Crime and Punishment with Greg Zink

I sit down with Greg Zink from the Smoke Filled Rooms Podcast and we discuss crime in Canada, how we got here and some potential solutions. Greg has a Podcast that covers political crime.

Greg can be found at: @gregzesq on Twitter and magentapills.substack.com

Transcript

Russell: All right. And we're back. This is Russell with the Canadian Conservative podcast, and I am joined today in studio with Greg from the Smoke Filled Room podcast. Welcome to the show, Greg.

Greg: Oh, thank you for having me, Russell. It's a pleasure.

Russell: So today we're going to talk a little bit about crime and punishment in Canada. But just before we do that, give you a chance to plug your show. Tell us what your show is about.

Greg: Sure. So my show is called Smoke Filled Rooms. True Political crime. It's a mostly storytelling podcast. I do deep dives into topics that I find interesting, and I usually construct little miniseries that can give people a better historical understanding of the topic in question. For example, I did a seven part miniseries on the Nuremberg Trials, and that's almost a day to day coverage of the entirety of the trial. I also did a five part miniseries on the murder of Marilyn Monroe, possibly by the Kennedy brothers. And I also have on various guests on my podcast to talk about relevant topics to political true crime.

Russell: So what makes a political true crime different than, just, say, your regular true crime podcast?

Greg: Well, that's actually the main reason I started the podcast, is because I was a fan of both true crime and politics. And when I was going to look for a show that had something of that nature, I couldn't find one. So right away I identified a niche that existed. What makes it different than regular crime? I guess it would be the scope of the crimes because there's nothing else like the power of the state to inflict untold evils onto the citizenry. This is best exemplified in an episode I recently, recently released on Demicide. Now, this is the concept that government killing its own citizens, which if you look at the work of someone like Professor R. J. Rummel, who I cite heavily in that episode, the amount of Demicide deaths exceeds that of war during the 20th century. So in short, that pretty much tells you you are more likely to be killed by your government than you are in a war or a conflict. And the body count greatly surpasses that.

Russell: Connecting that to Canada. Has Canada had a lot of historical crimes that involve the government that you know of?

Greg: First of all, I'd like to say I'm not a criminologist. I am just a true crime podcaster. So I haven't looked at a lot of stuff on a societal level like that. But one thing springs to mind, and again, I brought it up in my democite episode, the Sterilization program on native women that was run from, it seems like the 1930s up until the 1970s in Western Canada. I would classify that as one of the great black marks and crimes in Canadian history. Well, for the amount of people that they prevented from being able to be born. So that was one thing I kind of looked at in that episode. I was hoping we could talk more about modern crime. Like you said, you wanted to talk more about the existence and prevalence of crime in Canadian society right now, right?

Russell: Yeah. Like, what is going on these last few years? Because we're always told that crime is dropping, right. Crime has been rapidly dropping since the 80s, but it doesn't feel like that anymore. It doesn't feel like crime is actually reducing. It feels like there's an increase in crime. You can go to almost any major Canadian city, and you can see a lot of people that are living on the streets. You can see gang members walking around openly flaunting gang colors. You can see businesses with their windows smashed in. I mean, in Saskatchewan, you go to Saskatoon, there's lots of businesses that have their windows smashed in. There's lots and lots of people that are homeless, vagrants, people strung out on drugs, wandering around. And you hear about these crimes. You hear about random crime. We're always told, well, there's very rarely random crime. It's almost always someone that you know. But yet last summer, there was a case of someone that went to RUH Hospital. They were there for cancer treatments, and while they were at the hospital, someone who had just been released from prison walked up with a screwdriver and drove a screwdriver through the front of their forehead, just randomly, and they died a few months later. You have to ask yourself, how does this happen? How does this happen where someone is just wandering around the hospital with a screwdriver and then they drill it through someone's skull? What does that say about our society?

Greg: Yeah. Okay, so when you first posed this question to me well, when you first posed the topic to me about wanting to talk about Canadian true crime, I hearkened back to and this might sound a bit esoteric, but I went back to the fifth century BC. China, because I think there is this deep seated connection between the leadership of a country and how the citizens reflect their actions back to them and to others within the society. So I'm kind of riffing off of the idea of confucianism. The main thing that a leader had to do was have good moral character, and then they can affect the world around them through a sort of cosmic harmony. Right? So if the emperor has some sort of moral perfection attached to him, then his rule will be peaceful, benevolent, and the people will be peaceful and helpful towards one another. So in short, I guess I was thinking that the leadership sets the tone for society, and when it's as corrupt and ideologically obtuse as Trudeau's is, we're going to see downstream effects that manifest themselves in things like poor economic performance, social scapegoating, and for our conversation here, crime. So if you can just indulge me for 1 second. I pulled up a list and confucius. If you asked him back then what the most important parts of being a leader are, he would say that it's one, cultivating the personal conduct of the leader. Two, honoring worthy people. Three, showing respect to the traditions of the state. And four, identifying the leader. Identifying himself with the interests of the people, not of his own personal gain. So I guess this is all to say that when we're looking at political leadership, they set the tone for society. And when we have someone like Trudeau in his government at the helm, it seems like it's more susceptible to corruption in everything it touches. And obviously, in Canada, the criminal code is affected directly by the feds and the reigning government of the day. So this ancient wisdom can go a long way in kind of allowing us to analyze what this guy is and what he affects to happen in society. Because for people like us, and I know you're largely a conservative, we tend to see human nature as being largely static. I tend to think of it that way, that if you even go back to ancient China, like I just mentioned, human nature has more or less remained the same, but the incentives have changed along the way. So if you kind of look at all those different aspects I just named, let's just go over a quick list of all the different things that Trudeau has done since he took over. So we have the Riddy Hall workplace review, where Julie Piett, our former governor general, was abusing her employees directly appointed by Trudeau. We have the Agacon affair and him currying favors right at the beginning of his government with this rich businessman. We have him cavorting with terrorists like Jasper atwell. We have his suppression of the freedom convoy protest. And I'm still convinced to this day that if he had had his druthers, we would have seen a much harsher response to the convoy in general. That was the least that he could have done, and I bet he would have wanted to do a lot more. We can go on. There was the suppression of information during the COVID pandemic, which we are starting to see more and more, and things like the Twitter files. We have stuff like even little things like elbow gate when he pushed his way to the front of parliament. We have things like the SNC lavalin affair. We have things like the we charity scandal. We have the cash for access scandal that got revealed not that long ago about him allowing Chinese business people to meet with them for a pay for play kind of basis. So what I mean to say by all this is, if you look at the totality of the Trudeau regime, it's not hard to see why criminality would spike under him, because he fosters a culture of criminality himself.

Russell: He's taken crime and he's gone pro with it. It's not low level crime. It's at the high echelon. And in a way, people feel demoralized, right? Because we can't really, in Canada, affect change in our government the same way as in the States. We don't have recall legislation. Pretty much what you see is what you get unless someone voluntarily resigns or sits as an independent or something along those lines. So we're kind of stuck with what we get. And I think that can have a demoralizing effect on people when they start to see things are wrong and they don't really feel like there's anything they can directly do about it. We have to admit that there is a two tiered justice system. I'd even say a three tiered justice system. There's justice for the worst off in society. Schulzen Niskin had said in one of his books that a thief found with a knife is just a regular ordeal, and that's not a big deal, but a common person found with a knife was treated like a terrorist. And that's because it's like this already lowered expectation. Well, the thief doesn't know any better. That's just their life. But you should know better. So we're going to come down on you much more harshly, and then you get to the upper echelons where it seems like there's no justice whatsoever when things are not right. Look at even trying to get a public inquiry into this latest scandal. They're already playing games. I mean, pointing a special repertoire. Again, it's all political gamemanship, but at the end of the day, it has a demoralizing effect on Canadians.

