Ep 92 | Can Frustrated Conservatives Learn from the Tea Party? | Matt Kibbe | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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The last time we had today's guest on the Glenbeck podcast was April of 2019 and the world was a vastly different place.

The main thing you need to know going into this podcast is that today, the day we're recording this, is January 7th, 2021.

This is the day after the protesters stormed Congress.

Today's guest had one of the best responses to the chaos that took place yesterday.

He tweeted a quote from Martin Luther King: The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.

Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.

The guy who quoted Martin Luther King yesterday, Matt Kibbe of Kibbe on Liberty, right here on Blaze TV,

welcome, Matt Kibbe, to the Glenbeck podcast.

Matt, I feel

as though you and I have been here before

and

there needs to be a new path forward

to be able to save the Republic and save freedom.

Give me your first, your thoughts on what happened at the Capitol.

Yeah,

watching what went down at the Capitol yesterday

forced me to go back and think about a lot of the things that we did together as we were participating in the early days of the Tea Party movement and how this was fundamentally different, a mutation, a corruption of those principles.

And I'll tell you a story that I don't think you've ever heard before.

I think it was 2010, and we had organized a bunch of activists to come to Washington, D.C.

We were fighting against Obama's health care bill.

And one of the things we planned on doing, we spent the entire day reading about the civil rights movement and reading about Martin Luther King and nonviolence.

And we actually did explicit nonviolent training because

we knew that violence was not not only morally not us, but it was a really bad strategy to ape the tactics of the other side.

But one thing that happened during that day is a bunch of activists agreed to do what was called a die-in.

They were going to actually go to Nancy Pelosi's office and line the floor of her office and die.

And

this was a tactic borrowed from the left.

Correct.

And they went up there and they planned and it was going to be non-violence.

They got to Nancy Pelosi's Pelosi's office and a police officer, a Capitol Hill police officer, came up and said, folks, you can't be here.

And instead of anything else, what do you think they said?

They said, okay, officer, we'll move on.

I remember that.

I do remember it.

Yeah.

And so they did not have it in them to do the sorts of things.

that the left does on a regular basis.

And they very much respected that officer and they respected the rules.

And

they peacefully went on their way and we did other things.

And I was thinking about that watching the

Trump activists in Pelosi's office.

And I said,

this is a disaster.

It's a disaster for our values, but it's also a disaster for our liberties.

If you're wanting to move forward in an agenda,

creating the narrative that the left so wanted to say about us back in the Tea Party days, now they got it.

Now, Trump activists, fairly, unfairly, everybody's going to get drawn into this narrative that this is a violent movement.

And you remember, they used to call us Tea Party activists terrorists.

Yeah, I know.

And we were terrorists because we were waiving copies of the Constitution.

Yeah.

And now they have that narrative, and it's devastating.

So, Matt, I agree with you.

There's many reasons that what happened yesterday at the Capitol happened, but there are zero excuses for it.

Other than, you know, people are frustrated and they don't know what else to do.

I think there are some people now that are on the right

that are frustrated and think that violence is the answer.

But all you have to do is look at history to know that Malcolm X,

his ideas were a disaster when when he was saying, go after them, get him.

And while people fought Martin Luther King in his own movement, they fought him and said, come on, man, how much more of this do we have to take?

His idea, Gandhi's idea, Jesus' idea, is the right way to fight.

Make the case for a non-violent movement.

Yeah.

Well, first of all, just aping the tactics of the violent left, you have to appreciate two things.

One, that doesn't reflect our values, and a movement that's not rooted in the values that you're fighting for is corrupt and will never work.

And two, guess what, people?

We've always known this.

There's two sets of rules.

And if you're going to behave like the left, hoping that the political class and the media and law enforcement treat you the same way,

that's not going to happen.

But the most important thing, and this is what Dr.

King spoke about so often and we've talked about this for years you and i have

is that the tactic of non-violence is the most powerful force in the world violence doesn't work violence actually makes things worse and it creates opportunity let me just play devil's advocate i you and i have been talking about this for 20 years so i'm playing devil's advocate here

founders went to violence they had to have violence.

You say violence never solved anything.

Well, it solved the Civil War and it solved slavery.

You know, it's funny, of course, we used the Boston Tea Party as the model for the actual Tea Party.

And what was most interesting about the Boston Tea Party is the way that Sam Adams and other activists organized it in such a way so that it did not devolve into the kind of violence that you would have expected very much at the time, because at the time of the colonists, the British soldiers were gunning them down in the streets.

And yet, no one was killed, no one was hurt at the Boston Tea Party.

They very, in a very strategic way, focused on the tea, which they viewed as a symbol of crony capitalism and

government oppression.

Didn't burn down the ships, didn't desecrate the ships,

didn't molest anyone.

Many times were just like, Captain, we're only after this.

Stand over there and we're just doing this.

And they did it.

They were very careful that they did not do anything but dump the tea in.

And that's, you know, there's that famous John Adams quote at the time.

He argued, and I'll butcher the quote.

the quote, but he said at the time that one-third of the American public were patriots, one-third of the American public were in the tank with the British, and a third of the public were watching to see what was going to happen.

And what that nonviolence did is it galvanized the people that were trying to figure out who they were going to side with.

And to me, that's everything that we're trying to do today.

And we'll get into this.

But our job is not to convince Nancy Pelosi or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that freedom is a good idea.

Or the Republicans.

Yeah, or the Republicans.

Or any politician for that matter.

And

I think there's exceptions, but

that's not the point of a strategy.

