9/11, Charlie Kirk, and Political Violence Everywhere
Summary
9/11 Reflections: The podcast discusses the aftermath of 9/11, emphasizing it as a significant government failure that led to an expanded national security state.
Political Violence: The assassination of Charlie Kirk is highlighted as a grim reminder of the inherent violence in politics, with the discussion pointing out the increasing acceptance of violence as a political tool.
US Foreign Policy: The conversation critiques US interventionist policies, particularly in the Middle East, suggesting these actions have fueled anti-American sentiments and violence.
Osama bin Laden's Motivations: The podcast explores bin Laden's stated reasons for 9/11, focusing on US military presence in the Middle East and support for Israel, challenging the narrative that the attacks were unprovoked.
Domestic and International Violence: The hosts draw parallels between domestic political violence and international conflicts, noting the cyclical nature of violence and retaliation.
Historical Context: The discussion underscores the importance of understanding historical and political contexts to prevent future violence, advocating for political decentralization as a potential solution.
Government Actions: Criticism is directed at the US government's actions post-9/11, including the Patriot Act and ongoing military interventions, questioning their effectiveness and ethical implications.
Transcript
[Music] Welcome back to the power and market podcast. I'm Ryan McMan, executive editor at the Mises Institute. You can visit us anytime at our website which is mises.org if you want to get a lot of written content similar to this podcast. Now, for this weekend's uh episode of Power and Market, we've got uh two of our contributing editors. We have Connor O'Keefe and we have Joshua Mortar. Uh both of whom are regular contributors here at the Mises Institute. They have weekly columns and Josh also does a lot of work for us just as a uh a working editor processing our content as it comes in from our stable of many other writers as well. But guess what? It's 911. Um, and as just in case you weren't aware that we live in this violent sort of dystopian nightmare country in 2025, people being knifed, people being shot. Uh, just uh let's remember on 911 that 24 years ago today, thousands of people were killed uh by uh these these attacks on the World Trade Center um which of course the most deadly part of that as well. And so we're going to talk a little bit about that. I think what's notable about 9/11 is how so many people took the wrong lesson away from it. The uh the lesson of 9/11 was that it was a day of horrible government failure. Uh basically what you had been told your whole life is give us trillions of dollars and we'll keep you safe. And when it really came down to it, they failed miserably. And yet in the end, everyone who failed miserably got a raise. They got promoted. They got more power. And we have what we have today, a national security state on a scale never imagined before. And they use 9/11 to justify that. But before we get to that, uh I feel like we got to talk a little bit about the Charlie Kirk uh assassination. Um we don't have a whole lot to say about this, but it seems like it's something that needs to be said, right? None of us knew him personally. None of us have like opinions about who he was as a human being and things like that. Just someone we've never met. Uh could comment on his work perhaps. But I looked on our website. He's only ever been mentioned in passing five times uh at mises.org. I think maybe that's for a couple of reasons, right? One, not really like in our circles, right? A lot of the issues he covered were culture war stuff. didn't really seem to have many opinions on uh fiscal and monetary policy except in the most general sense and his foreign policy certainly didn't agree with ours because that just tended to be your general center right conservative foreign policy which tends to be highly interventionist in nature. However, uh, in terms of his advocacy of these issues, they weren't really bad enough that we felt like, uh, hey, this is some guy we need to really address. And so, just generally not mentioned much on the website. Uh, and looking at his work now, I never just never really even thought about him much, but, uh, now looking at at some of some of his work after the assassination, um, just not something that we would engage with that much at mises.org. However, unpleasant demonstration of what politics is really all about, which is violence. And I think this this sort of stuff is is having an accumulative uh effect in the sense of right I think when when this video came out which was a gruesome video if you saw this on social media of the assassination you'd already spent several days being made aware of this woman on a train in Charlotte North Carolina who was knifed to death for no reason whatsoever just minding her own business. And I think all of this is just a reminder of uh just how violent our society is, how the state is doing nothing to uh address it. Uh how wanting criminals are put back out on the street and how a lot of people who are involved in political activism are fine with horrible violence. And I know that in the wake of this killing, everyone is basically blaming it on whoever they don't like. So right-wingers uh who are involved in the culture war are blaming it on uh whoever they don't they don't like is trans. It's it's just leftists in general. The fact is we don't know anything. So I don't I don't know who to blame it on. I just know that it's it's just a reminder of how violent the political game is. And and I know that it's it's really affected some people who just aren't used to seeing that. And I just want to reiterate like right when we talk here on Power Market or just Radio Rothbard in our columns, any of that about how the very nature of politics is inherently violent. We're not trying to be like edge lords. We're not we're not like trying to say stuff that we think is, oh man, they're talking about how violent stuff is. Look how cutting edge. Look how cool they think they are cuz they're saying stuff that people don't normally say. This is just the reality of it. I mean, I don't know how you can come out of any say any significant reading program involving political theory and think that violence is not absolutely at the core of all of this. Mchavelli covers that uh in pretty excruciating detail 500 years ago. So uh unfortunately not terribly shocked. I mean, I was shocked in the sense of is this person important enough to assassinate? Uh, but apparently somebody thought so. And I mean, that just ends up leaving us speculating about who did it. But I I I don't know like what what what should I add to this, guys? I mean, at this point, there's so little information. What needs to be said about it? >> Yeah, there's not much we know. We'll definitely get more details uh in the future, but that's definitely like an angle there that you're not going to find most other places, but it's important to to talk about. Like I got a um an email I am subscribed to a lot of news focused newsletters and I got an email you obviously all of them were about this uh shooting this morning and the headline was something like this isn't politics and it's like yes it is. This is exactly what politics is. There there's something about um I I find that when you are deeply read in history, political history, but kind of all of history, it really gives you a much better perspective for our our current moment. And like the fact is like the people that are I mean, yes, of course, it is reasonable to be freaked out by what happened yesterday, especially if you've seen the video. that is the healthy human reaction. But to act like this is some um something that has just completely come out of the blue. Uh that this is like this singularly crazy characteristic of the current time. Um, it's just a historical and I think that that's one of the main reasons, at least for me, but I think our organization, kind of our movement more broadly, is pushing so hard for the things we're pushing for, especially things like political decentralization is because this is the kind of thing we are going to see more of as the federal government becomes more and more powerful. as the prize for, you know, the different political factions to fight over grows and grows and as the, you know, power for those factions to then dominate their rivals continues to grow like that that things are not going to calm down on the current trajectory that we're on. And you know, you add into that human nature, and we'll kind of get into this more with uh 9/11 later, but obviously like people are hyper emotional right now. Understandably, once again, the people that are uh were close allies of Kirk, kind of the the MAGA folks, a lot of them want blood. And like that is what happens when, you know, extreme violence is brought um is brought in like this. But it it's just hard to see like if that actually uh develops like if we start if if there's a left-wing uh commentator that gets gunned down or if there's I don't even like know what spec like it's impossible to predict how it would play out. But if the right starts using violence, it's not like that's going to calm things down either. Like there there is real potential for um this to turn into kind of a cyclical escalation. And I think at least for me personally when I see this kind of thing happening it really reminds me why it's so important to advocate for the the kind of decentralization and the sort of roll back that we are advocating for. >> Yeah. I think part of the problem is that the more powerful the state becomes or the more credible the threats of using state power against various groups becomes uh the the more likely people are to become emotional about to the point where and fearful enough to the point where they're going to use violence. If you lived in a society where your political adversaries didn't have power enough to really use them against you, there'd be no point in using violence. Unless of course you somehow had been convinced that they did regardless of what the facts were. And I think that's to some extent a factor here as well is you've got a lot of people attributing calls of uh political violence and domination to certain people that may or may not be actually uh plausible in terms of being able to exercise that power. However, we live under a regime now that is so powerful where almost anything goes in terms of I mean after after uh co right we saw that the regime won't even stop short of locking you in your home. I mean this was a real discussion. The regime won't even stop short of making everyone show their papers so that you can enter a supermarket, right? Do you have your vaccine passport? And while a lot of that didn't come to fruition thanks to resistance, that was the direction that they were going in. And that there were plenty of people who thought that people who were unvaxed should be jailed. People who were unvaxed or who didn't get their children vaxed should be jailed, should be fined, should maybe even be killed in some cases. And so that's that's the rhetoric we're still coming out of. I I think this has deeply affected people too is the sort of bitter division caused by CO as well. And that's we never got away from that. That's just really I think uh accelerated since co and of course that's not totally unfounded. People are realizing that your neighbor is willing to call for all sorts of violence against you, whether it's vigilante type violence or violence handed down from a judge uh and carried out by bureaucrats because that was the sort of violence that was being discussed often under uh co. So I I just don't see a significant difference here in terms of this. And also just note that America's is a country that's been basically constantly at war now for uh nearly 30 years if you count like a lot of those bombings that uh occurred during the uh Clinton administration during the 1990s the late 90s. So even before 911, right? So let's uh uh it just it strikes me as a little odd although the same thing happened after 9/11. people suddenly realized that the US uh was involved with a lot of violence out there and that the world was a violent place with and that the US regime in the name of the people who were living inside the United States was carrying out violence against other people and then people acted shocked that people hated them for it and then they invented the absolutely laughable nonsense phrase they hate us because we're free. Uh so uh that I think if we dig down we can start to see that on the domestic front we see some similar sorts of things as well. But what do you think Josh? I mean uh the what was I mean did this affect you right? Did this surprise you or I mean you work for the Mason Institute so you're