Matt Kibbe on the Deep State, Fauci, and the COVID Coverup

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Matt Kibby, welcome to Dad Saves America. It is so cool to do this. I I love this format and digging a little bit deeper. So, I’m I’m I’m honored to be here. Oh, well, you and I have known each other a long time. I’m trying to remember uh how long ago it was, but I think it was when you were at Freedom Works. Yeah. So, your beard was black. I had I I actually I didn’t have a beard. I h but I did have long sideburns and they were indeed black. Yeah. So So a while perhaps. So we’re we’re now the gray beards. Yeah. Yeah. Um I actually wanted to go back to that. So let’s just start with what Freedom Works was and how did you first get into this world of policy and politics? So it I mean it actually goes all the way back to my graduate studies at George Mason University and um we were reading a lot of the leftist literature on on grassroots organizing cadre building you know how to take over a town hall meeting all of that stuff and and is Saulinsky part of that like Solinski is part of it but there’s a whole literature that that thinks a lot about um how to uh essentially manipulate public opinion And and if you read Solleinsky, it’s it’s horribly cynical because it’s like and he actually dedicates his book to Lucifer as you might recall. I’ve only like unironically I’ve only read bits and pieces of I need to actually read the whole thing. But as you know, Solinsky, you know, the rules for radicals uh is is really a series of tactics designed to get people to think something that they wouldn’t naturally think. and great and and we so so very cynical, very manipulative. Um but there there’s a certain truth in that um that politicians and political actors and even voters like they never ever have perfect knowledge. Humans never have perfect knowledge. Um and it’s not it’s not it’s not a flaw. You’re not a lowinformation voter. You just you know you’re living your life and it’s almost rational not to pay attention at all. So the question was um you know how would we actually organize people around liberty and limited government and fiscal responsibility and you know very radical concepts. Right. Right. Right. Maybe we should balance the budget. I don’t know. Um a monstrous idea. Um yeah. Don’t drive the ship of state. Yeah. Off of off of a off of a cliff to mix metaphors. Yeah. Yeah. Um so so fast forward to Freedom Works was was the organization that I founded. But again, like based on this this this literature of grassroots organizing, could we create a constituency of people that would show up and um advocate for liberty? Uh we were doing that long before there was a Tea Party movement, but we were actually studying the Tea Party as a model for mostly peaceful social change. I’m obviously fascinated with American history and and the miracle of the founding and where these ideas came from. Um, a lot of people think it was sort of this immaculate conception of these these very wise men who had read the right books um, suddenly said, “Let’s let’s do the liberty thing.” But it was an ethos. The spirit of 76 was very much a grassroots movement. I think I think it was John Adams that I’m going to butcher the quote, but he famously said, “At the time we were doing this, one-third of the cup, one-third of the country was pro-liberty patriots. Onethird of the country was in the tank with the British. And then there was a third of the country that where am I? What do I think? Yeah. And it it was their job to to move opinion in their direction. So in a lot of ways this this was the model that we were working on at Freedom Works. And suddenly this this thing called social media came along and we were very lonely in opposing the Wall Street bailout in 2008. You know, I thought it was just like um we’re we’re going to fight this. not only we’re going to lose, but nobody’s going to be with us. Kind of like a sacrificial lamb. Let’s let’s do this because we have to, but there’s no way we’re going to stop this. And and we’re, you know, we’re sending out all these these missives on on very primitive social media and there was such a wave of people. I’m like, what’s happening? It used to be hard to get people to show up. It used to be like this this physical activity like you have to convince someone to get on a bus and come to Washington DC to do something. That’s such a it’s almost irrational. It’s such an investment of time and energy. And suddenly there was this wave of anger and calls that that actually shut down Capitol Hill. I’m like, okay, that’s a paradigm shift. There’s something different going on. It was almost like a market, right? uh spontaneously self-organizing, people coming together, all galvanized by the Wall Street bailout. Almost to a person, they would quote George W. Bush saying, “We have to abandon the free market to save it.” I’m like, “How did you guys even hear him say that? It’s because it’s because this insider game had suddenly become radically democratized and they they knew what the Wall Street bailout was and they stopped the first house vote and then then Boehner and Pelosi sort of colluded to do it around their backs and eventually they went to the Treasury Department and did it anyway. That’s right. It’s easy to forget that at the time in the fall of 2008, the first bill to bail out the banks failed in the House. Yeah. All right, here’s your obligatory reminder to hit the like button, subscribe to the channel, and ring the bell. It really actually does help us out a lot when we’re trying to book awesome new guests. They look at how many subscribers are on the channel and they say, “Yep, this is worth doing.” And I want to bring the best possible people to you that I can. Speaking of which, let’s get back to the conversation. I mean, they they sort of knew what the Tea Party was, but they did they didn’t appreciate that they were actually embracing an entire model of social change. Um, founded in sort of the American ethos of 76. So, it was it was a beautiful thing. The other once once you ask them why they were there, you would ask them what they want. And again like no talking points, no scripts, but to a person they would say individual freedom, some version of this individual freedom, constitutionally limited government and fiscal responsibility. Super radical dangerous ideas, right? And by the way, the Tea Party wasn’t the first social movement that sort of um started to scare the the machine, the establishment. Part of it was uh uh you could go back to Howard Dean, but you could certainly look at the Ron Paul movement as no one expected that to happen, but he used the cultural soapbox of presidential campaign to to plant seeds like Von Mises, who’s this guy? And specifically, there was a moment in the in the the presidential debates where I mean, this was fairly radical. Ron Paul was talking about how 911 was a was a a version of blowback for the CIA messing around. Yeah. And for American interventionism overseas and Rudy Giuliani was like, “How dare you, you know, take that back.” Because he was, you know, America’s mayor. And I mean, I was in New York for 911. So, you know, I wasn’t necessarily predisposed to like what Ron Paul was saying at that time. It was a, you know, a little shocking. If you go back and watch that clip, um, Ron Paul gets booed wildly because the GOP, the the part of the duopoly had filled the room with their guys, like GOP donors and and they were like as offended as really Giuliani was, but outside that room, the exact opposite happened, right? And this this again is early on, but um you know and he used um a old school tactic to get into a presidential primary debate and to be on TV, but it was social m media that propelled the Ron Paul movement. It it would have died on the vine because they would have choked him off. They would have said, “Okay, we’re going to come up with a rule that doesn’t let you come on and and do these debates because we’re not having that kind of subversive talk. This is our party.” So you had all these things happening and and and you know we can fast forward today and this um I’m still optimistic that someday despite the absurdity of our political choices apparently that we’ll have um you have all of these insurgents uh and not just third parties but you have you know the the Ron Paul’s in the Republican party um you have the Tulsi Gabbards in the Democratic party. They did the same thing to her. Yeah, the Democrats did the same thing to her that the Republicans did to Ron Paul. And so you have these these