They may just say to me, you know what, we don't want your
kind. Ask not what your country can do for you, Ask what you
can do for your country. Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's
the Ricochet Podcast. I'm Rob Long, joined by Peter Robinson and Steve Hayward.
James Lylats is off this week. Our guest today is Seamus Brunner,
who's written an amazing book about billionaires. Stay with us. It's when that
speech crosses into conduct that violates our policies against bullying arounds that speech not cost
that barrier? Does that speech not call for the genocide of Jews and the
elimination of Israel? America is a nation that can be defined in a single
word. How's the foot him? Excuse me? Hello, and welcome to
the Ricochet Podcast. This is episode number six hundred and sixty nine. Every
time I say that number is just astonishing. Uh. You can join us
at rickchet dot com and be part of the most stimulating conversation and community on
the web. We hope you do. Go to ricochet dot com right now,
but in the meantime, have a listen to us. I am Rob
Long, coming to you from New York City and joined as always by my
Ricochet co founder Peter Robinson and Palo Alto. Peter, how are you?
I'm extremely well, rob how are you? I'm doing great? And we
are also joined by Ricochet's I do we could Holy friend Rickochet, marrit Ricochet
adjunct visiting professor Steve Hayward. Steve, are you You're somewhere kind of glamorous?
Right? Yeah, I'm in central coast of California. Well, this
week I'm struggling to find my context. Rob, I've lost my context and
I can't find it anywhere. So you brought it up. Let's start,
let's go so it. Presidents of Harvard University of Pennsylvania and Matthews Institute of
Technology MITA were somehow bested by at least aphanic in the house, which is
a kind of doubly triply humiliating for them. And I was just going to
ask you so so they couldn't answer a simple question which seemed pretty obvious to
the rest of us, right easy to answer. They kept saying it to
me, you know, whether they condemn a calling, whether calling for the
genocide of Jews violates their own university speech standards, they couldn't answer that question.
Now, my real question to you is this, the the combined endowment
figures for all three of those universities got to be one hundred billion dollars,
right, correct? Correct, But I'm not exactly close to one hundred billion
dollars. You'd think they'd be better prepared. You'd think they would have anticipated
this question, right, They both, all three of them look so terrified
and stunned. What. Well, Okay, so I'll go next, because
Steve, having spent a great deal of time in academia in recent years,
we'll actually have detailed will have thought this through the level of detail that I
couldn't approach. On the one hand, I felt a certain sympathy for the
three of them because they were all attempting to answer the question under First Amendment
jurisprudence. They got hung up on that. And under the First Amendment,
even calling for the genocide of an entire people is legal. Speech is legal
until Oliver Wondell Holmes Old test you get a clear and eminent danger shouting fire
in a crowded theater. But of course that isn't really the relevant standard because
all three of these institutions long, long ago tossed a sigh any attempt to
live up to the First Amendment, or any rigorous attempt to incorporate First Amendment
standards into the standards of their own universities. So I may get this wrong
in one detail or another, but you'll understand the general point I'm trying to
make. At Harvard, if you miss gender someone, that's a serious offense.
At Penn there are proceedings moving forward. I believe they're still underway against
Amy Waxman, a brilliant published, widely published, widely respected teacher at the
University of Pennsylvania Law School. And why is that? Because she has suggested
certain things that we know to be statistically true, that there's a higher crime
rate among African Americans, that young American, young African American males are more
given to crime, they come from broken All of this is you're not a
allowed to say it, even though as far as I'm aware, no one
has even alleged that Amy Waxman has said anything untrue. She's said things that
make people extreme. And by the way, of course, all this is
uncomfortable to hear. I'd rather not hear it, even myself, I'd rather
not hear it, but it's true. It's certainly covered by the First Amendment,
but it's not covered by the University of Pennsylvania's own actual standards. So
a least Stephanic asks asks a straightforward question, don't come up here and try
to pretend that you abide by the First Amendment when we know that you cease
doing that years and years ago according to your own standards, Are people on
your campus allowed to call for the genocide of the Jewish people? And of
course the answer should have been an immediate no. That would violate our standards.
They could not bring themselves to say that, and that was just I
don't so over to Steve, why were they trying to pretend? Why were
they attempt to wrap themselves in the First Amendment? We all three of them
absolutely had to know that they were going to run into trouble on this.
Yeah, well, three points. One is the universities have been trying to
navigate between academic freedom and the First Amendment and preserving safe spaces for all their
protected classes, and now that has all blown up in their face and they
don't know what to do about it. Second, I'm quite sure that they
had lawyers and pr people supplying them with talking points, and all those people
live in a campus bubble and did not realize. By the way, it
wasn't just at least stemanic. There was Kevin Kylie, I think, was
the guy who said, if I am a parent of a Jewish prospective student,
can you assure them they'll be safe on campus? They couldn't even answer
that monequivocally, couldn't even give a generality about having a safe space. Here's
my hypothesis about what's ultimately the problem here. And this will sound contradict you
at first because it has two propositions. The first proposition is, and I
think people will perceive this and maybe not the second one. The first one
is college administrators are terrified of the campus left, of their leftist true,
true, true. The second proposition right now, the second proposition takes a
minute to understand what squares with the first one, which is campus administrators,
deans, department chairs, they actually don't take the left seriously. But that
I don't mean they're not afraid of them. They don't take their ideas seriously.
When you hear Larry Summers, former president of Harvard, or my Dean
Chemerinsky say I can't believe we're getting this anti semitism. Chemerinsky's phrase was nothing
that's prepared me for the anti semitism that I'm seeing right now. It's been
there all along. But the point is when they read some crazy you know,
the left wants ethnic studies, gender studies, they want colonial studies,
and all the intersectionality business. It's the easy, the path of least resistance.
