603: Socialism, Big Tech Censorship, Climate Change, Jonathan Emord, "The Authoritarians"

This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company. For more information and links to all.

Our great podcasts, visit hartmanmedia.com.

Welcome to the Holistic Survival show with Jason Hartman. The economic storm brewing around the world is set to spill into all aspects of our lives. Are you prepared? Where are you going to turn for the critical life skills necessary to survive and prosper? The Holistic Survival show is your family's insurance for a better life. Jason will teach you to think independently, to understand threats, and how to create the ultimate action plan. Sudden change or worst case scenario, you'll be ready. Welcome to Holistic Survival, your key resource for protecting the people, places and profits you care about in uncertain times. Ladies and gentlemen, your host, Jason Hartman.

It's my pleasure to welcome Jonathan Imord back to the show. He's been on before, talking about some of his landmark cases involving the FDA and other cases that he's done. It's just been fantastic having him, but really exciting. He's out with a great new book entitled the Authoritarians Their Assault on Individual the Constitution and Free enterprise from the 19th century to the Present. And I think this is just very topical right now, as I have said many times the past year. Covid, et cetera, the civil unrest. This is a central planner's dream come true. I mean, they have been able to exert all sorts of additional control and authority and surveillance on our lives, and they hope to exert even more. So, Jonathan, thanks for coming on to talk about this. Welcome back.

You're welcome. Thank you for having me on.

Yeah. So talk to us a little bit about the book. Is this your first book, by the way?

No, it's my fifth book. It's certainly a topic that I haven't addressed in the past.

Yeah, well, it's a very important topic. So, you know, let's start with kind of a historical outline because you do go back quite a ways. Why don't we sort of take a chronological look at the way authoritarian power has been used and abused throughout that time?

All right. So a lot of people don't realize that socialism has been with us largely in the closet, so to speak, for over 100 years. In fact, in the antebellum south, the principal arguments in defense of the institution of slavery against the abolitionist cries for the end of the institution were those that were adopted from Friedrich Hegel, who was a collectivist in Germany and developed a thing called the historic school historical schools in Germany that argued that people were simply instruments of the state when they performed well or properly, and that they had no individual rights. There were only collective rights. And that rights were given to you by the state and they could be taken away by the state. They called for an efficient administrative state. But in the antebellum south, the arguments for socialism were used to defend the institution of slavery. In fact, it was said to be the beau ideal of socialism, that is Plantation slavery. And they said that slaves were cared for from cradle to grave by a government that would afford them all access to the necessities of life, but would recognize their differences and would protect the superior race, the white race, in its advancement by having the mudsill work or the work at the bottom of the barrel done by an inferior race, a black race. Now this concept of racial division we see again presently the BLM organization Nantifa arguing that whites are the responsible party for the institution of slavery and that they are need to be wiped out. Slavery is really a Trojan horse used by these organizations because they were created by socialists, avowed socialists, actually communists. They're Marxists and they have no hesitation in admitting their Marxism. And they intend to destroy local, state, national governments, overthrow private enterprise, destroy capitalism and replace the system with a socialist or communist regime that they control. That's why they have no sympathy for Joe Biden or the Democratic party. Because for them it's not enough that the Democrats become socialists. Rather BLM and Antifa want to rule, they want dictatorial rule and they want to overthrow the government, whether it's comprised of Democrats or Republicans.

Well, I must say, isn't this an amazing irony? You know, the people who are supposed to be for equality and the people who are shouting about all of these things are actually working against their own stated goals.

Quite right. These people are not interested in equality in the least. They're interested in very much a state control or state enslavement of the entire population. Likewise, their profession of sympathy for the black race is really a lie. Because when it comes to the harm they cause, violence that causes, the arson and the looting and the destruction of buildings, all of that is taking place in cities. And they don't seem to care when they destroy a black owned business, ruin a neighborhood that is principally comprised of minority individuals, or cause assault or even murder of innocents who are in the minority community. It's not about their interest in protecting the black race. It's really about their interest in using.

