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Welcome to the Freethought Project Podcast, a hub for free-thinking conversations about the
promotion of liberty and the daunting task of government accountability. Here are your hosts,
Jason Basler, Matt Agarist, and Dawn Vi Jr.
Hello again, free thinkers. Welcome back to the Freethought Project Podcast.
My name is Jason Basler, and joining me is the Freethought Project Editor-in-Chief,
Matt Agarist. Also joining us is TFTP writer and editor, Dawn Vi Jr.
What a week it's been, and it's only Thursday, guys. It's really not easy to keep up with
all of it. Apparently, the longest U.S. government shutdown in history is now over,
yet another round of Epstein emails were released, and Trump is again calling a Democrat hoax.
Apple just launched a digital ID, and a former Capitol Police officer was just forensically
linked as the J6 pipe bomb suspect. Wow, guys. But don't worry. Don't worry,
free thinkers. We're all getting $2,000 tariff checks in January that will fix everything.
We did see some wins, though, this week. Flock cameras that we've spoken about over the past
few months on this podcast were just shut down in two cities when a Washington judge ruled that
all footage recorded by flock cameras are public record, according to public record laws.
So hopefully, that's the beginning of the end for flock.
Well, guys, we have an exciting guest and powerful show lined up for you today.
But really quickly, I wanted to remind our listeners that we had author and philosopher
Stefan Malinu on the podcast last week. It was a great conversation that hit on several
current topics relating to the rise of Nick Fuentes, censorship, and the culture wars.
And it was quite a thought-provoking interview. So I hope you will check it out after this
one. And of course, guys, don't forget to subscribe, rate and review this podcast on your
favorite podcast player of choice. All right, let's go ahead and get into this.
Our guest today is a longtime veteran of the Liberty Movement. He's an author, economist,
and the founder of the Brownstone Institute. Mr. Jeffrey Tucker, thank you for joining us,
and welcome to the Freethought Project podcast.
It's my pleasure. Thank you.
Yeah, well, it's certainly wonderful to have a chance to speak to you. As I mentioned,
we had Stefan Malinu on the show last week, which was exciting for us. Both of you guys have been
inspiring figures in my own personal journey into the Liberty Movement. And in fact, Matt and myself
actually saw you speak over a decade ago now in San Diego at the Libertopia Conference.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Stefan Malinu and I have mutated in various directions over 10 years,
I guess. You know, 10 years ago, I wrote a very similar article called somebody like,
Trump is Trump a fascist, right? This is for Newsweek Magazine. And I was very concerned
about the rise of the so-called alt-right within the Liberty World. That was back when I
believed that somehow you could somehow contain or direct or otherwise guide the development of
ideas within the Liberty Movement, which I learned very humbly, was not true. But what was
interesting is that Malinu, who I had been influential on me, and I felt to be a colleague
in the previous years, you went full Trumpy and singing the national anthem and dabbling
in race theory and all this stuff. And I thought, oh, God, here we go. Meanwhile, there were other
people in the Liberty Land that were going the opposite way. It's like, oh, microaggressions,
and we've got to embrace woke ideology. And I thought, my God, what is with the Libertarianism
that's so unstable that it's either drifting right or drifting left? And so I saw my job
in those years was just kind of finding that golden mean of traditional Libertarianism.
But in the meantime, 10 years later, there's a whole range of issues on which I sort of decided
that the rightward drift was understandable and justified. And even in some particulars concerning,
I don't know, things like deep state control of the media or the corporate state,
the extent to which the private enterprise corporations were actually just retail
fronts for the central state, that sort of Trumpy critique was correct. And
wildly underestimated the extent to which this thing we call the establishment was terrified of
Trump because of his independence, which is very much to his credit. I also underestimated the
extent to which woke ideology was completely despotically oppressive for an entire generation
that had any connection whatsoever to modern academia. So I didn't see any of this stuff
when I wrote my book on the topic. But there's some particulars on which I've just frankly
changed my mind, namely the issue of immigration and citizenship and nationalism.
Those are issues on which I've diametrically opposite views of what I held 10 years ago today.
And I don't think that makes me alt-right.
I mean, is that even a term anymore? I feel like that was thrown to the wayside after
that initial wave there of trying to fearmonger people on the right. And to your point there,
I do think that there is some legitimate critiques of Steph that we could probably point back to.
Yeah. And I don't want to single him out, by the way, because he was emblematic of a
kind of a trend of the time. And you're probably correct about this term alt-right.
I mean, there's a whole range of people that go to the dark enlightenment and then
you have the sort of the Fuentes nightmare kind of full-blown interwar late Weimar reactionary.
There's a whole range of these people out there. And in this context and this framework,
libertarianism has kind of been plowed under. I think the COVID period was devastating for
traditional libertarianism. And I've explained many times what went wrong and that sort of thing.
But anyway, I guess I would just like to say that there was a time when I felt very certain
that a rightward drift was like a calamity. And now I've come around much more to the views of
my own mentor, Murray Rothbard, who saw a sort of what he called right populism as being
sort of a viable strategy for liberty. I'm not sure I would call it that, but I see the
point he was making now. Yeah. Well, there certainly is a strong headwind in that direction in the has
been since the COVID era, of course. And we did get into the rise of Nick Fuentes with Stefan Molinou.
I was kind of curious to hear his ideas on Fuentes and how he holds them as far as the
censorship and the political persecution and if there was any overlap with his takedown and
censorship and all that stuff. And I felt like we touched on some pretty good territory there.
And I even opened up the conversation to Molinou with this principle versus pragmatism
kind of question just to see where he's at now 10 years later and if he would kind of touch on his
departure from the libertarian movement. And sure enough, he did. So I felt like there was
something there giving him the benefit of the doubt. And as you mentioned, he at one point,
he was kind of a main figure in the voluntaryism, libertarianism movement.
Oh, yeah, he was huge. I'm not sure what period that was. My imagination places this
in about, I'm going to say 2012, 2013. Sure. And he was a pretty important figure and
sort of the rising sort of anarchist spirit. And then he just kind of drifted more and
more and then I saw where it was going. And my intellectual reaction against that,
I don't want to call it reaction, but like opposition to that was based on knitting together
a series of themes that made sense to me at the time, which I now realize I've gotten carried away.
