← Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton
Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton
EP:15 - LIVE - SPECIAL GUEST - Auron MacIntyre : The Reason Magazine Hit Piece
01:06:44
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- [00:32]
A
Sam.
- [01:24]
B
All right, y', all, welcome to the show. It's Provoked with me, Scott Horton and him, Daryl Cooper. And we're gonna start off with a spot here real quick and get out of the way for the Expat Money Summit coming up on the 10th through 12th. And this is Mikhail Thorup. He's a really good guy and traveled around the world ten times or something. And he knows all the rules and regulations for how you can buy property in other countries, get dual citizenship or otherwise protect your assets. And no gimmicks. You know, this is all about how to pay your taxes and stay out of jail, but as little as possible. And the whole thing is free and it's a real substantive thing. You'll really learn a lot. And yes, they do have some upsells, but you will not waste your time on the free version. It's really great stuff. It's a two day long summit, Expat Money Summit. And just go to expatmoneysummit.com provoked to check it out. That is the 10th through the 12th. And then also Provoked is brought to you by the book Provoked, written by me, was supposed to be co authored by him, but he dropped out and I wrote it instead. But it's really good and you'll all want to spend a lot of money on a lot of copies for all your friends and family too. Okay, so a little bit of business before we really begin the show is I wanted to say thank you to Julian Dorey. He and his buddy Joey had me out to Hoboken, New Jersey, which is a real nice little town. I had only ever heard of it before because it has a funny sounding name, but it's a real place. And now I've been there and I had a really great sandwich from Lucy's Deli. And I went and hung out with Julian Dory and did his podcast for a little while. The other day they had me out there and it was a lot of fun. So I think they said it's not going to be out for a few weeks. So that's how they do it over there, I guess. I don't know. But keep your eyes out for that. And then I was on Judge Napolitano show the other day, if anybody wants to look at that too, I guess. And then also today I interviewed Ted Snyder on my show, the Scott Horton show, and that'll be up on my channel, slash, Scott Horton show here before too long. And with that, that's all the business I got. How the hell are you? Darrell Cooper, Martyr Maid.
- [03:32]
C
Perfect timing. I just got finished posting the link to the show, which I forgot to do, so I'm good, man. You know, I'm recovering from my wounds from the vicious attack that was levied against me and several of my friends in Reason magazine. But I am recovering, you know.
- [03:49]
B
Yeah. Well, with that, let's go ahead and introduce one of our mutual friends here, Oren McIntyre from the Blaze. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?
- [03:59]
A
Doing well, guys, thanks for having me.
- [04:01]
B
Absolutely. Happy to have you here. So, first of all, on behalf of all of libertarianism, I disavow Reason magazine as all libertarians do. Now, Jesse Walker, of course, is worthy of our respect, but I got to read their morning email about how Israel is defending themselves from Hamas every morning. And I've been tired of those guys for a long time anyway, but I'm so over them. And as you correctly characterize them on your show, Oren, they're the regime libertarians, which is a very, very small subset of the libertarian movement. Just so you know. And with that out of the way, have Adam. Guys, they called you a couple of right wing rikests. What's the matter with you? Or them after all. Anyway.
- [04:47]
A
Well, Scott, I appreciate you being one of the good ones, you know, I appreciate it.
- [04:50]
B
Thank you, thank you. Most of us are Ron Paul folk and no, you know what I should say too, I've always gotten along with Nick Gillespie. He's not exactly my point of view on everything, but he seems like a really good guy. But okay, I'm done defending them now. They said that you guys are obsessed with Carl Schmidt, and Carl Schmidt wrote that Adolf Hitler can do whatever he wants. I guess so. You guys apparently have a real problem. Is that right?
- [05:16]
C
Why don't you go ahead, brother? You're the main subject of the article. So.
- [05:21]
A
Well, as Daryl and I were laughing about before we got started here, I don't think I've ever heard Daryl mentioned Carl Schmidt once in my life. They're just like, yeah, seems like a Nazi. Just kind of round them all up there. By the way, it should be noted that Yoram Harzoni is one of the key figures in the piece. The Jewish, you know, nationalist art and Jewish nationalist. Funny thing, I've, I've interviewed everybody on the front of that piece except Carl Schmidt because that would require some necromancy. But I bet, of course I cast caught quite a bit of flack for having Harzoni on my show because I just talk to everybody. I want to understand what's going on I may agree with you, I may not, but ultimately, I just want to grasp the situation and have a conversation. And the fact that he got roped into this whole thing as, like, a dangerous Schmidian was incredibly comical. But, yeah, there's a real problem with, I guess we could broadly say the right at the moment, I guess, if that's what we want to call it. But there's a subsection, conservative and libertarian, who decide that there's, like, intellectual cooties. And if you read something that someone mildly disagrees with, then ultimately you are 100% a proponent of everything that person said. So, for instance, you can't read Plato's Republic because he talked about how you have to take people's children when they're seven years old and train them, you know, to be good fascists. And so therefore, anyone who referenced Plato or the Republic is obviously, you know, de facto for stealing people's children at 10 years old and turning to fascists. That's just how philosophy works. If you read any philosopher, you automatically agree with everything that philosopher has ever said, which is why everyone who reads Aristotle believes that everyone is a slave. You know, that that's. That's just how reading philosophy works. That's the level of intellectual rigor we're dealing with at Reason magazine.
- [07:11]
B
Yeah, well, and I think the point.
- [07:13]
C
Hang on real quick, Scott. Hold on. Am I the only person who. It sounds like a terrorist attack just took place in Orin's vicinity or something. Like there was a weird sound and now you're kind of sounding bubbly and we.
- [07:24]
A
Weird. Oh, is there a problem with my audio? Is it still going?
- [07:26]
C
Nope. Yeah, I don't know.
- [07:27]
A
What.
- [07:28]
C
There you go.
- [07:29]
B
Yeah, I. I think it went out for a minute, but I think you're back now. I think. Sorry.
- [07:32]
C
Yeah, we heard everything, though. It was just a little bit. Yeah, go ahead, Scott.
- [07:36]
B
It was good enough, though, and I think we're fixed. So. Yeah, look, the point of the piece is, you know, in spite of the fusion project that Daryl and I are working on here, the point was to say that the two U and a couple other associated type people, you're not just conservatives. You're to the right of conservatism. You're to, I guess, the radical right, where now the rule of law doesn't count and you both just want to kill your enemies. I guess invoke Barack Obama's NDA of 2012 or NDAA of 2012 and start rounding people up and throwing them in Guantanamo Bay, which is something I don't think I've heard either of you say. I watch your show pretty regularly, Oren, and I know Darrell pretty good. We talk usually like once a week or so. And I hadn't heard so much of that. So I guess that is the question though. And I've posed this question to Darrell before. Well, just how far to the right are you guys? Obviously you're to the right, not just of reason, but to the right of me. But how far to the right do you go?
