Transcript: The Savvy Street Show Interviews Jeffrey Tucker

 

Date of recording: January 24, 2024, The Savvy Street Show

Hosts: Vinay Kolhatkar and Roger Bissell. Guest: Jeffrey Tucker

 

Editor’s Note: The Savvy Street Show’s AI-generated transcripts are edited for removal of repetitions and pause terms, and for grammar and clarity. References are added in parentheses. Material edits are advised to the reader as edits [in square brackets].

 

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Good evening and welcome to the Savvy Street Show, and this time, too, we have a distinguished guest, and I will let Roger Bissell, my co-host, introduce the guest. Roger is a musician, writer, editor, and philosopher. Welcome to the show again as a co-host, Roger.

 

Roger Bissell:

Well, thank you, Vinay, and welcome to Jeffrey Tucker. Jeffrey is a very well-known figure in libertarian circles. He has written thousands of articles in scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages. I’m not sure I could even name five languages, let alone speak or write in them, but his most recent book looks to me like it’s Liberty or Lockdown. And, of course, it dealt with the pandemic. He writes a daily column on economics for the Epoch Times. I receive that newspaper and I get to see his columns and read them and enjoy them. And he speaks widely on economics, technology, culture, social philosophy—quite a range of subjects. Welcome to the show, Jeffrey, and I have a question for you here.

 

Jeffrey Tucker:

All right, let’s go.

 

Roger Bissell:

In 2014, you did a book on do-it-yourself freedom, and a few years later, you were flying over Sao Paulo, Brazil, in South America, and you gave a description of what you saw out the airplane window, and you had this kind of a vision or realization that freedom is inevitable, and the world can’t be ruled by a global government. More recently, you had a column, I think in 2021, called “The Battle for Truth in a World of Lies,” and I think you said that when civilization is in danger of being destroyed—well, this is actually an observation by Ludwig von Mises—that there is really no safe space and it’s kind of what they call “all hands on deck.” Everybody has to do what they can to help fight for freedom. So, in between the do-it-yourself time and today, have you kind of had a change of heart or change of perspective? And if you did, then what really took you from the one perspective to the other?

 

Jeffrey Tucker:

I’ve gone through a big change in my outlook.

I definitely understand your intuition, and I feel it, too, that I’ve gone through a big change in my outlook. But I think the tendency —because it’s my brain, my life, I tend to see an integration between the two, but I can see why it would be difficult for others to see that—is to think it goes something like this: In 2014, when I wrote that article, I had been struggling for years with the work of F. A. Hayek to understand what he meant by “the unplanned order” and the impossibility of central management. And, it suddenly occurred to me that the knowledge necessary to actually achieve anything in the social order, anything like a plan, anything like an intellectual’s vision or that of a central committee will always be elusive because the human mind is too complicated, so complicated that we cannot fully understand each other or even fully understand ourselves. Okay, so all we can do is sort of find a way around dark rooms looking for light switches. And we do find them from time to time, and then we build things. We build things like Sao Paulo, or we build things like Sydney. But, the most vibrant and interesting aspects of the world in which we live are not a product of planning, they’re a product of finding the light switches, you know, following the signals, and cobbling together and coordinating our activities with another to better our lives. And I think that was the insight I came to. As part of that insight, I realized that there was no chance anyone or anything could ever really control the world. Now, back in those days, on the other hand, I was also, I would say, mildly infected with a virus of inevitability. You know, this was 2014, where it seemed at that time—and we’re talking about 10 years ago—that through digital media, we were going to do an end-run around the old-fashioned states. My theory was that the state was dealing in the physical world, which is easier to control, and it’s always done that for thousands of years, but now we’ve migrated lots of our communication, our lives, and our productivity to the digital world, and that would always be elusive of state control. And that was my simple model. From that I concluded, like some dumbass Victorian in 1890, that there was nothing that was gonna stop the inevitable triumph of liberty, which was wrong. That was completely wrong. That forecast was idiotic, looking back at it, because the state gradually over the subsequent 10 years got its tentacles very deeply involved in the digital world through the typical methods, right? Reward the biggest industries, find out what it is they wanted, what they have and what they wanted, buy it, market it, sell it, make government very much part of their enterprise project. And next thing you know, they’re serving their masters, which is the government. So, there’s never been a more faithful industry in terms of obsequent servitude to state power as Big Tech, except maybe media and the munitions industry. And so—and that was already true, I would say, before the lockdowns hit in 2020. So, when lockdowns hit in 2020, states around the world, the global state, were able to deploy every one of its tentacles that it had—Pharma and Media and Tech and Communication and governments all over the world—to enact a program of appalling, despotic central planning that even went so far as to tell us how far we can stand close to each other, and imprisoned us in our homes, and abolished even Christian holidays. Okay, so totalitarianism on that scale, on a global scale, had never been practiced before in the history of the world. So, far from being correct in my prediction of the inevitable triumph of liberty, my dopey optimism caused me to miss the most egregious experiment in despotic central planning ever deployed on the human population. That’s my mea culpa. But partially because I was so wrong, I threw myself into that fight in the biggest conceivable way. And I’ve probably written well over 1,000 articles on the topic. I put together a collection. That’s my newest book called Life After Lockdown. I had to choose 75 articles written in the last three years. And I found myself faced with about 1,250 articles.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Thank you for your candor because not many intellectuals admit that they were wrong.