The concept of racism as a rallying cry to draw people into the streets and use them as a cover for violent acts against government, against business. And really with the end in view of it's very much planned with the end in view of overthrowing the government.

Well, I guess the first question is, have they? I think they have, but maybe it's not that simple. The question I was going to ask is, how have they fooled their own followers?

Well, this is true around the world, for example, with antifa. Antifa came from Europe where it was used for these same purposes. What they try to do is induce chaos, induce civil unrest. So they capitalize on a few popular concepts. It's ironic. Racism is detested universally in this country almost. There are pockets of racist, but they're in the minority and they're generally hated by the rest of the community for their views. Not.

Any sympathy. There isn't any sympathy in the population at large for discrimination of any kind. And so it's easy for us to accept this simple proposition that black lives matter. We all agree with that, but we also agree that all lives matter. But they condemn that concept because they really are interested in capitalizing on the notion of racism against blacks, because they found that as a very effective tool in inducing white populations and black populations to protest. So they use a protest as a cover for illegal activities. And so they send in people from around the country into areas where there's significant protests in the cities, and they then use that as a cover. And then ordinarily, at nightfall, they then take weapons out of caches that are holding them in secret. And then they begin these armed assaults on government buildings and on individuals and on businesses.

And most certainly, I mean, at the very simplistic level, these riots are destroying these neighborhoods for maybe decades to come. I mean, just very simply, no business is going to reopen in the place where these broken stores are and storefronts blown up, broken windows, etc. They're just not going to be able to get insurance. No insurance company is going to write insurance for these businesses, even if they wanted to reopen. So it's going to just economically devastate these neighborhoods even more.

That's precisely right. It's also the case that when these acts of violence take place and buildings are looted and burned and so on.

Many times the people who, particularly minority owners, their life savings go up in flames. Their entire investment, their whole life has been spent creating a business. And they employ people in the neighborhood. And so, you know, the devastation affects not just them, but also the community at large. And not to mention the terror that this causes in the community. I mean, people feel very unsafe, and they. And they oftentimes won't return to those areas to if they can avoid it. So there's no shortage of flight by people moving out of these areas, making them really just abandoned war torn regions of the country. And it's horrendous.

It really is awful. Something you mentioned earlier, Jonathan, was this idea of where they've collectivized these different groups of people basically, and they've tried to represent them as one entity. And it reminded me of a great quote by Ayn Rand, which I'm not going to remember exactly, I'm sure you know the quote. But essentially she said there can be no such thing as group rights. There are only individual rights, because the smallest minority in the world is always the individual. Of course, this is so logically obvious, right? Whenever anybody is acting as a group, they will not agree with each other. So what do you do then? Then they have to splinter off into another group and another group and then it just has to keep dividing forever until it always comes back to a single person. And interestingly, and you are the expert on this, by the way, and maybe I'm sure you can speak to it, but you know, our Constitution was written all about the individual. I mean, that was the first. Well, really the second document, maybe the Magna Carta first, that really glorified the individual over the state. I mean, the Bill of Rights, the whole concept is we're telling the government what they don't get to do. Right. I mean, that's just beautiful. It gives me goosebumps thinking about the beauty of that idea. So how have we lost our way here? I mean, there's a lot there. Go wherever you want with it.

