Keith Knight
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What's up, everybody? Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem. I am thrilled to have one of my favorite people to talk to. Obviously, he's been on the show many times before, Keith Knight. He is the managing editor at the Libertarian Institute. He's also the host of the Don't Tread on Anyone podcast. In my opinion, one of the absolute best and brightest voices in the liberty movement today. How are you, Keith?

I am doing very well. Dave, I've been loving your Piers Morgan appearances, dude. You've been knocking them out of the park. I'm so happy we're reaching those people. Well, thank you very much. It's always good to get in front of a new audience, and Piers Morgan has been very kind to me. I do think there are far too many people on those panels, but I do enjoy doing them, and so that has been a lot of fun. Anyway, so...

we, uh, as I mentioned, I had Scott Horton on the show, uh, recently, and we had mentioned that the libertarian Institute, which of course was Scott Horton's creation, along with a few other really great people like Will Gregg, um, and Sheldon Richmond, uh,

They have their annual fundraiser going on right now. Of course, this is the institute that is produced enough already in Fool's Errand. Has Scott Horton's new book, Provoked, coming out, which I'm so excited for everybody to read because I don't know if you've got an advanced copy, but it's just incredible. I'm sure you have.

And of course, your fantastic book, Domestic Imperialism, was published by the Libertarian Institute. Of course, Tom Woods, if you guys are familiar, if you remember when I debated Chris Cuomo, the book that I gave him was...

was Diary of a Psychosis by Tom Woods that was also published by the Libertarian Institute. Just an incredible organization. If you can give money, this is like the best thing to give money to. So anything else you want to say about that, and then we'll get into the episode. But what do you have to say about the Libertarian Institute?

Anyone who makes a donation can get any of those books as a gift. My book, Domestic Imperialism, is also one that you can get there. But I love Tom's book. It is full of tons of empirical evidence, principled arguments. And Cuomo's best argument was just to call you Legion of Skank like six times. He goes, if I get it in a seventh, maybe this will really take Smith down.

But when you're armed with Tom Woods' COVID book, nothing is able to compete against it. So, yes, Scott Horton, very wealthy in knowledge. However, when it comes to monetary wealth, Scott and I do need funding for our next book's

I'm working on two more myself. We have a Waco project in the works, constantly trying to hire people so we can be the libertarian educational website. So you can go to our search engine, type in minimum wage, Winston Churchill, agricultural subsidies and get

the libertarian position on those. Progressives say, we want to give you a free education. By that, they mean tens of thousands of dollars a year, or they'll property tax you and then give you a complete shit education. We actually want to provide a free monetary cost education at libertarianinstitute.org slash donate. Please go there to help us out.

Yeah. Isn't it so weird, by the way, just as you brought this up, I'm not even like I wasn't planning on talking about this, but isn't it crazy that as for me, I'm a little bit older than you, Keith, maybe a year or two.

Um, but I remember when I, you know, kind of when I was a kid, it being somewhat plausible that you're like, Hey, you know, you need an education and maybe you need some help financially paying for that education. And it is so wild. I was just talking to my wife the other day and we're talking about our kids who, you know, my kids, I have little kids. I have a five-year-old and a two-year-old. And we're talking about like, um, when it like, do you think they're going to go to college? Yeah.

And, you know, I was like, I don't know. And I guess there's there's some argument that if one of them really wants to be a doctor or something like that, that, hey, you have to get this piece of paper in order to be able to do that. But isn't it crazy that not just like what I do on my channel or you do on your channel, but if you really want to be educated.

It's amazing how the market has already provided a free education that is better than any state school could have ever imagined, like more resources than when I was a little kid. And like no, no government school could have possibly said, I have every book that's ever been written. And

And I have a lecture on that book by the smartest person, like breaking down exactly what that meant. Obviously, like in 1985, if you could have said, well, what if I had that?

everyone would have gotten, well, yeah, okay, if you had that, then you wouldn't need us anymore. And now we have that, and they're like, no, you still need us because you need a gender studies degree or something like that. It's pretty unbelievable. Yeah, and even if the state coercively funded and taxed people to pay for it, again, still not free, the state paying for it is somehow free. They see it, obviously, when it's like, well, the military spends a lot of money, but

Then again, it's free because government pays for it. It's like, no, that's, that's money and resources. But even the opportunity cost four years of your life to learn about this bullshit food pyramid and these bullshit mask mandates. That's what they talk to you about. So, uh, yes. Uh, the,

too high in opportunity costs and monetary costs. So yes, that's why we are building the Libertarian Institute to not just say the school system sucks, but to create an alternative. And the places you mentioned, YouTube, Odyssey, Khan Academy, Wikipedia, Mises Institute, did I say internetarchive.org? Those places are just treasure troves of

of private, voluntarily funded educational sites. So yeah, we got the arguments for private education as well. 100%. By the way, I'll tell you that I always get asked. I was just, my wife literally was just telling me, literally today, earlier today, she was like, I think you need to do an episode where you just go through your recommended reading list.