I don't think favoring immigration restrictions opens you up to fascism.
I had no longer believed that. And so I don't know, I feel like the last 10 years,
especially the last five have been really rough and quite an educational opportunity for people
with our ideological outlook. And it's sort of provoked us to rethink a lot of issues. And
that's always a good thing. Sure. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think we've all kind of evolved
a bit and especially after the Biden administration opened the floodgates and
obviously immigration has always been a political football. And it really is hard also for me
to believe that the same institution that created this mess, this quote crisis,
is going to be the same institution that fixes it. But ultimately, there are very few options,
it seems like, and maybe intentionally so. But one of the reasons I did want to have you on
as well, Jeffrey, is that because I feel like you've done an amazing job successfully just
opposing anarchy as something that's classy and electoral, even an aspiring.
There's that, of course. But I was kind of hoping that we could touch on a few things today,
maybe a few current topics. Yep. Obviously, Trump was elected to a second term a little
over a year ago now. He's been in office for like 10 months. But things have kind of hit
like this fever pitch recently. And I'm sure you've seen it online. There's
a lot of grumblings on Twitter of Trump betraying his base. And it seems kind of
significant because it's not just the libertarians or progressives kind of
saying this, right? It's his own MAGA base, the 50-year mortgage stuff, the doubling down on the
600,000 Chinese students to come to the US, the H-1B visas. I mean, they're all kind of ruffling
feathers. Well, and the stimulus payment of $2,000 for people in the... It's a Biden policy.
Yeah. It was presumably drawn from his glorious tariff revenue, which he continues to claim
are being paid by foreign countries, which is ridiculous. I mean, I don't know how you
could say that, but he keeps saying it. And so what you have is small business, wholesale
wholesalers and importers, paying huge taxes just to sell their products. These are American
businesses who are paying huge taxes to bring products to domestically. And then out of
those taxes, you're redistributing wealth back to people that I don't know,
I'm guessing it could be people who make less than $100,000 or something like that. So I don't
understand. I mean, this is just classic tax and spend. I mean, it's no different from
Lyndon Johnson or FDR or any kind of stupid welfare state crap that you'd ever imagine.
It's embarrassing. It's being done by Trump. The first 100 days of Trump were
mighty and glorious and tremendously exciting beyond multiple levels. But he has hit... He's bumped
into the same problem that any state manager is going to bump into, which is that the entire
machinery of state as it was constructed, the architecture of the state, is made to be
resilient in the face of demands that it change. And I don't think it's a lack of will. I think
that it's just an impossible nut to crack at this point. I mean, all of Washington is
doubling down on permanent Washington's just wants to stay the way it always is.
And quite frankly, the reformers are wildly outnumbered. You've got a couple
million people in the state apparatus that are permanent employees, and
they had hoped to draw down the employment in the federal agencies by half. They didn't come
anywhere near that. They made some dents, but the courts have intervened. They tried to abolish
the Department of Education, the courts intervened. They tried to abolish many things.
This is actually amazing when you think about the excitement in those early days.
Did you know, I should write about this because it's like historic,
that there were a couple of days there where the Trump administration had listed
like 15 or 20 major federal buildings on real estate markets for sale?
No, I hadn't heard that.
Yeah, they were going to sell like the Department of Justice, you know, to build a new
building or whatever. The Department of Housing and Urban Development,
the Department of Labor. These are huge pieces of property that are built in brutal
nostalgia. It's ugly things. And part of the thinking was we're going to gut Washington.
Why don't we just get to revenue and sell these things? And then the people that will move
into them will be malls and hotels and theaters and this kind of thing. And they'll make
Washington an exciting, wonderful place for tourists to come and visit. And this was,
I think, the Trump dream. And we'll just get rid of all these agencies. We'll just gut them.
And they can restart as purely digital if there's any functions they need to
finish up. Like HUD has lots of housing contracts. We'll just kind of clean this up.
So this is the original vision. And so they put these things on sale.
So then two days later, they came off sale. And I never got a fix on exactly what happened.
You'd have to really be on the inside of that to know the answers to that.
But here's what I speculate. That Trump was imagining creating DC into this glorious
mecca of tourism with the revival of nationalism, where Americans are proud to be America.
Let's take the family to the great home of the founding fathers or whatever.
But the main bidders on those buildings were not malls and theaters and other commercial
attractions. They were like Google and Microsoft and pharmaceutical companies,
lobbying organizations. They're the ones who wanted the property.
So now you've got a problem. It's like, okay, well, what are our standards for who can buy
these properties and who not? And then after two days and trying to figure this out,
how to keep the properties in the hands of people that would make Washington beautiful
and wonderful, they just gave up and took them off the market. And now if you go to Washington,
it'd be far from being the place you want to be. The city is dreary, horrible, sad, dirty,
crime-ridden, zombie, fentanyl people, flying around all over the place.
He sent in the National Guard to kind of clean up the place, but all they did
was hang around the Iserias. I was there when they were there. It was great to be in D.C.
Do you want a latte? Oh, sure. But they weren't going to the crime-ridden parts because why should
they? And who's there to make them? So I guess the National Guard is pulled back,
but meanwhile they leave a city that's dumpier, uglier, and more grotesque than ever.
So you had this kind of exciting vision going into this. And I'm sorry to say that
10 months later, the whole thing is just kind of, I think you're right. I mean, there's a sadness
about the whole thing. And all the Trump administration is doing right now is just
fighting back against their enemies, I mean, the plot to keep them out of office extends
all the way back to 2015. And the assassination attempts, the law fair, it was just unbelievable.
So all these people are still around. And the Trump administration is a tiny group of people.
I get reporters asking me all the time, wow, how great is it for you? You and your friends,
you were all out of power five years ago when you protested at lockdowns. But all
all you people are now in these powerful positions running top agencies. What does that
feel like? And my answer to that question is it feels like we're still on the outside,
still fighting for your current battle. We're still we're still being spat upon and trashed
and denounced. And we don't have any power at actually at all. I mean, the guys at
Marty McRae and RFK, whatever. And you know, this goes for many people, the Justice Department.