Wow, that’s terrific. You are an extremely prolific writer. And thank you for your candor because not many intellectuals admit that they were wrong. Like you said, Trump also hasn’t admitted he was wrong. And on that, I want to ask you a question about the Marxist notion of “accelerationism,” which effectively says that you make things that are bad much worse, and then you can get a drastic change. But, the drastic change can go in any direction. You could get a Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler, or you could get a Javier Milei after decades of stagflation. It’s unpredictable. Do you agree with that essentially Marxist thesis?

 

Jeffrey Tucker:

No, I think it’s grossly irresponsible. We should never wish for things to get worse. And unfortunately, there are some libertarians who do. They think, oh, well, everything’s going to fall apart and then we’re going to rebuild. Who’s going to take responsibility if it doesn’t work out that way? Are you going to take responsibility? And what does it mean to take responsibility? What if you’re wrong? So, we should never wish for things to get worse. We should always work for things to get better and hope they don’t get worse. Now, it is true that sometimes things have to get worse before they get better. But it’s just immoral to hope for that and much less to work for it.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Thank you—and a related question, you spoke about the tentacles of the government. I have a definition of the Deep State, which is a network of unelected bureaucrats in the “alphabet” agencies, including the intelligence agencies and global NGOs like the United Nations (UN), WHO, and media—you mentioned Donald McNeil in your last article—and academia. That network is powerful enough not only to influence government policy, but even enact it. That’s what we call a Deep State. And they can enact it through regulation because regulation can be added on effectively as though it’s law by unelected bureaucrats. So, is there something like a Deep State, and I think you seem to say there is, how did it happen? What can we do to overcome it if it exists?

 

Jeffrey Tucker:

It’s really good for partisans of freedom to be aware of this. This is the number one most important target. We’ve got to figure out a way to get its claws off the social order. And I don’t know how we’re going to do that.

I think every country has a different story. I know the US story pretty well. Let me say in the first instance, there’s a new consciousness towards this, which some people call the “administrative state” or “bureaucratic state.” Glad to call it the Deep State. Some people want to reserve the term Deep State for the intelligence side of things, which is also fine. But, we have a problem with three-letter agencies across the board, whether they’re transparent or not, whether it’s the CIA or the Department of Labor. I mean, they’re both unelected. This is contrary to the theory of democracy. It’s contrary, and we don’t even have to use the word “democracy,” contrary to the idea that people should have some mechanism by which they can influence or even control the system under which they live, which I think every humane political philosophy believes. There should be some connectivity between the state and the people they rule and back and forth again. Well, the existence of the administrative state stops that. In a historical sense, the administrative state began with Louis XIV as a mechanism of control. So, he brought in the aristocracy and built a system of internal management of his own state that survived him, right? But, the administrative state is really different from what you would call a personal state. A personal state is one in which the head of state dies, and maybe all the elected leaders die, and the state dies with it. If that is not the case, that the head of state and all the legislators expire and the state continues to live on, then you have an administrative state. And it began with Louis Quatorze, but that was 500 years ago. Mostly in the 20th century—it became canonical and instantiated and entrenched through governments that seek to manage economies, run wars. World War I is especially devastating in this respect. If you have a government that purports to get you out of economic recession or get you into war or otherwise accomplish some big end, you’re going to have to appoint administrators. So, the state gets too big and too involved for the elected leaders to handle. They outsource their responsibility to permanent bureaucrats who are said to have professional expertise and political protection so they can do a good job. Of course, that was the theory of the administrative state, but the reality is that they’re unaccountable to the people and have come to exercise despotic power in all Commonwealth countries and in the US. And that is the reality. In the US, we have three branches of government. We have the elected legislature, we have the executive, and we have the courts. But, all three take a backseat to the number one thing, which is the fourth branch of government, which is the administrative state itself. So, it’s really good for partisans of freedom to be aware of this. This is the number one most important target. We’ve got to figure out a way to get its claws off the social order. And I don’t know how we’re going to do that. It’s never been done before, but it’s absolutely urgent that it happens sooner rather than later and happens in all Western countries.

