Pete Quinones: Why I'm No Longer a Libertarian

Hey everyone, welcome once again to the

Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host John Harris, and we have a special guest today, Pete Quinones with the

Pete Quinones Show, which I started listening to last year. One of you sent me an episode.

It was actually about the suburbs and the formation of the suburbs, and I have a history education.

I never heard some of the things that I was hearing, and so it got me hooked, and I've been listening to it off and on since then, and I don't listen to many podcasts, but this is one of the podcasts that I do find is very valuable and interesting.

Free Man Beyond the Wall is the website, freemanbeyondthewall .com, or you can go to petesubstack .com

to find out more about Pete Quinones. Pete, thank you for joining me. Thank you for asking me on,

John. Thank you. Yeah, somebody sent me a link and said, hey, this dude mentions you in the beginning.

Check it out and everything, and I was like, oh, okay, and I'll just correct the record.

I thought I'd reach out and correct the record. Yeah, and what you're talking about, so people know, I did mention Pete Quinones on a recent podcast and said,

I listen to your podcast, but then I inaccurately stated, I said, well, I don't think he's a Christian, so I can't recommend his podcast, and what

I should have said is, it's not a specifically Christian podcast. You're talking about all kinds of things, economics, politics, all kinds of things, but then you told me you're actually a 1689

Baptist, and I thought, oh man, that's great because there's very few Reform Baptists who are in, what do you even call it, the more based political kind of unconventional approach.

So many of them are on that religious right train or gospel coalition types, and you're much closer to,

I don't know if we'd agree on everything, but we're both in an unconventional place where we're saying, what happened before isn't working, and so I thank you for your graciousness in coming on and letting me correct that record, but I do want to recommend your podcast, though, for people interested in those topics, and I thought we would start here, if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself.

You were a libertarian at one time. You now have a very influential, very big podcast, and you're not a libertarian anymore, so what happened?

I don't even know what I was growing up. I really think I was honestly one of those people who was, as cliche as it is,

I think I grew up fiscally conservative and socially liberal, and after 9 -11, you look at 9 -11 and if you lived through it and you were an adult on 9 -11 like I was, it was jarring, and you didn't know what to do.

Luckily, I had a friend who had been studying who Osama bin Laden was for years and everything, and he actually was the first person ever put it in my head that he was in Afghanistan and he was working with the

Americans. He could be an asset, and I'm like, okay, but after 9 -11, I come into that not really having a background in politics, even a basic poli -sci kind of background, so I don't know what

I'm doing. Do we support the troops even though they're sending them over there? What's the best way to support the troops?

What's the best way to protest this war without, because I thought the

Afghanistan invasion made sense to me, but Iraq didn't.

I had a little bit of working knowledge of the first Gulf War, 1991.

Basically, throughout the 2000s, I had no idea. I just didn't know what

I was anymore. In 2007, there was a debate and Ron Paul was on the stage with Giuliani and Fred Thompson, and it was all these, the typical, and I had no idea who this guy

Ron Paul was, but he said something that echoed what my friend that I worked with all those years ago had said.

He said, this is, I mean, they hate us because we're over there and we're bombing them. I was like, oh, okay, that's what it is.

All right, cool. I started investigating. I'm like, well,

I don't really have an ideology, a political ideology at this point. What does this guy Ron Paul believe? I found the

Mises Institute and libertarianism, and I found out that they were anti -war.

That made a lot of sense to me as I read more. I read that basically these were wars that were really constructed for, well, just interest groups knew these wars to happen.

And for like three years, four years in a row, I studied libertarianism and then

I just stopped and I worked and I had my own business for a while and I just dropped out and barely watched

TV, didn't do anything and just concentrated on work. And around 2016, well, late 2015 when

Trump joined the circus, I thought this is going to be interesting.

So I resurrected my old Twitter account from 2008, 2009, and just started basically posting.

And then I saw that memes were still a thing. I mean, I was looking at memes on e -bombs world in 2003 and 2002.

And I'm like, oh, that people are doing political memes now, it's not just cats and dogs anymore. And so I started making some and I started growing a following.

And around summer of, I started reading libertarianism again and studying and getting even deeper and deeper.

And around the summer of 2017, because the world needed another libertarian podcast at that time,

I started the Free Man Down the Wall podcast and it took off.

I think I was saying a lot of, I mean, I don't think I was saying anything new, but I think

I was basically confirming a lot of people's biases. And also,

I would come to find out later that a lot of people were tuning in because they just really liked the sound of my voice.

I can understand that. Yeah. So, you know, I'm like, OK, so about 16 episodes in of me doing my own, you know, self -congratulatory here's everything

I know about libertarianism, I'm like, yeah, I mean, I've been listening to the Tom Woods podcast for years.

Let me start doing interviews. And I found out when it comes to libertarians, if you reach out to libertarians and ask them to speak, oh, they will, they're more than willing.

They are, they will put, they will drop everything to talk. So same with Calvinist, by the way, you get a free lecture.

I don't do that anymore. That was my, the late 90s, the late 1990s and early 2000s.

I wore myself out. I'm so glad there were the internet wasn't as big and as wide as it is now, because I would have probably just alienated everyone.

Yeah, I'm past that. So the I don't I don't want to argue about stuff like that anymore.

It just doesn't make any sense to me. It's not it's useless as far as I'm concerned.

But some of the issues we're confronting right now, really. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I'd rather I mean, at this point,

I think I have more in common with a lot of Muslims than I do with a lot of Christians in the

United States. Muslims see the woke, Muslims see, you know, who's responsible for these foreign wars, just like I do.

That's actually a fascinating observation. And I want you to continue. But but like mental note,

I want to come back to that because I've had similar thoughts to that. But but yeah,

I don't know if it would be exactly the same as yours, but keep going, please. Right. All right. So podcast, things start going great.

You know, I start, Tom Woods teaches me how to monetize it. And I'm like, I start making making a little bit of money.

I start the income starts creeping up to the point that I had on my regular job. And but in 2019, the middle in the middle of 2019,

I start questioning. I'm like, OK, all of this libertarianism sounds really good.

It works, you know, in my head, it sounds great. But. How does it work in reality?

