All right. And joining us now is Eric Peters of EricPeters Auto Autos, plural. Ericpetersautos.com and I wanted to get Eric on because he’s had. He’s posted several things about the election and of course, also about cars. Always love to talk about cars and transportation because that is a very important component today of freedom, and that’s what they want to take away from us. Good to have you on, Eric. Thanks. Thank you for joining us. Oh, likewise, David. Thank you for having me. I’m not sure whether to be relieved or nervous. And I’d like to show the audience something in the way of a historical remembrance.

You guys remember this? This is Bushokyo. That’s Bush. What? Bush. Tokyo. Oh, Bushogio. Okay, I see that. I see the nose. I couldn’t say it was straight on. I couldn’t see it. Like a Pinocchio thing. Yeah, he’s a real naval aviator. But the reason that I wanted to bring him up, people might recall when conservatives, Republicans, not so much libertarians, but conservatives and Republicans were just ecstatic that George W. Bush beat Al Gore. You know, we had saved all the danger of Al Gore. And when he became the war president, he had something like a 90 plus percent approval rating and essentially was able to rule as a dictator.

And he called himself essentially that. I am the decider. You remember that? Yeah. We got into great trouble because of that. And then worse trouble followed on his heels because I believe that it was on account of everything that George W. Bush did that we ended up with Barack Obama, which in turn gave us Trump and Biden and all the rest of it. So these things do have consequences. And I think it’s important that while, you know, I’m very much relieved that the overt Communists didn’t win this particular selection, I’m still kind of nervous about what the Orange man might actually do once he’s inaugurated two months from now.

Oh, yeah, yeah, I saw. You know, I’ve been talking about these pronouncements from a lot of Christian leaders saying, well, you know, you just got to vote. There’s no question about you. You can’t vote for her, so you got to vote for him, that type of thing. And one guy has stood out and he has caught a lot of grief. And he said this because you got the lesser two evils. He said, the presidential election results, having delivered us from one evil, God now tests us with another. Right. And I thought that was pretty good. He’s testing you to see because the price of l Liberty is Eternal vigilance.

And the key thing about Trump is that he puts people to sleep and he puts a pacifier in their mouth. Everybody in this club is afraid to speak out. Just like if you were at a drag queen festival. You don’t want to point out that the lady up on stage or the man up on stage isn’t wearing any clothes. Right. Because then everybody’s going to hop on you. You don’t want to point out that the emperor is engaging in naked tyranny if you’re part of the Maga cult, because then they’re all going to hop on you as well.

Absolutely. A lot of people are rightly, in my view, concerned with regard to what might happen vis a vis Israel and what’s going on there. And, you know, I share that concern. But another concern that I have, I think, is more subtle, or at least it hasn’t been commented on very much that I’m aware of. You know, one of the planks, I think, that got Trump elected was that he’s going to promise to do something about this flood of illegal aliens, migrants into the country. Well, what exactly is he going to do? And what are people going to be willing to accept, particularly on, you know, so to speak, our side of the fence? What if he institutes a regime of your papers, please, you know, and check on us, you know, and of course, our side largely, I think, would probably go along with that, because after all, we got to get it under control.

You know, we got to catch all these illegal aliens and do something about them. But what may end up happening is something is done to us, and I’m very much concerned about that. Oh, I agree as well. We were just talking about that earlier, had a listener who pointed that out, and I said, yeah, that’s right. Be immigration and several of these voters, voter fraud and that type of stuff. But it’ll also be, you know, a lot of people will jump on and say, well, you know, we got porn being given to kids, so we need to have an ID to get on the Internet and all this other kind of stuff.

Right? Because they’re already saying in Australia that you got to. You can’t use social media. They’re introducing a bill. So you can’t use social media if you’re not 16 years old. How are they going to know that? Well, it means that everybody’s got to register, right? That’s obviously the situation. So if you want government to fix everything like that, you’re going to have to give it totalitarian power. And that is a very Dangerous thing. And I’ve played the clip of Trump saying, we’re going to stop them by the air, by the land, by the sea. You know, all the rest of this stuff.

The technocracy would love to do this with IDs, digital IDs, and as you point out, your identity papers, please. Right. The hallmark of an occupied totalitarian government is to have to have identity papers to go everywhere, including internally. I don’t think Trump is a stupid man. I think it’s silly to suggest that he’s stupid. But I do think that he can be thoughtless and reactionary and very glib sometimes in terms of the things that he advocates. You know, the classic one example of that might be, you know, do process later, take the guns now, things like that, instead of stopping for a little bit to think about it before he shoots off at the mouth or acts.

And I wish that he were a little bit more reflective and thoughtful. But we’ll see. You know, the die has been cast, as Caesar said before, he passed the Rubicon, and it’s now essentially a fate accompli. We’re going to see what he does, and it’s going to get very interesting, I think. I think we crossed Rubicon four years ago. If that wasn’t a Rubicon, I don’t know what is. But, you know, this is. This is. You know, people use the word consequential perhaps too often, but I do think this is a consequential election in that if he does not do anything, I don’t think it’s going to wear well, so he’s probably going to do something.

And then the question becomes, okay, exactly what? And how is that going to affect America and Americans? You know, and it may affect America and Americans in a very negative manner that they’re right now completely blissfully unaware of as they bask in the orange glow. Yep, that’s right. Well, I fully expect him to really energize the base and see them go absolutely crazy if he de escalates or ends this Ukraine war. Right. This is wearing on. Everybody is sick of that as well. Sick of the money. Every Zelensky has become this comic little clown that’s grifting everybody.

So, you know, he could end that, but I think at the same time, what he would do is escalate the war with Iran. Because you got Lindsey Graham and all these other people. Lindsey Graham was saying, yeah, they got this. I forget what he was. It’s like they got $17 trillion worth of resources. And Ukraine, we don’t Want Russia getting all that. We want it for ourselves. You know, I mean, this is like neo colonialism. It’s crazy. And he’s actually saying this kind of stuff out there. It’s apocalyptic and dangerous. Probably this goes back a few weeks before the election, but Scott Ritter, you know, the un, the inspector of weapons of mass destruction, I take as a very credible person, published an interesting article about what appears to have been an underground nuclear test in Iraq.

