Latest / The Junto Podcast / E61: The (not so) Hidden Costs of "Equality" - Why Communism Fails

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E61: The (not so) Hidden Costs of "Equality" - Why Communism Fails · The Junto Podcast

• 0:10
  Hello America, welcome to the Juneto podcast where we promote the practical
• 0:14
  applications of critical thinking and bold creativity.
• 0:18
  I'm your host Edgar Mills. Thank you for,
• 0:29
  Hello, America. Welcome back to episode 61. I appreciate you guys following along with me.
• 0:35
  I appreciate the input that I get. And yeah, that's it.
• 0:39
  So what are we talking about today? I thought I was going to go with an easy
• 0:43
  breezy subject, and then I did.
• 0:47
  I'm going to do something easy breezy sooner or later.
• 0:51
  But today, we're going to talk about a little bit about communism and democratic socialism and why,
• 1:01
  I say those ideas, it's a single ideology, why it still lingers today and what we as, well,
• 1:13
  classical liberals or libertarians, if you will, what?
• 1:18
  What do we got to do, man? We got to call it out, right? Everything I talk about
• 1:24
  in the vast majority of my podcasts are framed up through a libertarian perspective.
• 1:32
  And you can read classical liberal on that. I'm not a complete anarchist.
• 1:38
  But the tenets are there, right? Individual liberty, voluntary cooperation,
• 1:45
  voluntary interaction, private property rights, limited government. Those are the things.
• 1:51
  But today we're going to highlight the empirical success of the free markets
• 2:00
  versus central planning.
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  There's just boatloads of data that back up the success of the free markets
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  over central planning That's just the way it is,
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  So yeah, that's what we're talking about today.
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  Communism, or as it has been rebranded, democratic socialism,
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  That's not simply a case of good policy being poorly executed That's not what
• 2:34
  it is Now these people who believe in these things will have you They'll tell
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  you this But this is not the case at all,
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  Because you can see in history how it's consistently performed very bad Okay,
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  Communism or democratic socialism, we will use those interchangeably throughout
• 2:54
  the rest of this episode.
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  They're predictable. The failure is predictable.
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  Because the doctrine is rooted in, well, either a denial or an ignorance of human nature.
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  And it's also rooted in envy a bit, I think, if you go back all the way to Marx
• 3:16
  and look at that. But why does it linger in America? Why?
• 3:21
  Why do young people jump on board so easily and so readily?
• 3:25
  Well, it sounds good on the surface.
• 3:28
  It sells us empathy. Yeah, and that's good, right?
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  And it sells us some future utopia of everything is even, Stephen, and peaceful,
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  and the government's benevolent, and nobody hates anyone else, and blah, blah, blah.
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  But it sells that to the young and affluent, the college kids,
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  especially in the Ivy Leagues and whatnot. Yeah.
• 4:05
  It's not selling that to poor kids, really. I mean, it kind of is, right?
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  And if you're a poor kid, you're kind of like, oh, man, yeah,
• 4:12
  I'm being oppressed. But we'll get to that.
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  But it sells us those things. But it doesn't. The technique that it sells it with is sleight of hand.
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  Because in one hand, we're getting all this idealistic, fair equality across the board.
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  But the other hand is snaking away your rights, secretly digging in your pocket,
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  incrementally pulling out rights, hard-earned rights, freedom.
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  And those are the things, those individual rights and that freedom is what has,
• 4:49
  well, and the free market, has lifted billions of human beings out of poverty. Yeah.
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  So disturbingly enough there are polls out there these days showing that gen z,
• 5:03
  has a love affair with socialism and communism at higher at higher rates since
• 5:10
  the 1930s yeah pop so prior to world war ii communism was getting a foothold you know england man.
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  And then World War II came along. Well, we saw some pretty atrocious shit from
• 5:29
  not only the Nazis, but the communists as well.
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  And then the very minute World War II ended, what happened? The Cold War.
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  Because we had hardcore ideological differences.
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  Now, the classical liberal sort of libertarian answer is these young people
• 5:48
  have not experienced want or scarcity these young people these Gen Z's,
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  And then, of course, everybody these days lives in their social media echo chamber.
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  And then, of course, public school is, you can call me conspiracy theorist if
• 6:12
  you want, but it's indoctrination.
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  We can go back historically and look at why public schools exist in the form that they do now.
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  And that's, and that's been a disconnect for young people from like,
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  I mean, they teach history, but it's all shaped. It's always shaped, right?
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  It don't matter what school you go to. They're going to take the history of
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  the way they want you to look.
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  But they skip over the atrocities of the Marxists and the left and the communists.
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  They skip over the atrocities and the millions and millions and millions of
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  dead to sell this ideology of equity or whatever. whatever they want to call it.
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  And these young people, yeah, they romanticize this equality and this equity.
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  They romanticize it. Of course we want everybody to be equal. Of course.
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  Have equal opportunity. That's what we want, right? Equal opportunity for everyone.
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  But they want equal outcomes no matter what.
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  And that just ain't the way it is. You can't force equal outcomes.