Say sure, go ahead, and to have a department hire twenty crazy
faculty in what they now call cluster hires around social justice. And now suddenly
these people say, oh, actually, we really do mean that we want
Jews to die and for Israel to cease to exist. And the reason they're
surprised is they all thought this was just fun and games. We can do
land acknowledgments, right, the land acknowledgements drive me crazy. We can always
do. No one ever says, let's give the land back under Yale or
Berkeley or Harvard. Only Israel has to give the land back. That's what
the mob is demanding. Right, So it was double standards galore, and
give back to whom. I wonder though, that's the other question is yeah,
well, yes, of course, I mean it's ridiculous stuff. But
everybody, I mean, I've seen these land A student will give a land
acknowledgment and some professor or an illustrator will go, thank you for that very
profound statement. They don't mean that, they know it's nonsense, but they
go along with it. And now that they really mean it, they are
powerless to say anything intelligible because they've been complicit. I mean, sorry,
I'm sorry, I'm ranting, But the explanation I've heard Hilarry Summers has been
was president of Harvard. He did nothing to get in the way of this
spreading cancer on the Harvard campus. One morgal of detail. Sorry, I
file away job ads for department searching professors, and I file away all the
ones saying we want somebody by the way in English, German, literature,
all kinds of all the disciplines in the humanities, and we want someone who
will work in decolonialization and intersectionality. Now where are the provosts? You know,
the provosts at universities are supposed to be the quality control officers they ought
to be saying no, you can't have that ad. Some of those ads,
by the way, we want especially underrepresented minorities to apply for these positions.
That comes right up to the water's edge of being an illegal ad under
Title seven of these Civil Rights Acts. So yeah, the provost ought to
be standing up and saying no, you can't do this, but they couldn't.
I mean, right, but just one moment, I'm just to repeat
to build on Peter's sympathy, which I you know, misplay sympathy, but
I'm really good at misplay sympathy. Yeah, what if Claudine Gay had said,
president of Harvard University, had said, yes, it does violate,
Well, then she's got to go and punish all those students, like what's
that one thousand of them, five hundred them like in a in a stroke
of a pen, one utterance that she's got to enforce the rules, which
she doesn't want to force that, so she they're in a terrible position where
they have to weasel word their way out of it in an incredibly dishonest way,
because you're exactly right, You're to be honest, means you're gonna like
they're all gonna what are they all gonna go? Like even today there was
a student at NYU who's too tore down one of those posters, and NYU
said, okay, well you're out for till the till fall. But of
course that's a cascade of tragedies for this student because she's on financial aid and
she has to beat the dorms, and she has to do all this other
stuff, and she's on scholarship and all these things, right, which,
of course you think about before you violate university policy. But at the same
time, most of the students had no idea that those policies applied to them,
right, like, these are just rules to keep you from wearing a
sombrero at a Halloween party. I hadn't thought of this, But you,
being an old time script writer, you know exactly what would have come next.
At least Stephonic, You're exactly right. The next way, if Claudie
Kay, the president of Harvard, had said, yes, that does violate
our standards, then Elsa Stephanic would have said, well, then, doctor
k what disciplinary action have you taken against the twelve students who did a sit
in in your library? What disciplinary action have you taken against this outrage or
this outrage or this outrage? And the answer, of course would have been
actually none. You're right, You're right, those women were in an impossible
situation. It still surprises me that they seem so unprepared. I'm unprepared for
that. And also, I mean, part of the problem is that we
now I've been listening to this for the past three years, and one of
the things I find ridiculous, ludicrous. But I've accepted that people believe is
that speech is violence, speech is harmful. So if that's the case,
then whatever your speech is, you got to be careful. I don't approve
of that. I don't think that's right. But if those are the rules,
those are the rules. And then suddenly say, well, no,
no, no context is important. Oh no, no, no, no,
I mean actually only if it becomes conduct Well, I mean that that
just sounds like we're turning the clock back because it's inconvenient now to have these
standards, which I mean, the other part of I have to say the
the other part of this for me is that I find all this really glorious.
I gotta be honest, I'm enjoying every second of it. I mean,
I am not a good person. I'm loving it. I'm loving it.
I love a lot watching them squirm. I love the weasel worthy backtracking
the next day. I love all the anguish. I love the fact that
all the trustees are getting together sayings, do we need to make a change
here? I love it. I call it like a Christmas present, a
big, rich, delicious, gooey plum pudding. I mean, it's horrible
that it's in this context, but I mean I would be lying if I
didn't tell you that I loved every minute. There's that great German word for
this, right shotenfreud. But Rob, we should you know, we should
have that with chocolate sauce and whip with a cherry on yep, right now?
Man, Oh, let's just ad this thought. Uh, you know,
I follow the public opinion polls on this. In public regard for higher
education has been slipping badly the last five to ten years. It is polarized
more Republicans than Democrats. There used to be no gap between Republicans and Democrats
and regard for universities, and it was always very high. Now it's split,
but it's even down among Democrats. And I'll bet the next survey taken
that asked the question will show a discernible drop from the events of the last
two months. One closing observation almost even prediction. One suggestion. The suggestion
is keep your eyes on Pen in particular. Yeah, Penn has, for
various historical reasons, has an especially act has had and especially and does have
an especially active and devoted Jewish contingent among its alumni. And one after another
has gone public put it in writing, this is not the way trustees,
former trustees alumni is a big time, big money alumni ordinarily behave. Ordinarily
things are handled quietly. They've gone public saying unless things change, no more
money from us. And this one man yesterday, astonishing that he had had
the foresight to do this, he gave Pen one hundred million dollars in stock,
but in the fine print reserved the right to cancel that stock, in
effect, to take it back if Penn behaved in such a way as to
reflect badly on the reputation of his own firm. And he has now written
a letter to pen It's public saying, unless President McGill goes, that one
hundred million dollars gets canceled. Now, I have had some experience with trustees,
and I can tell you that trustees become intensely uncomfortable with questions of equity
and first amendment versus this right and balance. They really they don't want to,
they don't feel they understand it. They don't. But money. I
can guarantee that there have been phone calls among the trustees at Penn saying is
this lady really worth one hundred million dollars? Yeah? I mean it comes
down to this right. Either you can take my money or you can say
you want to kill me. But it is a great Christmas present we're enjoying
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Our next guest, Seamus Bruner. Seamus Bruner is the director of research at
the Government Accountability Institute. He's the author of the recently published Controligarchs, exposing
the billionaire class their secret deals on the globalist plot to dominate your life.