So. I'm like, let me have a couple, you know, let me have some people from outside of libertarianism on the show, leftists,

I interviewed some people on the left about anti -war kind of stuff, but, you know, I had Paul Gottfried on twice in the summer of 2019, and that raised some eyebrows and I had

Keith Preston on who has had the attack the system website forever.

And he's an old school anarchist, but he's like comes more from like the left side of anarchism.

And, you know, we had some really good talks. And but I found out that there was a certain branch of libertarianism that actually absolutely hated these people.

And I have a tenant and they identified with the left. And even though I wasn't explicitly,

I wouldn't say I was explicitly right wing. I knew that the left, you know, the left has always been to me just.

Terrible, evil, I mean, now I consider them evil, but. I'm like, why are they pushing back so hard to go through 2019 and covid hits, and as soon as covid hits,

I'm like, OK, libertarianism just doesn't work, it's not going to work in real life. OK, they what is the answer?

These social engineers are out here basically programming the minds of the public and the public is very programmable.

And they've set up this system over 100 years to make the public programmable, so much so that people are willing to out of a sense of I don't even know what kind of morality.

Like destroy their wealth to destroy their family and to split their family apart.

And I started looking at libertarianism and one of the first things I thought was and I didn't think this in these words, but I'm thinking if libertarianism doesn't have a way to socially engineer to get people to under, you know, to get people on their side to, for lack of a better term, manipulate the way people think.

It's going to fail, people are not going to buy into it. So summer of 2020.

I'm like, OK, who do I know that used to be a libertarian and has really good arguments against libertarianism?

And I'm like, oh, people were sharing Curtis Yarvin articles with me,

Menchus Moldbug, and he was writing these articles against libertarianism. He started writing them right around the time that Ron Paul started running for president in 2007.

So I'm going back and I'm reading this and I'm going, yeah, exactly. This is why it can't work. It cannot it can't work because for various reasons, but one is they don't want power.

They think power is immoral and power. Rules the world, power rules, makes change, power sets the culture, we this trans madness that we've been going through for a few years now did not come organically from the people.

It was it was put into the culture from on high. And so I'm like, well, libertarians don't like power.

Somebody that I know personally ran for governor as a libertarian in Georgia last year and said that his goal was to destroy power, which

I'm like, well, if you want to. Everybody talks about how, you know, like secession would leave a vacuum of power.

Imagine like somebody winning an election and going, OK, I'm not going to use power at all. Think about how quickly that vacuum will be filled from from the outside, because somebody is going to come in there and go, well, he's not doing anything.

He's basically he wants to take away your your health care. He wants to take away your Social Security. He wants to take away this.

And that person is going to build an army. I mean, they are it's been done in the past. I mean, this is this is history,

OK? It's the founding of this country was founded on liberty, but they didn't gatekeep people out.

You know, the first person who was like, hey, you know, this communism thing, this guy, Karl Marx, he's over and you should check this out.

They should have been like, you're on a ship and we're sending you to Europe with all your books.

And so I just came to the conclusion that, I mean, libertarianism, there are some good things within liberty.

I believe in private property, but I also believe private property has to have power to enforce it.

I believe in negative rights, but somebody has to be able to force negative rights.

I mean, me, me living, me having these fantasies in my mind of being out on my land, on top of my house with a 308 picking off, you know, the hordes that are coming to steal all my stuff, you know, once the government breaks down, which is what a lot of libertarians want.

Oh, yeah. The bunker mentality. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that that's not no. You need you need power in order to enforce all these things.

And the worst of it came. But I think everything went away, all the libertarianism, the the morality libertarianism, libertarianism is

Christianity without Christ. OK, they they promise you heaven, but there's no sacrifice.

There is no sacrifice you have to make. Everybody they tell you, well, we'll just get rid of the state and everything will be, you know, everybody will just decide to come together in Kumbaya.

Well, no, that that's not how that's going to happen. There are always going to be people who are going to say, no, you want heaven on earth, but you're not willing to sacrifice for it.

And sacrifice means that you have to be vigilant and vigilance takes force.

Yeah. When you when it comes to politics. So, you know, I do you think a lot of these guys like hardcore libertarians that like to reference the founders and they want to go back to this time.

They're just ignoring the fact that at that time we were coming, we were still somewhat pre -modern and there were already mechanisms to check and to promote self -government.

And the assumption was that a natural aristocracy was already present and would continue.

And those things are all gone now. And that's part of the difference in circumstances. Yeah, I think that, well, they don't one of the things that that most a lot of libertarians eschew is culture.

They don't realize that people have that people there are different cultures out there.

They actually hate cultures because if people are holding on to a culture, they don't want to go and join them.

They don't want to abide by their version of the non -aggression principle.

But also, you know, you have to realize that the founders were really one culture.

I mean, they were like you used to work. They were an aristocracy. Yeah. And I have no problem with aristocracy because I have no problem with hierarchy and hierarchy.

I've had. I had somebody just a month ago on Twitter. This is somebody who I've known of on Twitter forever say, you know, hierarchy is not necessary in life.

Yeah. And I'm and, you know, and then I'll have people say, well, that's just one person. No, that's not just one person on Twitter.

That is a lot of people. That is that is what a lot of libertarians think. And it's very leftist.

That's another thing. Another reason why I left libertarianism is because I realized it was leftist.

And even if people didn't even if there were libertarians who didn't think that they were leftist because they held some right values, there were still leftists, because basically the a lot of the things that they are.

They advocate for that the regime in charge will actually give them always benefit the left, gay marriage, legalizing drugs, all these, these are all things that benefit the left.

The whole row being overturned last year. I mean, that was a shock. It was a welcome.

It was a welcome shock. My monitor just went out, it was a it was a welcome shock, but, you know, it also didn't it cost

Republicans politically, didn't it? They thought they were going to have a red wave. And I'm one of those people who is pretty much fully convinced that one of the main reasons why the

Republicans didn't have that red wave in twenty twenty two was because Roe was overturned.

I think that that's just how far gone the quote unquote right is in this country.

The right in this country is more left is just as leftist as the as the left is.

It's just a couple issues. I mean, there is just a couple of issues that are social. But, you know, when was the last time you heard a

Christian decrying gay marriage? Oh, yeah. Publicly, they'll talk about family values.

They don't talk about that anymore. Yeah. You don't get specific. No one's being specific. You know, in 2000 in 2008,

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were against gay marriage. Yeah. And now in then in 2012,

Barack Obama was for gay marriage. And now. Conservatives, even

Christian conservatives. Oh, yeah. Don't talk about it. I mean, or are they, you know, you have like the

Daily Wire, the Blaze or the Prager, you all congratulating Dave Rubin on his story, like, what is that?

I mean, it's the. This is the problem with people who think that they're on the right.

I have some I have some rules of it. I see you doing these certain things.

I don't consider you to be a right winger. If you use the term racist, you're not a right winger.

Agreed. You're using the left's language. You're playing on there. You're playing on their field using their language and they make all the rules.

If you. If some if you think somebody is more right wing than you.

As a right winger, if you think somebody is going too far to the right and you start calling them a fascist, you're not on the right, you're not you're not an ally of mine.

Yeah. You're using the left's language and you are basically doing what the left is. You are basically what you're doing is you're defending the left and holding up the left's values while you're punching to the right.

And that's what the left does. They reach out to the left, punch to the right, and it's exactly what most of the right does.

It's what the daily wire people do. It's what the I don't.

I like blaze a lot, probably the best out of all of them. But Prager, you they these are all ones that reach out to the left when the left does something that they like.

Oh, you know, the James Lindsay's of the world. I mean, these people are. They're snakes, they're snakes in the grass, they're not helping.

I don't care. Oh, James Lindsay explains woke. Paul Godfrey did that in 1999 and 2001.

Why are you pandering to this guy who has basically said that if he had the choice between woke and right wing authoritarianism, he would choose woke.

Or or right wing, not even right wing authoritarianism, like a right, you know, any kind of right that has power that wants to use power.

People don't know. They don't really care that the left uses power. As soon as someone sees a right winger being like,

OK, we need to use power immediately, immediately, the training since World War two, that all that training since World War two kicks in all that programming that what

I call I mean, I think it was part of MK Ultra. All that friggin programming goes into their mind where they're like, they're like, well, no, we're going to become the

Nazis. And if you know how they say that, like, oh, there's going to be a swing back, you know, they've gone so far left.

There's going to be a swing back at this point. They're so far left. The swing back would be in the middle. Oh, sure.

Yeah, yeah. Swing back would be another iteration of leftism. It's not the 90s. It'd be like James Lindsay, James Lindsay, who thinks the 90s, if we just go back to the 90s, everything would be

OK. Really? Were you alive in the 90s? I was an adult in the 90s. The 90s was terrible.

The 90s was awful. There were kids in the hall. We're making fun of of woke culture in 1991.

I mean, the it isn't that that's where we got political correctness. Originally, I think the word was popularized in the early 90s, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And then the 90s, what? OK, maybe maybe the 1490s will go back there.

Well, this gets to what you said earlier about the comment you made about Muslims. I had a similar, not exact, but but a similar trajectory.

My first presidential election, I think I voted and I voted for Bob Barr. And I was a libertarian. And I don't know if I are.

What's that? CIA, Bob Barr. Yes. Yes. And I did not think in ideological terms as much.

I just wasn't satisfied with the choices in front of me. And, you know, I had a more just general conservative background.

And and I, I dally. I think if you're a young man, you don't dally in libertarianism.

There's probably something wrong with you at some point. I mean, every every young man I know, it seems like at one point or another.

So that apocryphal that apocryphal quote about being 30 and being a libertarian over 30. But then we grow up.

And that's what I think happened is the reality hit me in the face. I realized this doesn't conform to human nature. You can't build a whole philosophy off of just the non -aggression principle in the free market.

It doesn't work. And and I remember I went to Turkey for a week. I was I was just on a visit.

And I and in this couple with the fact that I was a furniture repairman for years and I would have to service all kinds of different cultures, eight to ten people a day.

And so I would go into Muslim households sometimes. And I noticed in both of these circumstances, I thought, you know, there's obviously a lot different between us, but they

I got into discussions more easily with them about political things. And they seem to see eye to eye with me more on some issues than people that call themselves

Christians at my own church, even. And I just couldn't figure that out. It bothered me actually a little because I'm just like,

I know I'm very fundamental things. We have a disagreement. We don't even agree on who

God is. But I'm wondering if and I want to see what you think about this, if it was a pre -modern modern thing, they're still living in some ways mentally in a pre -modern world.

They believe that there's hierarchy. They believe God is at the top of that hierarchy, their conception of God. They believe that we need a well -ordered society for the good of your people and protecting your culture.

And these innovations from the left that want to tamper with gender and all the other things that those are threats.

And that's where I'm like, yes, amen. Right. So is that what you're getting at? Is that what you noticed?

Yeah. They're also very insular. They like I've never been, but I know people who've gone to Saudi Arabia.

There are banks specifically for Saudi Arabians and they don't they don't they don't use usury.

It's against their custom. I mean, they're they're very biblical about that. Yeah, they're very I mean, the

Torah says the Bible says don't don't charge interest. Well, it's very negative.

Yeah. The law is pertaining to it. Sure. And we're you know, and we've you know, and what's funny is

I was I've studied enough that I'm in as early as the 1600s.

There were many debates in Christian circles in the I mean, almost wars over whether we could charge interest or not.

And, you know, Christians read the Bible up until a certain point, they were like, we can't violate

God's law, right? Can't do that. And they were convinced as a way to go.

I mean. Well, now you don't even have that discussion. We just, you know, that discussion, you know, and it's like I said to I said to my partner,

Chris, we have a company that makes documentaries and he's my partner.

And I told him, I said, look, I didn't think it was your gay husband. Just thanks for clarifying for everyone.

Well, no, I wanted to say who he is because he's really impressive. Chris Cofer. And he directed both of the documentaries that we've made.

And I said to him, he's like, where are you at recently? And I said, man, I'm at the point where I think that usury is evil.

And he's like he starts going into all the libertarian economic

Austrian economics. Well, I mean, who's going to. What who's going to start a bank, who's going to do if you can't charge interest, who's going to who's going and I'm like, dude,

I know, I know these are the things I struggle with, too. But I mean, when since you there are a lot of things that you can look at that happen in the world that since then, it seems we're going all downhill.