You know, there was seismic evidence that something happened out there that wasn’t an earthquake. It’s not yet been verified. But the possibility that they have acquired a nuclear weapons capability is something that really ought to be thought about. You know, if, if Trump decides to lob bombs on them, they might just lob back a different kind of bomb and start something altogether horrible. You know, that could be absolutely cataclysmic for all of us. And I pray that saner, calmer heads prevail over this thing. Well, I think that, you know, certainly they would have to do something asymmetric.

They would not be able to launch a transcontinental ballistic at the United States and hit us. What they would wind up doing, maybe smuggle in something, you know, across the open border, and then that would be the excuse to clamp everything down. And now everybody is clamoring for complete biometric control and ID and all because we don’t want to have another one of these attack. So, yeah, I think something like that easily could happen. But, you know, you talk about how Trump can change. Earlier in the program, as I was talking about Elon Musk, and of course I said, you’re going to be coming on.

I said the first time I talked to you, we talked about Elon Musk as the king of crony capitalism. That was your article at the time. Now, I guess he’s going to be the president of crony capitalism. And it’s just amazing to me to see this guy who’s become the world’s richest man, put out as somebody who is going to make government eliminate government waste. He is government waste. I wonder whether Trump, now that Elon Musk is apparently his best friend, is going to do anything to end this pushing of the electric vehicles that have made Elon Musk a billionaire.

Most people outside of the business don’t understand that the reason Musk is a billionaire is because he’s managed to leverage these zero emissions requirements and these carbon credits into this vast empire that’s funded his electric car grift. Now, you know, one thing I would like to see Trump do, and I hope that he does do this is tackles the issue of the permanent bureaucracy, the regulatory state, which is serving now as a de facto legislature. You know, they’ll issue a regulation, and the regulation has to be complied with. So it has the force of law, and yet it’s not a law and it’s not constitutional.

The Constitution says that Congress must write the laws. Congress has abrogated that and has given it over to this unelected regulatory apparat for a number of reasons. One, they’re lazy. But two, I think, more importantly, they do not want to be held accountable. You know, Congressmen can say, well, it’s not my fault, it’s the bureaucracy. You know, the reason that you, you know, you have to spend a fortune to get your home’s air conditioner replaced. Now, it’s not because of me. You know, these bureaucrats did. These awful bureaucrats. And of course, you can’t vote the bureaucrats out, so they’re utterly unaccountable once they get in there.

So, you know, Trump has a constitutional argument, first of all, and he even has a juridical one in regard to the Chevron decision, which says that, you know, the Supreme Court ruled that these, these bureaucrats can’t just summarily issue decrees like that that have the force of law. And then there’s just. The moral argument is wrong. You know, who are these people? Why do they get to run rush out over our lives? So I hope he’ll do that. Unfortunately, I don’t think he’ll do that. Everything that he has said thus far indicates that he’s not so much opposed to regulations.

He’s just too opposed to the way the regulations have been used by the other side. So in that sense, he’s sort of a typical Republican in that he’s not opposed to big government. He just wants big government to be used in the way that he’d like the government to be used. Oh, I agree. I agree. And, you know, if we go back and we look, and I’ve talked about this many times, you look at civil asset forfeiture, for example, right? People have their property stolen, as you well know, you know, in the name of the war on drugs, they steal people’s property.

They call it asset forfeiture. It’s theft. And they don’t find you guilty first. They don’t even charge you with a crime. They charge the property with a crime. So it’s the US government versus $9,000 cash, or the US government versus Learjet serial number such and such, and they say that they don’t have to follow the Constitution because they say that rules are different. And so they not only have to find. They don’t have to find you guilty. You don’t have a presumption of innocence. They don’t have to have an indictment, a trial, a finding of guilt.

And they are also not required to obey the prohibition against excessive fines and punishment because they say it’s a rule, not a law. So if it was done by Congress, it would be a law, and they’d have to follow the Constitution. But if they create this as a rule, none of the Constitution applies. That’s one of the most amazing things. And both Republicans and Democrats go along with it, because you pointed out if things go wrong, they don’t want the responsibility for it. And they can always. If things go wrong, they can always blame it on that regulatory agency, and they can come in and rescue everybody and look like the good guys by putting the regulatory agency back in its place.

And so that it allows them plausible deniability from all this stuff, they love to abdicate their authority over to it. And I’ll give you an example of Trump doing this in his first term. The Dreamer thing, right? The. The idea that you had daca, the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals, that was an executive order from the Obama administration. It wasn’t a law coming from Congress. And so they just put this thing out as an executive order. Now Trump comes along and he says, well, I’m going to change that. I’m going to get rid of that, but I’ve got to ask permission from the Supreme Court to do that.

It’s like, how do you have to ask them permission for an executive order from the previous president? You can just do it. But he played that game. And then the Supreme Court came back and said, no, you can’t do it. And so he said, oh, okay, I can’t do it. And so it allows these guys to escape from their campaign promises and all the rest of the stuff. And that whole regulatory rule regime is awful. And we saw it in spades when all the pandemic stuff came, didn’t we? Yeah, it’s as greasy as it is tyrannical.

They call it an administrative procedure, and it goes all the way down a number of states to traffic infractions. You know, it used to be that you’d actually have a day in court. You know, if a cop pulled you over for something, speeding, whatever it might be, you had a legal right to your day in court and to present your case. To a judge and even a jury if you wanted to. In some cases, well, what they did was to make it into an administrative matter and in some cases hand it over into a private company to deal with.

And you had, the only thing that you were allowed to do was to submit in writing, not in person, you know, your supposed explanation and, or excuse or defense or whatever it was. And that was totally pro forma. You know, you were going to pay regardless. You know, if you didn’t pay, then they go after you with the credit card, credit bureaus and slam your credit, you know, if you didn’t, if you didn’t hand over the money. And it’s a really subtle thing and it’s just sort of leached out and pervaded the whole system. And I do think the one positive thing I think we can, we can take away from this election, I do think there is an awakening going on.

I think by and large a lot of people are beginning to realize the maliciousness that just saturates the system now and how the deck is stacked. And granted, you know, Trump has leveraged and used, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real and that doesn’t mean that it is going to be sated by non action. I think people are going to demand that things get better. And that is something that makes me feel good about the election results. Well, I think, you know, when you’re talking about the red light cameras and speed cameras and things like that, where you’ve got a corporation that is accusing you of something and you don’t have a right to confront your accuser sometimes that’s been overturned in Texas and I don’t know how it is in Virginia.