- [08:40]
C
Well, I mean, you know, I tell people the same thing whenever that question comes up is it depends on what's going on in the world. You know, I'd love to be a libertarian again. That would be awesome. I would love to live in a, live in a world where I could be perfectly comfortable being a libertarian. But you know, that that's not the world we live in in political systems and political ideas. You know, people have this idea that principles are these things, that they're what makes a principle a principle is that they don't change based on any circumstance. They're like sacred, you know, and I just don't think that that's how politics has ever worked or should work. You know, you have to look at, you know, it's interesting actually in the reason piece, two of the, two of the, of the points that they make sort of to indict Carl Schmitt, it cites his legal argument justifying the 1932 Prussian coup as so called coup. And in 1934, the night of the Long Knives, right, where Hitler had the leaders of the SA rounded up and many of them killed, murdered. And you know, it says that the 1932 coup against Prussia, which basically what happened, you had the Prussian government, the parliament was so hopelessly divided that they couldn't form a coalition and there was no constitutional provision for that situation. And so the head of state at the time, von Papen, he stepped in and just appointed by diktat a government in Prussia to kind of keep things moving. And the reason piece says, you know, that this sort of, this weakened the Weimar constitutional order and paved the way and provided the tools that Hitler would later use to consolidate his power. And it's like kinda I guess you could make that case, but there was no real constitutional order in Weimar to protect at that point. I mean, you're talking about 1932. You know, this is Germany's being torn apart by street, I mean not street fights, street running, gun battles in the streets between communists and right wing militia groups. The Communist Party is the largest party in the country at the time, directly tied to Moscow. And everybody knows it. This isn't like a Russian collusion thing. They were taking orders and getting funding directly from Moscow in order to overthrow the existing German government and work them into the communist world with the rest of the conquered nations at that point. And so Germany's in this place where most people felt for very, very good reason that they were facing a choice between communism and Remember, this is 1932. The bodies are still warm from the holodomor, like just a few hundred miles to the east. You know, I mean, people know in Germany, people know what's going on there. They know millions and millions of people have been butchered in the last 15 years and, and they're facing a choice between communism or somebody who. Yeah, yeah, you love the autism hands, we all do. Or somebody who is willing to sweep aside the limits of the Weimar constitutional order. That reason is so in love with as many liberals then and now always have been, when what could have prevented Hitler? If anything could have prevented it, it would have been a strong executive of the type that Schmidt was talking about that could have done something about this communist insurgency. But the people felt like they had no choice except to bring somebody in who was not going to be. Let themselves be limited by that. You know, the second thing that they brought up again was a night of the long knives. And this is, you know, there's this tendency among modern people to take political ideas that are perfectly, you know, applicable to Vermont in 1952 and apply them to Germany in 1932, you know, or apply them to ancient Rome when they're talking about Caesar or something. It's just, it's a tendency people have to apply what they know to things that are radically different. You go to 1934, the essay is 2 million. This is a 2 million man street army, okay? In Germany, in a Weimar Republic that is forbidden from having more than 100,000 troops in its military or like military police forces around the country. They have a 2 million man army of street soldiers who are openly starting to talk about maybe we need to overthrow Hitler because he's not moving fast enough. He's making compromises with some of the existing power structures and all these kind of things. And so rather than wait for that to build up and manifest, you know, Hitler made a call, he went in and he arrested and rounded up and killed a lot of the leaders and kind of shut that down. Now that was mass murder, no question about it was, that was politically sanctioned, judicially sanctioned murder. No Doubt. But again, like, I would like to know what Reason magazine or all the people who, who, who would criticize that, criticize what Schmidt had to say about it, you know, what their, what their solution would be in a situation like that, you know, and I, I never get that part from him. It's just that, well, these things work in Vermont. They would work there, you know, but.
- [13:54]
B
So your point is that Schmidt wasn't that far to the right in the first place, so their measure is not such a big deal or what is it?
- [14:01]
C
No, my point is that, you know, when people talk about Schmidt, they want to talk about him as if he rose up through the ranks of American academia and now is a Supreme Court Judge in Washington D.C. you know, and like, here's what he's doing and how it relates to the American Republic or something.
- [14:18]
B
So you're saying really applicable if somebody wants to talk about you or Oren's beliefs. He's not really part of that discussion in the first place. I know. Oren, you were saying on your show the other day, I quote George Washington every day. What are you talking about? And they even admit in the article, right, that McIntyre does say that current laws on the books could be applied to accomplish everything he's talking about here, this radical who wants a right wing revolution.
- [14:47]
A
The fun thing about that article is that it's written in this style. Two or three paragraphs of absolute libel, complete falsehoods, complete fear mongering. And then they have to, after every two to three paragraphs, include in some parentheses the fact that actually I don't believe any of the things that they just assigned to me, that I say specifically that actually we should be bound by the law, that ultimately Trump should be acting under the color of law, that Schmidt is bad for being a Nazi, that Nazism is bad, and it's good that they lost. And I decry fascism. They have to like go in and caveat that after just, it's the most schizophrenic article ever. They have to, they're like, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie. Oh, by the way, he didn't actually say any of this. Lie, lie, lie, lie, lie. And that's the entire article. So the funny thing about Carl Schmitt is Carl Schmitt is a synthesis of Thomas Hobbes and Joseph de Maistre. And if you don't know anything about political philosophy, you know, Thomas Hobbes is the father of classical liberalism. You know, you have Lockean liberalism and you have Hobbesian liberalism, and these Two strains go in different directions. But ultimately this is the beginning, most people recognize, of liberalism. So in its very inception, this line of thought is fundamentally liberal to its core. And when you synthesize it with something like Joseph de Maistre, what you're trying to show ultimately is, you know, this is Schmidt's entire point.
- [16:17]
B
Tell it.
