Latest / The Aaron Day Show / Enemies of the State Roman Storm & The Fight for Code Freedom
Transcript
- Welcome back to the Aaron Day Show. This is Season three, episode nine. And this is, you know, it's sad to me that we actually have to do this episode, that we have to continue to do these episodes. This one is Enemies of the State with a special emphasis and update on Roman Storm. So the last song that we played is We Won't Bow. And that's a song that I created a long time ago, probably over a year ago. at this point and you know unfortunately we had this uh George Bush style mission accomplished situation where Trump said uh the war on crypto is over months and months and months ago and yet the number of crypto prisoners is growing at a really quick pace. We're going to have Dan O'Neill on a little bit later where he'll discuss the upcoming enemies of the state event, but we're going to have twice as many people that we're advocating for this time. So the supposed war on crypto is anything but over. And some of the cases, like Roman Storm, where he thought his case was resolved to the extent that he knew what charges he was going to be sentenced, governments decided they want to reopen the case. And now he's looking at potentially four years in prison. So we're going to talk with Dan about that event. But before we do that, I'm going to do the normal overview. There's so much going on. And then I'm actually going to do a little presentation about Roman himself. I reached out to Roman and I assumed It wouldn't make sense for him to necessarily come on right now. But, you know, the government wants to retry him on these two charges. The judge hasn't ruled on that yet. So I think April nine is an important date on that. And so, you know, if they rule against Roman, then we may have Roman on the show. I hope that's not the case. I hope we don't. have Roman on the case until he is a free man and we're talking about the ordeal he went through in the past but nevertheless this is what is ongoing today um so I want to you know recap what happened last week so last week I announced that I am running for U.S Senate and I'll talk about this a little bit I had my first public event last Saturday at Liberty Forum here in New Hampshire where I spoke and Scott Brown, who is a Republican candidate for US Senate, spoke. That was fairly interesting. But I'll get into what happened on that in a minute. But last week, I went into a pretty lengthy detail about what the campaign is all about. So it was about two and a half hours. And actually to condense that two and a half hour talk into thirty minutes, which I did. And I'll show you some of the some of the visuals for that because there's some new material that I presented above and beyond what I talked about last week. The episode prior to that we had on another prisoner of war and war on crypto, Ray Youssef. And we are going to continue to follow his case. He's facing similar charges that Ian faced. And in fact, common charges amongst a lot of these crypto prisoners. They try to get you for money laundering, operating without a money transmitter. license which is absurd how they do it and you know the extent of the charges that they they try to rack up with with that so this is an example this was the program for uh last saturday that was a pretty big deal i think for the free state project because the fact that we had a you know Republican candidate coming to the event. The Free State Project now has quite a bit of leverage and is seen as a political force in the state, whether people aren't happy about it, but I think it's inevitable at this point. And even Scott Brown said he can't win without The support of the Free State Project. You know, I previously opposed Scott Brown. I had a super PAC and we raised like a quarter of a million dollars to oppose Scott Brown in twenty fourteen. But this was not contentious between Scott and I. I don't agree with Scott on many positions, but but what we do agree with agree on is. the fact that uh we're both running to stop his opponent in the republican primary a guy named john or john e sununu and i think probably all states have this situation where you have these family dynasties political dynasties that end up emerging where you have multiple family members multiple generations and they end up you know in the governor's office they end up as mayor they end up in Washington, D.C., and they have their fingers in absolutely everything. And then they position themselves, you know, no one wants to go against them after a certain amount of time because of all of the power that they amass, both within the state, but then with their ties from Washington, D.C. But these are truly the people that everybody in all states should be trying to extricate because you will find it's the deals that they cut with Washington, D.C., the deals that they cut to enrich their own families and to enrich their own personal trajectory that erodes your state's sovereignty. And this is definitely the case with the Sununu family. So as an example of how bad this is, Scott Brown was a Trump supporter from the very beginning, actually became Trump's ambassador to New Zealand. And Trump ended up endorsing John E. Sununu, who was a never Trumper. so that goes to show you the amount of clout we don't i don't know exactly what the quid pro quo was for that endorsement but at the end of the day these are the kinds of of things where um you just need to cut those things out so we so we had an interesting conversation back and forth and actually scott said he would probably vote for me if if uh sununu was the republican nominee. So in the general election, which is kind of a big deal. And I actually told people, if you're going to vote in the Republican primary and you believe in that, you should probably vote for him. So it was very interesting, interesting conversation. And, you know, he's now aware of, you know, usually when you do these political things, it's just you go up and talk or you're trying to ask for people's know feedback or whatever and that was not my that's not what my campaign is about my campaign is about educating people about the threat that they're unaware of as opposed to asking you know