Transcription
You are the ultimate troll. Joe Rogan calls this man the ultimate troll: Like the “King of Trolls.” The "King of Trolls," he says, is Michael Malice. That is trolling at its purest. Trolling means intentionally posting things that annoy or provoke others.
Malice isn’t just a troll… He’s written interesting books, like this one about his travel to North Korea. He also has his own podcast titled, “Your Welcome.” Even its title is a troll because of how he spells it. I sat down with Malice for an hour, to talk about his book, president Trump, Malice calling himself an anarchist, not a libertarian, and his rude trolling!
Like when he interviewed Jordan Peterson's daughter: So when Jordan Peterson was having his health issues, I had Mikayla, his daughter, on my show and I said to her -- “Your dad has influenced so many people, so much, that he's got me taking benzos recreationally.” “My god… That is such a horrible joke, Michael!” “Michael, that's horrible!” But I got the laugh outta her so.
Here’s our full interview: “So, you're a troll. What does that mean?” [laughing] “You just go on the internet and you say stupid things and annoy people?” “I hope you can appreciate the meta humor of John Stossel, in his 70s, sitting there and making, in a half-scolding tone, saying, ‘So you're a troll… What is that? You just go on internet and scold people?’”
So, trolling is – the troll motto is – “you're either going to have fun with me or you're going to be fun for me.” And trolling at its best is turning a third party, and exploiting their weaknesses, and making them into an unwitting performer. Trolling is a type of performance art, at its best. It's also used in another sense, which is just being an ass on social media, and that's a sense that I don't subscribe to at all. There's no art to that.
“You're not an ass on social media.” “Oh, I am, but not exclusively.” There's also the other, more fun part. “Before you — And also off social media, just to be clear, it's-- I'm committed to the bit.” [music]
“Michael Malice, has there ever been a person in history that has more support than this fellow Brandon?” “Let's go Brandon!” “It seems like.” “You keep going on his show, and now you're going to do comedy?” “I'm thinking about it.” “Yes.”
On Malice's own podcast, he interviews lots of celebrities. It is the one and only legend, Roseanne Barr. “I have become friends with Roseanne Barr, which is one of the greatest things that ever happened to me, being friends with her.” “And I took a flight with her once.” “We were on a podcast together, and she's just telling me all these stories about, like, power agents, Sue Mengers, like these people who kids don't know nowadays.” “I was just sitting at her feet.” “I'm just like, you know, tell me this.” “And I think that's what makes podcasting so exciting.” “When someone has the scars and they can tell you how they got them.” “And that's certainly been your career.”
“My God.” “I mean, the things you've seen, is ridiculous.” “I mean, you've been around forever.” “And I'm not saying that disrespectfully.” “I'm saying the fact that you're still doing this is a testament to something.” “I have a crew here that helps me make sure what I say is true.” “You can listen to Roseanne Barr, and I bet not all of it's true.” “And --” “Don’t you dare talk about Roseanne Barr like that!” “You take that back!” “Well, no, we don't take it back here.” “And --” “Give me a break!” “Some of the some of the stuff that Rogan's guests believe is not true.” “And he admits that, he says that —” “Oh no, that's, that's a very fair point.”
“A podcast -- the difference between a podcast and a corporate media piece, is a podcast is not purporting to be, everything we're saying is the Holy Scriptures.” But when you watch corporate journalism and the panel, it is regarded as “this is the width of acceptable opinion.” They are there to manipulate their audience. It was, Noam Chomsky, where he said “the best way to control a population is to have strictly limited areas of discussion and vigorous discussion within those limits.”
So, for example, Jimmy Dore made the point about if you watch a CNN panel, he'll say, “should we bomb the s*** out of Syria? Or should we bomb the f***ing s*** out of Syria?” Like that's the range. And you see this over and over where The View is a great example. It's the Karen mothership. And my buddy Kurt Metzger says, “well, it's not called "The Views.” And the range, the person on The View who was the closest thing to a Trump supporter, which is a majority of Americans, Trump supporters, or even let's pretend it was 40%, was someone who denounced him in her father's eulogy, namely Meghan McCain. “The America of John McCain has no need to made great again because America was always great.”
So, if you watch that show, you would think as a deduction, that the range of political opinion is, “I hate Trump with every fiber of my being” to “I hate him so much I'm going to yell about him while I'm eulogizing my dad.” And that is not at all the range of political opinion in the populace. And that is a mechanism how the corporate press controls the general population.
