Brian talks to Auron MacIntyre about his book, The Total State – How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Eight o five, a fifty five KRC DE talk station.
I'm very happy Friday Eve to you, Brian Thomas. Happy
to welcome to the fifty five KRC Morning. So kind
of continuing the theme that I launched into this morning
about this ridiculous effort to go after Russians for alleged misinformation.
Apparently they think the Russians are in the can with
the Trump administration, but they're trying to suppress communication. Generally speaking,

(00:23):
everybody's got an opinion, everybody's got a mouth, and I'm sure
the Russians have one. I have one, You have one.
Just depends on how closely you are paying attention to
the facts and so you can discern truth from falsehoods
and draw your own conclusions. A man who knows all
about this my next guest Aaron or Rn McIntyre. He
is a calumnist, lecture author of a book we're going
to be talking about today focusing on the application of

(00:43):
political theory. Host of The r and McIntyre Show. You
can find them on podcasts with the Blaze search for
your podcast and check out his program. Today we're going
to talk with about his book The Total State. How
Liberal democracies become tyrannies. Welcome to the program, Arn McIntyre,
it's a real pleasure to have you on today.

Speaker 2 (01:01):
Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 (01:02):
You focus a lot about the whole COVID thing. I mean, look,
we just had Mark Zuckerberg come out the other day
and admit that the government suppressed and forced him on
Facebook to suppress what we now know to be true, honest, genuine,
factual information about COVID. But no, no, no, that went
against the government narrative. So we can't have any of that.
Last time I checked, Arn, we have a First Amendment,

(01:23):
the right to free speech and free assembly. Whatever happened
to that, as well as the Fourth Amendment, right to
be free of unreasonable searches and seizures. You and I
could go on for hours.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
Yeah, and really, I do at length in the book
explain what happened with a lot of these changes. A
lot of what has happened is that the authority of
the government, the authority that was supposed to be restrained
inside the first three articles of the Constitution, has been
shifted into a number of different institutions. A lot of people,
of course, have heard of the deep state. That's what
a lot of people call the unelected bureaucracy of the

(01:55):
federal government. But on top of that, we have institutions
like social media, like academia, like your regular news media,
and all of these wield enormous amounts of power, in
many cases, some of the powers that we're intended to
be part of the government. And now that those are
no longer something that is under the umbrella of the government,
the constitution no longer applies. So what's happening regularly is

(02:18):
that the federal government is basically shopping out its censorship
programs places like Facebook or other news media to make
sure that while they while the speech is still being restricted,
no technical First Amendment violations are being committed.

Speaker 1 (02:33):
Yes, But as I am an attorney and I do
recall the political reality, the legal reality that if a
government is working and is inextricably intertwined with a private business,
that private business can be deemed to be part of
the government and ergo must honor our constitutional rights. And
I certainly believe that was the case in connection with
the government's hand in hand work with formerly known as Twitter,

(02:55):
as well as Facebook and other social media outlets. So
it just depends on how far across the line. They
go on that.

Speaker 2 (03:03):
But the problem is that we continuously see that these
people are not about to heal under any any kind
of restriction. And unfortunately, it's obviously not just private companies,
like you said, it's also institutions that are supposed to
be objective. One of the reasons that so many people
lost faith institutions correctly so during something like COVID is
that the government was willing to go ahead and sensor

(03:25):
and manipulate data for purely political purposes in institutions like
public health, which are supposed to be above all this.
And really, one of the things I point out repeatedly
in the book is that the neutral institution is itself
amiss that a lot of our governance is currently based on.
We have moved so much of the authority of especially
the legislative branch, into these regulatory agencies that are not

(03:49):
actually seeing proper oversight, and they're the ones that are
really writing the laws at the end of the day
with their application. You know, we look at a situation
like COVID. We thought that Donald Trump was the elected
president of the United States, but in the state of exception,
the moment in which all of these rules seem to
be suspended so that people can feel sick during the

(04:10):
during the pandemic. Instead, it's actually Anthony Fauci. He seems
to be giving out orders.

Speaker 1 (04:14):
Indeed, and you know one of the worst states that
defended that. The sort of the entire process, the constitutional
reality of separation of the powers and the fact that
laws have to be passed. Pennsylvania, they just changed their
election laws on a whim. There's one day that was
this way, and the next day, oh no, you've got
ten extra days and you can do this and you
don't need to provide that. It's like, wait a second,

(04:34):
that was just an edict from on high. There was
no legislation passed their elector, and rules were not changed
by the legislative branch and then signed into law by
the governor. It just happened overnight. I think the problem
is we let it happen.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
Well. And the issue is when all of these rules
are being violated simultaneously, simultaneously, both by government agencies and
by different organizations, it's difficult to chase all all these
violations down. And that's really the issue. When these organizations
seem to act in some level of synchronicity, even though
there's no direct coordination from some kind of organization on

(05:11):
high than what you have is a scenario where thousands
of violations are occurring simultaneously. There's no way that any
watchtag organization is going to be able to bring legal
pressure simultaneously across all of those organizations. And so much
of this slips through and starts becoming precedent or the
way things just get done. It becomes standard operating procedure
inside these organizations.

Speaker 1 (05:33):
So, and I know what you're saying, We live through
it all with COVID. I mean, we have a Republican
governor who said you can go to a bar, but
you can't drink after ten pm. You can stay there,
but you can't drink after ten Now, what the hell
is that? There's no scientific foundation for that. It sounded
stupid when it came out of his mouth, but there
they were honoring the rule and not serving drinks after
ten pm. I how do we deal with this problem?

(05:57):
Obviously it was a multi state, global issue. Everyone was
freaked out because our messengers were freaking everyone out, and
it allowed people to sort of accept this draconian response
and this violation of our constitutional light rights and just
swallow it whole without even arguing about it. I give

(06:18):
you a great illustration, like the very close after this
whole COVID nineteen hit the fan, there was a protest
in downtown Cincinnati, and I had to then fopeach President
on saying, these people are crazy. They shouldn't be allowed
to be out in the streets. And I'm thinking, you
got a right to free assembly. You can't tell people
they're a lot of walk outside and engage in a protest,
that's a constitutional right. And he keeps like, you know,

(06:39):
you're right on that, and I was wrong. But the
defiance and the actual embracing of the right to free
assembly was outright rejected and condemned by elected officials across
the board because well, COVID, that's why. So Aaron, Aaron,
what are we to do about this? Because it shouldn't
ever happen in the first instance, but we just witness

(07:01):
it happening, and everybody feels like it's going to happen
again in a moment's notice.

Speaker 2 (07:06):
Well, the two things that I think are really critical
is one, as I look back into the history of
the constitution and political constitutions in general, One of the
things that I noticed is a lot of Americans just
assumed that because some restriction is written down on paper,
that's the law, that's it, that's the only decision to
be made. But of course the founding fathers knew, along
with most other political theories, you know, many hundreds of

(07:30):
years ago, understood that ultimately a constitution is only the
reflection of the values of the people, and if the
people are not themselves investined in any of these rights,
the fact that they happen to be written down on
paper doesn't actually protect them. The fact that most of
this stuff didn't really mean a lot of people ultimately
they were willing to put up with whatever happened whenever
their local government was telling them to comply with whatever

(07:52):
national government was telling them to comply with. Is really
a huge part of the issue. But the other part
is really the manner in which we have centralized control
and management of so many of problems. When you have
something like this, a state of emergency that suddenly enables
a government to make sweeping decisions without going through the
proper process, and you centralize everything into these massive agencies

(08:16):
that control the entire country or in some cases international
agencies that are pushing things top down into multiple nations simultaneously.
Then you end up in a scenario where one bad
decision or one decision to ignore the science ends up
affecting the entire nation or in some cases, the entire globe.

Speaker 1 (08:35):
And I guess the other component of this, And I
mean to remind the litigation attorneys what I practiced for
sixteen years. I know how damn expensive it is, and
I think a lot of it. People are unwilling to
push back, Like, for example, if you said, you know,
they said you're not allowed to go to church. Again,
that's the first and foremost mentioned in the First Amendment,
you know, the right to free exercise of religion, also
free assembly. You should be allowed to go to church

(08:56):
and you should be able to congregate with the folks.
But you're afraid to do that because some law or
some edict or rule has been written down saying you're
not allowed to do it. You're not going to break
the law, the law or the statement, even though it
isn't a lawful law, because you can't afford to go
to court and defend yourself. You'll have to go through
the arrest process, You'll have to get a lawyer, defend yourself.
And some people are like, you know what, it's just

(09:17):
not worth it. I can't afford the time, hassler or trouble,
so I'll let my rights be taken away.

Speaker 2 (09:23):
Well, and let's not forget that the entire federal government
was acting to slanner anybody who pushed back against this.
So everybody who said, oh, maybe this isn't a big issue,
maybe it's okay if we get together. They were Russian assets,
right like they were literally abel traders and foreign agents,
and you know, science deniers, You know, everyone is simultaneously
some kind of evil agent of Putin and some kind

(09:46):
of backwards toothless hits who doesn't believe in science. If
they think I could probably go to church if I'm
you know, not immuno compromised and under sixty years old,
it's probably not that big a deal. You know, you
have to lie to a li a lot of people.
You have to hyper propagandaize them to make them actually
believe when they look outside and everything's fine and there

(10:06):
aren't a lot of dead people in the streets like
the Black Plague, that there's actually some kind of global,
massive pandemic happening. Look, it was a bad disease. A
lot of people died. There's certainly people who are super
you know, vulnerable to it. I'm not pretending like it
wasn't real, But the idea that it had the level
of severity that it did is entirely manufactured intentionally by

(10:27):
a government and media apparatus that was looking to do
a dry run for how much power they could seize
in an emergency, and what they found was they could
seize almost all of it.

Speaker 1 (10:38):
Yes, indeed, And that's the scary part right there, and
we roll over and I think, you know, it's part
of the problem. Armactyre, author of the book we're talking
about the total state, how liberal democracies become tyrannies. Isn't
this really If more people had a more profound and
clear understanding of what the Constitution does, the rights it
does protect, these God given rights that we enjoy are

(10:58):
supposed to enjoy, they would be in a position to
stand up for that and say, no, you are not
allowed to do this to me. But because we lack
that basic foundation understanding the fact that we do have
a constitution that protects these rights, the supreme law of
the land people are willing to overlook it because they
don't understand it.

Speaker 2 (11:20):
Well. And I think it goes one step further. It's,
you know, the Constitution is there to remind us of
what our ancestors believe, what our tradition is. But the
Constitution itself does not protect anything. It is only the
people animated by that tradition, believing deeply in the rights
that their ancestors fought for, that actually protects that. The

(11:40):
paper has never protected one right. It is the people
believing collectively in that truth and holding it sacrifanct above safety,
above any other dictate from the government. That is what
actually protects things. And I think a lot of people
forgot that. They said, oh, well, the Constitution is sitting
somewhere safe under plexiicus protecting my freedoms. That is not

(12:02):
how it's work. That's not how the founders believe they
were supposed to work. They wrote to a document to
remind you of the tradition that you should be living
every day, not for the document to make some kind
of magical shield against your right.

Speaker 1 (12:15):
Well, arn, there you go. That's why public education has
turned its back on civics and teaching constitutional philosophy, as
our country used to do regularly, so people had a
grasp and understanding of what a wonderful place we have
because of these God given rights that the Constitution points out.
If you don't point it out, people forget it, and
then they're willing to stop drinking after ten pm just

(12:36):
because the governor utters the words. Right, that's right. R McIntyre.
Wonderful book. It's on my blog page fifty five care
sea dot com, so my listeners can easily get a
link to buy a copy of it. I will encourage
them to read it and share it with friends to
expand our understanding of this aren What do you offer
solutions in the book to these obvious problems that were

(12:56):
the seemingly insurmountable problems we're talking about right now.

Speaker 2 (13:00):
Yeah, I think that this is a difficult answer. It's
an easy solution, but it is a necessary one. We
have to start seeing people, especially people who oppose the
current progressive hegemony, to building alternative institutions both locally and
at the state level. The United States together was not
supposed to be some giant, monolithic amalgamation of different organizations

(13:25):
that form one opinion across all domains. It was supposed
to be a federal government where the power and decisions
were made much closer to home, next to the people,
where things are actually supposed to be decided, and our
current giant institutions are corrupted to the core. So we
have to start devolving things back to the state, and
we have to start stop trusting giant, monolithic institutions and

(13:47):
instead return our understanding back to alternatives that actually serve
the people where they live.

Speaker 1 (13:53):
Our Macca tyre talking my language, my friend. Every single day,
That's what I do on the morning show. So I'm
pleased to have been able to talk talk to you
today about your book again, The Total State, How liberal
democracies become Tyrannies. Thank you for writing it, thank you
for sharing your time with us today, and I'll encourage
my listeners to get a copy of the book. Arn
thanks so much for having Merope. My pleasure truly eight

(14:13):
nineteen