trying to pander to what it is that they think that they want because people don't realize that the actual threat they have in front of them is technocracy so i actually you know compacted quite a bit of information into this talk. And I think it was a lot of new information for some of the freestaters as well as for Scott Brown. These were some of the points that I made. And I'll tell you, I've been kind of racking my brain about this all week, which is, you know, I'm a little concerned even here at New Hampshire that technocracy may be, you know, planting hold at the state level. And it's caused me to want to start to research. We know, for instance, that Peter Thiel has heavily influenced, has been playing strategically at the federal level with people like J.D. Vance and other U.S. Senate candidates and congressional candidates around the country. And I've talked about several times what the end game is with that with respect to technocracy. But now I'm beginning to question whether he's been doing this as well at the state level. And so, you know, I've been predominantly trying to educate people all around the world about technocracy, not just locally. In fact, I've spent more of my time outside of New Hampshire than in New Hampshire. But I realized this weekend that I think a lot of people in New Hampshire, in fact, even some people within the Free State Project might not be aware of what's going on. And some of this hinges on this, what I have on the slide here, Curtis Yarvin and Yuval Noah Harari. So Curtis Yarvin has become very popular within libertarian circles. And Yarvin is the guy that influenced Peter Thiel. And he's put forward a pretty controversial philosophy that sounds like it's about limited government. with things like rage, retire all government employees being one of his programs and attacks on not only bureaucracy, but mainstream media and academia and so on and so forth. It's not until you dig in and realize that he's actually a technocrat. And so, yeah, you may replace government employees, but if you replace them with AI, you don't get more freedom. And so there's this whole narrative being built up around meritocracy, which is a backlash to all of the woke policies. It's a backlash to affirmative action. And certainly those things are disastrous. The problem is when you get into the mode of saying, well, if these are kind of the philosopher king types, then they should be, they're better at making decisions than people are making for themselves. And therefore they should be put in that position. And that is actually not a freedom oriented position. This is where technocracy ends up leading, which is that, well, okay, scientists and engineers or AI is making better decisions for you. And then you are essentially then become an NPC, not exercising your own free will, where all of your decisions are being made externally. That is not libertarian. That is not pro-liberty in any way, shape or form, nor is that pro-free will. And I think this is, has been lost. And I think it's been lost just primarily as a backlash to all of the woke stuff. So there's a lot more work to be done, I think, within the libertarian community on communicating this. And one of the big points that I made is that, you know, I love New Hampshire and I came here seventeen years ago as part of the Free State Project. But in the end, you know, we're the freest plantation in the slave column. So the fact that we're the freest state isn't useful or meaningful if we are tethered to the federal government and the federal government is moving warp speed towards technocracy. And I have been making this point since twenty twelve, since I got involved in politics in New Hampshire, which is that you can win all of these small things like, you know, we don't have to have inspection stickers here in New Hampshire and. don't have to get a license to get to do hair braiding and so on and so forth but um that's not all that meaningful if for instance you've caved on real id you've given up control of health care to the federal government through things like obamacare medicaid expansion destroyed free markets in health care and now thirty three percent of your budget comes from the federal government so you can't ignore the federal government you you can't just say well you know screw DC, we're gonna focus on New Hampshire, but then ignore all of the ties that are associated with that. And then I kind of outlined what those are in terms of what happened with COVID tyranny and everything else. People don't like it when I talk about this, but I don't care. I came to New Hampshire, I signed this pledge that says, to come to the free state project is the maximum role of government being protection of life liberty and property and so you know i take that seriously and that's not possible if we continue to give up to the surveillance state i presented this slide as well which uh dan will come on board and we'll talk about the event coming on but the war on crypto has expanded we only had five total people at the event last year and they weren't all crypto people we had ross olbrich ian freeman and roger veer as the crypto people and then edward snowden and julian assange and now we have all these crypto prisoners and we still have assange and we still have snowden and then we have more people in different categories and so uh it's it's pretty pretty sad to to look at so um i'm not going to go through the rest of those slides but i will say that you know my punch line in all of this As I do the campaign, the whole point of the campaign is not vote for me. I'm going to solve your problems in Washington, D.C. The point of the campaign is going to be to go across the state doing workshops, educating people about technocracy, but showing them how to exit the system. So as we sit here today and we look at, you know, are we in World War Three? You know, what do we think about bombing one hundred and seventy schoolgirls in Iran, so on and so forth? The answer to that isn't to, you know, chant audit the Fed or chant and the Fed. The answer to that You don't have to vote for it. You just have to ditch the dollar. And that has remained the solution since it was my presidential theme in