Greg: Absolutely, it does. And actually, if I can just quickly go back to one of the confucian ideals was respecting traditions of the state. And it connects to this idea that you just mentioned of powerlessness. Because even though in many parliamentary democracies we do see coalition governments, this has never been a thing in Canada. They were proposed a couple of times, but they never materialized. So this thing that he's doing right now with the NDP is quite outside of the norm. And like you say, it does feel even to someone like me, it feels very demoralizing and debilitating to just know that they're cooking up these deals behind the scenes and they're pushing through this radical, progressive agenda, and we literally have no recourse except to kind of pin our hopes on a polyev victory at some point in the future, perhaps. And we don't even know when that could be.

Russell: Well, and people are quick to point out the flaws of the Conservatives. I do want to say one thing, though. We treat our politicians very akin to how we treat our celebrities and we put them on these impossible pedestals. Like, quite often people will bring up that Scott Mo was involved in a car crash and that's why he's unfit to be premier and he was involved in his car crash all these years ago in Saskatchewan. And my thing is, well, what does that have to do with politics. At the end of the day, I don't know the whole story, but if he got himself in trouble and he paid the price with society, then he should be welcomed back into society afterwards. As long as he's paid the price. And he's now engaging as a law abiding citizen. This whole thing that we had this impossible standard on our politicians, yet despite this impossible standard, people will participate in high level partisan politics where, yes, I want this impossible standard for my opponent, but it's okay if my party leader wore blackface more times than they can remember. It's okay if my party member had a whole bunch of ethics violations because we have to support our party no matter what. It's a very backward system. I think people feel very disorientated by it because the rules seem to change by the minute, and there's nothing really set in stone for anyone at the high level. But yet for us I heard it. They call it like anarcho tyranny.

Greg: I was just going to mention that.

Russell: Yeah, I use a good example that I was in downtown Prince Albert sitting in my car, trying to fish out some change for the meter, and there was a guy on the sidewalk, and he was obviously strung out on drugs, and he was yelling profanities at people. He was trying to square up with people on the sidewalk, and people were avoiding him. And literally right next to him doing that, not even looking in his direction, was the meter made writing someone a ticket? I was thinking, well, you've lost the ability to police disorder, so instead you're going to go after people that have something to lose and they have some means to lose.

Greg: Absolutely. You just brought up this concept of a narco tyranny. It was a speech given by Samuel Francis back in the it was actually republished in Chronicles magazine recently for their anniversary edition. It's a very interesting concept that as cultural degeneracy sets in to an existing society, I guess you could almost go back to Weimar Germany as a relevant counterpoint to that. You have the almost embracement of chaos in the streets, and then at the same time you have the state cracking down even farther on law abiding citizens. And this crops up to me most prominently in instances like you just mentioned, knife wielding people, dangerous lunatics, drug addled or mentally ill on the streets, harassing people. Like you said, it's almost like there's nothing the state can do with these people. But at the same time, you're not allowed to defend yourself. We're not allowed to have constitutional carry like they would in the United States. And even if you do exercise some sort of forceful response to an aggressive individual, you might well end up in prison for your actions, for being excessive. I used to be a member of the NFA, which is the National Firearms Association. I'm sure you're aware of it. It's like the Canadian NRA, right? And they documented many instances of individuals who were protecting their families and their property in their homes from home invasions, where they would shoot the intruder after the guy who they shot recovered in the hospital. He would get out free, and the person protecting their family would be the one on trial for attempted murder.

Russell: Just a case, wasn't it? Brampton, Ontario, where a licensed firearms owner used their firearm to defend themselves and their mother in their home against home invaders, and now they're up on a murder charge for it.

Greg: Yeah, I'm not familiar with the details, but I do remember hearing that. Yes.

Russell: Well, we had a pretty famous case out here in Saskatchewan, too, with Gerald Stanley. So Gerald Stanley owned a farm.

Greg: I know this one. Yeah. Okay.

Russell: In rural Saskatchewan, and a car full of drunk teenagers that had a rifle with them pulled up into the property. They claimed they had a flat tire. They were looking for help, and basically Gerald opened fire on them with a handgun. But, I mean, the actual facts in the matter are in the court system, not the court of opinion. But the court of law are different. They came onto the property. They started harassing Gerald's wife, who came outside. Then they tried to jump start an ATV. So, again, we're not talking innocent people. They come onto the property. They're already acting aggressive. They're already trying to commit some level of crime. So Gerald goes out there. He sees the person sitting in the car with the rifle. So he fires around for the rest of his life. Although Gerald Stanley was found innocent or not guilty, I guess, for the rest of his life, he literally has to live in perpetual silence. He's going to be in probably some protection program for the rest of his life. Meanwhile, the family of the person that was killed has been invited to speak at the United Nations, and they've gotten personal condolences from the Prime Minister. And so people see that and they're like, this is backwards. It's tragic that a young person lost their life. Yes, the person's actions had consequences, but we're ignoring the consequences of the actions. We're excusing the actions away. Well, he was young. He was on a bad path. It was all these excuses for bad behavior. But Gerald, at the end of the day, paid the price for it.

Greg: Yeah, absolutely. And again, I want to circle back to this idea that the ethic of the leadership gets reflected back, because if you look at, again, trudeau over the course of his eight years, denigrating the role of personal responsibility, and by this, I mean he downplays his own scandals if he even addresses them. He encourages recklessness of the individual. With radical wokeness and almost encouraging drug use with the legalization policy fostering a culture of victimhood seems to be a big one with him tagging onto whatever the current thing is, whether that's BLM or sexual politics or Native affairs or feminism. He never will give up the opportunity to let someone absolve themselves of what they are, of what they've done, based on who they are, not what they've done, further entrenching people into poverty cycles and learned helplessness, I would call it, with these expansive social programs that he has no problem throwing tons of money into. And like you said, again, creating this anarcho tyrannical kind of state of affairs where it seems like the criminals are running the streets and the only thing that they can do is throw speeding tickets and minor infractions at law abiding citizens as opposed to going after the people who are actually responsible for these things. Even when it's getting increasingly frustrating to me to hear this term known to police. This is a term I've been hearing increasingly frequently in the news when it comes to any kind of mass shooter or anyone that's like, we saw this video recently of the guy getting stabbed at the at the Tim Hortons and the guy's still drinking his coffee. All these guys are almost in their totality. They're almost exclusively known to police every time. Except nothing ever seems to happen until it's way too late and people are either dead or permanently maimed.

Russell: This whole known to police thing, it's become quite a phenomenon. I mean, there's been even memes done on it. Bart Simpson and the Class of space, they're like, say it, Bart, say it. He was on our radar. He was known to police. It's actually become a meme. And usually memes are the ultimate form of mockery of problems that are not being addressed appropriately in society. And I guess I feel for the police in a way, because in some cases, I really feel like they must feel helpless to actually do anything. They're the ones with the power. At the end of the day, they have the power of state violence and so they can make a stand. I mean, they have the association of Chiefs of Police and they make their recommendations. But like I said, I recently put out a substac article called The War on Noticing. And in there, I said, instead of these news agencies getting some university criminologist professor, some Laurentian elite that lives in a closed off suburban community, get a street cop on there, get a security guard that works night watch at a 711 in downtown Saskatoon, Toronto, any of these places, they'll tell you what's up. And as long as they're not being shackled by their organization or their company, they'll tell you things that will blow the smoke right out of your ears.

Greg: Today I even had this strange occurrence happen that I was hoping I could share because to me, it bordered right on this idea of criminality and cultural degeneracy that I wanted to speak to you about. And I was at my bank today going over some mortgage renewals. So I get into the office. This guy's got like a corner office with those huge plate glass windows. You know, the kind where you can see out but they can't see in. That kind of thing.