I don’t know how it is in Tennessee either. But in Texas, it was in the state constitution that if you got a speeding ticket, you could demand a jury trial. And I used that demand for a couple of tickets that I got in Texas to basically negotiate away the ticket and, you know, to make it disappear and because they don’t want to do a jury trial. So it’s a great negotiating tool. Absolutely. I didn’t have the time where I could go do it. You know, it’s like I want to travel to some speed trap town in East Texas and fight this thing in a small.

But I, I hung tough on it and made the thing go away. But that’s the key thing. And you can put that in. My point is that you can put that in at a state level, local level, things like that, to stop red light cameras to stop speed cameras, to have a day in court. Those are the types of things that you can do at the local level that Trump isn’t necessarily going to do anything for you or the Congress. We need to start redirecting. I think everybody’s focus back to the local level. I think that’s where it’s really important.

Oh, I agree. But at the same time, there is absolutely now a mandate, and it’s not just Trump’s. It operates in the House and the Senate. The Republicans have been handed this victory. And I think one of the things that they we ought to hold their feet to the fire to with regard to these regulations and the regulatory apparatus that going forward, if we’re going to even have to have these things that they’d be subjected to a cost benefit analysis, minimally with public hearings before they are enacted and imposed on people. So you don’t have some bureaucrat in the EPA or the DOT but just summarily decrease something that’s going to end up costing everybody who buys a car another 500 bucks up front and God knows how much money down the road when the thing fails on the basis of some speculative hypothesized gain that is literally like contemplating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

You got to show that there’s going to be a meaningful and justifiable benefit before that regulation is imposed on people. I think that’s an extremely reasonable and fair position to take. I agree. I think the problem that we face, you and I, is that there’s not any corresponding organization for cars like there is for guns. Right? You’ve got the nra, you’ve got Gun Owners of America and a lot of others, national association for Gun Rights. There’s several of them that are out there and they’re all focused on a single issue. And you can say the same thing about the pro life issue or whatever.

And there’s other ones that are out there as well. You could look at on the left side, you could look at marijuana prohibitions, Normal. And a bunch of others who are successful and nullifying the UN I talked about this this week. You know, even though you had, you had in three conservative states, Florida, north and South Dakota, you had an issue on the ballot to legalize recreational use of marijuana, not just medical marijuana, because medical marijuana is now nullified by two thirds of the states, actually more than that. And so if that had passed in those states, you would have had more than half of the states would have nullified even recreational use of marijuana.

And yet According to the war on drugs, it is a Schedule 1 drug. My point being is that if we do things at the state level we can nullify this tyranny. And if we start to, and I think really the only way that we ever make any traction is if we’ve got an organization that is a single issue organization that’s going to push on that single issue. Because the politicians are this grocery cart full of garbage and some of the stuff in there is good and some of the stuff in there is bad, Most of it’s bad, but you can’t really get anything done.

Instead if you focus on a local, on a specific issue and you attack it at the state level, that’s what we’re missing. Maybe that’s what you should do. You should start an organization that’s going to fight against car regulations. Well, actually there is such an organization. It already exists and I’m affiliated with it. It’s the National Motorist Association. Yes, I’ve interviewed them, it’s been a while, but yeah, and I think they advertise on your website. And a lot of people are not aware of the existence of the NMA. But the NMA played a critical role back in the 90s in securing the repeal of what was called the NMSL, the National Maximum Speed Limit law which plagued the country for 20 years from 74 up to about 94, which required a 55 mile an hour speed limit on the highways.

You remember it? I remember it. You know, a lot of people were A Republican President. A Republican president. It was absolutely miserable. It made driving anywhere just such a hassle and an expense. You know, millions of people were mulcted of millions of dollars for driving at speeds that were legal and so presumably safe before Drive 55 came along. Anyway, Nma Hiddle did yeoman’s work lobbying Congress. You know I was involved in that when I was at the Washington Times back at the 9 in the 90s to get rid of the NMSL. And they are really a fantastic organization lobbying specifically on these issues that affect motorists driving, your freedom to buy the kind of car that you want and so on.

So if people are interested in that, I recommend they check out the site. It’s motorists.org good people. I’ve known them personally, I’ve worked with them for 30 years. Good. Yes, and that is the key thing. You have to have those kinds of single issue organizations. And for the most part most of these things have to be done at the local level. You know, for example, the 55 mile an hour speed limit that could have been nullified at the local level. It’s good to repeal it nationally. Okay. I’m not saying that’s not a bad thing, but I’m saying that individual states could have refused to do that.

They would have lost highway funds. They were being blackmailed by money. And that’s what we got to get people to understand is how the federal government gets around the Constitution, gets around the 10th Amendment, specifically by handing out money. That’s what people can’t understand about what Trump did in 2020, but it’s the same thing that Nixon did with a 55 mile an hour speed limit. If you do this 55 mile an hour speed limit, I’ll give you money. And so everybody gets upset with the state government or the local law enforcement or the highway patrol or whatever who is enforcing it, but it’s also being driven by federal money.

So it’s even worse than that because first they extract the money from the states. Yeah. They take the money and then they say, well, the Feds say, well, we’ll give you some of it back, you know, provided. Provided you do what we want you to do, you know, and it really, it’s paralyzing. So I think you kind of have to go one step farther back and somehow perhaps just stop giving the money. You know, that, that, that day has got to come. We’ve got to stand up to that and resurrect the principle that if it’s not yours, you don’t have a right to it from the individual all the way on up.

You know, as Tom Sowell once said, what exactly is a fair share of somebody else’s money that you didn’t work for? That’s absolutely right. Yeah. Well, it’s kind of interesting when we look at Musk, he’s going to be able to exert the kind of control that all these different industries dream of. And yet he doesn’t even have to take a cabinet position with Trump. He can stay as CEO. Earlier in the program, Eric, I talked about the fact that the two of them were throwing shade at each other earlier this year, Trump was talking about EVs and Biden and about Tesla and everything in a derogatory way.

Musk was saying Trump just needs to put on a cowboy hat or whatever and ride off into the sunset. But then when Musk perceptively realized that everything was turning in Trump’s direction and started channeling money to him, then it became a love festival. And in August, Trump said, well, I have to like EVs, because Elon gave me a lot of money. I mean, he just says the. He says the quiet part out loud. Yeah. You know, it’s interesting about Musk. You’re absolutely right. He’s cunning. He knows where his interests lie. And I think it’s important to judge him according to actions and not what he says.