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  So they romanticize that equity a lot. And furthermore,
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  they get bought into this fantastical version,
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  this ideology, and they ignore and conveniently ignore the testimonies and the
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  outcries of people who have escaped from these communist countries in recent years.
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  People who have lived it came to America and said, look, this is bad.
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  We don't want this here. Don't fall for it.
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  They write them off as some kind of, I don't know, pawns for the right,
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  I guess. I'm not sure how they write those people off.
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  But there's millions of immigrants in America who have escaped communism and
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  are very passionate about it.
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  So coming from my perspective, the Juneteau podcast ethos, we're striving for
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  mutual improvement, right?
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  A club of mutual improvement and progress and moving forward, not progressivism.
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  Progress. But we have to look at objective history and reality to do that.
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  Objectively, we can look and see that free markets work. We can.
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  Rule of law, we need it. Like I said, I'm not a communist or an anarchist.
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  I believe that we need law in America.
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  There are those that will exploit lawlessness.
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  And one that I've been hitting on the past few episodes is personal responsibility and accountability.
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  If we hold people individually responsible, that works. That works.
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  And then we have to reject, you know, like, these hyperbolic,
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  sort of feel-good, you know, slogans and whatnot and class and victimhood and class warfare.
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  And we certainly have to avoid their entire structure is built around the blame game.
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  All their policies, everything is built around the blame game.
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  The leftists, communists.
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  Yeah, it's not built on any positive forward-moving thing.
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  It's built on what we blame them for this, so we're going to do the opposite.
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  They don't do the opposite. So we're going to take a second here.
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  We're going to go through the body count.
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  It's not funny. We're going to look at the body count, the communist body count.
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  You can deny it all you want. You can compare, oh, well, that was in,
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  this is blah, blah, that wasn't done correctly.
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  Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You can do all those things. You can say it.
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  And all that's doing is making, internally, you're just making little excuses
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  for yourself to not accept the numbers, the reality.
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  So Marx and Engels did the Communist Manifesto was in 1948 sorry 1848 so,
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  a little more than a hundred and change years old. And it was all about class
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  warfare, all about it, all about the, the abolition of private property.
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  And all about the sort of dictatorship of the, well, what they called the proletariat.
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  What is the proletariat people? What is it?
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  It's the people, the workers, the, the regular folks. That's the proletariat.
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  And they want, and what everybody casually forgets is they want a ruling class to rule these people.
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  But what they either fail to understand or don't want you to know is that this
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  ruling class has an agenda. There's humans.
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  And human nature takes over. And for whatever corruption you think the free
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  market does, so does absolute control.
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  No concept of human nature whatsoever. but it sounded ideologically sounded
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  very ideal to them. Yeah.
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  So then there was Lenin And he was in power From 1917 to 1924 The Bolshevik
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  Revolution Is what led to the creation Of the very first communist state Right, that was it So,
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  And what did that give us?
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  Well, what was affectionately known As the Red Terror It gave us the secret
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  police The Cheka secret police.
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  And it created this, the gulag system, right?
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  The horrific place where they sent political prisoners. And that set the model.
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  That was the model for all future communist nations.
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  And that was a one party rule, right?
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  Communist party rules all. And they ruled by terror, not consensus,
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  not any form of democracy whatsoever. It was by terror.
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  And then we had Uncle Joe. Yeah,
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  FDR and Winston Churchill affectionately referred to Joseph Stalin as Uncle
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  Joe to humanize him. They wanted to humanize him.
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  You know, whatever reason, talks
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  and all that. Well, what was Uncle Joe responsible for, Joseph Stalin?
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  Well, they did this collectivization of the state for sure, right?
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  But have you ever heard of the Holodomor famine in Ukraine?
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  Look that up.
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  Literally millions of Ukrainians were starved to literally, purposely starved to death.
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  Then they had the Great Purge. and, of course, continued on with the horrific
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  Gulag system, of course.
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  And in the USSR, the former USSR alone, you can count about 20 million dead.
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  Who else am I going to say next? Yeah, Mao. Mao Zedong.
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  He was in power of 49 to 76. 76.
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  What they called land reform was just government taking land and killing the landowners.
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  And then he had this program, Mao proposed this program called the Great Leap Forward.
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  And I strongly encourage you to go just look at that standalone,
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  just the Great Leap Forward from Mao.
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  Somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 to 45 million people were starved to death.
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  Then the cultural revolution ensued. And the total body count under communist
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  China, about 65 million so far.
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  And then other notable, well, Pol Pot in Cambodia was another notable one.
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  And that, you know, hey, only about 2 million. people were murdered there. No big deal, right?
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  Under communist Cambodia, North Korea, Ethiopia, it goes on for the countries
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  that were ruled by the communists and the body count.
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  If you look at consensus, and there's some different numbers out there,
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  no numbers are exactly matching, but conservative count, and this is using,
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  there's a book out there called the Black Book of Communism.
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  But if you look at other research along with that book and stuff like that,
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  they put the communist death toll at about 100 million, about 100 million from
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  executions, manufactured famine, gulags,
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  political enemy, purging, purging,
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  if you want to compare, directly compare, they far exceeded whatever the Nazis did.