probably already well aware of uh the grim nature of political discourse right? Yeah, as you guys were talking, I was just thinking of the Lysander Spooner quote in uh the Constitution of No Authority where he talks about that, you know, the difference between ballots and bullets and that we like to kind of think, well, everything, you know, once you run things a certain way with uh with ballots, uh that it's it's structured and organized, but really the the bullets, the guns are behind that. And then it also just kind of over overlapped with um an article I wrote last week which was was actually inspired through some discussion with Connor where we had been talking about there's this category where the state monopolizes things like security provision and other stuff but then withholds services that it coercively taxes and and says that it provides. So the the examples of this are are standing down when there's public disorder, rioting in the streets, arson, property damage, but uh the the law will be used against um people who try to defend any of those rights. So I was shocked uh by Charlie Kirk's uh very public murder, I guess, but not uh totally surprised in just this climate environment. They almost, you know, whoever they is, I don't know. there what's going on. But uh Trump almost was uh assassinated twice on, you know, one on very public TV. And so I think uh I'd have a hard time not believing that this was a political murder as it was attempted with Trump at least twice. And um and that in in this sense it's already um murder and violence and all these things that are crimes are already offering an opportunity to talk about what the next state interventions are going to be. So MSNBC immediately was saying, "Well, you know what? I bet the Trump people are going to use this for some justification for something. AOC was talking about, you know, hey, are we finally going to deal with, you know, gun uh gun crime and gun uh violence? And then just some vile things about people basically uh insinuating that Charlie Kirk because he was a proponent of the Second Amendment deserved it and those types of things. But but all this stuff is that it's u that it's political. So it was disturbing. I think especially just in the sense that I don't think our culture has a because of uh bad uh ethics and disrespect for property rights and and all sorts of things and I mean by that self ownership as well that they can't tell the difference between the culprit and victim to the extent where freedom of speech is considered to be unacceptable political violence but actual violence is excusable um when it's committed by a criminal because the state you because the state virtually says so. Uh so for example, the woman that was stabbed in the neck minding her own business that Charlie Kirk had actually just been talking about the other day, people are already saying, well, you know, he must have been mental illness and he must have been hurting. And so now you can't even deal with just um straightforward crime even when it's brutal murder. And I think the state uh system helps uh kind of warp our ethical understanding of the the nature of violence and uh and that applies to as well to to foreign policy, you know, that uh that we're going to talk about. But um yeah, Charlie Kirk, we had a we, you know, not many people see someone die that way violently um right in front of them or on on a screen. Um and I know some people who were talking about how they were disturbed by that. But when you consider that when there's a drone bombing, we're so removed from that and it kills somebody, kills an innocent, you know, civilian, men, women, and children in the name of killing bad guys. Even if you get some bad guys, um that has an effect uh not only on those people uh but on others who who experience that. And then, you know, that further politicizes violence domestically and uh and internationally. >> Yeah. I I think the watching the video was was pretty unpleasant. I I wonder how many people When was the last time you watched the Zaprooter film of the JFK assassination? That was real low resolution, but that is grim stuff just to watch that. Uh, and just photos of um Jackie O's bloodstained pink dress and everything after that after she had her husband's brains blown out all over her. I mean, this is this is the methods uh these are among the methods used and especially used more often when people start to think that violence is an acceptable uh political method. And now Americans think violence is an acceptable political method clearly or they wouldn't support so many wars all the time against things that actually offer no threat to American territory or actual Americans as a standard practice. Uh however um they they don't like when it when it seems like it could be applied to them. And so I think they're they're seeing in many cases that uh it's real unpleasant up close and and personal. And I think you touched on a little bit too there in the sense of right if you if you cross over that line where you start to view political speech as a type of political violence than uh a response a a possible response an acceptable response if that's your way of thinking is to respond with actual physical violence. And that is that is the way of thinking that that many people uh use and that that is common on the left especially right where speech silences violence uh where speech is a type of aggression and therefore you can respond uh with some sort of of violence. Now, this this actually has even deeper roots, and I ran an article on this a couple of weeks ago, totally unrelated to this issue, but I think it's it's relevant in the sense of people responding with violence to words, is I talked about how the issue of uh fighting words, slurs, those sorts of things, those don't count as actual violence. And I think that is that is something that uh the left has attempted to capitalize on as well, right? If someone calls you the n-word, well then you get to respond with violence. That's that's like an excuse. Uh if someone calls you some other name, if someone uses fighting words, which is like a a real like legal concept, right? There's this idea that human beings then somehow no longer have the ability to use their reason and so therefore we're just expecting them to respond with physical violence uh to to fighting words. That people if they are provoked then they're violent. their physical violence is somehow more understandable and acceptable. And so that's a gray area that a lot of people I think spend way too much time in where they seem to think, "Oh, this person said words I don't like, so maybe I just need to shut them up using physical force." And uh way too many people are okay with that, it appears. And I mean, this just seems to be the extreme and natural outcome of that though in many cases. I also think uh a lot could be said about I mean at least for me I was definitely raised uh where that whole thought experiment about going back in time and killing baby Hitler was like a big uh a big thing that was brought up frequently and it was a lot of people agreed that like yeah you should absolutely do that and I think it's like not that hard to see how the logic then takes you to okay well who are the equivalents to baby Hitler's today and we are absolutely told over and over again um by you know obviously a lot of people that are whipped up in this mindset but also by like more establishment sources that Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump, the people of, you know, that MAGA movement are equivalent to these, you know, faright radical fascists, which from our perspective is especially insane because our basically our whole issue with uh Kirk and Trump is that they're far too moderate and that they're not uh they're not like we basically get all the downsides of having radicals um in power with none of the upsides because they're not actually like going in and like seriously cutting, you know, seriously draining uh the swamp. But it's it's just interesting how the establishment, many of whom I truly don't think believe that somebody like Kirk is actually this, you know, rabid fascist, stoke those flames. and how many people um on the left especially once again we're recording this on Thursday afternoon they have not caught whoever did this we don't know the specifics here but if you look back to uh like for instance um the second Trump assassination um once again there are still more questions with that guy Ryan Ralph I think was his name he's um I think his trial is ongoing right now but um I wrote an article at the time because it was just so clear that putting aside any potential kind of shadiness when it came to like some of his connection with some nonprofits that were, you know, involved with Ukraine. Putting all that aside, it was clear he believed exactly what the political establishment wanted him to believe about Donald Trump, that he was this force of evil. And once again, you know, if you're kind of raising all these people on this idea that if you had the ability to go back and prevent the rise of Hitler with violence before it ever happened, when he was an instant little kid, then that would be a good thing to do. It's just not hard to see how we get to the point where it's like, okay, well then clearly if we have this burgeoning fascist movement which is just taking control of Washington, then out of the tens of millions of people that seem to really believe that, it's not surprising that a few of them are going to actually try to do something about that. >> Yeah, I think that's right. And nonetheless, when you start to talk about this, when you talk start to talk about how, well, maybe uh you shouldn't shoot those people you disagree with, then people accuse us of pacifism. I mean, there are some people whose brains are so adultled by their desire to engage in violence. I guess not appreciating where that leads, uh, they they just let go of reason. And what's funny, too, is when they're engaging libertarians about it, they don't even have a leg to stand on, right? Every libertarian I know believes in arming yourself, believes in the right, if necessary, get your concealed carry license, know how to use a gun, right? These people aren't pacifists. Uh, and but just the idea that you should not be using violence except in cases of extreme need of self-defense. Uh, somehow, I don't know, they get caught or they think they're tough that uh they're talking about how they're going to beat up some guy who insults them or things like that. And this isn't uh this isn't just held to like one ideology. Although, I would say the left definitely encourages violence more in terms of like people say things you don't like. Um, and the left is useless too on war by the way, right? I mean, yeah, maybe 25 years ago the left was good on being anti-war, but I mean, they they got no problem with war. Now, I just look at their their position on Ukraine. Um, you you love violence in Ukraine if you're left, you love violence in Gaza if you're right. That just seems to be where we are now. And then I I mean, just if you needed a right-wing example of just how people uh believe that if I'm insulted, I get to use violence. You could have seen some of the uh reactions in the wake of uh Trump's executive order about flag burning uh where you saw people come out of the woodwork saying things like, "Well, if someone burns a flag near me and I'm going to punch him in the face, I'm going to kick them in the ribs." Really? I mean, that they say things that that offend you and you get to then engage. And by what's funny, too, is that a lot of these same people probably say things like facts don't care about your feelings, right? And then they embrace this totally feeling motivated idea of like someone insulted my flag so now I'm going to beat them up. So something something wrong something really messed up there. I mean you can't really say oh this is an American problem because uh human beings uh apparently no matter where they are have uh certain tendencies of this >> yeah like I said look at history. Just read read any history book. >> Yeah. They're not unique to America by any means. But if Americans are going to fancy themselves as unusually enlightened or peaceful or anything, right, well, uh I think we're going to going to have a hard time coming up with evidence uh for that because even when Americans do manage to have a nice domestic front in terms of violence for a while here and there, uh often there's a lot of support then for either state sponsored violence domestically or of course state sponsored violence. Uh >> well, and Ryan, just to make a point Oh, sorry. >> Oh, no. Go ahead. interrupt, >> but uh just to make a point on that, you know, a few years ago there was this big thing of oh we'll punch a Nazi and of course we know that they call everyone uh Nazis who doesn't who don't agree with