And I’ll give you two specific examples, one of which I know you’re aware of. You know, at first, when the thug government in Brazil ordered him to suppress the posts of some politicians and people in the country that the ruling Quinta did not like, initially, Elon publicly opposed that. But when he counted the shackles and realized he was potentially going to lose a lot of money if the thugs in Brazil shut down X in Brazil, he kowtowed and caved. So if he kowtowed and caved to the thugs in Brazil, what makes anybody think that he’s not going to do the same here? And he already is.

As you know and I know, X suppresses speech by suppressing reach. You know, unless you. Unless you pay Musk an ongoing fee to be verified each and every month. And in addition to that, don’t post anything long, thinkful. Your post gets sent to the timeout room. It’s very clever. You know, it’s not that you can’t post. Sure you can post. The problem is, half the time, nobody sees what you posted. That’s right. Has the same effect as that didn’t even change anything for me when I paid the eight bucks. You know, it’s. It’s like. It’s still.

I’m not. I’m not saying the stuff that he wants to hear, but you’re absolutely right. He literally bowed and scraped to Thierry Breton, the guy from the eu, saying, well, we got this DSA thing that’s going to come in here, and you’re going to have to obey that, right? Oh, yes, yes, I’ll do that. Yes, yes. And then what happened was that Theory Breton, I call him Conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theory tried to censor speech about the. Within the election and in America, and that was a bridge too far for him. He jumped the shark at that point, and they kicked him out.

But it wasn’t like Elon Musk resisted this. And yet what you see is all these people who. It’s the same people who support Trump that support Musk. So if any governor goes to Davos, like Brian Kemp or like Glenn Youngkin or whatever, or anybody else, they rightfully are suspicious of that. And yet when Trump goes there and he does it just a couple of weeks before he locks the world down. They make excuses for it and they talk about how, look it, he told them off and he told them that we’re not going to be a part of this.

And he stood up to these people. And so they see the same thing, as you point out. They trumpet the fact that Musk is there pushing back against Brazil, but then all of the conservative, an alternative media is silent when he caves into them and does exactly what they want. This bizarre wheeling around. And it occurs on both sides of the same coin. You know, you’ve got. If you went back, what, a year or two ago, Musk was the hero of the left. He was the darling of the left, you know, and then when he started to kind of come around to the Trumpian point of view, all of a sudden the left hates him and now the right loves him and nothing is really changed.

He’s the same guy and he’s playing them both, you know, and it just astounds me that people on both sides don’t see that. Yes. Oh, yeah, it’s absolutely true. Let’s talk a little bit about. Well, you mentioned the internal passport regime. That’s one of the things that we’re very concerned about. And I really liked what you just put up yesterday. Don’t deport, defund and tell people about that. Yeah. Essentially, you know, there are all these calls now that Trump has been elected, okay, we’re going to have these deportations. We’re going to round up all these people who came into the country illegally, which has a very strong, superficial appeal, because so many people are so tired, citizens, I mean, of having to pay taxes that go to finance things like hotel rooms in New York City and debit cards that are filled up with thousands of dollars of the money that they had to work for.

People are understandably outraged about that. So clearly something does have to be done. But I think the most effective thing that could be done to deal with the problem of the people who are already here, as well as the people who might come here, simply to make it unlawful for any public official to dispense or disburse any public money, any taxpayer money that will go to benefit anybody who isn’t an American citizen, it’s entirely reasonable. If I travel to Mexico, I don’t have a right to the benefits that are afforded to Mexican citizens because I’m not Mexican.

I agree. You know, I didn’t have a system. I’m not supposed to be in that country. I agree. I’ve said for the longest time I said the issue is the welfare magnet. And we’ve got such a big magnet that we’re pulling people around the wall, over the wall, under the wall, through the wall. If you got a big enough welfare magnet, you’re going to get people to come in and they’re going to do it. Even if you set up some kind of a slave ID system that Trump has talked about doing, even if you set up some kind of a horrendous internal biometric ID system, you’re still going to get people to come in.

If the financial rewards are enough. And these financial rewards are un. Unbelievable. We have provided for these people in poor countries. This is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And if we don’t stop that, that’s the essence of it. And that’s the one thing that they could stop very easily, but they won’t do it. I absolutely agree with you. Defund it. You don’t have to worry about deporting these people. Just defund it. Well, there’s a humane aspect of it, too, I think. If you say, look, if you’re willing to work and you’re willing to provide for your family and meet your needs and so on, I don’t really have an issue with that myself, because why would I? If somebody wants to get up on a roof and hammer shingles all day long and earn money, that’s cool.

I’m okay with that. That’s a, That’s a positive contribution to our society. You know, I don’t. I don’t have any desire to have a guy who’s up on the roof putting shingles down, rounded up and thrown back across the border so, you know, you can put into some detention camp or something, a concentration camp. The optics, I don’t think you’ll ever do that because I think the optics on it are so bad. And in his second term, I think he’s going to want to be remembered in a fond and positive way. So I don’t think they will do that.

But I also don’t think that they’ll stop the welfare stuff either. And that would be the obvious thing, as you point out. People who want to come across and work hard, workers, I’m fine with that. Yeah, there’s competition with people who are here and depressing wages. But, you know, maybe what you do is something else. Maybe you organize, maybe you learn Spanish and you organize these people and you’ve got your company and whatever. There’s a lot of different ways that we could go with that. But, you know, as long as they’re working, I don’t have that much of a problem with it as.

But what I have a problem with is the welfare thing that you’re pointing out. It’s bad enough to take money from a citizen and give it to another one, but it’s even worse when you give it to somebody who’s not a citizen. Yeah. I mean, interestingly, you know, Trump made great inroads with Hispanic people in this election. Yes. Citizens. I mean, because they also are tired of this. Yes. You know, so it’s, it’s not about being mean to people, which is the way it’s framed and portrayed by the left. It’s about not being mean to Americans.