twenty twenty four. You don't have to vote for it at the ballot box. You vote for it by taking your money out of the banks. And by the way, if you haven't noticed, there's all kinds of warnings all over the place. They're black rock. Other people are having issues with where they're halting withdrawals for from certain investment funds there are all kinds of alerts around and you know some of them may be fake or not but about potential cyber attacks on banks There are all kinds of issues with the banking system itself and defaults, credit defaults all over the place. I mean, we're kind of in the same situation we were in two thousand and eight before the collapse. Plus, we have World War three on top of it. So this isn't a drill. It's not a bumper sticker that you're not supposed to pay attention to. The money in the bank doesn't belong to you. But by participating in the system and by using the money, you enable the government to commit atrocities all over the world. And there's no voting that's going to fix that. But people don't understand this. And so I'm going to go show them and I'll show them how to use privacy coins, how to use gold backs, how to use physical silver to get out of the system. And I think a lot of this is people just don't think that they have a choice. The same with healthcare. You're not gonna fix the healthcare. No politician is even offering a solution. We don't have any markets in healthcare at all. The whole thing is fraud and now the government controls healthcare spending so the way out of that isn't to have some gimmick or some other new trade association lobby a political party it's to cancel your insurance form a medical trust to protect your assets and engage in medical tourism in a free market so Coming up next in terms of events, by the way, I'm going to be gone next week, but I am going to do the podcast. I'm going to do the podcast on Monday instead of the normal Thursday. So I'll do Monday at six o'clock. And the topic next Monday is going to be on the board of peace. And so, you know, I encourage you to research that ahead of time. But what I'm finding here is Incredibly bad news. If you thought that we defeated the globalists or defeated the WEF, so on and so forth, Trump has put together this organization that he's the chair of for life that governments put money towards, including the U.S. government, which has invested ten billion dollars. And they're going around and doing reconstruction projects, building technocracy in other countries where the people on the board are personally profiting from it. But they're actually promoting technocracy. For instance, right now they have a plan, a hundred and twelve billion dollar plan to rebuild Gaza, and they're calling it a technocratic state. It's going to have six to eight smart cities based on ai it's going to use a digital currency possibly even the trump stable coin which is a backdoor cbdc this is uh this should be front page news and probably otherwise would be in the fact that the first thing that the board of peace did was start world war three is you know i guess par for the course for these types of organizations but i'm gonna have craig winklewitz on and we're gonna go dig through all the people on the board we're gonna show where the money comes from, what the structure of the situation is, and how all of this fits into the technocratic agenda. So I'm going to go through before I bring Dan on, and I'll probably go through these slides somewhat quickly, but I wanted to give everybody a sense of what's going on with Roman Storm. Because I don't know if I've done a full thing on him or not, You know, on August the twenty third of twenty twenty three at six o'clock in the morning in his home in Sonowee, Georgia, you know, his daughter was already awake because there were armed federal agents surrounding his home. She's awake as a SWAT team is pointing weapons at her father's head. So I'm thinking about that for a moment, a quiet suburban neighborhood with manicured lawns and so forth, kids bicycles. In the driveway, the most exciting thing in a town like this is where the sprinklers go off at the wrong time. And then all of a sudden without warning, black tactical vehicles with body armor, assault rifles, a full machinery of federal law enforcement descends on one family's home like they're about to take down a drug kingpin. That's how this story started. And his alleged crime is writing computer code. So think about that for a second. The United States, a man was treated like a violent criminal. His family was traumatized because he wrote software, because he built something with his keyboard and his mind. And so, you know, you might be thinking if you're new here that there must be more to the story, that the government doesn't send SWAT teams after programmers. There must be something else. at play here, but the story gets worse the more you dig into it. Roman Storm came to America from Russia with five hundred dollars in his pocket. That's it, five hundred dollars. And he was chasing the American dream, the idea that if you work hard enough, if you're smart enough, if you build something valuable, America will reward you. And so he did just that. He learned, he worked, he built, became a software developer. contributing to the technological infrastructure that powers our modern world. He lived an immigrant success story that we've been told represents everything great about this nation. And then one morning federal agents surrounded his home and pointed guns at him in front of his daughter. you need to understand something critical here this isn't just about roman storm or about one raid on one house in one georgia suburb what happened that august morning represents something much bigger and more dangerous and more relevant in your life than you might realize because if the government can send to armed tactical teams after a software developer for writing code what does it mean for innovation in america does it mean for the next generation of builders and creators what does it mean for the fundamental promise that you can come to this country work hard and build a better life and you know there's actually a video that uh was played at anarcho poco the