Yeah, I've got a lot of friends in government now. But none of them have power. They don't have
the ability to change the system. They try. But it's discouraging. Every day you show up and
you give orders and everybody ignores them, you know, do you want to make a change in
something, whether it's a childhood immunization schedule or the grants going out to the universities
that are funded in DEI or you know, whatever the thing is you want to do speed up drug
approvals for this or that drug, whatever you want to do, there's a million committees and
10 million forms and and a thousand people objecting on this ground, this ground to this
people are being tied down by bureaucratic luliputians, I guess they're called.
And they can't they can't move. I mean, that's that's the the frustrated part about where we are
right now. Sure. And I think that's a generous take for sure. And you know, I guess this speaks
to the idea that there is going to be a top down solution, right? I mean, you've spoken
for years about decentralized solutions. And I certainly would take a $2,000 check if they
did sell those buildings off in DC, but I doubt that that and that seems a little more legitimate,
you know, those are taxes that are already paid for. That would make sense, right?
Right, right. You tell the building to give the money, the profits to the taxpayers. That's
right. But but speaking of, you know, DC kind of turning into this hellhole, pun intended,
you know, I think one of the things that the MAGA base was the most frustrated about
was seeing Trump invite the Syrian interim president and former ISIS commander,
Abu Muhammad al-Jilani to the White House recently. And I think Glenn Greenwald said it
perfectly. He said, imagine going back 20 or even 10 years and telling somebody that in 2025,
a long time leading al-Qaeda operative in Syria will be welcomed to the White House
as an honored state leader. I think that's a real poignant point. I mean, Trump even gave
him a bottle of cologne, like men's fragrance as a gift, you know? And so I think this kind of touches
on a nerve that a lot of Americans have been frustrated about regarding the U.S. government
training, equipping and putting these terrorist groups in power in the Middle East, only to
scapegoat them when it's politically convenient, but then also doing the photo ops and inviting
them to the White House when it's politically advantageous. So I kind of wanted just to
get your take on all this, like what you make of it, what's the motive, what's the play?
Is he just tone deaf to what his base wants as far as this goes? Is there a bigger picture
that we're missing? Well, yeah, Trump has a love-hate relationship with the base, right?
I mean, so that's, you know, he wants to placate the base, but also he betrays him
whenever possible, knowing full well they have no wills to turn. And it's been true on
justice for the COVID period, you know, but trying to the shots, the foreign policy stuff is
supposed to be America first, but it's not. But he's also profoundly aware that
regular people, they loathe establishment Democrats. I mean, they're the most horrible
people. And if Camel had taken over, I don't even know how dystopian the world would look
today. I mean, it's pretty bad, but it would definitely be worse. They wanted to shut down
the internet. I mean, that was their plan. Brownstone.org would have been confiscated.
This podcast might be illegal. I mean, but we're seeing take place in the UK right now would
have just been the beginning if Camel had won. So, and as it is, you know, as it is the
Trump administration's giving us terrible things like real ID, you know, that I think that
that plan for real ID had been in place for, you know, I don't know, 10 or 15 years.
And nobody had implemented it until the Trump administration. So,
so I don't know, you know, it's, I guess we're back to the old American problem
of pick your poison or something like that. I don't, I don't quite, I would not say the
Trump administration poisoned. There's a lot of good efforts. Let me just put it that way.
Good efforts being made in some sectors. But, but as soon as you get, just as soon as you
start feeling good about it, something, something new, terrible thing, you know, happens. Trump's
obsession with tariffs and protectionism is just, just off the hook, cray-cray is just,
just out of control. Like he actually thinks it's like some sort of magic policy. It's
oh god, I just really hope the Supreme Court, it turns back his tariff power. And, and by the way,
so do many other people within the Trump administration. Everybody just gets sick of his,
his crazy attitudes on this. And then, you know, he's so mercurial, you know, he'll say one thing,
one day, and then just forget, forget he ever said it the next day. So it's hard to follow
up on my game. He says a lot of good things. And then you get all excited, then he forgets
about them. Like, by that evening, you know? It's because we have cognitive dissonance in this
country at let levels that have never before seen in human history, right? Kind of. I mean,
because people are intellectually dishonest and they're dishonest with themselves. Like what you
said earlier, where you, you know, you admitted that your principles have shifted pretty
significantly over the last decade. And I mean, that's because, you know, many of us who
started this journey over a decade ago, in this black and white world of pure anarchism,
you know, we have to grapple with like, the world is a far more full of new haunts, right? Like,
and Captain Stan is not coming tomorrow, right? So we have to live in this world. And it's,
we have to figure out what is the transition path, you know, and what are the priorities?
You know, this is where it gets complicated. Yeah, that's the question I had for you.
So like, I want to, you know, I want to contrast like your honesty with like the
profound dishonesty at the heart of the mainstream conservative movement right now.
So you've admitted you, you know, you shifted right a little bit over the last decade. So,
you know, as, as we're recording this podcast, right, we saw people like yesterday, I was
scrolling Twitter and all these people, like the conservative twins, they're these two,
I don't know, like influencers, they're, they're, they're huge. And they were
celebrating this $20,000, I mean, $20,000 stimulus checks for Americans that make
under $100,000 as like a win for America. You know, they were like, this is far,
this is, but I'm like, dude, this is, that's not first off, supporting that is not conservative.
Second off, it's not a win at all. They're going to print this money from the Federal Reserve and
further devalue the dollar that everybody else, you know, is already struggling to buy groceries.
This is going to buy Americans like three or four. That's hot money on the streets, right?
So it's a hyperinflation. Right. I mean, that's not, that's,
there's nothing conservative about that. This is the same status garbage that,
that Biden did during COVID with his stimulus checks. And it's not just the stimulus checks
either, right? It's like, it's the cheering for the National Guard deployments and the cities.
It's the embrace of these terrorists. It's the total abandonment of limited government. It really is.