You know, constantly saddling them with bills for other people. Literally a limitless number of them. You know, nobody’s ever said, okay, we’re going to have a maximum of, let’s say, 5 million people coming into the country every year. It’s literally limitless, you know, according to these open borders people, which is a recipe for national suicide, culturally and economic. Oh, I agree. I’ve said for the longest time that we’re not going to have an American dream of owning a home, which we pretty much don’t have now because of regulatory costs and everything. We’re not going to have that as long as we’ve got the dreamers because they can come here and get a free education and many other benefits and they will continue to keep coming and it’ll be funded with property taxes.

So you’re not going to be able to afford a home or you’re not going to be able to afford much of a rental place either because the property taxes are embedded in that. People just don’t seem to think about the real cost of this stuff. I would pay money to keep my kids out of the government schools, but they’re coming for financial reasons. Yeah. That I think is you get to the root of it and pull it out of the ground and destroy it. And you’re right. This whole idea of having government schools, parents ought to be the ones that are responsible directly.

And that’s not a burden. That’s a good thing because you have control over your kids education. If you’re hiring a tutor or a teacher, you’re the one who’s paying the bill. And if you discover that the person that you hired to teach your kids is incompetent or in any other way, somebody that you don’t want to be teaching your kids, you can fire them. What happens when the kid is in the government? School, how much power do you have over what your kid is being taught and by whom? And the answer is absolutely none. You’re paying through the nose in property tax and your kids aren’t even being educated.

That’s right. And in New Jersey they just came up with a law that, you know, anybody else would go to jail. But if you show obscene material to a minor, that’s fine as long as you’re a teacher, right? Here’s some obscene if I hire a tutor and the tutor is showing obscene material to my child and saying, don’t tell your parents, that person is going to go to jail or worse if you catch them. But with the government schools, it’s okay. That’s why I talked about this earlier this week. I said, I’m going to call them from here on out, instead of public schools, I’m going to call them pubic schools.

Because that seems to be all that they’re interested in. They’re not interested in reading, writing and arithmetic. They’re interested in sexualization of children. And that’s really what they have focused on. It’s insane that we have to pay for this as well. It’s not insane from their point of view. You know, by stupidizing kids, by rendering them cognitive cripples, making them illiterate and enumerate, and then also warping them with all of this depraved stuff. What do you end up with? Well, you end up with these screeching, emotionally incontinent blue haired people who are exactly what Lennon referred to when he called them useful idiots.

Yeah, that’s right. They’re useful because they are very vulnerable. You know, they’re not able to think clearly. They feel and they react and they erupt and they stamp their feet and they’re exactly the kind of fodder that you need if you want to create an authoritarian police state. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, you have a good article about the roots of Marxism, the neighborliness of communists, and you got all these different planks of Karl Marx, the different goals that he wanted to have. You know, of course one of them was compulsory state education paid for by taxes and that type of thing.

But all these different things that are part of it, that is what they have been able to impose upon us. I’ve talked to Xi Van Fleet who grew up in China. She knows what a struggle session is. She says all of this stuff about being, you know, anti racism and all the rest of the stuff she said, that’s, that’s just a struggle session with a different Name all this woke stuff. It’s the same tactics that they’ve been using for the longest time and the same goals that they have been using for the longest time. Well, they’ve gotten a little bit more clever though.

If you read Marx and even if you read Lenin, they were rather honest and open about what they intended to do. Lenin spoke of imposing terror and using terror to foment his political ends. And Marx was very direct. If you read the Communist Manifesto and read the planks of the Communist Manifesto, and it’s appalling to anybody who’s not out of their minds when they hear and read this stuff. So they don’t generally talk about that stuff anymore. They put it in this sort of sitting around the campfire, holding hands, Kumbaya kind of language. You know, we’re neighborly.

Waltz used that in the campaign. Neighborly. I mean, it’s an inversion of reality and it’s a psychological technique. You know, they want you to think of it in terms of, yeah, I’m just going to go over to my neighbor’s house and ask him whether I can borrow something, you know. But you’re not being asked. You’re having a bayonet shoved in your back and you’re being made to hand it over. That’s right. And it’s not even your neighbor per se who’s doing it. It’s some government thug. You know, that’s the kind of neighborliness that they, that they mean.

And it’s so much of this verbiage, you know, they won’t just say, hand over your money. They’ll say, we’re asking you to pay your fair share. There’s no asking if you can’t say no without repercussions. You’re not being asked, you’re being told. That’s right, that’s right. And that’s one of the things that we see. You know, you talk about how they used to be more upfront about it. And it was really Antonio Gramsey, the founder of the Italian Communist Party, who said, yeah, we don’t want to have a. We want to be upfront about this and we don’t want to have a violent revolution.

Let’s do it by marching through the institutions. And that was where Pete Buttigieg’s dad spent his entire career as a college professor at Notre Dame, studying the life work of Antonio Gramsci in order to march through the institutions. And then he sends Pete Buttigieg to Harvard where he studied under a guy who loved the Italian communists so much. Sacco and Vanzetti that he changed his name to Sockvan Bercovic. And everything that he wrote was saying America based on the principles of the Pilgrims and Puritanism. And that’s the problem for all of the, you know, everything that we have in society is all based on that.

And we’ve got to eliminate that. And that’s really where all of the Democrats are coming from now. By taking over the institutions very subtly. And they have taken them all over. And so that’s why I think, you know, if we don’t realize that the institutions have been taken over, like the schools especially, that is the most obvious case. The schools, the media, entertainment, we don’t realize that those things have been taken over. You know, voting for a president in Washington is completely meaningless. Yep. Yeah, they did it piece by piece. And they began with government school system, you know, the Frankfurt School, going all the way back to the 20s and the 30s and infiltrating.

That had consequences because what they did was they were able to mold the minds of the next generation. And those people ended up going into the corporations and into the media and into law and it propagates. And that’s why now all of a sudden we find ourselves dealing with a company like, you know, Anheuser Busch, you know, having Dylan Mulvaney as their mascot. How did that happen? Such a thing would have been inconceivable 30 years ago because the people who are running a major corporation like that, they would have regarded that as sick and alien. You know, whatever their greed headed interests, they wouldn’t have done that.

But now this rising generation of woke people, you know, I disagree with Elon Musk about a lot of things, but he refers to this woke mind virus and he’s absolutely correct. And it’s sort of the latest strain or variant of Marxism. It’s just the same thing. Repackaged. Yeah, well, of course the people who are taking over the corporations and everything have been trained in all this, in the schools. But they’re also having a lot of economic pressure put on them by BlackRock and these other corporations to do that very thing. And if they’re publicly traded corporations, they have a great deal of leverage over them.

