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The Tom Woods Show
Ep. 2760 Darryl Cooper on the Degeneracy in American Cities, and Spencer Pratt-Style Bluntness
00:59:20
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- [00:02]
Tom Woods
Get ready to take a flamethrower to the official narrative and learn what the elites don't want you to know.
- [00:09]
Darrell Cooper
You're listening to the Tom Woods Show.
- [00:19]
Tom Woods
Hey, everybody, Tom woods here, episode 2760 of the Tom woods show with the great Darrell Cooper, host of the Martyr Maid podcast. You also know him from the podcast he co hosts with our friend Scott Horton called Provoked. And I've got Darrell here today on last time, I kind of gave him an assignment, and this time I said, just get over here and we'll talk about things. And I gathered together a couple things that are on my mind that are interesting or bothering me or whatever. And old Darrell here is the perfect sort of person to bounce ideas off of, to vent to. You know, he's a sympathetic. Got a sympathetic ear and a sharp brain, and that is exactly what I'm looking for in a guest here. So. So, Darrell, let's start with the whole Spencer Pratt thing. I'm a little bit late to this particular party, but better late than never. And look, I don't know everything about. I'm sure if I dug deep, I would find that he has terrible opinions on, you know, a half dozen things. But in terms of Los Angeles, which is an American city that one hates to see die, you know, I have a certain sympathy for the guy, and it's my wife who is a little bit more plugged into American culture than I am, who pointed out to me that he first became well known through reality tv. You know, I. I don't know anything about anything when it comes to that. But what matters now is he had a debate with Karen Bass and whoever that city council member is he's running against, and he absolutely eviscerated them in that debate. I mean, it just eviscerated them because I guess the city councilor has this plan where she's going to go and approach the homeless people and offer them treatment. And his response to that was, yeah, I'll take her out tomorrow and we'll do that, and she'll get stabbed in the neck. Because these are not people who are looking for treatment or looking for this, that, or the other thing. They're looking for super meth and fentanyl. That's what they're looking for anyway. So the whole thing's been surprising because I think we've kind of come to assume that California politics, even at the local level, are so screwed up that all you'll get is a choice between which person do you want to destroy the city or the state more and Then suddenly there's this guy saying, wait a minute, I don't actually think we have to live like this, where parents have to be terrorized by drug addicts on their street all the time or hanging out in front of the school. I think maybe there are things we can do. I guess I alerted you to this because you have wisely been taking a break from social media. So give me a sense of how does this strike you?
- [02:45]
Darrell Cooper
Well, it was a great ad and it's not hard to see why it appeals to people. You know, I do think you're right that a place like California, the politics there, is so captured that you really do have to appeal to a pretty narrow set of interests within the state in order to have a chance at anything. But that doesn't always mean that things go in the same direction, you know, And I think the LA fires specifically was one of these things where the senior bondholders in that city, a lot of them really started to look around, say, you know, this has probably gone far enough. You know, our wives are complaining because when they go down to the shopping districts they like to go to with their friends to have brunch, they have to step over human feces and, you know, and heroin needles. And so, you know, it starts to reach up to, you know, all of the social decay that results from the terrible policies that our governments at every level put in place tend to hit the ghetto first, the trailer park second, and then they start to work their way up into the middle class and beyond. And then you start to actually see some rumblings of change, you know, and I think LA and California in general has gotten to a point where it's probably starting to reach that point. And LA probably has a lower threshold as much as it's a liberal city because of Hollywood and everything else. You know, LA is still like an actual city. If you compare it to like San Francisco, for example. You go to San Francisco and if you see a child, you should put it in a museum. I mean, there's like no children in San Francisco. It's not a place where families go to live. I mean, to have a place where you can store a wife and three kids, you got to be a skillionaire to do that in San Francisco. LA's got families, got whole neighborhoods that are just families and kids going to school. And so it is a little bit different in terms of what people will tolerate. It's a lot more difficult to control. And I think the typical, when I lived there, which was, you know, a while back now, but 10 years ago or so, you know, the local election turnout, the off year, local election, like if it wasn't a presidential election year or something, it was like 8 to 10%. And so it really does not take a whole lot of people necessarily to shift the direction of things, you know, and so I don't know anything about this guy personally. First time I ever heard his name was when you sent me that tweet. But we saw kind of a version of this in 2020 at the Federal level. You know, it wasn't just that Trump's message, you know, finally just punctured through and overcame all the propaganda or anything like that. I mean, what you saw was, you know, from like, not necessarily everybody throwing their full support behind him, but from guys in the tech industry to like, even Jamie Dimon. I remember he was at a. It wasn't a speech, it was like a panel kind of thing that he was on and he was saying some positive things, like during the election cycle. You never would have heard from somebody like that in 2016. I think after four years of, of Biden. I might have said 2020. I meant 2024. After four years of Biden, you know, the people who consider themselves the proprietors of the United States of America, they looked around, they said, I just don't. I, we can't keep doing this, you know, we have to do something else. And so, yeah, we'll see. You do hate to see like a city like la. I've got some affection for the city. I'm glad to not live there anymore, but I mean, it's a very, very unique American city. You know, it's one where the ethnic makeup of the city is so diverse and so checkered that people tend to have a very, I mean, once you get, get outside of the hipster neighborhoods like Echo park and Silver Lake and whatnot, people who live in the actual city tend to have a sort of more realistic view of a lot of inner community relations at the sort of middle class and working class level than, than people do in more homogeneous cities. And I always found that pretty refreshing. But yeah, hopefully. I mean, this guy from reality TV turns it around. We've already seen one guy from reality TV make America great again, so.
- [06:48]
Tom Woods
Well, I want to play for the viewers. Even if you're not watching on video, you'll get the gist of it from the audio alone. I want to play the ad that I sent you, but he's got an. There have been an array of great Spencer Pratt ads, and some of them are being Created. I don't know. For all I know, maybe all of them are being created just by people who like him and have just created them for him. But this one. This is the one I sent to Daryl. I want to play it for everybody now. So, Chris, let's put that in right here.