video that i hadn't seen before with footage about the way that the feds raided ian's house And I may try to get a copy of that and play that so that you can actually see how scary, but also over the top absurd these SWAT teams are for these cases. You know, again, Ian's case, selling Bitcoin without a license. And then, you know, you've got to have five different federal departments coming in and a bear cat breaking your windows and all of this other stuff. So understand why armed federal agents arrest software developer Gunpoint and treat him like public enemy number one. You need to know his full story, what he built, why the government claims it's criminal, because his case isn't happening in a vacuum. It's part of a larger pattern, pattern of the government using its most aggressive tools against people who build things they don't understand or can't control. A pattern that should terrify anyone who believes in innovation in privacy or the basic right to write software without the fear of a pre-dawn Right. So, so tonight we're going to go through his story again. It's becoming a common story. There's a lot of overlap. This is why I did the song. We don't bow. And it's got, it has, um, Ian, Roger and Roman in it. I'm going to create more songs. Um, frankly, I've got a queue of songs to make. I'm thinking about doing one for each of the prisoners that, you know, and now I don't even know if I could do a song. There are so many of them. I don't even know if we could have an effective song. without it being ten minutes long that includes all of the crypto prisoners let alone uh every everyone else so this is where this starts at this six a.m raid um you know as I said Roman came here to Russia with nothing but five hundred dollars and he actually started working as a bus boy while he learned to code And so he's a self-educated developer, no CS degree or anything like that. He rose through the ranks to work at Amazon. I mean, he's literally the embodiment of the American dream. And if you're not familiar with what he built, he built something called Tornado Cash, which it's not a company, it's not a business. It's a mathematical equation that essentially runs on the blockchain. It's a privacy protocol built for Ethereum. So, you know, the idea behind this, you know, there are no employees, no bank accounts, no headquarters. And, you know, Roman met Vitalik from Ethereum in twenty nineteen. And the way that I heard him describe it is, you know, you look at if you want to look at Ethereum is kind of an app store. You know, it's pretty, pretty it would be pretty dangerous or, you know, who would want to have all of the apps that you download known publicly on a blockchain so his idea was to create a kind of a privacy solution for managing you know ethereum for managing things built uh on top of ethereum so pretty straightforward uh situation and you know there's something that is similar in in a lot of these cases which is before he went and built it, he actually sought out advice from a lawyer about whether or not, you know, he needed to get, for instance, a money transmitter license or something like this. And in one of his investors, he ended up having a venture capital firm invest in the venture capital firm, had their lawyer look at it and, and came back with, no, you don't need a, um, you don't need to have a money transmitter license to do this. Well, um, And in fact, in twenty nineteen, FinCEN explicitly said privacy preferring preserving protocols are legal. So Roman had this in writing. This was twenty nineteen guidance anonymizing software providers are not money transmitters. So he hired VC lawyers to verify compliance. Again, legal counsel confirmed this and he built it in good faith based on official government guidance and based on getting legal advice. so we did everything right and still got rated so what changed well as I've talked about on this show many times we have executive order one four zero six seven under Biden which authorized the CVDC and authorized a complete crackdown on everything else and again why would you crack down on crypto or you you would need to crack around on crypto because no one's going to want to see the DC so I think that many of these cases, although not all of them, some of them now, Ray and others actually were originated under Trump, but most of the crypto prisoners of war that we're dealing with, their situations started under Biden. So in August of twenty twenty three, the DOJ brings charges against Roman. They allege a billion dollars laundered by third parties using the protocol. This is kind of similar to Ian's thing, right? You're going to say, oh, you don't have a money transmitter license, and now we're going to hold you responsible for people that you basically sold crypto to, which none of this ever happens with banks. Again, banks can launder literally hundreds of billions of dollars for cartels, get caught, and no one goes to prison. There was zero evidence that Roman knew any criminals. He had zero contact with any money launderers. This would be like prosecuting somebody for building a highway for drunk drivers. So that's essentially what happened. And so the case went to the Southern District of New York, which, as you probably know, at this point, this is where they went after Trump. This is where they go after everybody, even though Roman wasn't based in New York. he ended up getting the worst possible court for his case. And so they had a kind of a drawn out trial. And I know there was some back and forth. I think one of the jurors had a nail appointment or something, and there was some deadline. I mean, it's one of those things when you read the details on this, it's ridiculous. But long story short, in August of, he was found guilty on one count maximum jail sentence of five years, but the jury deadlocked on the two most important charges, the most serious charges. So he was convicted on one count of money transmission, so without a license, and that's potential maximum five years. But the jury could not reach consensus on conspiracy charges. They couldn't reach, you know, there are all of these allegations about things involving working with North Korea and terrorism and money laundering