Well, the Founding Fathers really created a unique environment in defense of individual liberty in the history of the world. And they made the individual sovereign so that the state was the servant of the people. What these radicals that I include within them, really the leaders of the Democratic Party, because the leaders of the Democratic Party actually endorsed the idea of socialism in the Democratic primaries towards the end when both Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer stated within one day of one another that they would have no problem supporting a socialist at the top of the ticket who ran for president. And of course, they've endorsed socialist programs and policies, as have the President, as has the president. And so they have abandoned the concept, the fundamental concept of this nation. Article 4, Section 4 of the Constitution guarantees a republican form of government in the states and also authorizes the use of the federal military and militia to suppress instances of rebellion and instances where the republican form of government is threatened. But we are guaranteed by our Constitution, a republican form of government. Socialism is the antithesis of that. Socialism is the antithesis of individual rights. It's all power to the state. All people are enslaved by the state. They do what the state wants them to, as to their employment, as to their allocation of resources. It redistributes all income, has a politically favored class that receives the wealth and exploits everyone else. Anyone who's lived in a socialist country knows that. In the Authoritarians I have a whole section dedicated to the victims of communism and socialism who recite one of whom Donna Casanova, who is a former citizen of the Soviet Union, recites life under there. But when it comes to.

These fundamental concepts you're talking about, they're embodied in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, which is really our guiding light as to what individual liberty means in the constitutional sense. Lockean liberty, that is John Locke's second treatise on government, defined an order of government, just government that depended upon the rights of individuals as individuals and protecting those rights. So we have in the, in the Declaration of Independence we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. So these rights are pre political, they come from God, not from the state. In socialist countries, the only rights that exist are by leave of the state, because rights are said to be from the state. And in addition to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men. So it is the very purpose of the government in our republic to secure our individual rights against the government. Ironically enough.

These governments derive their just powers from the consent of the government. The only legitimate aspects of our government are those to which we constitutionally consented. And the administrative state is not consented to. Bias. Actually, it was a power grab in the 1880s on the Federal level that was promoted by progressives, as I explained in the Authoritarians, and created an unconstitutional government that now rules us. Actually, 3/4 of all federal law is not the product of those we elect, but rather the product of the unelected heads of the bureaucracy. And they have combined legislative, executive and judicial power, which was, according to James Madison, the very definition of tyranny.

Yep. And with what's going on now, I mean this is just advanced the Authoritarians, hasn't it?

Yes, we have now an overt instance. As I explained in the Authoritarians and as I did a bit in the program dating all the way back to the antebellum south, we've had socialism. And that that socialism progressed during the Progressive era. Into an overt creation of a socialist state in the bureaucracy, in the administrative state. And that was intentional. It was intentional to avoid. They created the administrative state, the father of which was Felix Frankfurter, who was a socialist, as I give all the details to in my book. He was a justice of the Supreme Court, but he was also a socialist. And he believed strongly in the British labor socialist movement. He was a member of the Fabian Society. He was a member of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society in the United States when he was at Harvard. And the students he praised the most were those that were advocates of government power and status, who were socialists. But the point is, he helped very much create an administrative state that would circumvent the constitutional limits on power. So he created an administrative government during the New Deal.

That actually is a all powerful government outside of the Constitution's defined government, and that has been ruinous to free enterprise and to individual liberty. In fact, the administrative state has none of the protections that Article 3 courts do for individual rights. In the courtroom, the accused is presumptively guilty. In the administrative state, you have no right to confront your accuser. In the administrative state, you have no right to a trial by jury, you have no right to against the use of general warrants. And there are numerous other right things.

Like civil forfeiture, the secret courts, the FISA court, all these star chambers. And I would argue arbitration also. These are end runs around the whole concept of a transparent and open system that should be visible to anybody. Anybody who wants to come and sit in a courtroom and report on what's going on or just watch what's going on should be able to do that. Yet this is all just kept from the public. I mean, you know, it seems to me that every courtroom in the land should just have an ongoing television video feed, you know, with audio so everybody could watch it. And, and so those judges wouldn't know who's watching. Right? You know, now you go sit in the back of a courtroom and the clerk says, who are you? Why are you here? They don't have a right to know that. That whole. The whole point is that the system should be just open to anybody who wants to witness it.