- [07:17]
Darrell Cooper
Turns out it's a lot easier to
- [07:19]
Tom Woods
fight fires when there's water in the reservoirs.
- [07:28]
Darrell Cooper
We're even allowed to arrest criminals now
- [07:30]
Tom Woods
with handcuffs and everything.
- [07:31]
Darrell Cooper
Thing, I don't have to wonder anymore
- [07:36]
Tom Woods
whether I just stepped in human or dog.
- [07:38]
Darrell Cooper
So that's nice. I only see needles in the hospital now.
- [07:48]
Tom Woods
Who knew it could be this way?
- [07:50]
Darrell Cooper
I love going to the park now that it's not an open drug market.
- [07:53]
Tom Woods
Okay, who here is willing to admit that common sense actually turned out to be good? I feel safe walking her.
- [08:04]
Darrell Cooper
She's definitely having a Pratt summer, who's
- [08:07]
Tom Woods
having a PR summer. So in this ad, you. It's just. It's such a pattern interrupt because you've got what look like ordinary people. I'm sure you know, it's an AI Ad, no doubt. But you have a policeman saying, you know, hey, we're allowed to arrest criminals and use handcuffs and things. And. And you have the child on the playground saying, I love being at the playground now that it isn't an open drug market. And another guy saying, well, now I see needles only in the hospital. You know, who knew it could be this way? And then another woman saying, well, you know, now I know if I'm stepped in, you know, dog feces or human feces, at least now I have a sense of that. In other words, it's gotten to such a point that even just a regular. A normal person, regardless of your political background, has to say, this is blankety blank ridiculous. If he were to win and actually be able to turn this around, what it would show is that the resources and the wherewithal to solve these problems, we're always just sitting there. So it isn't that. Well, they're just in Super Bowl. And what do you expect from poor Karen Bass? It's that that was a choice. She chose to have you live that way, and people don't have to live that way.
- [09:31]
Darrell Cooper
Yeah, we found that out when I can't remember exactly who it was, but there was that Chinese visit to San Francisco, and they just, like, in a week, they just completely cleaned up the downtown everything, and it's like. Wait, so you could have done that at any point, right? I mean, it is like. It's important to understand that These things. I think that most of us, a lot of us, even those of us who know better, often think of these kind of, you know, just the sort of social degradation, urban decay, like all of these kind of breakdown of large systems that we live within as sort of something that just kind of, you know, in Edward Gibbons style, decline and fall. Like it's just, this is just what happens in history over time. Like, you know, this is the direction of things, entropy. But it's really not true. Like we have all of the tools in place, we know how to do these things. We've done it before. I mean, so I lived in South LA back in 92, the year of the riots were very interesting time to live there. And it was a time when it's really like unthinkable today because when you look at the murder rates, the violent crime rates in places like New York City, Los Angeles, I mean New York had been cleaned up a bit by then, but a lot of the other big cities, you look at the murder rates and the violent crime rates in the years like 1988-92 or so, and I mean they were astronomical compared to today. It's experienced, I think, by people a little more broadly. It's not as concentrated in like, you know, gang ridden neighborhoods and it's less drive by shootings between two rival gangs and more just a random homeless man stabbing a woman on a bus, you know. And so it feels much more in your face and sort of random and dangerous to people. But in terms of numbers, I mean, it was just, it was astronomical back then. And what happened, you had the riots shortly after that, you had the O.J. simpson trial, which was kind of became this racial flashpoint, you know, and both of those kind of combined into, you know, there's just the media spectacle of both of them, the national like capture of attention on that issue following a period where crime had just, you know, all of the policy choices, urban policy choices that have been put in place since the late 1960s had just fully come home to roost. And it was at such a, such a fever pitch, the crime rates that you had the Congressional Black Caucus supporting the crime bill that Bill Clinton pushed through. I mean, all of the things that, you know, civil rights activists, BLM types decry today, you know, about the growth of the minority prison population today relative to the early 90s and everything, that was all supported by the Congressional Black Caucus. It was supported by the Democrats. And it was because people reached a point where they just, they had to do something. And guess what? It worked. You know, violent crime went way, way, way down over the next 20 years or so simply by, well, anyway, like the way it was accomplished was just by taking like the 1 or 2% of the most, you know, psychopathically and anti socially tended people off the streets and putting them in jail and putting them under monitoring by the government. I mean, that's really what happened. And then everything went down and then we sort of stopped doing that. Right around the time of Trayvon Walker Ferguson, Michael Brown, we kind of stopped doing that and everything started exploding again, like immediately. So this is something that we know how to do, we know how to fix. It's very simple. I mean, you go back to like, you know, the late medieval, early modern period in England where for like 250 years the English executed 1% or so of every male generation. You know, they just, they executed you for every crime you could think of. And it got to the point where, guess what? Like after a while you have a pretty law abiding population. And you can, you know, maybe say that today, now their population's a little bit too docile and accepting of government abuse. But, but it certainly handled the violent crime problem. So yeah, I'm not calling for executing 1% of the male population every generation. Although if I were to really go over the list of crimes I think deserve capital punishment, it might come out something like that. But great thing in that video is like the way they put it was kind of this realization of something that is very obvious to everybody, like, oh, it turns out you can just arrest criminals. Oh, wow.