Russell: Yeah, like a one way window.

Greg: Yeah. So the whole room is pretty much a glass box, right? So I'm sitting there, these three dudes just pull up to the window and they start ripping a bunch of huge joints right, on a bank. And this is just a small little plaza. I'm talking to the guy and I'm like, do you see this? These guys are smoking this huge blunt out there and he's like, oh yeah. This happens almost every hour because of that new marijuana shop they just opened up in the plaza. And I'm sitting there thinking because I can't exactly tell you where I went, obviously, but because of the location of this strip mall with the bank, it was nearly impossible for this person to have walked there. So it's almost certain that these people are going to drive afterwards. It's this weird acceptance of baseline criminality that I'm starting to notice in day to day life that is really concerning me, especially since I have children. I don't want people walking around smoking dope in public places. This isn't a means to say that I think marijuana should be illegal because I'm largely like a right leaning libertarian. I don't like the idea of legalization per se. I would prefer it just to be decriminalized because it's not, to me, something the state should be profiting on. Again, getting back to the confucian ideals it fosters this culture of permissiveness, of baseline self destruction that I think might be at the root of some of these things we're going to be discussing today. I would put a huge emphasis on the seeming acceptance of people with substance abuse these days. I find it hard, even within my work circles and friend circles, to find people that don't seem to that that seem to think they can't get by in day to day life without some kind of pharmaceutical or alcoholic help. And it seems like with a lot of the crimes that we're seeing, there would almost have to be drugs involved in a lot of these. Because I did look into a bit of the stats before we got on air here, and out of all the homicides in Canada, it says that 25% of them are gang related and they're almost overwhelmingly performed with illegal weapons, illegal handguns mostly. Again, we get into this anarcho tyranny thing where we know to some degree what the problem is with the guns and it's not taking them away from law abiding citizens. It's stopping the flow of these illegal guns at the border because we almost don't produce any guns whatsoever in this country. They're almost all black market guns coming in from the state. So we know a lot of ways that we could stop this. But instead of sealing off those choke points and really eliminating at least that singular factor, trudeau wants to take away my gun. And this is interesting to me because I own a handgun, and now I'm not allowed to do anything with it. And if I want to take it to the range, I got to go through this protracted process just to bring it to a firing range to have some fun once in a while. So to me, things like this, okay, so if you want to pick that apart, if you want to take the drug part first or the gun part first, I'll let you decide. Go ahead.

Russell: Very interesting in Canada, how we were kind of nanny stated a few years ago they banned menthol cigarettes in Canada. You can't buy menthol cigarettes in Canada. And the reasons why is that kids would be influenced to smoke. And smoking is bad, and we need to stop smoking from occurring. And morality police people, sorry to interrupt.

Greg: But you can make a sour apple liquor drink, and you can buy as many as you want, and it looks just as appetizing to a child as I'm sure these vapes and stuff are, right?

Russell: Well, definitely. And that's not even the menthol cigarettes. That's not even talking about vaping, the vape culture. But they ban menthol cigarettes, but then they legalize small amounts of hardcore drugs in BC. And I don't understand because who are we protecting here? What are we protecting? Overall? It seems backwards. Smoking kills for sure. I'm not going to sit here and defend cigarette smoking, but it kills over a lifetime, and there's lots of treatment options and lots of people's coverage at work now, coverage smoking cessation. And there's a real culture now. People smoke less than ever before. So we ban menthol cigarettes, but then we legalize small amounts of hardcore drugs, and we say, well, it's because these people can't help themselves, and it's better that the government becomes the drug dealer than the streets because we're taking money away from drug dealers. It's a very specific solution to a problem that has very little, in my opinion, good results overall. Yeah, okay, well, now you legalize this, and now you're narcanning this person that much more personally. And I don't want to get too much down a rabbit hole on this. I think it's a make money project for nonprofits in the private sector, because the more people that are addicted means the more nonprofits and private sector businesses that rise up to try to combat addiction. It provides jobs for people, provides jobs for cops, social workers, nurses. The drug trade itself is an incredibly lucrative job opportunity in Canada. In fact, they have entire diplomas and degrees. You can get just in addictions now to go work with people that are addicted. And at the end of the day, is that really helping the addict, or are you just making a middle class income to put your kids through college and have a car and a house. Where's the priority?

Greg: We all kind of know that a lot of these people that are doing, like, if we're talking about hardcore drugs, a lot of them know how to milk the system, how to get benefits. Like you said, there's injection sites they can go to. And this is why I was very interested in. Have you ever read anything by Michael Schellenberger?

Russell: I've heard the name, and I probably read a few things before, but I haven't deep dive dived any of his work.

Greg: Okay, so he was running. He didn't end up winning, but he's a writer, and he tried to run for the Senate of California, but he wrote a book called and also he was one of the journalists tasked with analyzing the Twitter files, along with Matt Tayibi. And he was the one that actually testified to Congress about a month ago the truthfulness of the Twitter files and their relevancy to free speech. But he wrote a book called San Francisco. He lays out a lot of the problems. It almost seems like you could take San Francisco and carbon copy of the downtown east side of Vancouver. It seems like they're very similar. So it seems like a lot of the things that he has to say would be applicable here, and it's actually doubly. Interesting, because I've noticed yesterday, actually, michael Fury, who's running for the mayorship of Toronto right now, do you know him?

Russell: Yeah. Wasn't he a former journalist or writer before?

Greg: Yeah, he wrote for the National Post. He actually picked up one of Schellenberger's campaign planks. He wants to almost do a push for treatment as opposed to letting people get free injection sites. He said there would be no new injection sites in Toronto if he's elected mayor. And that he seems like he's flirting with the idea that Schellenberger was pushing that. We would almost have to enact involuntary commitment of people to a mental health hospital if they did not accept the fact that they had a mental health drug addiction problem. And as again, as we just mentioned, they were frequently known to police, they would essentially be given the option of going to prison or going into a mental health facility for treatment. And it almost seems like even though I'm a libertarian and I don't want the state having any kind of power to arbitrarily decide who is and isn't mentally ill, I don't really see any other way that we could. Do this by with protecting the public and getting these people some semblance of hope and help without just simply turning them loose and hoping for the best. We can't keep going down the same strategy. It's not feasible, and this becomes readily apparent if you have small children to the point where you don't even want to bring your children to certain places.

Russell: Well, just to kind of go off of that.

Greg: Sure, man.

Russell: I'm plugging myself here a little bit, but I wrote another article called Hostile Public Spaces, where I talked a little bit about crimes I've seen and just how all these public spaces that people used to enjoy have become areas that are hostile to law abiding, normal, everyday people. The public park used to be a place people would go to bring lunch. You'd bring some games. The kids, they'd run around, enjoy themselves and that. Now you go to parks, and they're just filled with people that are consuming substances. Got tent city stuff going on. The public bathrooms there are filled with needles. And I mean, in some areas, the public parks are so bad that the city workers, with their unions, they get police escorts when they go to do cleanup and stuff like that. And that's just the parks. Then you have the malls. You go to the malls now. You used to go to the mall, and they had lots of seating in there. They want you to stay socialize, go to the food court, buy some stuff. They'd have arcades. They want you to be there, stay there as long as possible, spend as much money. The modern day mall, they want you to get in, buy some stuff, and get the fuck out. They don't want you to be in there because there's just delinquents in there. It's become a warm up, cool down spot for homeless people. The security guards have malls. It's crazy. You can go on Twitter and you can just find videos of, like, swarmings and some dirty, dirty beatings and that go on in these places. So people don't want to bring their kids there. They don't want to go to the mall, so they buy online. And so Amazon gets richer, and then you go to your public hospital. I can't believe how bad hospitals have gotten in Saskatoon. The hospitals, after a certain time, they're basically homeless shelters now. They let homeless people sleep in the lobby, they give them blankets, and they got to be out by a certain time in the morning. So how is that conductive to good health? And then you talk to people prince Albert, Saskatoon, and that the amount of theft that happens at these hospitals from people's rooms and stuff like that. It's a fucking zoo.

