Transcription
So, how exactly has this brand new, but already incredibly widespread phenomenon, flock cameras, license plate readers in virtually every city in the United States, what has it done to crime? Well, it has not eliminated it. Despite what they may tell you.
So, one of the cities that has the most license plate readers in the United States is Houston, Texas. Harris County, Texas, which is a huge place, but 4.7 million people in Harris County, Texas. It's about the size of Oman or New Zealand. It's a lot of people. And it also has a famously high murder rate. Lots of different kinds of crimes, but murder is the most straightforward because almost all murders are accounted for cuz there's a body and a missing person sometimes. So, murders go reported. So, we know pretty much precisely how many murders a city has. Harris County, Texas has over 3,000 license plate readers in it, in the county. So, you would think, think about 3,700 actually. So, you would think with 3,700 license plate readers all over the city, when you look at a map of where they are in Harris County, I mean, there's nowhere you can go where you're not being watched. You would think it would be the safest place in the United States, but weirdly Harris County, Texas had over 500 murders in 2025. The murder, that aggregate number of murders, the total murders in Harris County, Texas has risen dramatically over the past 10 years. Even as surveillance has become so intense, there is literally no place to hide.
Now, how does that work exactly? How is it that we increase the surveillance past what 1984 describes, and we still have 500 murders in one US county? Hard to know how that happened, but one conclusion we can draw confidently is that the point of the license plate readers and the facial recognition software which are integrated probably not to keep you safe. So, if you're looking for a shortcut to decode everything that you're hearing about almost anything discount the part where they say it's good for you. Because that is not a relevant component to the formula. Should we do this? Well, let's see. Does it save us money? Does it increase profit? Is it good for us? Those are the three main criteria. What it does to you and your family is kind of not on the list. It's not a variable in that equation.
So, it is clear, in fact, it's proven that if you turn a city into a panopticon, you still have, well, in the case of Harris County, Texas, hundreds of people getting murdered but you have no more privacy. Which is to say you have no more intimacy, which is to say you have no more freedom. Because privacy is a prerequisite for freedom. You cannot be free unless you can have independent thoughts and privacy. Independent thoughts are impossible without privacy. Which is why when the US military wants to train its pilots on what life in a prison camp must be like very often it puts them in a glass box naked in the center of the faux prison camp. That is a form of torture because you are stripped entirely of privacy. There is nowhere to hide. Everyone can see you at every moment. And what does that do to people? Well, it tends to drive them insane. And yet the US government, state, federal, and local has now constructed exactly that. A glass box at the center of a prison camp and we all reside in it.
So, what do you do about that, exactly? Do you go to your city council meeting and complain? That's been tried and if you're interested, go online. You can see video after video of concerned and very kind of forthright and reasonable citizens asking their city council members like, why are we doing this? Why am I paying for this? And what about my fourth amendment right that prevents search unreasonable search and seizure without a warrant by the government? And in every single case we could find, they're just blown off like some annoying crank. Oh, shut up. Safety. Safety. Eliminate cigarette smoking and we'll live forever. It's not like the life expectancy is going to go down if we do that. Oh, but it did. So, the point is license plate readers are safe and effective. And if you don't believe that, you're obviously anti-science. Shut up, science denier. What are you for the drug cartels? Oh, no, that would be the government. They're in business with the drug cartels. But normal people cannot get a hearing on this question.
Congress has made no effort to ban it or even regulate it to protect, say, images of you or your conversation with your wife and/or girlfriend or anyone else from being sent anywhere. There's no law preventing other people from stealing your conversations and your image in the most intimate moments of your life, like in your car and sending it to anybody or selling it to anybody. Now, some of these companies like Flock claim they don't. Okay. Hope that's true. Is it? We don't know. And how would we know? So, it's not an endorsement of vigilante justice or vandalism, of course, which we are not, for the record, endorsing. But is it out of the realm of possibility that if you set up a system like the one just described that some people will say, I've got no option but to take these cameras down myself?