minority voices, these dissident voices that are very much empowered by by technology and and you know the Tea Party just wouldn’t have happened without that technology and and the you know the machine the people that started demonizing them put a million people on the mall and everybody’s like oh what is this? Um we better do something about this. So, they started trying to figure out who to take out. And who’s they? When you say they, who you who are you referring to? That’s a short hand. Um, some uh some of my friends call it the blob. I call it the machine. But it’s the it’s the ecosystem of power mongers that feed off of big government. And obviously senators and congressmen, the lobby class, the corporate class. Um, you know, we now call it the deep state, but but like the administrative state is a real thing. Yeah. There’s um you just is there like a million non-military executive branch employees all of whom have a stake in this in their budget growing? There’s a reason why Arlington County is one of the wealthiest counties in the world. It is it’s it is literally like the Hunger Games. Yeah, that’s right. This the counties surrounding Washington DC are the richest counties in America. Yeah. How that isn’t enough to generate pitchforks is beyond me. It’s Panama. Yeah. I mean, if we ever do build a wall, they’re going to build a wall around themselves. Um to keep the rest of us out. And they’ll they’ll probably develop sort of a Hunger Game sort of motif cuz it’s kind of cool. Um but but it like um at first and it it shifted precipitously, but at first it was the Democratic machine trying to stop us because at this point you’re seeing like real political potential in all of these people because they’ve they’ve started organizing in districts again spontaneously. Nobody did this. You can’t actually tell someone to knock on doors. It’s something that they actually have to want to do. And if you actually want to have a tremendous impact, um it needs to be decentralized. But the Democrats, so you have Democratic senators, um you have Obama very publicly demonizing us, organizing for Obama, actually called us domestic terrorists. Sounds familiar. When we Yeah. All of all of these uh now they just call parents domestic terrorists. All of these themes were I’m sure we weren’t the first, but um you know, racist, domestic terrorist, Nazis, and and we’re called not like Nancy Pelosis called us Nazis because someone had had taken a picture of Barack Obama and put the little mustache on it. Like may maybe you think that’s tasteless, but that doesn’t make us Nazis. I didn’t get it. But they’re criticizing Nazism and maybe you’re being outrageous, but you’re not saying you like it’s like does that mean they they’re a fan of both the Nazis and Obama? I’m not I’m lost. Yeah. So, it it it started with the Democrats being panicked, but but the the the thing that shifted, you know, the Democrats were scared to death, but we weren’t really interested in the Democrats. We had a slogan at the time which was you have to beat the Republicans before you can beat the Democrats. We had t-shirts. They were very popular unless you happen to be an incumbent Republican and and they didn’t like him that much at all. But, you know, you know, Mike Lee was the tip of the spear. And then Thomas Massie is another amazing Yeah. There it’s I I I’m not big on politicians in general, but there’s a handful Thomas Massiey’s in that category. I’m like, “No, this is like a good person with actual principles. He sticks to them.” Tea Party Wave, Justin Amos, um, and and people forget this, too. But but Rand Paul um Mitch McConnell did everything he could to stop Rand Paul from getting the Republican nomination in Kentucky. Yes. And he handpicked his guy and and Rand crushed him. And and so at this point, we’re starting to piss off some really powerful people in the Republican party. So I I think that that you know, our real enemies were that the machine in the Republican party. We we went after Lindsey Graham. So, we’re we’re trying like we were just trying to replace them with fiscally responsible uh libertyloving people, but we were actually taking on the war machine. And I didn’t I didn’t think about it that way. But man, we pissed off some important people. So, it it was uh it was fun. But the ultimate demise of the Tea Party um around 13, 14, 15 was when Republicans, including some of the guys we helped get elected, um broke the caps on spending. Remember, there were spending caps, the Tea Party forced. This was it was called the sequester, if I Yes. And no one thought we’d pull that off, but we we created enough pressure to do that. it was Republicans that broke the caps because the defense uh they weren’t even cuts. They were there were limits on the growth of spending. It was intolerable to them. So that’s your that’s your Achilles heel. If you’re if you’re a fiscal conservative and you don’t care about these endless wars, you’re never going to get there. You know, Thomas Massie gets a lot of crap for opposing foreign aid across the board. Mhm. um he gets accused of all sorts of horrible things because he’s not wanting to spend money we don’t have to send to other countries so that people can die in wars. It doesn’t seem radical to me his position, but in Washington DC, the machine, the people that went after the Tea Party, that’s that’s that’s kryptonite, right? Like that guy got to go. It’s it is funny because there’s a um the leftight concept which began in like the French legislature like oh, who was on the who was pro monarchy was they were on the right and the revolutionaries were on the left or something like that. It doesn’t really feel like that has a lot of explanatory or or or even utility um explanatory power or utility today because when I watch like say Jimmy Door on YouTube who would call himself a man of the left I have more in common with with Jimmy Door than a lot of people who would say that who would maybe think they’re with me. Yeah. And um and I think he’s encountered that. And you have this this meme, right, which now like everything to the right of Lenin is far right. Like you’re either Lenin, you’re or you’re far right. Elon loves to tweet that out. The little meme. Yeah. There’s that there’s that um stick figure with the the person on the right, the person that’s on the left, and then the far left, and the far left keeps moving to the point where like the the person that was on the left is now like, uhoh, what I guess I’m on the right now. It’s kind of funny like I’m I’m and I want to go down this rabbit hole, but I’m I’m a huge fan of of some of my greatest critics. When I was a tea party organizer, Matt Taibbe was writing hit pieces on on us and the party. He’s awesome. like I I have so much more in common with him than than um almost any Republican on Capitol Hill. And even Bill Maher, who I you know, at least 80% of the time I’m agreeing with the guy and every time I used to go on, he I think every time he always started off with you’re just mad because there’s a black man in the White House. I remember these I remember these uh media hits with with you on that show and it was always like this is such a despicable line, Bill. What are you doing? Yeah, I I especially if he knew anything about I’d have to ask him because I I think he’s now like uh we created a monster and um and I think he’s rediscovering his his liberal roots. And I use that word because I I think um Jimmy Door, uh Bill Maher, um Dave Chappelle, Russell Brand, the list goes on and on and on. Matt Tabby. Yeah. By by by the way, well Matt’s different, but um all these other guys are comedians. So when you say you’re not allowed to say something to a comedian, they suddenly realize that that the left that they thought was liberal isn’t liberal at all. It’s authoritarian. It’s it’s very liberal. It’s it’s very da too. It’s very scoldy. It’s uh um it’s like it’s like it’s like a new religion, but not as fun as the old religion. And so they’re they’re they’re coming along. And I um I think there’s an exciting I I think um the the pandemic, the lockdowns, the censorship industrial complex has is the new Wall Street bailout. And there’s a new political coalition emerging that is in a lot of ways coming from from these guys you’re talking about. Um you know, lefties who um the left them. Uh so there’s an anti- athoritarian coalition that I think is quite exciting. um where Thomas Massie and Matt Taibbe and Rand Paul and Jimmy Door, they’re working on the things that matter and I think that’s really interesting. Yeah. I mean, I think