- [13:54]
Tom Woods
Yeah, people with the, you know, either with the social work or sociology degrees have their little clipboards and they've got a million reasons that that's a unsophisticated response. What? Just get the bad guys. But you know what, this is actually a case, Darrell, where the boomers are right about something because this is a very boomer response, which is, well, we have a bunch of bad guys out there. Why don't you go get them? Turns out that works. It actually does work. And there are people who, I mean, look, I, I can't speculate on what motivates them, but there really are people who, you know, sometimes when you, you hear the right wing say that so and so is soft on crime, you think, you know, well, maybe they're oversimplifying, but there really are people who for some reason have a perverse attraction to disorder and destruction. So these people can't be in charge or anything. Now I want to play this is just 30 seconds. But another thing I sent you. To this day, I cannot really convince myself that this is an actual ad by the LA County Federation of Labor. But I looked it up and apparently it is. The LA County Federation of Labor is running this ad against Spencer Pratt. And I want you to watch this ad and realize that they intend this as an ad against him, whereas I kind of almost feel like he's pranked them somehow into releasing this ad. Anyway, let me play it and you guys will all see what I mean. Republican Spencer Pratt is the last thing Los Angeles needs for mayor. Pratt opposes using taxpayer money to build brand new houses for our unhoused neighbors, saying it's time for the homeless to get help or get out. Pratt thinks LA needs thousands more police officers rather than more social workers. And Republican Spencer Pratt thinks public employee unions should have less power, not more. LA is on the right track and needs to stay the course. Vote no on Republican Spencer Pratt. All right, so we see even on the screen, not just in the narration, but on the screen, Republican Spencer Pratt. Now, by the way, I think he's running as an independent, so of course they think they'll hurt him by saying that, but opposes using taxpayer money to build brand new houses for our unhoused neighbors, which I think at this point a lot of residents of LA or have pretty much had it up to here with their so called unhoused neighbors. So we have that. Then they show a headline from the California Post. Spencer Pratt is taking a hard line on the city's homelessness, laying out a get help or get out approach. Then Spencer Pratt thinks LA needs thousands more police officers. Spencer Pratt thinks public employee unions should have less power.
- [16:30]
Darrell Cooper
I busted out laughing when I saw that one because I lived in California for many years. You know, you turn on political talk radio, local political talk radio, you can go right, left and center. Unless you're actually talking to a teacher, to a firefighter or some other public man. There is nothing that is more hated universally in the state of California than the public employee unions. You know, back when Governor Gray Davis back in the early 2000s was being recalled, the recall that led to the election of Arnold. A huge part of like all the stuff that was going out was all of the just insane retirement packages back then that public employees were leaving with. You know, there was all these loopholes, for example, where you could retire literally at like 50 years old if you started at 20 years old, you know, so you retire at 50 at 90% of the average of your final three years of pay. And what people would do was they, for like the last several years, they would save up all of their vacation time. So they just had years worth of vacation time. And then the last year you have the option to either take that vacation or you can cash it in. And so their last year, these cops and firefighters would make like $300,000 and their average would shoot up and they'd retire at like 140 grand a year for the next 40 years, however long they live. People. People were so mad. And so that one, I just. Yeah, it was hilarious to see that. But yeah, it does seem like an ad for him. And I think not just to people like us. You know, the homeless one in particular is really interesting because like the homeless situation and the housing crisis, homeless situations, interrelated things like that's something that has really like changed over the years. It's become a different kind of problem than it used to be. Right. We used to have places, you know, a lot of people have heard about the effect of like closing down mental institutions and involuntary detention and mental institutions and those people spilling onto the streets. That's certainly a thing that's definitely, you know, has had an effect on the sort of flavor of the homeless population in many of our big cities. No doubt about that. But there's this other layer where if you go back just a few years ago, like maybe a decade ago, about 50% or so, most people don't know this, but about 50% or so of homeless people had jobs for at least half of the year, for at least half of the previous year that they were like asked about it. So these are like, you know, inconsistently working maybe, but like working poor. Right. They eat at kitchens and they stay at shelters or they sleep outdoors. Now back in the day, we used to have places like, you remember that Tom Hanks movie, Big Hell, yeah. Where he's like a kid who's becomes an adult. And there's this one scene where he gets this room in this like CD motel, you know, this sort of by the hour motel where people go take their prostitutes and do drugs or whatever, real seedy place. And he goes there and like in the next room there's people cursing and screaming at each other and there's a, you know, a police siren going off and all this cast. And so he pushes the dresser up against the door and he's like real scared and everything. Like, that's not a place that I would want to take my wife on our anniversary date, obviously. But like, they used to be a place where you could Take a person who was like, right on the edge, you know, barely holding it together, but kind of holding it together, and at least you could get them off the street at night. We used to have this guy when I used to paint new construction houses, that was one of the laborers who would work for us. And this guy was. He wasn't all there. He's a little older. He was not all there. Alcoholic, real, real bad, like, you know, down the path alcoholic. And sort of lived out of his car for the most part. But he would stay in one of these sort of CD motels a lot. And, you know, he would come and he would work, he'd clean up around the job site, do his thing. He was, you know, good dude to be around just on a day to day basis. And then he'd go back at night to his cheap motel that was probably 20 bucks a night, and he'd get his bottle of cheap whiskey and he would, you know, drink himself to sleep and come back and do it again the next day. That guy, like that proverbial guy, that guy's on the street now because that. That motel got torn down and replaced with condominiums in every city in America. Like, urban renewal just did away with all of those kinds of places. Like Burnham makes the point in, I want to say it's his book about liberalism where he's talking about Skid Row and how. And this is just so amazing because it was so long ago and it speaks very much to, like, the modern urban renewal process, but how people look at Skid Row and they see it as a place. And if, you know, the problem is that you have this place that's dilapidated and that's ugly and, you know, broken down, whatever. What we need to do is take all these places and make them, make them nice again. We need to tear down that motel and put a nice condo in its place, etc. And it's like, well, Skid Row is not exactly like, it's not really a place. Skid Row is kind of an institution. It's a place in the sense that, like, it's where the people who fall off the bottom rung of the social ladder sort of collect, you know, the drain that they collect in. And you can move it, you can scatter it around, you can do a lot of things. But changing the place really doesn't do a lot to affect the underlying