Because she was, you know, she manages a lot of my like email and social media accounts and stuff like that. Not my Twitter. My Twitter is all me. I do that. But everything else you're talking to my wife. So if you if you send me a message on anything else, you're just sending my wife a message. But that's OK. That's she'll get it to me. But.

Uh, she was like, you know, people ask about like what your, your recommended reading list is. And she was like, maybe you should make an episode. And I was like, that is actually a good idea. I probably should do that. But I will say that, um, when people ask that,

The Libertarian Institute's list of published books is a great place to start. And I'm not just saying that because you're on the show or because I love you and I love Scott and a lot of people over there. It's genuinely true. Sheldon Richman's book, Coming to Palestine, I always recommend that for someone. If you just don't know anything about the Israel-Palestine conflict and you want to get started, that's a great one there. There's just so...

so many great books that you guys have published. So it's the best place to start your reading list and the best place to donate your money if you can is the Libertarian Institute. Thank you so much, Dave. Greatly appreciate it.

Okay. So for today's episode, now I'm, I'm going on vacation in the morning and I just recorded with Clint Russell. Now I'm recording with you. I'm trying to get some episodes in before I leave. But what we wanted to talk about today was a speech that you gave, I think a little over a year ago and it's called the state is the health of war. Now, when you gave that speech, did you realize that you got the order wrong or,

Or was that intentional? That was intentional. So originally, war is the health of the state was coined by Randolph Bourne. This would have been in 1918 during the First World War. His general thesis is that when a population is terrified of an external threat, that government of the domestic population,

is able to get away with rights infringements they otherwise would not be able to get away with in a time of peace when people were not terrified out of their mind of an external threat. What I wanted to do is make the case that the way

that wars are generally funded. What makes, what gives the wars their health is the state's ability to have access to a central bank where they could print money and fund these things without having to allow people to opt out, not to mention taxation. They get to coercively fund their operations. This makes, uh, the likelihood of people engaging in warfare much more likely because you're lowering the cost of the people engaging in the activity. Governments frequently have, uh,

educational monopolies with regard to compulsory education laws, or as Kamala Harris likes to call them, truancy enforcement laws. So when you control the minds of kids ages, what, 5 to 18, K through 12 in America, they're able to see the state as a much more virtuous organization. So any fights that they're engaged in must be desirable. They must be fought for, virtuous ends.

Another thing that's unique to states, which makes war more likely, is the ability to conscript and force people into funding campaigns.

into fighting these wars. Of course, they think they're so cool. They brag about, well, forced cotton picking is immoral and I'm against it. It was 150 years ago, but I'm taking a stand. And even though no one's asking me to take a stand on this, but Vladimir Zelensky enslaving all men ages 18 to 65 to fight in his military and get their limbs blown off so we could make sure that he stays on the throne in Kiev forever.

Well, that's not immoral. That's unfortunately just something that has to happen. And then finally, there's a blatant legal double standard when it comes to states that are allowed to engage in mass murder without almost ever fearing that they themselves will go to jail. General Curtis LeMay famously said to Robert McNamara during Operation Meeting House, the firebombing of Tokyo in March of 1945, that...

You know, if we lose this thing, we'll all be tried as war criminals. McNamara tells the story in The Fog of War. So knowing that they won't face any legal repercussions, those are the five reasons states are much more likely to engage in warfare than other organizations. And my general solution is to privatize security. We could talk about that at a different point.

Sure. No, and McNamara, of course, went on to be the defense secretary during the Vietnam War. So I guess he did learn some lessons from that conversation. But isn't that interesting to think about? Just that right there, that had America lost World War II or had America lost? I mean, OK, the Vietnam War, it's a little bit tougher to see a scenario in which we're like kind of totally dominated. But that...

we clearly could have been tried for war crimes and that like our people could have been held like, you know, the Nuremberg trials could have happened to the United States of America after World War Two or after Vietnam or after Korea or after Iraq or any of these. And what what really would the arguments have been against that? It would have just been like, well, we thought we were going to win. And by the way, if you actually listen to the the Nazi arguments.

In the beginning of the Nuremberg trials, that was essentially it. Ah, we thought we were going to win. So it would be okay.

Well, you know, there's an amazing part of the fog of war where McNamara on I'm working on a transcript for this. So the book right here, McNamara says proportionality should be a guideline in war, killing 50 percent to 90 percent of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional in the minds of some people to the objectives we are trying to achieve.

He was he has these numbers because he was collecting statistics in 1945 for the U.S. military. So this is why historical narratives are so vitally important, because the narrative is, well, America was attacked out of the blue for basically no reason at Pearl Harbor. So, look, don't bug me with any of this. Killing Japanese civilians is bad. They started it.