- [16:18]
A
I'm sorry, Joseph. Joseph Demistra. Yeah. So Demistra was a French philosopher, actually. He served in the Kingdom of Sardinia, but he wrote a lot. He was a. He was an arch Catholic. He spent a lot of time defending the church and its authority and these things. Very reactionary. In response, he has a famous volume on the French Revolution, probably second only to either Burke or maybe Thomas Carlyle as an authority on the French Revolution. And so this is a guy who very much opposed the excesses of kind of this revolutionary liberalism that was taking hold in France. The point of both of these thinkers, ultimately, is to say that at some point, for the civil order to be maintained, someone has to make a decision. And whoever that person is that can make the final decision, the ultimate decision, that person is the sovereign. This is why Carl Schmitt said, the sovereign is he who decides on the exception. There are constitutional systems, and for the majority of the time, the constitutional system is the one that we follow. But in moments of decision, you know, for instance, the Romans, obviously, they had a literal office of dictator, right? You had these two consuls, and they were the ones who were elected for the year, and they could disagree and they could have different roles. But if the. If Rome needed one decisive force for six months to make a decision on what was going to happen, in a dire moment, they installed a dictator. In fact, Schmidt wrote an entire book about dictatorships and the different types of dictatorships and the different levels of dictatorships and when they're appropriate and when they aren't, and when they legally fit into constitutions and when they don't. And so Schmidt is just going through a well established understanding of how constitutions and sovereignty interact. A lot of people look at Schmidt and they say, well, this is very prescriptive, right? Like this is. This is telling you exactly how you should operate a government. I would say that most of Schmidt is descriptive. He is not explaining authoritarianism or designing authoritarianism in a way that, you know, Newton was not designing gravity. He's simply explaining the properties of how these systems work. Now, ultimately, he's part of the Nazi party. I think most of that comes from his instinct to really just climb and ingratiate himself with power. But I'm not here to defend the man's character. I'm not saying Carl Schmitt is a deeply ethical person. He's a man you should follow. And you know, the Reason magazine piece says I follow his cultural teachings. Carl Schmitt didn't have cultural teachings. They made that up out of whole clothes. He's a guy who's doing political science. He's trying to lay out the way that politics works. You can disagree with him, right? You can say he's wrong about some things. I think Machiavelli was right on, like 80% of politics. I think the 20% that Machiavelli was wrong about is really critical. But I'm not just going to throw Machiavelli in the trash because I disagreed with 20% of his politics. This is true of Carl Schmitt. Yeah, Nazis are evil. It's bad. I don't like the Nazis. Now, can we talk about the way that this actually works? For the same reason that, like, von Braun can get you to the moon even if you don't agree with his politics. Right? Like, this is just the way the science works. If you don't like it, then argue with the science. But don't try to ascribe some ideological obsession to me when it's clearly these people who are ultimately obsessed with the specter of fascism coming back for them in the Euro Lord 2025.
- [19:34]
C
I think one of the interesting things, you know, you said Schmidt defines the sovereign as he who decides on the exception, right? In other words, decides on the time when the normal rules don't apply. And everybody immediately, right away, libertarian, non libertarian, anybody. The first criticism that pops in anybody's head of that whole idea is, well, then there's just going to be an endless array of emergencies and exceptions that justify continuing to act unilaterally. And that's probably. That's a danger. That's something to think about the whole point, the main point, that the reason Peace misses. I mean, regardless, like ignoring the fact that they slander Oron for eight paragraphs and everything, I'm talking about, like, the actual ideas that they're trying to talk about in the thing are that they're imagining they're in this fantasy world that we don't live in that place. Now, how could anybody go through Covid and think that we don't already have, that we. We already have a sovereign that decides, you know what? This is an exception. None of the normal rules apply, none of the old norms apply. We are going to do whatever we want and if you don't like it, we're going to send men with guns to your house to throw you in a cage or whatever they have to do. Like we're already 33.
- [20:48]
B
It's been like that since then here too.
- [20:52]
C
That's the funny thing about it too. It's like who are the liberals like biggest heroes? Lincoln, Wilson, friggin Roosevelt, Obama. Like four of the most authoritarian like you know, sovereign presidents in the history of the country, including Obama. I mean, you know, say what you obviously like the administrative state, like sort of boxes in the president in various ways now. But that dude just ordered the execution of American citizens. Yeah, that's true. I mean he was a mean old racist so they, they're a little softer on that. But, but you know, I mean today like a lot of these ideas, the liberal ideas were developed to help people understand and govern themselves in a political order. Where elected leaders, like most government action was either the direct result of initiative buy or was under the regulation of elected leaders. Right. Today the vast, vast majority of the government, 99% of the government has nothing to do with the elected leaders. Elected leaders are almost front men for this bureaucratic state. Their job is to either is basically to take the heat when things go wrong and then they get shipped out and they get to go work on a few corporate boards or you know, go head up an agency or something as their little reward or they get a book tour and then new people come in and you know, the bureaucratic state just keeps doing what it's doing. And I mean think about like the chevron case in 84, chevron versus the natural resources Defense Council or whatever. It was one of the biggest like cases that ever hit the Supreme Court. And it's really like ever since then kind of, kind of really defined how, how the courts have treated the administrative state. Right? The idea was this. The Reagan administration's EPA had reinterpreted some, some laws regarding pollution regulation, so forth. And basically they made it so that plants instead of having to individually get a stamp of approval for each thing they were, each type of thing they were putting out which made it like difficult to put out upgrades for that thing because then you had to go through the whole process again, whatever you could just have like your factory be approved and then you could just sort of work. And so you know, an NGO brought a, brought a case against the Reagan administration's EPA and Chevron and, and this what the Supreme Court decided long winded way of getting to my point here, what the Supreme Court decided has again, influenced the way the administrative state has acted ever since then. Basically, what they said was, look, we're just judges, okay? If the law is very explicit, thou shalt not do this or thou shalt do this, then fine, you bring it to us, and we're gonna do that. But if it's anything other than that, if there's any vagueness or anything like that, we went to law school. We're not gonna tell the EPA or some. The experts at these agencies what they should and shouldn't be doing. So we're going to defer to them from now on if there's any amount of vagueness or uncertainty about things. And so this was a conservative court. You know, six of the judges on the court at the time had been appointed by Republicans. That doesn't necessarily mean they're conservative, but it was. It was center right, say, and it was a conservative ruling in the sense that this was the court saying, you know, we're going to limit our own overreach or our own ability to reach into the executive branch and dictate to them what they can do. We're going to reinforce the separation of powers. What has been the effect of that for the last 30, 40 years now? The effect of it has been that more and more and more government action has been offloaded to this unaccountable bureaucracy that can do whatever it wants without even having court oversight unless things are very, very explicitly forbidden. And so this thing was meant to reinforce separation of powers. Decentralized power just has led to way more centralization of power than ever before, you know, and so they did finally.
- [25:02]
B
Repeal that one, though, right? Didn't they finally strike that down?
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A
Or.
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C
I think it's still. Yeah, yeah, they limited it. They didn't straight up strike it down.
- [25:11]
B
What you're saying is that the entire American political center and establishment are all a bunch of Schmidians now, and so what damn difference does it make anyway? Which. So to Oron, then let me ask you, contrary to whatever, you know, reason would say on your behalf, who do you look to as your most important political theorists or legal theorists about how things ought to be?