and all of this other stuff. But they deadlocked on on these other more important pieces, elements of the case. So so the government said Tornado Cash is so dangerous that they arrested Roman and then they lifted the sanctions on Tornado Cash itself. So in March of twenty twenty five, Treasury lifts sanctions on Tornado Cash, the thing that Roman created. And then Trump signs an executive order, stop targeting crypto developers. And then there's a DOJ memo that says, we're not a regulator, stop overreach. Then there's something called the Gulati opinion, code is not a crime. So with all of this, so it's looking pretty good, right? The software you created isn't illegal. The president has said, we're not gonna go after anybody anymore. You've got the DOJ saying, hey, we're gonna stop overreach. And yet the DOJ has just requested a retrial on these other two more serious charges. So now I believe he is potentially facing again, back up now from five years to forty years. So. There are huge implications for this. If Roman loses the case, then decentralized finance dies. Not in theory, but in practice. First Amendment protects written expression. Bernstein versus the DOJ in nineteen ninety six found that code is protected speech. Publishing encryption algorithms is protected activity. So if writing code is a crime, then the no developer is safe. The entire open source movement is at stake. know other crypto figures have received justice why not roman although as we talk about samurai wallet and then in a few weeks i'm going to talk to the lawyers uh for another roman roman sterling off we're going to find that this seems to be a target it does seem as though the government is very much still interested in shutting down privacy and maybe even shutting down open source development itself. And as I've discussed, Genius Act is a backdoor CBDC, Clarity and everything else. Everything that they're saying about America being the crypto capital world is more America becoming the surveillance crypto capital of the world. And even then, with a specific caveat where if you are a family member related to Trump or you're part of the Trump administration, you can be one of the ones issuing surveillance cryptocurrencies around the world and profiting off of it. There doesn't seem to be any actual interest in protecting our privacy or fourth amendment rights at all. So, you know, there have been pardons. You know, Ross Ulbricht was pardoned. CZ was pardoned. Now, you know, Ross was pardoned as a deal with the Libertarian Party that was secured for votes. CZ was pardoned and then went on to raise two billion dollars for Trump's world every financial. And also he actually created. usd one which is trump's stable coin so that's looking a little bit like a pay-for-play deal but then you have roman storm and all of our other crypto prisoners that don't have a deal with trump still facing prosecution or still sitting in a cage so the global picture here this uh isn't just america governments around the world are criminalizing Privacy as well. You have Alexey Kurtsev, who has been sentenced to sixty four months in prison in the Netherlands. Co-founder convicted for the same code in Europe. So this is Tornado Cash. You have Roman Semenov, third co-founder. He's currently at large. So there's a coordinated international assault on privacy. So if they can do this on code, then really nothing is safe. So there's a movement to bring this back. You know, I guess let me actually look through the rest of what I have to say here. I think, Garrett, let me bring on Dan O'Neill to go talk about the next part of this. Dan, are you there? Anyway, we'll wait for Dan to hop on here, but... You know, this is why we're doing the enemies of the state and yet again. Hey, Aaron, how are you doing today? I'm doing well. How are you? Good, good. This seems to be a little backbeat all of a sudden in your. Am I the only one that hears that? I have no idea if you're the only one who hears it. No one else has said anything. OK. Has it been like this the whole time? Now, it just started about a minute and a half ago. Interesting. So... It might be that the heater turned on here. I don't know if you recall. In fact, I've got this, like, ridiculous aircraft carrier sound when the heater kicks on. It's a long story, so it might be that. So I'll put myself on mute when you're talking. We'll see how that fixes things. Well, the one thing I'm thinking of with the Roman storm case is if, uh, if a banker gives out cash to anybody and they go and buy an ax and kill a whole bunch of people, you know, under the terms of how they're going after Roman storm, they should be going after the banker, but they don't, um, the constitution, which is still the law of the land that the, uh, politicians swear an oath to, um, the Fifth Amendment says everything should be clear. It shouldn't be vague. And the fact that he's facing almost forty years for, you know, creating a code that he had nothing to do with, he didn't even hold the funds, is just a form of lawfare and where they're just trying to punish people that, you know, don't want to do you know, what they want. So it's very tyrannical and it's against the Bill of Rights too. It is. I mean, you know, again, I've said many times, I think the Constitution has been dead for a long time. There's nothing about the financial surveillance laws that we have in this country that is in any way constitutional or that makes any sense at all, and none of it was necessary before nineteen seventy and none of it. And it hasn't worked. The bank secrecy laws and. Anti money laundering, your customer stuff catches less than three percent of the illicit activity, yet it costs sixty one billion dollars per year. And so rather than revisit the fact that we have too much financial surveillance and regulation today, we're adding more on top of it. as we have this new technology which makes absolutely no sense but of course this benefits the government and it benefits incumbent players and frankly it benefits people directly tied to the administration unfortunately yeah totally um and uh as far as the other crypto prisoners there's one uh operating on on licensed um what is the term that they