And Rogan schooled me about one of my myths, was that everybody has a short attention span. And I spent my whole career cutting things down. And on 20/20, we only had 40 minutes of airtime, and if Barbara Walters was taking more, I got less. “Shrink it, and I came to believe that was the best thing, and that's why I mostly do five-minute pieces on Stossel TV.” But Rogan’s success just proves me totally wrong.
“Well, I think it's a different paradigm because back then, you had three networks, right? And they're competing for a gigantic audience.” “And unless you're, you know, if you have— lose someone's attention span, they're done.” “Right? So you've got to keep kind of doling out the pellets to it like a rat kind of situation.” “But now with basically infinite places to watch a show, it's a different situation.” “You're not watching Rogan to get the news of the day.” “You're watching Rogan to have an experience.” “And that's something that, you know, ABC, CBS can't really do because they don't have the space for it.”
“I agree with you, and Stossel TV goes out on these different platforms.” “It's wonderful when there used to be just one source -- but I look at my Twitter feed now and there is so much misleading garbage.” “And among some of my friends, they, they're convinced about stuff that's just nonsense.” “Well, they were also convinced that Trump was going to put— let's talk about the nonsense coming from official sources.” “We were told that Trump is going to put transgender people in concentration camps.” “We were told that Trump's going to start a nuclear war if someone hurts his feelings.” “There were so many things we were taught that would happen under the first Trump administration that didn't end up happening.” “There's also lots of things we were taught about the other way.” “We were told that the Obamacare was going to lead to collapse of the health care industry, and we were going to have socialized medicine within a few years.” “That didn't end up happening.” “So there's lots of information that's out there that has to be taken with a grain of salt.” “But somehow, if it's under the rubric of ABC News or Fox News or NBC, it's supposed to be given more weight, or CNN, than other outlets.”
And we saw this when Rogan, who you bring up all the time, he tried ivermectin when Covid was happening, and he said, “look, I know what I'm talking about.” “I went to my doctor and he's got access to great doctors.” “Turns out I got Covid, so, we immediately threw the kitchen sink at it.” “All kinds of meds.” “Monoclonal antibodies, ivermectin, Z-PAC, prednisone, everything.” “They gave me a list of medications.” “Here's what I tried, a few days later, I'm fine.” He just put out the facts like he's like, “I'm one data point, not saying you should do it, this is what worked for me.” The next day, CNN: “Joe Rogan said he took horse paste.” Ivermectin, is something more often used to de-worm horses. As if he went to Petco in disguise, smuggled it in his, you know, trench coat and then just guzzled down his throat. I mean, that's the kind of thing where I always talk about how the corporate press is factual, but not truthful.
Before you became a troll in America, what interests me in particular about you is your take on communism and socialism and central planning. You've looked into more of it than most. “You were born in Russia.” “Yeah, the Soviet Union, right.” Your parents escaped when you were young, but you were always interested?
“I wouldn't say I was always interested, I became particularly interested as an adult in doing political commentary, because I was shocked at how naive Americans are.” American politicians, political figures are about the nature of of evil and totalitarianism. I remember very vividly, Mike Huckabee, when in New York, Michael Bloomberg, Mayor— mayor at the time, was making it illegal to have Big Gulps at 7-Eleven, like too much soda. “And--” “Was banning the big drinks because it's too much sugar.” “Right.” “And Huckabee, who was governor of Arkansas at the time, was like, what, this is like North Korea.”
Here, Huckabee compared threats to speech in America to North Korea: “My gosh, I’m beginning to think that there’s more freedom in North Korea sometimes than there is in the United States!” “Listen, if the worst thing about North Korea is that the sodas are serving-sized? This is a utopia compared to what they have.” “So—” But his point was valid, right? “It was not valid at all.” But he was saying government shouldn't be deciding for people. “Sure.” But the point is, if a government is limited to maintaining portion control, it would still be nothing like North Korea. “They do not have food to --” “They do manage portion control to the sense that your access to food is determined by political consequences.” When people are like, “This is the worst president ever. This government can't get anymore oppressive.” “It's like, we have so much further to go before we're lost as a country.” “And I think it behooves Americans to understand this.” “I read "The Orphan Master's Son."” “Sure.” Which is fiction. “If you read fiction, it's, it's worth it.” “It's compelling and jaw-dropping.” “I'm told that's an accurate portrayal -- because it's unbelievable.” “Yeah.” “It's, it's impossible to describe.” “And this is one of the reasons I went to visit North Korea because I'm like, I want to see what my family went through under the USSR back in the day.” “And it's basically in many ways a time capsule of Stalinism.”