issue. Right. Well, we did that all over America. And what we did, you know, by doing that was we take that guy who I was talking about who would Be on the job site, who again, he was barely holding it together, right? Barely. But he was not causing anybody any problems. You know, he's probably going to drink himself to death in relatively short order unless he found Jesus. But he wasn't going to hurt anybody, you know, and he wasn't going to be abused or hurt himself. You know, he just, he had like places he could go. You take that guy now and you put him on the street, he has to go sleep among like the criminals, among the drug pushers, among just like the real schizophrenic type, like crazies walking around. A guy like that who's already on the edge, falls off the edge and he becomes one of those people like very, very quickly living under the stress and pressure of like the real deal, like street, you know, and that's happened to a lot of people where you have a lot of these people who become homeless at first because they fall on hard times. Not necessarily even like, oh, I lost a job or something, but like, you know, people go through periods where, you know, they have kind of nervous breakdowns, periods of depression where they just can't get their lives together and they just fall apart. And one, you know, if you're already somewhere down near the bottom and you go through one of those periods for, you know, six months, you know, if you're like a working class person, like kind of, you know, very close to sort of the, the bottom of the social ladder already, and you go through like a two year period where you're just struggling with overwhelming depression and what, that's not good. I mean, if you get fired from your job and you can't get another one, and now, like, things can tumble real fast when you don't have anything to catch you down below. And so there are a lot of people who start out that way, but now when you take those kinds of people who probably could have been, you know, nudged back on course under the right circumstances, those people now are thrown into an environment. It's like if you take like an accountant who's a, who's a, you know, like gets in trouble for fraud and throw him into San Quentin in general population or something, and he comes out with tattoos on his face, like, you know what I mean? Like, it's like it's going to have an effect on you, a real negative effect. And so I think that back in the day, you know, people would see homeless people and they would be their view of home. The homeless population had that understanding built into it that like, that these are you know, not necessarily like dangerous people or anything like that. Some of them are, some of them are. And you know, you even had the, the sense that like, you know, you saw a lot of the crazy ones. But that's because the people who aren't crazy and they're homeless, like you don't see them, like they're not wandering the streets, getting in your face, you know, like as you walk to work or something like that. So. But people saw them as like, you know, something to deal with, but not like a big social plague in danger. But now that you have all the crazy drugs involved, all of the policies that are really designed to just give free rein to the worst tendencies of the most anti social people on the street, that people now see them as like these monsters, like roaming around their city and very, you know, too often, at least that is what they're looking at. And so when you then pile on top of that, that by the way, we should be building them brand new houses, that's something you could have gotten away with back in, you know, the 1990s or something, maybe, you know, where people would have still had that idea and bought into the idea that these are people who've fallen on hard times. That's just not something that anybody, except for just the most absurd Ivy League indoctrinated liberal could possibly buy into anymore. Even in a place like la.
- [25:48]
Tom Woods
Hey gang. Your school board met last Tuesday. You know what they decided. Your city council met too. So does your county commission. They spent money, changed rules, made decisions. Unless you were sitting in the room, you probably have no idea what happened. The local newspapers that used to keep an eye on these people are mostly gone. So what's left is a transparency gap. And that gap benefits people inside the room, not the rest of us. And that's why I like Citizen Portal. Citizen Portal makes every word spoken by elected officials word searchable. They've indexed and transcribed more than 1 million hours of government meetings. You search by topic, name or keyword and it shows you exactly what was said, when it was said and who said it. And this is important. It's not somebody's summary, it's not spin, it's not an editorial. Every result links directly to the original video so you can see the tape for yourself. The AI here isn't telling you what to think. It's transcribing and indexing the records so you can find the receipts. It was founded by the co founder of ancestry.com somebody who spent his career helping people find records they were told were impossible. To locate. This is for people who are tired of feeling powerless. Now you have what they have. Information, primary sources, and the ability to hold people accountable without waiting for permission. Well, I've been given 50 exclusive lifetime memberships for my listeners at $99, half the regular price of $199. Once they're gone, they're gone. So use code WOODS50@CitizenPortal.AI WOODS. WOODS. That's WOODS. 50@CitizenPortal. AI WOODS. Yeah. And it would have to be somebody who's never actually interacted with them. They know them only in theory. This is a person without a house. And what would I be like if I were without a house? Well, I'd be doing my best to pull myself together, and I would be well behaved, and I would make polite requests of people. Okay, well, that's great, but that's not exact. That's not at all what we're. What we're facing. What's. What's weird to me, and I think to a lot of mainstream Americans, is that it took this long, it took this many years of decay in a place like Los Angeles before you got a political candidate who actually said, you know, people shouldn't have to step in, you know, feces, and people shouldn't have to worry that their kids are going to be accosted by, you know, by drug addicts at the playground. I mean, I don't know if that's just the GOP's natural cowardice that they have to play the polite opposition. And they know that it would be impolite to mention problems like this, you know, so they don't. You know, they'll say, well, maybe the taxes should be a little lower or something. But this kind of in your face, blunt acknowledgment of what's actually happening is such a rarity, even though everything being said is so obvious that it's garnered the attention of the entire country.
- [28:46]
Darrell Cooper
Yeah. You know, I think part of it is in a state like California, in a city like Los Angeles. Like, it really. I mean, the GOP is. I mean, it barely exists in most of the state.
- [28:56]
Tom Woods
And I get that they're demoralized, but for heaven's sake, I mean, flames.
- [29:02]
Darrell Cooper
I'm talking, like, just in terms of the actual organization in the state. I mean, it is just an absolute shadow of his former self, like in the Pete Wilson days. I mean, it's just. It barely exists as an organization. And that is part of it that, you know, they just. They feel like they have to conform to a reality in which the other side controls all of the messaging channels. And if you want to get something out, you have to get it out in a way that is going to somehow make it through those filters. You know, be the guy who. I don't remember his name now, he's big name. I just don't watch a lot of network news. But the Republican guy who's always on the CNN panel, you know, oh, is
- [29:42]
Tom Woods
it the Scott Jennings or something like that?
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Darrell Cooper
Jennings, right. Yeah. You have to figure out a way to, like, get on to that in that environment and get your message out in a way that's not going to get you uninvited, that kind of thing.