them even though their position tends to actually look more like national socialism for the things that they advocate. In any case, I remember people posting this online and and saying, "Well, if they're a Nazi, that means they believe XYZ." They spell it out and then it's they want to exercise violence against you. therefore it's okay to punch that person and you know laying all this out. So the left will do this whole punch a Nazi thing but then it is it's not a secret that Ukraine is working with the AOV battalion which are genuine like great grandsons and grandsons of Nazis. There's a sa social nationalist party uh involved in Ukraine. So they'll they'll call Putin Hitler and say that you're an isolationist if you don't want to side on the Nazi with the Nazis in Ukraine to fight Putin, but then say well we need to punch Nazis here. So they're fine with um you know funding and supporting Nazis you know in in a movement uh to fight another you know world nuclear power. But then when somebody believes in freedom of speech here, that means that person's a notch Nazi and it's okay to use physical force uh against that person and you know and then on the same thing like you mentioned with the flag. It's like well they I remember getting an email forward years ago saying you know if you uh desecrate the flag you know this is whole thing about where when you're allowed to kick someone's ass is when they desecrate the flag you know all this different stuff. So and um so every society has its uh you know its blasphemy laws and uh people have their different things that they want to make um untouchable as far as freedom of speech is concerned. Um but yeah it is it is kind of surprising to me. I don't shouldn't be surprised. Uh but it it still never ceases to amaze me the things that people will um be willing to sacrifice their their ethics. they're they don't have a consistent principle in order to just go the opposite direction when it's something else they're upset about. >> Well, and we're even living in a society where uh violence is then carried out where the victim could not even in the most convoluted way be construed as having aggressed against uh the person who carried out the violence. And I mean that in the case of Arena Zerutka, the the woman who was stabbed on uh the Charlotte train, right? Some people who supported that, who supported the violence against this person, and these were usually like crazed left-wing proviolence advocates, some were calling it an act of decolonization, right? Because that's the uh that is presently the narrative that the the most extreme people on the left are like, "Well, violence against white people is acceptable because it's it's a form of decolonization." And so, we're using our violence as a reaction against their violence of the past. Of course, all the people who colonized places in the past are dead. Uh, and it's especially comical though in a dark way, the blackest of black comedy that you would target Arena Zerutska. This was a woman who just arrived in the United States like a few months ago. So, oh, uh, how is that decolonization? Because did Ukraine colonize your country? Uh, usually Ukraine's been on the receiving end of colonization. Uh so just the the whole idea that you could possibly justify stabbing this woman for minding her own business because she has pale skin uh is really just quite remarkable. And yet people have manufactured narratives to defend that sort of behavior. And this is this is where we're at in America uh right now. But that's all on the micro level. So let's talk about some of the more macro stuff because we're still living with the realities of 911. Now, let's get into some of the details of uh what you were doing working on this week. Josh, you have an article on mises.org uh relevant to today, the 24th anniversary of 9/11 and your the title of your article is a note on tea. Was bin Laden telling the truth about his objective? So, tell us a little bit about this column and then I think we get into just a broader discussion. >> Sure. Um, let me just make two uh comments that uh you and Connor probably don't need to hear, but just for our viewing uh audiences uh regarding 9/11. One is um the importance of distinction between Americans and the state in general. We are not the state. The state is not us. The state is individuals in the political elite who take certain actions. So I I have to do that because whenever you talk about 9/11, whenever you talk about Osama bin Laden, if you're going to try to look at the the history and kind of see, okay, what get inside people's heads and see as from the evidence what they were thinking, you know, you almost always get accused of um excusing it, condoning this or that uh type of thing. So on the right, I've noticed that the right will tend to um tend to use the the greatness of America, the American people, the American tradition to uh basically borrow capital for that to say that's the government. So when you criticize the government, they think you're criticizing uh America, you know, mom and apple pie and grandma and Thomas Jefferson and you know, all those things, which is not uh not the case. Um but the left likes to take the crimes of government and then uh apply those in the opposite direction over you know to to criticize America to get people to hate um America kind of like with the decolonization thing. So they'll take government crimes and uh and say well this was really bad don't you hate America now? So making that distinction is is key. And and then also um I just wanted to reference an article I wrote um a while ago called your your tax dollars are funding al Qaeda and Nazis. And uh just this is just to um preemptively deal with this idea of saying well by looking into the history of 9/11 and talking about how the US government was at fault for failing uh to deal with the security concerns leading up to it but also its interventionist foreign policy led uh to 9/11. um you know that is u part of the story and tea is often this is this uh concept in uh Islamic thought that isn't actually talked about that much but um people will talk about these uh this area of um any type of uh discussion on foreign policy when you say okay here's what what took place. Here's why they said it happened. And it's al also happens when people talk about, you know, their their Muslim neighbors. And politically, um they say, well, conservatives uh in America will often say, well, you know that they their religion tells you that they can they can lie. They must whenever they're talking, you know that they're lying kind of just like a lawyer. And so whenever they say that their reasons for you know foreign you know their foreign policy grievances you know that they're not really um telling the truth. Okay. So uh there is this concept in uh Muslim theology called uh called tea. And what it really deals with is this issue of um it deals with this issue of like a lot of religions where the question comes up as to whether it is ever ethically allowable to lie in order to um accomplish some type of goal. So Christians talk about this with, well, what if the government knocks on your door and asks if you're hiding Jews in the basement and they want to kill, you know? So this comes up, but uh recognizing though it does matter in cultures and there are things that of of dishonesty and and things that that matter and this may even be the case. Um my article was dealing with well how do we know whether the grievances of um so many Muslims around uh the world and in the Arabian Peninsula? How do we know whether they were really telling the truth when they said that you know our issues are these things? Our issues are um the America's foreign occupation of the Persian Gulf, its unqualified support for for Israel, the the um occupation of the the Palestinians, um the treatment of um the Muslims in Iraq through the bombing and sanctions during the 1990s, propping up corrupt governments in the Middle least um different things regarding oil. How do we know that those aren't they're not just lying to us? They're trying to trick us um into uh doing what they want by uh by subversion and uh and subtrifuge and they're trying to get us to believe something uh something else. Now, uh the reason why um reasons why that might be we should believe them is is number one, and by the way, this is uh it was asked on a a debate recently, you know, Dave Smith was asked by his opponent, well, who do you trust more, Osama bin Laden or Benjamin Netanyahu? And of course he wanted him to say, well, you know, if you answer one or the other way, it it traps him, he thought, in a certain point. But really, trust has has nothing to do with it. What you have to look at is evidence, context, and consistency um over time. Uh Osama bin Laden had been stating this over time, consistently publicly. Um, and then surveys and and research had gathered that people in Muslims in the Arabian Peninsula and elsewhere had 95% agreement that even though they didn't agree with al Qaeda's methods, they did agree with the idea of getting the US, its bases, its foreign occupying military presence out of the Arabian Peninsula. And it's very hard to get 95% agreement of anybody on anything. But if we just think of in terms of um in terms of well they're all in a conspiracy together to lie to us. It's very hard to get a conspiracy where you have 95% agreement without people uh breaking the the conspiracy in uh in some way. and and and the fact that there are other Muslim uh sects and disagreements and even wars and fightings and infightings among those groups. But I also found some research um from uh Max Abrams that was called uh Al Qaeda's scorecard. And one of the evidences that it presented is that there is a trove of private documents that were found and evidenced to be from Osama bin Laden himself. and it agreed with all his public statements as far as what his foreign policy uh goals were. So I had to kind of deal with that um point as far as uh that because whenever you bring up well what was their motivation whenever you uh whenever the US is siding you know with al Qaeda in in Libya in Syria in Yemen then apparently Muslims can be trusted but whenever they are um not doing you know what uh what we want or the narrative is not going the way that you that they want and it it threatens foreign policy interventionism. Well then tea they they're not to be trusted. You can't believe a single thing that they say and that kind of just reminds me of my my previous point. I I'll quit here is that you know people will will throw it at you. I can't believe you're you know speaking about their motivations and all this uh this stuff. What about 911? And I I want to throw back at the um interlocutor who would would say that is yes. What about 9/11? That was a terrible crime committed against our people. Why are we now as the American government? Um knowing we're not actually the government, but why are we propping up al Qaeda in taking over Syria? Why were we propping up them in Libya? Why were we propping up al Qaeda in Yemen? If we are really doing justice to the victims of al Qaeda and 9/11, why is the US siding with al Qaeda and Al Qaeda affiliates for the last 25 years, which should be treasonous in its foreign policy adventures in these countries? And so it's not uh it's not actually to the benefit of uh of the victims or the honor of their memories uh that that uh we don't question the wisdom of foreign policy interventionism and we just say well then it's they know what they're doing uh by siding with them elsewhere. So that was the the the point I wanted to make earlier on that. Well, I think that also helps to illustrate uh the difference in terms of dealing with uh the violence of 9/11 or what it was that invited that and the sort of violence that you might be encountering when you're Arena Zerutska, right? So in many cases where people on say the American left domestically are hatching violence against you, you're just minding your own business, right? You like you may not even be advocating for anything. you may be totally unpolitical and yet you're still targeted. Now, in many cases, Americans were were targeted uh in 9/11 who were also not political and minding their own business. But what's interesting is that in say a lot of these cases where you're killed as an act of decolonization or you're killed because you were anti-abortion uh or you're killed because you thought that there were two sexes that sort of thing. um that is I think quantitatively different from what it was that led to 9/11 right and and this comes to this issue of right what was Osama bin Laden talking about right whereas if you're just minding your own business and and you're just having opinions about things that conform to your worldview and you're not even advocating for anything uh well then it's hard to imagine why anyone would even be upset