um you know, we had Brett Weinstein and Heather Hang on the show and and they’re another they’re in that category as well. They’re almost OG, right? Like the first the first lefties to be cancelled that like who are these people? Right. Right. to be hunted by zombies right at Evergreen. So to that is a great segue which is to say that you know so you were in the trenches inside this world of political activism which is not you were in DC you’re working for a congressman. You are leading an organization that’s getting attacked by all kinds of people who basically have like I watch I watch cable news and I know you’re bad because a host on cable news said you’re bad and that’s all I know. That’s all I know. I don’t know anything about it. You’re some dark money thing or something. All these buzzwords. By the way, Keith Oberman called me the second worst person in the world and that is still on my bio cuz I’m sort of proud of that one. Who was the first? Hitler, I guess. Is it? It was Rupert Murdoch. So I I really I was I wasn’t even going to get that spot. So, um, so how should someone that hears about these minations, including organizations like Freedom Works, and just thinks, “This all sounds like this all sounds like you’re messing around with our democratic process, and I I don’t have a seat at that table, so maybe you didn’t have maybe a debt or whatever, but it still all sounds like you’re doing minations.” Yeah. I mean, I think this is this is something that I I do I want to be sensitive to because I think there’s like a kind of you get into this world of talking about politics and before you know it, you’re in an industry. Mhm. And you come to conferences and you see all the same people like we do and you’re in an industry now. So, how how would you explain the role of this activity as something that isn’t shouldn’t or shouldn’t always be s be considered suspect or corrupt? Yeah. I mean, it it’s a complex question because um you and I would also say on occasion if we’re looking at some sort of behavior coming out of Washington or some organization, you always say follow the money. Well, like a good example, Black Lives Matter. I think you and I would both look at Black Lives Matter as an organization, and I’ve had people like um Wilfrid Riley on the show be like, “That’s just a corrupt.” They literally they took in money, millions and millions, tens of millions of dollars. Yeah. It’s a grift. And funneled it to themselves and to totally unrelated causes, trans rights things, and international weird stuff. And it’s a grift. It’s It’s a scam. Yeah. So knowing whether Black Lives Matter is or isn’t a scam or Freedom Works is or isn’t a scam, it’s pretty hard. Yeah, you have to I mean you have to do if you’re talking about being a donor or a journalist, you have to do your due diligence. Um too many too many reporters don’t actually do any well almost no reporters do any work anymore. So if if you wanted to look at, you know, my little organization right now, Free the People, you would have to determine whether or not the things we do are authentic. Am I being paid for? Am I advocating certain positions simply because there’s money in it? Um, you’d be hardressed to look at my organization and come to that conclusion. um because there’s honestly not a a huge financial constituency for um what I would consider pretty pure philosophical libertarianism. But I think it kind of goes back to the Ron Paul thing. I think you look at the people and you look at the organization and and judge for yourself. Are they authentically doing what they believe? Um are they trying to make a difference? Are they um are they effective? But in that order, like yeah, are they good people? Do they believe what they say they believe? Are they effective? Um because, you know, some really bad people can be quite effective at at doing bad things. And and I I think I think it’s uh you know, it’s a it’s a burden for anybody that runs an organization. You you have to protect the integrity of that, which is why we don’t is why we don’t take corporate money. um you know, some of my friends who do um uh liberty organizations, you can tell when it’s corporate funded because it it sounds like a corporate talking point. And I I think that that that leads them exposed. I’m not I’m not saying they’re violating their principles. I’m not saying that that they’re doing something wrong, but it it leaves them exposed to this assumption from their enemies in particular or even like people just trying to figure out how what do I think on this subject? What do I think about global warming? Um, does that sound like Exxon talking points? Well, that that doesn’t that doesn’t persuade me. It might actually push me in the opposite direction. Um, there’s a there’s an Upton Sinclair quote that I come back to fairly often have since like committing myself to trying to align my personal values with my work. And that is, and I’ll paraphrase, you know, the man uh whose paycheck the man will not be made to understand something that his paycheck depends on him not understanding. There is a a feedback loop that is difficult, especially if you’re going down a road and you’ve brought people along with you and you come to a point where you actually honestly change your mind. You say, “I thought I believed this, but I have now come to believe something different.” Yeah. and now you’re at a crossroads where you’ve brought all these people along and even like your payroll, your livelihood now rests on a choice. How have you as someone who’s driven by your philosophy and your ethics and built your business around it? How have you grappled with that temptation, if you will? Yeah, we we actually we had a very specific moment. So, so Free the People was founded in 2015, really got going in 2016, and and the idea, it was it was almost like a transpartisan idea that we’re going to we’re going to bridge the divide and we’re going to we’re going to talk to people um across the political spectrum because I I don’t I don’t think libertarian is like right or left. It’s it’s it’s I I think it’s up or down basically. Um and authoritarianism is on the bottom. The most horrific uh blood soaked flavors of that are at the bottom. And as you get up, you get towards voluntary, cooperative, mutual respect, things that your mom taught you, right? Yeah. Being a good neighbor, treating other people the way you would like to be treated or the way perhaps that they would like to be treated. Don’t hurt people. Don’t take their stuff. Yeah. Um and and that that was our idea. and and we were very much, you know, we’re producing video content to reach young people and and telling um emotionally compelling stories. Um we we did one film on restorative justice that that had beautiful sort of transpartisan reach from the evangelical left to to to very um progressive activists. Um, and then the lockdowns hit and I we we stopped almost everything and like I was literally sitting on a beach in the British Virgin Islands in early March um with my laptop writing an article about how catastrophic it would be if we actually locked down the world because there was a hashtag uh maybe you have to bleep this out. I know this is called Dad’s uh Save America, but you remember the hashtag stay the I took it literally and I thought to myself, what if everybody stayed home? People will die. Particularly people at the margins, particularly people that don’t have any wiggle room in their lives and particularly in countries that are not as rich as the United States. If you actually shut down the world, you’re you’re not going to disrupt the supply chain, you’re going to break it. And so I wrote this piece long before supply chains were in the the public vernacular quoting Bastiat on how Paris gets fed. And I was just thinking about this and I’m getting really angry about it because, you know, within a couple days they did. We didn’t even know if we’d get home. So we left the beach early, got home because Trump was saying, “I’m going to I’m going to shut down the airlines.” And God knows what he’s going to say the next day. Yeah. We were in New York City in early March filming um with Jonathan Height for a documentary that’s the predecessor to this show about what’s happened to our kids and their mental health. And um it was like I mean the news was real time. It’s like Uber driver tests positive. We were like oh my god are we going to are we going to get home? Are they going to like down all the airplanes? Like what’s happening? Yeah. So so I got home. We got home um and we we got every my entire