Our job is to reconnect with the American people who are struggling to make sense of what's going on today.

And to me, that's a massive opportunity.

But if your strategy is violence, you are damaging everything that we're trying to do.

Explain why.

Why, why,

I mean, Martin Luther King said it just, it turns you into them.

Can you go into that to explain why

it just doesn't ever work?

I tweeted, and I won't try to quote Martin Luther King because I would do a disservice to his quote, but

he gives that amazing speech about how violence begets violence and hate begets hate, and violent tactics only feed the evil that you're fighting against.

And I think that's part of the problem is violence gives demagogues.

Think about your worst nightmare in terms of legislation, in terms of a politician that would have more power.

Violence gives them a platform to delegitimize you and to expand their power.

And I think one of the things that's going to come out of yesterday is a radical diminishment of our liberties in the name of public safety.

That happens all the time.

This is what they feed upon.

But it's also,

you know, and I think this is where, and obviously MLK studied and spoke to Gandhi about this stuff.

And

there's an entire global history of nonviolent movements that have fundamentally changed the world in favor of freedom.

It's the only way to win hearts and minds.

No one wants to join a violent movement, and you're just feeding your enemies' power.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: So the secret, though, of it,

that Dietrich Bonhoeffer learned, because he he tried the nonviolent approach.

And then eventually he was part of

the

Valkyrie

attempt on Hitler's life.

And he was a pacifist.

He didn't believe in killing.

I mean,

he lived these principles.

It wasn't a strategy for him.

That's who he was.

But what he figured out was

the opposite of Gandhi.

Gandhi said,

we're not trying to be non-violent for the Indians.

We are doing it to the Western, the Judeo-Christian West.

They will recognize good

over evil.

What Bonhoeffer,

who wrote many times, I've got to talk to this Gandhi, I've got to talk to Gandhi, he gets it, he understands.

What he didn't understand until too late was the Germans had already darkened their heart so much that there was no Judeo-Christian value that was the overriding mass appeal.

Correct?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Very much so.

We libertarians have this obtuse phrase we call

the non-aggression principle.

And it basically says you shouldn't hurt people or take their stuff, but you very much have a right to defend your life and your family when someone has aggressed against you.

And that's not what we're talking about here.

If I'm in Nazi Germany, I am fighting for my life, and the rules of the game are fundamentally different.

That's not what we're talking about in America.

And I would go on, like one of the textbooks that we provided Tea Party activists in that story that I told at the beginning of this conversation was a book called A Force More Powerful.

I know I've sent you a copy.

I share it with everybody.

And it's case studies of nonviolent revolutions revolutions that fundamentally change the world.

And of course, Gandhi's story is in there.

And MLK and the Civil Rights Movement is in there.

The Solidarity Movement is in there.

And

it's just empirical evidence that shows that people united in a set of values that are universal, the values that are going to be appealing to the rest of your countrymen and your community,

that's how you do it.

There is no other way to do it.

I will tell you that I heard a lot of people say, well, you know, this is the way they were doing it, you know, this summer.

Yeah, they were.

They were.

And it was wrong for them to do it that way.

But the proof is in the pudding.

At the beginning of Black Lives Matter, when nobody knew what it was, and it was just, hey, do you hate black people or you think black people should be shot by cops for no reason?

And everybody was in love with this idea and everybody was out marching, marching.

They had about a 78% approval rating.

They were more popular, I believe, than the military was or within a couple of points.

Most popular organization in all of America.

By the end of the summer, it was in the toilet.

It was in the 20s or just approaching 20.

That is because of the violence.

People didn't go to the website suddenly and realize, wait a minute, they're anti-family, they're anti-this.

They just saw that as that's a violent group of people.

I don't want to have anything to do with it.

Yeah.

And

we should point out, and I was very sympathetic to the early nonviolent Black Lives Matter protests because as I understood it, speaking to some of my progressive friends who were very much part of that,

their argument was in the context of law enforcement and the justice system, black lives are not not treated equally with white lives.

And I happen to believe that, and I could show you data that shows, particularly in the context of the drug war, there's been a very

disproportionate enforcement of the laws.

But the moment they got violent, and by the way, it wasn't the people that were righteously showing up the street not testing violence that got violence.

There was a bad apple or bad apples or perhaps an organizational bent towards violence.

That's absolutely the truth in Antifa.

I believe that it's probably true with BLM's leadership as well.

So you have to always distinguish between people that are trying to desperately fix the system and they're showing up because they don't know what else to do versus the professionals who want somebody to get hurt.

I wrote an op-ed.

I wrote an op-ed, I think in 2016.

We were covering the Black Lives Matter

rally or march here in Dallas when policemen were shot.

And

because we were there and so were the marchers, when the shots rang out, all of us just became human.

And we all, you know, rushed into alleys or hid behind cars.

We didn't know what the shooter was, where the shooter was.

And you kind of bond at that moment as humans.

And

I had an opportunity to actually sit and talk to the marchers.

And when I was truly listening to them,

what they were marching for was, please, someone listen.

Someone listen to us, please.

And they didn't associate with the Black Lives Matter, the anti-family.

In fact, they were the opposite of that.

That's the scary thing that you and I both have warned for so long.

Be careful who you're standing next to.

You might agree with them on this one big issue, but you have to know what else they believe because

they are going to either ruin your movement or you're joining their movement and

you don't know what you're in for.

You're on the wrong side.

Which, by the way, is why we need to police our own community

as aggressively, as fairly, maybe more so.

We need to hold people sort of,

let's accept the right-left thing, right of center.