use? An unlicensed financial business? Or conspiracy to do that? Unregistered money transmitter. An unlicensed money transmitter business. Now, Ian Freeman, for example, was charged with that, but there actually was nowhere you could actually get a license. So he got... you know, charged with conspiracy to do something where you can't even get a license to do it in the first place. And so he would be the most obvious case of a law fair that I can think of. Roman Storm, same deal. William Hill, from what I understand, same thing. And this is supposed to be the most crypto friendly administration Um, and how come all these guys are being, um, charged, put behind bars and, um, it's pretty, uh, it's pretty bad what's going on right now. It's bad. And I don't, I don't know. I guess I'd be curious to see what the mood, I think the mood is changing. I think, uh, I mean, having attended Liberty Forum this weekend and I will say my, um, my own feed has, has been posted. I I've been saying the same stuff for years and now it's getting, you know, a thousand times more traffic. And so I don't know whether that's the algorithm or the fact that maybe, maybe people are catching onto this. Some of the stuff that I was saying seemed extreme before, but doesn't seem extreme now. And, you know, one thing I didn't mention at the beginning, I was, um, I was recently on the dark horse podcast with Brett Weinstein. and Steve Patterson. And Brett was one of the people that was pushing this Trump strategy. He comes from the left. He's a Democrat. I guess I'd call him a liberal, but maybe a liberal in the philosophical tradition, not necessarily what liberal has become known to mean. And so he ended up heavily supporting Trump. And then he came out. He was just on Tucker Carlson yesterday saying, you know, he's obviously profoundly disappointed in what Trump is doing. And he's come out and he's got a lot of flack for it, too, to the point where I think he's a little bit afraid for his physical well-being. He's come out against this war in Iran. And so people are starting. to I'm not going to mention some of the other names, but there's some people here in New Hampshire that were some of the main activists on the ground supporting Trump. And they have reached out to me and they said, why? I mean, I can't do it anymore because there's only you can only do trust the plan. Trust the plan doesn't fit the evidence. Right. I mean, one of the things Trump ran on was. No wars in the Middle East. I mean, he was explicit about it. I mean, you can find these tweets going back to twenty twelve or whatever, making fun of Obama, making fun of everybody else. Trillions of dollars lost in the Middle East. And it's a waste of money and everything else. He even said this in twenty twenty four. And then he does this thing with Iran. And it turns out the thing with Iran, this isn't even like a situation where we had Colin Powell lying to the UN about Iraq and having yellow cake or whatever it happened to be. We didn't even have any evidence that they were close to nukes. Trump made his decision based on what his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had to say. I'm bringing all this up in this context because Trump has been one hundred and eighty degrees wrong on the war on crypto and on actual war. And at some point we have the midterms coming up here. It looks like he's already lost the House and the prediction markets have now the Democrats at forty seven percent chance of winning the U.S. Senate. This is part of why I'm running. Part of why I'm running is that the seat in New Hampshire could determine which party has control. of the US Senate. And, you know, if Trump is willing to do what he said he was going to do, which is end the war on crypto and free these crypto prisoners and then not pass the Clarity Act, which by the way, is the largest surveillance legislation in the history of this country. And you're not hearing that from anyone else. And then I'd throw on there a third point, which is fires Howard Luknick. If he does those three things, Maybe I won't run. But as it stands right now, he's going to get wiped out and they're going to lose Congress, which, by the way, at this point, as it stands, wouldn't be a bad thing because right now we have technocracy running without any obstacles. We've got real ID backdoor CBDCs. We've got war. We have crypto prisoners, all of it. Like, what's the point? In having complete Republican Party rule, what are the big wins? What are the benefits of this? And I think people are looking at the price of gas. They're looking at the job numbers. They're looking at actual inflation, not not what is reported when the government is actually capable of reporting on such things. People know how much food actually costs. And they're saying, what is this all about? He hasn't made America great again. His whole thing was make America great again, make America safe again, all this other stuff. None of that's happened. And he doesn't even have an excuse like COVID because he brought on the Iran thing himself. It was completely and totally unprovoked. And so now we have all these prisoners. And, you know, we still have prisoners. And this is a good way to introduce the... enemies of the state of it. But as I said in the introduction, I mean, Dan is a great friend of mine and he's the brainchild behind this enemies of the state thing. And I remember when he came to me in twenty twenty four is like, hey, I've got this idea. What do you think about, you know, doing this enemies of the state thing? And this was, you know, right shortly after Roger Veer had been arrested in Spain and everything else. And so I guess it sounds like a pretty good idea. So he put this whole thing together in Washington, D.C., huge party at the Libertarian National Convention. And it just so happens the next day, Ross, you know, Trump comes out and says he's going to commute Ross Ulbrich's sentence. And then, you know, eventually Roger's situation gets, you know, partially resolved. I still think Roger should get a pardon. But I think that this event did a hell of a lot to raise awareness for these prisoners. And now, now he's at it again. And I, you know, I'm fully, fully behind