And administrative courts are the worst offenders of them all when it comes to constitutional rights. They violate the guarantee of the independent judicial review. They're beholden to the agency itself. The agency is both the accuser and the judge. So there is never justice. There's never an instance where the accused is found innocent. They're always found guilty. It violates the constitutional Guarantee of due process that you were talking about. It violates, for example, the fifth Amendment right against self incrimination. Most fundamental right. It uses unconstitutional general warrants. We talked about that. It doesn't follow the federal rules of civil procedure. So there's no procedural regularity associated with administrative tribunals. They actually just impose their will on each accused person. That person has no resort to rules of procedure to protect them. Fundamentally in their rights. It allows into the record for decision entirely irrelevant and unreliable information at the request of the government, and it denies the accused trial by jury. Under the sixth and seventh Amendment, you have no such rights in an administrative court. And the decisions are largely exempt from meaningful judicial review because the courts largely defer to the judgment of the administrative agencies both as to the construction of the facts and, and the law.

Okay, so that's administrative courts and that all makes sense. But you know, most people watching or listening, Jonathan, I don't think they're very worried about showing up in, in front of an administrative court. You know, that does happen to people. I've, I've profiled some horror stories of it on this show. However, I don't think too many people are worried about that. You know what they are worried about, and you may not have even touched on this, but I'm sure it's on your mind, is the social media companies and the big tech censorship, whether it be Amazon banning books. Amazon does all sorts of evil things, but you know, Facebook, Twitter, I mean, it's just absolutely horrific what these companies are doing and how much control they have. What are your thoughts on that and do you think you'll have any cases coming up on that?

Well, I think invariably we will. They have argued that there is no First Amendment protection because the First Amendment is designed to protect the individual against censorship from the state. But the fact of the matter is the First Amendment is broader than that in its conceptual reach. And whenever business colludes with government to affect censorship, then there is a censorship that can be prosecuted. And that's exactly what's happening here with big tech. What you're having is.

A tech society dominated by far leftists who are entirely aligned with and cooperating with the Democratic Party and leaders in the Democratic Party.

And not only are they acting as a proxy for leftist government, but they're coordinating with each other too.

Yes.

You know, all of these idiots who are spouting the typical libertarian thing, which I would usually agree with, okay, are saying, well, it's a private business, they can do whatever they want. You can, but, but the fact is, they're essentially monopolies, okay? You can't go down the street to another Twitter or Facebook or Amazon. These companies have been in this winner take all world. They've been allowed to become so absurdly big and powerful. It would be fine if there was a marketplace of a bunch of evenly sized companies and platforms. I'd be fine with it. They could, of course, they're private businesses. But that's just not the. Why. Why is it that we don't have these kinds of rules in, say, real estate? In real estate, we have fair housing laws. The state has come in and said, you know, if anybody wants to rent your house, regardless of their race or beliefs or opinions or religion or politics, you have to rent it to them. Well, politics aren't really a protected class, but you know what I mean? You have to rent it to them. Right. But. But yet there's no law that says the social media platforms have to let everybody have a voice, which there should be if they're going to be this big and powerful.

They were given special privilege by the government.

Yeah. In the 90s, when they thought they were at a disadvantage under 230. That's ridiculous. Nowadays.

That was based on the notion that they were common carriers. In fact, they pledged that they would not engage in censorship, that they would not discriminate among views, and that they were merely common carriers. And as a result, they received all sorts of privileges, both on the federal and the state level. And it became actually during the Trump administration when they decided to become politically active in a major way by censoring information that was antithetical to their own views. And so then they stepped out of the role of being common carriers and into the role of being editors. And as such, their immunity from prosecution should be stripped from them. And section230 needs to be amended to affect that. And because they're functioning as editors now, it's not just that they're functioning as editors, in which case, if they were only functioning as editors, they would be entitled to full First Amendment protection. But what they've done is they've colluded with the political parties that they favor, and they have used these massive platforms to discriminate against parties with views that they oppose by denying them access. And also, they have advanced the views of parties they favor by, for example, allowing direct forms of speech that would induce violence to be carried by liberal parties and not censoring it and allowing it to continue for extended periods of time before public pressure is exerted. And then they withdraw See what's interesting, they eliminate any viewpoint there's conservative that offends them right off the bat without any hesitation or any complaint, of course.