Like, they're like, give us that standing army that the forefathers warned us about. You know,
that's conservative. So my question is, it's a two-parter, man. So what, what do you think
causes this profound cognitive dissonance? Like, why are people so, who call themselves
conservative now, like such the biggest cheerleaders for these policies that
are objectively statist? And, and to follow that up, if this is just what the system does,
if the very nature of political power is to corrupt principles and turn every movement
into like a parody of itself, then how on earth can we continue to expect this very system
to be the solution to the problem that it created?
Yeah, I, of course, I, you know, I wish I had all the frequent answers to your questions.
But I don't, you know, it's very easy to say, well, we should decentralize and create
parallel systems. And of course, that's true. And, you know, everybody's working really hard on that.
But, but you still have this problem of this gigantic corporate state that were the biggest,
meanest, most monstrous corporate state in the history of humanity is still exists. And
it's a grave threat and something has to be done to tear it down, right?
Maybe the best way to think about what's happening right now is it's round one. I
do think it's important to recognize something that, and speaking from the standpoint of history,
the Trump administration has tried to be reformist in the sense that they attempted,
they attempted a hostile takeover of Washington. That, this is the very first time in a hundred
years that anything like this has ever happened. The administrative state, as we know it, began
to be built sometime in the 1890s, but it didn't really get going until after World War I.
And it's just grown and grown and grown and grown to be this terrible fourth branch of government
about which people have known very little, but is actually in charge of the system. They work
very tightly with all the corporations, with media, you know, so they have a retail branch,
you know, and it's a beast of unfathomable size, depth, and broadness of scope.
And every president in the course of the 20th century has gotten elected, discovered that this
was true, that he was really just a powerless putz. And he names cabinet ministers like, I'm the head
of housing, I'm the head of labor. And they get to good parking place and then a nice office
and then everybody tells them to go fuck themselves. So, you know, whatever my language. So now you had,
you had, I'm not sure if you still, yeah, I'm going to say you kind of still do, you have an
administration in office that's desperately trying to do something about this problem in the
sense that like, give power back to the people, power of inconsistently apply that that is, and
they've had a little bit of success in some areas. But all of official Washington's pushing back
on it. And so maybe this is just round one. I don't know, this is the first time anything like
this has ever been attempted. And so I'm sympathetic. But, but they're not making a great deal of
progress. I would have, I think I would have expected more progress and we're just not seeing
it. I mean, they had beautifully laid plans. But by the 100th day, it looked like they just
lost steam. And now here we are, you're going into this dark winter months and everybody's just down
in the mouth like, Oh, God, I guess the system can't be reformed. Well, I don't know, maybe,
maybe it can at some uncertain point in the future. I, I'm all for parallel systems, all for
decentralization, all this stuff is great. But we have to dismantle this machinery at the top
one way or the other. We've got to, we've got to get rid of it. I'm not sure how we've
never like history doesn't tell us what this looks like when you have a corporate administrative
hegemon that's running essentially everything outside of any kind of democratic mandate.
You know, how does such a system get uprooted? And I don't think we know the answer to that.
Yeah, man, absolutely. And one of the things that I definitely want to touch on, you know,
when we're talking about this, like corporate administrative hegemon and, you know, the sort
of juxtaposition between, you know, some of the decent things that the administration may have had,
you know, in the works in the first 100 days versus, you know, now what we're seeing
really with this massive push and embrace of technocracy within the Trump administration,
particularly the figures like Peter Thiel and Palantir, Larry Ellison and Oracle and the way
that they're very quite obviously marching in lockstep to implement some of these same agendas
that are on the board for, you know, Civil World Economic Forum when it comes to
agenda 2030 and the digital ID, mass surveillance, carbon credits, and even with the way that the
manufactured border crisis has been utilized to sort of create or rather expect upon this police
state on the US border further implementing biometric surveillance and all these sorts of things.
And, you know, so where do you see it going in that regard?
This is a terrifying prospect. I mean, what I've begun to understand,
this is very difficult for libertarians to conceive of, but a lot of that crowd and I have
to include to some extent Elon Musk in this, but I guess Peter Thiel is a better example of this.
When they're attacking the, when they're attacking government, they're attacking
analog government and old fashioned government, right? Like public to public sector.
What they want is to set up their own privatized government that's in league with the remnants
of whatever state they leave in place that is much more profitable, much more powerful,
much more effective, much more intrusive. I mean, I don't know at what point this
occurred to me. Maybe it was like day 120 or something like that. I suddenly had this thought
in my head, what if they dismantle the old fashioned analog state and build a dystopian
largely privatized technocratic state? And we all in five years from now look back and go,
geez, she was better in the old days. This is the terrifying thing. And I tell you what,
we need to start broadening our understanding of what the state is. And I'll just give you a
quick example. So Brownstone uses Amazon services for its publishing. And we have
20 books and we don't keep inventory. If you order the book, they print the book and they send
it up. And we make some money from that. And mostly we get the word out and it's all good. And,
you know, the old ethos of the internet, we're all cooperating together. Oh, we don't have to
do everything because other people are going to help us to do it. And we have this divisional
labor and everything that everybody trusts everybody. Well, maybe yesterday I tried to
log in to see how book sales were going. They said, up, you need to be verified.
I do. Yeah. Do you have a choice? You have to get verification.
I said, here we go. So I went in there and I said, okay, click the, and we've all done this.
You click the button to get verified. Well, why do I need to get verified? And everything's
been fine. I've been using Amazon print on demand now for 10, 20 years. It's never
been a problem. Suddenly, now they want all my data. Next thing you know, I'm standing in front
of the camera. I'm holding up a passport. I'm coughing up my home address and phone number.
And, you know, like, so now suddenly Amazon knows absolutely everything about me and they said,
okay, thanks very much. Took all my data and went, went off with it. It was like,
what are they doing? But keep in mind that Amazon has a contract worth tens of billions
of dollars from the National Security Administration to host and the CIA to host
their website, their data for them. I mean, Amazon is a government company.