with you unless they have some sort of deeply disordered view of of violence and also committing violence against someone who's not even really advocating against you isn't even going to solve a problem. However, in the case of 9/11, the the calls for violence were in response to like very specific policies that were taking place, right? It was the stationing of forces in Saudi Arabia. It was destroying Iraq with punitive uh economic sanctions and everything else you list here, right? That was not anybody minding their own business, at least not as far as the regime goes. Many Americans didn't even know that was going on and they were killed uh as uh because they were being blamed for what the US regime was doing. In that case though, the US regime could have stopped doing those things without endangering any American. In fact, they would have made Americans safer by stop stopping doing those things because none of those things were required for carrying out the mandate of the US Constitution or what was necessary. So in those cases, Americans were being targeted for something that their government did, which was an actual form of aggression. Whereas minding your own business and just thinking that a man is a man and a woman is a woman, that's that's totally different from uh being targeted for an actual violent military act against some foreign people who then uh want to take it out against the the US regime. And so you you can see how just totally needless that violence was, how totally needless it was for the US to be involved in any of that stuff and that it ended up getting a bunch of ordinary Americans killed for no reason whatsoever that is of any value. Right? There were reasons, of course. The reasons were neoonservatives liked this, that certain interventionists in the US government wanted to be involved in these places. They wanted to support the state of Israel and those sorts of things. None of which was necessary. None of which uh a lot of which was unconstitutional by the way, just basic violations of the Bill of Rights in terms of carrying out that sort of intervention uh overseas in the name of Americans. And so it precipitated violence. But in that case, it wasn't you just minding your own business. In that case, it was a third party, the US government, claiming that with your support, it was carrying this out. And so there are just so many reasons where you can be targeted. It's just unbelievable. And can you even know? Um, and that's just the danger where you have an extremely politically active regime that's acting in your name and where it's constantly advocating for various types of uses of force against different groups, where it's constantly working to divide people up into different political groups that are supposed to hate each other. And that just seems to be the MMO of the United States since at least World War II. And I mean, you can't ever let your guard down now because even if there's nothing about you personally that might get you killed, then there might be something that your government is doing that's going to precipitate someone else to kill you. And that's why I think kind of maybe this whole Zerutka thing and the Charlie Kirk thing maybe go hand in hand too is that you can't even say, well, I'm not out there for advocating for anything. So what? You still might get knifed in the neck. And so it's uh it's it's just something that I think those two events combined, a lot of people look at that and they become very very alarmed. And I think uh probably for good reason. >> Yeah. The the uh name I've given it the concept which I just think is everywhere. I mean we're talking about our violent world, but with all these cases is indiscriminate revenge cycles. You basically have a crime and then the victims or you know whether that be a group, they lash out and attack a third party that didn't actually do it. And then that, you know, they become the victims. And it just kind of goes back and forth and back and forth. And yeah, like that is what happened with 9/11. You basically had, I mean, like literal crimes happening if we're looking at like the no-fly zone and what is what was essentially the siege of Iraq. Um, and just all the quote unquote collateral damage that was happening there. Just some straight up evil stuff happening um because of direct US government intervention, US government action. And then people understandably in that part of the world are very upset by this. Um and then you have Bin Laden kind of stoking that up and obviously you know he had a small group of hijackers that did this. He became you know this hyper famous uh figure after the attacks there. But um yeah, I I like uh the focus in that post uh you put together um Josh about his motivations cuz this that's just something that drives me crazy is that this idea like if you're ever actually trying to dig into like hey this was a horrible event that happened, why did it happen? Like if we really want to understand how to prevent it from happening again, we have to understand why it happened. And to understand why it happened, you have to understand why they did it. And when you're trying to understand why they did it, people will then turn that around and act like you're trying to justify what they're what they did. And that is um just to me obviously completely wrong, but fundamentally unserious when we're talking about preventing this going forward. But then yeah, like I I like the point you made that it it's not um it is still somewhat important what was happening in Bin Laden's brain, but really at the end of the day, he had to bring other people in to the operation and into his movement. And it's very clear that he was using these, you know, uh, issues in terms of what the US was doing in the Middle East to recruit other people. If if this was all a big lie, we would expect, you know, him to like them to if we actually look at the real al-Qaeda discourse that they would actually be talking about what was actually motivating, whether that be like, you know, whatever they were trying to pass, like the fact that we could vote or that there were like music videos and whatever like BS excuse the George W. Bush regime was trying to push, we would expect to see that like in their kind of internal discourse. And it was none of that. And then I think the most damning evidence um is the fact that a book I've brought up on the podcast a few times before, The Terror Factory by Trevor Aronson, where he details and documents all of these cases of the FBI doing, if you're trying to be charitable, sting operations, but a lot of them really seem to cross the line into straight up entrament um operations where they would get these young Muslim men in the United States after 911 to they would basically approach them, act like they're um shake or somebody from the Middle East, somebody connected to al-Qaeda and be like, "Hey, we're going to give you a bunch of money. Can you go bomb this, you know, government building or something, and then this little, you know, lonely, usually kind of mentally deficient kid would agree." Um, obviously there was never a serious threat to anybody, but the FBI would swoop in, you know, throw him in prison for the rest of his life and act like they were on the front lines keeping Americans safe. And what what's so notable about that book is that the FBI itself is recruiting all of these kids by talking about all of the civilians that the Americans are killing there. So it's like our own government knows what actually is motivating and has motivated the jihadist Islamist you know factions in the Middle East that were attacking us you know on 911 and have uh we've been fighting you know mostly uh since although you know it's very important to point out we have also taken their side in a lot of conflicts which I just think is completely outrageous but we know from their own actions that they understand this but then they will turn around and act like we're crazy for even talking about and or act like we're we're somehow justifying what happened when when really we're we're the only ones serious about actually trying to bring this stuff to an end. Right. And I I have an article actually coming out tomorrow that is taken from the perspective of September 12th, 2001. And just looking back at just the 1990s and I use the work of uh Robert Pap and uh and Feldman who who write you know dying to win and cutting the fuse and they have done this you know simple but brilliant concept uh which the the state department has even uh even used I believe of counting up and categorizing suicide terror attacks, you know, so that is a specific uh method. And prior to um al Qaeda and um Islamic extremist terrorism, uh most suicide terrorists, the biggest group was a secular Marxist group that was was Hindu. It was it was anti-religious Marxist um and and Hindu in culture and that was the the Tamil tigers in in Sri Lanka and so they were the biggest group. Now after that what you start seeing is uh Islamic suicide terrorism. Well what uh Pap and Feldman have uh come to is that the biggest single predictor of suicide terrorism is foreign occupation. meaning there's a foreign political entity controlling a uh local population who doesn't have the actual uh ability to fight back. And so they use suicide terrorism as a strategic way to coersse modern democracies in order to get them to back off of you know foreign occupation or or get uh concessions from them. So why do you see the rise of suicide terrorism from uh from Muslims from the 1980s forward? Is it because all of a sudden from go from the 1980s backward that uh Muslims didn't read or know about the Quran or didn't take that strategy at all going back to you can't even really find a lot of suicide terrorism among Muslims before the 1980s. What's going on? Well, there's more interventionism in the Middle East and then 1990 becomes the key year where the US moves into Saudi Arabia at the invitation of of the House of Assad and then never leaves after the the war in Iraq against Saddam Hussein. And Osama bin Laden himself was actually requesting of the House of Assad to fight Saddam Hussein and expel him from Kuwait. And when the House of Assad said no and invited the US, that's where he breaks off with them and says, "America's your master. I'm going forward." And this is where you start to see during the 1990s, especially from 1990, well really 199uh193, the World Trade Center attack and forward, this is where you start to see anti-American m al Qaeda or al Qaeda affiliated suicide terror and you know and and and it also decreases when foreign occupation lessens or exits the area Because if you just say, well, they just do it because they're crazy and they're going to do it anyway. No. In states after the war on terror started, once the US pulled out of certain areas, suicide terror decreased. So, and it's a it's a terrible myth that um you know, people try to rehabilitate or take a victory lap on the war of ter on terror, saying, "Well, at least we haven't had a second 9/11." Well, no, we haven't had a second 9/11 yet, but due to the war on terror, the uh killing of of civilians and relatives of people has done a great job of rec recruiting for al Qaeda, for the ISIS, for the Islamic State and other such groups. So, there could be another 9/11 and not in so much in the United States. But suicide terrorism increased from 2000 going forward after the war on terror. So it is an unjustified uh victory lap or patting themselves on the back uh that people attempt to do why they say well the war on terror worked look we didn't have a ne second 9/11. >> Yeah. I think here 24 years after 9/11 obviously the people who supported the Patriot Act supported the evisceration of American freedoms they've got to have something to show for it. So, of course, they're going to claim that uh endless US war since then has been a great victory. Of course, we can look at Afghanistan. We can look at Iraq and what basket cases those places are. And certainly no more pro-American than they were uh back then and see what the reality uh is. And of course, just non-stop violence everywhere, perpetrated by the United States, perpetrated by those who profess to hate the United States. And uh that just seems to be the grim reality. And unfortunately there's we're dealing with similar issues uh here at home. Let's just hope it never gets to the um to the level uh that uh that has occurred in some of these these other countries. But um that's that's no way that is not a given right in the larger context of of history in the larger context of historical acts regimes and so on. Uh I mean the US did have an actual right civil war. The US was born in a revolutionary movement that included a lot of butchering of one group of another group uh internally. It wasn't just people shooting British red coats. There was a lot of uh internal guerilla style violence there as well. So you can't really say it could never happen here. Um, and so we we really do need, I think, to hope and make sure that uh the sort of violence we're we're viewing in recent days uh doesn't accelerate because that's always a real danger. So, we'll know more going on going forward. We we we don't know who carried out this latest killing. Uh we don't know the motivation. We don't know who was behind it. So, uh until we know more, it'll just all be speculation. So, uh, we have may have more to discuss on a future episode, but, uh, we'll go ahead and wrap it up here for this episode of Power and Market. We'll be back next time with more, so we'll see you then. [Music]