- [25:36]
A
Honestly, I probably look at Bertrand de Juvenile more than I do anyone else who was the. For libertarians, this is the guy that Hans Hermann Hoppe was drawing on when he wrote Democracy the God that Failed. He's functionally, I would say, an Aristotelian in general. But the only reason to draw on Schmidt again is the fact that he's a modernization of two critical thinkers on the line that kind of gets us to where we're at right now. This is someone the left has been studying for a very long time. Actually, the left has been students of Schmidt for a good while now. This is accepted as good, you know, good research, good university work for pretty much any left winger who's working in the political realm. So the idea that you would look at Schmidt is in no way radical, except when you're trying to smear people with this, like, Nazi charge, which is the actual thing they're trying to do. Right. Like, again, I wrote a book, you know, the Total state. I did 10 chapters. Most of them were on different thinkers. The shortest chapter in the entire book is on Schmidt. Right? Like. Like, I reference him, I talk about him. He's important to understand. But he is one of, you know, several different thinkers that I focus on. I give him the least time of anybody. If you look at my YouTube channel, I've done a few videos on him. But he's dwarfed by several other thinkers, including Demistra and Alastair McIntyre and all kinds of other people that the left. The left would probably find far more approachable. But it's a lot easier to yell, Nazi, Nazi. Nazi, Nazi. Rather than to just say, oh, this guy is putting several pieces together of, you know, the reason we're in the modern situation you're in. And Schmidt simply has one of these critical pieces. The ultimate point that Schmidt is making is the same point that's been made from everybody from Machiavelli to Leo Strauss. I know, right? Like the arch villain of many, that ultimately there are moments where you have, you know, a crisis. And in those moments of crisis, you know, no constitution can meet every one of the things. No matter how well crafted a constitution is, it cannot assume every possible outcome that can happen. And in the moment, all that constitution can do is tell you who makes the decision. It can't tell you what the decision will be. It can only tell you who has the authority to make the decision. And that's how Schmidt came up with his famous formulation. You want to know who has sovereignty you? In a constitutional order, it's the person who can decide on the exception when the constitutional order no longer applies. Now, as Darrell has pointed out, the state of exception has been running roughshod over the American government for a long time. Pretending that we have not existed in a state of Schmittian exception for decades at this point is ridiculous. Now, you don't have to agree with the Schmittian exception to say that's what that is. I recognize the thing they're doing, the thing that's not good. So if you don't like the Schmittian exception, still having a grasp on the Schmittian exception helps you identify what's going on here. You're not in a democracy, you're not in a republic. You're not in a representative government. There's a perpetual state of the exception going on, which is allowing this extension of government. You could approve of that. You could hate that. It doesn't matter. The point is, this is the tool that allows you to diagnose the problem. If you don't have the framework to grasp the issues, then you can't see what the problem is or if it's even a problem at all. And that's what they're trying to do. They're just like, oh, well, if you notice that we're in the state of exception, then you might be challenging the orthodoxy of the regime that we prop up. And make no mistake, that's what reason is doing. They are propping up a regime that they serve. So they don't want you to notice that you live in a state and exception, because if you do, then all of their Lobert bromides don't work. Oh, I care about the rules. Cool. The rules have been out the window for 50 years. What do we do now? They don't want to talk about that. They just want to pretend we're living in a state that we don't have.
- [29:31]
B
And which is funny because if you ask any libertarian, including at Reason magazine or Cato or anywhere, what happened in 1933, they'll tell you the Constitution up and died in 1933 when President for Life Roosevelt, you know, took over and then took us to war, nationalized the economy, and created the world empire. So all libertarians know that. So, yeah, state of exception. That's what you know. How many different national emergencies are we under right now? Probably thousands since then, you know, and so, you know, during the days of W. Bush, and I think this is the real problem with at least some kind of spins on this thinking is when September 11th happens, then Bush says, I can make the exception and legalize torture and order people to torture when fact the law already did account for emergencies and torture and said, no, you can't torture even in an emergency. And so but Mr. Sovereign gets to break the law and do whatever he wants. And then as Al Gore would say, there's no controlling legal authority. I guess, as Schmidt would say, there's no controlling legal authority to stop him. He can commit as many felonies as he wants because that's what it means to be the President. And so and same thing for Barack Obama with his Terror Tuesdays and all of this stuff. I mean, all of these guys break the law. In fact, under the national security Act of 1947, the President is authorized to authorize the CIA to do things from time to time, or whatever is written very broadly like that. They can just break the law right there. Ever since the end of World War II, it's written in the law that the CIA can break the law if the President tells them to. So, yeah, that certainly seems to be where we are. And now you talk about in your great book, the Total State Oren, about the constitutional ghost dance, and that's me. I'm still completely married to this Bill of Rights. What are we going to do without this Bill of Rights? We've already lost so much of it, but when it's outright repudiated, then I don't know where the hell we're going to be then. But so what do we do? What course do we set?
- [31:39]
A
So this is what I've been trying to explain to everybody, libertarians included, though I think guys like you are a little closer to, you know, agreeing with this than obviously the people at Reason. But the critical aspect is this is a failure to understand what a Constitution is. No Constitution has ever been written by human hands. There is no written human Constitution. That's not what constitutions are. A constitution is literally the way your people are constituted. It emanates from the folkways, the traditions, the religions, the belief of the people. The Constitution of the United States is a beautiful document, but it's not a beautiful document because it was written down. It's got the best prose, though. It has amazing writing. But ultimately, the reason the Constitution was special is that it encapsulated a way of being, a way of life of a specific people at a specific time. It understood that these were the people who would be living under the Constitution. And you can have a written Constitution that. That jives with the actual Constitution, the way the people are living their lives. Or you could have an unwritten constitution, as many countries do, that jive with the way that they're living their lives. Or you could have a written Constitution that in no way actually reflects the way that people are living their lives, which is what we have today. Technically, we have a written Constitution, but the people in the United States are in no way following it. They are not the type of People, our founders themselves said, would be necessary to live in this type of constitutional republic. So if you want to restore these values, you must first restore yourselves to the state of the people who founded the country. You must live the kind of lives they lived. You must have the type of beliefs they had. You must follow the religion. You must respect the folkways. You have to embody the Constitution. It's not enough to just sit there and point at a string of words and say, I saw it on a piece of paper. Therefore, like, this is always the problem with legalism. Oh, well, I have the piece of paper. I'm waving in the air. Okay, how's that working for you? Is it stopping anything? Is it doing anything? No, not because the Constitution failed or the Constitution isn't good enough. It's because the people are no longer believing in it. They're no longer animating that document with their actual lived experience. So if you want the Constitution back, it's not about writing a better constitution. It's not about getting the framework exactly right, getting the exact legal language down. So therefore no one can get out of the Constitution. That never works. That's Schmidt's point. There will always be exceptions. And the only thing that matters in that moment is do you agree? Do you have a shared belief? The Romans for many, many years, had deeply held ideas about how republican government could work. You had sacred offices like the tribune of the plebs that could not be violated because all the tribes, all the people, believed in those traditions. But the minute that power was able to say, you know what? Maybe I just kill the tribunal in plebs. Maybe I just override that veto. Maybe I just don't care if I step back from that dictatorship. It wasn't the law that was making Cincinnatus step away from his dictatorship and return it back to the republic. It was the tradition, it was his honor, it was his beliefs that mattered. And that's what people don't grasp. The Constitution is not a piece of paper. It's not a set of laws. It's a way that you live your life. It's a belief that is encapsulated in that moment in the Constitution. And just like when the Romans lost their belief in their constitution, they went from a republic to an empire. The minute that the United States stopped having the belief in the. In the founding document and the founding principles, it doesn't matter if the document was still there. We're no longer a republic anymore. The paper is not the thing that's making you a country. It's the people and their belief in it that matters.