Yeah. Right. So it's great. They send you a bar of soap and a package of noodles and they bring
it to your front door. That's tremendous. That's not what their money is, right? The
money is in obsequious service to the intelligence community. That's where their money is. And that's
that's that's what they do. It's an it might as well be a division of the CIA at this point.
And so when they're asking for your data, you know, this is like, it's a CIA wrote you and
said, I'm going to do it. I would say, yeah, what about my rights? But Amazon,
oh, shit. Okay. I'll go ahead and do it. So this is this is the
your question about technocracy is really important. I think what we need to start realizing is that
that the Teals and the Palantirers of this world and to some extent with the Trump
administration is the handmade is setting up a different kind of state than we've ever seen
in human history. The most intrusive, the most surveillance oriented, the most privacy
invading and potentially the most powerful state you can imagine because they can control your life
without guns and cops and military. They can control it by cutting off access to your bank,
shutting down your car, locking you out of your home, essentially ruining your life. And you'll
do anything to keep that from happening. So therefore they can control you, you know,
entirely. Yeah, excellent points. And I think the point that really concerns me as well as
free market enthusiasts, you know, these are private companies. So on the one hand,
we might even have some Ancaps or Republicans who are cheering this on, right?
Oh, entirely. We saw this in COVID, you know, when when the private companies want to impose
vaccine mandates, all the usual dunderheaded, stupid chicken heads in the libertarian movement said,
well, they're private companies that can do whatever they want.
Yeah. Not understanding that these, the edicts were coming straight from government,
that the products that are imposing on their employees were never part of their labor contract.
And the products are themselves shielded from all liability claims. So if your, if your
company kills you, you have absolutely no recourse. That is not a free market. And yet, sure enough,
libertarians very reliably went out there and said, the private companies can do whatever they want.
So I think we need to get a little more careful about thinking about, about these companies. You
know, what's a private company is the Portuguese bakery down the street from me. Okay, that's
definitely a private company. Google, Facebook, Amazon. I don't know. They're main clients and
customers of the government themselves. And if the customer is always right under capitalism,
means the state's always right. So they're, they're retail branches of the government.
I would say the same thing is true of, of pharmacies like Walgreens and CVS, you know,
they, they're the ones who took ivermectin off the shelves, wouldn't distribute Hydrox
Chloroquine, even though it's prescribed by the doctors. They're the main distributors of the, of
the shots. You know, they are the retail branch of the government. And like you, you need to
realize this if you want to have a sophisticated understanding of the way the world really works.
Yeah. Oh, 100%. It's the worst type of cronyism.
Yeah.
Let's take it at a level deeper here. Speaking of KYC and these types of things. I know
you were one of the earliest voices that I heard about talking Bitcoin. And probably back in 2013,
I had no idea even what it was. And it's crazy to think that now it's trading over 100K per coin,
you know, but over the past few years, the Bitcoin brand has shifted. It's kind of gone
more mainstream. It's treated more like a stock or a digital gold and Satoshi's original
peer to peer vision. It seems to have faded, you know, the one that could disrupt central
banking. It seems to be completely gone. And there's this new narrative that's kind of emerged.
And people like Roger Vier has argued that Bitcoin was hijacked by special interests. And he even
published a book about that last year. Glad that he's free, of course. But some even go further.
And I'm really curious about your thoughts on this. Some suggests that it could have been
an intelligence operation from the very start. We just had a guest who spoke about this
a couple podcasts back. And with, you know, these state back stable coins entering the
mix, it does feel like crypto is unfortunately being kind of absorbed into the very system that it was
meant to challenge. So yeah, like what are your thoughts on the current state of Bitcoin and
crypto more broadly? And has the movement been co-opted by these institutions?
It's definitely been co-opted. I mean, I'm not sure what point it happened. I think it
was going to be like, so I got involved with Bitcoin. I think my first article was 2010.
But by January 2013, I was all in very excited. I don't know, maybe it was an
intelligence thing for the beginning. My guess is there was a team that invented that released
the protocol. And they used good guy frontman who wrote all the rhetoric, you know, like the
white paper and all the rest of it. But they were black hats as part of the development team,
probably intelligence officials that had left open this great question of the block size
for the future. And as soon as it started to scale, as soon as it started to get adopted,
we're talking about 2014, 2015, they constrained the block size so that
it was necessarily the case that it slowed down and became more expensive than
alternative methods of transmitting money, old fashioned dollars. And then
there was the same period when Venmo was made in squares, suddenly you could charge credit cards
over, micro payments became possible even with conventional credit cards, and then Zell and
whatever. All these other alternative means of bypassing ACH were suddenly innovated at the very
same time that Bitcoin became essentially unusable. When I remember 2016, I was starting to send
some Bitcoin to a friend and I realized it was going to cost me more to send than the money
I was sending. I was going to send 20 bucks and it was $60 to somebody to send it. What
happened to my old friend? Well, this was the throttling of the block size. They deliberately
made it so that the damn thing couldn't scale to become what we all believed it was supposed to be.
And this was definitely done by the core development team, the core developer team,
which is the biggest bunch of jerks you've ever met in your life. I went to a Satoshi
round table about this period and the core developers were just snooty and kept to
themselves. They wouldn't go to the sessions with us. Even when they go into the swimming pools,
they would go over there swimming by themselves and not talking to anybody else. These were some
real bad guys and they're the ones that kept the block size where it was. And then there's
a big controversy about Segwit, I guess it was, some method by which it could scale,
but they kept talking about second-layer solutions and color color and fellas crap.
And then famously came along the huddle movement. So the huddle movement was
a direct contradiction to everything that happened the previous five years. So the
previous five years is like adopt Bitcoin, use Bitcoin to pay. Oh, accept Bitcoin on your
retail site. Oh, use Bitcoin when you're making purchases and everybody would see
it with that. Because why would we do that? Because that's the essence of money. Like
if you get it into wider use, it becomes more like a money. There's no such thing as a money
that you don't use. It's ridiculous. Well, suddenly the huddle movement came along,
huddle, don't spend your Bitcoin, don't accept Bitcoin, don't adopt Bitcoin,
just all the OGs, hang on to what you have and let's all get rich. That was it. And
it was just unbelievable that this happened. So it was a complete betrayal. If anybody
doubts the story, this should look at Roger Veer's book. I wrote the introduction to it.