9/11, Charlie Kirk, and Political Violence Everywhere
Summary
Transcript
[Music] Welcome back to the power and market podcast. I'm Ryan McMan, executive editor at the Mises Institute. You can visit us anytime at our website which is mises.org if you want to get a lot of written content similar to this podcast. Now, for this weekend's uh episode of Power and Market, we've got uh two of our contributing editors. We have Connor O'Keefe and we have Joshua Mortar. Uh both of whom are regular contributors here at the Mises Institute. They have weekly columns and Josh also does a lot of work for us just as a uh a working editor processing our content as it comes in from our stable of many other writers as well. But guess what? It's 911. Um, and as just in case you weren't aware that we live in this violent sort of dystopian nightmare country in 2025, people being knifed, people being shot. Uh, just uh let's remember on 911 that 24 years ago today, thousands of people were killed uh by uh these these attacks on the World Trade Center um which of course the most deadly part of that as well. And so we're going to talk a little bit about that. I think what's notable about 9/11 is how so many people took the wrong lesson away from it. The uh the lesson of 9/11 was that it was a day of horrible government failure. Uh basically what you had been told your whole life is give us trillions of dollars and we'll keep you safe. And when it really came down to it, they failed miserably. And yet in the end, everyone who failed miserably got a raise. They got promoted. They got more power. And we have what we have today, a national security state on a scale never imagined before. And they use 9/11 to justify that. But before we get to that, uh I feel like we got to talk a little bit about the Charlie Kirk uh assassination. Um we don't have a whole lot to say about this, but it seems like it's something that needs to be said, right? None of us knew him personally. None of us have like opinions about who he was as a human being and things like that. Just someone we've never met. Uh could comment on his work perhaps. But I looked on our website. He's only ever been mentioned in passing five times uh at mises.org. I think maybe that's for a couple of reasons, right? One, not really like in our circles, right? A lot of the issues he covered were culture war stuff. didn't really seem to have many opinions on uh fiscal and monetary policy except in the most general sense and his foreign policy certainly didn't agree with ours because that just tended to be your general center right conservative foreign policy which tends to be highly interventionist in nature. However, uh, in terms of his advocacy of these issues, they weren't really bad enough that we felt like, uh, hey, this is some guy we need to really address. And so, just generally not mentioned much on the website. Uh, and looking at his work now, I never just never really even thought about him much, but, uh, now looking at at some of some of his work after the assassination, um, just not something that we would engage with that much at mises.org. However, unpleasant demonstration of what politics is really all about, which is violence. And I think this this sort of stuff is is having an accumulative uh effect in the sense of right I think when when this video came out which was a gruesome video if you saw this on social media of the assassination you'd already spent several days being made aware of this woman on a train in Charlotte North Carolina who was knifed to death for no reason whatsoever just minding her own business. And I think all of this is just a reminder of uh just how violent our society is, how the state is doing nothing to uh address it. Uh how wanting criminals are put back out on the street and how a lot of people who are involved in political activism are fine with horrible violence. And I know that in the wake of this killing, everyone is basically blaming it on whoever they don't like. So right-wingers uh who are involved in the culture war are blaming it on uh whoever they don't they don't like is trans. It's it's just leftists in general. The fact is we don't know anything. So I don't I don't know who to blame it on. I just know that it's it's just a reminder of how violent the political game is. And and I know that it's it's really affected some people who just aren't used to seeing that. And I just want to reiterate like right when we talk here on Power Market or just Radio Rothbard in our columns, any of that about how the very nature of politics is inherently violent. We're not trying to be like edge lords. We're not we're not like trying to say stuff that we think is, oh man, they're talking about how violent stuff is. Look how cutting edge. Look how cool they think they are cuz they're saying stuff that people don't normally say. This is just the reality of it. I mean, I don't know how you can come out of any say any significant reading program involving political theory and think that violence is not absolutely at the core of all of this. Mchavelli covers that uh in pretty excruciating detail 500 years ago. So uh unfortunately not terribly shocked. I mean, I was shocked in the sense of is this person important enough to assassinate? Uh, but apparently somebody thought so. And I mean, that just ends up leaving us speculating about who did it. But I I I don't know like what what what should I add to this, guys? I mean, at this point, there's so little information. What needs to be said about it? >> Yeah, there's not much we know. We'll definitely get more details uh in the future, but that's definitely like an angle there that you're not going to find most other places, but it's important to to talk about. Like I got a um an email I am subscribed to a lot of news focused newsletters and I got an email you obviously all of them were about this uh shooting this morning and the headline was something like this isn't politics and it's like yes it is. This is exactly what politics is. There there's something about um I I find that when you are deeply read in history, political history, but kind of all of history, it really gives you a much better perspective for our our current moment. And like the fact is like the people that are I mean, yes, of course, it is reasonable to be freaked out by what happened yesterday, especially if you've seen the video. that is the healthy human reaction. But to act like this is some um something that has just completely come out of the blue. Uh that this is like this singularly crazy characteristic of the current time. Um, it's just a historical and I think that that's one of the main reasons, at least for me, but I think our organization, kind of our movement more broadly, is pushing so hard for the things we're pushing for, especially things like political decentralization is because this is the kind of thing we are going to see more of as the federal government becomes more and more powerful. as the prize for, you know, the different political factions to fight over grows and grows and as the, you know, power for those factions to then dominate their rivals continues to grow like that that things are not going to calm down on the current trajectory that we're on. And you know, you add into that human nature, and we'll kind of get into this more with uh 9/11 later, but obviously like people are hyper emotional right now. Understandably, once again, the people that are uh were close allies of Kirk, kind of the the MAGA folks, a lot of them want blood. And like that is what happens when, you know, extreme violence is brought um is brought in like this. But it it's just hard to see like if that actually uh develops like if we start if if there's a left-wing uh commentator that gets gunned down or if there's I don't even like know what spec like it's impossible to predict how it would play out. But if the right starts using violence, it's not like that's going to calm things down either. Like there there is real potential for um this to turn into kind of a cyclical escalation. And I think at least for me personally when I see this kind of thing happening it really reminds me why it's so important to advocate for the the kind of decentralization and the sort of roll back that we are advocating for. >> Yeah. I think part of the problem is that the more powerful the state becomes or the more credible the threats of using state power against various groups becomes uh the the more likely people are to become emotional about to the point where and fearful enough to the point where they're going to use violence. If you lived in a society where your political adversaries didn't have power enough to really use them against you, there'd be no point in using violence. Unless of course you somehow had been convinced that they did regardless of what the facts were. And I think that's to some extent a factor here as well is you've got a lot of people attributing calls of uh political violence and domination to certain people that may or may not be actually uh plausible in terms of being able to exercise that power. However, we live under a regime now that is so powerful where almost anything goes in terms of I mean after after uh co right we saw that the regime won't even stop short of locking you in your home. I mean this was a real discussion. The regime won't even stop short of making everyone show their papers so that you can enter a supermarket, right? Do you have your vaccine passport? And while a lot of that didn't come to fruition thanks to resistance, that was the direction that they were going in. And that there were plenty of people who thought that people who were unvaxed should be jailed. People who were unvaxed or who didn't get their children vaxed should be jailed, should be fined, should maybe even be killed in some cases. And so that's that's the rhetoric we're still coming out of. I I think this has deeply affected people too is the sort of bitter division caused by CO as well. And that's we never got away from that. That's just really I think uh accelerated since co and of course that's not totally unfounded. People are realizing that your neighbor is willing to call for all sorts of violence against you, whether it's vigilante type violence or violence handed down from a judge uh and carried out by bureaucrats because that was the sort of violence that was being discussed often under uh co. So I I just don't see a significant difference here in terms of this. And also just note that America's is a country that's been basically constantly at war now for uh nearly 30 years if you count like a lot of those bombings that uh occurred during the uh Clinton administration during the 1990s the late 90s. So even before 911, right? So let's uh uh it just it strikes me as a little odd although the same thing happened after 9/11. people suddenly realized that the US uh was involved with a lot of violence out there and that the world was a violent place with and that the US regime in the name of the people who were living inside the United States was carrying out violence against other people and then people acted shocked that people hated them for it and then they invented the absolutely laughable nonsense phrase they hate us because we're free. Uh so uh that I think if we dig down we can start to see that on the domestic front we see some similar sorts of things as well. But what do you think Josh? I mean uh the what was I mean did this affect you right? Did this surprise you or I mean you work for the Mason Institute so you're probably already well aware of uh the grim nature of political discourse right? Yeah, as you guys were talking, I was just thinking of the Lysander Spooner quote in uh the Constitution of No Authority where he talks about that, you know, the difference between ballots and bullets and that we like to kind of think, well, everything, you know, once you run things a certain way with uh with ballots, uh that it's it's structured and organized, but really the the bullets, the guns are behind that. And then it also just kind of over overlapped with um an article I wrote last week which was was actually inspired through some discussion with Connor where we had been talking about there's this