➡ Eric Peters, a car enthusiast and believer in liberty, discusses the current state of the auto industry and the economy. He expresses concern over the rising costs of fuel and the potential impact on the sales of large vehicles like trucks and SUVs. Peters predicts that these economic pressures could lead to bankruptcy for major auto manufacturers like General Motors and Ford. He also discusses the potential for fuel shortages and the impact on the economy and food supply, suggesting that these challenges could be part of a larger plan to discourage car ownership.
➡ The text discusses the disconnect between a billionaire and average people who struggle to afford basic necessities. It criticizes his approach to manufacturing and trade, arguing that tariffs and restrictions on foreign goods don’t boost domestic manufacturing but instead raise prices for consumers. The text suggests that reducing regulations and allowing cheaper imports could stimulate competition and benefit consumers. It also criticizes the billionaire’s use of tariffs as a tool for personal vendettas rather than sound economic policy.
➡ The text discusses the speaker’s views on a popular figure’s actions and their potential motivations, suggesting they may be driven by narcissism and self-interest. It also delves into the increasing use of technology in society, particularly in cars, where new features are being introduced to monitor and control driver behavior. The speaker expresses concern about the potential misuse of this technology and the loss of privacy, likening it to a dystopian future where every action is surveilled and controlled.
➡ The text discusses concerns about corporations and governments using personal data for profit and control. It suggests that this model, seen in China, is being adopted globally, including by figures like Trump. The text also warns about the potential misuse of data, with everything we do online being recorded and potentially used against us in the future. It highlights the growing capabilities of data mining and artificial intelligence in this process.
➡ The text discusses the importance of standing up against rules that seem unreasonable, using the example of mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic. The author encourages people to resist such rules, even if it means facing consequences. They also highlight the need for awareness and non-compliance, suggesting that these are key to maintaining personal freedoms. The text ends with a critique of society’s increasing passivity and conformity, likening people to cattle waiting to go down a chute.
➡ The text discusses the impact of technology and capitalism on society, with a focus on the influence of figures like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. It criticizes the increasing reliance on artificial intelligence and the loss of individual skills and independence. The text also highlights the importance of self-reliance, using the example of farmers who are able to maintain their own equipment. It ends with a warning about the potential dangers of AI and the need for people to maintain control over their own lives.
➡ The text discusses the potential dangers of AI and the importance of decentralization in society. It highlights how Iran has used decentralization to protect itself, and how this strategy has been used in the past by guerrilla organizations. The text also discusses the potential misuse of technology, such as drones and facial recognition, by authorities. Lastly, it criticizes the double standards and lack of transparency in government and law enforcement.
➡ The text discusses the issue of civil asset forfeiture, where authorities can seize assets they deem excessive without a trial, and it’s up to the individual to prove their innocence. It also talks about the erosion of personal rights, with examples like random sobriety checks and forced blood draws. The text criticizes the government’s power to declare certain activities illegal and the potential for abuse of this power. Lastly, it mentions the Trump administration’s actions in Venezuela, where people were killed without evidence of drug possession.
➡ The text discusses the speaker’s experiences and observations about changes in car manufacturing, particularly the shift from V8 engines to smaller ones, and how this has made these cars less accessible to ordinary people. It also talks about the speaker’s nostalgia for the past, when ordinary people could afford and enjoy these cars. The speaker also reflects on changes in architecture, noting a shift towards more sterile and uniform designs. Lastly, the speaker reminisces about past experiences in Daytona Beach and how it has changed over time, becoming less lively and accessible.
➡ The speaker discusses the importance of individuality and freedom, contrasting the unique details of Victorian architecture with the uniformity of modern car designs. They express concern over societal trends towards conformity and control, urging people to value their uniqueness and resist efforts to ‘dumb down’ or control them. The speaker encourages listeners to share information and support their cause, emphasizing the power of knowledge and unity against deception and intimidation.

Foreigning us now is Eric Peters of ericpetersautos.com I think you can also do epautos.com also works. Always great to have Eric here, a fellow believer in liberty and mobility. He loves cars and he loves freedom. I mean, who doesn’t? It used to be that these two things were tied together. As a matter of fact, they still are and we’re losing both of them rapidly. So. Joining us now is Eric Peters. And I guess Eric, I looked at some of your articles. One of the things you said you would do to try to get you out of this, as you contemplate the fact that they’re really trying to actively destroy this country and it takes your mind off of it to go for a ride in your restored Trans Am that you’ve got.

It does for however much longer I can afford to do it. I put $40 in it and that was about a third of a T. Yeah, yeah. It is amazing sticker shock. And we all see that. It’s crazy what’s happening, but of course it is deja vu all over again. And I said, when I started talking about this at the very beginning, I said, I know how this is going to work out. This is going to be worse than the OPEC oil embargo. Our economy is in worse shape to start with and this is going to be a much bigger shock to the system.

And I think that’s going to be borne out and all this stuff. But I said, I just hope we don’t get disco music back. I think that’d be more like a, you know. But you’re right though. You know, I’ve been having deja vu because in many ways this reminds me of the situation back in 08, just before General Motors went bankrupt and Ford went bankrupt. Only as you say, I think it’s going to be worse this time because this time around General Motors and Ford and also Stellantis, which is the, the corporation that owns the, the Dodge and Ram brands and Jeep brands, they are almost entirely dependent for profitability on big trucks and SUVs.

You know, back in 08, they still had cars in their lineup. Ford doesn’t sell any cars anymore with the exception of the Mustang, and only cars General Motors sells or the Corvette and a couple of Cadillac sedans. And that’s nothing mass market is my point. Yeah. So what happens, you know, it’s bad enough now that these things cost $70,000 for, you know, a half ton pickup truck or an SUV, but when we get to five, $6 a gallon, maybe Even more than that, my feeling is that these things are going to just brick basically at dealership lots.

They’re not going to be able to sell these things. These are vehicles that are generally owned by people who are comfortably middle class, if there’s such a thing anymore. Yeah, that’s what they’re working on destroying, isn’t it? Yeah, I mean, you know, the uber rich are not driving around in 1500 Silverados and, and Tahoes. You know, that’s another echelon. That’s a whole nother category of people anyway. So what happens when these things start to pile up? Well, I think General Motors will probably go bankrupt again and perhaps Ford as well. Ford has been bleeding money. So is GM on that EV fiasco.

Those losses continue to tack up. So what then? You know, I suppose you and I are going to be on the hook for that too. In addition to everything else, we’ll get to pay for the bailout of these big corporations once again. Yeah, yeah. They’re too big to fail. As a matter of fact, you know, Eric, there was an interesting article that I saw this week about somebody in New Zealand and they said the government there is coming up with a fuel rationing plan and they’ve set up five different tiers priority. Right. Guess who’s number one? Oh, well, that would be the government.

Right, of course. So they get first pick at all the fuel that is left. Then if there’s some leftover, that goes to guess what, the big corporations, they’re number two. Then number three is infrastructure maintaining that. So the corporations and the government come ahead of even the infrastructure maintenance. Then you have small businesses and farmers, independent contractors. They come in at number four. Dead last is the consumer. If there’s anything left over from the table, any crumbs on the floor, they’re allowed to have them at that point. But really that hierarchy that is there and that shows the ultimate contempt, I think, for who we are in our country anymore.

And it’s not just in New Zealand, it’s in our country as well. It’s all the way across the west, isn’t it? Sure. And I think it’s delivered. You know, this. Oh yeah. This could be sort of the, you know, the final push to get us out of our cars. Yeah. By essentially making it impossible economically for us to drive them and perhaps even illegal for us to drive them. I saw, I caught something the other day. You may have as well. I think it was the CEO of Chevron who predicts that there are going to be shortages that are Going to be far worse than.

Than they were back in the 70s. Oh, yes. Yeah. You know, this is not fooling around. It certainly in California, a lot of people out there don’t recognize or understand that California actually imports the bulk of its gasoline, its oil, because the regulatory environment in California is so severe that they can’t extract and refine the abundant oil that they have in their own state. So they’re dependent on exports. Well, those exports have been shut down. So California, you may think, well, I don’t live in California, but California critically affects the rest of the economy. That’s right.