this event as well. And so, you know, I thought I'd bring in Dan to talk about this event, but maybe not only talk about this event, but also from the standpoint of, you know, sadly, because we talk about this all the time, how much bigger this event is, how many more enemies of the state there are from last time. Yeah. Last time we just had Julian Assange as a whistleblower, Edward Snowden. And speaking of Julian Assange, He was a news reporter that he was the one that released the WikiLeaks. And the news reporter is getting charged with the Espionage Act. He pleaded guilty to it just to get out of prison. That's actually a direct violation of the First Amendment. We can probably go down the line with every single one of our prisoners and how all their sentences are a direct violation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. which just goes to show everyone how our government is actually, um, an occupying force. They're not, they don't represent anybody or the people, but, um, we can go to Edward Snowden. He released a lot of things from the NSA, um, explaining to the American people that they're being spied on. They're being tracked. They're, um, you know, a lot of bad things are going on and nothing in this has anything to do with national security. Um, Jonathan Solter, Joshua Solter. He's doing forty years in a max prison in Colorado. He's the one who released Vault Seven in the WikiLeaks. We're hoping to have Gabriel Shipton come and he can talk about that and possibly even get an appearance from Julian. That would be nice. We're working on Snowden being at this event and on a video of some sort. And we have another big names that we can't announce. that have confirmed, but it's going to be really interesting. Some of the people that have stood up against the state in a massive way, and it's going to be an opportunity for people to come there, meet everybody, network, find out how to get involved from all You can also meet Lynn Albrecht. We're going to showcase her organization, MACS, Mothers Against Cruel Sentencing. Ask her, how did she do it for all those years? Going around with a paper petition for a while there and just herself and going everywhere to help her son. And there's going to be a lot of opportunities for people to come to this event. talk to everyone. You want to meet Aaron Day. You want to meet Bonnie Freeman. Mark Edge is going to be the MC. There's an outside chance that some of the prisoners might actually be there, but I can't talk about it. And so we have a lot of things in the works right now, the designing of the event, what's going to happen. We can't announce a bunch of things quite yet, but it's going to be an event that we hope is going to get a lot of attention to a lot of these guys, get the activists going and let's get them out of prison. Let's end this thing all, you know, once and for all. Um, yeah, I mean, it's, it's going to be a great event and I've seen some of the concept ideas for, you know, just the kind of the look and feel is there's going to be a really, uh, interactive environment so people can actually chat and share information and get to know one another you know I think you know from my perspective I started talking about Roger right around this time this was this this first event was was right after Roger was was arrested in Spain and people were not talking about his case. I think a lot of people were like, oh, well, this is, you know, some guy that's outside of the country and it's some tax thing or whatever, he'll just resolve it. And, you know, I wrote my book, I wrote this book, Final Countdown in, and part of it was to educate people about CBDCs, but also to warn people about Biden's executive order and the, at the time coming crackdown on crypto. and um i mean ian hadn't yet been sentenced um there were certainly some others who had been targeted and then you know roger was arrested just three weeks after his book hijacking bitcoin was released and i'm like they're not targeting him for taxes they're targeting him to silence him and they're trying targeting him to have a chilling effect on people who are effective at promoting freedom tools and freedom technology and that's why ian was arrested in my opinion it's very very clear it's obvious uh and and the other crypto prisoners that we have on this list they're all either open source privacy developers these are people that write code to protect our fourth amendment rights or they or they promote the use of Cryptocurrency is a way to stop central bank tyranny. I mean, these are people that are heroic. I mean, I look at Roman Storm and his background. I mean, coming here with five hundred dollars in his pocket and teaching himself how to code and do the whole nine yards. Why would we be punishing somebody like this? It's just backwards. Now, I understood why Biden was doing it. because Biden wanted a CBDC and Biden didn't want these things but Trump claims to want these things and this this is part of the thing we see the war on crypto is over you have to know what does crypto mean right because I would argue stable coins are not crypto a digital token that can be programmed tracked and censored that's backed by Fiat that's not cryptocurrency The whole point of Bitcoin was to separate money and state. When Ian was promoting these things, he was promoting things like Bitcoin, Bitcoin, not bombs, was promoting the idea that if you could use these things, not only Would it make it easier, faster and cheaper for people to be able to just engage in commerce? But you wouldn't be funding all of these wars. Those are all of the people that were targeted. And the thing is, they're still being targeted. So when I see Trump launch a meme, excuse me, he also launched a meme coin, but a stable coin that's going to be used in the technocratic construction, reconstruction of Gaza after they displaced two point three million Palestinians. When I see that Howard Lubnick is going to make money because he manages all of the treasuries back in Tether. So every time you use Tether, you're funding war, funding government debt and Howard Lubnick gets a cut. I'm beginning to think that maybe we need to have a definition and a discussion and a debate