lot of rifles, I could teach you to hit a dinner plate at 200 yards in three hours. So that's. Don't. Don't go down that road. That's. That's nonsense. Yeah.
- [73:08]
Daryl Cooper
It's people who don't know about guns who say stuff like that and just. It's so much easier to just find a gun guy and ask him, because if you do, they'll all say exactly the same thing. Yeah. 30:06. I mean, that's what they're for, is reaching out and touching things with, you know, I don't know, what do you.
- [73:25]
Scott Horton
Think it's gonna do if you're. If you're undisturbed, lying in a prone position with your gun rested on something, It's. That's not a hard shot. And so, you know, this is not. This is not jfk, you know, moving target in a vehicle from a window while you're, you know, standing up or something. This is. It's not a hard shot. You know, who knows what actually happened? Obviously, like you said, we haven't caught the guy yet. I mean, they better catch him soon, man, because, like, that's the worst possible thing that could happen is if people on any side start getting in their heads that, you know, so you're saying there's a chance, like, we could get away with this. Like, that's the worst case scenario. The very least, the message needs to be sent that if you are Going to do something like this, you better be suicidal because there's no chance you're getting away. And, and probably the best case scenario for you is that you catch a bullet before they arrest you. Because if that doesn't happen, you are going to see an escalation and a multiplication of this kind of thing.
- [74:27]
Daryl Cooper
Yeah, and look, I mean it's natural and healthy to fantasize about hurting Democrats. You know, I can sympathize, but it doesn't mean we gotta go that direction. We gotta think better about that. And, and, and look, for everyone. You know, I don't know when I, I learned this as a kid, I learned as just as a given, right, like clouds are made out of water vapor. And free speech is important, right? These are things that people all know and understand that whether you believe in natural rights theory or whatever, we're all each individually born screaming, right? We can talk and if it makes sense to you, as it does to me, but if you own yourself, then you must own the property that you just acquire, then obviously you have the right to say anything you want on your own property, to print anything you want and distribute it to any willing recipient. And our tradition has been at least that. The same goes for publicly owned spaces, right? Town squares and, and public streets and whatever, where obviously you don't have the right to trespass on other people's property. But otherwise, like, yeah, unless this is the Orient, then yeah, we, we have freedom of speech. Of course we do, dude. So there's that. The natural right of people to just say what they want. And if you want your right to be respected, then you got to tolerate others. But then there's the utility of the whole thing, which all the founders agreed that of course if the whole idea of this country is that the people are sovereign, they're born free and they allow this regime to exist to protect their rights. Not this is the regime ordained by God to rule this land and you people are lucky enough to suffer under it as its subjects, as is the tradition in the old world. If it's the same reason we have the right to bear arms, respect it. Not that we have it that same reason they respect the right to bear arms in the Constitution. The whole premise is that of course we come first, we allow you to be our security force. How could you take our guns away? Way that doesn't make any sense, right? Same thing here. They don't have the right to limit our freedom of speech. And then of course it's also important for the purposes of, you know, for utilitarian purposes. Right. That we have the ability to object to things that we think are wrong, especially without having to go to prison for it. And, you know, in the tradition of the entire west and everywhere in the world is that treason means when you disagree with the government. You know, in the Soviet Union, if you disagree with the government, they put you in a mental hospital and think about what goes on in there. You know what I mean? That's not healthcare. You know, this is. That's the tradition of everywhere but here, even in Canada and Mexico. Right. It's. Here is where we absolutely have to protect freedom of speech. And that goes for the same thing. I was just thinking when you were talking about. And I guess I. I mentioned the word too, when I was talking about from the financial crash, where suicide comes up. Well, you're not allowed to ever say that word on YouTube or they'll just censor you, like, right out of oblivion. Like, I don't want to say just unnecessary curse words and get us d ranked for that. But, man, we got to be able to discuss these subjects. And I don't care if they d rank us for discussing that when it comes up. What are we going to do? Not talk about that when it comes up is ridiculous. And they better start respecting our free speech. You know, that's what's the problem there. Not we need to give in to them. They need to give in to the fact that people got the right to say what they want and everybody needs to respect that. After all, this was the thing. The guy has freedom on his shirt, right? And then. And then the banner on the thing says prove me wrong, right? When they kill them. When he.