He lays it out in great detail. It was definitely intelligence level deep state plot to destroy
this great innovation, direct it into a new path. And then Roger, of course,
I think became a champion of the forking with Bitcoin Cash, which had some promise,
but then that was forked. And then now there's 100,000 other cryptocurrencies out there.
The only ones that are really promising are the ones that are the private coins. Because
the old fashioned Bitcoin or whatever is as a financial technology, it is traceable to a much
greater extent than your current dollar based bank account. They only keep records
in your bank for like seven years or something. Bitcoin is forever. Everything you've ever done
with Bitcoin is going to last forever. And law enforcement or just a disgruntled family member
and a court filing, your life is unfolds before everyone else's eyes forever long after you're
dead. So that's the essence of the blockchain. It's like a gift to the government like
nothing else in human history. Exactly. It's almost like the CIA created it.
It's such a wild contrast to where we were with this like 10 years ago. And as Jason mentioned,
we saw you speak. We actually talked for a little while in Libertopia. We were there at
representing the Free Thall project. And you were one of the first people to champion
Bitcoin's utility, even mentioned using it to like buy some extracurricular substances online.
And I loved it, man. It was cool. It's a perfect example of the permissionless,
you know, censorship resistant power. But things are much different now. And we're
realizing that and, you know, that early like anarchic utility is a million miles away from
what we're seeing today, you know, million miles away. It's been one of the most
devastating things in my life is to have my, you know, my techno utopian dreams of anarchy by
virtue of technology, shepherded by technology, that that dream that that I wrote about, you know,
so lovingly in two books, one was called It's a Jetsons World, the other is called A Beautiful
Anarchy. And they were just they embodied the ethos of the time. And well, none of that
became true. Yeah, none of it. And it just became even worse. So today I was reading for the first
time, a central bank has purchased a portfolio of Bitcoin, the Czech national bank, and a bunch of
US dollar peg stablecoins. Imagine that. And also some tokenized dollar deposits. So
now they're framing it as they're like they're saying, you know, it's just a little test
to gain experience. And of course, you know, they came out and simultaneously came out today
and reiterated that they're never going to use Bitcoin as a reserve asset. But this isn't
like an isolated incident. It's part of the exact same thing that Jason and I have been talking about
on this podcast and Don too, you know, we saw the Trump administration create the strategic
Bitcoin reserve back in March, and that kind of gave all the crypto bros a little like help.
But you know, this is a Trojan horse. And we've been talking about that for a long time.
And now we're seeing central banks actively buying. And we're watching this co option
happen right in real time. And they're not just buying Bitcoin, right? They're lumping
in with stablecoins and these tokenized coins that are going to be even worse than CBDCs.
And this is the end game like what would feel and what we're just talking about this,
the technocratic or the technologic utopia that you mentioned is basically this is the
other side of that coin where it's a fucking it's a technocratic dystopia. And where central
banks absorb the technology of crypto not to embrace like permissionless money, but to
hijack Bitcoin brand and legitimize their own real goal, you know, of tokenized bills,
regulated stablecoins, like total black rock style financial surveillance. And
as you mentioned, you know, privacy coins, like I know I have, well, I know Jason does too,
we have our own specific tools that we think are the ways out of this like like Xano,
you know, like things that are private by default and technologically incapable of being
co opted. But from your perspective, what do you what do you think is the solution to this
problem? Like how do we stop this? Maybe not so much hijacking how do we how do we stop this
or the fight against this tyrannical surveillance money that is one of the saddest things that
I've witnessed is the way in which the entire Bitcoin community that I helped shepherd into
being has been completely co opted by power. And I'm not even sure how many of them even
know it. You know, I've tried to explain it to them many times. I have a very, very good friend
of mine who I trust a lot. Who's a good guy, you know, and a good solid Rothbardian libertarian
anarchist type and brilliant person. But he got all excited about Bitcoin maximalism.
And I've never been able to talk him out of it. You know, he's every other coin is
only because it matters. Well, it turns out the only thing he really cares about with regard to
Bitcoin is making money. Yeah. And it was like, you know, but but my friend, that wasn't supposed
to be the idea. The idea was to create a freedom technology that would usher in, you know,
human rights and privacy and freedom. You know, it wasn't really about just
fattening your bank account. Then he'll just respond to me like, Oh, shut up. I don't care
about your fucking idea, your ideals or whatever. I bet your ideals. You're just you're just mad
that you bailed out of Bitcoin, you know, and and and are not rich as a result.
You know, I don't know. I don't know how long it's been true that revolutionary movements
just get entirely bought off by a promise of social prestige and money
and career goals and that kind of stuff. But I tell you, it's depressing to see the way this has
happened to the Bitcoin community. It's just sad to me. And I know there's some people who are
doing this and they don't, you know, part of the maximalist thing that they don't know what
they're involved with. But I'm immediately my hackles go up as soon as somebody described
myself as a Bitcoin maximalist, I just back way off. I think, okay, you may not be deep state,
but you might be. Yeah, I got a certainly a whiff of that. I was at the Bitcoin conference
in Vegas this past year and in 2025, I got free press passes. The only reason why I was there.
But yeah, it's certainly all focused on the maximalism side of things. And they're
they're all in, you know, they're all so excited about it. I just it's hard for me
to be on board with that. Even though we've seen it develop from its infancy, just knowing where it's
at now, it's truly hard to really support it. And this kind of brings me to another point here. Matt
just mentioned BlackRock. And I kind of want to talk about BlackRock because it feels even more
dystopian than the hijacking of Bitcoin. Because just recently, you know, Larry Fink
announced the beginning of tokenization of everything. And basically, the BlackRock
wants to tokenize everything that the real estate, the mortgages, the treasuries, even
carbon credits. And of course, you know, they always frame it as innovation and convenience
and all these things, right? So I was wondering where you see this going? Is this like a much
bigger existential threat than something like, you know, foreign policy or China and Russia?