Why do Americans need to know more about this? “I don’t know that Americans need to know more, but I think if people want to be educated about what happens when government runs amuck, they can do one of two ways.” “They can either read Atlas Shrugged, which is obviously a novel, or they can say, okay, what does this mean in practice?” One of the things that drives me crazy, and I suspect drives you crazy as well, is if people say, “well, communism works in theory.” “What does that expression even mean?” “If I tell you, 'John, hey, I've got this car that can fly, it works in theory.'” Everything works in theory, reality is how you determine how something works or not. And we've seen over and over what happens when governments become totalitarian, dictatorial. And we're not taught about it here in the States. And I think one of the reasons we're not taught about it, to the extent we should be, is because so much of corporate journalism for decades had been covering it up, or even valorizing it.
Why? “Because they had this vision.” Because in these countries, these intellectuals, these journalists and other similar types, they're high status. They're the ones who are making decisions. You know, Ayn Rand said “anyone who wants more power for the state is or wants to be the state?” These -- This is a Soviet term, these useful idiots, you know, they were championed by the Soviet Union. They're regarded as heroes because they were doing the dirty work of people like Stalin and Lenin, and they were more than happy to apologize and praise every genocide that came their way. And yet, if you live in North Korea, they succeed. “They believe that the leader is godlike.” That's true, that North Korea is an example and they've outlasted everybody else.
One of the reasons I wrote my book Dear Reader, and why I went to North Korea, is people have this idea, and I think it's fading away, especially older people that like, “oh, you know, these evil people are stupid or they're crazy – you don't last that long unless you're doing something right.” So there is absolutely a method to the North Korean madness, as there was a method to the Soviet madness. You see this even nowadays when people are like, “Oh my God, you know -- the Republicans or the Democrats -- they're so dumb.” “It's like, what seems dumb to you must be serving some purpose that is not at all apparent at first sight.” The North Koreans spread leaflets about how wonderful Dear Leader is, and it looks dumb to us.
“Yeah, the things that they are taught to believe are, you know, absolutely ridiculous.” But the costs of not believing or acting as if you don't believe are astronomical.
And can you give some examples from your work about what you found in North Korea? “Sure.” “I'll tell you a story as I heard it through a refugee.” So they have these kind of, Aesop's fables, like we would have, but they're all about the dear leader Kim Jong Il, the great leader Kim Il Sung, who's the founder of North Korea. “He makes it rain, he makes the sun shine.” This is even better, hold on. So, we know one plus one is two. And when the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il was in kindergarten, he raised his hand and he goes, “teacher, that's not true.” She's like, “what do you mean?” And he goes, “well, if I have one drop of water and another drop of water, I don’t have two drops, I have one big drop.” And the teacher is like, “wow, what a genius.” And I met a refugee and she learned this in kindergarten and she thought to herself at the time, “this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard.” But she knew, even at that age, to keep her damn mouth shut. Because if she starts questioning this, it's going to have massive consequences for her and her family. So this is the kind of things that they're taught that are absurd.
Here’s another example. If you read the propaganda, it's very monotonous because the— and the propaganda is what I use as the basis of my book, Dear Reader. It's based on the assumption that everyone in North Korea is mentally handicapped, because here's how it works. So, there's a bottle factory, the machine's not working, no one knows what to do. The Dear Leader shows up, fixes the machine, everyone applauds, and he goes to the next chapter. “Next chapter?” There's a problem. The shoe factory. Right? For this story to be true, none of these people working in this factory for decades understand how to fix a machine they use every single day. Only he can and you can understand if this were factual, then yeah, you really need this guy because otherwise all industries are going to collapse overnight. And one of the things they brag about is that unlike other countries, even these so-called communist countries, their leaders have field guidance. Rather than sitting in an office, they go out into the field and they kind of help with the problems in every industry. And all their newspapers, you know, North Korea, it's very insular. You don't learn about the outside world. The newspapers are like, “here's a farm and Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il came in.” “He told them how to make the wheat better.” So when we were given, on the plane, we were given old newspapers, but they're interchangeable. Like last Thursday's newspapers, is gonna be the same as next Thursday's. It's the same story over and over. They have all these brochures wherever you go. So, they tell you that the South Koreans and the US imperialists have built an invisible wall to divide the Koreas, that you can only, it's flush basically with the mountainside, that you can only see it through the north. And they put those like, you know, those like on the Empire state building, those stereoscopic goggles, whatever they are? So you can look at it, you're like, “what am I looking at?” “Is this a road, whatever?” But this is the pamphlet of the invisible wall that divides supposedly the two Koreas.