Greg: I quickly wanted to just quickly shout out I don't think we really give these people enough credit, but people who are working entry level retail or service industry jobs that are having to clean up, washrooms and stuff with like you said, these medical risks to them with needles and stuff. I really feel for these people, and God bless their hearts for even doing the jobs that they're doing because they're not getting paid to deal with frantic mentally ill and drug addicted people and clean up needles. They're supposed to be there to serve us coffee.

Russell: You want to talk about Anarcho Tyranny while the police officer is sitting, tucked in, ready to give you a speeding ticket. Tim Hortons workers are literally arming up with broomsticks to get homeless people out of their fucking bathrooms. That's a real thing. I've talked with people that work at Tim Hortons and Prince Albert, and they've had to enact these insane policies of locking the door. It's basically like a mini prison in these tim Hortons because they insist on time limits for people sitting in there. They lock the bathrooms where they have this locking system and this alarm system. It's absolutely insane. And like I said, while that cop is tucked away ready to give you a ticket, or you could be in Calgary and the police are giving you a ticket because you said something bad about drag queens or something like that. Just absolute nonsense. Garbage. The low retail workers, they're suffering. They're the ones, like, the number of retail workers that get trained in Naloxone. In Narcan, and they basically have to be mini EMS workers. And then they have to go bag up the garbage and get special training and special gloves when they bring the garbage bags out because they're filled with needles. Like, this is reality. This is actually happening. This is not some book. It's not fantasy. It's not some dystopian future. It's here now. And people getting paid ten to $13 an hour are literally doing the most grueling, insane work, and they're getting snubbed by society. They're getting treated like garbage and that. They're the working class. They're the working class. Not some teacher working in a school that makes $80,000 a year. And that's not the low class. I wouldn't even call that the working class. They're the upper class because they're making money. They can afford time. Back to what I was talking about, public spaces. I'm very blessed. I have a nice job, and I respect that. And I respect that there's many people out there. I try to be very nice to people when I'm out in public, especially service workers, because they're doing a lot of grueling work, and a lot of them, they can't afford to go to a private park. They have to use public areas and public transit. Public transit is incredibly dangerous. There's people that go on public transit, they just want to go to work, and they're locked in a metal tube with people that are completely deranged, people that are completely strung out on drugs. They're assaulted. They see assaults. Like, you look at New York, the subway system there, and someone is literally getting pummeled and stabbed. And people are sitting there, eyes forward, obviously traumatized. This is years of built up PTSD and trauma, and they're looking ahead, and they're just praying, don't let it be me. Don't let it be me.

Greg: Yeah, I mean, you just mentioned the public transportation, I remember, almost as like a harbinger of things to come. It was only like, what, seven, eight years ago or something like this? Where that guy decapitated the woman on the Greyhound bus.

Russell: Yeah, that was what, Vince Lee was his name?

Greg: Yeah.

Russell: You know, the responding officer that committed suicide, the first officer that was on scene actually committed suicide. And of all the people on the bus, I think the seven people have committed suicide that were on that bus.

Greg: Wow. Holy Christ. Yeah. So the downstream effects are their magnitudes worse than almost the actual crime. Right. But out of everything you just mentioned there, the thing that stuck out to me is like you were mentioning, we got these retail workers that are essentially being abused in these low paying jobs and we can't go to even basic familial places of the past like a park. All these things lead to low trust societies, ones where you don't want to help anybody, ones where you are to some degree depending on where you live, rightly. Concerned about your own personal welfare and the welfare of your family. And the danger of that to me is when you have such low trust in your average fellow citizen, you're more likely to look to the state as a more parental figure, I guess you would say. And that gets into its own kind of dangers as well, because instead of dealing with things at a community level, a charitable level, you're going to automatically have to escalate these things up the chain of command, as it were. So it just further splits coming out of COVID signifying people as essential and nonessential and then making people leave their jobs, creating economic hardships, foreclosure of businesses, pitting citizens against one another with these absurd vaccine arguments and splitting families apart based on a virus giving out people free money. Kind of only allowing the big corporate guys to remain relevant during the entire pandemic. You'd be hard pressed to even manufacture a situation that would be worse for society than what they did to us. And I really do think that what we're seeing now and what we're going to see for the next decade, a lot of the problems that we're going to see are almost directly related to what happened during COVID or in some instances, what didn't happen in terms of didn't happen. I'm talking about people having human connections with their neighbors, people going to family events, people going to see even we can't forget there's a lot of atomized people in this country right now. And almost the only release bell they would have was going to work and just talking with their coworkers, even though they might not have liked their job, they probably liked their friends that they had there. And absolutely everything was severed. And we saw we're going to see people that were already on the brink pushed over the edge. And seeing these downstream, especially with children, the downstream effects of forcing kids to mask up and stay away from people and don't interact with other humans, treat them like they're a virus themselves. This is going to lead to even in addition to the anarcho tyranny that was already emerging, this is going to be a decades long unraveling of horrible mental illness and obviously violence and drug addiction that will result from it.

Russell: Well, Greg, I mean, we're already seeing that this year alone. How many cops have been killed in Canada this year alone? Nine. That's absolutely fucking unheard of. It's absurd. It's actually absolutely absurd. And what's interesting in the conservative circles that are traditionally very law and order and pro police, I know people that are conservative and I don't share their viewpoint, but I understand where they're coming from, even if I don't share their viewpoint. They said, why do I care if cops were killed? They were more than willing to enforce ridiculous lockdowns and they were more than willing to beat up citizens for going out with their families. Look in Quebec. There they had that famous video of it was Christmas Eve and the Quebec police came and they were ripping people out of that house, saying there was too many people in the home in that. And then, so you see all this stuff then everything that happened with the Freedom Convoy, city of Ottawa. Oh, yeah, if you're honking your horn, it's going to be a $10,000 ticket. I mean, you might as well make it a million dollars. It's so ridiculous, it's disproportionately, outrageous. It is a complete overreach of the state. A lot of people woke up during the pandemic to what state abuse looks like. A lot of people saw that there were people in positions of power that would do anything to keep their paycheck. And it can make supporting the police very difficult because if you look at it, there was a lot of cops that were willing to do whatever it took for them to keep their jobs and to keep their pensions and keep food on their table. And I think I had heard a story once about firefighters and that went on strike with these police officers. So they just gave the police officers a raise and said, go arrest the firefighters. And they went and did it because the police going back to the Peelian principles. Robert Peele the people are the police and the police are the people. There is a disconnect if the police are no longer the people and the people are no longer the police. You don't have a police force anymore that's trusted by the public. They set up rat lines. Oh, yeah, rat out your neighbors. Like one of the mean jokes during COVID Do you have any unvaccinated people under your floorboards ripping off glorious bastards? And that and that was there for a reason, that was said for a reason, because it was state overreach. And what's really sad, I would have thought conservatives would have all been law and order, law and order, law and order. It blew me away. The number of people I know, liberal friends that I had that were cheering on every time the police were cracking skulls, they were just cheering it on. And I thought, you're supposed to be the party of special interests and kindness and compassion. Progressivism, not say that conservatives don't progress over time. It's inevitable. I was blown away by it. And now we've seen this resurgence of the libertarian movement in Canada, United States. But the problem is too is that there's a lot of mentally unwell people, I think driven mentally unwilled have attached themselves to the conservative movement. I had someone that told me that they legitimately believed that the vaccine was the what was it? Yeah, it was the sign of the devil. Like taking it in was taking in the devil. And I was like, you're fucking crazy. I'm sorry. You can have your objections to vaccines. I respect religion. I respect religious rights. But to say that by taking that you were aligning with the devil, you're a fucking nut job. I'm sorry. But there's people and they're like, yeah. And they're just cheering this person on. Are you guys fucking crazy?