- [35:28]
C
Yeah. And in the Roman case, in the modern case, that collapse of belief in the old ways comes as this is not something that's just entirely manufactured in left wing academic classrooms or something or by people like Carl Schmidt. Societies grow and they change and they have different requirements as far as their governance. And they, and people are going to start, you know, just to hold, keep it to our modern case. You know, you go back to like Roosevelt's takeover when he became president for life in 33, right. We can look at Roosevelt. We look back now and people looked at it then and said this is just, it's total overreach. This is, this is destroying the constitutional system. It's all over now. I don't know if somebody else being in office in 1933 would have made that much of a difference to those things. Maybe in details and like, maybe it would have been delayed a bit. But people were, you know, they were living in a world where all of a sudden you could have millions and millions of people being, having, have sheriffs show up to their farm to run them off their family farm because something happened in New York on the stock exchange and something happened on the commodities exchange in Chicago and somehow that cascades down and now I'm losing my family farm. This is like, you know, for most of human history, if you're going to lose your family farm, it was because some natural disaster happened. There was a famine or there was, you know, something, something real happening. All of a sudden we're in this world where people are losing their farms. There's no famine, there's no nothing. They're just. It's a financial thing that's happening in a distant place. And they look at the const. Constitutional order and they say we don't. This thing does not even. It doesn't begin to deal with the problems that we're facing now. And you can either make it deal with those things in a way that serves people or you can just, you cannot do that and people are gonna, are gonna look elsewhere, you know, because they have no choice. I mean, things do change. I think one of the things I wanted to bring up, Oren, is one of the, one of the many lies in that reason piece. But you know, they say that Schmidt, that the new right, such as it is, uses Schmidt to, let me see, he says to justify aggressive state action against all who are designated as Emmys. That is, that for. That's just a complete lie. First of all, like nobody's doing that, you know, nobody on the New right is invoking Schmidt to justify using the state to exterminate the Untermenschen. Okay? We. He is invoked, to the extent he is invoked at all by people on the right when they are talking about taking action against what amounts to this rolling color revolution that we've been living with for years and years now. You know, you're talking about. We're talking about like a country where you have violent, non state, you know, street armies like antifa, Black Lives Matter, who are actively collaborating with political officials, with the media, media corporations, with other corporations. They're getting funding from other corporations and the bureaucracy and local law enforcement, all these kind of things to terrorize American citizens for political reasons. You know, you look at what happened in Kenosha, this was like, you looked at as like a riot. It wasn't a riot. People were coming from all over the state, all over the region to go in there. And why were they doing that? Because they turned on their TV and they saw Kamala Harris saying that this innocent man who was wielding a knife at a police officer who just tried to kidnap his child, he was just murdered in cold blood just like every, you know, person that. Whatever. And that. What did she say during the Minneapolis riots? That this should not stop. Right? They hear that stuff. They hear that this is going on and they're being incited to violence. They're being incited to go attack an American city. And that's actually what happened. And so when you live in a place where that's possible, where the media is inciting that, politicians at the highest level are inciting that, running cover for it. NGOs, judges are running, you know, legal cover for these people. They refuse to prosecute them. And then somebody being chased down by a freaking child molester, trying to take his gun from him, Kyle Rittenhouse, when he fires in self defense, they try to put him in jail. You know, and so when you live in a society where that's already happening, there's no constitution you can possibly write that is going to allow you to fix that problem. You know, when the Vice President of the United States is saying, you should keep burning Minneapolis, that's what you should do. You're not going to write a constitution that's going to fix that. Somebody has to have the balls to step in and say, I'm going to put a stop to this. And the people who are causing this to happen and the people who are doing it are going to be punished so that people in the future know that they can't do this anymore. And we can say, well, but that's anti Democratic, it's anti liberal, it's anti American. You know what, it's probably all of those things. But America's never dealt with a situation like this before, you know, where you have so many just high level, such organized power at the highest levels working, treating, treating half at least of the American population as just real enemies, as war enemies, you know, cheering on their deaths. And it's, you know, when people talk about Schmidt, you know, again, this is the whole, the whole Reason magazine thing, when you go through it is like they're talking as if it's 1777 and people want to start quoting Carl Schmidt to overthrow the constitutional order. And I just don't know what world they're living in. And that's a weird thing for me. Like, they're libertarians, you know, allegedly. Which I would think of all people who look around and say, man, this is not anything like, you know, the way things are supposed to be running, that it would be libertarians. But, you know, they see that when it's convenient to see it, when they want to go after Orin and me, when they want to run cover for Covid, then, you know, Scotty Mike, by.
- [41:54]
B
The way, because this part of it is my business. I've never heard of either of these guys. I think one of them, I've heard his name one time before. The other guy I've never heard of before. So they're certainly not speaking for our movement, you know, whoever they are. But, you know, part of what you're describing there is what they call, I guess Sam Francis coined the term anarcho tyranny. And the thing is, a lot of that unrest is about the tyranny part. And then they're allowed to just run crazy and riot and loot. And then that's the anarcho part is the lawlessness part. And then when you have all this pressure from below for real judicial reform, I mean, man, there's so many lousy cases of cops kicking in the wrong door, shooting somebody, shooting an unarmed guy when they don't need to, jumping in front of a car so they can say, oh, she was trying to run me over, and just crazy things. And when people demand satisfaction on that, that you lift the tyranny part, where they fine and fee especially poor people to death all day. Instead they legalize armed robbery and they, you know, let murderers off, pay the bail, no cash bail for, you know, violent felonies and this kind of thing. And crack down on regular people committing so called offenses against state edicts harsher than ever. And so that's what really sucks is because libertarians, you know, will have this right and even including Reason magazine will have this right about what needs to be done. And then instead we get George Soros financed liberal and progressive prosecutors and socialists even. People come from the, what do they call it? Not the Social Democrats usa, but the modern one, you know, the one, I mean, the, the AOC one. And so then they come in and of course just screw up everything and make people want even more law and order, which means more of the tyranny that they weren't really asking for. So that's the unfortunate part is all the security that you guys are asking for is still a government program and they're still going to be, you know, cracking the protesters skulls, but letting the looters run till 3am I mean, we're.