Because it doesn't fit their community standards.

What a crock.

And it's entirely a shield for what in point of fact is viewpoint based discrimination that they maintain incessantly. Really?

Yeah. You know, the CEOs of these companies should be prosecuted and imprisoned. I mean, what they're doing is so anti American and anti constitutional and just absolutely disgusting. I just can't believe we are living in the world where this is going on. I absolutely can't believe it.

Jonathan, for the past 10 years or so, and you know, you as a, as a constitutional attorney, you know, maybe you can add to this. I'm sure you can. But for the past 10 years or so I've been saying that three things need to happen. At least one of these three, if not all three, these companies need to be split up under antitrust laws. That would seem obvious. They need to be regulated like the common carriers. Now, my understanding may not be correct on this, but what I've always understood that to be is, is look, the phone company, if we're talking on the phone to each other and we say something that, you know, AT&T doesn't agree with, they don't get to cut off our phone service as long as we're paying the bill. Right. And then, you know, they'll use the excuse, well, Facebook is free. No, it's not free. None of that stuff is free. We're paying dearly for it with our data. That should be our property, by the way. But that's another discussion. And, or their algorithms should be made public so everybody could see and all the computer nerds of the world could see what, why certain things show up in, for example, a Facebook news feed or an Amazon result or a Google result. And it's not a mystery. I mean, this is unbelievable that this is all a secret. It should not be a secret if these companies are going to be big monopolies. If they're not, and there's a big open marketplace and a marketplace of ideas, I don't care. None of that has to apply.

I think one of the things that I favored is a change in federal legislation so that there would be enormous tax incentives given to Internet service providers that would create competing platforms and expand the scope and availability of those platforms to the public, such that they would have more choices for accessing the same information. And those expanded platforms and tax incentives would be based on a Viewpoint neutrality type of approach. That is that the person, entity would actually fulfill the role of common carrier and would compete against these existing entities. The existing entities would be foreclosed from having an opportunity to receive these benefits so that it would create a competitive marketplace. Yeah, I think.

But the complete opposite has happened. The tax advantages are already there for these disgusting companies like Apple and Amazon. You know, they set up these offshore companies that are essentially shell companies. They do nothing and they somehow own all the, all the rights to what was invented in Cupertino, California. And they get to just basically embezzle money away from the United States and away from the US Taxpayers, their biggest market yet. They use our stock exchanges to go public and raise money. It's absolutely unbelievable. We allow this to happen.

They do the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party. They have developed systems for the Chinese to.

Surveil their own people.

In most sophisticated ways. And they have enabled these companies, by federal law, not cracking down on them, to have very cozy relationships with the Chinese Communist Party. That's one thing I would break apart immediately with federal legislation. I would forbid entities that are engaged in mass communication from having any dealings with the Communist Party of China Are avowed enemy.

I mean, this many people think Silicon Valley is just run by the ccp. I mean, you know, it's. It's amazing how entrenched these, these crazy beliefs are in Silicon Valley. It's. It's really staggering.

Well, there's a lot to be said for that. I mean, the amount of money that has been saved and the, and the technology transfers that have taken place to the People's army in China has been astonishing. And part of that transfer has been facilitated as a result of Big Tech. And we should be much more aggressively policing this and blocking it. But of course, it's in the Democratic Party's advantage, the current administration's advantage, to have this cozy relationship with Big Tech. So they just look the other way, right?

Right. Under Trump, there was a chance that something would change. There's no chance now. Not for four more years at least. But Jonathan, I want to make sure we wrap up with an action item, you know, a to do list. What do people do about this? Most people understand the problem. And, you know, if they're listening, they probably agree there's a problem here. What do we do?