category where the state monopolizes things like security provision and other stuff but then withholds services that it coercively taxes and and says that it provides. So the the examples of this are are standing down when there's public disorder, rioting in the streets, arson, property damage, but uh the the law will be used against um people who try to defend any of those rights. So I was shocked uh by Charlie Kirk's uh very public murder, I guess, but not uh totally surprised in just this climate environment. They almost, you know, whoever they is, I don't know. there what's going on. But uh Trump almost was uh assassinated twice on, you know, one on very public TV. And so I think uh I'd have a hard time not believing that this was a political murder as it was attempted with Trump at least twice. And um and that in in this sense it's already um murder and violence and all these things that are crimes are already offering an opportunity to talk about what the next state interventions are going to be. So MSNBC immediately was saying, "Well, you know what? I bet the Trump people are going to use this for some justification for something. AOC was talking about, you know, hey, are we finally going to deal with, you know, gun uh gun crime and gun uh violence? And then just some vile things about people basically uh insinuating that Charlie Kirk because he was a proponent of the Second Amendment deserved it and those types of things. But but all this stuff is that it's u that it's political. So it was disturbing. I think especially just in the sense that I don't think our culture has a because of uh bad uh ethics and disrespect for property rights and and all sorts of things and I mean by that self ownership as well that they can't tell the difference between the culprit and victim to the extent where freedom of speech is considered to be unacceptable political violence but actual violence is excusable um when it's committed by a criminal because the state you because the state virtually says so. Uh so for example, the woman that was stabbed in the neck minding her own business that Charlie Kirk had actually just been talking about the other day, people are already saying, well, you know, he must have been mental illness and he must have been hurting. And so now you can't even deal with just um straightforward crime even when it's brutal murder. And I think the state uh system helps uh kind of warp our ethical understanding of the the nature of violence and uh and that applies to as well to to foreign policy, you know, that uh that we're going to talk about. But um yeah, Charlie Kirk, we had a we, you know, not many people see someone die that way violently um right in front of them or on on a screen. Um and I know some people who were talking about how they were disturbed by that. But when you consider that when there's a drone bombing, we're so removed from that and it kills somebody, kills an innocent, you know, civilian, men, women, and children in the name of killing bad guys. Even if you get some bad guys, um that has an effect uh not only on those people uh but on others who who experience that. And then, you know, that further politicizes violence domestically and uh and internationally. >> Yeah. I I think the watching the video was was pretty unpleasant. I I wonder how many people When was the last time you watched the Zaprooter film of the JFK assassination? That was real low resolution, but that is grim stuff just to watch that. Uh, and just photos of um Jackie O's bloodstained pink dress and everything after that after she had her husband's brains blown out all over her. I mean, this is this is the methods uh these are among the methods used and especially used more often when people start to think that violence is an acceptable uh political method. And now Americans think violence is an acceptable political method clearly or they wouldn't support so many wars all the time against things that actually offer no threat to American territory or actual Americans as a standard practice. Uh however um they they don't like when it when it seems like it could be applied to them. And so I think they're they're seeing in many cases that uh it's real unpleasant up close and and personal. And I think you touched on a little bit too there in the sense of right if you if you cross over that line where you start to view political speech as a type of political violence than uh a response a a possible response an acceptable response if that's your way of thinking is to respond with actual physical violence. And that is that is the way of thinking that that many people uh use and that that is common on the left especially right where speech silences violence uh where speech is a type of aggression and therefore you can respond uh with some sort of of violence. Now, this this actually has even deeper roots, and I ran an article on this a couple of weeks ago, totally unrelated to this issue, but I think it's it's relevant in the sense of people responding with violence to words, is I talked about how the issue of uh fighting words, slurs, those sorts of things, those don't count as actual violence. And I think that is that is something that uh the left has attempted to capitalize on as well, right? If someone calls you the n-word, well then you get to respond with violence. That's that's like an excuse. Uh if someone calls you some other name, if someone uses fighting words, which is like a a real like legal concept, right? There's this idea that human beings then somehow no longer have the ability to use their reason and so therefore we're just expecting them to respond with physical violence uh to to fighting words. That people if they are provoked then they're violent. their physical violence is somehow more understandable and acceptable. And so that's a gray area that a lot of people I think spend way too much time in where they seem to think, "Oh, this person said words I don't like, so maybe I just need to shut them up using physical force." And uh way too many people are okay with that, it appears. And I mean, this just seems to be the extreme and natural outcome of that though in many cases. I also think uh a lot could be said about I mean at least for me I was definitely raised uh where that whole thought experiment about going back in time and killing baby Hitler was like a big uh a big thing that was brought up frequently and it was a lot of people agreed that like yeah you should absolutely do that and I think it's like not that hard to see how the logic then takes you to okay well who are the equivalents to baby Hitler's today and we are absolutely told over and over again um by you know obviously a lot of people that are whipped up in this mindset but also by like more establishment sources that Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump, the people of, you know, that MAGA movement are equivalent to these, you know, faright radical fascists, which from our perspective is especially insane because our basically our whole issue with uh Kirk and Trump is that they're far too moderate and that they're not uh they're not like we basically get all the downsides of having radicals um in power with none of the upsides because they're not actually like going in and like seriously cutting, you know, seriously draining uh the swamp. But it's it's just interesting how the establishment, many of whom I truly don't think believe that somebody like Kirk is actually this, you know, rabid fascist, stoke those flames. and how many people um on the left especially once again we're recording this on Thursday afternoon they have not caught whoever did this we don't know the specifics here but if you look back to uh like for instance um the second Trump assassination um once again there are still more questions with that guy Ryan Ralph I think was his name he's um I think his trial is ongoing right now but um I wrote an article at the time because it was just so clear that putting aside any potential kind of shadiness when it came to like some of his connection with some nonprofits that were, you know, involved with Ukraine. Putting all that aside, it was clear he believed exactly what the political establishment wanted him to believe about Donald Trump, that he was this force of evil. And once again, you know, if you're kind of raising all these people on this idea that if you had the ability to go back and prevent the rise of Hitler with violence before it ever happened, when he was an instant little kid, then that would be a good thing to do. It's just not hard to see how we get to the point where it's like, okay, well then clearly if we have this burgeoning fascist movement which is just taking control of Washington, then out of the tens of millions of people that seem to really believe that, it's not surprising that a few of them are going to actually try to do something about that. >> Yeah, I think that's right. And nonetheless, when you start to talk about this, when you talk start to talk about how, well, maybe uh you shouldn't shoot those people you disagree with, then people accuse us of pacifism. I mean, there are some people whose brains are so adultled by their desire to engage in violence. I guess not appreciating where that leads, uh, they they just let go of reason. And what's funny, too, is when they're engaging libertarians about it, they don't even have a leg to stand on, right? Every libertarian I know believes in arming yourself, believes in the right, if necessary, get your concealed carry license, know how to use a gun, right? These people aren't pacifists. Uh, and but just the idea that you should not be using violence except in cases of extreme need of self-defense. Uh, somehow, I don't know, they get caught or they think they're tough that uh they're talking about how they're going to beat up some guy who insults them or things like that. And this isn't uh this isn't just held to like one ideology. Although, I would say the left definitely encourages violence more in terms of like people say things you don't like. Um, and the left is useless too on war by the way, right? I mean, yeah, maybe 25 years ago the left was good on being anti-war, but I mean, they they got no problem with war. Now, I just look at their their position on Ukraine. Um, you you love violence in Ukraine if you're left, you love violence in Gaza if you're right. That just seems to be where we are now. And then I I mean, just if you needed a right-wing example of just how people uh believe that if I'm insulted, I get to use violence. You could have seen some of the uh reactions in the wake of uh Trump's executive order about flag burning uh where you saw people come out of the woodwork saying things like, "Well, if someone burns a flag near me and I'm going to punch him in the face, I'm going to kick them in the ribs." Really? I mean, that they say things that that offend you and you get to then engage. And by what's funny, too, is that a lot of these same people probably say things like facts don't care about your feelings, right? And then they embrace this totally feeling motivated idea of like someone insulted my flag so now I'm going to beat them up. So something something wrong something really messed up there. I mean you can't really say oh this is an American problem because uh human beings uh apparently no matter where they are have uh certain tendencies of this >> yeah like I said look at history. Just read read any history book. >> Yeah. They're not unique to America by any means. But if Americans are going to fancy themselves as unusually enlightened or peaceful or anything, right, well, uh I think we're going to going to have a hard time coming up with evidence uh for that because even when Americans do manage to have a nice domestic front in terms of violence for a while here and there, uh often there's a lot of support then for either state sponsored violence domestically or of course state sponsored violence. Uh >> well, and Ryan, just to make a point Oh, sorry. >> Oh, no. Go ahead. interrupt, >> but uh just to make a point on that, you know, a few years ago there was this big thing of oh we'll punch a Nazi and of course we know that they call everyone uh Nazis who doesn't who don't agree with them even though their position tends to actually look more like national socialism for the things that they advocate. In any case, I remember people posting this online and and saying, "Well, if they're a Nazi, that means they believe XYZ." They spell it out and then it's they want to exercise violence against you. therefore it's okay to punch that person and you know laying all this out. So the left will do this whole punch a Nazi thing but then it is it's not a secret that Ukraine is working with the AOV battalion which are genuine like great grandsons and grandsons of Nazis. There's a sa social nationalist party uh involved in Ukraine. So they'll they'll call Putin Hitler and