- [29:51]
Tom Woods
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [29:52]
Darrell Cooper
But then there's also like, you know, a lot of these. I remember back when the whole country was just burning in 2020 in the summer, and Tucker, when he was still on Fox News, had Mike Braun on Senator Braun, and Tucker was like, why aren't Republicans out in the street just denouncing this? Why aren't they condemning all these kind of just obvious things to normal people watching their, Their cities burn? And it was absolutely pathetic. I mean, Braun is like, well, you know, just have to understand that, like, you know, this is very sensitive issue. We have to be very careful about how we talk about this. Blah, blah, blah. It's like, dude, like, they're burning down cities. Like, what are you talking about? Like, if you can't speak firmly and clearly in this situation, then when can you ever do it, you know? And this is like a guy who was a popular senator in a conservative state. I think it was like, what was he, Wisconsin or Indiana? I can't remember. But anyway, you know, it was somebody who at the time was like kind of a. He was a popular senator and he even, he couldn't, he couldn't help but speak in a way that paid deference to the moral framework of the people who were burning down the cities. And so that is part of it. And, you know, do you think that
- [31:07]
Tom Woods
Trump kind of inspired the. All right, forget it. We're going to drop the pretense and we're just going to talk about what's really happening.
- [31:13]
Darrell Cooper
For sure. I mean, he definitely kind of tore the veil off of that. And he did that partly, I think, by just pushing the Overton window on issues himself and on presentation himself, but also by evoking such irrational and vulgar responses from the other side that they kind of lost a large part of their power to tis. Tsk. Anybody else for the way they talk, you know, but you know, I, I would also say that's kind of an object lesson of, like, why we have to be careful about these things. Like, like, I look now when I see Trump insulting Joe Kent or Thomas Massie's wife or making comments about how soon they remarried, you know, and, and whatnot. And I look at him and I'm like, I hear it. And I can't even listen to this guy's voice anymore when I hear those things. But then I think about it and I'm like, yeah, but you thought it was funny when it was Rosie o' Donnell and it was this and that. It's like, don't tell me the signs weren't there. And so, I mean, you can get too caught up in that where, you know, when, when you're in an environment where, you know, speech is controlled, thought is controlled, and you just. There are obvious things that everybody, including the other side, talks about at their dinner tables that nobody can say in public. That when somebody comes out and just rips that band aid off and lets it all out, you know, you almost want to throw. I don't even care about anything else. You know, this is. You have to throw them that you get intoxicated by, by the boldness of it. But, you know, you got to be careful. I mean, maybe there's no way to tell until, you know, you get into the situation. But sometimes, like, that's all there is. You know? What I mean is the vulgarity in the in your face sort of presentation. And I guess that's hard to tell until they get into office.
- [32:53]
Tom Woods
Do you ever wonder, maybe this is just me, but sometimes I imagine to myself, suppose Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, now Grant, those are federal politicians. But suppose they teleported somehow into the year 2026 and saw the debate, the mayoral debate in LA and saw some of these ads. First of all, they wouldn't even understand. They don't even know what fentanyl is, you know, but they would. They can use context clues, I'm sure, to figure it out. But imagine those people coming today and observing what's going on. Or I was asked recently, I have a personal trainer, and we've, at this point, we've talked about everything under the sun. So now we're. Now all we have left to talk about is hypothetical situations. So what are three historical events you would want to witness in person if you could, with a time machine? And I said, like, one of mine was very dorky, which was, I'd like to go to the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 because it was closed door, newspapers weren't allowed in. We did eventually, years and years later, we did get Madison's notes. But I'd like to know exactly what was said behind those closed doors. But I think about them and then I think again, if I could bring them to the present and see that we're not arguing about, you know, where the capital should be, you know, or whether we should assume the state debts or not. We're arguing about what should we do about menacing drug addicts who are, you know, bothering children. Like it's gotten to that point. And I would, I would like to see if any of them said, well, I wonder if there's anything we could have done better to try to prevent this outcome.
- [34:30]
Darrell Cooper
Yeah, it's really hard. Right. Because the fact is that we're contending with problems that result from a mindset and just a general approach to governance that they really never could have foreseen as something that could happen. Right. I had this conversation, I think, with Scott on one of our recent provoked episodes, or maybe it was when I was talking to Jim Webb recently actually about he had brought up, you know, the possibility of a congressional war powers authorization thing with the Iran war. And you know, Congress sort of asserting their authority on. And I said, you know, like, the problem with this is that the framers never could have imagined that Congress would not only fail to assert its authority in a situation like that, but they wouldn't want it. They don't want the authority because they don't want the responsibility. They all have the same APAC donors and everything else. So they want the war that's going on and they love the fact that it's all falling on the administration and if it goes badly, nobody can pin it on them. They love that the founders never could have imagined something like that. I mean, they just, up until very, very recently, I mean, if the executive tried to encroach too aggressively on the legislative branch, you would have Republican and Democratic leaders that would come together and say, so. So these are all. A lot of these things are problems that they just, they really would not have been able to understand. Like how people, you know, they would go talk to Karen Bass and just say, like, why don't you arrest the drug addled homeless person who's harassing children on the playground? And she'll say, well, you can't just arrest them. And they just would not know how to comprehend that. They just wouldn't have the mindset for that, you know, and so we're trying to Work the controls of a system that even the people who designed it said, you know, is built for a virtuous people, you know, built for a people who are really intent on self government and, and very deliberately. And their approach to it is something that is like defensive in nature. Almost understanding that like, we have to manage this in a way because if we don't, we're going to lose it. We're going to end up like everybody else. You know, the people, the countries we left and all the people in history. And so like, maybe it has to do with scale. They just couldn't understand the changes that would happen at scale. When, you know, all problems end up becoming abstract. May just has to do. I mean, again, we're talking about some of the most brilliant men in history, no question about that. But you're talking about guys who lived in 13 agrarian colonies who designed a system that is now governing a world empire, that we're talking about, you know, fighting wars with hordes of remote control robots and stuff. You know, I mean, this is like. And the fact that the constitution and the laws that have resulted from it are holding us together at all and still function basically to at least have a continuity of government that people consider legitimate and everything. The fact that it's still doing that, considering the changes that have taken place during the time, is really like. It does speak to their genius. But, you know, it's. Yeah, it would be. It would be. That'd be a good comedy. There was actually a. There was a movie a couple years ago, the hilarious movie that you cannot find anywhere anymore. You can't find it on Amazon. You can't find it anywhere. And I don't even know why, because it's not bad. But it's called look who's Back and Hitler dies in his bunker in 1945 and wakes up in the same place in BERLIN in like 2014 or whatever it is. He's going around. It's not a pro Hitler movie, anything like that. Like, I don't know why. I think just because it portrays them in a comical way that's kind of endearing maybe like, but I don't know, they like Jojo Rabbit. So I don't know. But like, anyway, you can't find it anywhere. And it's kind of that where he goes around, he's meeting all these like immigrant shopkeepers and he doesn't know what's going on. You know, seeing just him looking around modern Germany. They should make a similar comedy with like, you know, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and Bring them forward, actually, maybe, maybe do it with. It would have to be George Washington because he would have the personality that would probably provide the most comedy for that kind of a situation. But.