As if the people getting killed in Operation Meeting House in Hiroshima were involved in Yamamoto's decision to attack Pearl Harbor. Whatever. Okay, you're a psychotic collectivist. Either way, the Pearl Harbor story is a complete myth. The best evidence for this

There's a number of things. Probably the best evidence that Pearl Harbor was actually intentionally provoked is Secretary of War Henry Stimson. There are a collection of reports on the Pearl Harbor investigation focusing on Admiral Richardson and Admiral Stark and on page one.

177, Stimson actually said on November 25th of 1941, the president, Roosevelt, brought up the event that we were likely to be attacked perhaps as soon as next Monday for the Japanese are notorious for making an attack without warning. And the question was what we should do. The question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.

Realize this was Roosevelt's policy, and we didn't find it out until 1972 when the British War Cabinet papers of Winston Churchill were finally released to the public. If you look up an article by The New York Times, this would have been January 2nd, 1972. It's called War Entry Plans Laid to Roosevelt and Churchill and.

Roosevelt meeting in August of 1940. And Churchill says the president was sure they could come in. The president was going to be more and more provocative in hopes of engaging the Germans or Japanese. Everything was to be done to force an incident.

We can also know this is true because after Pearl Harbor, it wasn't, oh, I'm so sorry. I meant to keep us safe. Government did not hold our end of the social contract. So we're going to return everyone's tax money because that's why you have to pay because we keep you safe. So if we don't hold up our end, we got to give everyone refunds.

No, there was no apology. There was give us more money, more power. And now we get to kill with impunity. So realizing the Pearl Harbor myth is so important because the lack of empathy people have for mass murder, arguably genocide. Tucker can't even bring it up without getting hassled by the Daily Wire crew is just terrible. And then the nail in the coffin was in 1999. Robert Stinnett published a book titled Day of Deceit, where he cites the McCullum memo.

which says, I don't know if I have that here. The last line in this memo written in October of 1940 says, if by these means, he lists five things that the US could do, Japan could be led to commit an act of war, so much the better. At all events, we must be fully prepared to accept the threat of war. So the state did not have the incentive to keep the peace. The state is the health of war and had

every incentive to provoke an incident to justify a mass murder campaign, knowing their social status and power would drastically increase if the nation was involved in war. All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Enterra Skin Care. Their founder, Nick Andrews, is a biomedical engineer by training and a former pharmaceutical industry maven and an enjoyer of martial arts. He often found his skin worn and in bad shape after contact with the mats

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All right, let's get back into the show. With the idea of collective punishment or holding a group of people responsible for what their government does in an act, let's just say it's an act of aggression. You know, it's like imagine if anyone were to say to the American people,

You know, like you, Keith, or me, Dave, you're responsible for the Inflation Reduction Act. And you'd go, wait, wait, what?

Like, I mean, like, literally forget even like us grab someone who's not political at all. Go to you like your kids little league game and grab a random parent and go, hey, how about that? Reduct the Inflation Reduction Act. What did you do right there? They go, I don't even know what you're talking about. They don't even know that the government did this. And there's tons of like drone strikes and military campaigns that like our people don't even know about.

Imagine holding you responsible for something like that. And then, you know, it is the same logic.

as holding some random Japanese guy. And this isn't even like today in the information age. This is like, you know, you're bombing some village in Japan. They may not even have known that Pearl Harbor even happened. They have no idea. They're like, dude, I'm fishing. What are you talking about? I have no idea. It's just some random dude

who got caught up in some international dispute and powerful people over here were trying to take over. And they just, it's like, yep, you got to be incinerated in order for us to take more power. The real history is that.

And Brian Kaplan makes the excellent, concise argument in a book titled How Evil Are Politicians? Spoiler alert, Barry. He says the problem with war, the costs are extremely high. The outcomes are extremely uncertain. And with the nuking of Japan, the greatest bulwark against Japan.

The chairman Mao, I forget what Mao's title was at the time when he was fighting Chiang Kai-shek's army. But that was one argument for not completely destroying them with unconditional surrender to they occupied Vietnam since September of 1940 and had Korea as a colony since 1910. So once the U.S.,

took down those damn Japs, we inherited two conflicts in Korea and in Vietnam that otherwise would not have happened. But it's very hard to foresee those things. So this is the ultimate contradiction that we always hear. If you're unhappy with the way your government's doing things, make a sign, persuade your neighbors, but don't really get physical. You can't even go inside the Capitol building. We'll blow your head off if you try to do that without a permission slip.

So if government violates your freedoms, try to persuade yourself out of it. But if any foreign government potentially might in the future threaten your freedoms, we must go to war. We must kill tens of thousands of civilians. We must advocate turning places into glass publicly. That's what we do.

when there's a potential threat of our freedoms from anyone else. But when this domestic regime takes all your freedoms away, well, you just got to lay down and die for it. So the fact that the vast majority of the educated elite population believes in two things which are completely opposed to one another, they're right.