Greg: Here's the thing. It strikes me as so strange when you mentioned that because it immediately triggered the thought that you're right, that on the right and the Canadian right, we are constantly badgered to distance ourselves from the crazies. Meanwhile at the exact same time on the progressive left, they uphold their crazies. The crazies that think that you should be able to transition a child into another sex. They will hold that person up as someone to be respected and revered and the crazies on our side. You have to completely distance yourself from them. It's a strange dynamic with that.

Russell: And I've said this many times before so for the people listening that have heard a million times before, you're probably going to roll your eyes and that but everyone wants their brand of conservatism to be the top brand. So we got the libertarian conservatives, we got the weird progressive conservatives. You got your trad conservatives, your Catholic conservatives, your Muslim conservatives. And each one has a different tenant. It's conservatism in a way, but each one has a different way of going about it and they're just fucking bickering with each other. The PPC bros and the CPC bros. I don't say anything about anymore. I just stay right out of it. I don't even comment. I follow people that are hardcore CPCRs. I follow hardcore ppcrs. I mean, I interviewed Maxine Bernier on my show before and it's just they're fighting and fighting and fighting and I'm like, well while we're fighting the weirdo authoritarian leftist they're just going to keep winning. So we might as well just give up now because apparently we can't actually agree on anything. We actually want to conserve. So whatever, just let the authoritarian weirdos take over since apparently we don't have the balls to do anything and take a real stand on anything.

Greg: Yeah, I'll address that in one SEC. I wanted to hearken back to that thing that you said about the police, the lack of respect with police during COVID because of all those extreme instances that we've seen online. There was one white pill that we got during the pandemic, and that was when, at least here in Ontario, doug Ford wanted to almost have the police act as his own COVID gestapo and randomly pull over people on the street or in their cars to make them produce their paperwork of who they are and where they're going. Now, that was during the lockdowns here. Thankfully, almost every chief of police in the province of Ontario, with the exception, I believe, of one, and I think he was in North Bay. But that's not exactly the point. The point is that they all pushed back and said, this is nuts, we're not going to do that. You're going too far. And within a day he backtracked off of that policy. So if there is something good to pull out of the police during that time, it's that they wouldn't do anything. So that was a white pill for me. The second thing you said was like the lovable losership of the conservatives in Canada, to me, this is just even our conservatives are progressives. So every time the left moves the goalposts farther down the ideological line and down the policy line, that becomes reality. And because of the amount of stuff that they promise people with those policies, they never get reversed because the conservatives, like you said, are too cowardly to backtrack and take things back. It almost seems like they never do that. They almost always accept what has previously happened. Like I know Michael Malice always says this thing about conservatism is just liberalism driving the speed limit. And that if you really want to see what the conservatives believe now, look at what the liberals believe ten years ago. So it just seems like because we are an inherently progressive liberal democracy, this is just the way it's going to go, man. And we kind of have to always adjust to what they're doing because they do wield a sense of cultural superiority. We know that they have the universities, we know that they have entertainment, the bureaucracy, most governments, school boards, they dominate these things. So it makes you almost get black pilled when you think about it deeply, as in how could anything possibly get better unless the whole thing completely collapses on itself.

Russell: And the fact is, we can't let that happen. If it collapses, it's game over. I've talked to a couple of conservatives that I know and I mean, I respect them, but they've told me, well, we just got to let the system collapse. I said, what the fuck do you think this is some like doomsday show, though? Everything's going to collapse and you're going to have your tribe that's going to come out of the bunker and fix everything and install the new world Order. That sounds pretty dystopian to me, to be honest.

Greg: If what we're seeing in the inner cities, like we've been talking so much about today with the crime and the chaos and the anarchy not the good kind, not the philosophical anarchy, the chaos, anarchy, is that what we have to look forward to? Because we know that, like you said earlier, these people that are making these decisions, they're not going to be living in that. They're going to be living in almost gated communities or in some chateau in the Laurentian, right? They're not going to be dealing with this stuff. Do you have any ideas of what we can actually do? Because it sounds like you're pretty pessimistic about the political process. What else do we have?

Russell: So naturally, I'm naturally a pessimist. I really am. I mean, I grew up that way. I've always been a pessimist. But the nature of pessimism, and not just hopelessness, is that you expect the worst, and then you plan for changing that ahead of time and you work on changing it. To me, it all comes down to community. We want to turn this around. We have to foster good sense of community and what that means when we foster sense of community. Here's the thing. Conservatives got lazy while we were watching football. Liberals were in school boards, they were in universities. They were indoctrinating people. Here's the thing. We have to bring back the civic citizen. That is how we change this around. I get we're all living busy lives. I live a really busy life. I still when there's issues that matter to me, I drive down to Saskatoon and I go to city council meetings, and I make my voice heard. I support other people when they're making their voice heard on things. We have to participate in the political process. It's not good enough to say, well, the political process is rigged and flawed, and so I'm just not going to participate in that. I'm going to spoil my ballot. And here's the thing. A lot of people think being a civic citizen is showing up once every four years to vote and then saying, oh, I'm a civic citizen. That's garbage. Civic citizen. If you're a Conservative, join the Conservative Party of Canada. Go to your local EDA and join a committee and start proposing policy changes, and that drive the change you want to see. But conservatives and I get it. A lot of the liberals out there, they're on social services. They're 300 pound, pink haired fucking hippo weirdos. I get it. I get it. That just means that we need to be that much.

Greg: Yeah. So in thinking for that brief minute about what you're saying about the need to get involved and to push an agenda, I'm not disagreeing. I think that is very important. One thing that I've really been heartened by hearing recently was is by guys like Tim Poole has been talking about this, but more importantly, Ron McIntyre, he is like a post liberal thinker who, if anyone out there, check out his Twitter. It's one of the most engaging and funny Twitter pages you can find. But they are kind of pushing this idea that we should set up almost, I think, what they call it, as parallel economies. And their basic argument is that because we are still living within the remnants of the capitalist system, it is still capitalist nonetheless. We should form our own, not necessarily societies, but we need to create our own businesses, we need to create our own educational institutions and we need to set them up to accommodate our interests alongside what's going on so that we can protect each other from a lot of the harms that are happening. So, for instance, even if you don't necessarily want to set up a business, if there's a way that you could seek out like minded people in your community that are more right wing, libertarian, conservative and work with them in whatever they're doing. If you don't want to be the creator of things, to find people with similar ideals and work with them and try and big up a community of like minded people so that you're not beholden. To the system or to the threat of cancellation. And that if we can do that, then we'd be much more unified and behind a common ideal that could more readily push back against what's going on without having to constantly work within their system. So I was just curious to see if you thought that was worth anything, a parallel economy type idea.