Yeah. What? And that is the accepting Christians in Europe, accepting usury as a you know, as something that is is to be normalized, is just a way of life.

And I'm looking back and I'm like, how do we how do we get here?

That's how do we get from how do we get from, you know, a a surf.

In Europe, who worked three hours a day in the field, spent the whole rest of the day doing whatever he wanted.

And his and his feudal lord didn't really care what he did on a day to day basis, as long as he had his tribute paid at the end of the month.

To. I mean, I've had jobs where I've worked six days a week, 10 hours a day.

Had no life for five or six years. Kids who don't know their parents, how do we get there?

You know, and people will say. People will be will say, well, you know, before before we went off the gold standard in 1970, 1971, you know, a house, you get a house for $25 ,000.

And a lot of people, you know, and putting 20, 20 percent down was besides people paying for it outright, putting 20 percent down wasn't strange.

It was actually the norm. It was the rule. Well, how do we get there? Well, you know, we went off the gold standard, fractional reserve banking and everything.

OK, how did all that start? Where did that come from? It came first from.

Abandoning usury, and I know that there were a lot of kings that weren't good, they would clip coins, they would, you know, the gold, they would they would mix the gold, so it wasn't 100 percent pure gold.

Sure, I know that. OK, what does that have to do with the fact of where we are right now?

You're bringing up something that I think libertarians often miss is that the moral issues they're integrated with, you can't separate them from fiscal issues.

And the market is moral there. You can't just divorce them and say that, no, what's good for the market is what's good for public policy.

And that's what we're going to do. And morality is a separate issue. That's a personal decision. No, they're integrated.

And and I think that was one of the things that woke me up to this now, not on the usury issue as much, but but now that you bring that up,

I mean, that's just one of probably hundreds of issues that we have capitulated on over the course of centuries that our ancestors would just look at us probably like cross -eyed and just wonder what in the world we're thinking, what are we doing?

You know, even the concept, I was talking to someone the other day about voting, right, and just voting and and and secession.

Right. So so the the fact that for most of human history, universal voting, universal suffrage was not the norm.

No one people would have thought you were crazy if you suggested that. And now they think you're crazy if you just say that, well, maybe we ought to have some kind of a standard.

I mean, they think you're crazy if you want to be right. Same thing with, you know, we have 50 states.

If we if we lose Alaska or if we combine Oregon or if we, you know, split Texas up or whatever, like somehow that's threatening some innate idea.

And it's like, but that's how we got here. That's that's isn't that the American Revolution? We separated from Great Britain.

Wasn't that a success? These unconventional approaches are what younger people I find, young men especially, are now attracted to because they realize, but that just makes sense.

But there's a there's something ingrained that's holding us back from considering these options.

What do you think that is? What do you think is is at the heart of this? You mentioned libertarianism being a religion without without Christ.

I mean, do you see liberalism that way, too, that this is just these are religious movements, essentially, that are masked as.

There's no difference between libertarianism and liberalism. That's where libertarianism came from. Paul Godfrey, you know, rightly points out that what's called liberalism has morphed, you know, liberalism used to be, you know, live and let live individual rights, basically what the founding the founding was liberal.

I mean, when people say that the founders were conservative, if the founders were conservative, they would have been fighting for George III.

That's literally what conserving means is you are trying to conserve what came before you.

The founders were liberals. They wanted something new. Isn't that what liberals want? They want something new.

The new thing, the new shiny thing, you know, the old trans rights. I mean, just anything that they can glom on to.

I mean, I really what is it? Well, I can see the founders being conservative in the sense of like wanting to keep their local governments with more authority over over the crown, you know, where King George would like this disband local parliaments and stuff like that.

I mean, I could kind of see that being conservative, but but you're right. I think what you're saying about like they were appealing to these universal principles and so forth.

Yeah. I mean, you have to see that in their writing. Right. I mean, they're they all I mean, almost to a man were inspired by the

Enlightenment. What is Enlightenment thinking? It's anti church.

It's anti church. The Enlightenment is anti church, 100 percent anti church.

What came before? They're against what came before. And well,

I mean, if you don't have thrown an altar. What do people do?

But what do we know inherently as Christians? We know that people inherently look to worship.

They want something to worship. They are looking for it's in their bones. If they're not worshiping

God, they're worshiping politics. They're worshiping something. They're finding something. Ted Kaczynski does a great job of pointing this out.

The beginning of his manifesto, the first 30 say he just talks about the liberal. He explains how the liberal.

If if the world was perfect, the leftist would have to create strife in order to have something to fix.

Something would have to something would have to go. They can't have it. They can't allow it because they they need something.

And they need things to constantly be changing, where people on the right have a tendency to just be like, yeah, same as it was yesterday.

I'm good with that. You know, but I mean, it went wrong.

I mean, if you just want to stay in the United States, I mean, it went wrong with. Yeah, I mean,

I guess the biggest one is to start with, you know, the war of northern aggression. And it was what was it?

It was a bunch of people basically exercising their their sovereignty and invoking

God in order to do it. Now, I mean, maybe they you know, maybe they.

Shouldn't have maybe they should have kept the compact, but when you look and you examine the fruits of what happened, well,

I mean, that's when the country starts going downhill. Early 1900s, the

Teddy Teddy Roosevelt kind of people. Now you have wars going overseas for wars,

Philippines, things like that. Then World War one and World War one just basically centers at all.

You know, we're not going to get into vote for me and we won't get into World War one, we'll get into World War one, get into World War one.

What does I mean, what happens? You have World War one allows the

Bolshevik Revolution and Russia to happen. World War one because of the Treaty of Versailles and the the the

Allied blockade causes the National Socialists to rise up because when your people are starving and being flooded with degeneracy from the outside and being being invaded by communists from your north, from your northeastern border coming because they see this weak country, they're like, oh, we're going to take it.

We're going to take this country over. This will be we're going to get this for the Communist International. Well, what happens?

You know, eventually you're going to have World War two. And what is what what do we first you have 1929, you have the

Great Depression, which. Bank caused, you know, the

Central Bank, which only came into existence 16 years earlier, causes this and FDR gets elected.