The costs of engaging in violence are extremely high and the outcomes are extremely uncertain. That's why war should be avoided. And that's why state is the ultimate culprit when it comes to war, because the cost of them going to war is much lower than any other organization who has to associate freely with fighters and has to fund it out of their own pocket. Yeah. So, OK, so the idea that war is the health of the state, I think, has been

pretty fairly established over the years and that it's like, obviously, after 9-11 and we're like, hey, we're at war now because this...

enemy declared war against us, I guess, as the official narrative, then of course, you're going to have the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, and you're going to have the TSA under that, and you're going to have the Patriot Act, and you're going to have all these things. So I think people recognize that when you're at war, the state has to grow. But I think the point that you're making about the state being the health of war is something more like

okay, if you have a state and you like, if a state already exists and you recognize that war is the health of the state, then wouldn't it follow that if the state already exists, they'd want something that is the health of it. So wouldn't they be looking for something that could make them stronger and richer? I mean, look like I, as, as,

I'm a person with a family. And if you were to say that something is the health of this person and family, then I'd probably be looking to create that thing that is the health of my family. Right. So if you're the state and war is the health of the state, then wouldn't as a state, you always be looking for more war.

Exactly. Even the most defensible examples. I do want to touch on I have one more thing on Churchill, but the one that people might be most familiar with is on this would have been, I think, September 20th of 2001. George Bush is speaking to Congress and says Americans are asking, why do they hate us? They hate what they see in this chamber, a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our right to vote.

Our freedom of speech and our freedom to disagree with each other says something to that extent. Now, the point of terrorism is to have a shortcut to fame, to bring the world a message. And you can read bin Laden's own words in terrorism.

anything that he's published since his letter to King Fahd in 1995. But most famously, in Tactical Recommendations, he says the Americans are occupying the land of the two holy sanctuaries, Mecca and Medina. And just as we were able to drive the Soviet empire out, we're going to drive the Americans out. The Americans are starving kids in Iraq. He uses the number of two million to rile his troops.

The number is not two million, but that's what he uses and then says that Israel is basically a U.S. creation going back to Harry Truman and is ultimately responsible for the plight of Palestinians in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. So it's the three places.

Things that he talks about nonstop. You can read a collection of his work. It's titled Al Qaeda in its own words. It was published by Harvard University. This is what his actual gripe was. So after September 11th, after Bush did not keep us safe, his approval rating went to 91%.

Jeb Bush once on the presidential debate stage against Donald Trump said, say what you want about my brother. He kept us safe. And Trump says 9-11 happened under your brother. Apparently, the crowd was very offended for Trump saying that. I don't know. It's absolutely bizarre. So the Taliban was not allied with Al Qaeda by any means. There did not have to be a war over something like this. In fact, October 14th of 2001,

The Taliban's deputy prime minister, Haji Abdul Kabir, came out and said, we don't want war with America. We're power hungry. You could just hear him saying, look, we just want to violently dominate the people of Afghanistan. We don't want to have to fight the Americans here. We'll hand over bin Laden over to any opposition.

So we're not it's not directly to America, not to Israel, but any of these potential third parties and then immediately Egypt. Well, then he's on a plane to D.C. for some Nuremberg type trial.

George Bush mentions this in his book, Decision Points, in the chapter titled Afghanistan, where he says the goal of telling – of demanding the Taliban to hand bin Laden over was a method of showing their defiance. So –

He goes, my plan is to show their defiance, hand him over, to which the Taliban says, we'll hand him over to any third country, to which Bush says and NATO, they have their first Article 5 declaration of war. 20-year war leads after 11 days after the 20-year war, the Taliban re-seizes Kabul. This was NATO's first declaration of war. And now there's nothing to learn from that, but –

I guess we might have to start going after Putin and expanding NATO even more. So this is the psychopathy. Even the Afghan war is completely unjustifiable when you look at the cost to civilians. And even under Donald Trump, the Watson Institute at Brown University found that under Trump, civilian deaths in Afghanistan increased 330%.

It's totally evil. This is the pro-life movement that we have. This is the head of the pro-life movement, Donald Trump, justifying mass murder of civilians. So the state continues to be the health of war, even in the best examples. Yeah, geez. It really is something to see, like even think if you think about the fact that the Taliban was essentially the landlords, right?

You know, like they were essentially like they rented out some land to a group that, you know, like imagine going to an apartment building and someone in the apartment building was accused of murder.

And going, I'm going to hold the landlord responsible. And the landlord goes, oh, hey, if one of my tenants killed someone, go, you know, I'd love to help you investigate that. And they go, no, no, no. You're the bad guy. We're going to fight a 20 year catastrophic war to make sure that you don't own this building anymore. Against your other tenants. Right. And then you fail. Right.

And you leave that landlord with more weapons than they've ever had before.