How did you get there? “I thought people aren't allowed in North Korea.” “You've never been?” “It's the new Milan.” No, so it-- my friend Ed. “Dumb, dumb, dumb Ed.” I saw his picture on Facebook in front of a North Korean tank in Pyongyang capital city. “I'm like, what's going on?” And of course, he met someone at Burning Man who does these tours. So, it was legal for quite some time because they wanted Western money, because North Korean currency is worthless. You know, externally. So, it was legal to go. It only became illegal after Otto Warmbier, who I think shared the same room I did in the same hotel, you know, left North Korea in a persistent vegetative state. But it's not legal now. Now, after that, travel to North Korea became illegal for Americans. And they shut down extensively during Covid and only recently opened up at all.
But now we have the internet. I naively assumed, once information is in the clouds, that people everywhere could get some and see the truth. “Right.” So North Korea might be the only country where you don't have internet access. So, they have an intranet they've been developing, but foreign access to foreign information is death penalty stuff. And the great leader, Kim Il Sung said “class enemies must be exterminated three generations,” which means if someone in your family commits a crime, three generations are punished. And you're not often told who did the crime or what, you're just rounded up or punished. “Yeah.” “And if you're living in the West,” Yeah, there's this book that you're quoting from. It's the story of— a young man's memoir, set in his escape from South Korea. “Pyongyang, Korea, 1989.” By the way, they always refer to themselves as Korea, And north is lowercase n south is capital, is lowercase s because Korea's won and the south is not a different country, but a region under the occupation of the US imperialists. So, according to their mythology, Korea is the only racially pure country on Earth and the only, the first country on Earth. “They really believe that the capitalists are changing their clothes 30 times a day?”
Thankfully, so, here's what's fascinating. Information— as information has gotten easier and easier to access, I see behind me, you have those encyclopedia, right? Now we have Wikipedia. Anyone at any time, just get on the phone, you can look up anything, right? And that's instead of having to pick up a book, fully leaf through it, try to find something. The easier it is for information to flow, the harder it is to censor that information. We don't have footage from the 1930s of what happened in Ukraine. Because cameras weren't ubiquitous. Now, try to hide something where everyone has their camera, we saw this during Covid, when the reporters were being dishonest, average people with their videos, or their cameras just put it up on social media instantly, before it even hit the newscast that night. So, as a result of this, thumb drives and other bits of information were smuggled into North Korea. So, there's a far greater understanding of what's going on in the rest of the world, and in fact, they've had to change the propaganda accordingly. They used to say that the whole world envies us, that all these other countries are starving, and now they acknowledge, “okay, we're poor but we're poor together, and we're struggling together to make a more prosperous future.” So they've had to adjust.
“Your recent book is The White Pill.” “Yes.” “Taking off on The Matrix, I assume, it being red pilled.” “Sort of.” So, the red pill and blue pill are from The Matrix. [music] “You take the blue pill.” “The story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.” “You take the red pill.” “You stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” After that, there became the black pill, which is like, it's a wrap. Like either America or the West is doomed, and the white pill is a symbol of hope.
“What does white pill mean?” Well, the book is about the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. So one of the things that was getting to me is how many people, especially young people, in recent years, were getting discouraged about the future of this country, the future of civilization in general, and they thought, “we're done.” Like even if we have these small stopgap victories in the long range, it's going to -- it's over. And it drove me crazy because I'm like, people far worse position than us won a far greater victory in our lifetime. And no one talks about it. And the story of— The fall of the Soviet Union. The fall of Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, and, you know, of other countries.
That came with it, East Germany, so on and so forth. And I think it's such an important story because, as you well know, this was the foreign policy issue for decades. Everything was read through the filter of the Cold War, without exception. Which is better, capitalism or communism? Everything--and in school I was taught, and I'm sure you were taught too, here are the plusses and minuses of capitalism, here are the plusses and minuses of communism; we were taught, oh, under communism there's nothing, nothing is wasteful. It was like, yeah, if you're starving, you're not going to waste that scrap of food. So yeah, that's factual but not truthful.
So, first of all, the story is important because it shows how bad things can really get. So, there are people who are whining about, like, I can't believe what we're going through. A lot of people went through a lot worse, and not that long ago. But they also won. And that's the key part, is that the enemy class is not composed of impressive people. We are not up against Gods. We're not up against, you know, supernatural beings. If anything, we're up against people who are far closer to snakes. And yes, snakes are dangerous, but they don't run the world and nor should they.