And what does FDR do? FDR fundamentally changes the United States forever.

Over 6000 executive orders. That he just pushes across his desk,

I think the next closest to him is like a thousand. Yeah, I didn't even know it was that many. That's pretty crazy. Six thousand executive orders.

He just pushes across that. Someone please fact check me and yell at me if I'm wrong. But the and he basically rewrites the

Constitution. He basically says the Constitution is not in.

No one cares about the Constitution anymore. We're going to come up with this U .S. Code, and this U .S. Code is what binds everybody from now on.

And ever since then, it's just been downhill. Then it's just, you know,

World War two is bad enough. But I mean, I don't know if I want to get into this. But in 1954,

Brown versus Board of Education. Yeah, that sets it up for race wars in the streets, 10 years, not even 10 years later.

And it's like and this wasn't there weren't people out in the streets protesting, saying, you know, we need the schools integrated.

We need the schools integrated. No, this was forced upon people. And now people can take a moral position and say, well, you know, they should have been segregated in the first place.

OK, well, maybe. OK. But what happened when they did it?

What happened when they did? I mean, I just finished reading a whole book on my podcast and it's called

Race War in High School. And it just it just details what the New York City public school went through because of integration, forced integration, a school that went from a majority white population to a majority black population in the span of six years.

Culminating in a teacher being set on fire. Yeah. Yeah. And and it's.

You can make the argument, just leave people alone. People will people will come together if they want to.

People will self segregate if they want to. All of that is perfectly fine. It's perfectly fine.

People all over the world do it. There's no reason that the United States has to be different than everywhere else. And then, of course, you see in the last, what, 20 years?

Yeah. Now every country in Europe has to be like us. And their crime rates and their rape rates are skyrocketing.

The murder rates are skyrocketing. Yeah. This isn't there's like there's no one there's no one you can elect to do this.

I mean, well, maybe this can't be done by law. This can't be done by laws.

This can't be done. I mean, you could basically remove from the society everybody you think is a problem.

And it won't change the fact that we think a certain way. We continue to think, as I call it, the spirit of the age.

We have this spirit of the age that causes us to, you know, call, you know, jump to, oh, you're a racist if you don't want to, you know, if you don't want to live in a neighborhood that's predominantly of another color.

You're a racist. And this is somebody on the right saying stuff like this. It's like we're in trouble.

I mean, I'm I mean, localism is to me is really until.

I mean, I think we're looking for a Franco figure to come along and fix this like one like a right wing authority.

I mean, Paul Gottfried said this on my show recently. He said he believes the only thing that can defeat woke is that a right wing authoritarian is going to rise up and is going to have the military and the police on their side, and they are going to crush these people.

And why does he believe that? Because that's what history tells us happens. Yeah, and I think a lot of young men especially are starting to come to a similar conclusion.

I've heard the Franco reference now a number of times. One of the things you said earlier in the podcast, though, just reminded me that libertarians don't tend to take into account culture.

And a lot of these things you're talking about, they're cultural and you don't. Culture is a sensitive thing.

It's like a garden, like you don't want to flood it because it needs water.

You don't want to put all these other seeds in there that are going to choke out the plants that you have because they might look nice.

I mean, I'm sure they will look nice and beautiful flowers or whatever. But there's a there's kind of a homeostasis that you have to take into account.

And and when people want to tamper with culture from the outside by imposing some kind of an abstract concept in their mind that maybe on paper looks good and that would be great, there's all these consequences that arise because they don't take into account human nature and how humans collectively tend to think and act.

And and so there's there's a somewhat of a naivete to it. But, you know, what for the audience that I have, which is mostly composed of Christians, although we have a few atheists,

I think, who enjoy listening and and some other people. But, you know, they're not given they're not presented with a lot of options like positive visions.

And right now, the only thing positive you've really talked about is localism as a way to let's just assume everyone who's listening is anti woke, you know, for the most part, in general, you know, the wokeness since 2020.

You know, what what do you see in localism? What political philosophy would you say you are now?

What's the vision that people can can look to as as something that's hopeful?

I don't I mean, waiting for the dictator to come, you know, not dictator, you didn't you never said that, but waiting for the authoritarian figure to come.

That seems somewhat unlikely. I mean, I think it'll happen.

I just don't think it's going to happen in our lifetime. But which which means things are going to have to get a lot worse.

But I really think that that can be mitigated, mitigated locally. So I know people

I've been to small towns in this country that just driving through, like, say,

Ohio, Southern Ohio, especially that. And they might as well be libertarian.

They don't know that they're libertarian. You know, if the cop pulls you over, he knows you and he's going to be like, come on, man, stop it.

You know, not to speed past old man O 'Brien's farm, that he's going to get upset and he's going to call your mom.

Yeah. These these kind of places where people can still leave their doors open, you know, leave their doors unlocked at night.

This is a very libertarian society. It's very high trust. All people who share the same culture.

The South is, you know, different because, you know, because of slavery, a lot of a lot of a.

The ancestors of the the progeny of slate of people who were born slaves or were slaves here still are here.

So the South always has a mixed culture. I find that the more rural you get, the better off it actually is.

Not always. I mean, 20 minutes up the street, up the road for me is

Dadeville, where that sweet 16 party got shot up, you know, like three weeks ago.

I mean, it made national news, you know, and it was it was brutal. It was all black on black crime, you know, and.

It's horrible, you know, and we just where we are now, we just bought a house on a little bit of land north of here.

And it's I mean, where I live now, I live in a college town and it is that it's bigger than I want.

I mean, it's 75 ,000 people without the students. You know, so I wanted, you know, 3000 or less.

So we found 3000 or less. You know, we found a a county that. Is I mean, seems more like I mean, everyone knows each other.

And you even the little time I've spent up there just doing some getting renovations done and getting everything ready.

You know, the restaurants, places we've gone, people are all saying hi to each other because they all know each other. Right. That that's different.

I mean, that is that's what's going to save you. You know, if you also this and this is something that I don't think a lot of people take into consideration.

I mean, I think the the one libertarian who got it right, got it, got it all right.

Well, I mean, except for his anarchism is Hans Hermann Hoppe. He talked about in 1997, he was talking about localism in 1997.