- [43:59]
A
Already seeing in Portland there's been what, two reporters recently who have been arrested by the police for, you know, saving an American flag. Like not fighting anyone, not going to battle, not, not diving in and you know, just picking up an American flag and putting it out. And they didn't arrest the people who were assaulting the cops or burning things down or you know, doing violence in the streets. They arrested the reporters who were, you know, victims of violence because they recovered American flags and did nothing wrong. Like that's what the police are doing in this area. And when you look at that behavior, you need an explanation for it, right? Like I'm sorry, but rule of law obviously does not explain what's happening there. So what is happening there? Well, you see, the Portland police know who their friends are and who their enemies are. And it turns out that the most important political distinction is not the rule of law. It's not what the Constitution says. It's who the state recognizes as friend and enemy. Now you don't have to like that. You can be a libertarian and say, I don't want the state to exist at all. But the entire point of what Schmidt was saying is that as long as the state does exist, the nature of the state will be to declare friends and enemies. And the friend coalition will be those that allow for the existence of the identity of the group. And the enemies will be those that challenge the existence of the identity of the group. And again, you don't have to like the group in question, you don't have to agree with the actions taken by the state. But it is very observably clear that he's correct about the way this dynamic plays out. The funniest thing about people attacking the friend enemy distinction is that they are almost always attacking those who recognize the friend enemy distinction as existential enemies. Like, they literally frame you as, oh, if you recognize the friend enemy distinction, you're an enemy and you're not welcome and polite to society. And the state should probably snuff you out for going around and recognizing that there are friends and enemies. And this is the lie at the heart of liberalism. There are no objective institutions. There are no neutral institutions. The institutions must make decisions and they must decide who they're going to apply their standards to and how they're going to apply it and how force is going to be applied. They have to decide all those things. Now, as a libertarian, you might say, well, the state just shouldn't exist. And that solves that problem. We can have a deeper debate on that. I think that's impossible. And therefore decisions must be made. But just sitting around and pretending like the decisions aren't being made. This is why people look at libertarians and assume they're the handmaids of the left and the handmaids of the regime. Because when it's convenient, they just shut their mouths. And then the minute someone pushes back on the regime, they say, oh, well, you're asking for something ridiculous outside of the box. Well, actually, no, I'm just recognizing where we're at. And the fact that we already have police who are going to arrest you for peaceably saving an American flag that's been burned and thrown on the ground, assaulting no one, but you're going to jail anyway. We're not arresting the violent people. We're not arresting the mob. We're not arresting the rioters. We're arresting you, American citizen, for trying to pick up a burning flag. Like that's where we're at right now. I don't understand how you look at that situation. You're like, no, we're just a normal liberal democracy. That's just where we're at right now. Anybody who challenges that or notices that they're the real problem, that's when it becomes clear you're just controlled opposition. You're just. That's all you are.
- [47:18]
B
So just to clarify here a bit, because I think again, they admitted that you have said explicitly that you want the President to follow the law and that's it. So, fine. On the other hand, though, the rest of those paragraphs are full of them at least pretending that what they thought that they heard you say was forget the law. Actually, I'm sick and tired of the left, so I want the government to just hurt them for me. That's what they thought you had said, because, hey, friend, enemy distinction and exception decider and all of that. So is that or is that not what you're saying?
- [47:54]
A
No, I think that everything that can be done, that needs to be done to stop the violent left can be done under the color of law. The problem is not that there are just not laws in the books that restrict leftist violence. The problem is that we ignore them. We don't apply them to the left. We make sure that judges make sure that these people never see the inside of a jail, even if they're arrested as where if the right is arrested. If you have January 6th protesters, they, you know, what was the. They just had the guy, the trans person who wanted to kill Brett Kavanaugh, right. Just got eight years in jail. Now, you want to compare that to the leader of the. Of the Proud Boys, who wasn't even at January 6th. He was sentenced to 22 years in jail. Several other Proud Boys were sentenced to 17 years in jail. Donald Trump was facing over 100 years in jail for the fake charges they brought to try to keep him out of the election. Now, you can disagree with the Proud Boys and Donald Trump, but if you try to murder a Supreme Court justice, I feel like you should get, I don't know, maybe as much time as a guy who wasn't even at January 6th, much less not a third of the prison sentence. We can't look at that and pretend like there isn't some kind of exception going on. So do I want there to be some extrajudicial action by Donald Trump? Do I think we need to break the Constitution in half in order to destroy the Left? Not at all. All you need is a basic application of the law. Even the most basic level of equal application will destroy the leftist project. But they've been operating without any kind of actual law for at least 70 years. At this point, the left just has a blank check for violence. And they've had it since the 1960s, at least. So they're used to having no penalty. So the slightest amount of legal penalty under the laws we already have is like fascism for them, because they've never had to pay a price for the violence that they use. The Weather Underground was trying to murder people. They were blowing up government buildings. They're planting bombs everywhere. And you have them serving as professors in colleges, celebrated mentors of presidents of the United States. Can you imagine that for Timothy McVeigh, which, you know, we don't need to go deeper into the. The actual. Yeah, yeah, but, but you get what I'm saying, Like this is, this would not be applied to any right winger in the same way. And yet this is how our law works. So no, all we need is the actual law on the books. But we're not getting it. And so what does Carl Schmidt do? He lets us understand why we aren't getting it. That's the, that's the reason you invoke him.
- [50:21]
C
Yeah.
- [50:21]
B
Eric Rudolph, School of Medicine. Wait, hold that thought just one sec. Darrell, I gotta tell them this. Buy my coffee. Scott Horton show Coffee. Just go to scotthorton.org coffee. I gotta make a living here. And then I also want to say we got 3,000 something people watching and listening to the show right now. So please, everybody like and subscribe and share and hit the bell and all those damn business model type things. We got to build up this show and you guys all like it a lot. So yes, thank you. Don't forget to subscribe. And now you were going to say something, Daryl, but also had a question for you which is I wonder why you think this is happening. And I don't want to jump too quickly to the Israel thing because you know, reason is not just simply a Zionist rag. It has not been, you know, historically. But then again, in their morning email every morning I got to read all about how poor little Israel is just defending themselves against the terrorists as they slaughter a Waco massacre worth of children every single day over there. And then I notice that you guys are right wingers who don't like Israel very much. And it seems like it makes a lot of sense, if I was a hasbarist, to just say all good right wingers love Israel and the ones that don't are fascists, because that fits in a cookie cutter. So I wonder if you think that perhaps that might be part of what's behind this smear against Yalls characters here.