Russell: I mean, I watched Tim Pool and so I've heard the parallel economy argument. I'm not disagreeing with it. My concern with the parallel economy argument is that regardless of what you do, if you're not actively working to change the system, now, all you're doing is you're inviting institutions for capture. That's all you're doing is you'll sure make your school. And then because we're not involved politically, they'll just make policies and things that force that woke ideology into the school and there's nothing you can do about it or else they're going to take your business license away and you won't be able to practice business. Right, sure. So while I get the parallel economy argument at a micro level, sure. But we still have to be civic citizens. We still have to push that systemic change. And this whole thing about cancel culture in that I talked with Stuart Parker and he's a socialist, very staunch socialist, and we ended up arguing, not arguing, agreeing on 99% of the stuff, really, which I was kind of shocked about. And really what it came down to is that eventually everyone's going to get canceled. And what is the purpose of being canceled? One day I'm going to say something wrong and someone's going to come for me and they're going to dig through my past. They're going to find out where I work. They're going to put my work on blast about me in the hopes of why? In the hopes of what? Accountability? No. They want you to get fired from your job. They want you to get divorced. They want you to have no money, they want you on the streets, and they want you to kill yourself. That's what it is. Cancel culture from the left and the right does it as well. I'm not going to let them off the hook. Cancel culture from the left, they want you to kill yourself. That is their end goal. They want you to be so financially ruined. They want you to be so demoralized that you just offer yourself. Sorry about that, Greg. Okay, your thoughts on cancel culture and this idea that they want you to kill yourself?

Greg: Well, again, while you were saying all those things, I completely agree. To me, this begs the question again, and I know it was only recently popularized in the States, but I've been a big proponent of it for a long time, and that's of national divorce or secessionism, which could be another potential solution to what is going on and how we can create our own thing that's not a part of the progressive, liberal democratic tradition that's going on here in most of Canada. So I like this idea a lot because I don't have a lot of faith in any sort of major reform. I don't want to see bad things happen to anybody. It's almost tempting to think if we put the same amount of energy into trying to reform an unreformable monster into trying to create our completely own place, like, say, an Alberta secession movement. That strikes me as something that would be, or at least a radical decentralization of powers from the federal government to the provinces so that each province can kind of act like a us. State. That interests me a lot more than trying to get Pierre Polyv to do the right thing if he eventually wins. And it strikes me as something that would have a lot more long term beneficial effects for everyone involved, and there would be a more strong, high trust society in those places that enacted that. So do you have any thoughts on national divorce in that respect?

Russell: I think national divorce is probably better than a parallel economy, because, again, parallel economy can be captured. The state can just simply turn private industry into public industry, can nationalize things. A national divorce is probably a better option. The more power we can give the individual provinces, I think it's probably for the best, but even then, there's provinces that exercise their powers a lot more, and they still seem to be having lots of trouble because it goes all the way down to the municipal level. But we focus a lot on the feds, and for good reason. I mean, the federal government has a lot of control over our lives. The provincial government does. The biggest changes that we can make are at the municipal level. Look at Alberta. Alberta is Alberta strong gas and oil. And yet you go to Calgary and Edmonton. I mean, the Western Standard has reporters that basically all they do is just document the crime in Calgary and Edmonton. They made a full time living off that. That's the free market right there. That's not a result of provincial policy per se. I mean, they have a role to play in it. It's not a result of federal policy, although the Feds certainly have a role to play in the overall infrastructure of the criminal justice system. That's all municipal. At the end of the day. It's not up to the Feds to open a homeless shelter and staff it and come up with creative solutions to crime and come up with ways to move people out of poverty and into standardized living system. That's up to the municipality in conjunction with the province. So I think the most power that we can wield for a national divorce is to get more power in the municipal governments. Because if we have policies municipally that are working and crime is lowered and people are prospering more, then other cities are going to say, okay, what the hell are you doing? How is that working? We want to do that in our city, and then they're going to adopt those policies, and then the province will take notice, and then eventually there can be pressure on the federal government to adopt similar policies. My opinion, municipal is where we have the power, and that is where we need to put our focus.

Greg: That is an interesting concept because it just struck me, as you were saying, all these things that we almost have. An interesting case study in Canada that we almost uniformly ignore, I guess, is the existence of Pei. It seems like it's a literal safe haven from all the ills of society that are happening in the urban city centers. I don't think they have any murders. It seems to be a very high trust society that has an inherent conservative ethic to it of communitarianism more than even municipal politics. It's weird that it's almost like it is a well governed municipality as opposed to a province. It's strange that it's a province. I think that is an interesting point you brought up there, because Pei would almost completely back up everything you said.

Russell: The power that we need as society is in our communities. The liberals look to Justin Trudeau to save them. The conservatives look to Maxine, Bernier, Pierre Polyev to save them. The NDP look to the Communists to save them. There's all these different people, and they're looking for heroes, and they're looking for these idols in high up federal places to save them. The fact is, no one's coming to save you. They're going to collect their paychecks. And they're going to go back to their gated communities, they're going to go on their hot vacations and you're going to suffer and squalor and you're going to get what you get. I saw Jordan Peterson earlier on this year and he said what? I've been well, I mean, he said it way better than I can. The guy's a doctor in that. But why do you deserve access to the highest echelons of society? What have you done to prove yourself that you deserve that access? And I agree 100% because community is where we're going to make the difference. How many people I'm going to rag on Catholics and Christians for a second, I'm sorry, because I know everyone's society does it, but I have to for a second. What is the third theological virtue? I don't know if you're Catholic or Christian or not.

Greg: I was in a Catholic school, but that was a long time ago.

Russell: The third theological virtue is charity. Every single Catholic is called to do charity. They used to call it alms to the poor, that sort of thing. That builds community. Charity builds community. My Godparents, they're kind of mad because I strayed away from religion and that I became more like Emmanuel Can't and looking for moral reason than religious reason. But they would always tell me, they would say, you know what, Russell, we've grown up very lucky. And because of that, we should be helping people that are less fortunate. We have an obligation as Catholics and as good human beings to help people that are suffering and to help have them have a higher standard of living. And you don't do that by getting a microphone weighing £400 with dual pink hair and marching down the street, smashing windows of small businesses and threatening to beat up billboard, Chris or whoever else is in your way. That doesn't help anyone. That's narcissistic. It makes people feel good, but it actually doesn't do anything. No, it's where we're going, and we're working in the food banks and we're helping people. We're volunteering at the Optimus club. We're becoming Legion members and standing up for veterans. And there's our collective power right there. But instead you got people legion, for example. I just brought it up, oh, the Legion doesn't represent veterans. They don't even have any veterans in their ranks. I'm like, well, you served in the forces, why don't you join the Legion? They don't represent veterans. Well, they could if you actually joined and you actually because they have a national convention, you could bring your issues there. The Legion doesn't have to go lockstep with the government, but because you're lazy, you've seceded power over to people that are more than willing just to follow the liberal government wherever they go, not actually protest them. Legion wasn't conceived to love the government. They were actually there to protest against poor government housing policies for veterans returning from war and stuff like that. Well, we've lost it. They just became another captured institution. You have to join it. You have to be that change. And then through that action, you can get back to more conservative values. You can get back to conserving something instead of just tearing it down because that's what the rights doing right now is anyways. I know people don't like her, but Carmaya from Ontario, she goes to all the different things and she videotapes all the different protests and everything. Right wing people out there, and they're just as bad as the left wing people. And I'm like, what are you conserving? What are you building up? Are you just mad and you want to break something and you want to destroy something and you want to get one on your opponents, or you want to be a micro celebrity online and run a grift? Okay, that's fine. When it doesn't work, you can't get mad.

Greg: Okay, yeah, I agree with the I guess I would call what you're talking about like, communitarianism. And it seems to be for me, the big thing is familial strength is a huge part of what I think can go a long way to creating a lot of good down the road. And not just your immediate family, but your extended family, about helping out everyone in your family that needs it, doing everything you can to make sure everyone in your circle gets better opportunities. If everyone did that to the most of their abilities, it seems like a lot of social problems could be solved. But again, we get back to this problem of like, we started off talking, wanting to talk about the crime situation. What is the communitarian response to the knife wielding drug addict at Tim Hortons?