team on I don’t think you even did Zoom back then, did we? I don’t think it was even a thing. I don’t remember. But we got together and said, “Okay, we’re going to stop everything we’re doing and we need to talk about this and we need to explain to people that the basic economics, you know, the link between economic prosperity and human health. the fact that if you’re not getting a meal, you really have really important things to worry about that are not whatever this thing is. And we don’t we don’t know what this is. We don’t know how dangerous it is. I I’m not an epidemiologist. I’m not even thinking about that stuff at the time. I’m just thinking about economics. So, we shifted gears completely and and this goes back to your earlier point. I sent out a fundraising letter. I thought that particularly in the context of the Wall Street bailout that that we would get a lot of support from our donors. I think it was basically crickets. I didn’t hear anything back. I actually heard back from I I just met uh with one of our supporters um who actually emailed me back at the time and said scolded me said you don’t understand how dangerous this is. Um, so I I was I was sideways or at least like my my supporters were not really interested in what I was interested in, but we did it anyway. And um, honestly, they’ve come around. Everybody’s come around. And particularly the people that sort of fell for the the demagoguery of of Fouchy at all, like they feel betrayed. They feel lied to, they feel angry about what happened. But but it was it was something we decided to do because not enough people were doing it. Like we’re talking about the the beltway think tank class. Yeah. No crickets. Nothing. So it was like the Wall Street bailout all over. It’s like okay, we’ll do it. Um and you know, I’m proud of the work we did. We did one documentary um about a father in Brooklyn who’s trying to save his family restaurant. I remember this documentary. Yeah. And in the middle of trying to save his restaurant, his son develops a health problem, seizures. And remember Cuomo and the mayor said because because they’re health experts, right? They know how to manage hospital flow. They said, “We’re going to prioritize COVID. So if you have something else, you can’t come to the hospital.” His son dies. It’s a devastating story. Um but we don’t we don’t pick on Cuomo. We don’t pick on lockdown orders. We just tell this story of this guy. And it it was a way for people to humanize Bastiat’s story. Yeah. The unseen. Yeah. I I didn’t quote Bastiat. I just told a story. Terry always yells at me because I I love to quote dead economists. No, no. We’re in the same boat of being super nerds. And it’s like, so for those who aren’t familiar with Bastiat, his one of his famous ideas, well, you you explain. Well, I’m thinking of the you the scene and unseen. There’s there’s a lot of important um bosiat stories and he has this essay in economic sophisms called um I don’t know if it’s called this but it he asked the question how was Paris fed and and it’s about this magic that happens where for reasons that nobody understands when people wake up in the morning there’s bread there’s food there’s everything you need is there and they have no idea where it came from. Um, and that’s the scene part. It’s just basically assumed that bread’s there. We’ll be fed. It’ll be fine. Um, and then they start tinkering with that. It’s like, well, maybe we should tax bread or regulate bread or or um, you know, make it more equitable, whatever whatever they’re doing. Y um and they don’t appreciate the incredibly complex web of voluntary activity and special skills and distributed labor that led to that magic of Paris being fed. And you know it sort of portends most of Hayek, right? Like trying to explain the market process to people and and that was like you know starting with Trump like he I think he actually said well I can shut it off but then I’ll just turn it back on. Look, this is this thing that these analogies and the the words we use matter so profoundly in how they shape our thinking. And to to some extent, I would even say that the sort of postmodernists have a point about the power of words because stimulus um the car metaphor of the economy that there’s an engine and it can stall and it needs to be it needs a jump start. It’s like there’s no engine. Yeah, there’s no there’s no uh starter. That’s not that is that is like an analogy. Ross Perau wanted to lift the hood, right? Like that is an analogy that suggests a bunch of things that are not true. That suggests that a there’s a fixed mechanical machine with gears that fit in a particular way and that there’s a mechanic that just needs to know how the machine works. It can go in and be like, “Oh, this pneumatic tube got loose. Let me now we’ve got the circular flow back.” None of that’s true. The closest analogy, if you’re going to use one, is the rainforest and an ecosystem with animals and plants and living things that are all in constant dynamic reaction to each other. And if you think, “Oh, we don’t have enough wolves. Let’s bring back more wolves, you’re going to fundamentally disrupt every single thing. It’s chaos theory.” Yeah. U random tangent. Um we had a beautiful interview with Yoel, who’s a a Cuban dissonant musician. um who um co-wrote the protest song Patria Vita that that created those massive protests in in Cuba and and so many kids got jailed and and horrible things happened. It was it was a it was a music that galvanized the world. And when we interviewed him, he used the forest um metaphor for explaining capitalism. And he, you know, he he hasn’t he probably hasn’t read Mises. I don’t know. But he’s he’s like, you know, imagine a forest that’s just banana trees. And he just goes on and on explaining the beautiful complexity of of this ecosystem. And I’m like, “Dude, we need more musicians explaining capitalism because we’re not doing it.” Ramble tangent. Well, so you have you have become a very effective filmmaker and your organization like us uh is dedicated to trying to use storytelling to get at these ideas and these values. Um you have a series about the COVID uh coverup. Yeah. So tell me about that. Yeah. like that. And that’s that’s like this this almost irrational obsession I have with um the loss of humanity and liberty and speech and health and and everything we did to children. Like I I could just keep going on about about the the the tragedy of of the government response to CO. But as I dug into it more, I had to become an amateur epidemiologist. This was not on my list of things to do, but we all had to because over time um sincere people started realizing that the government narrative really didn’t make sense. So, you’re saying that this virus that came from a cave all the way over there, thousands of miles away, broke out in this lab in Wu, not in this lab, but in this market in Wuhan. Oh, but there’s a lab where they’re doing this stuff. Like it it’s like the John Stewart like the mask falling off moment of John Stewart Yeah. cracking jokes with and and um uh uh Steven Colbear being uncomfortable with with what is like how are you uncomfortable with this joke? Like what’s what has broken in your brain that you’re uncomfortable with John Stewart making this joke? And he’s like you sound like Ron Johnson. Like he couldn’t he he it’s like he’s broken. He’s like a broken person there. Like it it it became um a religious faith and and like Co Bear like I’m old enough to remember when he was funny and now he’s like a a flack for um the medical industrial complex basically. Yeah. I was like how did that happen? I I I mean I have theories about that but so you’re you’re dealing with all of this. It none of it even makes any sense. Like first of all, you learn how leaky the constitutional protections that we thought um were were sacrosanked are like suddenly you’re not allowed to say certain things. You’re not allowed to leave your house. The government is deciding by the way, Homeland Security, SISA, some agency I’d never heard of before in Homeland Security is deciding whether or not you are essential or unessential. So, in other words, the government’s deciding whether or not you’re allowed to work, whether or not you’re allowed to leave your house, whether or not you’re allowed to do anything. And I’m like, how is this how is this happening? Is this China? So, so you’re digging in, you’re digging, you’re digging, and I’m focused on economic arguments, but I but I got to know um Jay Bacharia. He’s amazing. Yeah, he’s great. And and by the way, he’s if there’s