about what crypto is, because we're not getting any crypto. We're getting surveillance. People in the administration are getting rich. We're losing our privacy. We're losing our freedom, our economic freedom, and then these prisoners are losing their actual freedom and being thrown in cages. And frankly, it's probably going to be somewhat difficult for us to amplify this. I hope if you're listening to this, you share this. I'm going to be talking about... this event and these prisoners every episode between now and the event, we should probably tell people a little bit about the logistics. I've got the website up here, uh, on the screen, but you want to talk about kind of where it is, when it is, that kind of thing. So it's going to be, uh, Saturday, May, May the twenty-third Grand Rapids, Michigan at the Libertarian National Convention in Grand Rapids. Um, it is, um, I guess the logistics of it, that's pretty much where that is. You could probably go to LNC.com, find more information on hotels or travel or whatever else. The website is going to be expanding. We're going to be adding sections on the prisoners, what they're accused of, and more information on how to get involved. And as far as Roger Ver, I want to go back to that for one second. What do you think the coincidence is that he comes out with a book called Hijacking Bitcoin and then gets arrested and charged with one hundred nine years in jail? Well, I've always thought that there are two elements to why he was arrested. One is the timing of the book. The timing of the book is interesting because. Actually, I think he got shafted twice by two administrations for different reasons. I think that he was arrested under Biden because, OK, hey, this this is Bitcoin Jesus. We're trying to launch a CBDC. We don't want this guy out there talking about. how to use Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies like Zeno or privacy coins or whatever as a way to defeat the CBDC that we're trying to push through. So I think there's an argument to be made that you would want to silence Roger even outside of the scope of hijacking Bitcoin. But then I think that there are some Bitcoin maxis that took advantage of the situation because I've thought about this a lot. I spent a lot of time trying to educate people about the hijacking of Bitcoin. And it occurred to me that it's unlikely that the Trump administration knows about the hijacking of Bitcoin because all of the people that donated money to Trump and that surrounded him and then advised him are people that were promoting the the Bitcoin Maxi position. I don't know how he would have heard of this other information. So interestingly, once he was arrested, you had a different group of people coming in saying, well, you know, and it was disgusting watching Maxi's watching people like Max Kaiser. I'm going to get pissed off if I start to start talking about this. But people that were saying, oh, yeah, he should rot in jail. Well, we were watching these people that were actively wanting Roger to be suppressed, which is part of the reason that I continue to talk about it. I mean, the fact that it's the truth and it needs to get out was that it was also a major reason. But man, the fact that, you know, I remember when they had that Bitcoin convention. In twenty twenty four, Trump was there and Cynthia Loomis is talking about a Bitcoin strategic reserve and RFK is there. And I spent the whole event putting out threads based on the book Hijacking Bitcoin, because I know from traveling around the country that people have never heard about the stuff in hijacking Bitcoin. Now, here's the irony of this. I got blocked by people just for writing a short little review about the book that Roger had retweeted before he went to prison and I got blocked by Bitcoin core developers, people like Adam Back, a whole long, long list. But then I actually started talking about Epstein's involvement three years ago with CBDCs and an overlap with the funding of the Bitcoin developers. And I wrote an article about it. And then the Epstein files came out. And now it turns out that it completely vindicates Roger. And it's even worse than that. And so in a really interesting way, these Epstein files have broken this open. I wrote an article that is called Hijacking Bitcoin. And it's funny to watch how people have responded to it because people, they immediately say, try to say that I'm parroting Roger's position from ten years ago, which they misrepresent having not read the book. But it's not. My whole article on this, my whole position, I came at it from a completely different angle, but it turns out the two stories fit together. So this is why I've been doing interviews with Steve Patterson the co-author of Hijacking Bitcoin. We've done numerous interviews together. We've been on the Shannon Joy Show. We were just on with Brett Weinstein. And we're doing an interview with Catherine Austin Fitz on Friday. And there are some other things that we may be doing in the future on this, because now the genie is out of the bottle so there are a lot of people that like to say oh well the block size war is in the past well you know for ninety nine point ninety nine percent of the people on this planet they've never heard of the block size war so it's not in the past it's information that's completely unknown to most people on this earth but i will tell you a hell of a lot of people that aren't involved in crypto are very interested in understanding what jeffrey epstein's involvement is so i think this is going to break the whole thing open but to answer your original question yeah i i think that timing of the book um and when you look at everything else and the charges and the fact that it's been ten years and everything else and look in a way roger still isn't talking because they they gave him this i read the agreement that they have that's online i mean he really can't say anything he has you know kind of like effectively a gag order for three years that's what they wanted they wanted the silent they didn't want the money i mean look the government has spent what, thirteen billion dollars already in this war in Iran that was supposed to last two days? Do you think that they needed his