- [78:20]
Scott Horton
Yeah, and I think, you know, shot. And I think, you know, Charlie would have. One of the things he would have pointed out is that, you know, the government putting people in jail for saying the wrong thing is obviously one of the ways that freedom of speech falls apart. But freedom of speech is a culture as much as it's a policy, you know, or way, probably way more than it's a policy. You go back to Weimar Germany in the 1920s and read the Constitution. They had basically what we would call freedom of speech. It wasn't written like the first Amendment, but it was written into the law that people could say what they wanted. But no, you couldn't. Because if you were right winger, you were going to have communists show up to your meetings with, you know, stink bombs, if you were lucky, bullets and grenades if you weren't. If you were a left winger, you were going to have National Socialists or somebody else show up and break up your party. And so they didn't have freedom of speech because the culture just wasn't there. And this was the part of it that Charlie Kirk really represented. He was. He understood and he looked around and look, he could have. It is very. It is very, very lucrative to just be a. A firebrand, you know, out there just. Just breathing smoke out of your nostrils and calling for the destruction of your enemy. There's a ton of people out there who, who build huge platforms doing that. And especially, like, it is not always, you know, it can be. It can be a really thankless position to take sometimes to do what Charlie did, where he would take it from the. From the right as hard as he took it from the left sometimes, you know, because he wouldn't go far enough because he's treating these people with too much respect and all that. If you care about what happened to him and if you feel bad about that, then respond to it the way that, you know, in the spirit that he would want you to respond to it. It, you know, and, and don't really just like, trash his life's mission, basically, in your response to this thing that happened to him, you know, because, I mean, I would just say, you know, he's the one who sacrificed himself for it and, you know, so he should be the one who. Who really has the most say in how we respond to it. We've got enough public statements and just. And just enough of him out there that we actually know the answer to that question of how he'd want us to respond to it, you know, and. And locking down freedom of speech, locking down, just especially, you know, using the, you know, using this, the state, let alone more just reciprocal political violence from right to left. These are all the. The absolute last things that he would have wanted to happen. And so, you know, if you're talking like that and going down that road and trying to convince other people to come with you, you're not really fighting for the memory of Charlie Kirk or anything like that. You're just fighting. And I would encourage everybody not to do that, especially right now, because, you know, it's times like this where a lot of this stuff, a lot of things that don't make sense, normally things like this happen, really intense stuff's going on, and suddenly they seem to make a little more sense than they used to, but then that's going to fade, and those things aren't going to make as much sense anymore. And you don't Want to be one of the people who look back. I've been there. I mean, we've all been there probably at some point, you know, look back on things you said or things you did after one of these crisis moments and have to just sort of, you know, own the fact that as the society was ramping itself up into a. Into a conflict model, that, that your contribution to it was to help just a little bit, intensify it, rather than to de. Escalate and try to make things better. And that's none of us should be doing, especially if you're on the right and interested in, like, putting over the. The, you know, the policy goals and cultural and social goals of the. Of the right. You need to understand what Scott said earlier, that this is these type of things happening. This is not a show of strength by the left. This is like desperation from the left. This is like flailing because the right, I mean, it's like. It's like you said, the left is in the position of The Republicans in 2009 now after George W. Bush, where nobody takes him seriously. They, you know, and all the right has to do is keep their cool and keep marching forward. And, you know, that's how you can honor the memory of Charlie Kirk and just, you know, get through this in a way that preserves your own dignity and lets you. Lets you, you know, really look at yourself in the mirror when it's all done.