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  The Nazis were ruthless and cruel, and so was communism.
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  So to not look at those with the same level of scrutiny is disingenuous or ignorant, one or the other.
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  And never mind the Nazis, those numbers exceed anything, resembling anything
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  remotely Western, capitalist, democratic republic, etc., etc.
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  Every communist regime followed the same
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  format centralized power right centralized control get rid of class enemies
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  or political enemies get rid of them followed directly by tyranny and famine that's the way it is,
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  And why did it follow the same path? Because that's the inevitable result.
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  That might not even have been the playbook. That's just the way those plays inevitably play out.
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  Yeah, man. Kind of sucks. You won't ever convince me otherwise.
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  I hope to convince you that it does.
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  And I hope if you're like a hard lefty, there's nothing wrong with liberal politics in America.
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  But the further left you go and you start getting into Marxist,
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  Leninist ideology, you're off the reservation.
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  So who's some modern, let's see, let's look at some modern practitioners of capitalism.
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  I mean, communism, because some of them kind of, now they've started to pervert,
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  right? They've started to dilute a little bit because a pure communism doesn't work.
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  China is all about capitalism to the degree that the state still makes the decisions,
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  but they're happy to sell, buy and sell products around the world. Right.
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  So you could call that a sort of a hybrid sort of system, but it's still, it's still state owned.
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  Right. Yes. What about Cuba?
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  They have chronic shortages of everything all the time.
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  Everybody says, oh, you can go to Cuba and get free medical.
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  Well, yeah, but they're holding their doctors as slaves because being a doctor,
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  I mean, you can't make a living, right?
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  North Korea, everything's all very pristine and ordered.
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  Satellites go, everything's pristine. but you guys have seen yeah they got stores
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  set up with faults with facades of of food and products but the reality is there's
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  no food and products they starve their people they starve their people,
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  and they have a prisoner political prisoner camps over there as well well not
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  just political prisoners but all any prisoners.
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  What about venezuela yeah man wanted to
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  in south america venezuela at one time was the most wealthy country that had
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  the highest oil production possibly possibly in the world at one time and what
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  happened what happened they nationalized oil production now what are they doing him,
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  eaten rats. They went into a state of, and you can blame America if you want.
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  Blame America. Sure. Go ahead.
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  America didn't nationalize the goddamn oil trade.
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  All right. So, oh, well, had they not pressured or snatched up Maduro,
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  they would be doing fine.
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  No, they weren't doing fine at all.
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  And under Chavez, oh my God.
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  They're not even going to be started on Chavez and like Sean Penn.
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  People are starving in the streets, starving.
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  And they're eating these opulent meals at these galas and whatnot because Sean
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  Penn's a good one. Venezuela.
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  Vietnam, Laos, over there in Southeast Asia.
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  The communists won, right? People love to throw it up that Vietnam was a big
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  mistake. Whatever, maybe it was. It definitely was.
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  But the communists weren't. Well, what happened over there? They had to eventually
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  adopt some form of capital.
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  They eventually had to ditch pure communism to survive. And they did.
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  And they're surviving, right? But the communists still run the show.
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  So if we look at some very direct contrasts you
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  can look at north and south korea there's a meme going around you see it all
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  the time where at night satellite looks down when you see a very distinct line
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  south korea is all lit up and booming north korea is blacked out you can say
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  that's for good or bad or whatever,
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  but those people, the North and South, started from the same place at the same
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  time, but they went on two different systems.
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  And now South Korea is booming and has been. It's a technical powerhouse.
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  And it's essentially...
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  A westernized democracy, if you want to call it that.
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  Look at the direct contrast of pre-Castro Cuba and post-Castro Cuba. Yes.
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  Now, there's not that many people old enough to remember that Cuba was a booming
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  touristy place and gambling and the rich people went down and all that stuff.
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  Havana. And then once Castro took it over, all that shit, well,
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  America sanctioned them and embargoed, blah, blah, blah.
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  Don't blame America for the system that their greedy ass leaders chose.
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  What about, here's another good direct comparison, Hong Kong pre-97 when Great
• 22:01
  Britain still owned Hong Kong. Hong Kong was thriving, man.
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  Remember the Bruce Lee days? Hong Kong was going to be another they had a Hong Kong Hollywood it was,
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  alright and then when it went back to China I mean they're probably still booming
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  in a way but nothing like it was,
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  what does that tell us anyway so those are good comparisons then they're valid
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  comparisons there's not don't think there's any gotcha thing in there or any
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  But what about or what if? Those are good comparisons and legitimate.
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  What that shows us is that government centralized planning fails because you
• 22:48
  still have flawed humans up there making decisions. But now they're making it
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  with a very limited perspective. of them.
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  Capitalist-leaning nations consistently always deliver higher standard of living,
• 23:02
  higher standard of living for the individual guy, for the individual family, for the.
• 23:10
  The ability to chase your dreams, to create, et cetera, et cetera.