 

Roger Bissell:

That’s for sure. Well, for years, I have heard commentators on TV, on the news, especially talking about some policy, and they would talk about the politicians who enacted it either being incompetent and just bumbling or that they had some nefarious end that they were trying to pursue, or maybe it was just a power grab. But the one tactic that I hear people suggesting is going on is…some particular, obnoxious policy might be a distraction to take our attention off what they’re really up to, as they say. And do you think that is any kind of realistic idea? For instance, during the pandemic, was there something beyond just shutting us down and making us do what they wanted? And if so, where can we go to look beneath the surface to see what’s going on? Who do we read? Well, of course we read you. But in general, where do we go to listen, for reliable analysis and news?

 

Jeffrey Tucker:

This is a difficult question. I will just answer it this way. Concerning the pandemic, my initial thought was that there was a kind of panic. And then I thought, no, this is really the unfolding of a plan and it’s a mistaken one, thinking that you can control infectious disease through social distancing and lockdowns. But then as time went on, I realized there was more going on. There were more interest groups involved. There was a censorship agenda, a desire to shut down the “anarchy” of the internet and once again create a kind of hegemonic sort of control over the public mind through a single voice on the media. And certainly, that would include controlling the internet. But then as even more time went on, I realized something quite devastating—and this is a fairly recent revelation—that everything that happened between March 2020 and December of that year was driven towards one central goal, which was to delay the population [response], keep everybody in a constant state of frenzy and panic until the vaccine rollout. And, that this had been the plan all along. This plan had been hatched in January of 2020, and they had promised a very early vaccine rollout.

I tell the story only to say that we’re four years deep into this. And it took me three-and-a-half years of that to figure out what I just told you.

They thought they were going to get it by the summer. That didn’t happen, so they kept delaying it and delaying it. So, everything that happened, that most horrible year of our lives, from the masking to the distancing to the hopping around and the constant disease panic, and the frenzy and the arrests and travel restrictions and all the rest of the bullshit was all designed to keep the population in a state of frenzy and in anticipation of the vaccine. They wanted the vaccine rolled out to the maximum number of people to administer the top number of shots, even to those people who were certain they didn’t need it. And the data did show that 99% of the public, even if the vaccine worked, did not need the shot. Because it turned out that something we knew very early on was that, you know, the pathogen in question really only posed a medically significant risk to the aged and infirm. Working age populations never needed this stupid thing in the first place. They wanted to maximize the number of customers for their shot. So, that’s why you lost a year of your life…it was for that reason. And I tell the story only to say that we’re four years deep into this. And it took me three-and-a-half years of that to figure out what I just told you.

 

Roger Bissell:

Right. I noticed that over the period of several years that it was a very rough sorting into red state, blue state, Republican, Democrat, but really there were a lot of people floating one way or another because of the fear factor that you’re talking about. You said several minutes ago that being aware of, making people aware of the swamp or the Deep State or the administrative state is a very important thing. Is there any hope for the two major political parties? Is there a hope that one of them will grab on to this issue seriously and sincerely and do something about it like Milei seems to be doing, hopefully, in Argentina, or are they the only game in town for political change and the best we can do is education or…not to ask you for an endorsement of any candidates, or a party, but just how do you look at the two major parties right now?

 

Jeffrey Tucker:

Well, I had assumed from the very beginning, because everybody was wrong on this, it was bipartisan, left, right, Republicans, Democrats, the Libertarians in the US…I don’t know what happened in Australia, but in the US they were grim. I mean, just terrible. The Students for Liberty was sending out messages…stay home, stay safe. It was unbelievable. And all these top [intellectuals]…Walter Block, my friend, Mr. Anarchist, was endorsing lockdowns. It was so bad. And I had assumed that because so many people were wrong, that there would be this wake-up moment where everybody would realize they were wrong and there would be a big rush in the other direction. Oh, we were wrong. Now let’s get this, let’s apologize and get it right. I was, again, completely wrong on that. What actually happened is that people got embarrassed about their positions and entrenched in them and have been unwilling to admit it. So even to this day, you will not see most of the public figures that were backing pandemic lockdowns and shot mandates recant their position. They just refuse to because they’re just plainly unwilling to admit their own error. And this, unfortunately, applies to vast swaths of the population that sacrificed weddings and funerals and celebrations and travel, that made great sacrifices for what they believed was the common good because we’re all in this together, and so on. They lost a great deal of their liberty and their prosperity in their lives and their personal volition along the way, and they don’t want to believe it was all in vain. People just don’t want to believe that. So as a consequence, we’re far from having a reckoning on this whole thing. I mean, the terrible truth was that it was all a complete waste. There wasn’t one thing you sacrificed that did any good for anybody at any point. It was all a disaster. And that’s just a very hard truth.

 

Roger Bissell:

Well, Jeffrey, you are a rare person. The whole problem of sunken costs. “We’re halfway across the muddy Mississippi and the damn fool says to push on,” you know, so many people just say, well, no one will ever take me credibly again, if I admit that I made a mistake, but you have to, you have to come clean. We have to move on.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Absolutely, I think your credibility increases if you do that. Certainly, yours has. So outside of the major political parties, like in the Libertarian Party—and there are a few candidates for their nomination, and there’s RFK Jr.—Do any of the outsider candidates seem exciting to you at all?

 

Jeffrey Tucker:

Well, as you know, Trump is this very night [January 23 in the US] tying up his nomination for the Republicans and there are two reasons he’s running. One is to get presidential immunity from prosecution because he’s facing 90 lawsuits. He’d rather be president and be immune from that. The second thing is to stop an inquiry into what happened in March 2020. He doesn’t want any talk of that, and all of his people don’t want any talk about it, so they systematically avoid it. He will only grant interviews if you agree not to talk about his COVID response. I could never get an interview with him. Anybody who does know what I know is not allowed to ask these questions. There’s a complete shutdown of information there. Commonwealth countries have a parliamentary system, which means that minority voices can get a seat in government. In the US, for whatever reason, the founders chose a system called “the winner takes all.” And unfortunately, this leads to strategic voting: people don’t vote for the candidate they really want. What they do is vote for the person they think is most likely to beat the person they hate. And that’s why we have two parties, because there’s this law in political science called Duverger’s Law, which is that all systems of voting where the winner takes all devolve back to two choices, precisely for this strategic voting thing. So it creates a very strange and difficult irony, which is that a candidate can poll very high, even higher than all the other candidates, but if people do not believe that he has a chance of winning, they will cast their vote for a person that they like less, in the hope that the person they like less than the person that they like least [best] will beat the person they hate the most. That is the way it works. And so, you might love RFK Jr., but tremendously fear Biden, so, you vote for Trump. Or you might love RFK Jr., tremendously fear Trump, so vote for Biden. That’s just the way it works. That’s why these polls make no sense. I appreciate RFK Jr. a lot, he’s a friend, and I appreciate everything he’s doing. He was great on COVID, his books are wonderful. But these polls showing him with a higher favorability rating than Trump or Biden don’t mean anything in terms of election outcomes. I’m so sorry to say that. And I know the [RFK Jr.] campaign doesn’t want to hear that. But, it’s just true. It just does not translate to the votes he needs. Now, is there a chance? Yes, there’s always a chance. But it is so small. And the only chance he has is as a spoiler…prevent one of the other two candidates from getting the necessary electoral votes and then throw it to the House and the House votes him in. So that’s the way it would have to work. Nothing like that has ever happened in American history. Can it happen this time? Yes. Is it worth doing? Probably. And I don’t want to be the guy saying, oh, you’re wasting your time.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

I guess that applies to the Libertarian Party as well. But what about the media? We have, I would say…kind of a Beltway libertarianism in Cato and Reason.com. And there is a distinct difference between them and Mises.com, where, at least in my mind, the people who even read Mises let alone write for them, seem to recognize, for instance, the entire climate alarm as false, and whereas some of the other organizations turn left…sort of leftist libertarian (or are they unaware of the Deep State or don’t talk about it?), is there any hope of having a properly unified libertarianism?

 

Jeffrey Tucker:

Cato and Reason were completely AWOL during the [pandemic]…when they were needed most.

No, never. I mean, the factions are infinite within libertarianism. It’s just the way it’s going to be. As for the Cato and Reason crowd, I mean, of course, you know, everybody who follows this stuff, and not many people do, but those who do, know for sure that Cato and Reason were completely AWOL during the [pandemic]…when they were needed most. Cato endorsed lockdowns, vaccine mandates, tax funding of pharmaceutical products, masking, you name it, everything. Reason was a little bit better, but they endorsed masking. They were very slow to say anything about lockdowns. And the fact that Reason now is going “No lockdowns!”—thanks a lot, we could have used you four years ago, right? What happens when you fail that badly is that you surrender your credibility. I mean, your only reason for existing is to defend human liberty. When it’s needed the most is during a crisis, and if you’re not there for that, you might as well just pack your things and find somebody else to do [it]. And everybody knows that in the United States. Donors certainly know that. So, I just expect that these organizations, these institutions, these publications will just gradually die out.

 

Roger Bissell:

I’m sure you’re right.

 

Jeffrey Tucker:

Mises did publish Walter Block’s endorsement, a full endorsement of lockdowns, which they should not have done. And he shouldn’t have written it.

Now as for the Mises [dot] org, that used to be my old organization. I was proud that they took a good position on all this stuff. That made me enormously happy. They did publish Walter Block’s endorsement, a full endorsement of lockdowns, which they should not have done. And he shouldn’t have written it. But apart from that, they did good work, not in-depth work, but they took the right position when it mattered the most. So, God bless them for that. And by the way, the Mises Institute has been under fire for however long—it’s been around 40 years—from all the other libertarian organizations, for forever. They call them every name you can possibly ever imagine. But Mises Institute never cared. It just kept doing its work. When I was there, I uploaded 1,000 books and I still use them every day. So, you know, they’re absolutely to be congratulated for not giving in to regime priorities when it mattered the most. And you know…it really matters. When you have a crisis like that, people look to libertarians and go, what do the libertarians have to say? And if you’re just not there, if you just shut up, or you just go along with the regime priorities, whether it’s on war, or climate lockdowns, or infectious disease, whatever the subject, it doesn’t matter. Bailouts in the event of a financial crisis, whatever it is, if you acquiesce to regime priorities, you’ve made yourself irrelevant. It’s a dumb way to go, because people are listening to you.

 

Roger Bissell:

Yes. Well, I’d like to shift the focus over to what we could call the moral versus the practical or the moral, ethical versus the economic dimensions. You wrote a piece back in October for the, I read it in the Epoch Times, “How Free Money Corrupts the Soul.” And usually, you run into this idea in economics, how subsidies encourage overproduction of things that people wouldn’t ordinarily value enough to want to buy them. And so, whatever you subsidize, you get more of it. And a lot of times you get more of things that you don’t really like or want. And we see this as true, not just in the economy, but in personal and social issues like, well, I hate to pin the tail on the donkey and say, well, welfare, you know, if you, subsidize people for not working, then you’re going to get more people who don’t work or the incentive is not to go back to work.

 

Jeffrey Tucker:

We saw that during COVID. The stimulus payments were a catastrophe for the work ethic. I mean, TikTok is full of videos of people just screaming, “Why do I have to work? What is this work crap?”

 

Roger Bissell:

Right. So, is there some really deep connection between the economic and the moral that they just really work together like that, hand in hand, or is it just a coincidence?

 

Jeffrey Tucker:

No, I’ve always believed that they’re the same thing. I’ve never, ever entertained the idea that there was some inconsistency between economic well-being and the moral good or the social good. I think all these things are the same thing, and we divide them up for no apparent reason. I mean, if I thought I was pushing policies that were leading to prosperity, but were also spreading evil, I couldn’t do it. Or pushing policies that were spreading moral good, but impoverishing people, I couldn’t do that. So no, they all go together. I would speak to you just briefly—the point about free money is most beautifully illustrated, I think, by monetary policies after the year 2000, because we drove the world to zero interest rates, and that massively distorted capital markets and the structure of production, and fed vast amounts of money to the largest corporations and the biggest borrowers, that they were able to get at almost zero cost. And as a result, they tremendously expanded way beyond their capacities, and they lost a sense of the limits of things. And that’s leading to a kind of vast numbers of workers that were just plainly idle, and the idle hands did the devil’s work. It was during these years, the last 20 years, that we saw the rise of DEI and ESG and, you know, the HR hegemony and all the bullshit coming out of the modern corporate life. That was all created by the Federal Reserve. And that was in response to, first, the Y2K panic at the turn of the millennium and then the financial crisis of 2008. And that only came to an end a couple years ago, once the Fed shifted policies, and what do you know? Now we’re seeing a vast purge within the white-collar corporate class and they’re facing massive layoffs every day. That’s what happens when you have a market-based interest rate, because you put a price on credit now for the first time in a quarter of a century, you will get different outcomes.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Right. We just spoke about a very weak, if any, alliance between the Reason and Cato crowd and the Mises crowd. But one strange thing I noticed in the last two or three years—[only] anecdotally, I don’t have the research for it, but there are people who are left-wing in their politics, including someone like RFK Jr., for instance. And they’ve certainly woken up to the wokeism and the cancel culture. There have been academics who were canceled. I know a former Marxist who was canceled and [he] turned over from being a Marxist to a libertarian…he has nominated himself as a candidate for the Libertarian Party now. And so is there another much more loosely formed alliance that we can form with people who have been harmed, they’ve lost their jobs, they’ve been canceled, they’ve woken up to wokeism, and they may not be politically aligned to us, but they’re waking up.