We just listened to him in 1997 and started this whole thing. You know, his vision was 10 ,000

Liechtensteins. You know, Liechtenstein is a little, you know, it's a you know, micronation in the middle of Germany.

It's basically owned by the Hanser Hans Adams family.

And it's like if you don't want to pay taxes, you don't have to pay taxes. If you don't want me is just the the monarch has owns a corporation and basically funds everything through that.

I have a friend who just went and they have a lottery that you can move there and he like won the lottery.

He got his EU citizenship and then won the lottery. And now he's in. He just sent me a picture the other day of him with Hans with Prince Hans.

And I think that's what it is. But here's the thing is like the town

I'm moving to. And over an enormous amount of the town is owned by one family.

They're farmers. It's how they make their money. You know, my property backs up to their property, backs up to their their farm.

They have a vested interest. They've been there well over 100 years. The the selling agent is the brother, the sister of the patriarch of the family.

I mean, there we were. I'm pretty sure we were vetted. Because we were going to be moving to this town, which they own this.

It's basically like moving to a little Liechtenstein, because this guy has such a vested personal interest in this town operating in a certain way so that his business continues to operate.

He has the kind of wealth to crush anything that would come in there and destroy it.

It reminds me, I don't watch the television show Yellowstone. I've seen one part of one of the spinoffs, but my understanding is that the whole concept of that show is basically intergenerational, like a family who likes their ranch, doesn't want anyone messing with their ranch and has all these forces lined up against them throughout the last century.

And they defeat all of them for the sake of keeping the land the way it is. And and that appeals to people like what you're talking about appeals to people because you have a hit television show that that's kind of the whole premise of it.

But like doing this in reality, though, I guess running for local office, investing in your community, not buying from Amazon when you don't need to and going down the road instead, going to the hardware store instead of Lowe's, going to the farmer instead of the grocery store.

Right. That that's hard. That inconveniences people. They like we like to see that on television when it's presented.

But but living that way seems like it's just I don't know if I have the confidence that people are actually going to do that.

That's that's my hang up, I guess. I mean, do you see positive momentum in this? Well, it's like I said, libertarianism is

Christianity. Without Christ, people aren't willing to sacrifice. There you go. There's no sacrifice. So we got to be willing to sacrifice.

Yeah, that's really good. Yeah. I mean, sure. The only the biggest supermarket near me is a

Piggly Wiggly, and I'm not going to have access to a Publix or, you know, or anything like that. And I'll have to drive in order to get a lot of things.

But hospital is a hospital, you know, a full service hospital, really close and everything.

And it's. A town with no no crime, it's in the middle of, you know, a good place to be.

Yeah. You know, and I think that is the best way to mitigate. People are like, oh, well, if the feds want to come in there, they can just come in there whenever they want.

Well, what are you going to do? Stay in a city? Yeah. City. I mean, do you know why cities are fully convinced?

You know, why cities are as bad as they are? People are not made to live in cities. Oh, boy.

I hope Tim Keller didn't hear that. Yeah. They're not made to live in cities. What are we talking about? We're talking about what? How many how many thousands of years of of people living agrarian lifestyle?

And then all of a sudden you're just going to snap. You snap your fingers and, oh, go into this place and live on top of just pile each other on top of you.

I have this theory that. I won't, I won't. That's fine.

It might be out of line, but but I'll say it privately. OK, the

I mean, cities are just I mean, what are they? They were just invented for bankers and politicians.

That's it. It's bankers and politicians. That's why Thomas Jefferson, you know, even that leftist.

But but I agree with him. He's like, well, what are what are cities made for?

The cities are made to to construct banks and to construct all these things, to suppress the farmer, to suppress the person who's who's out outside of the city.

Cities always end up taking taking all the power. That's why, you know, there's all these people on the on the right now.

And when I mean the right, I'm not talking about the boomer con, right? I'm talking about like people who, you know, are like we're we're done with this daily wire.

Oh, yeah, I got you. Yeah. And they're like and they're like, well, we can't give up the cities because, you know, the cities, that's where the power centers are.

They understand that the cities are the power centers, but they don't understand that they lost them a long time ago and there's no getting them back.

Well, they think that's where culture is produced instead of an organic approach where you which was what you're saying is actually cultures produced at home.

It starts when you're young and you're living at home. That's your first community you're born into. And there's obligations in that community.

And there's traditions and that's culture. And yeah, if we're watching, if we're hooked into the

Internet and television all the time, I suppose we're going to be influenced by the cities. But like, I'd rather get rid of those things.

I mean, people are listening to this on the Internet, but like what they're tools. But what I mean is like, let's spend more time, as you used to say, with locally, with the people around us and less time watching television shows, right?

That will be the solution, not creating better television shows. We're going to beat the left at its own game by making.

Oh, I mean, that's part of the problem is people are hooked into those things instead of their local attachments. I mean, if you're in a small town and your town is getting a

Starbucks, if your first response is, yay, we're getting a Starbucks and not let's make sure we never get a

Starbucks in this town, you haven't you haven't picked up on you haven't gotten it yet. You just haven't gotten it yet.

I mean, this is not it's I know when you tell people to go read a murderer, you know, they don't want.

But Ted Kaczynski figured this out in his manifesto. This is industrial society in its future.

Everybody thinks that that's this book like, like, oh, Al Gore. You know, it's like it's like an Al Gore book or something.

Now he's talking about the human condition, what technology did to humans, how humans used to get up, go to work in the field, sometimes have to fight for their survival.

And that was something that was fulfilling to them. It was something that became a part of them.

It became a part of their chemistry. And then all of a sudden, within the span of like a couple 50 years, 100 years, all of this technology is coming in to replace work.

All of this, things that people do, things that people make. So is it any wonder why a hundred year, you know, what, 80 years after the

Industrial Revolution really kicks off in the United States, women are lining up and going, we need to vote. You have all of this, all this do -gooderness.

You have. Well, think about this. The progressive movement. I mean, the progressive movement comes into it, comes into existence right after the

Industrial Revolution. And who is and who started the progressive movement?

Southern Protestants. So the Protestants started the political progressive movement.

Yeah, I mean, what was Woodrow Wilson? OK, Wilson was the person I thought of.