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  But communism does, in fact, deliver equality. What am I going to say next?
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  Everybody's equally poor, except for the party. Except for the party.
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  And I'm going to say something cynical here, but this is what I believe about
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  a lot of the leftists sort of elite. They believe in a pure communist society
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  that they would be among the advisors in the party.
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  They would be in the in crowd there. So they would get their steak.
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  They would get their wine. Yeah.
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  That's what I think about that.
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  So anyway, democratic socialism is just communism with better freaking public relations.
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  The end game is the same total state control
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  that's the end game and the state
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  can when i say control i mean over means of production that's the
• 24:15
  catchphrase everybody loves means of production and ultimately over our lives
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  how many kids we can have look at china things we're allowed to say or not etc
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  etc what we're allowed but one of my favorites ayn rand said there's no difference
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  between communism and socialism.
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  And the means of achieving the same ultimate end. Communism proposes to enslave men by force.
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  Socialism by vote. It's made with a difference between murder and suicide.
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  I like that. I believe that. I think that's very succinct.
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  So me saying all this and railing on, why are young people so...
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  Why do they fall for it? Why are they still pulled in by it? Why?
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  Well, one, it offers sort of a fantasy of this benevolence, but it's false, right?
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  It's not real benevolence. But they offer that.
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  Like, don't you want poor people to be able to eat? Don't you want to be, you know, whatever?
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  Don't you care for the poor and marginalized? Yeah, of course.
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  Excuse me. Messed up there. Yeah, of course I care for the poor and marginalized. Of course I do.
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  It sells empathy, but it sells it with zero accountability.
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  And it completely ignores the fact that free markets have outperformed,
• 25:48
  right, that have lifted millions out of poverty, more so than any of this communist
• 25:53
  redistribution madness ever has.
• 25:57
  And then it's emotional, right? It appeals to emotion. And young people are emotional, right?
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  I'd say I was a little bit of a lefty when I was young.
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  I don't know who said it. Someone said, if you're not a lefty when you're young, you have no heart.
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  If you're not conservative when you're old, you have no brain.
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  I think that's right. It's emotional, though.
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  And then you got all the social medias in it, and it pumps, and it loves on
• 26:30
  all this equity and this DEI. And then you have all these celebrity endorsements.
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  You got Pink telling everybody, don't listen to my music. Man.
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  You got Sean Penn going to Venezuela, Cuba, to indulge in this excess that nobody else has access to.
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  But on Instagram, though, it looks good. You got the universities.
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  They're all liberal. and they and then they're just echo change they just funnel
• 27:04
  it because these professors don't,
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  they don't show the students the goddamn bread lines or the or the the realities
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  of the secret police or mass graves they don't show that that's a result that's
• 27:21
  something else happened that that's not a result of communism that's.
• 27:28
  So whether it's on purpose or out of ignorance, it is absolute disregard for human nature.
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  I've said it all the time. I always say that. I say that all the time.
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  Human nature. You can't legislate it. You can't politicize it. You can't policy it.
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  It is very individual.
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  And there are people that will take advantage of anything.
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  Karl Marx assumed that people would work for the collective once the exploitation was eliminated.
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  The reality is without any chance of owning private property or without any
• 28:12
  profit or loss incentive or any incentive to innovate.
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  Why? Why would you do it? If I weren't like a slave to produce X, Y,
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  Z, and that X, Y, Z is given away freely and I make my whatever my allowance
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  is and given a free loaf of bread and some toilet paper,
• 28:37
  at some point I'm like, oh, what the fuck? Right?
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  Is that selfish? No, it's not selfish. English
• 28:44
  that's America that's rugged
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  individualism we seek to
• 28:53
  create well maybe for the benefit of others maybe for the benefit ourself but
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  you know that I believe that if we are our best selves then we will be a benefit
• 29:04
  to others by default and that's a fact that's a fact self-interest.
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  Rightly understood right rightly explained so
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  rational self-interest is in
• 29:18
  everyone's interest that's it
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  communism believes in no such thing
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  communism brings everybody
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  down to the lowest level it keeps them there takes
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  any incentives away it takes even the
• 29:35
  will to live away you can look through history there's
• 29:39
  no creativity any creativity that you have seen there has been some awesome
• 29:44
  creativity come out of communist nations it's so god dang dark it's dark it's
• 29:51
  agony because communism breeds resentment and then it forces coercion.
• 30:00
  Grow older, you'll realize, you'll start maturing, right?
• 30:04
  And you start to see consequences of actions and policies play out over the longer term.
• 30:12
  Then you realize, all right, I can see why communism was bad.
• 30:17
  I can see why when I was young, I thought it was good, but now I see the result,
• 30:21
  and I see that that is absolutely horrible.
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  And if you're a critical thinker, you can do that.
• 30:29
  Now, that said, The pushers of this ideology, these college professors who live
• 30:35
  in a bubble, a little ideologically protected bubble, they grow old and they
• 30:40
  never see the consequence.
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  They avoid the consequence. They look at their manifesto and their text like so,
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  and then they continue to push the same ideological BS that has no practical
• 30:56
  place in American society, Western society,
• 31:01
  any society for that matter.