If you do what they, you know, if they like your company, you can, it’s basically a license to print money. But if they don’t like your company, they can pretty much drive you out of business. And so they’re more beholden to the blackrocks than they are to the customers. And so everything is turned upside down with this stuff. This ESG stuff that almost nobody knew about until about a year or so ago, it is what drove Akio Toyoda out of the leadership role at Toyota. Notwithstanding that he is the grandson of the founder of the company.

Because the people on the board wield that kind of power and that they were very interested in pushing this ESG agenda. You know, in the case of Toyota, particularly with regard to this electric vehicle thing, Accio Toyota was opposed to it. You know, he was one of the few big wig people within the car business who said more than a year ago, this is a bad idea. This is going to cause massive dislocation, even bankruptcy across the industry. You know, this is not going to work well, we shouldn’t do this. You know, and having the audacity to say that and for not towing the line and going along, he was summarily removed and they installed a more pliable person in his place.

And of course Toyota has understood that, you know, that this is unworkable, it’s an unworkable solution. And so they put their engineers into, oh, let’s try something else. You know, maybe try fuel cells or something. It’s like, no, no, it’s got to be tied to the electric grid because that’s going to be our control grid. You know, no other solutions are going to be allowed. That’s a real tell. Just like the vaccine thing was. Well, we got a problem here. Okay, I’ll believe your problem. I believe that we’ve got some kind of mysterious COVID virus out there.

But how about if we try this or try that? No, no, you can’t try that. You’re only going to have this solution and that’s it. That’s another tell that there’s not a real problem. It’s really sad to me as somebody who has a great emotional attachment to cars and loves the industry to see the damage that has been caused, particularly to Toyota. You know, Toyota has had, and deservedly so, a reputation for building outstanding vehicles for years and outstandingly durable and long lived engines for years. That’s been shattered. Just recently they had to recall more than 100,000 of their new turbo hybrid V6 engines that have replaced the V8 in the Toyota Tundra pickup.

Because the thing had a catastrophic problem that resulted in catastrophic failure. So can you imagine what that has done to Toyota’s reputation? Imagine if you bought a brand new $60,000 Tundra brand new and within a month the engine total failure and you have to have the engine replaced. You know, it’s, it’s egregious yeah, oh yeah, yeah. And they’re having problems with the new Tacoma. You know, the Tacoma was one of the best vehicles in that class of vehicle. Mid sized pickup truck. They got rid of the V6. That’s bulletproof. You know, that’s a 300,000 mile engine.

They got rid of it in favor of a turbo hybrid four cylinder engine. And they’re having all sorts of problems with the things now. There’s no market demand for this. The market didn’t say we don’t want a V6, we don’t want a V8. We crave tiny turbocharged four cylinder engines with hybrid systems attached to them. There’s absolutely nothing driving this other than the pressure to comply with the regulatory regime. That’s right. And this has been building for a very long time. You go back and you look at the Toyota Hilux, you know, it was legendary. You got Top Gear guys, you know, the little Toyota Hilux that they tried everything they could to kill it and they couldn’t kill.

Finally I think they put it in salt water and left it or something like that and then they hung it from the ceiling of the set there. But it was legendary in terms of its ability to keep going. But because it had, I think it was a diesel engine or something like that, they wouldn’t let that come into the US because of the EPA. The EPA? Yes. And now this year, 2024, Toyota brought out a stripped down version of the Hilux called the Champ. And it has a gas engine and it doesn’t pollute. Nothing’s polluted since the 90s if you want to get into that topic, but you can’t have it.

And guess how much a Hilux costs in other markets? 13,000 bucks to start. What? Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. I mean, if people are interested, I’ve got a couple of articles on the site about that. Yeah, it’s designed to be configurable. It’s basically, basically the cab and then the back where the bed would be is whatever you want it to be. Toyota has partnered with a number of aftermarket suppliers. So if you want to make it into a jitney bus, if you want to make it into a food truck, or if you just want a conventional bed on the back of it, well, you can specify what you want.

It’s got all the pre drilled attachment points, it’s modular. So it’s designed to be able to do all of those different things really easily and really inexpensively. The point is it’s a $13,000 truck. You know, if you Looked at the price of a new truck in this country, what we’re allowed to buy. I mean, the least expensive of them are $30,000 and up. Yes. And it’s not just the cars, it’s the homes, it’s the appliances, it’s everything that we’ve got. And they are trying to strangle us with every one of these things. I was talking about Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, tsmc, that’s got this big thing that they’re bringing into Phoenix, this big factory town that they’re bringing in.

One of the things they were talking about was the fact that housing in the United States is four to five times the cost of housing in Taiwan. Why is that they don’t have nice houses there? Well, actually they do. It’s just arbitrary, you know, regulations on about everything that raises the cost. And they’re doing that to everything that we have to make us artificially poor to rob us. And they’re specifically targeting the rising generation of young people. I came across something that was astounding. I don’t know whether you saw this, but guess what the average age of a first time home buyer is in the United states as of 2024.

Oh, yeah, I saw that it was 50 something or something like that. 54, yeah. I know people who are past the age at which most people start raising families, you know, and what are you supposed to do if you’re 24, 25, you know, and you want to get your first house? It’s impossible. The average cost of a new single family house in this country, I think is about 420,000 bucks, which means you got to come up with 10% cash on that. I mean, how many people in their 20s are ever going to be able to do that? So what they’re doing, and I think this is part of the maliciousness that I like to talk about, don’t like to talk about it, but it’s an important thing to talk about is to alienate the young, to antagonize and annoy the young and make them feel that they haven’t got a shot, they haven’t got a chance.

There’s no hope that the government will help you. We’ve got the answer. You know, Harris did this during the campaign. She tried to bribe young people and say, well, we’ll give you $25,000 in assistance distance, you know, to get your, to get your first home. Well, what would really help, One thing that would help is getting rid of these zoning requirements. You know, in most places in this country, you can’t put up a modest sized single family home anymore that would be affordable to a first time buyer. You have to put up some gigantic McMansion because the zoning laws specify that the house that you put here has to be essentially similar to the one that’s next door and the one that’s on the other side.