 

Jeffrey Tucker:

My experience at Brownstone is…I have retreats and conferences all the time and I have a huge [staff]…250 writers, and we have weekly meetings. One thing we never talk about is fundamental ideological issues. There’s just a broad agreement for human rights and freedom, the primacy of freedom and the need for free speech and for civil liberties. And I would say that my writers and people that are working with me at Brownstone overwhelmingly come from the left side of the political spectrum. And they’re making their way to where we are.  They probably think I’m crazy on some topics, but we don’t really talk about those things. We talk about the issue that’s at stake right now, which is, do we really want to live under the thumb of this corporate-backed hegemon? (that censors us and injects us with poisons; probably that’s not a good idea). And so, I agree with you. We’re seeing an enormous sort of re-scrambling of political ideological loyalties. And I’m enjoying that enormously. And it has not been an issue for Brownstone at all. I don’t have any kind of like purity tests or pedagogical lectures, condescending lectures, you know, if you’re going to write for Brownstone, you have to read Ayn Rand or something like that. I just don’t do that at all. I just insist on a broad consensus in favor of human rights and freedom. If you’re for human rights and freedom, then let’s see what you have to say. And that seems to work best for us.

 

Roger Bissell:

Well, this has all been very enjoyable and exciting. And I’d like to now offer you a chance to give us a little benediction message here at the close of our conversation. We started out talking about the theme of optimism versus pessimism or hope versus despair. And I’d like to know what do you see as the greatest hope and chance that we have to restore freedom and liberty? Are we doomed to be a dwindling remnant, but we just have to keep on plugging away? Or do you see clear signs of things turning around? I think you’ve already given us some indication of that. So, if you could expand on that a little bit.

 

Jeffrey Tucker:

We’re not supposed to be here. We’re not supposed to be holding this podcast. If they had their way, they would shut us down in a flash, but they cannot.

I will…A lot of whether you’re optimistic or pessimistic comes down to what you think might has happened and where we are today. And I start with the presumption that in March 2020, they attempted, they, the ruling class, attempted to impose a global totalitarian censored state. That was it. They wanted universal global vaccine passports. They wanted to inject us all with their platform technology, and convert all the world’s medicine over to their shots, and censor all of social media and control all travel in and out of cities, and everything else. They wanted that whole thing—and they failed. They completely failed to get that. Now, that may be a temporary setback for them, or it might be a victory for us. I think a lot of it comes down to what we do and say from here on out. And I will tell you this. The establishment, the old establishment, by which I mean the New York Times, the World Health Organization, the World Economic Forum, they are absolutely terrified because we all know what they attempted. Vast swaths of the human population, and I mean all over Europe and Latin America, all Commonwealth countries and the United States are packed with people who know exactly what they tried to do to us. And we have never been more determined to resist that. And they are aware of this. So, we’re not supposed to be here. We’re not supposed to be holding this podcast. If they had their way, they would shut us down in a flash, but they cannot. I think the momentum is on our side right now. I will never again say anything is inevitable. But I do think that if we continue to work, and we cannot let the pressure up, that there will come a point where we’re going to see something resembling a time when we can celebrate. It’s not [here] yet, but it’s coming.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Terrific. And what we would like to do is conclude on that extremely optimistic note with a vote of thanks to our distinguished guest Jeffrey Tucker as well as to my co-host Roger Bissell. Thank you for being here and good night and good luck.

 

Jeffrey Tucker:

Thank you.