• 31:04
  I've said it before, and I'll stand by it.
• 31:07
  Communism works on a scale of about eight or 10 people, 20 people maybe.
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  But as soon as somebody gets in there with a different value system or a different
• 31:18
  set of desires and wants and needs, then the group is done.
• 31:24
  Because then the manipulation starts. Well, I need to fulfill my needs.
• 31:28
  Oh, that's selfish, Edgar. Well, is it?
• 31:31
  Am I not allowed to have my own wants and needs?
• 31:35
  And if I have the will to go after those, am I not allowed to do so?
• 31:40
  Well, if you're a tyrannical communist dictator, then yes, that's what you think. No.
• 31:48
  Yeah.
• 31:50
  Young people are still pulled in, right? But I think maturity,
• 31:55
  then I think critical thinking will get you out of it pretty quick.
• 32:00
  Or just go visit, you know, go live in a communist country for about three months.
• 32:05
  If you want to put your money where
• 32:06
  your mouth is, go live in a communist country for about three months.
• 32:10
  And if you can get back out of that communist country and come back home,
• 32:14
  then you'll probably have a different perspective.
• 32:19
  So now I want to look at some of the contradictions that we see from these young
• 32:25
  idealistic people let's look at the first amendment freedom of speech,
• 32:32
  well the left has already foregone the freedom of speech whenever they came
• 32:38
  out with hate speech whenever that was I can't remember probably in the early 2000s.
• 32:46
  Usurped freedom of speech. There is no longer such a thing as freedom of speech.
• 32:52
  Well, do you want people to be able to say racist things, Edgar? Yep.
• 32:56
  Do you want people to be able to say hateful things, Edgar? Yep, I do.
• 33:02
  There's already laws that you cannot incite violence.
• 33:06
  We already know these things. But no, not only can we not incite violence,
• 33:11
  but you don't want anybody but will say anything you don't want to hear so we
• 33:15
  have hate speech freedom of speech no longer
• 33:18
  exists so they want to ban speech
• 33:21
  certain speech on campus but then they
• 33:23
  want to have space safe spaces where then they can say
• 33:26
  whatever nonsense they want to say as long
• 33:29
  as it's ideologically correct to them that's it
• 33:33
  in one recent case out there there's there's black students at some university
• 33:38
  trying to segregate the university dorm system so they can have a safe place for black people only.
• 33:52
  I'm sorry, POCs only.
• 33:56
  It's bizarre. It's hypocritical. What about the Second Amendment?
• 34:02
  Now look, I've done podcasts. There's liberals out there, They're gun club,
• 34:07
  private groups who are carrying guns these days. And that's great and good on them.
• 34:13
  But what's one of the first things communists take over? What's one of the first
• 34:17
  things that happened? They disarmed the public. Why?
• 34:21
  So in modern, the modern paradigm here, the lefties want to blame the gun.
• 34:27
  They want to ban the object and they have no intention of putting any accountability
• 34:32
  onto the perpetrators. the actual people doing the crimes,
• 34:38
  the gun. Well, they're ignoring that throughout history, that's what communists do.
• 34:44
  So they're not admitting communism openly, but they're doing all the communist
• 34:48
  things, and then telling you you're crazy for calling them communists and a conspiracy theorist.
• 34:54
  And why do communists disarm people? Well, throughout history,
• 35:00
  armed insurrection is what has defeated tyrants.
• 35:07
  Yeah.
• 35:10
  What's some other good stuff? Lefties love to rage against the death penalty
• 35:15
  because the state shouldn't have, well, not the state, right?
• 35:22
  Has a right to life. But then I'll go and bemoan a cop who kills an armed violent
• 35:32
  protestor. They bemoan that.
• 35:33
  They bemoan the death penalty. They bemoan death.
• 35:37
  But then vehemently.
• 35:41
  Passionately defend and promote abortion. Don't roll your eyes if you're a lefty.
• 35:47
  If you're a lefty and you believe that, you either don't know when life begins
• 35:51
  or you don't care, one or the other.
• 35:54
  Or they celebrate, remember Luigi Mangio,
• 35:58
  they celebrate a young activist going and assassinating in cold blood a CEO
• 36:06
  of some insurance company on the streets of New York.
• 36:10
  Bullets to the back of the head. They celebrate that. He's glorified. He's a hero for that.
• 36:19
  So killing ain't wrong. as long as it's for their ideology.
• 36:24
  That's hypocritical. It is not consistent.
• 36:28
  It is intellectually dishonest.
• 36:31
  Meanwhile, they completely ignore, again, the body count.
• 36:35
  Hundreds of million plus dead, starved, murdered.
• 36:40
  These days, still, communist countries will still disappear political dissidents.
• 36:46
  Hell, America disappears people for, but it's usually for some political criminal
• 36:52
  enterprise, whereas communism is just, hey, this guy disagrees, he's vocal, gone.
• 36:59
  Suicided, somehow poison or somehow gunshot wound, suicide to the back of the head.