Well, in fact, that's exactly what a lot of people will conclude, including this man. Watch. >> Do you have plans to continue to take down these Flock cameras? >> Absolutely. Well, absolutely. They are clear and present threat to public safety. >> 44-year-old Javon Martinez is facing larceny, property damage, and tampering with evidence charges after police say he took he destroyed three flock cameras costing Rio Rancho thousands of dollars in damage. >> You know, you called me, but I am here. I'm I'm right here. I stood up. I walked up there. She wanted my name, but I have a right to not bear testimony against myself. Giving my name constitutes testimony. And so, I just chose to remain silent. >> Oh, guy in American flag shirt quoting the Constitution. He must be a dangerous radical. Better kill that guy. He knows his rights. That's not acceptable.
So, there are a lot of people like that. And if you go on the internet, at least as if yesterday, and this may change in the age of AI, who knows, but as of very recently, there are dozens, maybe hundreds of similar videos of people destroying license plate readers, cutting down the poles, running into them in their cars, spray painting them. There are how-to videos on how to disable them with high-powered lasers you can buy on amazon.com, which apparently fry their circuits. We're not endorsing that, of course. But they're videos, in other words, of people who don't feel they have any other recourse whatsoever making one last-ditch attempt to preserve the one thing that makes them free in this or any other country, their birthright, by the way, and that's called privacy. They don't have it. They'd like it back. They think the Constitution guarantees it to them. Their lawmakers don't care. Their leaders don't care. Their police departments don't care. They don't think it's to make them safer. They understand that it's to strip them of their most basic humanity, which it is. And so, they're doing the only thing they can imagine doing, the only thing the powerless really can do in a situation like this, and they're taking matters into their own hands. And some of them are being punished for it.
So, you don't have to endorse vandalism, of course, and we're not to understand the impulse behind it. And if that guy is any measure of who's doing it, and judging by the videos we saw, he definitely is a measure of exactly who's doing it, it's not the malcontents. It's not drug-addicted kids knocking down Flock cameras for fun. It's sober, decent, patriotic Americans who believe the promises of their country. They're mad, not because they're trying to get something from Flock, but because they want to be left alone by Flock. Because Flock was not part of the country they signed up for. No one asked their permission to steal their images and to spy on their conversations, to read their license plates. So, any person with any capacity for reasoning and with any empathy for other human beings may not endorse that behavior, but can certainly understand it. And enlightened people might work to some kind of compromise. Maybe there are ways we can use technology to lower crime and make it safer for your grandmother to go to the grocery store. That would be good. But maybe we can do that without eliminating your humanity by taking away your privacy. But that's not, of course, the posture of the billionaires who run Flock. Safety. Safety.
>> Eating right's pretty important, but it's hard if you live here. About half of the American diet is ultra-processed foods, and that hurts you. Fake food harms your body, your mind, and especially your liver. So, people think that feeling sluggish and foggy and bloated is just what it is to be older, but that's not true. Eating crap makes you feel that way. Well, our friends at Dose have a solution. It's called Dose for your liver. This doctor-approved, [music] plant-based liver supplement is clinically proven to promote liver function and lower liver enzyme levels. That means you're less bloated, less tired, you feel more like yourself. All you need to do is take a daily 2 oz shot, tastes like orange juice, an easy shot of liquid, it's not the vax. People we know use Dose for liver and they have seen rapid results in their blood work and they feel much, much better. The difference is very obvious. Lots of brands claim to support liver health, but do so before their products have gone through testing. This has been tested. Everything checks all the boxes. Visit dosedaily.co/tucker. Use the code Tucker for 35% off. That's dosedaily.co/tucker. Code Tucker, 35% off. You're going to love it. Thanks for watching our YouTube channel. We hope you'll subscribe to it. And by the way, you can hit the little bell on there and get notifications every time we produce a video. We hope you'll do that, also.