Well, Woodrow Wilson's father was a Presbyterian minister from the south. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, well, and all the and like the progressives that were coming down after the war to basically going down to the south, all the northerners going right, right, right.

But they were all Protestants. They were. Sure. Yeah. To bring the Protestant work ethic.

Well, how is that work at that work? And I mean, that's in the process of work, I think is. I hate that.

Such a terrible idea. It's just, you know, you don't agree with Max Weber. Yeah, I know.

I mean, I agree with you're with him on a lot, but not on that. Well, you know, I would trace it to,

I think, the abolition, not abolition. Well, abolitionists, but the reform movements of the 19th century that predated progressivism that came out of a lot of Unitarianism and transcendentalism, these rational approaches to and it did came out out of Protestantism.

You're absolutely right. But that went south. Right. And then and I think maybe

I don't it got somewhere along the line. You know, the Battle of the Republic being maybe the first example of this.

It got cloaked in red, white and blue. That this is the American thing is to be this way. Well, that's a that's a subject for another show.

Yeah, yeah. We're getting so of, you know, patriotism and Christianity. Exactly what that means.

You know, bring in Romans 13 and have a long discussion on that. And, you know, I mean, it's it's all very.

Yeah, it's all very it's difficult because we're the time we're living in, we see people being hurt.

We see people being destroyed. We see people's lives being destroyed. You know, whether it be

I mean, I don't care what it is. I mean, probably the obvious most obvious thing is like the transgender thing.

It seems like, oh, we can't sterilize. We can't sterilize the next generation. Just, you know, so we'll make them sterilize themselves.

You know, we can't force it upon them. So we'll convince them to do it. And, you know, there's very mouth, very

Malthusian ideas associated with it, as far as I'm concerned. But yeah,

I mean, I just and then maybe, you know, what does the Christian do about this?

Because, you know, I'm I'm one of these people who is as Protestant as I am.

I very much a supporter of the Crusades and I'm very much a supporter of the

Inquisition in Spain. That was also my heritage. So I actually know more about the

Inquisition than most people do. And I know you can't drop that on a Protestant podcast within the last few minutes of the podcast because I'm already going to get a bunch of hate mail.

And now so no, no. Well, we'll have to talk about that maybe on another podcast. I mean, everything I said,

I was raised Catholic. So, you know, there's you don't you don't get rid of that. You know,

I mean, I graduated Catholic high school. You don't get rid of that even even when you even when you become

Protestant. Well, Catholic, you know, integralists tend to be they're more comfortable with the idea of an authoritarian figure coming in.

And of course, some of the people who are detractors of Christian nationalism, which is more of a Protestant project, will say, well, it's just integralism.

It's just about authoritarianism. I haven't seen that as much on the Christian nationalist side. There's certainly a desire that like Stephen Wolfe talks about this

Protestant prince, a Christian prince that would come in and do something. But but they're very clear that we don't want ecclesiastical power and magisterial power intermingled, that those are separate things.

Whereas, you know, with the Catholic view, the integralist view, it seems like that's more there.

The pope and the Catholic Church does have somewhat of an authority over the magistrate. But what do you think of that?

What do you think of Christian nationalism in the last few minutes here? Because that's the hot topic now, especially with my audience being debated a lot.

I mean, I don't know if you've read much on it or I haven't. You know, I I'm I have contact with the the other.

What's his name from Gab? Oh, Andrew Torba. Yeah. Yeah, I have I have contact with the other Andrew, the one who helped him write it.

And oh, is car and yeah, yeah, yeah. We we go back and forth sometimes.

But I'm really not that up. I mean, I don't know what they're put it this way.

I don't know what their solutions are. I don't know what they've laid out as solutions to me.

You know, when I read Warren Carroll's book, The Last Crusade, which was about the

Spanish Civil War and, you know, how basically he called that, you know, basically the last the last crusade of the

Catholic Church was basically rising up and destroying communism.

And it was coming into Spain in 1936, which had basically taken over, which had basically taken over most of Spain.

And they started burning the churches down and they started executing the priests and the nuns and the seminarians.

And, you know, it was Franco who said, you know, there were there were other groups there.

The Carlists were the the Catholic monarchists, but.

And they were with Franco's group. Franco was more of the nationalist, but he was a Catholic. And then you had the

Falange, which were the were the fascist, the fascist in Spain. They chose

Franco to be their leader. And when they won, Franco just basically became dictator for life. And he destroyed he kept

Spain communist free until 1975, when he died. It's a little more where I'm at.

It's a little more where I'm at now. Yeah, I know. Interesting. And that's fascinating. So let me just give you a hypothetical.

So you have someone who says, hey, look, I'm running for president. I but I don't really want to be president.

I think we're post -constitutional. It's not working. I'm going to be a king. I'm just going to be honest with you.

Once I win, I'm going to be a king or maybe even I don't have to win. Like I'm just, you know, coming in and I'm going to take control.

And he has a vision for for the local. He wants local communities to be somewhat left alone, allowed to kind of be themselves.

But he's going to crack down on the woke mob and what they've.

Are you in support of that? Pete Quinones, is that like your dream to have that happen?

Absolutely. OK, that's what I want. I mean, I don't think there's any other way out of this.

And we're not going to liberally, you know, like like James Lindsay says, the only thing that can defeat woke is liberalism.

And liberalism hasn't even gotten started. And I'm like, so basically what you're saying is real liberalism has never been tried.

Right? Yeah. I mean, exactly what that tweet said. You know, and I mean,

I just don't. I when Paul Gottfried said that on my podcast, I'm like, all right, thank you. From what you know, what

I've been saying for for two years now and the former libertarians who come across me, who used to listen to me, they're like, oh, you're just an authoritarian now.

I'm like, you have no idea what it takes to defeat what we're doing. I mean, people want to talk about how bad the

Weimar Republic was. We're we're far worse. We're far worse.

I want people to know I did not tell you we didn't have any conversation about James Lindsay at all before this.

You brought James Lindsay up, but he has been influential in some of the more reformed

Protestant world because he was platformed at some G3 related events,

G3 being a big conference in the Protestant world. And he was one of the ones to explain wokeness in a way that people in the

Christian world somewhat understood. But I met him because of these connections in 2020 at CPAC.