That’s why you see all these cooking cutter neighborhoods with all essential the same houses everywhere. Yeah. And it goes to the appliances. Look at all the appliances. Oh, you got it. You can’t have a gas appliance or you can’t have this or that. You got to have this electric appliance. And we’re going to dictate each and everything that you can have and how it’s going to operate. And of course, we’ve seen this type of thing as well in the uk. I remember a few years ago they were talking about how the prices of houses had rapidly gone up very quickly in the UK and priced younger people out of the market completely.

And now it’s come here. And what typically happens is they kind of use the UK as a test bed. And then it goes from the uk, it goes to California, then it goes to the rest of America. And so that’s really kind of what we’re seeing with a lot of this stuff now. They’ve run this game. They know how to manipulate it so we can’t afford anything. Electricity costs in the UK right now are four to five times the cost of electricity in America. And we’re about to have an explosion and all that. As they’re going to build these offshore windmill farms off the coast of Long island, they’re going to the profits that these European companies that are making this wind farm are going to make.

Their profits are going to be somewhere in $50 per megawatt hour wholesale. Their profits are going to be something like $50. But the entire cost today off of the existing power structure is in the 30s. And so just their profits alone are going to be that much. So it’s going to be four or five times the cost of what people on Long island are paying right now for electricity, if not more. And so this is the way that they are. You know, we’re going to require that you do this. And by the way, speaking of California, you just put up an article about helmet laws.

But did you see, and I want to talk about that. But did you see that Newsom has now put up a requirement for electric bikes? They’re going to have to have like 50% by 2030 or something like that. Motorcycles you mean? Yeah, yeah. Motorcycles, yeah. They’re going to have to have electric motorcycles. And it’s got to be like 50% by such and such a date. And then after that it’s going to be. Eventually it’s got to be 100% electric motorcycles that will get absolutely nowhere. And the reason for that is it’s one thing to try to push that on car buyers because a lot of car buyers view the car as a necessary appliance.

You know, they’re not necessarily enthusiast people like you and I are, who have an emotional attachment to driving into cars. They just want to get from A to B. So you might be able, assuming cost isn’t an issue, to persuade them to drive an electric car. Maybe people who ride motorcycles, and I’m one, want to ride a motorcycle. They don’t want to ride something that looks like a motorcycle but isn’t one, you know, and that’s what we’re talking about here. Something that doesn’t have an engine, that doesn’t have a transmission because it’s electric. You know, it’s just a direct drive.

So you don’t shift anything. Just sit on this thing. It’s a scooter. Maybe it’s a fast scooter, but that’s what a scooter is. Yeah, it’s not going to work. They’re not going to be able to sell that to people. Now they can try to legislate old motorcycles off the road and I have no doubt they’re going to try to do that, probably, and they’ll do the same with cars. But they’re never going to succeed. It’s going to put companies like Harley Davidson out of business. And Harley Davidson is already almost out of business precisely because they’ve got this German CEO who’s a big time woke DEI guy and who has completely alienated people from most people from wanting to buy a Harley Davidson motorcycle.

Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Talk about the helmet laws a little bit because that’s been. You got an article that says why helmet laws are silly and tyrannical. Well, they’re silly in the first place because they’re arbitrary. You know, we’re told, I’m told that I have to wear a helmet in order to be able to legally ride my motorcycle. But I’m able to wear flip flops. I’m able to wear shorts and a T shirt if I want to. So I guess my head will look good in my coffin. I mean, if their argument is, you know, that the thing is about safety, well, it doesn’t make any sense.

That’s not really a rational position to take. And as far as the tyrannical stuff, I think it sort of explains itself. It’s nobody else’s business what risks. I choose to assume, of course, the predicate is this socialist argument that, well, if you get into an accident, society will be made to pay the cost. But that presumes that society, you know, that we have this socialist system in which what I choose to do somehow imposes an obligation on you and other people to be responsible for it. And that’s outrageous. You know, if I choose to ride a motorcycle and flip flops in a short and shorts and without a helmet and I wreck, well, that’s on me, you know, morally, and it should be legally.

It’s nobody else’s responsibility that I do those things. Just the same as, look, I choose to go to the gym and work out and run because I, you know, I want to try to keep myself in good shape and not die prematurely. But I don’t think people who are overweight and who don’t exercise should be fine. I mean, we want to have cops walking down the street, and if they notice you’ve got a big gut, they roll up to you and give you a ticket for imposing costs on society. You can make exactly the same argument.

It could happen. You know, they’ve got religious police in Saudi Arabia and Iran, so we could have obesity police. Why not? There’d be a source of revenue for them. You know, you point out, if you question why we should have to have a license, ask yourself why George Washington did not need a license to operate his horse on the public right away. And so. Yeah, yeah, exactly. There’s another argument that is interesting. And again, I speak as somebody who’s been riding for decades, so I feel I have some standing to say this. And, you know, dawn and I, when we go out riding, oftentimes we do this.

We do a freedom ride, and we take our helmets off on the back roads. And I am always amazed by how much my peripheral vision increases when I don’t have the stupid helmet on. When I have helmet on, I’m sort of blinkered. I can see what’s ahead of me, but in order to see what’s on either side of me, I have to rotate my head left to right in order to be able to see it, whereas I can look straight ahead and have a panoramic view of the road ahead. Also, I can hear things much better because my ears aren’t stuffed up by the helmet.

Yeah. And finally, unless you spend a lot of money on an extremely expensive, lightweight helmet. You know, your typical moderately priced helmet, which will cost about 150 bucks or so. You wear that thing for an hour and your neck will start to hurt, hurt, because believe it or not, that slight amount of weight that you have added to your head strings your neck. And when you, when your neck is strained and your shoulders are stiff, you’re not in as good a position to be a competent and safe rider, because that’s distracting as you would be if you were in, you know, full command of all your senses.

So you can make a very persuasive argument, in my, in my view, that the actual effect of helmets is less safe than the hypothetical benefit of wearing the helmet. That’s right. And I’ve known people, motorcycle riders, I’m not a motorcycle rider myself, but who said that some of these helmets, they can add weight, and if you don’t have something to keep it from going forward, it can snap your neck. If you get into a bad accent, too, it can increase the chances of that happening. Yeah, sure. And, you know, at the end of the day, the thing I guess I object to the most is this obnoxious, busybody, condescending parents of adults.