- [38:47]
Tom Woods
Well, you know, on the George Washington front, let me just say a quick thing because you did say. I think you either, either you mentioned APAC or Israel or whatever, but when you read the Washington Farewell Address, I've read the foreign policy part quite recently because. For a newsletter I wrote. But there's another half about national unity and stuff that most people don't read. Leaving that aside, and indeed not reading it again for the time being, when you look at that part about the United States not getting involved in foreign conflicts and, you know, we're happy enough to leave Europe to its crazy conflicts and we have the blessing of being all the way over here and. But also we shouldn't have a special favoritism for any one foreign power. Now, when he talks about that, it is so eerily prescient about the relation, the US Relationship with Israel. It is so eerily prescient, it almost gives you the chills. It is exactly what he's describing. Word for word. It is what he's describing. And I believe it's been a tradition in the US Senate every year for many, many years for some member of the Senate to read Washington's farewell address. So one, one day out of the year, somebody says something true in the US Senate. So that's just. And George Washington has many, many admirable qualities, by the way. Even, even if as president, maybe he favored some things that I didn't favor. And he was sometimes the kind of person who, the last person who spoke to him could persuade him of something. So. The National Bank. Yeah, I don't know what, what you want me to do here. You know, Jefferson makes a good argument. So does Hamilton, but Hamilton's the Treasury Secretary, so we'll. We'll go with him. It's hard to stay angry at George Washington because of what a heroic figure he was and because, I mean, the King of England apparently did say he. He truly is the greatest man in the world or the greatest man who ever lived or whatever. The rendering is so not perfect. But because he's the father of our country, I can kind of look the other way when he's not exactly right on things. But on this matter of foreign intervention and showing favoritism to any one particular country, it is as if he had indeed taken that time machine and flown back and they told him, you got to be quiet about the Time machine part. But just say frankly, what you saw in the future.
- [41:04]
Darrell Cooper
Yeah, I mean, it is true. So for most of our country's history, you know, really up until like the 1960s, the Vietnam War and the Cultural Revolution kind of marked the, the end of it. You know, we had this old WASP kind of establishment that went all the way back. You know, sons of the American Revolution types and these, these old money families that, you know, not all of them were as prominent in 1776, but you know, they, they made their money in the late 1800s or mid-1800s and you know, pushed their way into that sort of pseudo aristocracy and, and became like ensconced in it. And you know, that class of people, when you got a little bit later, you know, we, we, they started to sort of bring in Irish Catholics first, but then others from like the European ethnic migrations that came in, they would work them into that, the ones who, they felt needed to be a part of it. And we had institutions, you know, like the secret societies at Harvard and Yale and stuff, for sort of inducting, you know, promising young people who are not necessarily from the big families like into that organization, training them what their responsibilities were. And you had this class of people who really did think of the country in generational terms. I inherited this from my father. My kids are going to inherit it from me. Not my fortune, not my business, this country, you know, and, and they really did have that sense of long term proprietorship over it. And if you had another country like any country like Israel that was coming in and really like trying to assert a prerogative to exercise a, you know, a dominant amount of control over our, over our policy, especially doing it by spreading money around, by trying to influence the political system through, through just propaganda. They would not have tolerated that. They would absolutely would not have tolerated. This is our country. You're not, you're not doing this. And after the 1960s when the old WASP establishment kind of got wiped out or just, I guess delegitimized, you know, their kids decided that they just didn't want to do it anymore. You know, Nelson Rockefeller died in 1978 or 79, I think. And what David Rockefeller was that, was that his name? The one who, the one who went off to that South Pacific island and got eaten by the cannibals or something like. But yeah, exactly, exactly. It's like what, you know, you don't hear about any of these families anymore because they don't matter. They're just rich people. Like, you know, like any Other rich, rich people, they're not a class in the way that they had always been. And so what that meant was we have this system of government that was designed from the very beginning to be this open system, you know, that. That anybody who knows how to get at the controls and, you know, and work them can. Can use the system to, you know, forward the interests that they favor and think are best. But with this class of people, this class of proprietors sort of at the helm, you know, maybe with a very loose grip on it, but at the helm. And when that went away, I mean, it just. Everything got turned over to like, how well organized, how well funded, and how aggressive of a minority interest group are you. And with Israel, I mean, there's just. There is no interest group, no ethnic group, no foreign lobby, anything that is even remotely close to as well organized, well funded, and as aggressive as the Zionists in the Israel lobby. And so since there's nobody minding the store anymore, there's nobody really around to tell them no, you know, they know how to get at the controls and move them and make them do what they want to do. And there's just no higher authority to sort of kick them off the bridge.
- [44:52]
Tom Woods
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- [46:28]
Darrell Cooper
There you go.