And he told me to my face, I mean, just he was just honest with me. He goes, I don't really know what I'm doing here because I'm not conservative.

I'm I'm a liberal. He just said that to me. And but all these people were conservatives were platforming him.

And so I wonder whether or not some of the issue isn't really even James Lindsay. It's a right that loves Elon Musk and loves

Bill Maher and loves any any person on the left who is willing to show a little bit of spine on the newest, you know, innovation.

They'll rally behind that person and include them as one of their own when it's like maybe you can learn from Elon Musk's bravery on some things, but he's not one of you.

You need to just make a separation there and say, no, he's I mean, have you looked at how he wants to put brain chips, you know, chips in people's brains?

Right. Well, and I don't even think the one needs to be it needs to be a Christian. He just needs to understand.

And what I will say is Paul Gottfried, I will mention again, Paul Gottfried had all of this figured out in the late 80s.

But the reason why people on the right conservatives, even

Christian conservatives, won't go near Paul Gottfried is because he is a right winger and he's more right wing than they are.

Yeah. So they'd rather they feel weight because of, you know, the last everything since World War two, the right.

If you go too far right, you're going to be the next, you know, mustache man. So they so they feel more comfortable with it.

James Lindsay, who's just basically a wolf in sheep's clothing. I mean, I do not think he has our best interest at heart.

If you're on the right, if you're a Christian, he's clearly stated he I don't the I don't know why.

I mean, I mean, I assume he would go to speak at a Christian conference because, you know, he just needs to pay once the paycheck and once the, you know, but I mean, he does not share your values.

He does not share Christian values. He does not. He is a leftist through and through. He has said that over and over again.

Go search his Twitter account. Yeah. Well, this morning he was posted. Someone sent me I'm on Twitter, but he was posting about basically supporting gay rights.

But, you know, we got to draw a line at this transgender stuff. I'm paraphrasing. And yeah, we're pointing out like, wait, they're related.

What are you talking about? Like, I mean, the other I mean, can you imagine? I mean, when

I was a kid, it was like, I mean, I knew my uncle was gay. I just knew he was gay and everything, but he hid it.

He you know, they now in New York, in the 70s, it was a lot more open in certain areas like down in Greenwich Village and things like that, walking hand in hand.

But when it came to like going to work people, I mean, even if people knew they hit it, they didn't even if their co -workers knew they hit it.

I mean, right now it's like, I mean, I did you see that DeSantis basically outlawed.

He made it against the law illegal in Florida for. And I don't even know how he would enforce this.

Anyone under 21 to go to a gay pride parade. Oh, I didn't know it was that restrictive.

And they canceled the gay pride parade. Yeah. Oh, no, I did see that. Yes, you're right. I saw that the headline about that canceling it. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, yeah. Well, why? Why? You know, if you're if there is a gay pride parade happening in your town.

Yeah. And you aren't out there cracking if if the sheriff is not out there cracking down and saying, no, this is not going to happen.

You live in a leftist environment. You live in an environment that has been taken over by the spirit of this age.

That's right. And the spirit of this age is monstrous. You know, I mean, and if you're thinking right now, well,

I wouldn't want my my sheriff to do that. You might be on the left. You might be a leftist.

You know, I don't want to go Jeff Foxworthy here, but yeah, yeah. You might be a leftist because why are you going to allow you want your kids to see this?

You know, it's like it's like Owen Benjamin up in Idaho says my kids don't even know what a gay person is.

My kids are like my oldest is eight years old, doesn't know what divorce is. That's there's something precious about that.

You know, the innocence has not been corrupted yet. Yeah, it's going to happen. It's going to happen, but it's better that it happened later than sooner.

And with parental oversight to help explain. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, we've we've gone over an hour now.

I don't want to take too much of your time. I appreciate you weighing in on some of this stuff. Freeman, beyond Freeman, beyond the wall dot com and Pete's substack dot com are the places people can go to check out your content.

And you can go to any podcatcher and any any podcatcher. I'm still I'm still on all of them.

iTunes haven't canceled you yet. No. And the Pekin show and it'll come up. So I would just direct everyone with the hate mail.

Just send it to Pete because, you know, he's the one that said it. So, yeah, I'm sure you do get a lot of that.

Do you get a lot of free money on the wall? It's on mail dot com. Yeah. I never get

I never get hate mail from like the left. I get hate mail from people on the right who are like, you're not going far right enough.

Are you serious? Yeah, man, we have different audiences. And I'm just like, and I'm like.

I can't say the things that I want to say. If I were to say the things I want to say,

I'd be on more lists than I probably already am. Well, the value in this is that we have to have conversations and what's what's been going on for the last few decades, but really centuries, it's not working.

And people know that it's not working. And all the proposed solutions in the mainstream are just recycled versions of the last 50 years since World War Two.

There's nothing going back to the deep traditions that we've had over the course of centuries since Christianity that we can draw in the

Anglo -Protestant tradition. There's there's nothing not even trying to learn from other European traditions or other places.

It's just this box we're in. And so I think having you on talking about this, it gets us out of the box a little bit.

It challenges us and makes us ask questions. And that's a good thing. We need more of it. And so I appreciate it.

Maybe one day we'll have a conversation about how the Protestant Revolution led to trans kids. Oh, boy.

Oh, boy. You know that. I don't know if you're aware. There's a podcast in Moscow, Idaho, the cross politics show.

And they had a guy saying that Baptist theology led to transgenderism. Are you aware of that or not? I mean,

I know that a lot of ortho ortho people will say I heard some Orthodox Christians say recently that Protestantism, you know, interpreting the

Bible on your own leads to gay priests. I was like, so yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, it's

I mean, maybe I don't know. You know, I'm I'm also I'm I'm very

I've spent enough time in I'm one of those people who spent enough time in a seminary library to question everything that I've ever been taught and question everything that, you know, about church history and church.

And, you know, it's just amazing that everything started going downhill right after about 1513.

I don't what happened. What happened around that time? And you were and you're a foreign Baptist. You did tell me that I'm a

Baptist. OK. All right. Yeah. So this is going to be an interesting conversation to have as well.