Well, that's why I wrote the authoritarian. So give the book a little plug. There we are. And I wrote this book primarily because I was so upset that the nation was falling apart. The foundational principles that I revere were being destroyed. So not only do I explain the whole history of socialism in the authoritarians and explain what has happened, how it is that it became overt, and why there is rioting in the streets and so forth, but I also give very detailed explanation of what we need to do as individuals, what we need to do to defend our rights and to expand protection for them. And the most immediate concern, I think people should rightly have, is the safety of your homes, the safety of individual lives. The protection for yourself and your family should be foremost in your minds, because it's no idle threat. I mean, if you ask people from communist countries and socialist countries how quickly those countries were overwhelmed by revolutionaries, it happens so quickly that you can't even take a breath. And so you need to anticipate the threat that actually exists and to be ready. The great history of this country is tied to the second Amendment. And we have had our right to bear arms, which most other people in the world have had taken away from them by their government. Thus far, we have not had that happen. So we can stand as individual sentinels for liberty by arming ourselves and anticipating the threats to our family and to our property. And we ought to be ready for that. And we ought to be prepared to defend our property and our lives as best we can, and be prepared with the arms necessary to do that. That will be extraordinary. But we also have to fight back by vigorously objecting, as many have in Seattle, to the defunding of police, to these movements that are designed, all of that is designed by antifa, by blm, to eliminate all barriers to their takeover. So if you don't have the police and you don't have jails and you don't have bail, and you don't have any vehicle by which citizens can have any state protection for their rights, then the revolution is facilitated. And that's what they're about. So all of these politicians who pander to these ideas of defunding police and of supporting institutions that take away your rights ought to be removed from office. So exercising the franchise, but that's not enough. You've got to be vocal. This is a time when individuals have to use the resources available to them, even if it's communicating with friends, even if it's more writing a letter to the editor, writing, appearing on a show such as yours, talking wherever they can about the necessity of acting to defend our rights. And when it comes to the border states, with the influx of refugees coming across the border, of individuals who are pouring into this country, who are undocumented aliens. Those people do pose a threat because among them, sadly, there are a large proportion that are engaged in criminal activities as a result of the cartels being responsible for the movement of these people into the country. So you have sex trafficking, you have drug trafficking, you have criminal arms trafficking, you have terrorists coming across the border in the midst of all these people. And so what do we have to do? Well, if we aren't going to have a federal government that protects our rights, we need to get rid of that federal government, get rid of the democratic control, get rid of President Biden by voting him out of office. But we also, people in the border states need to demand that their police protect them against this onslaught. On the local level, they need to also be armed, and they need to be ready for anything that comes their way. And we have to have, at a bare minimum, it is the most fundamental duty of the government of all to defend individual rights. And if the government won't do it, we have to do it ourselves. So we have to get ready. We have to get ready.

Well, as they say, the Second Amendment is the amendment that makes the First Amendment possible. That's the old saying on that. Do you think we will see any kind of real type of secession movements or anything like that? I mean, you know, we've, we've seen these over the years. You've heard inklings of them. Twenty years ago, I was predicting that, you know, if we live our full natural lives, we will definitely see secession happening. But the interesting thing is, in today's world, I don't know if it would really be state by state, like in a geographical way. I sort of wonder if there's some. Maybe we're already really seeing that because, you know, people are voting with their feet and they're, you know, moving all around the world. But do you think we could actually see some states secede from the Union or parts of states?

I think you're really touching on something here that I do in the book in the Authoritarians, and that is that we really are in a pre civil War kind of an environment. There are many parallels to be drawn between our circumstances now and what was bleeding Kansas in 1850, before the Civil War in 1860. And there you had in microcosm, the Civil War in Kansas. And I think we see these civil wars taking place across the country in urban areas where people are being forced to defend their property and their lives against the onslaught that is there. And your point about people moving with their feet, voting with their feet, is actually very much the case, so that this mass migration, internal migration of Americans away from cities like New York and cities in California, the entire state of California, Washington State, Oregon, moving internally into Idaho, Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota, Texas, Florida, all of this migration, which is changing the demographics such that even the number of members of Congress from blue states are going down, and the number of members of Congress for red states.