You know, I’m a grown man. I can make my own decisions. I don’t need somebody else trying to hold my hand like a good little boy or a bad little boy and telling me what I’m allowed to do and what I’m not allowed to do. We should be living in a free country where adults are free to make cost benefit choices, risk reward analysis, and be held accountable for that. Absolutely. But be left free to make those decisions for themselves. Well, yeah, and we also had all the people out there demanding masks. And you remember what they said? And I just like, are you kidding me? That’s your argument said, well, we can tell you to wear masks because we tell you to wear seat belts and we tell you to wear motorcycle helmets and all the rest of stuff.

I said, oh, okay, so my seat belt protects you, my mask, my helmet protects you. That’s why I have to wear it. What claim do you have on that? And of course, my mask doesn’t protect you either. If you’ve been told that you believed a lie here, but that was a kind of insanity. It’s like, well, we can. And it didn’t have anything to do with whether any of this stuff was safe or affected. They just had to do, well, I’ve got the authority to tell you that you got to wear A helmet. I’ve got the authority to tell you you got to wear a seatbelt, so I can tell you that you got to wear a mask.

But, you know, they actually did have a point in that. If you accept the, the idea, the principle that it’s legitimate for the government to tell you that you have to have a car with a seatbelt and then you have to wear a seatbelt, well, doesn’t everything else follow? That thing has to be rejected at the root. It’s none of the government’s business to tell you that you have to buy a car with a seatbelt or wear one. And if you go down that road, then. Well, yeah, the government doesn’t have any business telling you you have to wear a mask or a helmet or get a jab from some pharmaceutical company either.

Yeah, I remember my dad started talking about the license that George Washington did even have. My dad started driving a car when he was 8 years old because back then there weren’t that many cars and a lot of it was off road stuff because they didn’t have a lot of roads. And if you could find somebody that was willing to turn their car over to you, that was the key thing. Right. If they could trust you with a car not to wreck it, you could drive it. And in my generation, I started driving motorboats because we lived in Florida.

I was driving motorboats when I was eight. And then when. So we went to Virginia to cover a story. At one point we wanted to rent a boat and so we could get a better angle at what we were shooting. And I was able to do it because of my age. They had a grandfather clause there. And this is actually even before I became a grandfather, but I was old enough, they were calling me a grandfather because they knew that people our age had been driving boats for a long time. And we’re going to put up with this licensing stuff.

Right. So they put that requirement on the younger people to get them in line. But they said, well, if you’re over a certain age, you don’t need to have a license to drive a boat. It’s crazy stuff. Well, the really incredible thing is that it even doesn’t even have anything to do with confidence as far as driver’s license. That’s right. It’s purely a government issued id. And it’s another obedience training session. That’s all it is. You know, a pilot at least who gets a license to fly a private airplane or a commercial airplane actually has to demonstrate that he’s got the competence to fly the airplane.

Nobody has to demonstrate any particular competence to get a driver’s license. So the whole thing is absurd. That’s right. You’re absolutely right. Talk about Clarkson, Jeremy Clarkson. You got an article there. He’s had an interesting life after Cars are no more interesting. So now he’s doing pubs and he did a farm and all the rest of this stuff. Right. But his comment about cars, what did he say? Well, he used a. He used an expletive, which we all know. Yeah, he’s right. You know, Clarkson is one of the old guys, the old guard guys, and, you know, I admired him when I was coming up.

And also guys like Brock Yates, you might remember from the Cannonball Run days. Yeah, Car and driving. And that was back in the days when car journalists actually liked cars. It seems like most of the ones that are doing car journalism today actively dislike cars. They cheerlead everything that makes cars unpleasant and unwanted by people who actually do like cars. Clarkson was a gearhead and an enthusiast, and so that clicked and resonated with guys like me when I was coming up who loved cars. What he meant by the expletive was that they’re all just these homogenous appliances now that try to parent you, that try to data mine you, correct you and anybody who enjoys driving will hate these things.

And he’s absolutely right. And you know me as an active journalist who reviews cars. You can’t believe how difficult it is for me sometimes to sit down and come up with something positive to say about these new cars. Or at least I should phrase it differently. Something different. Like what makes this appliance different than that appliance. Well, see, this Appliance has a 9 inch LCD touchscreen, and this one over here has a 12 inch touchscreen. That’s right. You said for the longest time it just turned into mobile cell phones that you write inside of. And rowan Atkinson played Mr.

Bean. A lot of other things. Blackadder, he’s an engineer by trade and became an actor. And he’s got these very expensive cars and has had them for a long time and years ago, he said, you don’t really drive these cars, you manage them. And that’s really one of the things that you’re talking about when you go back in the article, you talk about when you’re in high school and how the cars had their own idiosyncrasies, their own failures, leaking roofs and rusty floor pans and all the rest of the stuff. But it was fun. And I had the same kind of experience we all had that Experience.

We could get a cheap car. And it was a lot of fun even with all those flaws. Great memories. Yeah. This brings up something I wrote about a few days ago. Volkswagen has acquired the rights to the Scout name, the old International Scout, remember that? Oh yeah. And they’re bringing that thing back now as another battery powered device. That’s exorbitantly expensive and yada yada yada. But in researching the article, I came across some interesting comments by the guy who’s in charge of this operation and he had the audacity, I think, to refer to this thing as a connection machine.

Now there’s nothing at all in this thing that connects you to anything except sensors and actuators. You know, they tried to make the interior look like the old Scout in that it has levers and so on, but those levers don’t connect to anything. You know, in the old International Scout you had a mechanical lever that connected to the four wheel drive and the transfer case and you know, you maybe had to get out and man, manually locked. That was connection rolling down a window. That’s physical mechanical connection. Now you sit inside your rolling app and you know, you tap a screen and you push a button and the computer then, you know, registers whatever the data input is and then it decides to do something.

It is the, it is the antithesis of being connected in my opinion. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. You’re wired and that’s it. You know, it’s all numbing. It’s a real numbing experience. Absolutely is always great to talk to you. Thank you so much, eric. Eric Peters, autos.com always about liberty and about mobility. Thank you so much and everyone. Have a great weekend and hopefully we will see you next week. And the David Night show is a critical thinking super spreader. If you’ve been exposed to logic by listening to the David Knight show, please do your part and try not to spread it.

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