• 37:11
  Car accident with a single vehicle, no other vehicles involved.
• 37:15
  Lefties love to ignore that stuff. It happens all the damn time.
• 37:21
  So is life precious or not? Only if you believe the way they do.
• 37:26
  What else, man? I said earlier, it's about,
• 37:30
  oh, don't you want to help the marginalized and the poor. Yes, I do.
• 37:37
  Well, Edgar, socialism will ensure that the hungry get fed. Well,
• 37:43
  show me in history where that's the case.
• 37:45
  More than any other recession, right? We had the Dust Bowl. We had a Great Recession.
• 37:52
  More than all those combined in America, American in history,
• 37:57
  but communism has starved scores more people than any recession, than any hard times.
• 38:07
  Yeah, that's it. The numbers don't lie on that. The numbers don't lie on it.
• 38:12
  What else do the lefties love? What else? Well,
• 38:18
  this victim in class, what I call role play,
• 38:22
  because it is role play where there's a victim class and if there's a victim
• 38:28
  there must be an oppressor the lefties they love being the underdog or they
• 38:33
  want to they want you to believe they're the oppressed right the victim class
• 38:38
  when they're out of power especially it play it plays up,
• 38:42
  big style but even when they're in power they play up that they're the victims but they're in charge.
• 38:50
  Power, the lefties, they impose their will just like the righties do, right?
• 38:56
  So red and blue in America are one and the same.
• 39:01
  And they impose whoever's got the majority in Congress is getting their way.
• 39:10
  And even the left is as tyrannical as the right ever has been.
• 39:18
  And this is one of the most absurd things about friggin' Antifa,
• 39:22
  bemoaning, well, police brutality and whatnot, but then they go out in the street
• 39:28
  and are equally or more so brutal. Well, we're fighting fire with fire, Edgar.
• 39:37
  Outro music. If you bemoan that and then you go out and replicate it with more
• 39:45
  force, then you're not against violence.
• 39:49
  You're simply against somebody else's violence. So you're a hypocrite.
• 39:54
  Yeah, you're a hypocrite. Or at least intellectually dishonest.
• 39:59
  Antifa. Very funny. Really?
• 40:04
  The love affair with big government leads to
• 40:09
  sort of a incremental slow motion loss of of of individual liberties and freedoms
• 40:15
  and what is hate speech or some kind of suppression of speech today will turn
• 40:22
  into a suppression of thought tomorrow i point you to the uk and i'll point you to canada,
• 40:29
  That's around the corner if you don't get a handle on what our rights are in America.
• 40:35
  If you keep trying to manipulate them for some partisan BS.
• 40:41
  All right, let's go back in time a little bit. The Communist Party USA existed, and it does exist.
• 40:49
  So in the civil rights era, now there's a lot of controversy.
• 40:53
  There may be from this, but we'll talk it anyway.
• 40:57
  They befriended and partnered and infiltrated essentially the civil rights movement.
• 41:07
  They did that not for the betterment of the black man. I promise you that.
• 41:13
  It was not for the betterment of black Americans.
• 41:18
  It was for the advancement of the communist revolution.
• 41:23
  They wanted a communist revolution. They wanted communist takeover for whatever
• 41:28
  bizarre reason, because they're in charge.
• 41:31
  And once you're in charge as a communist, you're in charge forever.
• 41:35
  And you can just, your inner circle, they carry on forever short of an armed revolution.
• 41:43
  So they didn't want true equality for the blacks.
• 41:47
  They just used the racial tension as a foothold and an impetus to push class warfare.
• 41:55
  That's that's what they did and it's
• 41:59
  factual it's on record that's i'm not making i'm not throwing you my opinion
• 42:03
  here that's that's facts and then you know i mentioned this guy every now and
• 42:08
  again Saul Alinsky he worked with the communists and explicitly used what they called the have-nots,
• 42:17
  to leverage political power. That's it.
• 42:22
  And he dedicated his infamous book, Rules for Radicals, I reference it a lot.
• 42:30
  He dedicated that to Lucifer, Satan, as the original radical.
• 42:39
  Is that the right team to be on?
• 42:43
  Oh, Is that the right team? I don't think so, man. Damn.
• 42:50
  And that book still influences. That's still the playbook. They still use every
• 42:55
  one of those techniques today.
• 42:58
  What about the Black Panthers?
• 43:01
  They were explicitly Marxist. They said it.
• 43:05
  And they called and they were armed. The Black Panthers, that's part of the
• 43:09
  reason gun control is what it is today is because of they didn't want black
• 43:13
  people having guns. That's and whatever. It is what it is.
• 43:17
  Doesn't change the fact that the Black Panthers were communists and armed.
• 43:23
  And they called. They openly called for a violent overthrow.
• 43:27
  They openly called for that. But Huey Newton, who was the founder and leader
• 43:33
  throughout, you know, like 60s and 70s and whatnot, he openly praised Mao and
• 43:38
  he openly praised Castro.
• 43:40
  And the irony is that both of those two men would at minimum have enslaved Black
• 43:48
  Huey Newton or murdered him for whatever.