- [83:03]
Daryl Cooper
So, yeah, and look, people shouldn't lose sight of the beauty of capitalism too, man. The whole thing is that as long as we're all trading with each other, then it doesn't matter what we look like and it doesn't matter what we believe in. Right? We all use the same funny money and we all more or less speak English. And so we can do. We do. Everybody gets up in the morning and they go out and they engage in commerce all day long with people that they don't know, with people who are from different places, who believe different things in them, who look different from them, who they might not even like at all. But this is where we get the best price for the thing that we need for the project we're doing. And that's how the world works. So that's why there's no war ever coming between Austin and Round Rock. You know what I mean? And yes, it's true. The Democrats live there and the Republicans live here. I'm in Round right now. I'm from Travis county, but I'm. I've been gentrified. But the point is that we got too much at stake. We're too interdependent with each other. And so you don't have to like each other. We don't have to all like hermitize and, and separate and, and disavow each other's culture. We are all Americans. We don't have to agree on everything at all. But we're not going anywhere. You know what I mean? It's not like the right's going to be able to get rid of the left. So then, I mean, and right now the Democrats especially, and really the, the left, generally speaking, but especially the Democratic Party is in such a position of weakness. All of their leaders are so old and decrepit and degenerate and discredited and they're just pathetic. And I saw where I forgot which poll it was, but the Republicans numbers went down a little bit and then so did the Democrats. The Democrats did not go up. You know, on the other side of the seesaw, they're just falling too. People are just so sick of them. And then after this, I mean, just this alone is going to cost them however many points on the margin right there. And so, yeah, now is not the time to be totalitarians. Now's the time to conserve the revolution of 76. That's what conservatism is supposed to be about. It's what liberalism is supposed to be about too, quite frankly. But y' all are all a bunch of terrible deviationists from true Americanism, which is the Declaration of Independence, natural rights and free markets and property and capitalism. So. So that's that. And now we're so out of time and over time. But it is September 11, and so it seems like somebody might say something about that. Probably you would say something wise about it. And then also we gotta talk about this, that we have these drones, these Russian drones shot down over Poland, the road. Let me just report to you. The Russians say, oh, come on, they jammed our drones and drove them off course. Well, Poland invoked Article 4, which is not Article 5, but it says, oh, we need an emergency consultation about what the allies are going to do about this. So they found every reason to want to exploit the crisis and ramp things up and say, see, I told you so, and this kind of thing about the war and make it worse, rather than finding an opportunity to ramp things down. I guess I would just say we should leave NATO immediately. But everybody already knows that. But you see what an absolutely filthy moral hazard is built into this thing where we got the polls, who they got to know. There's at least a good chance the Ukrainians jammed the Russian drones and drove them off course. We don't know what the percentage likelihood is. Maybe they know it for a fact or what. But there's no reason why the Russians are going to fly a bunch of unarmed drones over Poland just to get them shot down and create a crisis like this.
- [86:51]
Scott Horton
So they're, they're avoided doing things like that this entire war. Yeah. You know.
- [86:58]
Daryl Cooper
Yeah. When there's an accident. Right. Yeah. They accidentally shot a missile, a defensive missile went off course and hit a farmhouse in, in Poland. And they invoked Article 5 and all this stuff. Zielinski lied about it, said it was a Russian missile. We know it was. So. Yes, God dang it. And then. I'm sorry. But then September 11th. Say something smart man. It's been a long time. And, and God dang, the world has suffered a hell of a lot in response to that thing.
- [87:22]
Scott Horton
Yeah, I mean, you know, September 11th was kind of the, like, the way I judge generations isn't like, you know, you're Gen X if you were born between this and that, it's. How do you, like, what, what stage of your life were you in when some pivotal civilization defining event happened or when something changed? You know, if you were a kid who was watching your parents deal with that scenario, that's. You're a different generation than, you know, somebody who, who was a young adult who was dealing with it. Right. And so, you know, those of us who were, who were young adults, I was, I guess I was 20 when 9, 11 happened already in the military. And so, you know, that's the culture I was in and the stage of life I was in. And for my DoD job, you know, I would often go out to US military bases for work. And it got to the point in 20, 19, 20, 20, you know, right before I stopped working for the DOD, that I would go out there and I'd meet some of these young soldiers, sailors, airmen, who were 18, 17, 18 years old. You can get into the military at 17 still, with your parents permission. 