- [51:42]
C
I mean, maybe, you know. Yeah, I don't know, maybe Oren has thoughts on that. I mean, I think, look, if. If disliking Ted Bundy makes me a fascist, then I guess, you know, I should learn to goose step. I just, you know, I don't apologize for. I've always look up until like I've always tried to be fair with Israel. There's nobody that could listen to my Fear and Loathing series and make the case that I did not do my best to. To try to be Fair to the Zionist perspective. And I was always like that. When you go in and start massacring tens of thousands of children among a stateless people, captive, stateless people with no army of their own, no air force, no nothing. Yeah. I'm going to have words for you. I mean, I just. People don't like that. That's just too bad. I mean. Yeah. And if it makes me a fascist, that's just fine. I don't know, Oren, do you get the sense that that's like part of the motivation behind some of this stuff?
- [52:37]
A
I mean, I don't.
- [52:38]
C
On Israel, you hardly even really. So I.
- [52:42]
A
The amazing thing right now is if you, if you, you know, look at what's happening to Megyn Kelly, right? Like, she loves Israel. She's been very clear about that. She just refuses to denounce Tucker Carlson. And because of that, and because, like, she. She noticed that, like, people like Charlie Kirk were kind of saying, well, you know, I love Israel, but maybe we should be a little more careful with the way it's conducting itself. Like, all of a sudden she's getting struggle session like, you hate the Jews, you hate Israel, all this stuff. So it doesn't matter. You can say barely anything, which I try to in general, if for no other reason than I want to care about Israel. Not at all. I would like Israel to be like Timbuktu or, you know, Madagascar or Zimbabwe, where I just don't ever think about it at all because it just doesn't matter. It's not my country. And so I don't care about it if I don't have to. The only reason I have to care about Israel is, is literally if I don't spend all of my time saying, yes, everything they do is holy and we have to follow them because God said so. I get a thousand people in my comments telling me that I hate the Jews and I want them all to die. I'm a bad Christian and all these things, and I'm just very tired of it. You know, they just had Benjamin Netanyahu talking about the woke, right? And how important it was to use social media influencers to attack the woke, Right? Man, I wonder where he got that verbiage from. But, you know, I don't want Benjamin Netanyahu talking about how important it is to influence our country's policy openly. I just think that if I'm going to send a guy, I don't know, 3 to 4 billion dollars up front and then another 20 to 30 billion dollars on the side, that maybe he could shut up and be thankful and go away, but no, instead I have this guy openly talking about how he's dropping a pile of money on American influencers with the explicit intention of manipulating the public opinion in the United States. I just don't want that. And by the way, I don't want it for Qatar or for Russia or for Ukraine or for China or anyone else. I don't want any foreign influence in my country. And Israel is just one of the many countries I don't want to hear from about my domestic politics. That's it. But that's enough. That's all you need. If you, if you say that, then you are of course a Neo Schmidian, which they, by which they just mean Neo Nazi, by which they mean we should shoot this guy. Because let's be clear, Reason magazine is saying we should murder these people. Like, I don't want this to be like, there's no equivocation on this point. Reason magazine knows what it's doing. It's putting out a hit piece. It wants people to kill you. Just like the, you know, people who are yelling Charlie Kirk is a fascist want him dead. And then they killed him. Like that's what that means. Fascism means secular Satan. In our, in our, in our current vocabulary. You can kill baby Hitler, he's so evil. You can kill him as a baby when he's the most innocent. He's no longer human because he's Hitler. And when they call you a fascist, that's what they're saying about you. You could be murdered. You don't have to do anything wrong. You're just in the state of being a fascist and therefore worthy of violence. That's what they mean.
- [55:35]
C
Yeah, violence that is framed in entirely self defense terms.
- [55:39]
A
Right.
- [55:39]
C
You know, like the way that these people think the murder of Charlie Kirk was actually an act of self defense. You know, just like killing baby Hitler was because Oren and me, Charlie Kirk, I mean that it is baby Hitler in a way. Right. According to these people's like, interpretation where if you let this thing grow that, you know, this is the seed, this is the. Yeah, it seems harmless now, but if you let it grow, then this is what's going to happen. And wouldn't we all kill baby Hitler? I would not, by the way. But, or, and I want to, or, I don't know, you want to talk more about the Israel angle, Scott?
- [56:15]
B
Well, I just wanted to actually ask you guys if you wanted to because time is running short here. I wanted to make sure before I forget to give you a chance to stick up for the other guys who got attacked in the piece.
- [56:27]
A
Who.
- [56:27]
B
They were attacked by name. And I'm sorry, I don't have it in front of me right now, but in case y' all wanted to get a word in on behalf of your buddies there, I guess these are all people you said you've had on your show before, right, Oren?
- [56:38]
A
Yeah, it was again, Yoram Harzoni, who of course, again, ardent Zionist and Israeli national and just somebody who has noticed that liberalism has probably run its course and we need to start looking at actual nationalism and people are going to have their disagreements again. I caught a lot of flack for having him on my channel from people on the right, the far right, who said, how could you talk to this Zionist? You know, he's. He's going to sell you all the Zionist propaganda. I was like, no, I'm just going to talk to him and hear what he has to say. And I agreed with some and I disagreed with other things. And, you know, the fact that this guy is somehow being dropped into the same, you know, bucket and say, well, this guy obviously is a neo Nazi because, you know, I really.
- [57:23]
B
Founder of the Burke, the Edmund Burke foundation thing. Okay, I know who you're talking now, at least.
- [57:28]
A
Yes. And then I'm trying to remember who the last person there was one other person I think they had besides me and Daryl and Carl Schmidt in the picture, but I've suddenly forgot the lineup. But, yeah, it is just, it is just wild that they have grouped all of these people together. Like, look, in many ways, I think Daryl is a bleeding heart liberal.
- [57:47]
C
Right.
- [57:47]
A
Like, I disagree with Daryl on several things, but, like, the idea that all of us are somehow unified and are, you know, genuflecting. Before Carl Schmittz. Oh, it was Curtis Yarvin. Right? Right. And, you know, again, Yarvin has obviously a lot of unorthodox ideas, but the one thing that Yarvin is just never, ever, ever, ever doing is calling for estate violence. Like, he has been very careful about this, right. He will talk about how a regime could change, but he only ever talks about regime change in peaceful manners. In fact, he talks repeatedly how dangerous it is to try to change it in any other way. So the idea that he is, like somehow sitting there and, you know, steepling his fingers and just waiting to pounce in the next, you know, Reichstag fire is just, is just ridiculous. But again, facts don't matter because Reason magazine is just there to call you a Nazi. That's all they want to do.