The great bulk of the things that enter this country come into places like the Port of Los Angeles, and they have to be shipped across California into the rest of the country. And also, California grows a lot of food. Yeah, food is diesel and dependent and fertilizer dependent. These are other things that are related to what’s going on over there in the Strait of Hormuz. So it’s not just that we may not be able to afford or be allowed to drive by fall. We might be starving by the fall. Yeah, well, a lot of people are.

I mean, you know, before we are starving here, there’s gonna be a lot of people in developing countries who will be starving because they just won’t have the money for food. It’ll get so expensive. But isn’t it interesting, you know, when you look at how Trump has presented himself as he very carefully constructs these fake images of himself, just as carefully constructed and just as fake as all these superhero memes and godlike memes that he puts on social media. He’s created this idea and he done some things in terms of overturning the endangerment rulings on the EPA and other things like that.

He had made some moves that got people who were fighting the climate Nazis and fear mongers and everything. A lot of people applauded that. And I even said myself, I thought that was probably the best thing about the first Trump regime. Even though he didn’t go nearly as far as I would like to see him go, but he started doing some more of that this time. But what about if you got the guy who said, drill, baby, drill. What if he’s the one who basically kills what they call the fossil fuels? I don’t like to use that term.

They’re not fossils and they’re not, you know, that’s a misnomer. That is something that’s put out there, I believe, by the CIA and their fake peak Oil narrative, which is absolutely fake. But what if he’s the guy who winds up killing that with what he does with the Trump oil embargo? That’s what I call it. It’s just like the OPEC oil embargo, except worse because it affects far more of the global supply. I agree. And whether it’s the result of recklessness or some deliberate awful plan, I don’t know that it matters because the end result ends up being exactly the same thing.

That’s right. I think a lot of people just psychologically and emotionally are having difficulty dealing with the now open contempt that he shows for his own supporters when he says things like, it’s worth it, according to him. Yeah. I mean, and the irony, of course, is that the bulk of his supporters are blue collar people, you know, out in the, you know, out in the middle of the country. People who actually work with their hands and their tools and equipment to earn money. And those are the people who are being hurt the most by, by these, by these, these effective tax increases.

I like to call it, you know, the gas tax because that’s, that’s the war tax. That’s what it is. That’s right. Getting around it. Do you think he ever asked his chauffeur, when the chauffeur filled up the tank, how much it cost? Yeah. And to give him kind of some benefit of the doubt that could be an aspect of it, because somebody in his position, he is a billionaire and he doesn’t pay his gas bill. He’s got accountants and people who do that for him. People fill up his vehicles, people fill up Air Force One. He just gets transported.

And I think that it’s probably very difficult, even with the best of intentions, for somebody who, who is in his tax bracket to be able to relate in any way to people who have to sweat putting $100 into the tank of their car. But Eric, he’s a blue collar billionaire. We were told. Yeah, yeah. I mean, he worked. I never bought that. I never bought. I couldn’t see Trump relating to any of the blue collar people that were out there. And when I saw what he was doing the first time through this boneheaded stuff. And again, I don’t care if the guy is stupid, I don’t care if he’s evil, I don’t care if he’s senile.

It doesn’t make any difference. What he does is what he does, and what he’s doing is evil, stupid, boneheaded, and demented all at the same time. When you look at what the guy actually does, there’s absolutely no way that anybody can make an excuse for this. I’m sorry, there’s just no way. I agree. And what about the things he hasn’t done? Remember a few months ago when he was talking about the tiny guys? Remember I think you and I talked about it in one of the prior episodes, you know, for people who aren’t, who aren’t conversant.

What that means is he was referring to these, these little vehicles, these little like low cost vehicles that you can get in Japan and other export markets that you can’t get in the United States. And he made a big announcement about how he was going to, by stroke of executive order allow the tiny cars to be manufactured in the United States. Yeah, people didn’t pick up on that. As if there were any prohibition against manufacturing them in this country. There never. The problem was why would you manufacture them here when you can’t sell them here? That’s the point.

You can’t legally sell them because they’re non compliant with a variety of federal regulations having to do with safety principally and also emissions. Not that they’re unsafe and not that they’re, you know, dirty. Nonetheless, they just don’t comply with some of these, these requirements. And he’s done absolutely nothing to alter the regulatory regime to make it feasible for Toyota for example, or Nissan to bring vehicles into this country that are readily available in Mexico. By the way, I did an article a couple of weeks ago list listing about half a dozen vehicles you can buy south of the border for $15,000 or less which we’re not allowed to buy here because you know, they don’t quite comply with one jot or one tittle of the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Manual.

Oh yes, that’s the key issue. You know, when we look at this, you know, our trade deficit as if that mattered. And I’m of the firm belief that the trade deficit does not matter at all. It is an artificial nationalist metric that is out there. Really doesn’t make any difference. We want to have manufacturing here in this country, but that’s the wrong way to go about it. The wrong way to go about it is to prohibit manufactured items from other countries. Because then what you do is you prohibit building blocks that people domestically could use to get started.

But I’ve said all along adding another tax is not going to create more manufacturing. This is the fallacy that we’ve always seen from Democrats that we’re going to tax our way to prosperity. The presumption of Donald Trump and Peter Navarro, who by the way is A failed Democrat politician from California. Their presumption is that somehow this tax is going to be a creative engine because you put a tax on manufacturing goods coming from other countries, that somehow people are going to line up to start their own businesses. No, what would cause that would be to get rid of these regulations that are strangling business.

And I had, you know, going back in my family’s history, my grandfather back during the Great Depression was doing patent medicine in his backyard and then he had his sons selling it door to door. And so it was a long way from there to the point where I was graduating from high school, thinking about what I wanted to do. And I’d grown up listening to my dad and my uncle talk about how difficult the government was doing, constantly throwing monkey wrenches at him in the same way that we’ve seen Trump throwing monkey wrenches at the entire infrastructure.

Okay, but that was the kind of stuff that you typically didn’t see back in the 60s and early 70s. You didn’t see that if you didn’t have a business, but you could see it coming. And so I looked at that and it’s like, well, I don’t want to get in this business. Because at that point in time they were doing manufacturing of cosmetics and all the different regulations that were out there, even with the atf, he had to keep on file with the ATF and they paid him no interest on it. He had to keep an amount of money that was worth more than our house was and just keep it constantly there because they’d buy alcohol for perfume and things like that.

And the ATF was on them. But it’s always the regulation. And it’s like, if you want to make this, if you want manufacturing to come back, you got to take away the regulations, the regulation that is killing it. Yep. If anything, the availability of lower cost imports exerts positive competitive pressure. That’s right. Domestic manufacturers, and that in turn puts pressure on getting rid of some of these regulations. You can imagine, for example, if, you know, if a company could come into this country and start selling $12,000 cars, the, the other car companies that are effectively forced to sell 30 and 40 and 50 thousand dollar cars would be saying, wait a minute, we need relief here.

We need, we need, we need some of these regulations, like with regard to the airbag thing and a number of other things. Those need to be done away with or we’re going to go out of business. Give people alternatives. That’s a positive aspect of the free market. What’s happening instead of These tariffs, encouraging manufacturing, all they’re doing is increasing prices across the board, which is no benefit to the average American. You know, this, this, there’s this, this idea that somehow, let’s say Ford and General Motors that manufacture vehicles in this country are going to lower their vehicle, the cost of their vehicles.

No, they’re not. They’re just going to, you know, everything’s going to get equalized. Because what do you and I do as consumers? We have no option. You know, we’re stuck. We have no choice. If you want the item, this is what the item costs. And by the way, Trump apparently is about to put another 25% tariff on, on vehicles that are made in Europe, which affects. That’s right, yeah. Audi, BMW and Mercedes. I just looked that up before we went on air. And it’s like, you know, why did he go from 15%, which was what was agreed to at Turnberry, Why did he go to 25%? And he just comes out and he says, well, they’re not abiding by that Turnberry agreement.

So I’m going to go. I’m going to disregard it as well. And he never said what it was that he thought the Europeans were not abiding by. He just says, well, they’re not abiding by it. Well, what’d they do? Well, I’m not going to talk about that. I’m just. They’re not abiding by it. So I’m just going to random. I’m just going to raise the prices to 25%. I think it has everything to do with his anger as he’s flailing around and he’s telling everybody that he’s won the war, that he’s destroyed Iran, all the rest of this.

Meanwhile, he is desperately crying out for help from NATO. He’s not getting it. So he’s going to go up on the tariffs. Absolutely. I’ve said all along that what he is all about, he’s not about geopolitics, he’s about ego politics. And the same thing is true of his tariffs. When he looks at it, he gets angry with the country. So what does he do? He adds, he doubles the tariffs or he takes it up over 100%. You know, he’s threatened to do that, he’s done that and he’s pulled it back, you know, with this taco stuff all the time.

It’s just infantile what he is doing, and incredibly destructive. And I think deliberately so. I think so, too. It’s just. So if you take it at face value that you know, he’s a MAGA guy, and he’s trying to make America great again. Well, the simplest things that he could do would be to reduce the regulatory burden. Do things like say, hey, if you want to go to Mexico and you want to buy a $12,000 Nissan, you can drive that back into this country. That’s. That’s. That’s your right as an American. That would be massively popular. And instead of being at 35% approval, I think all of a sudden he’d be at 60% approval.

So why is he doing that? That’s right. You know, it’s. It’s counterintuitive because from a rational point of view, you think like, he. He can’t be this stupid, and he can’t be this dement. Must be that evil. That’s the only thing that makes any sense to me, for what it’s worth. Well, he did bankrupt six casinos that he owned. And so whenever he puts out this stuff saying, I hold all the cards, it’s like, yeah, you held all the cards and all the house rules as well at the casinos that went bankrupt underneath you. And you’re doing it again now to everybody.

It’s crazy maliciousness, you know, percolate upwards every once in a while. You know, for example, you know, the way that he treated Marjorie Taylor Greene. Again, I’m not, you know, like, beating the drum for Marjorie Taylor Greene, but the fact is, she was perhaps his most ardent supporter when he was out of office and during the 2024 campaign, she just did everything she could conceivably do to help him get reelected. And then for having the. The audacity to express her own mind with regard to this Epstein stuff, all of a sudden, she’s not only Persona non grata, she’s a traitor.

She’s a horrible person. Trump says all these vile things about her. Same with regard to Tom Massey. Same with regard to anybody who in any way deviates from the orthodoxy of Trump worship. Well, it’s the narcissism. I mean, he worships himself, and so you better do that as well. He probably thinks that, well, you know, they don’t support me anymore, that he. Meaning the rank and file people. So they deserve it. I don’t care. You know, let them eat cake. I mean, that’s the Marie Antoinette thing. And Marie Antoinette, actually, in her defense, you know, this is a poor woman who grew up in a court, and she didn’t have any understanding of the outside world.

She was a courtesan, basically. So from her point of view in Versailles. There’s plenty of cake. Why don’t the President see cake? It’s everywhere. Trump knows better, you know, and he just doesn’t care. He regards us as the help. That’s who we are. That’s right. Yeah. He’s out there. Truly is in kind of a Versailles mentality as he’s putting his name on everything. He’s replicating the archdu Triomphe in France and going to call it the Arch de Trump here. I guess just take something and do a crude version of it. And of course, there’s this other thing, this garden of heroes.

And I gotta say, you know, long ago I got. I guess it was back in the 90s. I said, I’m just not coming back to Washington anymore. We went up with the family for vacation to go to one of the museums that was up there. I said, I’m just fed up with this place. Everywhere you go, it’s a mausoleum. Okay? It’s like a memorial to a dead society, and we really are a dead society. There’s a great article on Mises talking about how this is really the fourth version of America that we’re living in right now.

You know, we had the Articles of Confederation, we had. The next one was up to the Civil War, then between the Civil War and the New Deal, and now here we are after the New Deal, and they’re laying the foundation for very vicious technocracy. I mean, it’s just amazing. When I look at it, I see the Republicans and the Democrats in a bipartisan effort. You got some of the most conservative Republicans, some of the most liberal Democrats coming together to lay a regulatory framework for how they are going to not only set up and subsidize all these tools of technocracy, and if you want to participate in society, in that new society that they’re creating, then you’re going to have to give them identity papers and all the rest of the stuff that were the hallmark of Nazi occupiers, you know, and so you’re not going to be able to use AI unless you can give them ID and biometrics and all the rest of the stuff.

We’re not going to be able to use any crypto or stablecoin unless you do the same thing. Not going to be able to use the Internet or social media or applications. I mean, just go down and down the list. They’ve got all these disruptive technologies that they want to put in place after they burned down the world that we’ve got now. And then, if you want to use any of those. They’re setting the framework here so that everything has to be by permission so they can surveil everything that you do. We’ve seen this happening in the automobiles as well, but now this is happening with everything.

Yeah, glad you brought that up because we’re just a few months now from the beginning of the introduction of the 2027 model year cars. And there was something that was passed back in 2020 or 2021, part of the gigantic infrastructure bill that Biden put forward that requires, beginning with the 2020, 2027 model year, that all new vehicles have some form of distracted or drowsy or impaired driver technology. They’ve been, they’ve been bleeding this out piece by piece. I’ve been noticing this for about the last two years. In the cars that I get to test drive, you look at the steering column and on the steering column there’s what looks like, at first glance, you think it’s perhaps an accessory indicator cluster of some kind.

Maybe they didn’t have enough room over here and they decided to put some warning lights here that might come on. When I first saw it, that’s what I thought it was. And then when I was doing the monologues I do with my little handheld video recorder and I went back to look at it and I saw the little infrared eyes that were watching. So that’s what is going to be in all the new cars come 2027. This eye monitor, eye movement system that constantly scans your face, your expressions, where you’re looking. And if the system doesn’t like where you’re looking or your expression, it will, you know, at first just prod you with some nanny suggestion that you pay attention to your driving, that you look straight ahead.

The Toyota I had told me to sit up straight, if you can believe that. I felt like I was back in fif straight again. Sit up straight. But, you know, inevitably the next step is that the technology will be used to throttle the car. You know, if you’re not driving in the manner that they want you to drive, they’ll just dial back the throttle, they’ll apply the brakes, and as crazy it sounds, they’ll even have the capability to steer the car off to the side of the road and shut it down. All of these technologies have been embedded in new cars now.

Yes, five, 10 years, I’ve seen a VW ad where they’re proud of that. You got a woman who’s driving along the interstate, she pretends to nod off and fall asleep, and it slows down. A little bit, and then goes off to the shoulder of the road and stops. They’re proud of that. Lance said, set up straight or we’ll raise your insurance rates. Many government, yeah, we’ll just take over the car. Ford just filed a patent for an iteration of this technology whereby if you are deemed to be in a foul state of mind, as you know, as determined by your facial expressions, if you seem angry, the vehicle will not work.

It will not permit you to drive. If it thinks you’re not in the right frame of mind to be driving. General Motors has a patent out there for something that they called a gate monitor, meaning that not only are you monitored inside the car, but as you approach the car, the cameras watch how you walk. And if the. And if the cameras determine that you are perhaps impaired because you’re a little unsteady on your feet, maybe you stubbed your toe, you know, maybe your head hurts, who knows? But for whatever reason, if the thing thinks that you might be impaired, then it bricks the car.

Wow, this stuff is almost here. You know, it’s a matter of months now before this stuff will be in your next new car, if you choose to buy one. Yeah, I won’t be buying one. Yeah. That’s amazing. It just horrible how they have weaponized technology against everything that we do, isn’t it? And that’s what I see. You know, as somebody who loved technology, I went into engineering because of that. And it’s gotten to the point where I really despise it. You know, Eisenhower talked about the military industrial complex, but he also talked about the military industrial academic complex.

And what he was saying was the government was going to take over all research. Well, they have. They’ve taken over all research. They fund it, they control it. And they put it to sinister uses, don’t they? They want to know everything about everything that we do. And we’re not allowed to know anything they do. Right, Correct. Exactly. And they want, for a variety of reasons. One, they want to monetize it. That’s the corporate incentive. They want to figure out a way to profit from all of this information to sell you things, and they also want to use it to control you.

You know, the insurance companies have, I’m sure, are ecstatic and jumping in the air and clicking their heels at the prospect of being able to know every incident of you speeding or making an illegal U turn or not wearing a seatbelt or doing any other thing that they decide can become the pretext for charging you more for the coverage that you’re forced to buy. That’s right. All of this is headed, and this is, you know, when we look at Trump again, another clue that the guy is not who he says he is. He’s, he’s not an America first guy.

He’s not a populist nationalist. He is a globalist. Everything this guy has done lines up exactly with what the World Economic Forum wanted. It worked out very conveniently for them to get a guy in who pretended to be exactly the opposite. He pretended to be their opponent. And yet he stabbed us in the back. He got behind us to stab us in the back. And when you look at his model, rather than going with the model that made America great because America was free, rather than deregulating and other things like that, he wants to always buy into a company like he did with Intel.

He wants to have a partnership with everything, just like the Chinese government does. And why does the Chinese government like that? For the same reason the Trump people like it, because they get incredibly rich. They get a share of this stuff, they get a kickback from it. You look at the open corruption of the Trump family and his sons, and it’s very much like what you see in China. You know, they, they’re communist, but they really have a fascist economic model where you have the government owning along with the corporations. You give them a share or you don’t do business there.

And that, if you look at what Trump is doing, is really what he’s trying to recreate. They’ve used the globalists, have used China as their beta test site for so many things that they want to do, whether it’s a one child population control or whether it’s their economic model. And that’s where he’s taking us. That’s why he’s not gonna look at freedom him. He’s not about that. He’s about the globalist approach of we’re going to have a merger of corporations and state, and the corporations will be stakeholders and so will the politicians because you’ll pay them for the privilege.

Yeah, I think it’s inaccurate to refer to the Chinese as communists. They’re corporatists. That’s right. That’s the new business model. And it’s literally that this, this merging of corporate and government power together and making it impossible to operate outside of that envelope. That’s right. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a horrific thing. You know, they figured out in this country, among other things, like the flock cameras. That’s a really good example. Oh, yeah, Slot cameras. The government is at least as a matter of law, prohibited from doing certain things by the Constitution. But private corporations can do them and then they can, as the terminologies share with the federal government.

That’s right. So now you’ve got these private companies putting up these, these cameras everywhere just to surveil us. And you know, the data is being shared, you know, with various government entities and. Brilliant. It’s absolutely. That’s right. And that goes back. That’s right. That goes back to the beginning of the national security state, you know, right after World War II. Truman created the NSA as well as they established the CIA. And that’s why when you had the Church committee hearings, the Pike Committee hearings in the 1970s, they turned it into this thing about assassinations and heart attack guns and stuff like that, that.

But those hearings were really about the fact they were spying on American citizens from the very beginning of their, of their agencies doing it without a warrant. And so they had the FISA hearings. They came up with the FISA act, the FISA Court and all the rest of the stuff. They then used that as legal cover to give them excuse for things that were prohibited from the, in the Constitution they were prohibited from doing. But we got people like Mike Johnson out there saying, well, we can’t have a warrant. Can you imagine how that would slow everything down? Whether you’re talking about immigration, whether you’re talking about spying on American citizens.

But they tested this, you know, back in the 1960s. They took a Supreme Court case up there and the Supreme Court said, well, if this is data that the phone company has about you, that actually belongs to the phone company, it doesn’t belong to you. So they can turn it over to the government if they want. And guess what? They want to do that because they get a monopoly. The government can show how much it appreciates these large corporations. And that’s been the basis for this kind of, kind of fascism. But I think really more accurately, it is technocracy that is really happening.

And these guys have known that and they’ve talked about it. Even on the Democrat side you had Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was talking about the technocratic age. He said, actually between Two Ages was what he called his book. And he was saying, you know, very soon we’re going to know what you’re going to do. Before you know what you’re going to do. We’re going to be tracking and surveilling everything that you do. And this is what they’ve used China for. They’ve used China as a beta test site for techno, for technocracy. And we’re going to get this good and hard.

And it really is converging. I mean, they are laying out a new constitution with all these different acts that they’ve got out there. For crypto as well as for artificial intelligence. I think one of the more troubling facets of it is they now have got the technological capability to store essentially a limitless amount of information. They may not actually be monitoring us in real time initially, any given moment, but everything that we do, every keystroke, everything that we see online, all of those things, they’re being recorded somewhere so that it’s a future point. Forget ex post facto law.

They’ll be able to criminalize certain things and then they’ll be able to go back and say, oh, look, you did X, Y and Z. That’s right, and pull that back up and hold it against you. So it’s advisable at this point to assume that absolutely everything that you do online is recorded somewhere in your mind, that this might not be a prudent thing to do. Maybe don’t do it. That’s right, yeah. William Benny said that about a decade ago when I was talking to him. He said, they’re recording everything. He said, don’t tell me that they can’t go back.

And I forget what it was we were talking about at the time. He says, don’t tell me they can’t go back and find that. They’ve got that everywhere. What they were missing at the time was the ability to go back and data mine all that stuff to sort through it. They now have that capability. That’s what we were seeing with Doge, and that’s what we have seen with Trump, weaponizing his head of Housing and Urban Development. The guy who’s head of hud, his name is Pulte, and he comes from a home that a family that was a large home builder, Pulte Homes.

But what he did was for Trump’s purpose. He went back and looked at people that Trump wanted to come after in terms of bring me the man, I’ll find the crime. And what he did was he went back and audited all the real estate transactions of people using artificial intelligence. And that’s how he found the loans that were taken out by Lisa Cook with the Federal Reserve, as well as Letitia James, the New York Attorney General, and said, you took out loans saying this was for your own personal use and yet you never lived there. That’s the kind of thing they’re going to throw in our face.

That’s the kind of auditing they’re going to be able to do. And that day is here. I mean, for over a decade they’ve been building data centers like the massive NSA data center out in the middle of the, the desert in Utah, Bluffdale, Utah, and storing everything they can about us. And now they’re at the point where they can go back and data mine that for the people that they don’t like for whatever reason. And the question is, what do we do? I think that’s on everybody’s mind. Well, what do you think we do? I look at it and I think really where the rubber meets the road is these massive AI data centers.

And again, in Utah, they’ve got a data center that is going to be the biggest one so far. 40,000 acres, two and a half times the size of Manhattan. And it’s going to use more power than the entire state of Utah. And people rose up by the hundreds to go to a local city council meeting. And three city councilmen just rubber stamped it. They didn’t care what the people said. And so that’s the issue. I mean, that’s where you’ve got to stop it. And yet you can’t stop it because they own these people. Even at the local level, it’s too far gone.

But I think that’s where it needs to be stopped. I think that’s the only way they’re going to be able to stop it. But, but then, you know, how do you, how do you get control of this? And we’ve got a lot of people who are very, very corrupt, even at the most local level. I have two answers and I wish I knew what the third one was. The first one is awareness. You know, people have to understand what’s going on. Yeah. And the second thing is non compliance. You know, there’s still a lot of room for non compliance.

Don’t be, you know, don’t be passive and just agree to do something, particularly if it’s optional. In many cases, you don’t have to do certain things. Real ID is a good example. You don’t have to, in many states get the real id. Granted, it entails some inconvenience if you don’t get the real ID in the event that you perhaps want to travel by air. Well, suck it up and endure some inconvenience if need be. And you know, going down the road a little farther, I think, unfortunately, I don’t like this. Nobody likes this. I. It may be necessary to accept that there are going to be some consequences for non compliance.

I mean, I was prepared to do that. As far as during COVID you know, I was prepared. That’s right. We’ve already had that dry run. And that was, that was something where he moved the Overton window for the people who are going to comply, but he also moved the Overton window for those of us who are going to resist as well. Yeah, yeah, that’s key. I have no desire to go to jail, but I, you know, I was prepared to get arrested if need be. And I. I was a little provocative. You know, I would go into stores without.

Without a mask on and just go about my business. Luckily, nothing happened, but it might have. You know, I just. And I. I just wished at the time, I was thinking, if only more people would do this. Yeah. Trying to put my personal horn. But my God, what happened to the spirit that used to be characteristic of Americans? If enough of us said, I’m not playing along with this nonsense, you know, I’m gonna go shop. That’s right. Enforced it, the whole thing would have fallen apart. Such important and such a simple and such an easy thing.

And I remember, and I’ve told this story to my audience many times, but, you know, going around, we went out a couple of times to eat, and I thought, well, I’m not going to go to some of these chains because I know how they’re going to act. They’re going to just do whatever corporate policy is, But I’m going to go to some of the local restaurants that we know that. I know the owner works in the store because I used to do that. I used to have some stores and we used to work in them. And I know exactly what I would have done.

I would have said, yeah, sure, come on, I’m not going to tell anybody about that. But they tried to enforce that stupid mask rule on me, that you’re going to have to wear a mask before I seat you, then you can take it off. And it’s like, I absolutely refuse to do that. And I raised my voice. I got really loud with him in the two places where this happened, and I kind of regretted it in a sense. I don’t like to argue with people and shout at people, but they deserved it. And I said, bring me the manager.

I want to talk to the manager. And I got out of there and I said, you know, this is total nonsense. I didn’t put it that way, but I used a stronger term. But he said, yeah, I know, but you have to do it. Anyway, I said, no, I don’t, and you will never see me in your restaurant again. I will never come here again. And so, yeah, there is a place where you got to draw the line. I had a dental appointment as well, and I had prepaid for some work and I had to call Alex and tell him that I wasn’t going to be able to make it in for a particular thing that was happening.

And he goes, well, I don’t know. This is the hill to die on. I said, no, it is the hill to die on. Every one of these hills is the hill to die on. And we’re going to let them take this over. And I absolutely refuse to budge. And they backed down at the dental place. But I said, are you telling me that I got to wear a mask in here and then you’re going to put me in the chair and I’m going to have my mouth open and you’re going to be down in my mouth the entire time? Come on, let’s get real about this.

Besides, I’ve already paid you. I parted ways with the down dentist that I had been going to for 15 years over there for exactly the same reason. He wanted me to play kabuki. I was supposed to put on the stupid mask to walk literally 15ft from the. From the waiting room to the examination room. Oh, I was gonna do it. And this was a guy I’d known for 15 years and was on a friendly basis with. And we parted ways. You know, he was all angry that I wouldn’t play along, and I guess he felt shamed because he was, you know, cowing and bowing because he wanted to maintain his practice.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, I despise that. I really do despise that. You’ve got a funny article here. An evening out at Taco Bell. And I’ve forgotten about the movie Demolition man set that up for people. Yeah, well, the sci fi, you know, it’s. It’s the. The effects are kind of cheesy. It was made in when, 1993 or 4 or something like that. So a long time ago. And it’s a dystopian, you know, futuristic novel scenario in which Stallone is a cop who has been put into cryo sleep for 30 years. So, you know, he goes up to roughly our era, I think 20, 30.

He was frozen in the 90s. And now he’s in this new world where everything is hyper, hyper micromanaged and controlled. People are fined for raising their voice or uttering a curse word. And the most extravagant luxury is an Evening out at Taco Bell, like that’s, you know, the apotheosis of fine dining because everything else has fallen by the wayside. So they make a big production about going out to Taco Bell and they run for the border. Yeah, it was pressure. It was predictive because these things, you know, used to take as kind of low culture, low brow.

I’ll get a fast food burger. Now it’s becoming so expensive. It is an indulgence. Yeah. I had not been to a Burger King in a while, and dawn and I were out one day and we’d been out all day and we were tired and it was late and we were heading home. So we said, hey, let’s stop at that Burger King up there. And. And because we’ve seen the commercials, the Whopper supposedly been redesigned so we got two Whoppers just for the heck. That’s all we got. No fries, no drinks, two Whoppers, $15. Wow. And the Whopper was this.

It wasn’t like what you see in the commercial either. You know, you see this really lush looking burger when they show it to you on the tv. And what we got was this sad looking thing, you know, dry disc of salty meat in the middle and a kind of flaccid piece of lettuce on top of it. The only thing that was big about it was the bun and the price. Yeah, yeah. Got a big price. It’s a Whopper of a price. That’s right. Yeah. It’s crazy, isn’t it? And. And the lifestyle that we ordered seems to be out of stock.

But you know, you go back and look at. It’s all these dystopian movies, they were spot on, weren’t they? But the ones that were talking about how everything was going to get better and better, brighter, those have just kind of fallen by the wayside. They look really naive now, don’t they? They do. And I think one of the common themes that was running through those movies, going all the way back to H.G. wells and his novels, is the infantilization and the passivity that’s been gendered in the bulk of the people. You know, people have been tamed, were like feedlot, feedlot cattle who just stand there, you know, waiting to go down the chute, you know, without even trying to kick the farmer on the way down the chute.

Yeah. It’s remarkable what they’ve managed to do. You know, they created a herd animal society of largely obese people who just do what they’re told. I haven’t seen the movie. But I’ve seen the reviews of Andy Serkis’s new imagining of Animal Farm, and basically he changed it completely to not make the communists or the totalitarians the bad guys. And instead he managed to somehow create a new character who is a capitalist and. And she’s the bad person and all this stuff, but it is beyond belief juvenile. But these people were spot on with a lot of this stuff.

As a matter of fact, we look at the technocracy at H.G. wells, shape of Things to Come, and I think they just called it Things to Come when they did it in the 1930s, as Raymond Massie was in it, and it truly is what we see happening now. I can’t look at that without seeing people like Elon Musk and Bezos in that role. Yeah, sure, you know, I remember. You probably do as well. And I should have paid closer attention to it. I think it was during the very first week of Trump’s second term, may even have been the day after he was inaugurated, when he had that very public press briefing with Ellison.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know the tech Stargate. Yeah, yeah, Stargate, Yeah. That should have been. You know what they say, what they call in law enforcement a clue about where things were headed. I said, look at this. He’s been gone for four years. He comes back, very first thing he does is sell mRNA. But what he’s doing is now it’s different now he’s going to team up the MRNA with artificial intelligence. And he and Melania and the entire regime there of Trump has been pushing AI and clearing the decks for AI. And this is something that is going to be weaponized against us.

I always think of when I look at artificial intelligence now, this is going to be wonderful. I always think of the Twilight Zone episode, To Serve Mankind. Remember that? Yes. The Catamites or whatever their name was. Yeah, It’s a cookbook. It’s a cookbook. Yeah. They’re going to eat us. So that’s really the kind of service that we’re going to get from AI. Yeah, it’s depressing and it’s dehumanizing. And I do my best because I need to. To find a way to be positive to some extent. So that’s why I take my Trans AM out as often as I can, you know, to feel alive again.

And, you know, we get so wrapped up, particularly people who do what you and I do have to be online a lot and have to wait in the sewers, so to speak, to see what’s going on. Stare into the abyss. Yeah. You know, but it’s important to step away from that to the extent that’s possible. You know, with regard to cars and stuff that’s coming online with the, the facial recognition and the eye movement monitors. Don’t buy a new car. Buy something old, older. Empower yourself, learn how to fix it. You know, have a vehicle that you’re not dependent on a dealership and a hundred dollar an hour service for.

I mean, I understand it’s a little bit of a lift. You know, people have gotten used to being comfortable and not having to do these things and, and they specialize and, you know, they. A guy becomes a stockbroker and he knows how to do that, doesn’t know how to do anything else. Well, you know, earlier Americans were much more versatile. They were much more confident in a wide variety of things. I think that’s important. Yeah, you know, I, you know, I think you should know a little bit about everything to the extent that you can, instead of being so pigeonholed in these one things, which, you know, leave you dependent.

I mean, I don’t, I did not grow up in the computer age, so I don’t really know that much about computers, but I’ve learned. I’m not by means anything masterful with computers, but I’ve learned how to do a few little things with computers. Instead of going, oh, it doesn’t work, I got to take it down to the guy and have him look at it. Yeah, yeah, that’s right. Yeah. It’s kind of the farmers are the guys who are the jack of all trades. And that’s why one of the earliest things you and I talked about about was the Millennial Copyright act that was being used by John Deere as well as some of the car companies to say, you don’t own that car.

We own it in perpetuity because we own the intellectual property of the software. You’re not allowed to even buy a module from us and replace it yourself. You got to have us do it or one of our technicians or dealerships do it. And that really didn’t sit well with the farmers who were used to doing all this stuff on their own, putting stuff together with Bailey Wire or whatever. It got a lot more complicated than that. But, you know, if you look at this whole farming model, it’s like everything else in the economy. And it’s like Trump really doesn’t understand how everything is interconnected.

Certainly Peter Navarro does. And I think Elon Musk got it right when he said he’s as Dumb as a stack of sack of bricks because they don’t understand how everything is connected. He doesn’t even understand how the Strait of Hormuz affects us. They keep saying all the time. And Pete Hegse says, well, we don’t use the straight of Hormuz, so it doesn’t affect us. Well, yes it does. I mean, the bottom line is if you even go back and look at the 1973 oil embargo, that was only against the United States, but it affected everybody globally because we have a global market in oil.

And if you don’t have oil, you’re going to go somewhere else and try to buy it and you’ll pay a higher price for it. Same thing is true. People can’t, people who are getting their oil through the Strait of Hormuz, if they can’t get it anymore, they’re going to come here and they’re going to drive the price up. And that’s what you’re talking about. The, the CEO of Chevron was basically trying to explain that to people in a shorthand way. This is a global market. And, and he said that. But people don’t understand the implications of that.

He didn’t unpack it for them and they don’t want to think about it. I think one of the take home lessons is the big is bad. These top down pyramidal structures are not just totalitarian, but they’re also fragile. You know, they’re susceptible to these cascading failures that have absolutely catastrophic repercussions for people. Yeah. So to the extent that we can decentralize and, and do things more locally, including things like farming, you know, farming has gotten big, big ag. These farmers are in hock to some big combine. You know, they technically own their land, but they are in so much debt they have to buy their seeds from Monsanto and they have to get everything else.

You know, they’re basically serfs on their own land at this point, so can’t do anything with their big combines and tractors and so on. I’ve got an old diesel tractor, I can do whatever I want to. If I need to weld something on it, I can do that. You know, I can jury rig it, I can make it work because it’s mine and nobody else can exert control over my property. That makes me feel good, you know, and I think it makes everybody feel good as an adult human being to have control over your life as opposed to being controlled particularly by these, these faceless, anonymous, centralized entities, these bureaucracies.

Nobody you can appeal to. You can’t even talk to another human being on the phone. You know, it’s just fill out a form and talk to the hand, talk to the AI. And of course, if Josh Hawley gets his way, the way they wrote this bill, the Guard act, you really need to take a look at that. It’s unbelievable what they’re trying to push, but reclaimed the net and had a. Had a good article about it and somebody else did as well. I think maybe it was reason, I’m not sure. But it would include not just the large language models, which get people going.

And you have the AI psychosis, which is pretty well known now, people who think they’re actually talking to some conscious, sentient thing. Right. And it even took in Richard Dawkins. Somebody pointed out this is a guy who coined the term meme, and now he’s become one. People are laughing at Dawkins for being taken in by this. He said, I tried to convince myself that this wasn’t a conscious being, but I failed. I think it is a conscious being. You know, I’ve noticed this. I’ve begun to notice it a lot more lately on YouTube for a distraction.

I enjoy watching things like military history, car videos, and things that are on YouTube. And I have noticed the propagation of these AI narrated videos. Yeah, yeah. And I immediately click off. Now, I’m just one person, but I think if more of us who are appalled by this AI stuff just refused to watch this stuff, it would go away. Yeah, that’s right. You know, you can tell it’s not a human. After you watch it long enough, they’ll. There’s a tick. There’s something. You know, you can see that they mispronounce a common word, or they’ll spell out a letter or something that ought to be just read fluidly so you can tell.

Don’t go along with it. That’s how we end it, by not going along with it. That’s right. Yeah. And I think you’ll probably wind up having a situation where people are going to have to basically drop out of a lot of this complex, centralized society. When you look at the importance of being decentralized, I mean, just take a look at what’s going on with Iran. You know, the asymmetry of this war with the United States is really key. And what have they done? They’ve decentralized even their command structures so they’re not vulnerable to a decapitation strike.

They realize, on the other hand, that we were. And so what did they do the very first day they Took out some major radar installations that were there. That really kind of hampered a lot of the anti ballistic missile defense system that was there. And then that allowed them to do further damage. But they had already set themselves up in decentralized cells. And we’ve seen this in the past. This is something typically that insurrections and guerrilla organizations would typically do. They would set up individual cells that would operate independent of others. As soon as you start creating a hierarchy, then all somebody has to do is take it over from the top.

That’s what we’ve seen has happened to our own government. Perfect example of that. They made it hierarchical, they consolidated it and centralized it. And then you got somebody like Trump or Biden who takes it over and you’re done. Right. It’s weakness and it’s our strength, as you say. You know, the reason that the American colonists managed to defeat the greatest army at the time was to a large extent because they fought this partisan guerrilla kind of warfare. They didn’t meet the British generally in serried ranks and march toward the gunfire. You know, they sniped woods, hit and run type tactics.

If the south had done that, they could have attributed the Union. That’s right. Perhaps gained their independence. So the Iranians in our time now have shown that’s how you fight. You know, you can use the very technology that is oppressive and tyrannical in the wrong hands. We can turn it around and use it too. That’s what the. Use these cheap drones, you know, to. To render effectively obsolete these multimillion dollar weapons systems. That’s right. And I think that’s what’s really behind. We’ve talked about this many times on the show, and Lance has pointed out, he thinks that really this obsession that they have with ghost guns, for example, they are now extending this to wanting you to have to.

They’ve got all kinds of controls that they want to force the 3D printer companies to put inside the devices to go through a reference library to make sure that you’re not violating somebody’s copyright or this or that or that. You’re not printing some kind of a gun part that they don’t want you to print. And I think really it’s not even about copyright and it’s not about guns. I think it’s ultimately about drones because that’s really going to be the deciding factor in terms of asymmetry, I think, in the future. I agree with you. Yeah. Oh, by the way, this was sort of just an amusing but alarming article.

At the same time that I did a Couple of days ago. Have you seen the KIA prototype police vehicle? No, I haven’t seen that. I didn’t see your article on that either. Tell us about it. Well, among other things, it’s got drones built into it, so, you know, they could sick the drones on you. It also has pattern recognition technology, so it’s scanning around all. Everything you know, identifying you by your face and various other things, you know, to identify all of the, the, the near do wells that are out there. More easy to round them up.

So again, just like it’s sort of like another Sylvester Stallone sci fi movie. Judge Dredd, Remember that one? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I am the law. That’s what they, that’s what they think. That’s the way ICE works. You know, I am the law. But you know, in terms of the, the fact that they’re wearing masks out there, that they don’t have badges with their names on it, and now they’re going to go to the next level. They’re going to have these kind of meta glasses that will hide their eyes from you, but at the same time it’ll be looking at you and running through their biometric database to see if they’ve got anything on you, everybody that they’re looking at.

It’s a perfect metaphor, quite frankly, for what this government has become. They demand to know everything about you, and you’re not allowed to know anything about them, so you’re not allowed to even see their eyes. But with their glasses, they can learn everything about you. It’s a perfect metaphor for. Yeah, you know, it’s, it’s sort of an elaboration of the mirrored sunglasses thing, you know, where they, it’s an intimidation tactic. Yeah. Where they’re showing who’s boss. They don’t want you to see their eyes. And of course, if you wear, you know, if you wear glasses or if you have tinted windows, you know, they can’t see inside your car.

That’s an offense. Meanwhile, they’re driving around in these totally opaque vehicles that you can’t see inside of. You’re absolutely right. It’s, it’s, it’s cognitively dissonant. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s an aspect of mental illness, if you ask me that. It’s not even like they can recognize what they’re doing. It’s, they think that these, this duality, this double standard is somehow normal. Like it’s okay. They’re not ashamed at all. I feel kind of like a jerk that I’m doing this to you. You know, I see your point. You know, why do I get to do, you know, just like, you know, the cop, you know, the cop who comes roaring out of the side street, driving 20 miles over the speed limit to pull you over for going six miles an hour over the speed limit.

That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. I had an interview last week, which is really interesting interview. The guy had worked undercover as an ATF agent. And so he was focusing on getting guns from cartels and from the Gambino crime family and all the rest of this kind of stuff. And yet when he’s talking about what he was doing and how he got one of his best informants, he’s talking about the fact that because they also have jurisdiction over tobacco, this guy got some tobacco that they haven’t paid the taxes on it. And one of the things he pointed out to, he said, you know, the people who turn in these other.

The guy had some convenience stores, right? And the people who blew the whistle on him, he said, we saw this all the time. Were typically his competitors out there, the other businesses that are out there. And that really kind of goes back to all this regulation stuff, right? Usually you’ve got the businesses that are already established. They are begging the government for regulations to keep other people from getting into the same business. And we see that when Sam Altman was with OpenAI, went before the congressional committee and said, this is really dangerous and really important at the same time.

So you need to give us money because it is so important, but you also need to make sure that only responsible people like us are going to have access to this. It’s just. It’s so obvious because we’ve seen this over and over again. And even this guy who’s operating undercover as a government bureaucrat could see that. That it’s. The regulations are there because the businesses are pushing them and they want to. The big guys, the established guys, want to set up a partnership with the government. That’s the way this stuff always operates. But he was completely not aware of, really, a lot of the things that immediately would click with me.

You know, we talk about civil asset forfeiture all the time. And that’s a real sore spot with me. The idea that the government can come in and confiscate your car, your cash, your home, your plane, any of that kind of stuff, and charge it with a crime. And, you know, they’d come in and they would say, you know, the U.S. government versus $9,000 cash. They would act as if the inanimate object or whatever had committed a crime. And they would never charge the owners, let alone convict them, but they would just take the stuff and then they would go through another level of fiction and say, well, this is not a criminal charge.

This is a civil charge. So you don’t get any due process, you don’t get any presumption of innocence. You don’t get a trial. Furthermore, because it is civil, you will have to sue us in court. And so in a lot of cases, you know, it costs about. In some of the big cities, they go around confiscating these cards that are worth a thousand dollars because it’s going to cost about $1,000 for you to initiate a legal action against them. It’s so criminal. And they do it so often. And again, you know, when you’re looking at somebody who’s operating in the world of Prohibition, I thought it was really funny and actually kind of amusing to see how blind this guy was to what was actually happening with the prohibition stuff.

But he’s got an interesting story where he went in, he ran a whole bunch of different businesses as part of these things. And it looks like he wrote a book about that and looks like it’s going to be picked up and made into a. A series for tv. Each season will be another one of these businesses that he ran because he did it for a couple of decades. That’s interesting. You know, in many ways, Al Capone was a legitimate businessman. Yeah, exactly. Selling alcohol and, you know, running prostitution. I mean, I understand these are vices and, you know, some people regard them as immoral, but at the end of the day, he was providing things that people freely wanted to buy.

With regard to the civil asset forfeiture stuff, my understanding is that they can simply declare any amount of money that you have. Excessive. That’s the term that they use. It’s subjective term. So it could be $20 or it could be $2,000. And then, as you say, they can just take it and it’s on you to disprove that it wasn’t, you know, acquired as the result of some illicit activity. Yeah, prove you’re innocent. Prove that you’re innocent. That’s exactly it. And that’s what he was saying. He said this guy they turned as an informant is somebody that was a competitor that blew the whistle on him.

Said something about the way that he had gotten his tobacco to avoid paying taxes. And he said, we weren’t really worried about that. He just had a great car. He had a really nice Cadillac, and we wanted that Cadillac, because we get to keep it and use it for our own personal use. If we were to confiscate it. To me, that people just put up with this, but I suppose, what else can you do? Yeah. You know, our society has been beaten down, I think, into a state of passivity by this. It goes back a long, long way.

But, you know, I can remember back in the 80s, you probably can as well, when they began to do these, these random blanket dragnet, probable cause, free sobriety checks. Oh, yeah, I hated that. Whereas previously, you know, the, the idea was, look, you have to actually have given some reason to suspect that a person is impaired by alcohol. You know, the cop would have to say, well, I saw him weaving. Yeah, you know, something like that. Now you just happen to be out driving on a given road and everybody who’s on that road is. Has to stop.

Subject to. Is subjected to an interrogation by cop, show their papers and prove to the satisfaction of this cop that they have not been drinking and it was really bad. In Texas, they had a situation where they did forced blood draws. Oh, yeah. And they would get physical people, you know, and arrest you and then. And still do the forced blood draw. I mean, it’s just criminally insane. And yet you got the people like Mike Johnson. It’s like, oh, we can’t bother with search warrants and all that kind of stuff, and we can’t hamper our law enforcement.

And it’s like, well, that’s the whole purpose of the Bill of Rights is to hamper the government to make it constrained. Right. It’s. It’s a subtle, emotional and for some people, very appealing argument. Well, you know, we’re going to get more criminals. We’ll. We’ll catch all these bad guys not realizing what they’re doing is surrendering everything to these authorities, which they, I guess, implicitly assume are always benevolent, would never abuse their power. You know, and if you follow that logical daisy chain, well, you know, why not just say copy whenever he wants to walk in your house for any reason to see if anything’s going on that’s illegal.

Why shouldn’t we, you know, have to open our doors to any cop who just walk in our house? Yeah, that’s right. Why shouldn’t we have cameras in every room in our house, including the bathroom? That’s right. You know, you might catch some bad guys, you might catch some illegal activity. We start to look at it that way, you begin to understand why this stuff is so pernicious. But it’s easy for a Lot of people, you know that old saying about how hard cases make bad law. Nobody likes actual criminals. Everybody gets appalled when they hear a story about some actually drunk driver who blows through a red light at 100 miles an hour and kills a family.

You know, it’s difficult to say we shouldn’t do something about that. But what ends up happening is that everybody gets treated presumptively as if they were that person, even though they’re not that person. And I think a good example of this is what the Trump administration is doing down in Venezuela. It really sent me over the edge when I saw them just killing people on site without ever determining if they’ve even got drugs. Right. And Rand Paul has pointed out, you know, that 25% of the cases that they stop, they look like they are suspicious and they might be carrying drugs.

25% of those cases, they’re not carrying drugs. But they never even bothered to look at this. They still to this day have not produced any evidence of the people that they killed, had even had drugs. And they’ve killed about 180 people. Think about that kind of government. They can do that to you as well. And that’s why, you know, the Constitution doesn’t talk about citizens having rights. It talks about people having rights. Because if you’re going to do that to somebody because they’re here illegally or doing to somebody because they’re selling something that you have declared is illegal and you made that declaration illegally in violation of the Constitution, by the way, if you’re going to allow the government to do that, then of course the government is going to feel free to do whatever they wish.

And the examples that you pointed out just come into your house whenever they feel like it, or if they like your house, maybe they’ll go back and they will use artificial intelligence to audit your life and find something that you did and then charge you with a crime to take your house, maybe they’ll do that. It’s a measure of the moral deadness, I think, of our culture. Not everybody, because there are a lot of people who are appalled by it. But in one of those incidents, they had disabled the boat or shot the boat. The guys were in the water, clearly helpless.

Oh, yeah, yeah, they just executed them, you know, I mean, so, you know, that was considered a war crime when it was done by Lieutenant Cali in Vietnam, the My Lai massacre, you know, innocent people that were, you know, just rounded up and shot. That’s essentially what the federal government did. And you had Hegseth and Trump, Gloating and smacking their lips about how fabulous it was that this was being done. Yeah, I just, I’m so done with these guys. I mean, I was done with them throughout all of 2020. It’s like, I’m not making any excuses for this guy.

And you point that out when you’re talking about Trump and his third term. Yeah. As he said in all three of his terms, he thinks he’s there. But you point out the fact that basically, and I’ve said this from the very beginning as well, and I said it, you know, when I got fired at Infowars, I was talking about this. I said, he’s the one who created the 100% vote by mail election with this lockdown, which is phony. And we all know it was phony. And he’s the one who created that. He added a whole new level of corruption to the ra corrupt elections that are out there.

It’s kind of interesting and I’m sure you’re getting some schadenfreude out of Trump turning on Alex Jones now. Yeah, yeah. Well, it’s just a matter of time. It’s. I suspect that’s more WWE type show for our benefit as well. Yeah, Well, I think that’s the one time. This is going to be the one time that Alex doesn’t flip back. I mean, Alex has been for Trump against Trump, for Trump against Trump. You know, he can’t make up his mind. He keeps flip flopping. And so he’d come out and I know privately he absolutely hated the guy a long time ago.

You know, he’d swear up one side and down the other about Trump and I can’t believe he’s doing this to us. And he knew that he was being put in an untenable position of having to excuse this stuff and having to make up nonsense about it being 4D chess and all the rest of the stuff. So he’d jump off the bandwagon and then he’d get a lot of pushback from people and then he would jump back on it again. Do that over and over again. This time there isn’t any jumping back because Trump is jumping on him this time.

Looks that way. Yeah. It is interesting to see what has happened with it. I don’t know if you know about this, this is not off of of your site, but I just thought this was interesting. BMW is revisiting the Z8 and the Z4M from one of its boldest eras, they say, and they’re talking about the restoration of V8s and of course, we’re seeing that now in the luxury cars. And you said this a long time ago, you said, what is it that’s going to be able to distinguish Porsches from or Lamborghinis or Ferraris or whatever from these other cars if they lose their V8s or V12s and all the rest of this stuff, the special engines that they had, you know, they’ve spent a lot of time inventing these things.

Their entire value added thing is built around these special engines or special suspensions and things like that that are, that are going to disappear. And so do you see this as coming back as a niche product? Because certainly it’s going to be anything that you or I could afford to buy. Yeah, absolutely. I do see it coming back. It is coming back and as you say, as a niche product. And that’s the, you know, that’s good, but it’s also tragic. And these were at one time accessible, available to, you know, to people who were just ordinary people.

I mean, even a Corvette, for example, a Corvette as recently as the 80s was something that was within the range of, you know, even a blue collar person. You know, you could afford a Camaro, you could save up and you know, a few years after that you could probably get into a Corvette. Forget about it now, you know, it’s a sixty, fifty thousand dollar car to start and you got the insurance and everything else on top of it. So yeah, these things are available, but they’re only going to be available to the relative few, the extremely affluent few who can afford to indulge.

They just dropped off for me a, a new Land Rover Defender that has the supercharged V8. Wonderful vehicle. You know, if you’ve got $110,000. Let me check my wallet here, right? Yeah. Nope. Whereas you know, my, my old muscle car, my 76 Trans Am, when it was new, it wasn’t cheap, but it also wasn’t exotically priced so, you know, regular. They were all over the place. You remember in those eras. Oh yeah. Back in the day it was common for ordinary people to be driving a car with a V8. I’ve got an article coming out tomorrow that talks about, you know, the new status symbol of choice over at lexus, which is $140,000 minivan with a 2.4 liter hybrid, turbo augmented drivetrain.

You know, as opposed to what you used to get for, you know, for a lot less than that. You used to be able to wonderful V8s and the Lexus flagship sedan, the Mercedes flagship sedan, BMW flagship sedan, all of them now. Well, the Lexus is being retired after this year. But those cars, they come with little six cylinder engines now and they’re not even that big. I, you know, if you along a Mercedes S class, which was once an impressive car, really impressive car, big, hulking, solid car, it’s smaller than a 75 Chrysler Cordoba. And the Cordova came with a V8.

But does it have fine Corinthian leather? If only it did. You know, I’d far rather have a 75 Cordova than a new Mercedes S class. The Cordova is not data mining me. It doesn’t have lane keep assist. You know, it doesn’t monitor my eye movements. And there’s something to be said for plush 3 across seats with fine Corinthian leather. That’s right. You know one of the things that just made me so sad and it was maybe, let’s see, when was it? Was it, I think it was 2017 before my show started. We went back to take care of some family business that was back in Florida.

And when I was growing up my family used to go to basically two places for vacation. They go to Daytona beach or they’d come here to Gatlinburg. And I really loved Daytona beach in those days. It was so much fun. I mean I get a little, only time I rode a motorcycle and it had a little governor on it so it wouldn’t go that fast. But you could go as fast as it was allowed on the beach of Daytona. They won’t allow anything, not even a little moped like that is not allowed on the beach anymore.

I mean they used to race cars on the Daytona. That’s how the Daytona 500 started. You know, they would have one leg of it was along the packed sand on the seashore, the other leg was coming back on the paved road. And then it would get really complicated on the two curves that connected the two because the sand there was really soft. And so if you go back and you look at the races that they had, that’s usually where people lost it. But you know, I just remember cruising up and down and people cruising up and down the beach with all that kind of stuff.

And we went back about a day, decade ago and I just couldn’t believe it. I mean they still have the boardwalk that’s there, they still have the big pier and all that kind of stuff, but nobody was allowed on the beach. Essentially you couldn’t put any cars out there. And of course nobody was walking through it because it’s a long stretch. And so it was just lifeless. And it’s like, man, they’re just destroying everything that’s alive in our society. It just made me so sad to see that. Yeah, I actually did a little clip that we use in the show because of that.

And I showed kind of before and after. I went back on YouTube and I found some clips of people in the 70s and, you know, having a great time on the beach with their cars and everything. And, you know, and then today how sterile and shut down everything is. And it’s like, man, this is like, you know, the 15 minute city lockdown already here at the beach. Yeah. You know, you reminded me when we started the conversation about how D.C. looks like a gigantic mausoleum with all these tombs and bleak architecture. I remember reading a long time ago.

I can’t remember the author’s name. You may be familiar with this book. It’s called the Architecture of Doom. Have you heard of that book? No, no. It was about the National Socialist period and, you know, and that Bauhaus. Just sort of severe, ugly everything. Big but ugly. Grandiose ugliness. Kind of like brutalism in architecture. Yeah. Where they use the raw materials. The university that I went to for engineering, University of South Florida, was done in the 60s and it had that brutalist architecture. I mean, it was just barren and intimidating, really, if you look at it.

And that’s what you see now everywhere. Yeah. You know, these all have that same fake facade, you know, with the little fake peaked roofs and everything. Ugliness and homogeneity and ugliness everywhere. They’re just draining the color and the vitality out of everything. And we really ought not to let them if we can. That’s right. Yeah. It was such a kind of a culture shock in a sense. I met Karen at the University of Tampa. We were both going there and it was based on a hotel building that had been built by this railroad magnate named Plant.

And he decorated this thing. And it was a mixture of Victorian architecture and Islamic architecture. So they have kind of this Victorian hotel and they built it with. The thing is still standing. And it truly is an interesting building architecturally. They used railroad ties as kind of the main construction framework that was there for it. But they had all these minarets and all this other kind of stuff. And actually I was in a band group and they called it a fraternity, but it wasn’t a fraternity in the sense that you had a house and everybody lived together.

I mean, it was a fraternity in a sense that we’d go around and pick up the Supplies and everything before and after the games and things like that. So we’d actually get in it to work. But we had a place where we could meet, and it had access to one of these minarets, and we would climb way up the top of this minaret, and it had. It’s just filled with broken steps that you had to watch out where you’re walking and all kinds of dead pigeons and everything. But when you got up there, it was a great view.

But the place. Place was so meticulous in its detail and. And it had all this Victorian detail in it everywhere. And then I go from there to the University of South Florida, and it’s all this brutalist, antiseptic architecture. It’s like, wow, you know, just makes you feel different, you know, when you’re in these two different spaces completely. Well, look at pictures of car dealership lots in the 70s and even the 80s, and look at them now. And there’s a reason why practically every car you see on the road is white, silver, or gray or some permutation of that.

They charge extra for, you know, for interesting colors and not just a little bit. You know, if you want metallic red, in a lot of cases, that’s like an 800 option. Now you know why most people are driving around a car that looks like a refrigerator. That’s right. Fifty Shades of Gray. And it’s kind of. There’s kind of a sadomasochistic automobile industry that has now evolved and all this stuff. It is sad to see it, but who knows? Maybe people get fed up with this stuff and maybe the pendulum will swing back the other way. First, we have to educate people.

We have to let people know how important it is to have freedom and value those things that they’re actively destroying. That’s the key thing. So I really appreciate what you do@ericpetersautos.com thank you, Eric, for coming on. Always great to talk to you. And thank you for holding the torch for freedom and mobility. I really do appreciate that. Likewise. Thank you. Have a good day. You too. The common man. They created Common Core to dumb down our children. They created common paths to track and control us. Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing and the communist future.

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