17, 18 years old. And I would start talking to them. This was, in fact, it was 2020, because the election was coming up and people would be talking about it. And I realized, like, there's going to be people voting in this election who were not alive when 9, 11 happened, you know, who were 7 years old when the financial crisis hit, who were, I mean, shoot, there were people there, there are people now who are of voting age who were like 10 years old when Trump announced his candidacy. You Know, and that stuff is. It's hard to wrap your head around sometimes and just, you know, and realize that. And I. But I think it's important to, to realize it because, you know, it helps make you a little more tolerant of the way people sort of relate to a lot of these events. You know, somebody who is, who is 4 years old when 911 happened is never going to relate to it the way, you know, you were if you were a young adult watching this happen on TV and, you know, and, and those type of experiences and all of the things that happen afterwards. I know you've. I mean, you've banged your head against this wall so many times, like, you know, trying to get through to people in the lead up to the Ukraine war and the lead up to this Iran war. Everything. People. A lot of these people, they weren't around for Iraq. They didn't. They weren't there in 2002, or they were too young to remember it. You know, and so trying to explain to some, you know, to some of the younger people that none of this stuff is new. We've seen this playbook a million times. And preserving the memory of that and realizing that really the people who do these things are not that creative. They just run the same play over and over because they have new batches of people to put over. You know, to put it over on 911 was, you know, it was. You hate to, you hate to say it, but like, you know, the grant. When the history books are finally written, they may, they may, they may record that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda won the war that they declared on the United States. You know, because our reaction to that event, in a weird way, it's contributed even to the things we're talking about in this episode. It's impoverished people. It's made people just completely distrust and, you know, all of the institutions that they, that they, that they need to be able to have some amount of faith in if we're going to hold ourselves together as a cohesive society. It's destroyed the economy. It is just sharpened and sort of militarized our politics to a degree that again, if you're 20 years old now, that's the only politics you've ever known is just cut throat. You're a Nazi, you're a communist, you're a terrorist. Fu. Politics, you know, that's all, you know, and, and so even, yeah. You know, even this stuff that, that we're seeing today is, in a way, it's. It's still fallout from that. And you wonder if. If that blow was fatal. And I, you know, and I, and I hope it wasn't, but it's going to take. It's going to take real effort and sacrifice to put things back on course. And we're going to have. I mean, you said the key thing, right? Which unless you're, you know, unless you're the Israelis dealing with the Palestinians, it is impossible to indulge the fantasy that your opponents are not going to be around tomorrow. You know, they can indulge that fantasy if they want. Here in America, the people that you hate, they're still going to be here tomorrow, and they're going to be here the next day. And you've got to live with these people, you know, and politically, I mean, I think the answer to that. You went right to it. It's subsidiarity. You know, it's like let everything that can be handled at the lowest possible level be handled at that level. You know, a presidential election or a Supreme Court nomination is not as big of a deal. If Alabama can have their abortion laws and New York can have theirs, and everybody's just sort of accepts that that's how it is, then it, that by itself turns the temperature down on, on our politics tremendously. Just because the stakes are so much lower, right? And, and because, you know, if you, if you don't like the policies that you're living under, it's a matter of moving to the next town or county or maybe state and not trying to find a new country to, to go live in. You know, and I think that the events like, of this week, for a lot of people, including a lot of people who don't pay a whole lot of attention to politics but are sort of vaguely aware of who Charlie Kirk was and everything, it's sort of torn open and spilled out onto the table. You know, the, this, the, the, the. The damage that we've allowed to accumulate in our society and our political system over the last 25 years. And there's a lot to clean up up. And, and we need to get started on that now if we're going to have any chance of it. And, and so, you know, again, like, I think to honor the memory of Charlie Kirk, whether you like this look after what's happened, after where he's at now, what, whatever disagreements anybody had with them are totally irrelevant. Okay? He's gone. That's it. His kids and his wife are, are who survive him. And all the disagreements you had are completely irrelevant. The fact is, he was a, he was a nice he was a good person. You know, he's a good father, and he was a good husband, and he was just a. He was a kind. Like, I only met him one time, talked to him only for a few minutes, and he's one of those guys who, you know, I was nobody at the time. This was before I kind of blew up. It was at a conference. He treated me like I was the only person in the room. Everybody there wanting his attention, but he was talking to me at the time, and he was locked in, treating me like I was the only person in the room. He was just a kind person, a generous person, and that's all that matters at this point when you think of his memory. And so that's. That. That's the aspect of his life that we all have to try to. To honor. And if we do that, you know, we'll at least be taking a tentative step in the right direction. So. Yeah.
- [94:45]
Daryl Cooper
All right. That's a great place to leave it. Thanks, Darrell, and thanks, everybody. We'll see you next week.
- [95:05]
Scott Horton
Sorry, Chris. Thanks, brother.
- [95:07]
Daryl Cooper
No, it's all good. I'm over here at my sister's house, hanging out with me and mom, taking.
- [95:10]
Scott Horton
Care with her today, so it's all good.
- [95:15]
Daryl Cooper
That was an excellent. That was awesome, by the way.
- [95:19]
Scott Horton
Yeah. Okay, cool. I mean, I was at first, you know, yesterday, right after this happened, like, I was ready to come in here just breathing fire, but after, I'm glad, you know, I'm glad that this didn't happen this morning. I'm glad it happened today. I just had a chance to sleep on. I was like. It's what I said, you know, like, there's just too often where I look back and I'm like, you know, like, I contributed to making that situation worse, not better, and having to. Having to just sort of know that, and I. And I'm. You know, I don't want to do that here, so I do need to.
- [95:52]
Daryl Cooper
I do need to run, guys. You guys can stay in here and chat.
- [95:55]
Scott Horton
Yeah, no, I gotta.