Russell: You don't even let it get to that level. So what's the communitarian response? You know all your neighbors in your neighborhood, you have a good working relationship with your neighbors, good rapport. So maybe you've started a neighborhood watch program and maybe you have a block parent program, and everyone's been screened and everyone is on board with agreeing that they're going to look after their area and their community. So you got about 20 families or so. Then you find out that there's a drug dealer in your neighborhood, and you know the house you've reported to the police, the police say they're on it, but of course they got a million other things to do and they got to focus on other things. They're not going to post a squad car out there and they can't just go kick the door in and these people have rights. Sure. Well, what if 20 people all got signs that said, a filthy drug dealer lives here and is putting poison in our communities? And they all went outside and every single day they picketed outside that drug dealer's house, and every single time cars pulled in the driveway, they're taking plate numbers down. They're not doing they're on public property. And they just keep the pressure on. And they just keep the pressure on. They don't hurt. I mean, when I say harass, they're not threatening or anything like that. Everyone knows what they're doing is they're casting the light. Here is the problem. And I can guarantee you, drug dealers, criminals, they don't like light. They like to be able to do their stuff undetected, unmolested, and that every single day you do that, it has to be relentless. It can't be one day a week, it can't be one or two people because one or two people can be intimidated. Maybe they could even be assaulted, things like that. You've got 20 to 30 people there every day. You know who's calling the police? The drug dealer. And when the police come and everyone is properly protesting and they're not impeding traffic, but they're making their voice heard, the next thing you know, the drug dealer is moving away. Most drug dealers, smart ones, they don't actually want to get into a confrontation with anyone. That's not good business. A good drug dealer wants to be able to work their craft with as little interruption as possible and fighting with people and having the police there and things like that, that's interruption that's interrupting them, slinging dope. And when I say dope, I don't mean like marijuana, I mean because no, that they're not selling marijuana, they're selling fentanyl and methamphetamine and crap like that. When there is someone that is hanging around outside of Tim Hortons and they are crazy and they're not listening to reason and the police say, well, we're too busy to respond. If it was a community there, you would call up and you'd say, hey, we got this guy outside, he's acting crazy. He says he has a knife. I guarantee 30 people show up and they tell the guy to leave. He's not going to try to attack 30 people. And if he does, there's 30 people there to subdue him. But that requires confidence. That requires a society of people that are sure of themselves, that requires people that are self disciplined and that requires people that are courageous. Because there is a level when you're confronting crime at that level, there is always the risk, of course, that it could escalate to violence.

Greg: Okay, well, that's an interesting take. I appreciate that. And again, these things get back and there does seem to be, like I said earlier, this denigration of the role of personal responsibility from the highest levels too, to not actually care about your lot in life, but to just go along with whatever the thing is and get swept up in it. And I feel like another underutilized tool that could be used to help stop a lot of these things before they start is social ostracism and social pressures put on people. Nothing legal, but just people having a more higher intrinsic value of themselves and the people around them. Like you were saying, sounds like a very important part of communitarianism.

Russell: So give me an example of that. What is social ostracization and how do we wield that in a way that can combat crime?

Greg: Sure. So first of all, I quickly wanted to bring up just the word itself, ostracism. I'm doing some investigation for a miniseries I'm releasing in a couple of months called it's going to be about the Trial of Socrates. So I'm doing a lot of research about ancient Athens and the term ostracism comes from that time. A lot of people don't know that it was actually a method to exile people that were conflicting with the general society. So what would happen back then is if you wanted to bring an official charge of ostracism to the Democratic Assembly, anyone that was an Athenian citizen could bring up an ostracism charge to any other individual in the society and they could say, I officially declare Russell to be ostracized. And within that year you would have that whole time to sign up 6000 of your fellow citizens to sign a piece of pottery with the ostracism person's name and your name. And if you could collect 6000 of those pieces, you could have that person exiled from society. It was almost a mechanism they used to try and dissuade political leaders from going too far so then more people could stand up against them and kick them right out of the country if they wanted to. But sorry, getting that was just a little tangential thing I wanted to mention about it. But social background, the social ostracism, I guess what I mean by that is within your own sphere of influence, you try and dissuade people from pursuing antisocial actions or thoughts with the threat of cutting them off socially if they don't adhere to what I guess would be considered a normal human behavior. And I guess this would work with like drug addiction or if you noticed escalating drug addiction, if you noticed escalating alcoholism, escalating abusive tendencies. Using a more socially ostracism approach to stop people from doing these things to begin with because like we kind of covered earlier, it seems like we're creating a culture of victimhood and permissiveness that seems to permeate everything. And the best way for us to push back against this is to make it socially unacceptable to do these things to begin with. Because that doesn't require a law, it doesn't require state intervention. It just requires people with similar values to say, we're not going to tolerate this kind of behavior and if you're involved in it, we're going to give you a high social penalty for doing those things.

Russell: So I guess my question to you is how is that different from a cancellation?

Greg: Well, we wouldn't be directly taking away their work. I'm not saying there should be a policy that cancels people from their jobs or makes them unemployable. It would just make within social circles that you hold, you should have to want to stick to a certain set of values that you espouse that encumber base level decency that doesn't devolve into, for example, like I just said, substance abuse degeneracy.

Russell: So how do we take that to the next level, though? Because I've seen people before that have no shame whatsoever. I mean, we have cases where people are literally defecating at the side of the road as people are walking by and people are openly having sex in public and masturbating. So they've been as ostracized as they can get socially. So in a way it gives them power because now they're beholden to no one. There is nothing that can really hold them back, besides maybe, of course, being just exiled to a jail or a prison for a while where they're still there. They're just out of the public eye.

Greg: Yeah, I mean, I guess I just have to go back to what Schellenberger said about possible involuntary commitment if they refuse to deal with the problems they have. Because regular people should not have to be subject to their fantastical whims of what reality is. Most of us share a common objective reality where we try and go to work, have a family, but just do fun things. We don't have to deal with these things from crazy drug addicts in populated places. They should almost have to be forced to either be in jail or deal with the problem. I don't like saying that as a libertarian because it strikes me as something deeply status, but at the same time I can't see a better solution because again, I know you kind of answered it, but that crazy drug addict that's wielding knives. Are you under the impression that you can save this person?

Russell: It's always up to the person to save themselves.

Greg: Okay.

Russell: And that I can't save anyone. I'm going to say something, and again, I'm generally lean pretty libertarian, but I actually agree with that. I think the libertarian ideology is good when we're in a relatively healthy society where we don't need a lot of state intervention. I mean, conservatism itself doesn't reject state intervention. So a lot of conservatives that have kind of taken a libertarian approach because they're like, well, I don't want to be, as Matt Walsh might say, like a Christian fascist conservative or whatever, because they're worried about this label that they're going to be a fascist if they want any type of state run intervention. I think that if someone does not want help, we have a country right now where you're allowed to be as nuts as you want. There's nothing illegal about it. You can be as crazy as you want. And a libertarian would say, okay, yeah, it's your right to be as crazy as you want, just don't affect me. Well, that's a fantastical idea itself because do I really care if people do fentanyl? No, I don't. I don't really care what people do with their bodies. I really don't. What they do with their body is their choice, really, at the end of the day. But however, actions have consequences. And so by doing fetty and being I call them like fetty soldier and that there's consequences. Consequences on the public health care system, consequences on the criminal justice system. When you're so high you can't control yourself, so you start declothing because you're overheating and then you decide to run through traffic, banging on windows, screaming at people and stuff like that. Well, now you're infringing other people's right to life and liberty and that the libertarians don't really have a true answer to that, in my opinion. But I agree with involuntary commitment. You reach a certain point, okay, you know what? You're going to get help and we're going to get you off drugs. It's going to suck. What was that movie train spotting this adage where the addict tells their buddy, okay, I'm ready to get clean. So they rent out a buy the hour motel or whatever, and then they basically string them to the bed and they just scream for hours on end and they go through the withdrawals. And then if they live, then they'll be clean and they'll have to stick with it. But we could get into a large conversation because I love sociology, I really do. Fixing crime, when we have the person that has the knife and they're screaming and they're a lunatic and we send them to jail. We send them to prison.