say that you're an isolationist if you don't want to side on the Nazi with the Nazis in Ukraine to fight Putin, but then say well we need to punch Nazis here. So they're fine with um you know funding and supporting Nazis you know in in a movement uh to fight another you know world nuclear power. But then when somebody believes in freedom of speech here, that means that person's a notch Nazi and it's okay to use physical force uh against that person and you know and then on the same thing like you mentioned with the flag. It's like well they I remember getting an email forward years ago saying you know if you uh desecrate the flag you know this is whole thing about where when you're allowed to kick someone's ass is when they desecrate the flag you know all this different stuff. So and um so every society has its uh you know its blasphemy laws and uh people have their different things that they want to make um untouchable as far as freedom of speech is concerned. Um but yeah it is it is kind of surprising to me. I don't shouldn't be surprised. Uh but it it still never ceases to amaze me the things that people will um be willing to sacrifice their their ethics. they're they don't have a consistent principle in order to just go the opposite direction when it's something else they're upset about. >> Well, and we're even living in a society where uh violence is then carried out where the victim could not even in the most convoluted way be construed as having aggressed against uh the person who carried out the violence. And I mean that in the case of Arena Zerutka, the the woman who was stabbed on uh the Charlotte train, right? Some people who supported that, who supported the violence against this person, and these were usually like crazed left-wing proviolence advocates, some were calling it an act of decolonization, right? Because that's the uh that is presently the narrative that the the most extreme people on the left are like, "Well, violence against white people is acceptable because it's it's a form of decolonization." And so, we're using our violence as a reaction against their violence of the past. Of course, all the people who colonized places in the past are dead. Uh, and it's especially comical though in a dark way, the blackest of black comedy that you would target Arena Zerutska. This was a woman who just arrived in the United States like a few months ago. So, oh, uh, how is that decolonization? Because did Ukraine colonize your country? Uh, usually Ukraine's been on the receiving end of colonization. Uh so just the the whole idea that you could possibly justify stabbing this woman for minding her own business because she has pale skin uh is really just quite remarkable. And yet people have manufactured narratives to defend that sort of behavior. And this is this is where we're at in America uh right now. But that's all on the micro level. So let's talk about some of the more macro stuff because we're still living with the realities of 911. Now, let's get into some of the details of uh what you were doing working on this week. Josh, you have an article on mises.org uh relevant to today, the 24th anniversary of 9/11 and your the title of your article is a note on tea. Was bin Laden telling the truth about his objective? So, tell us a little bit about this column and then I think we get into just a broader discussion. >> Sure. Um, let me just make two uh comments that uh you and Connor probably don't need to hear, but just for our viewing uh audiences uh regarding 9/11. One is um the importance of distinction between Americans and the state in general. We are not the state. The state is not us. The state is individuals in the political elite who take certain actions. So I I have to do that because whenever you talk about 9/11, whenever you talk about Osama bin Laden, if you're going to try to look at the the history and kind of see, okay, what get inside people's heads and see as from the evidence what they were thinking, you know, you almost always get accused of um excusing it, condoning this or that uh type of thing. So on the right, I've noticed that the right will tend to um tend to use the the greatness of America, the American people, the American tradition to uh basically borrow capital for that to say that's the government. So when you criticize the government, they think you're criticizing uh America, you know, mom and apple pie and grandma and Thomas Jefferson and you know, all those things, which is not uh not the case. Um but the left likes to take the crimes of government and then uh apply those in the opposite direction over you know to to criticize America to get people to hate um America kind of like with the decolonization thing. So they'll take government crimes and uh and say well this was really bad don't you hate America now? So making that distinction is is key. And and then also um I just wanted to reference an article I wrote um a while ago called your your tax dollars are funding al Qaeda and Nazis. And uh just this is just to um preemptively deal with this idea of saying well by looking into the history of 9/11 and talking about how the US government was at fault for failing uh to deal with the security concerns leading up to it but also its interventionist foreign policy led uh to 9/11. um you know that is u part of the story and tea is often this is this uh concept in uh Islamic thought that isn't actually talked about that much but um people will talk about these uh this area of um any type of uh discussion on foreign policy when you say okay here's what what took place. Here's why they said it happened. And it's al also happens when people talk about, you know, their their Muslim neighbors. And politically, um they say, well, conservatives uh in America will often say, well, you know that they their religion tells you that they can they can lie. They must whenever they're talking, you know that they're lying kind of just like a lawyer. And so whenever they say that their reasons for you know foreign you know their foreign policy grievances you know that they're not really um telling the truth. Okay. So uh there is this concept in uh Muslim theology called uh called tea. And what it really deals with is this issue of um it deals with this issue of like a lot of religions where the question comes up as to whether it is ever ethically allowable to lie in order to um accomplish some type of goal. So Christians talk about this with, well, what if the government knocks on your door and asks if you're hiding Jews in the basement and they want to kill, you know? So this comes up, but uh recognizing though it does matter in cultures and there are things that of of dishonesty and and things that that matter and this may even be the case. Um my article was dealing with well how do we know whether the grievances of um so many Muslims around uh the world and in the Arabian Peninsula? How do we know whether they were really telling the truth when they said that you know our issues are these things? Our issues are um the America's foreign occupation of the Persian Gulf, its unqualified support for for Israel, the the um occupation of the the Palestinians, um the treatment of um the Muslims in Iraq through the bombing and sanctions during the 1990s, propping up corrupt governments in the Middle least um different things regarding oil. How do we know that those aren't they're not just lying to us? They're trying to trick us um into uh doing what they want by uh by subversion and uh and subtrifuge and they're trying to get us to believe something uh something else. Now, uh the reason why um reasons why that might be we should believe them is is number one, and by the way, this is uh it was asked on a a debate recently, you know, Dave Smith was asked by his opponent, well, who do you trust more, Osama bin Laden or Benjamin Netanyahu? And of course he wanted him to say, well, you know, if you answer one or the other way, it it traps him, he thought, in a certain point. But really, trust has has nothing to do with it. What you have to look at is evidence, context, and consistency um over time. Uh Osama bin Laden had been stating this over time, consistently publicly. Um, and then surveys and and research had gathered that people in Muslims in the Arabian Peninsula and elsewhere had 95% agreement that even though they didn't agree with al Qaeda's methods, they did agree with the idea of getting the US, its bases, its foreign occupying military presence out of the Arabian Peninsula. And it's very hard to get 95% agreement of anybody on anything. But if we just think of in terms of um in terms of well they're all in a conspiracy together to lie to us. It's very hard to get a conspiracy where you have 95% agreement without people uh breaking the the conspiracy in uh in some way. and and and the fact that there are other Muslim uh sects and disagreements and even wars and fightings and infightings among those groups. But I also found some research um from uh Max Abrams that was called uh Al Qaeda's scorecard. And one of the evidences that it presented is that there is a trove of private documents that were found and evidenced to be from Osama bin Laden himself. and it agreed with all his public statements as far as what his foreign policy uh goals were. So I had to kind of deal with that um point as far as uh that because whenever you bring up well what was their motivation whenever you uh whenever the US is siding you know with al Qaeda in in Libya in Syria in Yemen then apparently Muslims can be trusted but whenever they are um not doing you know what uh what we want or the narrative is not going the way that you that they want and it it threatens foreign policy interventionism. Well then tea they they're not to be trusted. You can't believe a single thing that they say and that kind of just reminds me of my my previous point. I I'll quit here is that you know people will will throw it at you. I can't believe you're you know speaking about their motivations and all this uh this stuff. What about 911? And I I want to throw back at the um interlocutor who would would say that is yes. What about 9/11? That was a terrible crime committed against our people. Why are we now as the American government? Um knowing we're not actually the government, but why are we propping up al Qaeda in taking over Syria? Why were we propping up them in Libya? Why were we propping up al Qaeda in Yemen? If we are really doing justice to the victims of al Qaeda and 9/11, why is the US siding with al Qaeda and Al Qaeda affiliates for the last 25 years, which should be treasonous in its foreign policy adventures in these countries? And so it's not uh it's not actually to the benefit of uh of the victims or the honor of their memories uh that that uh we don't question the wisdom of foreign policy interventionism and we just say well then it's they know what they're doing uh by siding with them elsewhere. So that was the the the point I wanted to make earlier on that. Well, I think that also helps to illustrate uh the difference in terms of dealing with uh the violence of 9/11 or what it was that invited that and the sort of violence that you might be encountering when you're Arena Zerutska, right? So in many cases where people on say the American left domestically are hatching violence against you, you're just minding your own business, right? You like you may not even be advocating for anything. you may be totally unpolitical and yet you're still targeted. Now, in many cases, Americans were were targeted uh in 9/11 who were also not political and minding their own business. But what's interesting is that in say a lot of these cases where you're killed as an act of decolonization or you're killed because you were anti-abortion uh or you're killed because you thought that there were two sexes that sort of thing. um that is I think quantitatively different from what it was that led to 9/11 right and and this comes to this issue of right what was Osama bin Laden talking about right whereas if you're just minding your own business and and you're just having opinions about things that conform to your worldview and you're not even advocating for anything uh well then it's hard to imagine why anyone would even be upset with you unless they have some sort of deeply disordered view of of violence and also committing violence against someone who's not even really advocating against you isn't even going to solve a problem. However, in the case of 9/11, the the calls for violence were in response to like very specific policies that were taking place, right? It was the stationing of forces in Saudi Arabia. It was destroying Iraq with punitive uh economic sanctions and everything else you list here, right? That was not anybody minding their own business, at least not as far as the regime goes. Many Americans didn't even know that was going on and they were killed uh as uh because they were being blamed