Shamus, that sounds very left wing, Seamus. If you're going to have
trouble with any of the hosts on this show, it's going to be Robbie.
Yeah, come back right now. I mean, I kind of know
why I don't like billionaires, because they all tend to do exactly the same
thing, and they complain a lot. But what what's your what? What
what's wrong with What's what's a control of ARC? That's a great question.
And I wrote this book to appeal across the political spectrum. It's actually much
more important than a political book. It's this is an existential book. This
is the billionaire are not all bad, you know, not all billionaires.
Most billionaires are quite good. And there's three thousand billionaires. This is only
about thirty of them. And there's nothing wrong with making money. I mean,
we're capitalists, so there's nothing wrong with making money. But it's what
you do with that money. So I define a control of ARC as a
billionaire or bureaucrat who is plotting and scheming to dominate every aspect of everyone's life.
They want to control every industry, from food to health to information,
I mean critically information. And once they have control over things like the food
sector, the information sector, the financial sector, they can turn the dials
and pull the levers and nudge you in certain directions, and they really want
to change your behavior. You see that with control over the energy sector,
actually banning gas stoves, banning gas vehicles, you know, banning cows.
So, Seamus, you're not saying this is not the old charge that used
to be leveled against John D. Rockefeller Senior, that he was using his
money to corner markets and make even more money. He was using his money
for profit. You're saying that there are thirty billionaires who are using their effectively.
They're giving, well, explain this, but they're using their money for
ideological purposes. I'm going to guess that one of the thirty you mentioned in
your book is George Soros. For example, give us two or three names.
Yeah, so George Soros. Of course he gets his own chapter and
we talk about the Open Society mission and how he uses things like that.
I mean who could be against an open society it sounds lovely, and who
could be against things like a democracy initiative or democracy partners? But he really
inverts the meaning of these words by buying off very small election. I mean,
we see it with the prosecutors and sowing chaos in our cities, opening
the prisons. George Sorees is sort of a special control of ARC. But
the other ones. I mean you've got Bill Gates of course at the at
the top there, and then all of the guys who go to the World
Economic Forum and talk about things like going cash lists or implementing digital IDs that
are effectively going to be social credit scores. I mean, I thought,
the reason I wrote this book is because there's all these things that sound like
crazy conspiracy theories, and then then you dig in and you see, well,
actually, no, they do want to use a form of digital ID
to track movements and track activities. And if you are going the wrong places,
doing the wrong things, buying the wrong things, you'll get you know,
you know, you'll have sort of this social credit score. We see
it right now in Ireland. If you're attending protests or riots, whatever the
case may be. They want to take away your right to free speech.
And actually they're talking about taking away the entitlements of these protesters, taking away
you know, Europe's got it more of a welfare state, but they've got
sort of basic, universal, basic incomes. They want to freeze their assets.
You saw it in Canada with the truckers. They wanted to freeze the
trucker protests assets. So the motivation here would be what these are people who
are already so rich that the usual motivation that still affects most of us,
which is paying the mortgage, setting something aside for retirement, they got They
blew past that ages and ages ago. The mere accumulation of money after a
certain level becomes uninteresting to them. I'm trotting this out to see if this
is if you approve of this, if this is right, And so all
their gratification shifts from earning profits to doing good, and they define doing good
as in one way or another, manipulating the way the rest of us live.
In the interest of George Soros as a particular and I think skewed sense
of justice. Bill Gates is on and on about the planet and how we
need to shift from eating beef to eating I don't know what grasshoppers or grass
or somethings. Yeah, so have I got that these billionaires of whom the
rest of us should be on red alert because in one way or another,
they're coming after us. To them, they're doing good. That's all they
want to do with all their pile of money is to do good. Is
that right? Yeah? I mean the chapter one is called the Good Club.
They actually formed this club called the Good Club. That should be a
big red flag right there. You'd think they could come up with something a
little more creative. And so the first meeting of the Good Club was in
May two thousand and nine. Bill Gates convened the meeting. It was at
Rockefeller University in New York. George Sorows was a co sponsor. There were
other billionaires there, Oprah Winfrey, Ted Turner, among about ten others.
And so they get together in May two thousand age Yes, right, the
people who want to save the planet. It's a very ambitious goal. And
so they get together and they say, well, Barack Obama's just been elected.
We've all spent an enormous amount of money and influence to get him there.