All this consolidation with BlackRock has been enabled by the debt based economy and the
inflation. I mean, if we had good old fashioned gold standard, these gigantic financial companies
just wouldn't exist. So, you know, they're parasites on the public. And yet it's the
private sector, right? So they're buying up homes all over the place and realizing the dream
of the world economic forum. I don't know. I just think that fiat money is the great
original sin of modern capitalism. And it's kind of corrupting everything.
You mentioned stablecoins earlier. You know, the stablecoins are really nothing other than a method
by which government bonds are going to be able to maintain their credit standing. You know,
it's just another market for T-bills. And that's all it is. So if you can shift over
the money, transmit or transmittal services over to companies that are invested with trillions
and trillions and trillions of dollars in T-bills, then you've created another market for your debt
and enable more government spending and more power. So there's just like no getting off this
thing. From an individual point of view, I mean, you've mentioned several private
coins that are really great. And I have friends of mine that live off these things and they do
very well. I'm not that technologically sophisticated. Oh, I got to tell you,
you know, I used to go travel the world speaking about Bitcoin. But after the thing just became
unusable and kind of corrupt, I just kind of lost interest in it. And then I've turned down
every single invitation for me to speak up about Bitcoin for about the last eight or nine
years because for seven or eight years, because I don't have anything to say.
You know, what am I going to stand up in front of you and say buy Bitcoin, hold it and then just
get rich? I mean, what else is there to say? I don't even understand what goes on at these
Bitcoin conferences. Like what's anybody even talking about besides, you know, the goofy
plans to put luxury cars on the blockchain or, you know, here's my new sunglasses on the
blockchain. You know, beyond that, beyond this stupid gizmos like that, what actually is there
left to say about this? Because if I stopped writing about it, if I stopped speaking about it,
because it just became like a grift in a way. And it just disgusts me.
Yeah. No, I mean, that's, I think that's called integrity and good for you for doing that. And,
you know, it was exactly what you mentioned. I mean, it was almost like a TP USA event.
I mean, there was like big, very overly dramatic stage presence. And I mean, yeah, it was,
it was kind of silly. It was fun in some ways just because people had the enthusiasm and the
excitement and you could feel it in the air, but nothing of substance. Yeah. I mean, there was no
talk about privacy coins, how we, you know, decentralized, none of that stuff, you know.
It certainly was a stranger in a foreign land.
Yeah, I used to give these big lectures. I've traveled the world giving lectures about
the history of money and the place of Bitcoin within it and giving complicated lectures about
reserve requirements for banks and the stability and stability within the free banking systems
and all these things. And none of that's interesting to anybody anymore, you know,
because it's not really about the ideas. And it's certainly not about ideals.
You know, God bless Roger Ver, he's kept his principles all this time.
And, you know, and, you know, Interpol went after him and arrested him and threatened to
deport the guy, you know, or bring him to the US. And he threw a lot of hard work, got out of it.
He probably, if Camel had won, he definitely would be in jail today. So, you know, there's
certain things that Trump administration has done good, you know, getting Ross out of prison
and so on. But I just said Mario Roger, because, you know, he could have gone along with the
racket and he just didn't. It's just like, there's something in him that just cannot be
just will not go there. You know, he just he believes strongly in liberty and
was the first principle. I wish there were more people like him, really.
Oh, I wholeheartedly agree, man. That's one great dude right there.
Yeah.
He was supposed to be on a podcast last year, but we got our times mixed up
with Spain and everything else. So it never materialized.
I think he was in Korea, then.
Yeah, he was actually in Korea.
We were all mixed up, I bet.
Yeah, he was in Korea, man. It was the most disgusting thing, but he was
arrested and basically put under house arrest and we're in an ankle break. So I said,
I'll look himself. I mean, the Bitcoin Maxers were just celebrating.
They just thought, oh, I know, man. Max Kaiser was all over that. And he started
and told me about my mother because I was standing up for Roger on the next date.
It's crazy. Yeah. I just don't understand that, man. The dude championed liberty.
There's no reason to attack him for that. Like, this is the guy that's trying to help people
become, you know, self-sufficient and fight against this digital tyranny that he saw coming
so long ago. There's absolutely no hate that should be directed towards that, dude.
Oh, man.
But, uh,
Yeah, what a great man. It inspires me. You know, gentlemen, I've been thinking about
this a lot because I, you know, let's just say 10, certainly 12 years ago, I believe that we were
minting libertarians, you know, by the many dozens every day, right? I traveled the world
for students for liberty, spoke to the students, you know, it's like, there are all these
organizations, all these people I felt like even in 2012 or something, I started a new
company called Liberty.me, which I thought was going to be a new social network for libertarians.
And yeah, it was kind of a stupid idea because I hadn't thought through it very well.
Plus, I wasn't a majority holder of equity in the company. So I was basically in a position
not making any decisions about the company at all, which is something you should never do.
But that's what we do. If you don't have the capital, you get venture capital and then venture
capitalists are running your company until they get sick of it and they sell it, which is essentially
what happened. But the point is that I thought that something great was happening in the world
through our educational work. And then it just, it just all collapsed partially because of
intellectual infantilism. People started learning their libertarians through
libertarianism through memes instead of like books or careful thought or struggle. They were just
joining, I don't know, for to get a good, you know, hook up on weed or chicks or, you know,
whatever. And then as soon as, as soon as the winds changed and the career prospects
changed, you know, they bailed entirely until the COVID period when most libertarians
were entirely for the lockdowns. I mean, reason magazine was celebrating the glory of masks and,
you know, I mean, it was unbelievable what happened. And now we just live among the
rubble. I mean, whatever we thought existed or was developing was so thin and fragile
and unsophisticated and uncourageous that it just fell apart with the slightest change of winds.