Even though I've never been part of Trump nationalism, I feel an obligation to speak up, and I have.

Going all the way back to 2016, you can find an article I wrote on The Blaze talking about the violence at Trump rallies,

and it was very much

Trump activists sort of falling into that trap when they were goaded and

even violently attacked by leftist protesters, they started punching back.

Because in 2016, he was encouraging that.

Yeah.

I mean, from stage, he was encouraging that.

Yeah.

And to me, that, and I wrote about it, grossly irresponsible

on candidate Trump's part.

You have to speak up and hold your folks accountable.

First, I'll go back to what we did with the Tea Party.

You can go back and and look at the rallies.

Part by 2010, when we knew that people from the other side were going to infiltrate and make us look bad, a key part of my stump speech, you can watch these old speeches on C-SPAN, was

telling my folks, and sometimes they didn't really enjoy it that much, but I said, there's zero tolerance for violence, for bad actors.

Even if it's a sign, that doesn't match our values, we're going to ask you to leave.

And by the way, it's not going to be me.

It's going to be the neighbors that are going to surround you.

You have to police your own community first.

And I see this dynamic

where the left absolutely turns a blind eye to Antifa violence and the looting of shops and stuff like that.

And I don't think that anybody that calls themselves a conservative or a Republican, I'm a libertarian, whatever you want to call yourself, you've got to hold everybody to the same standard.

You know, I remember

doing the show on Fox where I asked everybody to come together and we started the 9-12 project.

And it was based on nine principles, 12 values.

And

I did that for a reason, because it wasn't about Donald, it wasn't about Barack Obama.

It wasn't about health care.

It was about principles and values.

And I remember meeting with you the first time.

Do you remember the first time we met?

I think it was,

well, it would have been in Dallas, right?

No, it was in New York in my office in New York.

And

I was very hesitant to

meet with you because I did not, at the time, you were running Freedom Works.

And I did not want this to turn political.

This was about principles and values.

And you and I sat down in my office and I realized you're a libertarian.

You're not, there's, there's, you're not a GOP guy that's looking for power.

You're looking to teach the same things.

And the first Tea Party march was on 9,

was on 9-12.

And

there was something, in fact, I've heard several people who were at the march yesterday.

said, look, I attended all the old Tea Party things and the things that, you know, the restoring honor events.

And

this just felt different from the beginning.

There was something that was different, and it wasn't necessarily the leadership, it was just a pocket of people who nobody had briefed that crowd on and said, Look, remember, we're not violent, we're not any of these things, squash them, point them out, get away from them.

And that was really important to both of us.

Yeah,

and and like the entire legitimacy of the cause depended on that.

Yeah.

And yeah, you might, by the way, you, you are a tough interview.

You grilled the hell out of me.

Apparently I passed the test.

Well, I just I didn't want it to

it had to be bigger than a political party.

And as you know,

the whole Tea Party thing and even Freedom Works kind of fell apart after you left because it was a hostile takeover by infiltrating of the GOP.

They saw it as something they could use and it turned into something ugly.

Politics broke the Tea Party ultimately.

And I think that's a lesson we can apply for how we move forward.

And I'm not against being involved in political races as long as you believe that the person that you're fighting for actually shares those values.

And it's a very hard thing to figure out as we've learned the hard way.

But, you know, the very first race that we got involved in in the Tea Party movement was Mike Lee.

And I have to say to this day, I'm still really proud that I was involved in that fight.

I have to tell you, I haven't,

I can't think of another politician that

I haven't been pissed pissed at.

You know what I mean?

I might disagree with him from time to time, but I always listen to him or I'll call him and I'll say, Mike, what is it?

And his answer makes me feel bad because I'm like, oh, crap.

He's rooted in principle and the Constitution.

But

we had this slogan back then.

We have to beat the Republicans before we can beat the Democrats.

It was an absolutely values-based, non-partisan mission where we were going to hold everybody to the same standard.

And of course, Mike Lee took out a tired old incumbent that didn't stand for anything anymore.

But what happened is once we created that community, it was like crack for opportunistic politicians.

They wanted to get on that stage.

And

what became a principled fight for principled fighters eventually became, oh, we have to support the Republican slate.

And, oh, we have to win the presidency.

And

it just became about nothing.

And I think once the Tea Party lost its moorings in those values and its willingness to hold everybody to the same standard, that's when things started to fade away.

Aaron Powell, that is, I mean, that was the problem with

this rally, where some people were saying, yeah, but I've had enough.

So violence is, no, you have to have the same standard.

If it's wrong for them, it's wrong for you.

but it doesn't seem to me, Matt, and this is really why I wanted to talk to you today.

It doesn't seem to me that you could put the old tea party back together.

First of all, a lot of the people, I mean, that was, what, 10 years ago, 12 years ago now.

And so they're older.

You know, we were in our 40s when that happened.

And we're not exactly 40 anymore.

And some of our supporters back then, the people who were really the diehards, that's a different generation.

And a lot of water has gone under the bridge.

And a lot of people

feel differently.

We believed in the police.

We believed in, you know, we could change the Republican Party.

We believed in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights.

We believed in ourselves.

Being able to change things.

Well, I don't believe in the courts anymore.

I don't believe in the FBI, the DOJ.

I do believe there is a deep state.

I do believe that things are out of control.

The media, I mean, I thought I didn't have any trust for the media in 08, 09, and 10.

Good heavens.

That was baby romper room stuff.

I don't believe in truth, justice, and the American way anymore because I don't think it exists.