• 43:53
  Like he was a useful idiot. He was a useful idiot for communist causes.
• 44:01
  And this, again, this is consensus
• 44:05
  among historians and scholars that the Communist Party USA used black Americans
• 44:14
  and they used them as useful idiots to further their anti-American cause.
• 44:22
  They used black Americans to agitate politically to further their cause. Those are facts.
• 44:31
  Now, I'm going to be balanced here real quick because I also hate big government to include the FBI.
• 44:39
  Yes, the FBI was running a counterintelligence program back in those days targeting
• 44:44
  Martin Luther King and Huey Newton, but also the KKK.
• 44:50
  Hey, nobody's going to share that with you, but they also targeted white supremacy
• 44:54
  groups and they targeted a lot of people.
• 44:58
  The majority of that targeting was illegal. The surveillance,
• 45:02
  illegal, warrantless, literally warrantless.
• 45:07
  And that's, you know, J. Edgar Hoover, you can say what you want about him. I think he was this guy.
• 45:13
  I think he was wrong, wrong on a lot of levels.
• 45:17
  The FBI was, you know, people say, oh, the FBI has become so political.
• 45:23
  The FBI has always been political.
• 45:26
  It was a political beast. Their whole purpose is to spy on anti-American whatever,
• 45:33
  whoever's against the sitting system.
• 45:37
  Yeah. Counterintelligence under the FBI. And the problem is it was so loose, right?
• 45:42
  Well, they could target people who are a threat to national security,
• 45:47
  but also who they deemed, let me quote, a threat to social order.
• 45:57
  What social order is that exactly so
• 46:01
  yeah fbi got control so they
• 46:05
  targeted people for political
• 46:08
  purpose only which is not not cool the fbi
• 46:12
  was a political beast and exploited cultural divisions
• 46:16
  which so did the communist party so it
• 46:20
  was so you can see how the grassroots quickly gets
• 46:23
  overshadowed by these bigger power plays these people
• 46:27
  that would use the grassroots for their own ends that's the
• 46:30
  way it is i think and i've said this before i
• 46:33
  think probably antifa in
• 46:36
  america was probably grassroots for about
• 46:39
  the first week and then somebody saw profit in it and then it got exploded and
• 46:47
  now the founder of antifa is living in like multi-million dollar homes two or
• 46:52
  three right under investigation for embezzlement human nature and,
• 46:59
  Lefty, doesn't matter. Commie, libertarian, human nature.
• 47:04
  She saw opportunity to enrich herself beyond her wildest imagination and took it and exploited it.
• 47:13
  Therefore, discrediting the whole movement.
• 47:17
  All right, so I got a few questions. These questions I formed for the lefties. So listen carefully.
• 47:26
  Listen carefully and take note. What draws you to the left?
• 47:32
  Now look, think about that critically. Don't say Donald Trump.
• 47:36
  Be deeper than that. I'm not talking about personality or whatever.
• 47:42
  I'm talking about larger ideology, philosophical ideology, not some a-hole car salesman. All right.
• 47:51
  So if you say Donald Trump, you're shallow and maybe you don't have the capacity
• 47:58
  to think deeper than that.
• 48:03
  But what draws you to the left? Is it do you have a genuine desire to care for the people?
• 48:10
  And whatnot? Or is it, are you shallow?
• 48:14
  Is it just a fashion statement because your favorite artist or rapper,
• 48:19
  whoever waves, waves a red flag?
• 48:22
  I want you to think about the question, what draws you to the left?
• 48:28
  And then critically analyze whatever the answer is on it.
• 48:33
  All right, that's one question. Here's another. How far are you willing to take the ideology?
• 48:40
  Is it casual local politics, like you just want some leftist policies in your town?
• 48:45
  Or do you believe that the state, and when I say the state, I mean federal government,
• 48:49
  should control all aspects of life,
• 48:51
  to include how many kids you're allowed to have, or what kind of car you're allowed to drive,
• 48:56
  or whether or not they're going to put a cutoff switch in your car so that when
• 49:00
  you've driven whatever allowed number of miles, it stops and automatically returns
• 49:06
  back to the charging base.
• 49:09
  Like a Roomba. How far are you willing to take it?
• 49:13
  And then if you're willing to take it all the way, right? You're like,
• 49:16
  Hey, okay, good. What if the guy, so you give the power to the government to do that.
• 49:21
  Well, what if the guy in charge of making those decisions, ain't your guy?
• 49:26
  Then what? Once you've given the power away, it's too, it's too late. All right.
• 49:34
  What incentivizes excellence and creativity under communism?
• 49:41
  What is the incentive to create and produce and excel under communism?
• 49:49
  Now, if you're in the ruling class, that's it. You got all the money. You got your prime rib.
• 49:57
  You can eat your tomahawk steak and sip on your wine and your opulent government-provided
• 50:06
  apartment or 50-acre mansion.
• 50:12
  But what about the rest of those? What about the other 359.5 million people?
• 50:19
  What incentivizes creativity and productivity and excellence in communism?