And it's, it's a shock to me. So I don't know, I don't know what that implies for the future,
but one of the reasons I started Brownstone Institute is because I wanted to rethink this,
you know, let's take apart the machinery of the state one piece at a time, examine it,
see the best way we can reform it, dismantle it, whatever. What are the methods by which we can
achieve? Not some weird ideological vision, but a plain sense of human rights and liberties that
everybody intuitively has. How do we see that realized in this world to stop this growth
of the surveillance state, stop the therapeutic poisoning state, stop the systematic depopulation
efforts that are going to stop the secret governments that are running our lives outside
of democratic control and see something like a revival of the enlightenment vision of people
like Thomas Payne or Thomas Jefferson, you know, like, how do we do that? And so my purpose
of Brownstone was like finally to have an independent think tag that would work through
these kinds of problems. I realized I could not do that with any of the legacy institutions that
exist because they're all in the pay of corporate donors that otherwise corrupts filled with
careerists, whatever, whatever. And it got boring to me. So I don't know,
rather than just curse the darkness, I decided to invoke a shade light of candle. So that's
what Brownstone is trying to be. Man, you did a great job with it too. Thank you.
Hey, free thinkers, this is Matt Agarist, and I'm going to take a quick pause to remind
you of something really important. First off, apologies for the interruption,
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So thank you for being part of this journey, for sharing these ideas and for standing with us.
We're at the end of the show here, but like we always, I don't know if you know
that or not, but the Free Thought Project podcast always likes to end on a positive note,
because sometimes these conversations can get a little dark. So before I get to that,
man, I want to thank you for coming on. Man, you've been a huge influence.
I know Jason told you that earlier, but you've been a huge influence in my life,
you know, honestly, like since even before Jason, I saw you speak at Libertopia back in 2014.
It was exciting that we got invited to that and we got, we were like,
oh, Jeffrey Tuck is here. It was cool. So that's great. That's very sweet.
Well, I tell you what, we're fighting every day and I will say this,
I have never been under attack. Now that I've ever been in my life, then I am right now.
I am trolled. I'm followed from restaurant to restaurant from bar to bar. Just this last
week when I was at children's health defense conference with a booth and a couple of undercover
journalists, you know, were tricking. Yeah. And so this is going on all the time. And
all that tells me, I mean, what's this stuff? Like if, if what we're doing were not effective,
they wouldn't bother. So to me, I look at this and go, well, you know, we're over the target,
you know, we're doing the right thing. We're, we're taking on the real enemies.
If we weren't being effective, they would leave us alone. But why would they even care?
I mean, a political ran a wicked attack on me the other day. And right now Kaiser Health News
is preparing another one. New York Times, you know, I sat for a two hour interview with New
York Times reports. I'm like, very nice lady, but you know, probably when some of the article
comes out, it's going to be a wicked attack. I don't know. But I feel like I'm in a weird
way, you know, the collapse of that old, old libertarian movement that we imagine ourselves
to be part of has made room for some really highly effective, targeted efforts to dismantle power
and, and protect liberty and, and make it possible for something new to emerge on the other side
of this. I didn't mean to sound depressing. I'm actually, in a strange way, more optimistic now
than I ever have been, because I now see the practical means by which we can actually make
genuine progress, not create utopia, but make genuine progress.
Yeah, for sure. And I think the Brownstone Institute is a huge part of that, man. It's a,
it was very well needed, especially during the COVID times, you know, like there was so much
wild, crazy stuff out there on the internet. People thought that the Kim Trails were magnetizing
their brains so that hammers could stick to their heads. I mean, it was some crazy stuff, man.
Yeah. Are you being that type of?
But I mean, and now like, as you document in that article, like it's changed, you know,
people are now running like well funded hoaxes to manufacture this, like these studies to
try to smear their opponents. And I'm very glad it was you that they came up to and were able to,
you know, they just got thwarted in their, in their tracks. But anyway, man, we've covered a lot
of ground today, you know, like a whole bunch of ground. And not all of it was like doom and
gloom, you know, but what, you know, we always like to try to concentrate on solutions here.
So for our final question here, it's a white pill. If you had a magic wand,
obviously the Brownstone Institute is a piece of this, but like we're going to speak
theoretically here. If you had a magic wand and could wave it right now to fix like the root
cause of all these things that we've talked about today, like the status mindset, this mindset,
this economic insanity, this war on truth. What would it look like? And what would that solution
actually be? Well, you know what I'm going to say. I mean, it's the same thing everybody
would say. I mean, we got to unplug the money machine. Like if we just get rid of the Fed,
we'd bring back health, thrift, prosperity, some degree of economic rationality,
independence, limited government, the budget would be balanced. I mean, that one solution
of just eliminating the fiat money machine at the Federal Reserve would be the single
solution, I think that would fix more than anything else. And I don't know how that happens,
but I love just saying it over and over again in the Fed. Ron Paul's been chanting it for decades,
man. And it's so true. We need more Thomas Massies, more Rand Paul's, more Ron Paul's,
you know, more Justin Amash's. I mean, Trump even said he was going to audit the Fed,
but that quickly went to the waste. Oh yeah, I remember that. Man, Jeffrey,
thank you so much for coming on today, man. And before we finally turn it off here,
obviously, thebrownstoneinstitute.org is the website, but where else can people
find your work and support it? Yeah, I don't know if you know this, but I write,
well, six days a week I write for E-POP Times, which is the fourth largest newspaper in the U.S.,
almost the third. It's actually the largest circulation in the last
half of this time. So they've given me a daily column, which is something I never imagined
in my life that I would ever have. And they also have a physical newspaper that comes out weekly.
So I think it's strange. Our passions emerge in unexpected places when they called me up
and said, we won't give you a daily column. Well, I don't know. I can't think of anybody
who would give me a daily column. So yeah, great. So yeah, so if you want to read my
writings on every subject you can possibly ever imagine, you can go there.
Yeah, I've read multiple of them. I liked it whenever. That was like three or four years ago,
right? That you had since you've been there?
Yeah, yeah. I've been there for, I guess, three years, something like that.
They haven't fired me yet, which is incredible. We'll put those links below the podcast description.
Jeffrey, thank you so much for coming on today, man. This has been a great conversation.
Thank you, Mr. Tucker. My pleasure. Thank you so much, guys.
Thank you for listening to the Free Thought Project podcast. And please don't forget to
rate, review and subscribe. Free minds, free people.