How do you get people who have done it,

have been belittled, stomped on, feel like they've just had their vote taken from them.

They're mocked and ridiculed by their own party and their own people.

They're tired, they're fed up, they're done.

How do you appeal to that person and say, hey, we're going to get together and do this?

Yeah.

I mean, it's difficult.

And I could very much, like you just described, follow this 10-year process

starting with President Obama, his campaign, and David Axelrod, his key advisor,

essentially calling us domestic terrorists just

for peacefully petitioning our government for redress of grievances.

So I sort of get how some people ended up here, but I think the mistake,

going back to

the sort of death of the Tea Party, and then even Trumpism, that the core value of any grassroots movement can't be in a charismatic leader.

Yes, right.

It was never about you or me.

It was always about the thousands and thousands of leaders who were leading by example first.

And

I think the first thing we have to realize, and maybe this is that moment to realize that is a politics is not your friend.

Politics is not the solution.

If you put all of your eggs in a basket where you're going to elect someone and they're going to solve all your problems for you, you're forgetting what our core philosophy is.

We want to be left left free enough that we can solve our own problems.

And that, to me, is a fundamentally different ethos.

You know, I think with your original 9-11 platform, you got at what today is still the right strategy.

It took us a while to get here.

And that's like

we got to take on the culture.

And let me define what I mean by that.

Like, I think we've been trying a top-down approach to fixing our culture

when our culture and those values values that hold us together as Americans have been rotting from the bottom up.

And we know how it happened.

It's the education system, it's the media, it's the Hollywood, it's everything

that has been teaching us, particularly young people, that these American values aren't any damn good anymore.

Yeah,

it's consumerism,

it's everything.

Everything.

And

we need to

take our message to the popular culture.

And we need to be speaking to people who don't know all of our secret code words.

They haven't read Jefferson or Madison.

And they would never identify as conservative or libertarian.

They're probably not even sure what those are.

Or if they do think they know what they are, it probably is fundamentally different than we think it is.

And that means not

doing sort of angry clickbait rage against the machine kind of stuff that very much

worked for Fox News.

It works for the angry left.

But the people in the middle,

they actually want to find common ground.

They want to listen to other people.

They want to feel like they're part of something.

And the way we do that is not to start a new political party.

Maybe there'll be one.

I mean, I'm a libertarian now.

Maybe that's part of the answer.

But I don't think it's politics.

I think

it's telling that story and treating people that don't agree with us with a modicum of respect.

So I've talked to several senators and congressmen recently, and I've been saying this for a long time, but I think now it's really becoming important.

You know, I told them the birth of

the Republican Party in the 1850s

was the

beatdown of a senator who was standing up saying, I don't think either side, I don't think either party actually cares about slavery.

You say you're going to phase it out, you're going to stop it.

Now you're all playing political games and almost beaten down, or actually almost beaten to death on the floor of the Senate.

And

I've told them

somebody, we don't need a beatdown, thank God,

but it might be coming.

But

we need somebody to stand up and say, I don't care.

Both of you suck.

Both parties suck.

And I don't care.

I'll work with anyone who just believes in the Bill of Rights.

Just the Bill of Rights.

We are so far apart, nobody even knows what they are.

And that's the problem and the solution.

And I'm out.

And, you know, if they could get a few key people

that could lead, if they don't do it, somebody else has to.

But

just say to people, look, do you believe in freedom of speech?

That's being lost.

We have to talk about what freedom of speech means.

We have to understand that life is not fair.

You're not always going to agree.

In fact, most of your life, you're going to be surrounded by people you might think are pinheads that are over you.

You know what I mean?

You got to deal with it and move move on with your life.

We have to get back to this place to where

my parents, my grandparents, they didn't talk about politics.

They didn't talk about religion because they knew it would piss everybody off.

And I don't care.

I don't need to know that part of you.

You do in your bedroom.

You do in your personal life.

You do in your faith.

Whatever.

I just, I have bigger principles here.

Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.

You know,

how do we get back there when

that has been so eroded even more in the last 10 years?

Well, isn't that potentially the counter-revolution?

And we all know that counter-revolutions are super cool, and you're fighting against the man, and you're fighting against the status quo.

But the new man is woke authoritarianism.

It's absolute intolerance for anyone that deviates from your view of what the righteous way to behave is.

And to me, that's a big barn door opening for small L libertarianism, because we don't really have any designs on your life.

I just want you to leave me alone so that I can raise my family, so that I can go worship where I choose to worship, so that I can live my life as long as I don't hurt people or take their stuff.

And you've seen both Ben Shapiro,

he's a pretty conservative guy,

and Senator Mike Lee, a pretty conservative guy, make different versions of that argument, Mike, in the context of federalism, of

the whole genius of the federalist system is it allowed different states and different communities to make different decisions on how they would govern themselves.

And Ben argues that the only way out of the culture war where every four years we're going to fight so that we control power so that we can make everybody else live like us, the only way out of that death cycle is to embrace a libertarian ethos.

And we shouldn't actually be using the L-word.

We should figure out a way to explain this because it's basically what your mom taught you.

It's an American ethos,

it's a common sense ethos.

It amazes me that

so many people today

think they just have the right to tell

me or you or somebody else how to live their life.

And I know this must seem ironic to a lot of the

to the left because the honest ones were like fighting for the freedom of speech, you know, against conservatives that were saying, you can't put a crucifix in urine.

Yes, you can.

I don't like it, but yes, you can.

So it must be seem ironic for the honest ones, but it's ironic for me

because those people who said they were really for freedom of speech, they really were for equal rights with, you know, gay marriage and everything else.