Part of The White Pill is, you're saying, we can win. Don't be depressed. Tyranny can be beaten. And has been beaten. That's the point. This isn't some Pollyanna, everything's going to be okay. This has happened quite recently. I'm sure you remember because you were old enough to remember. Because I was a--kind of a kid, I didn't realize the significance when that Berlin Wall fell. It was a huge, momentous moment. People don't even realize how insane this was. That for 40 years, oh no, what was it, 28 years, you had a city surrounded by concrete, and it was a demented prison where the ones on the inside were the ones who were free, and that people were risking their lives and often lost their lives trying to climb that barrier, and escape into freedom. And—Into Berlin, which was surrounded by the wall. Yeah. I had thought for a long time that it's just like a wall halfway dividing a city into two, right? It was surrounding it. And it's just the kind of thing where if you told someone about this nowadays who hadn't heard of it, they wouldn't find it believable. It's just insane. But this was what people had to live with for decades.
What I find unbelievable is that watching the wall go down was, oh my God, finally people have wised up to the evil of central planning and communism and socialism. And free enterprise will, has won, and prosperity will rule. And yet, it doesn't. And the academically smart college students oppose it and want to go back to some form of socialism. Why? Well, I don't think people are capable of wising up in general. I don't think they have the capacity. These academically smart college students, well, one of the points I've made for a very long time, and to quote Ayn Rand, the universities are the real villains in this picture. Like, that you go to school as a beautiful young coed, and then you leave four years later as a swamp walrus who can’t have a conversation with their parents. So, the universities are clearly the real enemies in the picture.
And how does this happen? I mean, they just want to advance themselves like everybody else. Who? Who, who's they? The professors and the administrators. How did it get so crazy? I don't think they're crazy at all. I think they're depraved. And because professors are, as a rule, completely mediocre people who cannot compete in the marketplace of ideas--But, how are they mediocre? They competed against everybody else in their high school, and they got into Yale. I'll tell you exactly how. Because if—a Yale degree is something that's irreplaceable, even today. If I have Yale on my diploma—my life is set. That's the ultimate in-privilege, right? Which is why these endowments need to be seized and distributed as reparations. But if I'm an academic, that means I can't be a podcast host, I'd be making more money. There's some who are authors, so those are kind of crossed off the list. But these are people who are humorless, who are not particularly, who are marginally intelligent, who specialize in one specific thing that's of very little value, and whose only sense of status and power is lording it over other people. They are horrible by every metric, even worse than corporate journalists, because at least corporate journalists have to be able to have a decent conversation, and be interesting.
So, the fact that people are understanding that this is where the poisoning starts, and I'm very hopeful that Trump is taking the fight to them, that bodes very well for the future of America. They are really the source of everything wrong. Trump is taking the fight to them and saying things like: When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics. He's wrong in that because they've been dominated by Marxists for like 100 years. So, this idea that this is a recent phenomenon and you know this perfectly well, I mean, you're telling me, like in the 1940s, like, was it 80 years ago that Marxists weren't heavily involved in the universities? Woodrow Wilson's mentor, you know, it was his whole, he invented the American Economic Association specifically to fight this idea of liberalism in economics, and to introduce the idea of government interventionism. So this has been going on for over a hundred years. But is it the president's job to get people fired? Is that democracy? Oh, I'm not a fan of democracy, but I don't think it's the president's job, and I don't want them fired, I want them fired out of a cannon. Why are you against democracy? Oh, because I think as ridiculous as it is for someone to be born into a fancy family aristocracy, and they're going to have a say over my life, that someone is physically proximate to me, that their opinion has to matter about how I live my life? That makes no sense. And it's the kind of idea that we only consider as a hypothesis, because we've been trained to believe it since kids. Since we were kids. I'm a libertarian, you say you're not a libertarian, you're an anarchist. Right.
So, I would think an anarchist wouldn't want the president mucking around with colleges. I don't have a problem. I don't believe in the police, right? I don't have a problem if a policeman kills a murderer, right? That's not how I would want things to be adjudicated. But I'll take whatever wins I could get. And I'm sorry, you don't believe in the police? Correct, I believe in, I don't believe in government monopoly of security. I think it causes inefficiencies, it causes no responsibility and no, and anything like that. We should arm and protect ourselves. And have private security, because then you'd have accountability. Nowadays, if a policeman does something wrong, and we saw this during Covid where they were, the rioting, the cops are like, yeah, we're just not going to do our job. So good luck. I mean, imagine any private organization saying we're not going to provide security cause things are getting tough. They'd be out of business overnight. We need more people like Kyle Rittenhouse who got maced by the police by the way, people don’t realize that he was assaulted by four people, the fourth one was the cop who had no consequences for this that night. Anyway, back to your point about Trump. I agree with you. I don't want to—It's not the president's job–the President shouldn’t have a job at all. But if a cop, if a cop shoots a murderer, I don't have a problem with that. So I'm, if someone who's bad kind of ruins the lives of people who are infinitely worse, I'll kind of bite my tongue.
Break it down, the difference between libertarianism and anarchy. Anarchism is libertarianism with principles. I would say libertarians believe there should be some government, and we have principles. And the principles are, shouldn't hurt other people, a government is useful to keep the peace. I don't want a private army. I would be a little nervous if they were fully in charge, and we need some government environmental rules. You disagree with all of that? I disagree with all of that. And I'll tell you why it doesn't make any sense. Because if you had a government monopoly on production of food as they had in the Soviet Union, is that going to mean more food or less food? It'll mean less food. But that's missing the point. No, no, no, you're missing the point because security is a service like anything else. So you understand, I had you on my show, and I did my best John Stossel impression: Okay, I'm going to ask you a question in my best John Stossel style, are you ready? You call yourself a libertarian. You say the free market can provide better than the government on most things. Yes! Books? Books. Let me think. The free market...Yeah! Was pretty good. And I said, should the government be producing books? And you go, no. I said, well, should the government be producing helicopters? And you're like, no. And I'm like, well maybe we don't need government at all. Point being, when you have something as important as security or anything, food, education, to have it at the purview of a monopoly, let alone a government monopoly, makes no sense. People understand in every other context, including you, when you have a monopoly, it is expensive, you have shortages, and you don't have accountability. But somehow when it comes to security, you're okay with this, and then you live in New York and wonder why it ends up being the way it is. Well, I'm not saying it's efficient, I’m just saying it's better if government does it. How about pollution? My smoke goes to other people's lungs. Under anarchy, there's no incentive that would deter that. Of course that's an aggression. That's, of course you have an incentive. You are violating my space. So that would be adjudicated under private arbitration. Which would be faster and more efficient.
But let's talk about pollution because as you talk about all the time and as you understand perfectly, despite the propaganda, the pollution is the problem of places like China. Under places where you are not producing wealth, you have to drain every bit of resource. And where human life doesn't matter, you're going to drain every bit of resource that you can. And if it costs you people getting cancer and dying, you don't care because no one can do anything about it. So, the pollution is a complete red herring because it is by far the fault of poor countries and dictatorial countries as opposed to free markets, because under free markets, people are more invested and have more of a space to say something, to clean up the environment. If I let my car emit all kinds of smoke, I could save money not having that fixed. But the point being, the pressure would be on the car manufacturer to produce a car that isn't capable of doing that. And you have this happen nowadays. If you go to Whole Foods, they'll have the little button on the product that says this is ethically sourced. So it's not really going to be up to John Stossel, and there would be some John Stossel’s out there, who make those polluting cars or they don't really care. But the point is, all the pressures on cars and all these other mechanisms are far more a function of people getting informed and involved than it is the function of government laws. And you're not going to have government laws to begin with, those people are informed. They're always a consequence. But the air and water were getting filthy before we had these government pollution control laws. And how’d they get cleaned up? Through government saying—They got cleaned up because you had organizations that are saying pollution is bad, killing species and not having them recover is bad. And overwhelmingly people came around like this is true. And these companies did something about it. The government laws came as a consequence. From public pressure, not from laws? From public, correct. We agree to disagree, on that. We libertarians say vote with your feet. And you have, you used to live here in New York City. Sure. Now you're in Austin, Texas, along with all the cool people. Oh, yeah, all of them? Well you're here. So not all cool people. Joe Rogan, Elon Musk. Lex Friedman, Kurt Metzger. Yeah.
Talk about that. You've been a New Yorker for a very long time, right? You were here in the 70s and 80s? So I think, a lot of times cities punch above their weight culturally, when you have this cross-pollination. You had this in Paris in the 20s. You had this in New York, late 70s, early 80s. And now I think we're seeing it a bit in Austin because Austin is becoming a big Venn diagram. You have the biohackers, you've got the podcasters, you've got the comics, you've got the cold plunge crushing it white people stuff, but everyone talks, the thing is, when you go to a party, you never know who you're going to talk to, it's gonna be someone interesting. And New York used to be like that. Brooklyn used to be like that and they destroyed it. And it's something I loved about New York and remember very vividly. And something that's very exciting to see happening now, in the great state of Texas.
Back in time, around World War 2, you write about FDR as vice president, comparing Siberia to America's Wild West. Yeah, that was his quote, that basically his vision was that Siberia is a new frontier for the Soviets, in the same way that the West had been a frontier as America moved westwards from the eastern seaboard, and there are no two countries more alike on Earth than the United States and the Soviet Union, this is the vice president at the time. What he didn't point out is the reason so many people were moving to Siberia, wasn't because there's gold in them thar’ hills, though there was gold in them thar’ hills. These were gulags. These are concentration camps. They were forced to go. It was a prison. Gulags were nightmarish prisons. It was a gigantic Gulag archipelago, Solzhenitsyn wrote in his books. So, yeah. He was the quintessential example of a useful idiot. And he came back just raving about it. And thankfully, many years later, he came to realize, in his words, that the Soviet system is evil and beyond redemption. But that would have been the end of, what he said, it would have been the last year of his second term in office had he been president.
I understand why intellectuals say, this works in theory. We want to believe that good people can get together and just work it out in a commune -- it's like a family, but no commune anywhere has survived, they—Lots of people start them, these utopian societies, they all die out except for one. Oneida. Yeah, they're still around. They make they make cutlery and stuff. And because they sell this stuff, they've survived. But I don't think there's still a kind of this communist utopia, you know, a little commune. I think they're just basically a company. I'm not sure. So, they all die out. But we want to believe this. It's natural. It's warm and friendly. Who's we? That's commie talk. People, it's just--I don't want to believe it. I don't want to believe that I'm going to get together with my neighbors, and we're all going to collectively make decisions about my life, at all. It's selfish to say money should be the decider. The thing that's interesting is something has to be the decider. Like, an example people often use is, "How can you put a price on a human life?" Well, you don't have a choice, right? It happens all the time. If there's a wrongful death suit, if, God forbid, you run over someone's kid--We do it all the time. The jury has to sit down and be like, well, they can't say unlimited. Something has to be on that check. And it's a very tragic situation, very difficult one. But this happens on a daily basis. So, something, when you're dealing with things like exchange and you have something that you want and I have something that I want, maybe you want some of my stuff, I want some of your stuff. The only way to have this adjudicated peacefully is through some unit of measurement. And that's what money does.
You write that the New York Times reporter was covering up starvation. That's right. There, not only was the Holodomor, which happened in the early 30s in Ukraine, this was a, millions of people were starved to death as Stalin tried to collectivize the farms. The New York Times explicitly, constantly said, there's no famine here. The people are just merely tightening their belts. Well, people tighten their belts when they're either exercising or they don't have food. It's not a fashionable thing in this context. And when Gareth Jones, who was one of two people who didn't take the Soviet government's word at their face value, and did some investigative reporting on his own and revealed what was happening in these villages that were starving--The Soviet Union is not the workers’ paradise that was promised. No one's coming to help us. Walter Durante, from The New York Times, made it a point to denounce him as a liar and a fraud, and the entire Moscow press corps joined in on this kind of chorus and depravity. He said, well, they're hungry, but they're not starving. Later he said, you know what? A good reporter tries to earn his salt and sometimes we get it wrong. Well, this is kind of a--when you're talking about millions of people, including children, starving to death. This isn't simply like, oh, I think Hillary's going to win, it was actually Trump. This has massive consequences that resonate to this day. And again, why would he do that? I mean, it's--I assume he doesn't want people to starve. I think he doesn't care.
So, let's talk about this guy. This is Walter Durante specifically, he got a Pulitzer because he had interviewed Stalin, which is a major accomplishment. At the time, Stalin was pretty reclusive. So think about it. You are, you could either be--these are your people. I mean, you could either be a regular reporter at the time or you could be the Soviet Union, 1917, what became the Soviet Union is formed, you have the Russian Revolution, it's very new country. There's been nothing like it on the face of the earth before. Everyone's interested. Are they going to solve the problems of capitalism? So, there were a lot of journalists who got there to kind of make their mark, you know, earn their credentials. And he was the head of the press corps. He was the dean. So, when you're the biggest guy, in the most interesting country on Earth, that’s status. That means a lot to people. And when that's the most important thing to you, everything else can fall by the wayside. I think people in America are naive about the levels of malevolence and depravity that corporate journalists are capable of. Because they see them on TV, they seem nice and amiable. Sometimes maybe they get it wrong. Maybe they're a little left of center. It's so much worse than that. And that's something I talk about constantly in my work. It's so much worse, how? Because I --And why do you keep calling it corporate media? Because I think--why I don't want to make it a partisan thing or a right versus left thing is, historically, leftists have been very good at understanding that corporations are not our friends, right? They've been very critical and skeptical, if a corporation tells you something in a press release, it's going to be self-serving. And people understand this in other contexts. So, when you put it as corporate journalism or refer to the corporate press, it helps people in a nonpartisan, non right-left kind of way to understand, okay, subconsciously they realize corporations are self-serving and these are not entities to be taken at face value. And I think that does a lot of the job in terms of arguing okay, who are these people, who are they working for? Aren't we corporate journalists? I'm self-serving. Yeah, but what corporation do you work for? Myself. Right, but you're not corporate. Now when you're at ABC, that would have been a different story. I think the fact that across all political affiliations, there is an enormous increase of contempt and skepticism towards corporate journalism that is very healthy. Because the most important thing for people to be free is information and truth. And you can't have that if you have these gatekeepers, you know, blocking access to facts and information and trying to control population in a malevolent way. So the fact that there is, anyone can go online and research anything for themselves is something that was mocked, bizarrely, during Covid, is a very healthy sign. And here's the thing in terms of trust, there's enormous asymmetry, if I tell you 100 truths, but one lie, you will regard me as a liar. So all it takes is realizing at one point, oh, it's not these people have a bias. They have an agenda. And once that switch goes up in someone's head, it's very hard to bring them back. So I think this, and it's very American. From the beginning to have skepticism of authority and to question those people who are in power. One of the other reasons I'm very hopeful, and I'm
Sure you share my concerns is if you look at what's going on in Canada and in England and Germany, where people are getting arrested for tweets or Facebook posts. This is something that Tim Walz and Hillary Clinton were talking about explicitly. There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation.
Hillary Clinton was talking about it in 2016, how we got to crack down on-- She had heard the term fake news and when Hillary Clinton is deciding what news is fake and what isn't, that's very dangerous for a lot of people. So the fact that, you know, that's been kind of nipped in the bud with this last election, gives me a little bit of hope. I'm not at all putting faith that Trump is going to be some great arbiter of truth, but anything that stops, you know, when Biden wanted to have this kind of "Ministry of Truth" deciding, you know, what is factual, what isn't. That's a very scary proposition for any person to have.
When the government decides for itself what's true and what isn't. It's ugly. It's dividing us. But I think I share your optimism that eventually people will learn who makes sense and who's full of crap. And also, it's very healthy to be skeptical of everything you see on your screen.
For a long time, we were taught, okay, Walter Cronkite is a great example. You could trust this guy. The idea that he's this kind of radical far leftist, even to this day, people regard as a joke. But that was the truth of the matter.
Are you excited about Trump? I'm excited about Elon far more than I'm excited about Trump. I don't think Trump, sorry to all the Republicans out there. There had been no move on the Trump administration, the first Trump administration, to reduce the size of government at all. He had Congress for the first two years, Republican Congress. The budgets weren't shrinking government and it was increasing spending, so-- By a lot! Later, the Democrats took over. They're going to blame Democrats. For two years, nothing. So I'm not at all-- Trump is hardly some minarchist. Let's get that straight.
What I'm excited about is bringing someone like Elon, who has experience with this, and I trust his judgment far more than I trust Trump's. And you think he can shrink the state? No. But I'm hopeful that things are going to move in a better direction. The White Pill is about hope, not optimism. And I think I'm hopeful that the just the tenor of the conversation will change. The fact the discussion would be like, instead of what new government program do we need? Instead of what government program can we cut. That is where I want the conversation to be. And I suspect you want that conversation to be there as well.
I do! So, the state just can't be shrunk. It's too tough, but we can slow its growth. No, it can be shrunk. But I don't think there's any, at all, sense in Washington or in the population that that's something that's desirable. People love the-- it's just like with voting, right? They hate politicians, but they love their personal congressman? This is that kind of paradox in voting. People want government to be smaller, except for this program, except for this one, except for that one. So, they want it theoretically, but not in reality. Because if they really wanted it, more politicians would be campaigning on it. You're not even — Republicans, some of them campaigned on, “I'm going to reduce the size of government,” but they never say what. And back in the Tea Party days they did. These days I don't hear them ever. So I have again, this is why I'm an anarchist. I don't believe in democracy.
I have very little hope that there is a strong appetite in Washington for this to happen. I'm hopeful Elon’s going to move the conversation, but he still has to get his stuff through Congress. And every program in Washington, as you know perfectly well, as people watching this now perfectly well, has some senator or congressmen, who will defend that to the death.
Now, my only hope, here's a way to hope. Maybe Trump, who's very petty, will be vindictive and will be closing down like bases in the home states of politicians he doesn't like. I'll take what I can get, right? So, if he does it for the wrong reason, I don't care. And the Department of Education, if that's his first target, as he's been saying, the campaign, that's something I'm very excited about, because what's being done to kids and the breaking of their minds for over a century in this country is unconscionable. So if that is, abolished, the Department of Education, that is a massively important step forward, rescuing the kids from the state.
Thank you, Michael Malice. You are welcome. [swoosh] And if you liked this video, you are welcome to share it, and hit like and subscribe button below. [music]