Uh. It's also in kind of the the tail end of the global
financial crisis. So there's this populis resentment rising up amongst the people who've all
been foreclosed upon. And these guys all made a boatload of money, people
like Warren Buffett Blackrock is a ConTroll of arc entity. And so, uh,
they get together and they say, what should we spend all of our
money on. We've got this, uh, this great president who can you
know, do what we want? And they basically all unify around this cause
of overpopulation. And you hear Bill Gates talk about it. And this is
another one of those things that is, you know, conspiracy theorist fodder that
I wanted to get to the bottom of and overpopulation. So is the earth
overpopulated? I mean, that's a debate that we should be having. Some
people say absolutely not. It's we've got plenty of space. If you've ever
traveled by airplane over and lost countries. Let me guess they never say to
each other there are far too many billionaires. Now all say there are far
too many peasants. Exactly right. And so George Sorows has got five kids,
Ted Turner's got five or six kids. So actually Ted Turner has proposed
that entrepreneurial, enterprising peasants could actually sell their fertility rights. I mean it's
a new thing. I had never heard of fertility rights. So if you're
poor and you make yeah, it's like a carbon offs at a child offset,
you could sell it to, you know, a billionaire who might want
to have more than two. Okay, So these guys are lefty nuts and
the only reason that we pay attention to them, should pay attention to them,
but we should is that they are so rich and so well connected in
the technocracy that runs much of the country that they're coming after us and they
can actually get Okay, Now, one more question before I toss it over
to Steve Hayr. You don't know Steve as well as I do, but
I can tell from his eyes that he's desperate to get in here. So
are there any of these billionaires who are doing good? Are there any who
are giving their fortunes to the charter school movement or to the founding of new
churches? Are there any who are proceeding with a certain humility and actually giving
their money away and toward causes of which we might approve? Certainly many,
there are many, many good billionaires out there. This book isn't about them,
but and I don't and I don't want to care. It wouldn't sell
right right one day. But no, the billionaires who fund, you know,
like causes like our own, so you can you can look those those
individuals up, their great American patriots and the funders of charter schools especially.
And I don't want to caricature you know, these guys on the cover of
the look. I mean, I certainly don't. I get deep into their
history and kind of find out what makes them tick. And Bill Gates,
for example, he's rebranded as this philanthropist, so no, he's, you
know, not the guys in this book, they're not giving to those good
causes. But they do, I'm sure give to good causes. I mean,
they've given enormous sums of money. But if you were to look at
a pie chart, it would be like the width of a paper clip on
the pie chart the money that they are they are spending. Like Bill Gates,
for example, he was never very charitable at all. I read,
you know, his father's memoirs and accounts from his siblings and accounts from Microsoft
employees. While he had a much more active role in the company, by
all accounts, he was brutal. I mean, his sister said he was
quote nasty his mother. John D. Rockefeller Senior, this is a man
who was absolutely ruthless in acquiring his fortune, who's now rebranding himself as a
man who gives dimes to children. Well, it's brilliant of you to bring
up that comparison, and I get into it in the book, and it's
just sort of what as Rob tell you, Yeah, of course that's his
industry. Well, actually, it's fascinating that the Rockefellers were in John Due
and were a prototype of control of arc prototype where it was only after the
Justice Department started looking into the practices of Standard Oil or in Bill Gates' case,
Microsoft, that they set up their foundations. And then they set up
these foundations in John D's case, starts giving dimes out and Bill Gates's case
starts giving out million dollar checks to schools and libraries. Now, was he
just trying to help the kids learn? Or was he trying to implement things
like social emotional learning, this intentionally vague term that does away with arithmetic and
science and math and puts in things like DEI into kids' brains. But it's
more like brainwashing. But anyhow, Bill Gates, I mean, on her
death Bet his mother was pleading with him. He's now the richest man.
It's the mid nineties and he's been the world's richest man for twenty of the
last thirty years. She says, please please give some of your money to
charity. He still would not until he sets up the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation. I mean, you should watch some of the anti trust depositions where
they're in, you know, questioning Bill Gates about his practices. It's very
Clintonian how he's like, I don't know what you mean by, you know,
cut off the air supply to my competitors. But he sets up the
BILLI Milinda Gates Foundation, rebrands, becomes this great philanthropist and since then he's
gotten into a lot of industries. Now Bill Gates is he's a farmer,
he's he's a doctor, he's an educator. He's got a lot of hats
that he wears. But but and it's not a problem that he wants to
invest. He kind of says, Oh, I'm just investing in farmland to
diversify my holdings. But what we found at the government Accountability Institute. Is
he's using the same tactic that Microsoft used. It was called embrace, extend,
extinguish, where he enters an industry, extends his reach and then works
to extinguish and cut off the competition. Now that the way they're doing that
to the farmers is with all these climate change regulations and emission standards and to
save the planet ostensibly. But I can tell you, I can tell you
the fake meats that he invests in beyond meat impossible foods, a lot of
these lab grown meats that are coming up, they're more energy intensive. I
mean, nobody knows sustainability better than a farmer. They go out of business
if they don't treat the land and be good stewards of the soil. So
these companies that are growing it in labs are much more omitting of what Bill
Gates would call greenhouse gases. Yeah, seamous, it's Steve Hayward out in
California. By the way, there's something quaint. I'm glad you margin farmer.
See if we call him, well, I did roll grapes for a
little while once upon a time. It's funny that you would mentioned Bill Gates
and the anti trust business because this now is sort of ancient history. But
what we were afraid of was, oh my god, Internet Explorer might dominate
the browser market, which nowadays this just shows you the problem with the anti
trust. But I started spending some time around Silicon Valley entrepreneurs gosh, almost
thirty years ago now because I'm getting old, and there were two things that
struck me. One was, especially in the case of Gates, like why
is the government coming after us? What did we do wrong? I mean,
yeah, we're tough competitors, but they didn't get it. They didn't
understand politics. Instead the dominant mentality. And I know Peter probably sees this
because he lives there. Is your tech entrepreneurs don't understand politics. They don't
understand why social problems aren't solved like engineering problems. They're actually social engineers.
They don't realize that social engineering is a you know, for all kinds of
reasons that we all know is a ridiculous idea. They think they're smarter than
we are, because why shouldn't they think that they've made all this money and
given us all this technological progress. And I think the apotheosis of this was
seen a few months ago or I guess last year now with the downfall of
Sam Bankman Freed. Now we follow all his crypto shenanigans, But the part
that arrested me and still does was the fascination with effective altruism. Yes,
and why were they going to be effective? Because they're smarter than the rest
of us and no better. The implicit understanding of that, by the way,
is that what the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation have been doing for
decades was ineffective. I have to say it's another moment of schadenfreud, which
has sort of been a theme here today. So there's this hub risk they
have and that they're smarter than us, and that's what makes them dangerous.
I mean Carnegie. And here's the distinction. These guys want to change the
world because they have a vision. The older billionaires like Carnegie, they thought
when Carnegie's case, he thought it was an obligation to give back on moral
grounds, right, he thought if he dived any money at all, he'd
go to hell. And the Rockefellers it's a mixed bag. But they want
to do good and but no, this new class has got they're completely different
class a billionaire by the way, that's why. I love your title control
of Guark. I think that's absolutely perfect. They don't see any reason why
they shouldn't be in control deep down inside their contemptuous of democracy. Sorry,
Seamus, this isn't really question. It's a long rant, but I wonder
if it's a wonderful You're nailing it, Steve, You're nailing it. Go
on continue, No, no, I just that's sort of my observation is
this is a different class of philanthropy and quite sinister. Yeah, well,
you're absolutely right. So there's this great MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum, and he
actually captures exactly what you just said by saying, I mean they basically have
a god complex. Why because they've built their own worlds, these digital worlds,
things like Meta and Facebook and Microsoft, and they think because they can
turn the dials and pull the levers in their own digital worlds and get their
intended results there and everything's perfect and to their liking, that they can export
that ability to the real world. And that's the problem because they can't.
You can't social engineer. All you can do is try to control people,
and Americans we don't want to be controlled. And that's one of the big
problems. I mean, the number one goal of these controller guards that just
the people in this book, not all billionaires obviously, but just these guys,
is they want to transfer power from individuals and from even countries to international
institutions, things like the World Economic Form, the United Nations, you know,
the World Health Organization, institutions they control supernational organizations. And so I
mean that's how George Soro sort of plays into this. He wants to abolish
borders. I mean a lot of the chaos that we're seeing in our lives
now, from open borders to crime in our cities, to even inflations,
is really about weakening nations so that international institutions can swoop in and save the
day. So aside from buying your book, which however, is not to
be neglected. The name of the book is ConTroll of Garcs and you can
get it on Amazon or anywhere else that books are sold, or any other
monopolistic platform. Exactly buy it from your localist bookstore. Please. Aside from
buying your book, Shamus, what should we do? What in the is
there is there scope somehow for a peasants revolt? Well visionary World Economic Forum
visionary? You've all. Noah Harari says, no, there's no hope.
Abandon all hope, you peasants. The peasant revolts of previous centuries are impossible.
Today. I think I have great hope. I think there's awakening happening
amongst the people, I mean on the right, conservatives. The debate for
at least forty years has been no tax cuts, in regulation, that's our
economic policy. And we're starting to realize that the big corporations do not have
our best interests in mind. And so previously one might defend corporations like Microsoft
or Meta. No, the debate of the future and we're starting to wake
up to this is over artificial intelligence, which is going to bring about a
unit like you're already hearing calls for a universal basic income UBI. And Sam
Altman, the head of open ai chat you know, off and on again,
head of open ai chat GPTs maker. He says that UBI is coming
because job losses are coming, big job losses, and it's going to hit
the professional classes first. I mean, you may be listening and thinking of,
well, I'm safe from you know, I use AI right now.
Just no, you are training your replacement. And so when everybody starts losing
their jobs, and you'll see more and more videos of people in their car
crying about how they can't afford rent or groceries. In their tragic videos,
the UBI will be pitched as the solution. Well, we can just give
you a meager, you know, monthly check and you'll be fine. Sam
Altman, by the way, says it'll be a thirteen thousand, five hundred
dollars check. And you may he already knows the figure, yeah he,
Oh, for all two hundred and fifty million working Americans, it'll be thirteen
thousand, five hundred. And you may think, well that ain't bad,
you know, I could I can make ends meet on thirteen thousand, five
hundred a month. No, no, no, it's thirteen thousand, five
hundred per year. According to Sam Altman's manifesto about the coming AI revolutions,
and so what do we back our own billionaires? Do we back the good
billionaires? Is there any hope of a Godzilla versus King Kong? We've got
Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and David Sachs and Joe Lonsdale. And in New
York there's Cliff Ass. I mean, there are Cliff astness. I should
finish pronouncing his name. There are good guy billionaires who seem I won't say
they're all spoiling. Elon Musk does seem to be a man who enjoys a
fight. He's spoiling for a fight. But the people that just named are
willing to fight. Do we just repose our hope in them and hope that
Godzilla defeats can Kong? Well? Number one, we need to wake up
and spread the word about what's coming and what these guys are up to before
they close the close the loop and close the net around us. But so
that's that's the first thing is you've got to be aware. You've got to
have the facts. You've got to be able to articulate these facts convincingly to
your peers and your friends and your family and evangelize you know that you know
we don't want to be controlled. Number two. Yeah, there's a there's
a big imbalance between the George Soros ATM machine and the Silicon Valley lads,
the guys in this book. I mean, they are spending enormous sums and
we have great funders on the right. You mentioned them, and you know
they're very generous and study after study shows that conservatives are more generous than liberals.
But there's an imbalance there just is on you know, funding causes on
the right, and so you know, not to not to say that they
need to spend more, but they really do. And I mean, we
may never match the George Soros ATM machine, but it's important that we try
one more question before I repose your final moments in the in the tender hands
of Rob Long. And here's the question. What are I'm very impressed And
this isn't a question I'm going to give a little speech myself here, but
I'm tremendously impressed by you and the other people that Peter Schweitzer has gathered around
himself in Florida, because what you were doing is something that used to be
known as journalism. Your book is research. You've interviewed people, You've gone
through documents, you have a thesis, and you print a and you write
a book about it. The institutions that are capable, the legacy institutions,
the New York Times and on and on, that are capable of long form
journalism are garbage. They're just not doing real journalism. There are some exceptions,
but only some exceptions. So just tell us very briefly about tell us
who Peter Schweitzer is, tell us what you guys are up to. Well,
well, thank you so much. It's an honor to hear you say
that, and I will pass along your kind words to Peter Schweitzer. He's
an investigative legend. For those who haven't heard of him, he is my
personal hero and mentor. I've worked with him for since twenty eleven, so
over a decade I've been working with Peter Schweitzer. I thought I wanted to
go into politics by the way I studied polysci. I thought I might want
to be a politician or something. Interning for Peter Schweitzer for six months disabused
me of those notions, and I find it much more gratifying and helpful to
be exposing the corruption. So I've worked with him on the books Clinton Cash,
Secret Empires, and I'm kind of the nerd that Schweitzer said, Okay,
now just go take you five thousand pages of Clinton Foundation nine to ninety
filings and make some sense of it. And so I follow the money as
our motto. So I put everything into a Spreadsheet's what I did for this
book. I put all all the figures into a spreadsheet and just start filtering
and sorting, and eventually it's something like a Uranium one speech where they're paying
Bill Clinton five hundred thousand dollars in Moscow will pop out. But yeah,
it's atrocious. What the mainstream media has become the legacy media New York Times,
and we're seeing a renaissance now, people like Michael Schallenberger and Matt Tayebbi
and Barry Weiss and just like the substack has really done such wonders for investigative
journalism. And so I think that that's what gives me hope, really is
there are people out there who still are digging through the mountain of prap that
is thrown at us from you know, you get you get a foider request.
Either they give you nothing or they give you a mountain of nothing.
And uh so it's you know, and I and I'm you know, we're
working on trying to use some of these AI tools that they're putting out to
uh expose the people who really want to control our lives. So I actually
got bing GPT. I was on the wait list and beta user for it.
Uh and it was amazing because I was searching bing gpt for dirt on
Bill Gates, and it initially was turning up some great results, and within
a month it was like, why do you It starts talking back to me
saying, well, why do you think Bill Gates is an altruistic And I'm
like, oh, altruistic is kind of an interesting word, Like how do
you define altruistic? Mister bing or mister and missus bing Seamus? You know
the other side. I hope this book sells and sells and sells, and
I hope that by the time you're let me see, I'm going to guess
you're thirty five, is still a few years away for you. I hope
by the time you're thirty five, you're at least you're on the way to
becoming a Bill Gates of your own. But no, no, why would
you wish that on the other side pays better? You're aware of that,
are you? That's right, Yeah, we're not in it for the money.
This is a nonprofit. I uh okay, yeah, yeah, all
right, Or to rob, you're mistaking the part. So here's my real
question. I mean, I you know, I'm not really scared of people
trying to control me. I'm scared of people trying to make my life better
and do good for me. That the altruism that you said, like that,
that's what I'm scared of. I'm scared of people thinking, well,
you know what, if we let you make your own decision, they're gonna
be messy and complicated and chaotic, and you might make the wrong one.
You know, we just went through two and a half years of that.
That was essentially the subtitle of COVID nineteen. Do what we tell you to
do, even if it's not really important or necessary, because we just we
it's going to make life simpler. And I think there's something attractive about that,
not just for the billionaires, but for people. People acquiesced to this.
People complain when the world isn't risk free. They complain when well,
I know, I have to do this all by myself. They complain when
there's no government or no official bureau or app to solve a problem. I
mean, aren't I mean, I understand you're you're focusing on thirty billionaires about
the billions of dollars, but aren't we the problems? And they have the
reason, They have powered influences because they're selling something that's very attracted to a
whole lot of people. No, I mean that's exactly exactly right. I
mean I talk about it where it's like slipping into a warm bubble bath of
tyranny. I mean, it's very it's very easy. That's kind of one
of the scary things about it. It's so convenient. And I and I
do applaud them. Again, I said, I don't want to caricature them
in the book, and I did, and I applaud them for a lot
of the tools they've made that have made life easier, right down to the
Rockefellers. You know, they they made life better in a lot of ways.
But what's coming down the pike with with the AI revolution, and it's
and you know, we don't need to be scared of AI. I mean,
we hopefully can use it for all good things. But the power that
it has, and that this is the economic debate of the future over UBI
and and whether people, you know a lot of people think about the UBI
is like, oh, well, I'll just be able to finally take those
guitar lessons and pick up painting and culinary classes and it's just going to be
lovely. And that's the thing. It's not going to be lovely. Uh,
And and working hard for a living is gratifying, and they in trying
to trying to take that away from people is actually uh evil in a way,
I think. But anyhow, you're right, it's I mean, were
we not you and me on this podcast, But we, as in the
non control of arts, are part of the problem because we saw it in
the pandemic. How many people turned into Karen's and I mean our own family
members wouldn't let us into their houses without masks, and and the masks became
like a safe banket. I mean you still see people wearing masks just now
in New York City. I see them all the time. Yeah, all
the time. So that is a problem. And waking up, I mean
we can have convenient I mean, we live at the greatest time in human
history. I mean it's amazing. Maybe twenty years ago might have been better,
but this is actually little to statistically the best time it is. I
mean, you can have a meal delivered to your door within a matter of
minutes at the tap of a button. It's an incredible time to be alive.
But we also do need to wake up and take some personal responsibility.
I guess go outside and touch grass maybe once in a while. But it's
you know, we may end up like China. Is all the warning is,
the West may end up closer to a system like China. I mean,
claud Schwab talks about stakeholder capitalism and it, oh, it sounds so
lovely. We've got all these stakeholders. They don't consider us stakeholders, and
we don't get a seat at the table, just like we didn't get a
seat at the table during the pandemic. These problems, things like climate change
are too big for the peasant class understand. They need to be solved by
global institutions. And everyone to a man in this book, right down to
Bill Gates and and and you know fashion they all praised China's response to COVID,
and they said the ability of the CCP to they use euphemisms like mobilize
resources or or or they're quote efficiency or something, and like, we know
what that's code word for. It's co word for brutal authoritarianism where the people
don't have a say and point us. And so all the people who like
you know, just kind of are slipping into this warm bubble bath of convenience.
They're they're not going to They're not going to like a system like that.
They're not going to like the facial recognition cameras. They're not going to
like the weekend driving privileges lost for disinformation and all of that. So,
but it's hard to choose. It's hard to choose the hard way, right.
I mean, when I come home, I'm up traffic abroad and I
can land in the airport and I sort of breeze through and I do you
know, global entry. I don't even show my passport. I just look
in the camera. Yeah, it's kind of great, you know, but
I but I hear you, Okay. The book is called Control of Arcs,
Exposing the billionaire class, the secret deals, and the globalist bought to
dominate your life. The author Seamus Bruner, Shamus, thank you for joining
us. Thank you guys so much. This was this is a real pleasure,
Seamus. Parody think in terms of parody. I want you to infiltrate
some parties at Davos and do an update on Tom Wolfe's Radical Sheet. All
right, I'm gonna make tell Schweitzer whatever he has in mind for you.
That's what I have in mind, will you please? Yeah, if I
end up in you know, a Swiss prison, I'll thank you. That's
the way. Think of all the writing you could get done in. It
could be a lot worse places. That's probably true. It's probably quite nice
over there in prison. Think of all the tobal run they'd serve you great
to have you, right, all right, take care of Seamus. Bye.
Well, thank god. I'm not a billionaire. It's all I can
say. Yeah, exactly, I'm If you were Rob, you would be
running the counter offensive. Again, you're insufficiently alarmed, Rob. You do
know people want to take your guess stoves a chef for the words. In
Santa Monica, where I used to I lived. I rented in Santa Monica
for many years before I moved to Venice, before I moved to New York.
They met, it was early days. They put out an ordinance where
every new toilet had to be a low flow toilet when those toilets doesn't really
work right, and all these you know, Santa Monica's film People's Republic of
Santa Monica. They called all these millionaire billionaire environmentalists, right, they were
all in favor of this. But when they were redod to their houses for
their millions of dollars. They didn't want that. So but in order to
get the certificate of occupancy, you gotta have an inspection, and that inspector
is going to look and see make sure those toilets are like low flow toilets.
So what they would do is they would install the low flow toilets and
all the bathrooms, and they get the inspection, and then they would swap
out the low flow toilets for they really they're really good ones, the Japanese
ones that like basically are like Niagara falls. And so I think at some
point someone estimated that there were twenty five low flow toilets in the entire city
of Santa Monica. They just kept rotating from house to house to house to
house. So I guess I guess my only comfort I take from this from
the book and from what Shamus was saying, was that the great news here
is that the billionaires are almost always wrong. They almost always make terrible the
roast. They think they're so smart, even the ones that we might be
sympathetic to, and they make these classic classic blunders. Sometimes it gets us
all killed. Sometimes they lose a lot of money. Sometimes nothing happens.
But this stuff never works, So I guess that's what I'm comforting myself with.
But maybe I am insufficiently alarmed. But yeah, they do a lot
of great damage along the way, though. I mean, one case in
point, just one is the Ford Foundation, going back fifty years ago.
One of their biggest grant areas was overpopulation, and they bankrolled international planned parenthood
the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars and led us some real horrors like
you know, forced sterilizations in India and such. There's a great book on
this called Fatal Misconception by a historian of Columbia who's otherwise a liberal. But
it's very savage. And by the way, even the New York Times now
says, gosh, just in the last month, gosh, maybe falling fertility
is going to be a real problem for the next century. Which, by
the way, it's like the universities. You know, Julian Simon, you
know, Peter knows he was, you know, they were saying this fifty
forty fifty years ago. We have been saying conservatives about university for the last
twenty five years. And you know, boy, we have one after the
other we get to say, I told you so, but there we are.
Yeah, I told you so. That sounds that's that sort of weak
sauce when everything's rubble, But you're right. I mean that is that is
I do. I do comfort myself that way. I was aware of Seamus,
and I was aware of his book. He's even better than I expected.
He's well stolen. Yeah, I mean, he's well spoken, he's
hardworking. So I take I really do take a lot of comfort. Rob
and Steve. All three of us love good journalism, and all three of
us are of an age so that we saw with our own eyes the journalism
business model collapse. Just collapse, all three of us in one way or
another. I mean we've had this conversation over drinks how many times over the
years. Where's the new business model going to come from? Where? How
can you save the New York Times? How can you revive the Washington?
Well, here's where it comes from. Peter Schweizer's put together half a dozen
really bright guys like Seamus in West Palm Beach, Florida, of all places.
Barry Weiss is in Montecito with something called the Free Press Online. Shallenberger
is up in San Francisco, Matt Tayibe. I don't even know where Matt
Tayibe is, but the Alex Berenson from his home and Ry, I think
it is someplace in upstate New York. Journalism, good journalism, is beginning
to get done, new institutions, new voices. I find that I have
lived to hear the first shots of the counter revolution. That's the way I
feel. That's actually, that's so optimistic, Peter. It's good for the
The paradox is brought to us by some billionaires or otherwise a problem. Right,
the Internet has lowered the barriers of entry to this, which that's true,
that is true. But that is also the problem with billionaires is that
they or rich people in general, is that it's it's just irresistible to resist
the idea that I'm rich because I'm really smart. Yes, and I figured
it out and you didn't. And you know what, I'm really smart in
this one area. I mean, you could say this. You can say
this about Elon Musk, very very brilliant guy. Right, and we're going
to go to Mars because if we love Musk, he built an electric car.
Nobody said he could do that. Then he comes head to head with
an ad supported media business, and he's floundering and he's pretending that it's someone
else's fault, whereas in fact, he purchased an ad supported media business and
now is complaining about the terms of that ad supported media business, which is
a little bit, you know, kind of like a come upance for somebody
who's fairly arrogant. But that's okay, that's all right, that is what
the market is supposed to do. The problem really is when that these sort
of when the come up and this doesn't happen because they are not part of
the market. Instead, they're part of the regulatory system, which doesn't ever
have a come upance. We never lose regulations, We never lose bureaus,
We never lose people telling us, you know, how many gallons are in
our toilet tech. We only get more and more and more of them.
And the solution isn't to replace those people with people who agree with me.
The solutions to get rid of that altogether. Yeah, I said, we
get the opposite. For my entire adult life, you will hear Ralph Nader
or some other person on the left say regulation of X or Y has failed.
Therefore we need more and better regulation. Yes, the right conclusion from
this right, that's exactly right, That's exactly right, well fellas, I
mean, I I don't even want to bring this up because it's I'm so
I'm so exhausted by it. But it does seem that this is am I
right, this is the Hunter Biden endgame here. The indictments that came back
down yesterday are sort of that. I mean, I think it's a very
big deal. I think it's a very very big deal and now means it
cannot be avoided next year. It is also I you know, I don't
want to well put on a tiny tinfoil hat and say curious that this indictment
was not issued until after the deadlines had passed for someone serious to file against
Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination. I'll just put it that way. There's
all that we have that's good. Tit Foyle hatism. I gotta like it.
I like it like we have. If you look at one of the
debates, I guess it was the first debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
Biden says, this is a close reconstruction. If I'm not quoting him
exactly, nobody made money on China. The only person who made money on
China was this guy, and he points at Trump. He was lying through
his teeth. He was lying to the American people in an election year.
That is a danger to democracy. And now we know he did it.
No thanks to the mainstream media, but thanks to James Comer and some very
dogged, terribly uncool Republicans in the House of Representatives. But uh, and
the yesterday Biden's lawyers. So he has he's being indicted or a tax evasion
to the tune of one point six million, if I recall the figure,
and Biden lawyers. Biden's lawyers had the effrontery to say that if his name
was anything other than Biden, this case would never have been brought. If
his name was anything other than Biden, he'd be in prison right now.
It's staggering. It is just staggering now to start thinking through the politics of
this thing. What does it do? I mean, my fear is that
it kind of numbs the entire electorate to serious criminal charges. Oh well,
doesn't matter that Trump has been indicted by because now hunter Biden has been These
should be taken seriously. And my concern is that in some way they may
neutralize each other in practice, in the practice of practical politics, but it
sure looks like it sure feels like just a touch of justice. Yeah,
I'm not so sure about that, Peter. I mean, if you think
back to Whitewater and the Clinton's complicated land deal they lost money on and then
ultimately an impeachment over you know, sex scandal, which people said, ew,
but that doesn't really rise to I think that this is such obvious self
dealing, such obvious influence pedaling that even, you know, an independent voter
or someone who's not especially idylogical, is going to say, this really stinks.
And I don't like these people that that that. It does seem like
classic government influence pedaling, corruption plus tax evasion, which makes everybody mad.
But what's interesting about it is the only reason we had to do to get
away with it was pay his thinking taxes. He could have kept millions of
dollars. Yeah. By the way, I don't know if you've seen the
itemization of what he spent his money on. It's really fun. Yeah,
hundreds of thousands of dollars on women. I think that's the itemization line item.
But we only reason we have this sort of fifty six or whatever it
is, fifty plus page indictment is because the plea deal was thrown out in
the summer. I mean, wasn't the stately pace of justice. This was
a weird, unexpected judge tossing out a plea deal in August that ended up
with the same prosecutor coming back with this this, this kind of the size
of this indictment suggests that there had to been something going on before that plea
deal was thrown out, because you don't go from a plea deal which is
gonna be fine, suddenly this guy's going to do time for four or five
years, right, That's that's I mean, I'm no lawyer, we need
john you here, but that seems like a bizarre swing from we're not going
to touch him to actually, we're gonna throw the book at him. That
that's it. That's an interesting story that I can't wait for to be told,
but probably won't be told for a few years. But i'd love to
know. Speaking of Foyas, I'd love to have that those conversations for you,
because that would be a really interesting story. Let's speaking of interesting stories.
This story is coming to an end. Thank you. Fellas for joining
us. This podcast is brought to you by shop Off. I support them
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It gets us up when the AI algorithm helps defeat the automatic brains trying to
defeat us, and it's all unhappy. Honkah today. First day, it
started last night. I think last night was the first night. First night,
first night was last night. You're right, and Steve, thank you
for joining us. Always a pleasure. See you on down the road Next
week, Fellas, Next week, Boys Ricochet join the conversation.