I agreed with you.

I agreed with you.

But where are you now?

Because now

everyone is being forced because of another religious group and their, you know, their beliefs.

I mean, global warming

and

this Marxist critical theory, that's become a religion.

And it's almost a theocracy that we're living in now.

You deny it,

no matter what your evidence is, you're out.

And by the way, that's as illiberal as it is anti-constitutional conservative.

Yes.

That entire ethos of authority and appealing to people in power.

And I see it in every argument we have today from lockdowns to global warming and everything else.

And honest liberals, and there are absolutely all over the place in the United States,

a huge population of honest liberals that are distraught by wokeism.

and the cancel culture and all of this stuff.

And I think that's one place where we can begin.

And it starts with the First Amendment.

And it starts with

being willing to not shout down someone that disagrees with you.

But we are

at least half of the country is cheering.

And I think to some degree, I bet it's 70% of the country cheers when their side silences the other.

And that, I mean, it's digital book burning right now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well,

I'll take 30% to start with.

That's a lot more than any of the heroes we've been talking about had when they started their fights.

So

I'm very much comfortable with that.

But I think like the difference and tactically,

and I don't want to go down the rabbit hole of big tech and how they control the conversation, but tactically,

we

have an advantage because we're not making stuff up.

We're speaking truth.

And I'll tell you what.

Have you read 1984 lately?

I mean,

it could be the newspaper, you know, if anybody read a newspaper anymore.

But I mean, it's shocking how relevant it is today.

But that, like, the challenge on a strategy moving forward that looks at speaking truth to power in this way.

And that means calling out the media.

That means calling out big tech.

It means calling out the political class.

It means calling out yourself when you're wrong.

It means calling out yourself when you're wrong.

Well, I wish we could learn how to do that again because it doesn't seem like anybody feels the responsibility of doing that anymore.

I have to tell you, Matt,

we sat around after my broadcast last night

after a full day at the blaze of everybody, you know, broadcasting and Elijah Schaefer there in D.C.

And

we all looked at each other, which I don't think we would have done 20 years ago because it would have been normal.

But we looked at each other and said, who else has done what we've done?

We have

asked the really hard questions that we didn't want to ask because it will incriminate our side.

We have not made excuses.

We are exactly the same as we were on Antifa.

And we're really truly trying to find the answers.

And when we do, we call a spade a spade.

That doesn't happen very often anymore.

Because,

well, we have this debate.

Is it because people don't want to hear the truth?

They just want to believe what they believe.

Or is it that there is no credibility?

There's no, no one trusts anything.

And

everyone feels betrayed by even their own side

that they

don't know what to believe.

And so they just trust themselves and what their gut says.

Which is it, do you think?

We don't want to know the truth or we don't believe anybody?

I think it may be a combination of both.

And in our personal...

consumption of this stuff, we probably can't always discern the difference in those those two things because it's painful when someone calls out one of your core beliefs and says,

that's wrong, you got it wrong.

And you have to be willing to at least listen to the possibility that your team got it wrong.

But it's, you know,

we all know about these echo chambers now, and that's a real thing.

But again, going back to this theme of a counterrevolution, particularly young people,

you know, they left Facebook a long time ago because they didn't want to be manipulated.

They didn't like the idea that this scroll would prevent them from actually pursuing ideas that were interesting to them.

So they binge-watch things and they listened to Joe Rogan for three hours a day, which is utterly contrary to everything we thought we knew about how people consume content.

So,

again,

you're not going to start with a majority and go back to John Adams.

If we have 30%,

and maybe we don't have 30%, 30%, maybe we have less, but

that doesn't mean that you can't create a better product, an act of entrepreneurship, where people

that didn't even know they needed a better thing

are still searching for things.

And

I think we have to lead.

This is what I get into.

Leadership is leading by example.

Even if you're the only person in the world that's willing to do it,

somebody steps out first.

And all of the heroes we've mentioned, they did that.

We have to do that.

So I was thinking about,

you know, revolution and civil war for the last 20 years, a lot.

But I was thinking about it here in the last probably eight, nine weeks a lot because I think the color revolution is

what we're witnessing right now, the beginnings of a color revolution.

And it's being prompted and pushed, I believe, by very influential people.

And somebody said to me, it's time for a civil war.

And I said, Do you even know what that means?

Do you know what that means?

And who are your allies?

Well, we've got a lot of people in America.

No, no, forget about that.

Who are your allies?

Who do you know that has power and money, a nation state that will actually say, hey, hey, hey, 50% of the population stood up recently.

50% of the population of Hong Kong may have been more than 50%.

It was at least 50%.

The minute America turned inward and started looking at what was happening with coronavirus, China marched in and ended it.

Ended it.

We've lost Hong Kong forever because nobody cared.

Nobody was standing with 50% of the population.

What chance do we stand in

a civil war?

We have no friends or allies.

It's all anti-America or anti-freedom or big globalization.

There's no one out there.

I mean, I just look at

any suggestion of violent overthrow of government or whatever.

And I always want to say, well, what's your end game?

Yeah.

Do you really think that at the end of that, if you break it, do you really think that good guys are going to show up, angels are going to show up

and govern us benignly?

There's just no example for how this model works.

And again, it's against our values.

It fundamentally violates that.

But there is a.

Go ahead.

No, no, go ahead.

No, look, I had been thinking about this in the context of not just technology, but emergent workarounds to broken government systems.