a ven diagram of of successful credible epidemiologists published, celebrated at least before co and hayekian economists with PhDs from Stanford. The ven diagram is one guy. Yeah. And it’s Jay and I think that’s probably part of the reason he was able to um sort of see the the forest for the trees on some of this stuff because he was thinking about the economic consequences. Um, but when I when I was interviewing him on my show, um, he sort of casually said, “Yeah, there was an explosion of funding after 911.” And I I dug into it a little bit more and I asked him a little bit more and he he said, “Yeah, the the Fouch’s power and his money came right after the anthrax attacks, which was part of of the the panic.” Really? Yeah. Um, and I haven’t I haven’t heard this. No, so this is the rabbit hole this entire series goes down because because I think, you know, it it’s not enough to say this was an economic catastrophe and you destroyed a lot of lives. It’s not enough to say shutting down schools and making kids wear masks is is is catastrophic for their development and we don’t even know how bad that’s going to be. It’s not enough to point out that a lot of people committed suicide. you know, maybe there’s the I I think vaccine damage is a real thing. U I think we don’t know exactly how that’s going to play out. Um but none of that is as dangerous as what I think I’m uncovering. And it it basically have Have you ever seen Stranger Things? Yeah, of course. Okay. Um if if people listening haven’t heard this, I’m going to spoil it a little bit for you. Uh Terry and I were late to it, but we’re watching it um somewhere during a lockdown. I already talked to Jay and he he had had this colonel in my mind. Stranger Things is a science fiction about a shady government agency, military-industrial complex type agency doing weird, crazy, dangerous science experiments ostensibly to stop the Soviets. And in the middle of this, right, they accidentally unleash hell on earth. Does that sound familiar at all? Um, and so like like the cover up there, there’s actually an explicit Stranger Things vibe to it. Um, it’s part sci-fi. It’s part who done it. We’re we’re trying to make very dense, complex material, engaging for people. We dig a little bit deeper into the the origins of this huge boom in gain of function research financing. um controlled by Fouchi um empowered by um let’s and some of this is is slightly speculative but not really empowered by Dick Cheney. So the neocons Republicans had this idea that they needed a bioteterrorism strategy. One of our worst enemies is going to create a supervirus and attack us with it. Okay. Yeah, there’s a reason. I mean, it’s not unreasonable to want to be able to defend against that. That makes sense. It it makes sense and it’s something that I hope um um the good smart people in government, if there are good smart people in government are thinking about. Some of them sneak through and survive. But you you you end up with uh to quote Hayek again, you have you have a knowledge problem. um you you have this this arrogant scientism, but you also have an incentive problem. So Anthony Fouchy somehow raises his hand and says, “I got an idea. Um what if we think about how absurd this is? What if we map out all the potential pathogens? We’re going to go into the batcaves. We’re going to harvest these things. We’re going to take them to labs. um we’re going to then manipulate them, weaponize them with gain of function research to see if um just how dangerous we can make them and then we’re going to come up with a solution. But we’re we’re going to map it all out and we’re going to do this in in labs. They were doing in United States labs. Um and and so many scientists freaked out. They’re like, “This could be a worldending episode if you guys make a mistake.” Um so there was some sort of pause. It wasn’t a ban but during the Obama administration there was a there was a pause on gain of function research. It wasn’t nearly stringent enough but um Fouchy found a way consumate apparachic that he is well let’s offshore this. Let’s take it to places where there aren’t such restrictions on this kind of research. I mean assuming that that is the actual decision-making tree. It’s like, “Oh, well, we’ll do this thing that is manifestly very dangerous and requires quintuple level security, safety, like, you know, whatever is done to keep you from falling out of the the scariest roller coaster at Six Flags, we’re going to do 1,000 times more than that.” Yeah. And Oh, no. Let’s move it offshore to like dodgy labs in countries that are technically like our adversaries. That that how does that you know like well that that’s the it’s like the burning dog. Then this is fine. Yeah. That that’s like the power of corrupts part. Like it whenever whenever I look at any um issue um government failure kind of thing. I look at the knowledge problem the hayek problem. They don’t know as much as they think they do. And there’s a lot of that going on here. But then you look at the incentive problem that they’re going to keep doing it because it’s a cash cow. Like there’s there’s a whole ecosystem of universities and and research labs and and nonprofits, NOS’s. It’s twice as big now as it was before CO. And of they they want more money. And are they ever going to sit around and say, you know what, this might not be good for humanity. You wish they would. It comes back to that Upton Sinclair quote. Yeah. But um so Rand Paul um is is uh very much my sort of intellectual partner on this. We this project was started um through a series of conversations that Terry and I had with him about this and he’s written in a very important book on the subject um sort of uh documenting exhaustively sort of Fouch’s um duplicity and and and makes makes I think a pretty airtight case that that Fouchy you know lied before Congress and was in fact funding gain of function research. I mean Fouchi himself has publicly argued for years in favor of gain of function research. He actually said in 1819, you know, there might be a lab leak. I’m paraphrasing, but he he I’m not I’m not mischaracterizing. You know, there might be a lab leak, but the cost is worth it. I’m like, yeah, okay. How do you know that? How do you know that? And then suddenly he’s scrambling to to silence Jay Baracharia. And and as you sort of peel back the onion, and this is the point of this series, it’s um um I don’t know what the end of the story is yet. I I I know that this was not a health public health operation. This was essentially a military operation and which explain sort of the all the things I was talking about earlier like lockdowns and and the very authoritarian responses that that’s not typical public health stuff. Yeah. This was all fundamentally a kind of martial law action. M we fell into martial law in 2020 and it was shifted um you know responsibility um within the Biden administration maybe going back to the Trump administration responsibility was shifted to um DoD, Homeland Security, FBI um you know probably the CIA but they never used their own name when they in these emails and and you could you could you know look at um the reason you know who’s involved is because of Elon Musk. and the Twitter files. So, we we we don’t we don’t know everything about who signed off on Gain of Function Research. We don’t know actually who Fouch’s boss is. We have some theories, but we don’t know. But if you want to if you want to look at um a good place to dig, look at all of those agencies that were browbeating tech companies into silencing not just Jay Bodachari but any epidemiologist that was saying, you know, this looks like a lab leak. You know, um lockdowns are not good and they’ve never been good and the entire public health literature says don’t do that. and and you had at a very granular level these alphabet agencies in in the um military-indust I’ll just call it the military-industrial complex saying you know to Facebook to Google to Twitter this guy like it’s it’s just a guy right it’s not just Jay buttercharia but this guy just said something he’s got 15 followers shut that down like it’s so wildly hamfisted that I I think that in itself is kind of a smoking gun. Um, but the I think the guy that’s going to be most interesting is a guy named Dr. Richard Ebrite uh based at Ruters. And as it turns out, Ebrite in a very lonely fight has been blowing the whistle on the militarization of of gain of function research going all the way back to 2001. And this is not the first lab leak. This is not the first gain of function accident and they’ve been doing this stuff and he’s been trying to get people to pay attention to this because I mean they’re you know weaponize Ebola that is the that is the thing is the and they are like this is happening. So this this is I mean Ebola’s fatality rate that that is the nightmare scenario, right? You smallox, Ebola, there are viruses that there’s viruses that go after children. I mean, this we were kind of lucky in the sense that this disaster had the profile it had of basically being a bad flu that would could be very fatal for people that were immune compromised or older, which is horrible, but so is influenza. It was influenza on steroids. Um, it’s a corona virus, but to imagine something else. Yeah. You don’t want to. I mean, it’s like World War Z stuff, right? I’m with Dr. Ebrite. I’m like, we should ban it. It’s It’s not Ebrite says that there is no medical benefit to manipulating viruses this way. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I do know that um government agents and bureaucrats with perverse incentives and and sort of a fatal conceit and arrogance that they can do things that they can’t do. I know that they potential of making a catastrophic mistake. So, we should just say no. And I don’t think that it seems like, you know, if I ask somebody like uh do you trust a bunch of faceless bureaucrats to not make a mistake? And if they do make a mistake, we’re all dead. There is something inside of bureaucracy that is um the the cover your ass nature of bureaucracy gives rise to some really heinous stuff because it when you don’t have the marketplace in which um survival is success and you if you do stupid things or you hurt people too, you know, even accidentally, you go out of business. Like if you’re not protected and you have a product that ends up killing a bunch of people, you will be put out of business. But agencies kill people all the time and they don’t get put out of business because they can’t be. And so how do we keep them in check? It’s just bureaucracy. And that gives rise to things that can be I mean one example of where I think things have gotten unfortunate is that prior to this the pandemic I think it was absolutely the case that the the Food and Drug Administration was causing tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of Americans to die by by restricting their access to medicines that were already approved in other countries like in Europe. Yeah. Or maybe have risks, but the risks are worth it because you’re going to die. Yeah. And and it was broadly understood that like reforming the FDA actually would result in us getting more medicines faster and that free marketeteers and right of center people were for that and Trump passed this right to try legislation. That’s part of that movement. And now this this is one of the many things that has been unleashed by the pandemic and the catastrophic policy. It’s hard to make that argument anywhere now, right? Because people are like, “No, the the the like the fact that the vaccines came out quickly in and of itself isn’t necessarily bad, but but it’s like no, it it’s supposed to take two decades to create a vaccine.” It’s like, no, it actually isn’t. Right. right? That that wasn’t a feature of the precoid time. That was a bug too. And I don’t even know how to make those like you can’t make those arguments anymore. There’s a lot of ways in which and and I think this is um Jordan Peterson has talked about this research into authoritarianism that was done in the aftermath of World War II and that and I don’t know I haven’t looked at it carefully. I don’t know like what does it mean to have an author authoritarian mindset was their model of that correct but what that work as I understand it did is it s did the it used these surveys with some sort of profile of what it means to be an authoritarian and it found a high correlation between authoritarian mindset in and and being in a region that was exposed to infectious disease and that makes sense. Because when our when we are threatened of in life or limb, our fight orflight systems kick in. our thinking fast system kicks in and we become willing to do we become willing to accept crazy stuff like like the government telling telling me to put a mask on my three-year-old or or stay in my house and wash my groceries like an imbecile. Um and we become like you better you better put your mask on your three-year-old or I’m going to call the cops. We become like monsters. Yeah. Or I’m going to deny I’m going to demand that they deny you healthcare because you didn’t do the thing. Yeah. You be so known Chomsky so-called anarchist becomes Yes. We should starve people to death. Yeah. We should forbid them from getting work and let them die if they don’t want to accept a vaccine that the logic of which also is inconceivable. It’s like, okay, wait, let me get this straight. So, you’re saying the vaccine works perfectly. You got it. You got the shot, right? So, if I don’t get the shot, I’m no risk to you because you got the shot. So, why do I need to get it if I don’t feel comfortable getting it? Because you got it, so you’re fine. Why don’t you just leave me alone? Like, like, how did that not like that didn’t penetrate a majority of people’s minds? It’s a non-religious religious fervor. And um you know, I went back um I always got to bring this back to Hayek. Um, I went back and reread The Counterrevolution of Science. I don’t know if you’ve ever slogged through that book. I have not. So, I’m excited to hear what I remember I remembered it like I I struggled through it um when I was younger and and it mystified me a little bit, but it’s like it’s it’s him building out his critique of scientism as he’s struggling to explain to socialists why they they don’t know nearly enough to do the things that they say they want to do. and in and he particularly um you know basically takes a knife to this French aristocrat um St. Simone and it at the time it felt so unhyek because Hayek Hayek’s using sort of um um Twitter appropriate language for this guy’s an idiot basically is what he says. Um and and when I went to reread it I’m like okay I get what’s going on here because St. Simone was this French aristocrat. He’s considered the father of socialism even though one of his students actually coined the term. And this is before Marx made socialism an explicitly violent sort of class struggle thing. So St. Simone is is this scientistic technocrat. He has a fetish for the sciences and he imagines replacing markets and freedom and all that chaos with a he calls it a council of Newton. He’s going to build a temple, Sir Isaac Newton, and he’s going to seat a panel in that temple of the smartest people, engineers, scientists. Yes. Does it sound familiar at all? So, it um you know, the idea was we just we just need smart people to reorganize things and we can trust them because because they’re so much smarter than we are. And that’s what that’s what they did. And I I think we’re still in that situation where, you know, we’re we’re slaves to the science and we have to trust the experts and the experts are the people at the right universities. The experts are the people that the government appoint to tell us how to live our lives. Um the enemy today is not socialism. The enemy today is this technocratic scientistic fascism. And it it goes all the way back to the Hyekian project. He’s like, “This is the enemy. It’s not MarkX, this this guy. Um, so it’s fascinating to me and and you know, you get to the to the fatal conceit of this entire project. Um, science, as you know, is is a process of of a very humble process of people saying, “I don’t know nearly as much as I think I do. So, I’m going to come up with this hypothesis. I have this theory. I have uh I have some data to maybe back up this theory and I’m going to put it out there in the marketplace of ideas and all my scientific colleagues are going to tear it apart. They’re going to tear me down. They’re going to try to destroy my idea and out of that I mean how describes this in the counterrevolution of science. Out of that doesn’t come objective truth. It comes it out of that comes our best effort to understand objective reality within the limits of our ability to comprehend it. We’re moving, we’re only ever moving towards Yeah. truth. And it’s only ever towards truth within a context because Newtonian physics is great until you get small enough that it breaks in ways that are so insane that they don’t they are just the stuff of science fiction. like quantum entanglement and particles coming in and out of existence and superp position that only reveals itself. It’s if it’s observed and all that crazy stuff that it’s like it’s crazy except that I think it’s like we rely on quantum physics for the manufacturer of microchips. So it works but we barely understand why it works. Yeah. And so even within a domain you can just hit a wall and be like okay well we know this in this context for these sets of circumstances and that’s it. And when we try to apply it over here it all breaks and we don’t know why. So when you say the science is settled you are making a statement of faith. Um and you’re also making a statement of of piousness that that will not be challenged. I actually have I I love my little artifact. I have a Fouchy prayer candle in my studio to remind me of Wait, someone actually made this? Yes, you can go on Amazon right now. Get get one while you can um before Pap Fouchy goes to jail. But um you know, he he became this this quasi religious figure. And it and I think I think that um piousness is what empowered people to do start doing really horrific things to their neighbors. And you know, thank God it didn’t go as as bad as it could. Like I’m I’m a student of the cultural revolution in China where you know, people turned into animals. Um and you know, we didn’t quite get there, but you see where some of us did. Yeah. Yeah. So you you see where this can go when you do this. So it’s a it’s a combination of these two things that that we need to tackle. like you you can’t trust people with that much power. But honestly, if if you found angels who were really the smartest people in the room, they don’t know enough to do these these these wild experiments which could potentially cost your family their lives. seems like seems like a a reasonable benchmark, but you know, we’re still sort of stuck into this this science fetish like we’re going to we’re going to hand over like when we’re scared, right? Yes. When we’re fearful and they tell us that this this is, you know, they we had all these scare numbers that told us it was going to be like, you know, 5 10% of the population. Um, by the way, they they’ve been doing this every pandemic as long as the pandemic industrial complex um has been around. And and the reason Jay Bodacharia started um questioning the numbers very early on is that he went through this with the swine flu. There was there was there was a whole hype about that. swine flu, bird flu, these all. And you you can look at, you know, the World Health Organization is is is is giving you these catastrophic numbers about how many people are going to die and they’re they’re gearing up and the money’s flowing and the NOS’s are doing their thing and they’re ready and then it’s just a flu. Um and and he he ran the numbers on that one. So very early on he he ran uh it’s called the Sarah Santa Clara study and and he discovered and maybe you talked about we talked about this. Yeah. I mean they he wasn’t the only one at the time to do that to basically uh notice very early that substantial amounts of the population if you randomly sampled people at a college campus or in Germany they did similar things. Oh, 5 10% of the population already has antibodies to this, which means it’s been out there, which means that the the fatality rate we’re being told, which at the time was something like 3%, which would be horrendous. Yeah. It’s more like 03%. Yeah. Because instead of 100 as the denominator, it’s 10,000. So Jay Jay Jay convinced Johnas to come on my show and talk about this again. like I’ve had to become an amateur epidemiologist way outside of my field of comfort or expertise. But but I I do think like there you know you had really smart people like those two guys Scott Atlas all happen to be at Stanford um Ebrite but there’s there’s a whole army of um demonized um epidemiologists but there’s a much bigger army of just smart guys on the internet. Have you heard of this group called Drastic? It’s a hashtag drastic and I forget what the acronym stands for, but it’s basically an army of citizen slleuth who have plenty of expertise in their professional lives who start digging through the internet to find documents. And as it turns out, you know, unlike the the the church commission where the CIA literally burned the documents so the church couldn’t find out what they were up to, uh, turns out the internet’s forever. And so you have all these amateur slleuths who are very responsible for driving this narrative and exposing Fouchy. So you have the guys on the inside who are in a lot of ways more effectively gagged and stifled. But you can’t stop free people and you can’t censor everybody. And and to me that’s that’s that’s a fascinating anecdote to this sort of this the scientism and and centralization of of power and knowledge and science is it there that the reason they won’t succeed is that there is a decentralized world of of people who know better and are willing to do the work. Um we are in this moment right now where um the trust has been destroyed um o repeatedly in in the things that we have been told and raised to believe were earned hierarchies of authority that oh no you went oh it’s really important that this person went to Harvard and Princeton and Yale these aren’t like utterly captured um fifth columns run by crazy people and grifters and basically just hedge funds that pretend to do something on the side like educate which is what they are. They’re no no these are these are the elite filtered through a process to give us the best and brightest and we see that to be a scam. That’s not true. These places suck. They’re horrible. They’re run by lunatics. They raise our kids to be um broken in their minds. Um the media in the in the like the corporate media, the sort of big media are are manifestly liars that carry water for power. Um so institution after institution, we have been systemically lied to repeatedly, mockingly, belittlingly. Um, that leaves us in a scary place because even though yes, we have the internet, the internet’s also centralized more than ever. We rely on these platforms that aren’t actually the open internet. They are individual mass privately held servers. I got nothing against being privately held, but power corrupts in all forms. They can flip the switch. You know, Parlor got shut down, all that stuff, right? How do you think about where we head next from where we are right now at almost like the anthropological or historical scale? You know, you’re how do you think about where we are in this moment? So, I have to quote my one of my favorite philosophers who was the lyricist for the Grateful Dead, a guy named John Prairie Barlo. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of him. um he became sort of a um a um technology um romantic. He he wrote something called the uh Declaration of Internet Freedom. And it was it was like a riff on the Declaration of Independence. Uh very romantic about the potential of all of that. And all the way back then he was saying like all of these tools and and he didn’t know what AI was yet probably but all of these tools are incredibly liberating technology um social media um decentralization democratization you know shifting power back to the end user um you you could be quite utopian about this like this could be a big beautiful thing where you know we we can we can do a lot of self-governance and You don’t need to go to university to learn what to think. You can you can create your own curriculum and and it doesn’t matter. He had this beautiful thing and he’s like it doesn’t matter if you’re in Manhattan or Mali. You now have access to the extent of your abilities and your ambitions to teach yourself anything. Yeah. It’s that that aspect is truly amazing. And then he said, “But these same tools can be weaponized against us um by by government.” And you have this this entire you know, we talking about the machine before. I I I barely even comprehend what that is, but I know it’s it’s collusion between corporations and and power mongers and and you know, the media is part of that. They’re all they’re all captured. So, so you have this this blob of powerful interests and I, you know, as as someone that sort of had this blind faith in in markets and you like I’ll pick on pharmaceutical companies just for a second here. Um, I thought that that we basically had a market and that we basically had companies that were focused on medical innovations. You know, I’m a stage four cancer survivor, so I am the beneficiary of of a chemotherapy drug. um 20 years cured. So I’m you looking great. I’m I’m probably okay. But but like I had this blind faith that that that you know we had a system where innovations would prolong our lives and and bring new products to market. Um, I got very redpilled and maybe blackpilled when I looked at the collusion um, between pharmaceutical companies and government agencies, not just the NIH, to the point where our government has as majority intellectual property interests in the vaccines that they force people to take. I’m like, so is this a private company? Is this a politically captured company? Is it regulatory capture? Or are they actually in the same building? and do do we even trust anything about this process anymore? But it to me it’s a microcosm of this bigger thing because you you could talk about endless wars, you could talk about crony capitalism, you could talk about big pharma have their entire business model is getting the government to force you to take a product that you don’t want. Yeah. I mean, Obamacare in a lot of ways really broke the dam on this by asserting something that had never been asserted before is my understanding, which is the government mandating that every every citizen purchase a particular product, which was health insurance. Yeah. That you you must by law now take it and we will tax you if you don’t buy this product. So you have like going back to Jimmy door like you um the rhetoric about about corporations and oligarchs starts to make some sense to me now because um you know the oligarchs aren’t the Charles Ko of the world who are trying to make a better product and make a profit doing it. They’re people that that basically, you know, sit at the World Economic Forum or some other crazy place and say, “We’re the puppet masters and we’re going to make sure that um the monetary system and the financial system and the health care system that it takes care of us. You know, when when we take away your carbon that you heat your home with and and if you’re lucky enough travel on a plane with, um we’re still going to have our planes.” So, you see this this this blob of of interest that that appears to be getting more powerful. But I think the reason they I’ll I’ll be hopefully optimistic at some point. I think the reason that they look so scary is because they’re scared. And and you just have to look at the censorship industrial complex. Think about how hamfisted it is. Some some poor dude at the FBI is going through Bob’s tweets and saying he can’t say that. Get Get Facebook on the I’m mism mixing my companies. Get get Twitter on the phone. We got to shut down Bob. It’s true. He’s a bad man. And well, they’re like cornered animals. So So a cornered animal is going to act even more vicious and crazy than than one that’s able to maneuver freely and and has a lot of um ro has a lot of uh room to move. Yeah. I mean, they used to just like um buy the reporter at the New York Times, hey, write some uh write some great stories about the Soviet Union. Oh, it’s great. Okay. Um done. Checked box. And that that’s not that’s that’s that’s a statement of fact what you just said. That’s not a conjecture that happened. And they and they used to do that and and they they are still trying to do that, but they do it different ways. And you know I I think I think the way that they control you know we I guess we call it corporate media now legacy media whatever that thing is um so much of that you know between actual government money advertising or pharmaceutical money it’s like it’s like a huge percentage of the budget and so they can’t they can’t bite the hand of their master. So there’s this basic public choice story about this, but um I think that the delegitimization of all that is a very healthy thing. It is a scary thing. Um it I can see how it would go south, but we have to appreciate that we’re in the middle of this. You know, we’re talking about the Tea Party earlier. We’re in the middle of this paradigm shift and the first step is to take the red pill. Do you want to see how the world actually works? Yeah. Yeah. Well, it turns out all all those authorities, you know, Walter Kankite, that that senator that you thought was such a good man, um, it turns out that it’s all a lie. Um, and that’s that disrupts everything. It freaks people out. They’re they’re scrambling to figure out how to figure things out, but at the same time, we’re building these these informal structures of cooperating, right? Yeah. Um, yeah. One of your fellow GMU alums, Pete Betty, says, “We are always in a three-horse race between three S’s.” And in true econ nerd fashion, Smith, which is to say division of labor and specialization and trade, shumpeter, which is to say innovation and creative destruction and coming up with new things and breaking and disrupting the old ways of doing things, and stupid, which is government and crooks and liars and cronies and central planners and all the people that think they’re smarter than they actually are. And so long as Smith and Shumpeter can outrun stupid, we continue to make progress. And despite all of the brokenness and the corruption, our world is actually still getting better and we should not lose sight of that. But but stupid can do a lot of damage. We’re in anxious times. Um, by the way, I don’t know if you know the story, but uh Pete and I went to college together and I was not an economics major. Um, but he and I got into a very beer soaked argument one night and and I had discovered all these ideas um reading the liner notes on a Rush album dedicated to the genius of Ein Rand and then I found Ein Rand and Einrand says read Lick Bon Mises. Um, my dad randomly is transferred to Grove City, Pennsylvania. I don’t don’t want to go to college but dad dads win these fights. Um, went to college as a biology major, hated it. Um, not doing well. get in a drunken argument with Pete about because we’re dorks and there were no girls around so let’s argue about the proper role of government and I started quoting like Mises and and Hayek and he’s like why aren’t you studying economics here I’m like why would I do you know that the chairman of the department is a student of Lud Van Mises I had no idea how would you know back then like right like like information and knowledge was so sticky like you stumble across these things and so he’s the reason I’m here because He’s like, “You dude, you got to change your major and do this.” And I followed him to George Mason University and and my entire um shady career has been influenced by that. I ask this question of every guest. Um we call this show Dad Saves America because I really believe that it is a role that we inhabit that lays a foundation for a free society. that it’s actually where our agency as individuals and the choices we make plays out in the lives of our kids and creates that foundation for human flourishing not just in the family but in the society through the community through the all the interactions they will go on to have. How do you think about your role in the American story? Um, I think that what what I’ve tried to do as as someone that started off as a wannabe academic, um, and and I was pretty good at writing when I was younger and I I sort of went on this path where I’m like, you know, I write these academic articles and and three people read them and I got really great notes from people I respect and then I write my first Wall Street Journal oped and I started doing the math. if I could get it down to 800 words, I can actually reach thousands of people, maybe maybe even hundreds of thousands. And and then continuing to pursue that, like I I think my role is to try to translate these values we love so much into some simple language, even a story that that might turn on people that are that are struggling with the same questions that we have. Um because I really believe in the wisdom of crowds. Like I don’t I don’t think experts are going to save us. Um I don’t believe that that um people are too unsophisticated to get these ideas. I mean your mom taught you these ideas. Right. That’s right. Don’t hurt people and don’t take your stuff. Stop hitting your brother. Don’t take his don’t take his food. Yeah. Um so I think it’s I think it’s it is common sense. I realize that not everybody’s a libertarian, but there’s that libertarian instinct in people that that I want to I want to I don’t want to tell anyone what to think, but I want I want to turn them on if I could. So, that’s that’s what I hope I’m doing. Um, and you know, we’ll see. Thanks for being on Dad Saves America, Matt. This was a ton of fun. It was so much fun. Thank you. [Applause] Experience Free Speech

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