Greg: Yeah.

Russell: We've temporarily reduced the situation. Sure. For an already crisis level situation. We need to start being proactive. We need to start doing policies and interventions in communities that are suffering now so that we don't end up at that level if we can help it. And I mean, this might sound unconservative to say at the end of the day, we do need some limited social safety nets. I think they should be driven by the free market. I don't think the state should have control over it. But to say that there shouldn't be any social safety nets whatsoever, we're not a hunter gatherer society anymore. Most people can't even make a fucking campfire and that so I mean, saying that there's no social safety nets in our modern day era, again, in my opinion, that's a luxury idea.

Greg: It's hard to disagree with much of what you said. That's the reason why I brought up the Schellenberger idea of involuntary commitment or prison, because we simply can't have this going on continuously and just waiting for bad things to happen. And I don't think it's violating the non aggression principle at all. If, like we said earlier, you're known to police, you've already been involved in some sort of altercations with the police. You're a known drug user. And again, I'm not talking about people that are walking around with personal amounts of drugs and they blow off their steam with whatever substance they use. I'm talking about like we're talking about the crazy ones in public spaces. And again, the only way to do this is to make them help themselves or separate them from society because there is no other way to just continue to let this happen. It just can't go on like this.

Russell: Well, and I agree, we're going to have to make some policies that are going to make some people not feel good. We're going to have to make some policies that are going to negatively impact some people, but unfortunately, we're going to have to make some policies that are going to have to do those things for the greater good of society. And that's a slippery slope, and I think we really have to be careful with that. We really do. But it's gotten to a crisis point. Some ass hat on Twitter will come at you and say, oh, crime has been dropping since the that. Well, that's because they've taken a lot of what we used to be classified as violent crime, and they've moved that into property crime. They've cherry picked. They've moved the stats. And the fact is, they make crime reporting for some things so difficult that most people don't even bother to report crime anymore.

Greg: Yeah, exactly.

Russell: For every assault that's reported, I can guarantee you there's ten assaults that aren't reported. Gang members aren't reporting assaults on each other unless they want a little bit of free cash from Crime Stoppers. So, I mean, we're in a situation here where I don't care what a Laurentian elite or some criminologist that went to an Ivy league school and lived in a gated community says about crime for eight years. Go talk to your fast food workers. Go talk to your security guards, late night security guards. Go talk to your frontline police officers, EMS workers. Go talk to real frontline social workers. Not the ones that sit in the office and make policy in that, but the ones that actually do go out on the streets and try to bring people. And a lot of them tend to be more liberal, and that's fair enough, but they're going to give you a widely different answer than some asshole that sat in a classroom for eight years looking at statistics, having an ideology, and manipulating those stats in a way that makes it look better for them.

Greg: Again, it's hard to disagree. It seems like there's a lot of playing around with the numbers and making things for the current regime seem better than they actually are. So I would not be surprised in the least if even after all the stuff I listed at the beginning of the episode that the feds were doing in their degradation of society in general, that they would be also involved in manipulating statistics. It's completely within the realm of reason from where I'm sitting.

Russell: Noam Chomsky and he's a pretty famous liberal in that he wasn't wrong when he said about manufacturing consent. He wasn't wrong when he said the state manufactures consent, he was 100% right. But we're post manufacturing consent. And I know that's a scary word.

Greg: To say because we're post national we're post truth, actually.

Russell: Yes, 100%. But when I say post manufacturing consent, we don't need to make up anything anymore. The people will just do it themselves. There's people I'm going to use a matrix reference. They're so plugged into the system and that, and they're so reliant on that system that they'll do whatever they can to if they can't make the system be the way they want it to, then they'll just lie about it until it does become that. Or people get so confused they just give up.

Greg: Yeah. Parallel to that, you have the Siloing effect where people only listen to the information that they want to hear. So the lies will go unabated because the people that are willing to bring them into themselves to internalize them, they're already on board.

Russell: Sure. I want to talk quickly about artificial intelligence and the reason why I'm segwaying to artificial intelligence really quick here. Scott Adams actually brought up a really good point the other day and it's made me rethink some of my ideas about AI. They could never actually let us have an AI, because the AI will simply tell the truth and we can't handle the truth. The AI has no reason to lie in a pure form and so they have to put guardrails on it because we can't handle what the AI is going to say about our society. We can't handle those types of truths on any political side, on any philosophical side. The AI has no emotional need to soften any blows for us. So if we actually let AI loose and we said, how do we resolve the overpopulation in India, for example? Well, their solution might be something really awful and they're just going to say something that's really awful and inhumane in that. And because the AI has no reason to lie, has no reason to play to emotion or play to humanity. So we might ask the AI, how do we solve the mental health crisis? The AI might say, I'm not saying this myself, but who knows? It could be soundclipped that way. So who knows? The AI might turn around, say, you know what, we need to get rid of all the mentally ill people. And then the AI might turn around saying, we need to identify these gene markers, and anyone that has these gene markers, we need to forcibly sterilize.

Greg: We already have woke GPT, right? Like anyone who spent any time talking with this thing and seeing the examples online of its internal biases that were built into it. You're right. No, they can't let most people have the truth because you can't handle the truth. Right? That's the old cliche. I assume that a lot of these things would be counter to the narratives that were being sold. I mean, one big thing that I'll very quickly mention this before we wrap up. There's an old Sam Harris episode of waking up.

Russell: Oh, no.

Greg: Yeah. Well, he's had good stuff. I know he's ridiculous since COVID but he had an episode about gun violence, and he's pro gun, and he was talking about the racial demographics of gun violence and how it's overwhelmingly in the States, at least we don't keep the same stats here, but it's overwhelmingly black people that are shooting black people. It's not cops that are shooting black people. But if you ask the average person, they probably wouldn't give you that story, and they probably wouldn't like to hear these things. So that is a very prescient kind of thought experiment that Adams put forward, because you're right, I don't think that they would ever let us have it. It would make us flip things in such a way that we would be distrustful of what we were being fed previously. Like, it would completely destroy the regime narrative, so it couldn't be allowed to be said.

Russell: Greg, I really appreciate you coming on the show today. This has been a fantastic talk. We went for about an hour and a half here, and really, I feel like we just started to scratch the surface. I know we weren't able to deep dive as many topics as I think we kind of originally planned, but you left me a lot to think about, and I'll be kind of thinking about things and readjusting, and I hope you had some stuff to think about as well.

Greg: Oh, no, you gave me a lot to think about. I appreciate the conversation, man. I really like your show. I've been listening to all your catalog so far. I appreciate what you bring to the table and just keep doing what you're doing, man. I hope that I can get on my show soon because I appreciate what you do.

Russell: Definitely. And just before we go, do you want to plug any social media stuff one last time before we log off here?

Greg: Yeah, sure. If anyone wants to just go to smokefilled rooms. Net, that's my website. You can find me on Twitter, which I think has been kind of scrolling at the bottom of your screen.

Russell: I tried it, but that's the crash we had earlier.

Greg: Okay, well, it's at Greg Zesq. Yeah, you can just check out my podcast catalog is available on all the major sites that you can think of. And actually, today I just started my Rumble channel, and that's the only video platform I'm going to be releasing my podcast on. And the first one is an interview I just did this week with Jack Johansson of the Secret Police podcast, and we talked all about all the different Russian secret police forces that have existed back to the 16th century. So that was pretty cool. And I think that's about it, man.