And a great example of this is how parents are hacking the education system, having discovered it's sort of like it's sort of like they took the red, Morpheus gave them the red pill,

and they discovered that it's not a public education system.

It's a government-run education system that cares a lot more about education bureaucrats than it ever cared about your kids.

And

they're learning the hard way, and they're going through the curriculums perhaps for the first time, discovering that this system is no damn good.

And I forget what the data is,

but so many parents have left the public system and they're pursuing alternatives to that.

To me,

the revolution, if you will, is that individual individual action.

If we've been trying to fix the education system from the top down and it just gets stronger and stronger,

why don't we do it one household at a time?

And you could apply that same logic to charity.

Like if you really want to dismantle the welfare state,

we've done this too, right?

Yep.

Go help a neighbor.

And, you know, the guy from Barstool Politics is doing that.

Yep.

And I'm sure like thousands and thousands of people that don't have his big platform are doing the same thing.

Yeah, we're doing it.

Mercury One is doing it.

My charity, we set charity up.

Mercury One was about: if you want smaller government,

you have to do more, you know,

because it's your

problem.

It's not Washington's problem.

It's the problem that you have in your own community.

So let's fix it ourselves.

And it brings me to

a possible idea to shoot for, and I guess that's the

10th Amendment, the states.

You know,

it bothers me to talk of secession because

I don't want to secede from the United States.

They do.

They should leave.

If you can't get back to the things that are in our national archives that are protected behind glass, then

you're in the wrong country or something, because these are our principles.

And it does no good

to

talk about that, even though I don't think we have much in common anymore.

We have to reunite common ideas and common sense back to all of us, both sides, all sides, before we can come back together.

But

I worry about what might be coming down the tracks with

an unbridled pack of

war horses that are moving this critical theory and Marxism and everything else down the road.

Is there something to be said for

a movement that is in your local and state, and that's it?

Forget about the federal government.

I mean, you know, keep your eye on it, et cetera, et cetera, and do what you have to do.

But

you put your energy in local and state, and you make your state a constitution safe zone.

You know, it's a sanctuary state for the Constitution.

If they're passing something there, I don't really care.

California, others, you can do that if you want.

We're not.

We're not.

What do you think of that?

So like the L-word, localism, is a word that somewhere along the way, we gave up.

You know, we give up words like community and justice and

localism and democracy.

And from my perspective, those are our words.

Localism, bottom-up, neighbor helping neighbor, the unimaginable power when free people come together and decide to do something for the common good.

That is ours.

That is our model.

That's how we think the world works.

That's how we know good things happen.

So it...

it's sort of going back to sort of the

corruption of trying to elect someone to solve all of our problems.

that's not our model.

Our model is local.

So I think absolutely it has to be, you have to focus on your community and focus on your state and maybe worry a lot less about what Washington, D.C.

is up to.

I know what they're doing to us.

I know what they're going to do to us.

But if you work from the bottom up,

you create a model for social change that would attract more people to it.

I'm part of an organization called the Free State Project.

I don't know if you know what this is, but

libertarians are moving to New Hampshire.

They're actually pledging and picking up their families and moving to New Hampshire because they want to make New Hampshire that place where they can live freely.

And I think their license plate even says something about that.

Yeah, it does.

It does.

But not a lot of people up in the North.

I mean, I heard a...

What was it?

Maybe it was in White Christmas with Bing Crosby, you know, that movie?

And they said something about going up to Vermont.

And,

you know, well,

you don't want to be a Democrat up there.

It was some joke about how there were no Democrats up there.

And I thought, wow, things have changed quite a bit.

You know,

that's not exactly a live-free or die area, is it?

Yeah.

Now?

Well, you have, I mean, New Hampshire's biggest problem is Boston and people fleeing Boston.

Yeah.

Just as Vermont's biggest problem was people fleeing New York and then sending Bernie Sanders over, which from my perspective didn't work that well out for Vermont's.

But

the idea was it's a small state and the ethos there,

left or right, I don't know what you call it, but there's an ethos of self-reliance, which again is a very American value.

I was going to say that's American.

That's not left or right.

That's American.

Yeah.

And

it's also disappearing, right?

Self-responsibility and self-reliance.

But I'm for

thousands of experiments like that.

Me too.

And that's one of them.

I'm not against political experiments.

I spent a good part of my life trying to make the Republican Party pro-liberty.

I think it was a noble experiment that hasn't paid off for me personally where I sit today.

But getting back to this culture stuff,

the storytelling and the listening and the emotional appeal, I'm an economist who came to this very painful realization late in life that very few people think about things in the context of opportunity cost the way I do.

And I drive my wife crazy with the way I think about the world.

But most people don't think about that.

They consume things through their emotions and they process the way

they interpret events through their emotions.

So let me present a problem that you and I have dealt with for 20 years.

Liberals get that.

The left understands that inside and out.

I like the analogy of

we need each other because if you can relate to the theater, a bunch of conservatives on stage, that theater sucks.

There's no art in our soul, generally speaking.

But you also don't want a bunch of liberals in the back office.

You don't want them running things.

You need some responsibility on that.

We need each other.

We need each other.

And

conservatives, we have been looking to,

you and I and others have been looking to appeal to people's hearts.

Andrew Breitbart was right on this.

But where is the money?

The left will spend money like crazy.

We don't get our billionaires together, and

they don't seem to believe in it so much that they're willing to spend.

They're willing to just put the money on the line.

I know it's a

warm and fuzzy, squishy thing that's never going to pay off in politics, or at least not for a very long time.

Where are those people on the right?

Well, it's funny you ask that because my day job is trying to find those people to fund what we do at Free the People.

And in their defense,

they probably funded a lot of those ham-fisted conservative projects that weren't art at all.

They were just human action applied to a theater.

And that's not how it works.

You start with the story and you start with the art and

those values shouldn't be beating you overhead.

So our side sucks.

We've established that and we've probably, you know, my investors have spent lots of money over the years investing in very disappointing projects.

So it's kind of a chicken and an egg thing.

But the thing that I find most

exciting when I go speak to a group of young people, Terry and I now give these, my wife Terry and I give these joint speeches called Love, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, which is a series of personal stories about our life.

And

you go speak at Young Americans for Liberty or Students for Liberty.

You go speak across the globe.

We just spoke to 1,200 kids in the country of Georgia right before the lockdowns.

On fire.

And

they are artists and videographers and storytellers and novelists and technologists.

They actually have all of the skill sets we need to create a culturally vibrant movement.

Whereas old guys like me, you know, I read a bunch of books and I don't necessarily have the skill set to do that stuff, but we've been able to hire a lot of young people that do.

So part of it's generational.

Part of it is proving to investors that we don't suck.

And that's going to be a, we got to dig out of that hole because there have been attempts and they haven't been that great.

Part of this is,

you know, I think a lot of behavioral scientists, because they,

you know,

Bernays, you know, the history of Bernays, that guy changed the world.

Advertising until World War II was called propaganda.

It was known as propaganda.

Then propaganda got a bad name because of Goebbels,

as it should have.

But

now we're so deep in behavioral scientists and

we know everything that will turn every button and switch.

And the left employs these people.

The left

scoops them up, listens, plans, plots.

We're sitting here saying, whoa,

how come violence doesn't work?

They don't have to have that conversation because they have the biggest minds in America working with them, knowing, don't do that, don't say that, move this direction.

Here's how you connect with people emotionally.

we got nothing we got nothing yeah how do we bridge that gap in this high-tech world that is happening so fast how do we bridge that gap

do you remember um we're in las vegas and you and pen jillette and i had a conversation for my show

And we kind of asked him the same question.

And I think I said something like, how do we persuade people that liberty is better?

And he sort of dressed me down in a way that only he could,

because he argued that our job is not to convince people that we're right and they're wrong.

Our job has to be,

and I don't know how he said this, but the way I would say it is, we need to build it and they will come.

Live

those values, create art that reflects those values, and don't be people over the head over it.

Don't suggest that they're not smart enough to figure out how smart you are.

And that is a very different strategy than the one you're describing, the propaganda strategy, how to manipulate people's emotions.

And I don't want, I'm not saying, no, wait, wait, wait.

I'm not saying that we should manipulate people's emotions, but we don't have

they are armed to the teeth with this machine.

And

the thing I love about libertarianism, and at the same time, I'm so frustrated with libertarianism, is

nobody wants to work together.

They got their thing, you do your thing, that's great.

And that's good unless you're in war.

And we are in war for freedom right now.

Yeah.

Well, it's the so the libertarian movement is still a cadre movement from my perspective.

And it's populated by people with very strong opinions and that sort of instinct not to work together.

But getting back to that next generation of young people, they gather, they cooperate, they get the idea that free individuals can come together and create something bigger than they could have done by themselves.

Right.

And to me,

these are growing pains.

And this is why I am involved in the Libertarian Party right now, because I think there is an opportunity to do something bigger that shows people, like you remember those those original marches and and the the march on

912

2000 the first one yeah but but there were several but um there is nothing like the energy of a million people showing up with the same values yep

you can't do that reading Atlas Shrugged.

No.

It's a different thing.

And so we got to get people to understand that working together is a real,

there's more, there's more energy and more satisfaction doing that.

Anybody can be pure.

And if we have to be pure alone, that's fine.

But the opportunity, and again, getting back to what I think Penn was trying to say is just do it.

Just lead by example and show people.

what is possible.

And that doesn't, that's probably the same with investors, right?

You got to create a product and show that it's viable before you're going to get people to say, you know what?

That's a smart strategy.

I'm going to invest in that.

So, Matt,

let me take you now to

what you think is coming our way.

Prepare us mentally.

for what you think.

You live in Washington, D.C.

You've been watching this nightmare circus happen for a long time, up close and personal.

Is it as bad as I think it's going to be?

Are they...

I really believe that they mean what they say.

You know,

I've been called a crazy man for some of the things that I've said were coming,

and they turn out to be right only because I take people at their word.

When they say crazy things and they have power, I take them at their word.

And it ends up usually that they're telling the truth.

Are they going to do these things?

Yes.

And they have a weapon that they've never had before.

They finally figured out how to appeal to our fear.

And I'm talking, one thing I haven't talked about this entire hour is the never-ending lockdowns.

Yep.

And the stripping of our humanity and the stripping of our ability to feed our families and how that fed into everything that happened yesterday.

We haven't even discussed that, but they have found a weapon, fear, is their weapon to use against us.

And Joe Biden has said it's going to get worse before it gets better.

Oh, yeah, no, a winter of discontent is what I think he was describing.

A cold, bleak winter was one of

his phrases.

So,

to me, just on a practical level,

breaking through

that narrative that somehow you have to

attack your neighbor, all these videos I see of people attacking other people because they're not behaving the way that they believe they should behave,

that is toxic.

And it probably reminds you of the onset of various authoritarian

regimes.

So we got to push back.

We got to push back with everything we have.

And here's a great example.

There was a bar owner in New York City.

And I don't, there's so many of these stories, but I hope I get this one right, who refused to shut down and came up with clever ways to avoid the mandates of Cuomo and the communist mayor of New York.

And they came and they arrested him.

And the entire neighborhood showed up and peacefully protested in his behalf.

But as I recall, the end of that story was he hit a cop with a car.

And so he lost the entire narrative.

As frustrated as we are, as angry as we are that people are shutting down our businesses, they're taking away our livelihoods, they're stripping us of our liberties, we're going to have to practice civil disobedience in ways that galvanizes the rest of the American public that is afraid of the virus.

They're afraid that they don't know what's happening, but they also know that they can't live forever with the economy locked down and controlled by the government and government allocating resources and deciding that this industry makes this or not makes this.

That to me is an opportunity, but we got to do it right.

So what do you suggest those people do?

In California, I'm really heartened by what's happening in California.

Because people I disagree with and who would not, you know, be welcoming to a phone call from me saying, hey, good job, congratulations.

Those people who have always seemingly voted a different way are now seeing, wait a minute, this is not what I thought it was going to be.

And they are standing up against the machine, peaceful,

most of it, if not

in California.

I think mainly all of it.

I don't think I've heard a violent story out of California from somebody who was experiencing lockdown.

And you have the biggest recall movement in the history of America happening right now spontaneously.

Yeah, that's, to me, that's exactly what you do.

This is, to borrow a word, this is the resistance.

And

it's a chicken and an egg thing.

I understand

why a gym owner or a nightclub owner or a restaurant owner puts their entire lives at risk.

when they defy the authorities.

They lose their liquor license.

They get shut down.

They get called into court.

The only thing that protects them is a bunch of customers peacefully showing up and supporting them.

And when they lose their license, showing up in the streets and defending them.

We could go back to the civil rights movement and look at some of those tactics.

You know, go to the diner, sit down, have a cup of coffee.

If the police pull out the fire hoses, don't resist.

It's hard to say that.

Well, it's easy to say it.

It's hard to say.

It's hard to do.

But by the way, you can't do it alone.

If they divide and separate us, they'll just take us down one at a time.

The strength is in numbers, and this gets to the sort of strength of community and the feeling that we had on that day in 2009 when we were not alone.

There's a safety in that.

There's a sense that you can make progress.

But we have to resist.

And I love what I've seen in California.

But honestly, I'm seeing other countries do it better than us.

And I never thought that America would be sort of reticent in defending their liberties like I've seen over the last year.

Matt, I hope that we can spend more time together in the next coming years because

I think that

it's it's important to share what we have learned and

speak again to a lot of the people that were with us at the first time who thought,

I mean, it makes no difference.

It did.

Did you read Obama's book?

Did you see what he said about the Tea Party and how

oh, you have to read it?

He, in fact, it's actually quoted in some of the Obama, you know, action committee or whatever he's got going on, it's quoted that

what happened to him

and how he was thwarted and how he couldn't get things shoved through

really happened because of a very effective tea party.

Now, they certainly weren't telling us that then, but here he is 10 years later going, the tea party was extraordinarily effective and modeling what they're doing off of us.

Yeah.

That's heartening.

Yeah.

But the, and, and you made this point early on, the, that the right strategy for the future is not to reimagine

that glorious past.

The world's changed.

We've all changed, and we, frankly, we have better tools now than we had back then.

So we need to think more expansively.

I mean, that there

we have, I still have an audience that was there and

they're tired and they they I think they have been convinced that they can't make a difference.

And we've learned a lot.

We've gone through a lot and we need to

find that spirit of hope and optimism that we had at one point.

and not this spirit of despair, it's over and the only answer is violence.

It's not.

Yeah.

It's not over.

Even today, I'm an optimist and

today would be the worst day for me to say that

because

I know the power of free people.

I know we have an ability to figure things out.

We have an ability to bounce back every time we take a hit.

And that is the story of America.

And I point point to the day that I discovered that the Tea Party existed was the day

that Americans mobilized and shut down the Wall Street bailout, that Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner, they held hands on the House floor and they say, we're going to do this.

And the American people discovering this new tool called technology, shut it down.

And that day I knew something was different.

Today our

ability to know and do things and to organize is a thousand times better than it was then.

Oh yeah.

So we can't do the same thing.

We have to do something else.

Oh yeah.

And part of that is to tell that story and work from the bottom up.

Imagine if millions and millions of people worked from the bottom up to take over their communities, to take over their school systems, to take over their county councils or whatever it is.

I don't want it to to be too political.

Just take control of their own life.

Just take control of your own life and destiny.

Just that.

Stop listening to what these people are telling you to do.

I can't, I mean, I cannot believe.

You could have told me a year ago.

that

there's no way we're going to be free with our business and

we're going to be wearing a mask for a year, and they're going to talk about maybe two years, and we're going to talk about mandatory vaccinations against something that was

99.6%

non-lethal.

I would have said, you're crazy.

And we've just rushed to,

I think, at first, to try to be decent people.

We don't want to kill people.

We don't know what we're dealing with.

Let's just do the right thing.

You know, four weeks later, I can't believe we're still doing it.

And now here we are, almost a year into it.

It's astonishing.

I've never seen anything like it.

And it caught me flat-footed.

It caught me by surprise.

And I'm hoping that the brave people that start the counter-revolution will give the rest of us the courage to join them.

I agree.

Because that's the only way out of this.

It's the only way out of any mess that our politician our political class creates for us we got to join together and resist tyranny matt thank you thanks glenn

just a reminder i'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people