- [46:29]
Tom Woods
And it happened in 1961. And apparently the official explanation was that he drowned. But then later on, people looked into it more and it looked like he was actually killed and eaten by a local tribe. So that's certainly a way to go. Maybe that's something I can talk to my trainer about. What would be your preferred manner of death? I'll tell you, it ain't that. That's for sure.
- [46:49]
Darrell Cooper
No, no, definitely not. I mean, it's a good story, I guess, when you get to heaven or hell, but. Yeah, no, that's not the way that you would want to go. No, but I mean, this is, you know, this is a sad thing, right? It really is. Like, you know, you have. These old families weren't perfect, obviously, but who would we even think about like, that today? I mean, you have like the Bushes, right?
- [47:11]
Tom Woods
Okay.
- [47:12]
Darrell Cooper
But the Bushes, it's like, worked for the Harrimans. I mean, they weren't like upper tier, sort of Rockefeller level, like American aristocrats. Like, this was a family that was kind of a leftover family that, you know, from those days.
- [47:25]
Tom Woods
Oh, and not to mention the general public may have respected them well enough, but never had the kind of affection that you would expect from a family like that.
- [47:33]
Darrell Cooper
Right. And it's just so different because I think as capital has become more mobile and borders have become blurrier, you know, identities have become more fluid that the upper class, like, has in fact, but certainly is seen by people as having sort of dissociated themselves from the rest of the country in, like, important ways. I mean, you just. When you look back and think you can read the most scathing, critical book of Andrew Carnegie, you know, it'll talk about the labor, you know, oppression, whatever, about the Rockefellers and how aggressive he was and, you know, undercutting his whatever, all the kind of things none of them can get around the fact that these guys built every library, every damn university. I just, you know, they built out things in this country that we still are benefiting from today. And today you just. That's just not. Nobody does that kind of thing. I mean, you in here, the perfect example of it, right, is Jeff Bezos ex wife, who I think is like the. For. I think she's the richest woman in the world because she was married to Jeff Bezos. But when they got divorced, she kind of went off the grid for, I don't know, a year or something like that. Like she was just, you know, the divorce happened, it was in the News and then Mrs. Bezos ex. Bezos was. Was just sort of out of the news. And then all of a sudden magazine spreads cover photos like all. It's a big like, it's like a coming out party, right? And it's like her announcing herself kind of on the public scene as a public figure. And all of the stuff that it would go through is all the billions of dollars she was giving away to all these worthy causes. Feminist groups, trans groups, racial justice groups, like all of these kinds of things. It's like, dude, go. Can we get somebody to go build a library? Can somebody like, do something that like, is actually going to really, really benefit like, people, you know, more than just mean. Forget the fact that like all of those things he's doing are actively destroying the country. But like, even the way the money's being spent, like in a more general sense is like, you're doing this in a way that is just going to be completely irrelevant. Even if everything goes perfectly, it's going to be completely irrelevant in 10 years. Like, this is just stupid. You know, go build. Like. But that's just not how people think because why would they spend their money like that when they don't really particularly identify with any particular city, barely identify with the country. And so, you know, there's just, yeah, when you get that sort of revolt of the elites and the dissociation of, you know, the masses and you have that sort of unofficial divorce, you know, you lose that sense of responsibility on both ends, honestly. I mean, Tucker make likes to make the point about how. I mean, on one hand, like, I think some people hear this and they think it's kind of a petty, like, petty point to make. But I, I don't think it is. And he doesn't mean it this way in a petty way. You talk about like how when he sees a lot of these tech billionaires and you know, they're giving a speech at the whatever Democrat National Convention in a hoodie or something, you know, and he's like, I get it, man, you guys are cool. San Francisco Dudes and, like, you know, you're bucking the system and this kind of thing or whatever. Like, I get it, but, like, one of the reasons that that never would have happened in, like, the old days of, like, 2005, you know, but like, any other time before that is because, you know, you're saying something when you go out. It's like, if this country is going to put me in a position where I've got $50 billion or the equivalent or whatever, where I've got the level of power and responsibility, you know, just power and privilege that comes with that, the least I can do is make a presentable appearance and put the effort into, like, dress myself, not like a child. Like, when I go out and to be seen by them, that's just. The least I can do is. Is offer them that respect. But there's just. Nobody would even think, like. I think most people heard Tucker say that, and they just. They didn't even see his point. They were like, what are you talking? Like, what do you mean? You have an op. Like, Jack Dorsey has an obligation to the public to present himself in a certain way. What are you talking about?
- [51:52]
Tom Woods
I know no one can understand this. They think there's something wrong with you for pointing it out or that you're obsessed with mere outward appearance. But thing is, outward appearance reflects inward appearance. And secondly, it indicates a kind of level of respect you have for the people around you. You know, like, you don't show up at a wedding with a torn shirt and a pair of pants with patches on them. Right? You could, because that would be disrespectful toward the people there. So on some level, even after all the degradation of the west, we still kind of know this, right? On some level, we do kind of know it. Now, Scott told me, and I guess maybe I remembered this at the time recently, about Pat Buchanan getting very upset that Barack Obama had taken his jacket off in the White House, that the jacket is part of what the man is wearing. It's not like you put on a coat because it's cold. That's part of what you have on. You don't take it off. And he thought that was a kind of informality that he just couldn't abide. And, and, and, and Scott thought of it as kind of quaint old Pat Buchanan, which I kind of do, too, because, yeah, I get it. Of all possible things to be worried about, but I want to have a pap. Buchanan who reminds us of things like that.
- [53:06]
Darrell Cooper
You know, I don't want to dis you need it. I was reading a book a while back on the Mi massacre, and I can't remember if it was talking about Charlie Company itself or if it was referring to another military unit that had carried out an atrocity. But they were interviewing some of the people who were involved, and one of the things that one of them said, it's kind of famous, if you're into that kind of history, said it started when guys stopped shining their boots. Like, that's when we started down the road to what happened there. Because, like, once, you know, in this even in the military, and while I was in the military for the most of the time I was in, I didn't get this either. But it's like you let that go and now you're on to the next thing and like, you know, now you have to hold the line one step further down. And then if you let that go, it gets easier to let the next one go and it starts rolling downhill. And like, you know, it's one of the reasons that, you know, you've seen actually people from within the spec ops community in the last, really, in the last 10 years, you've seen a lot of this in, like, internal sort of, you know, military journal type type writings and stuff saying that, you know, just having been at war and just deployment after deployment after deployment for so many years, which if you've been in special operations, you know, since the global war on terror started, I mean, your deployment schedule has just been absolutely insane. That it has had an effect of weakening, loosening discipline within these units. Because things are different when you're out in the field. You know, you're out there, like, nobody's really, you know, getting on your case about your facial hair or just, you know, any of your uniform items or whatever it is. Like, that kind of stuff that, that's. That stateside stuff, that stuff when you're back at training command and when you're, you know. But those things are really important. Like, that's why we pull people off the line for a period of time to kind of reset that so that when they go back out, you know, they're starting at that same baseline. And, you know, so I think, like, as a society, yeah. Like, you can't have the wealthiest people in your society thinking it's okay to show up to your wedding in a hoodie, basically, and not have that spill over into everything else. Like, you know, what this is what would happen in that funny comedy movie with George Washington coming up that I want to see made is he would See all of the chaos in Karen Bass's la, He would just. Just be completely befuddled how this could possibly happen in America. And then he would see the richest man in the world in America and in the world, walk down the street in like a T shirt and sandals, and he would go, oh, okay, now I understand now. I get it.
- [55:44]
Tom Woods
Yep, I understand now. By the way, I can't wait. The comments are gonna rip us to shreds, Daryl. They're gonna. Because it's gonna be people who do dress that way all the time. And now, look, I should be wearing a jacket and tie, but I'm not. And you and I will argue about. At what point do you, you know, do you need to reproduce from the spectrum?
- [56:02]
Darrell Cooper
It's a spectrum, right?
- [56:03]
Tom Woods
Like, the degradation is so much like, we just went. We'll have to wrap up after this. But my daughter and I, over the weekend went to see Beethoven's 9th performed and it was fantastic. It was absolutely. It's such an amazing piece of work, especially that final movement. I mean, it is. If you can pull that off and perform that well, what an accomplishment that is. But anyway, it was kind of a letdown that at an event like that, it would have been expected that everyone would wear a suit for an event like that, because this is an elegant night out. This isn't. You're going to see Terminator 2, you know, this is an elegant night out. And, you know, I wouldn't say people were dressed like bums, but it was just like, well, wait a minute. These are the type of people who donate to the Orlando Philharmonic. They donate to it. Like, these are people who care about the. These are. This is the upper crust of this local society. And that's what they aspire to, is their own. I mean, yeah, I know it's more comfortable not to have this button. Button. I. I know that. I know there are a lot of things that be more comfortable, but that wouldn't be respectful, you know, that I don't do. You know, I could. Well, we could think of all kinds of. Of gruesome things I could do that would be. Be impolite, inappropriate. But anyway, I. I wanted it to be an evening where, okay, this is what the elite of society is capable of, you know, is something that's high class, that at least one thing in the society isn't Crocs and a sweatshirt. You know, like, there's one thing in the society that hasn't succumbed to that and that has some dignity and self respect. And we didn't even get it there.
- [57:34]
Darrell Cooper
Yeah, I think as a child of the 90s and somebody who did not understand or like the show back when it was on live on tv. As I've gotten older, one of the main lessons of life for me has been that Frasier Crane was right about pretty much everything.
- [57:50]
Tom Woods
And I'll say, by the way, and this will have to stop here, Frazier is a this will probably be more controversial than the other thing. Is a vastly inferior show to Cheers. Cheers was the better show. He was better on Cheers. I find Frazier intolerable. I hate all the characters. I even hate Frasier, whom I liked on Cheers. So Cheers is the better show. But if you and I get into this, Daryl, we'll never, these poor people will never be able to get back.
- [58:15]
Darrell Cooper
I, I, I'm a Frasier guy.
- [58:18]
Tom Woods
Okay, so we'll have to talk about
- [58:20]
Darrell Cooper
this some other time.
- [58:21]
Tom Woods
But anyway, Daryl Cooper, I appreciate your time. Thanks a million.
- [58:24]
Darrell Cooper
Anytime.
- [58:25]
Tom Woods
And ladies and gentlemen, don't forget, you can be dressed as casual as you want, but the best week of the year is the Tom Woods Cruise. And Scott Horton will be there with me as will Clint Russell. So check that out@tom woods cruise.com we'll see you next time. Make yourself and those you love less vulnerable to the regime, both mentally and physically.
- [58:46]
Darrell Cooper
Get more forbidden information@tomsfreebooks.com and be sure
- [58:50]
Tom Woods
to subscribe to the show wherever you listen.
- [58:53]
Darrell Cooper
See you next time.
- [59:02]
Tom Woods
Like the sound of the Tom Wood show, my audio production is provided by Podsworth Media. Check them out@podsworth.com Enter code WOODS50 to get 50% off your first order. If your recording sounds rough, the Podsworth app can make it not only listenable, but professional. Remember, when you use code WOODS50, you get half off your first order and you'll also be supporting this show.
- [59:27]
Darrell Cooper
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- [59:56]
Tom Woods
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- [60:03]
Darrell Cooper
I asked our host a question about
- [60:05]
Tom Woods
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- [60:06]
Darrell Cooper
back to me super quick.
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Tom Woods
See, that's a premier host move right there.
- [60:11]
Darrell Cooper
I wish I had a premier group chat. I asked them where we should have
- [60:14]
Tom Woods
dinner last night and they left me on red. I know you saw it.
- [60:17]
Darrell Cooper
It says it.
- [60:18]
Tom Woods
Classic group chat move. Don't walk into a surprise book a top rated verbo. Stay with a premier host if you know you verbo.