And then you still go back and go, all right, what's the next one? What's the next war we're going to fight? No, no. We're talking about a positive reflection in Scott Horton's book, Fool's Errand. He has a source that Al Qaeda on September 12th of 2001 was roughly 400 fighters. Yeah. Decade or two later, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria had tens of thousands of fighters in multiple countries. So, yes, it is this old.

uh, 10 minus two equals 20. You do create more terrorists, uh,

When you engage in in these activities. Yeah, it's also funny because in that Afghanistan chapter of George Bush's book, he says that terrorism came from these Mujahideen fighters who originally were engaged in resistance actions against the Soviet occupation from 1979 to 89. So he admits that this terrorist activity.

issue is a result of empires occupying your land and you see it as a resistance opportunity this is what ronald reagan understood i want to say in 1983 a group that later merged with hezbollah um

They had killed, I believe, 213 Americans in Beirut in Lebanon. So according to neocon theory, Lebanon is going to take over the world if we don't declare war on Lebanon. Ronald Reagan pulled the troops out and no war followed. We're still waiting.

Yeah, that he sent a bunch of Marines in and then he pulled them out. And I believe if I'm not getting it wrong, his quote was, we do not understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics. And man, if people had just listened to Ronald Reagan on that. And OK, I know. I know Ronald Reagan also wasn't perfect either.

on any of that. But was that not the perfect summation of all of it? It was like, you know what? We do not understand what's going on there. And they are not operating on the same system that we are. So let's just divest. Let's just not be a part of this.

Man, we would all be so much better off if we had heeded Ronald Reagan's words of advice on that one. And his actions. I want to say also in 1983, the Soviets shot down the Korean Airlines 007 flight, which had a number of Americans, including a sitting member of Congress. And Ronald Reagan did not declare war over this.

I'm told today I got to declare war against China because there was a balloon in the sky which had zero casualties. The Soviets killed a sitting member of Congress and a number of American civilians on this flight. Ronald Reagan did not declare war. And within a decade, the Soviet Union came crumbling down. That's because they overexpanded themselves in a war in Afghanistan. What empire would do such a thing?

Yeah, really. All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is My Patriot Supply. I love this company. I think there's a lot of people out there who have been, let's say, concerned about instability and a little uncertain about what the future might hold. And it's always better to give yourself a little bit of certainty about things that really matter. And one thing that really matters is

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All right. So we've established that war is the health of the state. Obviously, if there's a war breaking out and you're, you know, on whatever your your, you know, whatever your taxes are, if a war breaks out, we're going to go, hey, we got to raise your taxes and you're going to say, OK, well, sure. Our boys are out dying in this war. I'll pay a little bit more taxes. But.

And for the idea that the state is the health of war, let's say you have you have an income tax. You have a central bank where you can print money. Why would you want to start a new war? I'm sorry. Are you asking me this as a question? Why would they want to start a new war? Well, why would a country want to start a war? What would benefit them?

What benefits them is they're able to mobilize the passions of their population by creating the external threat that I am here to protect you against Xi Jinping, against Vladimir Putin, against Kim Jong-un. So they eventually have this rally around the flag effect where people will associate sitting politicians with the country when hearing the country is out.

under threat from foreign entities, they will most likely rally around that person and justify the state taxing more, printing more, increasing taxes.

Defense obligations. The purpose of talking about why these wars are based on lies is to show that these are wars of choice. That is easily the best indicator that, uh, states are more likely to engage in activities which lead to the mass murder. You know, of course we're evil, uh,

by advocating voluntary exchanges between capitalist acts, between consenting adults. But the state mass murder programs, well, it's not an incentive problem. Maybe we just have to elect better people. They never get to the root of this issue at all. That's why anti-war progressives absolutely need to improve and basically just concede that libertarians have power.

been right about their genuine analysis of the state. So states engage in war because they are able to get away with things that in a time of peace, they'd be less likely to get away with. The wars are generally not in the interest of the masses. So they

lie and say that these threats are not coming from the state that takes 30% of your income and claims the right to conscript you and indoctrinates your kid with the food pyramid, making them 400 pounds when they're 10. No, that's not a threat to you. The threat

is if Xi Jinping controls just this area or this area plus this area called Taiwan. So that's why governments do it. It increases the amount of power and influence they have. There's no market check and balance that exists in the market where if people don't like what you're doing, they can voluntarily disassociate with you. They can stop funding you. That doesn't apply to the state. So they engage in all these wars for choice, which, but where the cost,

Even in the best examples, don't... Okay, here's where we can bring Churchill back in. He wrote a... My point was the costs seldom outweigh the potential benefits. September 1st of 1939, Hitler goes to reunite a 95% German city, Danzig. That's according to Encyclopedia Britannica. It was 95% German at the time. So he invaded Poland.

On September 3rd, Neville Chamberlain, who we're told is like this dumb dove who never did anything. Neville Chamberlain declares war against National Socialist Germany as a result of this invasion because they promised to give a war guarantee to Poland. It was not a war guarantee because the Soviets invaded on September 17th of 1916.

And there was no declaration of war against the Soviets. It was trying to provoke a war with Germany. So notice the independence of Britain is already violated. The decision to go to war for Britain is now put in the hands of Polish colonels. That's a violation of independence if I have ever seen one. So.

The war ends, and Churchill doesn't just thank everyone for all the taxes and apologize for all the deaths and how we could have done this peacefully. He says on page three, the preface of his first speech.

Second World War memoir. He says, "...the human tragedy reaches its climax in the fact that after all the exertions and sacrifices of hundreds of millions of people and the victories of the righteous cause, we have found neither peace or security, and we lie in the grip of even worse perils than those we have surmounted."

meaning we declared a war for Polish independence. You can read the text of Chamberlain's declaration. Poland then ends up under Soviet occupation. Churchill brings this up to Stalin at the Yalta meeting. He says, look, we fought a war for Polish independence. Eight million Poles have been killed from that favor we were doing them.

Can we have elections in Poland? You got to host those to which Stalin says, oh, free elections like in British occupied Egypt. And that was Stalin's response to Churchill. This is according to a book titled Stalin's War by Sean McMeekin. So that was interesting.

Just looking at the costs and benefits, not to mention the Soviets occupied half of Europe on the east. So that is just looking at Churchill. By the way, Churchill was not elected. Chamberlain was elected and then kicked out after the Narvik debacle. So the fight for democracy had unelected Winston Churchill, unelected Joseph Stalin and like 20 term President Roosevelt. Right. Right. It was four terms. So.

I'm going to stop there and see if you have to comment on anything. This Churchill myth is so deadly. People say, oh, he's a hero. The modern day Churchill is this guy. So let's just follow him and do whatever he does.

Well, it does seem like the idea of democracy has become the modern justification for statism in general. And I think that if you look at it from kind of a more broader, you know, reaching perspective from pre-democratic norms up until today,

you'll get a clearer picture of what the state really is. So, you know, like today, people kind of cling to democracy as this thing that makes the state legitimate. But even like today, you know, look, Kamala Harris, you know,

Is she where she is because of some democratic norm? You know, no. I mean, I don't know. The whole democratic primary just on the side of the capital D Democratic Party was no, they wouldn't even allow a real, you know, democratic process. And they just but then you'll hear people today like 18 million people voted for, you know, Joe Biden. You're like, OK, well.

Well, I thought you told me 75 million people voted for him. Okay, whatever.

But they voted for him. Some people within his party decided he was too old and they kicked him out. Seymour Hersh has written a really interesting piece about this lately. So, okay. But so democracy has nothing to do with it. But really you'll recognize democracy has nothing to do with anything. This is all just an excuse for why it is okay that this government rules over you. And so,

Particularly if you look at governments of the past, obviously it says that has nothing to do with it. It's just that these were the strongest people with the most guns and they were able to take control of their people. That's all it is.

Democracy is the sales pitch that works. And the way they really get their sales pitch was summarized perfectly by Thomas Sowell when he said, these issues are seldom, if ever, discussed empirically or economically or on principle. What people are looking for are solutions.

people to vilify and hate and, uh, heroes to admire. So that's why the Churchill myth gets so heavily circulated. It was the Churchill cabinet, which on May 15th of 1940 initiated the bombing of civilians in Germany. And the blitz didn't happen until September of 1940. So, uh,

This policy was summarized by a science advisor to the war government, Charles Percy Snow. He gave a series of lectures at Harvard called Science and Government. And here's how Snow summarized the paper. The paper on bombing went out to top government official scientists. It described in quantitative terms the effect on Germany of a British bombing offensive in the next 18 months. The paper laid down strategic policy. The bombing must be directed assertively.

...

The paper claimed that given a total concentration of effort on the production and use of bombing aircraft, it would be possible in larger towns of Germany, those with 50,000 inhabitants, to destroy 50% of all houses. These are the fighters for democracy. They are so worried that you won't get a 1 in 10 million vote to determine which liar sits on the throne next.

constantly justifying mass murder. This is the actions of the heroes of democracy. I'm not even pointing to, well, Napoleon did. Well, actually, Napoleon was after the French Revolution for liberty, equality and fraternity. So whoever they think the villains are, are let's just say villainous. The heroes of democracy are constantly engaging in the most evil crimes. There's a book

Titled The Complete War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle, where he actually says that Winston Churchill one night was shaking his fist at the sky saying, why won't they come? De Gaulle looks at Churchill and says, are you really are you not having any patience to see your cities get destroyed? To which Churchill responds, according to Charles de Gaulle.

You don't get it. Once the Americans see Oxford and Coventry getting bombed, they'll have to come in. The state will even justify the mass murder of its own civilian population, which it pledges allegiance to defend. They will justify them getting killed. The case is with Pearl Harbor. The case is with the British getting bombed. Churchill even authorized Operation Catapult, which was killing –

1200 French servicemen and his justification at the International Churchill Society is, well, if we didn't kill him, those subs might have gotten in German hands. So these are the crimes that people will justify engaging in when they have a legal monopoly on printing money, conscripting people, and they control the education system, which is how they're able to hide these things for so long. Yeah. And doesn't isn't that something that people should keep in mind today? Right.

When our our ruling elite are advocating for more escalations in the war in Ukraine, more escalations for the war in Gaza. You know that like I feel like there's a sense amongst Americans that like, yeah, but we're doing this to make sure that our people don't ever have to die. It's like, no, I don't think that's actually true.

Oh, of course. It provokes a war, which makes it more likely. And so if you look at the cases of the First World War, Germany gives Austria a blank check to declare war on Serbia and fight the Russians. And this favor to Austria was so nice of them, led to the death of 1.1 million Austrians. Sir Edward Grey in 1905 pledged a war guarantee to France against Germany. So

They did them a very nice favor, those French. First World War against Germany led to 1.3 million French deaths. They have to pay the price. So when you're not being Mr. Nice Guy, when you say, we're going to give a war guarantee to Ukraine, we're going to give a war guarantee to Taiwan, that makes you nothing but a psychopathic

prick because we have historical references to see what actually happens in these cases that in no way makes you the good guy to just issue war guarantees and put the obligation to defend people. The obligation is put on all Americans to defend who sits on the throne in Kiev or in Taipei or in Tehran. This super

psychopathic amount of just comfort with putting massive, deadly obligations on people. It would just never occur to me to say, Dave, I hate the current governor of my state. So you're going to battle, buddy.

Dave, my independence is being violated by the current politician who needs to rule me. Your kids got to get drafted. Your towns might have to get bombed, but my independence is being violated. It's completely sick. Yeah. OK, so given the current situation that we have.

where we have a pretty dangerous war brewing in Ukraine and a pretty dangerous war brewing in the Israel-Gaza situation, what would you say is a sane policy? Given all of this theory, what's a sane policy to have going forward?

So let me first quote another book that I would recommend reading. It's called A Promised Land by Barack Obama. So to understand, maybe all of the examples I'm using are historical because I have no examples in the present of this. Here is Obama stating the nature of Vladimir Putin's gripe with America. All right.

This is on page 464. The U.S. decision seven years earlier to pull out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and its plans to house missile defense systems on Russia's border continue to be a source of strategic instability. The admission of former Warsaw Pact countries into NATO during both Clinton and Bush administrations had steadily encroached on Russia's sphere of influence, which was

So, in other words, according to the former president, Russia's gripe is not...

Well, we're taking over Hitler's failed plan to take over the world, according to twice elected president. Those are Putin's gripes, NATO expansion, color revolutions and getting out of now open skies as well. But previously, the anti-ballistic missile treaty. All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Monetary Metals, a phenomenal company. And right now you can unlock a 12 percent return on silver.

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Again, click the link in the episode description or just go to monetary-metals.com for more information on how to participate. All right, let's get back into the show. So looking at history, what I think we should advocate for the present is constant negotiation. This is Robert McNamara's first lesson in The Fog of War, empathize with your enemy. The examples that you can look to are,

Nikita Khrushchev earned the title the Butcher of Budapest in 1956. And in 1959, he was at the White House shaking hands with General Eisenhower. In 1962, Kennedy and Khrushchev were sending letters when the Soviets had, I think, 90 nukes.

in Cuba, which Castro apparently told Khrushchev that he wanted to use. But through the process of talking, the amount of empathy between the parties increased and, uh, they were able to deescalate the situation. Basically Castro ordered these, uh,

armaments as a result of Operation Mongoose, the CIA's attempt to assassinate Castro. You can read about all their assassination theories before they ever went into practice in a 1953 document titled A Study in Assassination, which they used in 1954 when they assassinated officials in Guatemala.

So more talking, more empathy, more Donald Trump shaking hands with Kim Jong-un. I mean, literally, I am told that we can have a formal alliance with Joseph Stalin, have the Yalta conference, but we can't talk to Vladimir Putin. Putin, did you know he's a bad guy? He did bad things in Ukraine. I have heard that. The Holodomor took place in the 30s. After that, there was a formal alliance with Joseph Stalin to give him half of Eastern Europe. But, you know, can't can't talk to Putin.

In 19 – I want to say 64, the Chinese Communist Party had Project 596, which was their capability display of showing that they had nuclear weapons. So Nixon –

or LBJ and then Nixon, could have said, well, we're going to have to go to war with China. It's just too powerful. Instead, within a decade, Kissinger and Nixon are shaking hands with Chairman Mao, but can't talk to Xi Jinping. Xi Jinping's a bad guy. They have two positions. They say, well, if China invades Taiwan, then we might lose access to our semiconductors. But on the economic realm, they go, the problem with China is we trade too much.

Well, then wouldn't we just keep trading even if they did take over Taiwan? Can't these things just be built in America? A real tough on China policy is decriminalize all capitalist acts between consenting adults to drastically make America the only superpower because that's how an economy grows with more social cooperation, less barriers to trade and more innovation. So that is the lesson that we can have for today. More talking, more empathy, more

less vilification of large populations. I think Donald Trump the other day said, well, if it was Iran who tried to take me out, we might have to wipe them off the map. Well,

If he assassinates Soleimani and their response is to assassinate one person, Trump's response is to murder potentially 80 million Iranians. Which group is the uncivilized one here? Or just let's say hypothetically, let's say hypothetically that it wasn't Iran who is trying to take Trump out. Let's say it was America.

Let's say it was people in the United States of America who are trying to take Trump out. Would any of us accept that, therefore, we have to kill tens of millions of Americans?

No, of course not. Because we would all recognize, no, it's not innocent men, women, and children here. It's bad guys here. So we have to take out the bad guys, right? Like whether that's here or over there. And by the way, with the Trump assassination,

I think it's here. So let's let's say we it still doesn't justify you just killing innocent people anywhere. Doesn't matter. Yeah. Thou shall not murder. You don't even have to say, well, I've been wrong. Dave Smith libertarians have been right. They say the Bible. You know what? The Bible has been right. I was going to justify this next mass murder campaign. I reread the Ten Commandments. You're not going to fucking believe what's in there, dude.

We're not allowed. It's one of the top ones. Thou shalt not murder. Turns out we're not allowed to. For progressives who advocate equality, the most unequal... Okay, if one person pays another a low wage, okay, that's unequal. Whatever, whatever.

If one person murders another, that's the ultimate exploitation, the ultimate inequality. That's why the left needs to be with us on this issue. That's why the pro-life people on the right also need to be with us on this issue as well.

Other examples of the fucking state in America allying with tyrants, Mohammed bin Salman, the butcher of Yemen. They allied with Jabhat al-Nusra, Al-Qaeda in Syria to take on Assad. It's just so sick that there's so many examples I could probably come up with a lot more.

But yeah, Antonio Salazar running Portugal. He was a member of NATO. You have the regime of colonels in Greece when Greece was a member of NATO. NATO has nothing to do with democracy. Zelensky didn't hold his March 31st election of this year. This is after he bombed a NATO ally on November 15th of 2022. This is the defender of democracy. Doesn't allow men ages 18 to 60 to leave.

uh, enslaves them in a war just so Yanukovych doesn't get on the throne. That's the other thing they do. This is the purpose of, uh, the war deception. According to historian, Arthur Ponsonby, he says, look, all the wars are based on lies. Uh,

Now, why is that? The reason is that we see wars from all these different countries through long spans of time. You might look at it and say, is there like, is it literally just the Rothschilds running everything? Because it seems they're always lying us into these wars. He says, there's a very simple explanation to go to war. You have to be asking millions of people to get their limbs blown off, to get their sons to die. And you can't sell that by saying, look,

Dave, I'm going to be conscripting your kids and I'm going to be taking 30 percent of your income until my war is over. But we'll be able to make sure it's not Yanukovych on the throne in Kiev. It's Zelensky. That's not going to rile people up. You have to say probably not. Putin is days away from taking the entire planet Earth over. He's going to engage in mass enslavement. Then it's going to be mass murder. And then he won't have a climate change policy. And then the world will literally end.

That's what they have to do every single time. That's why all the wars are based on lies, because people would not be willing to engage in this huge burden, this huge cost if they weren't scared shitless out of their minds for no for no reason at all.

Yeah, that's exactly right, man. And that's why they have to keep scaring us with absolute bullshit. All right. Keith, it's always a pleasure to talk to you, man. Thank you so much for coming on. Let everybody know where can they find your stuff?

I got to plug one other thing while I'm here. Of course, go ahead. So for those of you who didn't see me the first time I was on Dave's show, I was a hundred and ten pounds heavier because I was. That is true. So it looked like there was like me and an elephant on the fucking screen. So the carnivore diet is something I think

everyone should look into. So a lot of this talk about, well, I think the Federal Reserve should do this and, you know, the State Department should do all these things. Well, those things are really hard to change. The best thing that I have done in my recent life was do this carnivore diet. The vast numbers of Americans are heavily overweight. The carnivore diet and avoiding carbs is the best thing you can do today to improve your life.

I'm not plugging a company or anything. It's just a meat and cheese diet. So I just had to get that out because I want to sue every one of these goddamn teachers who sold me that food pyramid. Every one of these motherfucking doctors just committed fraud and said, maybe try smaller portions.

fucking assholes. So I have to talk about that. Other than that, check out, uh, libertarian institute.org. You can look at my book, domestic imperialism, nine reasons I left progressive progressivism. There was a free PDF, uh,

on our website of that, as well as my previous publication, The Volunteerist Handbook, 48 essays and books that I read, which turned me from being a progressive into a libertarian. So those resources are free. I really hope people will go to libertarianinstitute.org slash donate to help us really make this information accessible to as many people as possible. And this speech that we talked about today is also on the Institute in video form. I'm working on a transcript.

We will put it in the episode description. Keith, thank you so much. You're literally, you're a gem, dude. And it's always a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much for having me, Dave. Take care, buddy. All right. You're the man, Keith. And thanks everyone for listening. Catch you next time. Peace.