for what the US regime was doing. In that case though, the US regime could have stopped doing those things without endangering any American. In fact, they would have made Americans safer by stop stopping doing those things because none of those things were required for carrying out the mandate of the US Constitution or what was necessary. So in those cases, Americans were being targeted for something that their government did, which was an actual form of aggression. Whereas minding your own business and just thinking that a man is a man and a woman is a woman, that's that's totally different from uh being targeted for an actual violent military act against some foreign people who then uh want to take it out against the the US regime. And so you you can see how just totally needless that violence was, how totally needless it was for the US to be involved in any of that stuff and that it ended up getting a bunch of ordinary Americans killed for no reason whatsoever that is of any value. Right? There were reasons, of course. The reasons were neoonservatives liked this, that certain interventionists in the US government wanted to be involved in these places. They wanted to support the state of Israel and those sorts of things. None of which was necessary. None of which uh a lot of which was unconstitutional by the way, just basic violations of the Bill of Rights in terms of carrying out that sort of intervention uh overseas in the name of Americans. And so it precipitated violence. But in that case, it wasn't you just minding your own business. In that case, it was a third party, the US government, claiming that with your support, it was carrying this out. And so there are just so many reasons where you can be targeted. It's just unbelievable. And can you even know? Um, and that's just the danger where you have an extremely politically active regime that's acting in your name and where it's constantly advocating for various types of uses of force against different groups, where it's constantly working to divide people up into different political groups that are supposed to hate each other. And that just seems to be the MMO of the United States since at least World War II. And I mean, you can't ever let your guard down now because even if there's nothing about you personally that might get you killed, then there might be something that your government is doing that's going to precipitate someone else to kill you. And that's why I think kind of maybe this whole Zerutka thing and the Charlie Kirk thing maybe go hand in hand too is that you can't even say, well, I'm not out there for advocating for anything. So what? You still might get knifed in the neck. And so it's uh it's it's just something that I think those two events combined, a lot of people look at that and they become very very alarmed. And I think uh probably for good reason. >> Yeah. The the uh name I've given it the concept which I just think is everywhere. I mean we're talking about our violent world, but with all these cases is indiscriminate revenge cycles. You basically have a crime and then the victims or you know whether that be a group, they lash out and attack a third party that didn't actually do it. And then that, you know, they become the victims. And it just kind of goes back and forth and back and forth. And yeah, like that is what happened with 9/11. You basically had, I mean, like literal crimes happening if we're looking at like the no-fly zone and what is what was essentially the siege of Iraq. Um, and just all the quote unquote collateral damage that was happening there. Just some straight up evil stuff happening um because of direct US government intervention, US government action. And then people understandably in that part of the world are very upset by this. Um and then you have Bin Laden kind of stoking that up and obviously you know he had a small group of hijackers that did this. He became you know this hyper famous uh figure after the attacks there. But um yeah, I I like uh the focus in that post uh you put together um Josh about his motivations cuz this that's just something that drives me crazy is that this idea like if you're ever actually trying to dig into like hey this was a horrible event that happened, why did it happen? Like if we really want to understand how to prevent it from happening again, we have to understand why it happened. And to understand why it happened, you have to understand why they did it. And when you're trying to understand why they did it, people will then turn that around and act like you're trying to justify what they're what they did. And that is um just to me obviously completely wrong, but fundamentally unserious when we're talking about preventing this going forward. But then yeah, like I I like the point you made that it it's not um it is still somewhat important what was happening in Bin Laden's brain, but really at the end of the day, he had to bring other people in to the operation and into his movement. And it's very clear that he was using these, you know, uh, issues in terms of what the US was doing in the Middle East to recruit other people. If if this was all a big lie, we would expect, you know, him to like them to if we actually look at the real al-Qaeda discourse that they would actually be talking about what was actually motivating, whether that be like, you know, whatever they were trying to pass, like the fact that we could vote or that there were like music videos and whatever like BS excuse the George W. Bush regime was trying to push, we would expect to see that like in their kind of internal discourse. And it was none of that. And then I think the most damning evidence um is the fact that a book I've brought up on the podcast a few times before, The Terror Factory by Trevor Aronson, where he details and documents all of these cases of the FBI doing, if you're trying to be charitable, sting operations, but a lot of them really seem to cross the line into straight up entrament um operations where they would get these young Muslim men in the United States after 911 to they would basically approach them, act like they're um shake or somebody from the Middle East, somebody connected to al-Qaeda and be like, "Hey, we're going to give you a bunch of money. Can you go bomb this, you know, government building or something, and then this little, you know, lonely, usually kind of mentally deficient kid would agree." Um, obviously there was never a serious threat to anybody, but the FBI would swoop in, you know, throw him in prison for the rest of his life and act like they were on the front lines keeping Americans safe. And what what's so notable about that book is that the FBI itself is recruiting all of these kids by talking about all of the civilians that the Americans are killing there. So it's like our own government knows what actually is motivating and has motivated the jihadist Islamist you know factions in the Middle East that were attacking us you know on 911 and have uh we've been fighting you know mostly uh since although you know it's very important to point out we have also taken their side in a lot of conflicts which I just think is completely outrageous but we know from their own actions that they understand this but then they will turn around and act like we're crazy for even talking about and or act like we're we're somehow justifying what happened when when really we're we're the only ones serious about actually trying to bring this stuff to an end. Right. And I I have an article actually coming out tomorrow that is taken from the perspective of September 12th, 2001. And just looking back at just the 1990s and I use the work of uh Robert Pap and uh and Feldman who who write you know dying to win and cutting the fuse and they have done this you know simple but brilliant concept uh which the the state department has even uh even used I believe of counting up and categorizing suicide terror attacks, you know, so that is a specific uh method. And prior to um al Qaeda and um Islamic extremist terrorism, uh most suicide terrorists, the biggest group was a secular Marxist group that was was Hindu. It was it was anti-religious Marxist um and and Hindu in culture and that was the the Tamil tigers in in Sri Lanka and so they were the biggest group. Now after that what you start seeing is uh Islamic suicide terrorism. Well what uh Pap and Feldman have uh come to is that the biggest single predictor of suicide terrorism is foreign occupation. meaning there's a foreign political entity controlling a uh local population who doesn't have the actual uh ability to fight back. And so they use suicide terrorism as a strategic way to coersse modern democracies in order to get them to back off of you know foreign occupation or or get uh concessions from them. So why do you see the rise of suicide terrorism from uh from Muslims from the 1980s forward? Is it because all of a sudden from go from the 1980s backward that uh Muslims didn't read or know about the Quran or didn't take that strategy at all going back to you can't even really find a lot of suicide terrorism among Muslims before the 1980s. What's going on? Well, there's more interventionism in the Middle East and then 1990 becomes the key year where the US moves into Saudi Arabia at the invitation of of the House of Assad and then never leaves after the the war in Iraq against Saddam Hussein. And Osama bin Laden himself was actually requesting of the House of Assad to fight Saddam Hussein and expel him from Kuwait. And when the House of Assad said no and invited the US, that's where he breaks off with them and says, "America's your master. I'm going forward." And this is where you start to see during the 1990s, especially from 1990, well really 199uh193, the World Trade Center attack and forward, this is where you start to see anti-American m al Qaeda or al Qaeda affiliated suicide terror and you know and and and it also decreases when foreign occupation lessens or exits the area Because if you just say, well, they just do it because they're crazy and they're going to do it anyway. No. In states after the war on terror started, once the US pulled out of certain areas, suicide terror decreased. So, and it's a it's a terrible myth that um you know, people try to rehabilitate or take a victory lap on the war of ter on terror, saying, "Well, at least we haven't had a second 9/11." Well, no, we haven't had a second 9/11 yet, but due to the war on terror, the uh killing of of civilians and relatives of people has done a great job of rec recruiting for al Qaeda, for the ISIS, for the Islamic State and other such groups. So, there could be another 9/11 and not in so much in the United States. But suicide terrorism increased from 2000 going forward after the war on terror. So it is an unjustified uh victory lap or patting themselves on the back uh that people attempt to do why they say well the war on terror worked look we didn't have a ne second 9/11. >> Yeah. I think here 24 years after 9/11 obviously the people who supported the Patriot Act supported the evisceration of American freedoms they've got to have something to show for it. So, of course, they're going to claim that uh endless US war since then has been a great victory. Of course, we can look at Afghanistan. We can look at Iraq and what basket cases those places are. And certainly no more pro-American than they were uh back then and see what the reality uh is. And of course, just non-stop violence everywhere, perpetrated by the United States, perpetrated by those who profess to hate the United States. And uh that just seems to be the grim reality. And unfortunately there's we're dealing with similar issues uh here at home. Let's just hope it never gets to the um to the level uh that uh that has occurred in some of these these other countries. But um that's that's no way that is not a given right in the larger context of of history in the larger context of historical acts regimes and so on. Uh I mean the US did have an actual right civil war. The US was born in a revolutionary movement that included a lot of butchering of one group of another group uh internally. It wasn't just people shooting British red coats. There was a lot of uh internal guerilla style violence there as well. So you can't really say it could never happen here. Um, and so we we really do need, I think, to hope and make sure that uh the sort of violence we're we're viewing in recent days uh doesn't accelerate because that's always a real danger. So, we'll know more going on going forward. We we we don't know who carried out this latest killing. Uh we don't know the motivation. We don't know who was behind it. So, uh until we know more, it'll just all be speculation. So, uh, we have may have more to discuss on a future episode, but, uh, we'll go ahead and wrap it up here for this episode of Power and Market. We'll be back next time with more, so we'll see you then. [Music]