• 50:27
  All right, here's a final question. when you gain power and implement this communism
• 50:36
  will you still champion the underdog,
• 50:41
  or will you become the new tyrant because you have to understand that what was
• 50:46
  the underdog is now going to or the the tyrant is now going to be the underdog
• 50:51
  so you got in charge now and now there's underdogs out on the street who believe
• 50:57
  different than you but you're this You're the prevailing power.
• 51:01
  Are you still for the underdog?
• 51:06
  Or do you know better? And you're going to enforce and impose your will because
• 51:13
  you think you know better.
• 51:15
  And when you do enforce your will...
• 51:19
  Force communist policy, it will be at gunpoint. Yeah, it will be at gunpoint.
• 51:27
  Think about those things, folks. Those are for my lefty listeners.
• 51:31
  What you think about those things.
• 51:34
  All right, wrapping it up here. Look at the realities.
• 51:38
  The realities of the past communist regimes, the current communist regimes.
• 51:43
  Read primary sources.
• 51:47
  Understand incentives what what how
• 51:50
  incentives play in politics and definitely
• 51:54
  reject any fantastical utopian
• 51:58
  friggin answer that or shortcut it it don't exist understand that self-reliance
• 52:08
  is more important and more critical than state dependence it's more fulfilling.
• 52:16
  It's more natural. Understand it.
• 52:22
  Share this episode, folks. If you've got lefty friends and family,
• 52:25
  share the episode. Get them to listen to it.
• 52:28
  If only this one. Hey, check this out. See what you think.
• 52:31
  See what the arguments are. See if they hold water. See if they're legitimate.
• 52:37
  So what I'm going to put in the show notes is I'm going to throw five books at you.
• 52:42
  Five books that are some of the most pivotal, most highly studied,
• 52:52
  informative books on communism today.
• 52:58
  They're nonfiction for sure, but they outline, each of them,
• 53:02
  the human cost of communism, the human individual cost of communism.
• 53:07
  And they have survivor testimonies.
• 53:13
  Of declassified records and whatnot, and they have a really solid historical analysis.
• 53:22
  And they all collectively put them together and they sort of make a big, total, broad,
• 53:28
  compelling argument against the ideology of communism and socialism because
• 53:33
  they tear down the core principles, which collectivism is one of them, of course.
• 53:42
  Central planning, of course. And then, obviously, the single-party dictatorship.
• 53:48
  In America, we've been mowing the two-party system.
• 53:51
  Imagine being under a communist dictatorship of one party.
• 53:55
  So they've got a lot of good stuff in. They've shaped a lot of the academic views of communism.
• 54:01
  And I don't mean the lefty academic. I mean, like, proper...
• 54:07
  Studied humans, and they show us that this pursuit of this mystical worker's paradise is false.
• 54:16
  It just leads to tyranny and death. That's it.
• 54:22
  But these books will give you a deeper understanding. So that's it,
• 54:27
  folks. That's what I had to say today.
• 54:30
  Why do young people, or are they lured into the communism?
• 54:35
  These are some of my thoughts. I might've been a little fragmented and rambling
• 54:39
  a little there, but these are some of my thoughts.
• 54:41
  So thanks for listening, folks. Please do share with your friends and family
• 54:48
  and whoever. Please share the podcast.
• 54:50
  Please comment if you have something to say about it. Please do.
• 54:54
  I'm always looking forward to it, to responding to the feedback.
• 54:59
  I love it. We've got June coming up soon.
• 55:02
  We've got the OSS Challenge, OSS to Green Beret Edition. That's June 6th.
• 55:06
  Plenty of space there. It's not even remotely filled up.
• 55:10
  That's sponsored by Athena Target Systems.
• 55:13
  And the Special Forces Foundation is to bring awareness for their cost.
• 55:20
  What else? We probably, I think this month, we have a pistol workshop. Yes.
• 55:25
  The Sons of Liberty match at the end of the month and we have.
• 55:33
  June 13th we have the Libertarian Party of Georgia Range Day and there's going
• 55:39
  to be some barbecue for sale out there from Moe's barbecue, Moe's original barbecue
• 55:43
  here in Rome so bring an extra 20 bucks,
• 55:48
  other than that folks, thanks for listening please follow all the other stuff
• 55:52
  to teamguys.com Of course, the website, thegintopodcast.com.
• 55:57
  And then please, if you can, if you have the, this is the opposite of communism.
• 56:02
  I'm asking you for voluntary donations to the gifsengo.com backslash help a homie fund.
• 56:12
  This is the non-state grassroots way to help individuals out on the street who need it.
• 56:20
  So that's what we do there. So you give some money, I give money.
• 56:26
  And when I see someone on the street in a pickle, I give them some food,
• 56:32
  buy them some sneaks, whatever it is, help single mothers with diapers.
• 56:39
  Yeah, anything we can do, we do. Now, this is in the scope of my circle.
• 56:46
  I hope to expand the circle one day. But meanwhile, that's what we're doing.
• 56:51
  All right, good people. I appreciate each and every one of you.
• 56:55
  Take care of each other. Be good to each other.