- [58:40]
B
Yeah. Well, look, I. I like this quote from Daryl. I think that's right, that you do more than anybody on TV to help set the tone for what the American conservative movement is talking about and how they feel about things, what they know about things. You do a really great show, always very deeply informed, great interviews with great guests, and I watch you all the time. YouTube knows to serve me up all the latest or McIntyre every day. So no question about that.
- [59:06]
C
No doubt one of my few appointment listenings.
- [59:10]
B
Yeah. All right. Any closing words, Darrell?
- [59:15]
C
I mean, I could go on about that stupid article for a lot longer, but, you know, just the. The main takeaway from it is just, you know, that I just. I really have trouble wrapping my heads around what world, the reason people who wrote that article, like, have been living in this whole time, you know, I mean, imagine you're in, like, a boxing match and your opponent pulls a knife and starts slashing at you, and you somehow make it through the round, and you get back to your corner and you're like, coach, he's got a knife. What should I do? He's like, well, whatever you don't do or whatever you do, don't hit him below the belt. No rabbit punching. I don't want to see any of that dirty stuff. Because, you know, the integrity of this. We have to be better than them. The integrity of the sport is at stake here. And so you look over to their corner and you say, well, but now his coaches, his corner men are flashing a gun. Look, you just get out there and give him the old 1, 2. And the coach hears Reason magazine, of course, and all the people like them. And so you go out there and he runs at you with the knife, and you drop a headbutt on him, him and drop him, and the fight's over and you get disqualified and you lose and they award him the championship. And then the next morning, you wake up and you pick up Reason magazine and there's an article in there about just framing you entirely as the bad guy and the other guy is the victim. And how, you know, they quote the guy telling, you know, the writers of the piece that he's just shocked and appalled that you would, you know, that you would ever do such a thing, break the rules in such a way your own coach is denouncing you as a rule breaker. You know, this isn't the way I taught him. And that's like, where we're at right now. You know, it's like if you're Playing if you're. I'm just going to take my sports metaphors way too far, but, like, it's all I got. You know, you're playing a soccer game and somebody comes over and just punches you in the face. Instead of coming over and giving that guy a red card and throwing him out of the game, the ref comes over and shoots you in the head. At that point, you're not playing soccer anymore. You're playing something else. There's a whole different game afoot, and you better adjust to that and start playing according to the new rules, because that's, you know, and the reason people, again, they're just. They're living in a world that doesn't exist right now. And one of the things I would point out, too, about what Oren always says isn't say, like, let's do all this stuff, because it would be awesome. He doesn't say, let's do all this stuff because the Constitution and all those things were bad and stupid and all the ways we used to do things, that. That's. That was always a bad idea.
- [61:38]
A
Idea.
- [61:38]
C
He says, if we ever want to get back to anything like that, we need to take some action against these things that are standing in the way of debt, you know, and, and, and. And we're not talking about people who have the wrong ideas about immigration or wrong ideas about anything.
- [61:56]
A
Actually.
- [61:56]
C
You can be, I think in Orens, in, In mine, you can be a communist. In my country, you know, if I'm the emperor, you just can't go out and actively try to overthrow the government or do illegal things. All we're really asking for is the radical just request, please, oh, please, please state authorities. Can you please just do the actual thing that your name is and exercise state authority? Can you just enforce the laws that are already on the books? It seems like a pretty simple request, but it's one that is just apparently too much.
- [62:34]
B
And so, because, I mean, in your boxing analogy, it sounds like you're saying it's time to start going beyond the law and win. Which was, I think, contrary to the way Oren was describing his view.
- [62:50]
C
When that guy brought a knife into the ring, winning and losing was no longer the relevant metric. Okay, you need to survive is.
- [62:58]
B
I guess what I'm asking is. So then, like, for example, some people are saying it's time to censor the left. But then again, the First Amendment would forbid that. But then again, the Democrats, when they were in power, they were sure not shy about censoring the hell out of people. So for example, are you saying that the right wing government should go ahead and abuse that same power because it serves them right or not?
- [63:22]
C
Well, look, when you, when you no longer have a, like a concept of loyal opposition amongst a large section of the population, including people who are in positions of power, then, I mean, those are questions that you have to ask. Like a lot of people, a lot of people watching maybe would listen to that, what you just asked, and they don't even like, it's almost a rhetorical question. It's like, of course the answer is no. But these are, these are, these are discussions that have been forced on us at this point. You know, so like speaking of censorship, one of the things Reason actually quotes Oran on, instead of reinterpreting and you know, paraphrasing, he says companies like, companies like Discord need to pay a severe price for going out of their way to allow an organization of terrorist networks on their platform. And then reasons comments on this and says ISIS propagandized, fundraised and recruited via Facebook, Twitter and Google. But the Supreme Court rightly ruled in Twitter vs Tamne 2023 that the social media companies were not guilty of aiding and abetting. Quote, social media firms do not owe a duty of care to all potential victims of terrorism, even though they knew that several terrorist organizations were using their platforms to recruit new members, explains University of Florida law professor Jane Bambauer. All well and good, that would be a compelling argument if we were having a neutral, good faith argument instead of the discussion that we're actually having, which in this, in the world that we're having it in, which is the one where, you know, people on the right were being censored at state direction for, forget about violence. I mean, just for questioning, the 2020.
- [65:04]
B
Election, hey, they kicked the president off of there while he was still sitting in the presidency for another couple of weeks.
- [65:10]
C
Yeah, and that's why it just seems like we're like, I feel like I'm in the twilight zone sometimes when I'm trying to have a conversation with somebody like the writers of that magazine, where it's like, if you could, like in a vacuum and you were to take us out of all context, we could have this discussion and it's a worthy debate. But you have to live in the world that you're actually living in and there's just not. And they sort of make a profession out of refusing to do it.
- [65:36]
A
Yeah.
- [65:37]
B
All right, well, listen, I think we better wrap. Oren, tell us about your show.
- [65:41]
A
Yeah, I've got the Orin McIntyre Show. It's, of course, on BlazeTV. You also can catch it on YouTube and rumble and Twitter. I'm never calling it X. Sorry. You can also cash in all your favorite podcast platforms, you know, Apple and Spotify and Google and all that stuff. So check it out if you'd like.
- [65:58]
B
And I have your book here somewhere on the pile, but it's buried. But it's a great book. The Total State. Oh, you got one.
- [66:04]
A
Yeah.
- [66:05]
C
Must read.
- [66:07]
B
Absolutely. All right, well, thank you both very much. Great show. Really appreciate it. And thanks, everybody, for watching. See you next week.
- [66:15]
A
Sa.