California just lost a seat for, I think, the first time in its history. That's amazing.

So we're seeing whether the political environment in this country is capable of arresting the extraordinary socialist destruction of Republican governments that is underway. And people will be voting, and I think they will be voting in large numbers in 2022. And I believe that we're going to see a Republican majority arise in the House and the Senate. And I think in 2024, that trend will likely continue. And I suspect that barring some unforeseen circumstance, that a Republican will replace Biden in the White House. And these Republicans are going to be different than Republicans that we have seen in the distant past within our lifetimes, though, for those of us who are 60 or thereabouts. But these are going to be individuals who are going to be committed to restoring constitutional strictures on government power. We've seen this happen with the Supreme Court recently in its decisions. In its decision in its most recent case, it has denied the government an assumption of power. In the case of the Federal Trade Commission, Federal Trade Commission had been operating through Republican and Democratic administrations alike, with confiscatory power nowhere given to them in the enabling statute for the ftc. So they would have disgorgement and.

They would take people's money as part of their own assessment judgment against a party. And the Supreme Court held that they had no such power and that therefore there was no statutory basis for it. And they struck it. And that was a 9, 0 decision. Remarkable.

Wow.

Yeah. And so I suspect that this is another bellwether of what's to come. I suspect that we are going. The good news is the light at the end of the tunnel. I do suspect that we are going to see more effort than has ever happened in our lifetimes to restore the Constitution, to return limits on government power that have been a constitution in exile since the administrative state arose in the 1880s. So that's the good news.

Yeah. You know what's interesting about the voting with the feet and this mass migration that's going on is that outside of some woke tech companies and woke Hollywood or the entertainment industry in general, I guess I should say the real economy is run by people that generally vote to the right. They run most of the small businesses. They're hard workers. I mean, when places like New York City and California, you know, I could call it the socialist Republic of California and New York, you know, when they, they're just going to lose their tax base, I mean, they're going to be in trouble. Now, Biden's administration will bail them out, but this problem could last for decades.

The extreme liberalism of the Biden administration is quite remarkable because we have a socialist president. People thought they elected a moderate, but what they have is a socialist president and they have a socialist Congress. Majority of Congress is now socialist in its orientation on legislation. They won't admit themselves to be socialists unless they're members of the squad or some other minority in Congress, but political minority. But what I suspect is going to happen is a major backlash because the destruction of the fossil fuel industry, for example, the backbone, the very backbone of the free market system in the United States, is not going to go by without consequence, political consequence. And they understand that. So they're trying to rush through as much legislation as possible before 2022 that establishes a socialist state in the United States. But the states are objecting. They're filing suits against the federal government. The oil and gas industry has been decimated by much of this. You take, for example, the state of New Mexico.

The destruction of the fossil fuel industry and allowing leasing on federal land to extract fuel has been devastating to their economy, which has been heavily dependent upon the revenues derived from, from those highly lucrative activities. And so something like 40 to 60% of the revenue of the state is gone as a result of Biden's executive order. The executive order itself is another socialist move because the Constitution would have compelled that to be passed by legislation. But Biden just took the power in violation of the separation of powers and acted as if he were a dictator. He's destroyed leasing on federal lands of oil and gas with no explanation. He has wiped out entirely the Keystone XL pipeline.

Well, look, I mean, think about it. On one stroke there, he got to put a bunch of Republican workers on the unemployment line, destroy a bunch of Republican companies, and then he got to inflate gasoline prices for a bunch of Democrat voters who don't understand how inflation works and how supply and demand and how the economy works. So they're instantly going to need to be taken care of by the government more because he's, he's impoverishing people. I mean, it's, it's. And making them all more dependent on.

Government climate change agenda would call for the end of fossil fuels. It would call for the elimination of gasoline. I mean, his, his pipe dream is.

Yeah, I'm, I'm sure every immigrant gardener can just afford a new Tesla, right? They could just buy a Tesla. Yeah, absolutely.

And it's not out of a concern, not one whit of a concern about the welfare of individual that this is driven by. It's driven by this fanatical socialist green agenda where the whole idea is unscientific and contrary to the basic engineering principles about energy. The energy industry laughs at the idea that you could run this country with reliable sources of energy on solar and wind, when those are two unreliable sources of energy that cannot even function without heavy state subsidization. The cost of the energy generated by oil and gas is multiple times that of natural gas. And the effect of relying on it is to destroy an economy. And that's basically what they're about. They don't want a Western society to exist in the United States. They want to kick us back to the Stone Age. They don't want air conditioning, they don't want central heating. They don't want skyscrapers in the cities. They don't want to have anything.

Well, they want skyscrapers as long as they can compact people together and control them better.

But one of the things, you know, the solar and gas or the solar and.

Wind energy, the environmental consequences of that are extraordinary. And they completely ignore them. I mean, to take up the amount of land necessary to have these giant farms for solar and wind would wipe out a huge swath of the entire United States dedicated instead of to farming and agriculture and to the wildlife, to these things. And, you know, windmills chop up all sorts of flying animals.

When they actually function. They've been a horrible thing in Europe. They've killed bat populations, bird populations have been decimated by these things, and yet they have no regard for that whatsoever. That's not a concern in the least. And it's because, as the chief of staff to Alexandria Ocasio Cortez admitted, that really it's not about the climate, it's not about the environment. It's all about socialism. That's what it's really about is to come up with a Trojan horse to deliver socialism. So you tell everybody the world's coming to an end based on the oceans rising, and, and, and then you tell them the only solution is you give up your car, you give up fossil fuels you don't have energy from, and.

Become more dependent on government. That's the Bottom line, goal of everything, take mass transit. You don't have a car, you know. Yeah, be part of the collective. That's got it. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Jonathan, it's always interesting to talk to you. Let's hope there's a turnaround. You know, we're going to see a generational shift here now with Gen Z. We know what the millennials are like, we don't know what Gen Z is like yet. Maybe the cultural shift will occur and things will swing back to, you know, a center point of reasonableness. Who knows?

I would rather defend my freedom and have it than have it taken away and then resent for the rest of my life the fact that I didn't defend it. So I'm hoping that these youth will come to realize that there's nothing more precious about being an American than to be free and that liberty is the defining characteristic of what it means to be an American. The rest of the world comes here because here you can be free. If we take the last bastion of defense of individual liberty out of the world, then we will be forever miserable because there is no joy in being a slave to the state, there's only misery. And everybody else in the rest of the world understands that.

Yeah, they sure do. And you see that in South Florida with the Cuban population, you know, one would think they would vote for Democrats and you know, because they're a minority. Right? No, they get it. They know what communism is like and how much it sucks and they don't want to go anywhere near that. And so, you know, it's, it's. Yeah, the rest of the world understands this stuff. But you know, people who didn't grow up in it, didn't witness it, they don't get it. And sadly we have a generation that is going to be running the world soon who really didn't know what hardship was. You know, they were the most catered to generation in human history, so the only way they can get it is from history books. But history has been revised by the the government run school system and the leftist indoctrinated universities. So how would they know any different? Right, so, right, we'll see. The book is the Authoritarians, Their Assault on Individual Liberty, the Constitution and Free enterprise from the 19th century to the present. Jonathan Imord, thank you for joining us.

Thank you sir.

Thank you so much for listening. Please be sure to subscribe so that you don't miss any episodes. Be sure to check out the show's specific website and our general website, hartmanmedia.com for appropriate disclaimers and terms of service. Remember that guest opinions are their own, and if you require specific legal or tax advice or advice in any other specialized area, please consult an appropriate professional. And we also very much appreciate you reviewing the show. Please go to iTunes or Stitcher Radio or whatever platform you're using and write.

A review for the show.

We would very much appreciate that and be sure to make it official and subscribe so you do not miss any episodes. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode.