7-15 Spike Cohen

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Coming up next, we have got the amazing Spike Cohen.

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Spike Cohen, of course, the vice presidential candidate on the Libertarian ticket in 2020.

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Raised quite a stir.

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You see you see Spike all over the place.

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Where is Spike? Is he popping in? There he is.

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This Spike.

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How are you, buddy? Go ahead.

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That’s all right.

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Spike also a best selling author and co owner of Muddied Waters Media.

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And I want to talk a little bit about that.

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Some very fun stuff.

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Yeah, absolutely.

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So, Spike, what have you been up to? I know you’re a big freedom guy.

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Here you are hanging out with us at the floor of Freedom Fest.

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What’s your mission right now? What do you got going on? My mission right now is to just be one of the many contributors here at Freedom Fest to what I believe is the most important part of spreading the liberty movement.

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And that is, if we’re going to as the theme of this Freedom Fest is if we’re going to turn the tide towards freedom and towards liberty, we need to be creating and growing a culture of freedom and liberty.

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And if you think of what a culture is, it’s really just an accumulation of the customs and institutions and the arts and the figures and the history of a given society over time accumulating into the culture that it makes up.

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And that culture can often attract people to it and bring more people to it.

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And that’s the foundation that that society is built on.

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If you look at what’s happening at Freedom Fest if you look at what’s happening at Freedom Fest right now, we don’t just have political stuff here.

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Every aspect of a society is being represented here with a look towards freedom.

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The film and the arts, business, even people’s personal finances, even their health, every single aspect of life in society is being covered here at Freedom Fest in building that culture of liberty.

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Looks like you ran for vice president last time and you were all over the nation.

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I mean, you did a great job going around and speaking and stuff.

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What are you hearing from folks that are just kind of sick of the far right and the far left? What are you hearing? Because that seems to be who comes to you and has reacted to you, right? So I hear a lot of, like, they’re against the divisiveness, they’re against the constant team Red versus Team Blue roped up between the two parties.

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But I think more importantly, the average American, I’m not sure how much they’re even tuned into politics.

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They’re worried about things like, I can’t afford to fill my gas tank.

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Right? I can’t afford the cost of living.

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When I was campaigning in 2020, they were worried about things like, I don’t know when they’ll let me reopen my business or go back to work.

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I don’t know when my kids will be able to go to school again.

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And so what is basically a result of the political process that’s happening? They’re living out the real term consequences of that, and that’s their main concern.

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So what we as libertarians and we as liberty lovers need to do is understand that the vast majority of people, they’re concerned about their day to day life and how things are affecting them, right? If we can show the argument for how freedom is not just the best, most moral way and freest way to live, but it’s also the way to address the problems that they are facing, I think that will do incredible.

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Spike something interesting.

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A lot of people feel like they either have to be in one vote or the other, republican or a Democrat.

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The reality is most of us are in the middle.

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I wrote a book called The Common Sense 80% that did quite well last year talking about all of us.

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And I think libertarianism is really that common Sense 80%, but it’s always kind of had this strange brand or whatever.

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Can you explain exactly what a libertarian is? Because I think most people would be surprised to know that they are libertarian, right? So the ten second version of libertarianism is libertarians believe that people do best when they’re most free.

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And we recognize that often the misery that people are suffering is as a result of too much power being in the hands of too few people.

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And so we seek to take that power and give it back to the people where it always belongs.

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That’s really what libertarianism boils down to.

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We believe that you shouldn’t hurt people or take their stuff.

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You shouldn’t aggress against people, and that means that the government shouldn’t be aggressing against people.

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Right.

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Where do you think the biggest encroachments are right now on government? As far as government, taking our freedom in the last two years have been probably one of the worst I’ve ever seen in my life, and I’m 57 years old.

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As far as the government coming in and really overreaching in a lot of different areas, the Kobe regime was the greatest infringement on the rights of the people as a whole that I think anyone alive has experienced in this country.

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Obviously, there have been much worse than other countries during most people’s lifetimes.

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But in the United States, the Koba regime as a whole to the entire general population is the worst single infringement on the lives and rights of people as a whole in the United States right now.

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I would say that where the government is most, it’s hard to pick where the government is infringing most because they’re pretty much infringing everywhere.

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I would say that the biggest infringement right now is on the it’s hard to pick, but I would say probably just the individual concept of people being able to make decisions for themselves.

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There’s sort of this wholesale assault on the idea that you should be the primary decider of your life and of your day to day, how you live your life.

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And that actually it’s.

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That freedom, that ability for you to make choices is really why things are why you’re having so many problems right now.

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If you just gave them more control and more money and more power, then things would be better.

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It’s hard to really say, well, this one specific thing, because they’re really hitting us on all fronts, so it’s hard to pick one.

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Let me ask you this.

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I mean, you had a lot of faces of the offenses going on, these offenses on our freedom.

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Who are the worst offenders, do you believe? Who are the faces of the worst offenders? Like, as individual politicians? Not just politicians, bureaucrats too.

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I mean, there were a lot of them that contributed to this mess, this koban mess.

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If I had to pick one as an institution, it would be the federal reserve.

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Because you have to think, if this problem is if we called it a monster, the head of that monster is its ability to decide what money is, to create that money out of thin air, and then to use it to spend on their own political purposes and stick the bill with interest on it, on the rest of us.

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And so without them being able to do that, their ability to be able to, for example, shut down the economy and hand people stimulus checks while also handing off trillions of dollars to the cronies who put them in office, or endless wars overseas to help the military industrial complex, or the over imprisonment of people here in the US.

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Any of the things that are happening that are a major infringement on our daily lives, rights and property are happening as a direct result of them not actually having to prove us provide us any value and prove that they have value.

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And that’s a direct result of them controlling the monetary supply through the federal reserve.

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Got it.

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What about the lockdowns pouchy and trying to force vaccines on people, trying to force people to stay at home, trying to force people to wear a mask.

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Well, first forcing them not to wear a mask, and then forcing them to wear a mask, and then actually, you can just decide for yourself.

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Right? The COVID regime is what I call it.

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And that’s fauche and the NHS and all of that, right? That’s something that are the national institutes of health, and that’s something that they’ve been wanting to do since 2005.

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So when the bird flew, when you say 2005, what happened back then? And why did they fall short on their goal? Well, it’s because it didn’t come here.

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So they were worried about the bird flu.

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And so the bush administration had Anthony fauci, who was still in the position he’s in now, create an action plan for if the bird food came here and started spreading from person to person and the plan they created for the virus to add a 90% fatality rate, 80% to 90% fatality rate for the bird flu.

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They then used for COVID, which I think at its worst, they thought it might have a 3% or 4% fatality rate.

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Turns out it’s below 1%.

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But it’s not even that.

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It’s not even that.

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And they used that Lockdown regime for COVID, and they introduced it to the states as guidelines, heavily suggested guidelines, and that’s how we ended up with the COVID regime.

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And it’s something they’ve had in place for 15 years at that point.

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Was there something behind it besides just the virus? What do you think? Well, you ran for vice president.

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You got to have a feeling on this.

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You got to have an opinion on it.

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Yeah.

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So I think it was very telling that neither the Trump administration nor the Biden administration have taken any serious steps to really can’t.

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Trump at least talked about it, but there was never a formal attempt to try to investigate the source of this virus.

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Right.

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There’s something there.

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I’m sure we’ll find out more as the years go along.

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Got it.

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If you look at the history of how government does things, but I will say, absent even that, any opportunity that government has to take a crisis and leverage it to get more power, they will do that.

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A terrorist attack, a virus, an economic crisis, whatever it is, government says, oh, wow, a bunch of people are really desperate right now.

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This is a great opportunity to convince them that they’re the problem and we’re the solution.

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And they did that with Kobe.

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Right.

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All right.

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Now let’s talk about you running for vice president.

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You got the Republicans, you got the Democrats, you got the Libertarians.

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They’re usually the third party in line.

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Right.

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Very popular folks, too one.

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What’s Libertarian? Who ran for president of Libertarian? How did you get to be the vice presidential candidate, and then where did you go out to campaign, and how did you run your campaign? So our presidential candidate was Joe Jorgensen, and our system is completely different from the Republicans and Democrats.

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Probably doesn’t surprise you.

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So in the Republicans and Democrats, they pick their presidential candidate, and then the presidential candidate decides who the VP is.

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With our system, the delegates choose the presidential candidate, and then the following day, they choose the VP candidate.

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So I actually ran for the vice presidential nominee.

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Right? Yeah.

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So I actually got that.

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And then after we got that, in terms of travel, I went to 35 states.

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Joe and I combined went to, I think, either 47 or 48 states.

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Many of those 35 states I went to two or three or four times.

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I had something like 200 events in a five month span of time.

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Basically, I slept about 2 hours a day.

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The awesome thing about that was I got to see such a wide cross section of America, right from New England to California and everywhere in between.

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And it was absolutely incredible.

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But what was amazing was the common experience and the common complaints and the common hopes and dreams that I was hearing from everyday.

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Americans across the country often went back to the same thing, right.

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Things are getting worse and worse.

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Right now.

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We’re not quite sure why it is, but we’re sick and tired of being told, oh, it’s Team Reds fall.

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No, actually, it was Team Blue’s.

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Fall.

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Well, no, actually it was Team Reds fall.

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They want to know whose fault it is, what’s causing it, and how we can fix it.

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We got about 1 minute left.

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Sure.

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I want to ask you what’s it going to take to get a Libertarian candidate in the debates? In other words, I got to tell you, I’ve followed you for a long time, known you for a long time.

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I would have loved to have seen you on the stage.

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Can you imagine spreading Kamala Harris? She would have been done.

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I would have done at least as well as the fly day.

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Right.

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So the short answer is we need to get 15% or more in the opinion polls.

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Problem is, they don’t have to include us and they didn’t include us in the opinion polls.

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So the real answer to that question is we need to grow such a culture of liberty and such a base of grassroots support for liberty that they simply can’t ignore us.

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And if they do ignore us, it’s at their own peril because we’re getting more attention than anyone else.

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And that’s the work I’m doing now with my new organization, you Are the Power.

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That is the work that libertarians and liberty lovers here at Freedom Fest are doing across the country.

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And that’s the work that we have to do.

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Build a culture of liberty, invite people to come into it, show that our ways work better than anyone else, and move forward from there.

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Spike, as a and I do believe you are a very credible vice presidential candidate, when you sit there and you watch Kamala Harris, you’ve seen she has a track record of failure going back.

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She had one success, louie and Willie Brown.

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She knocked that one out of the ballpark.

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Outside of that, every office she’s ever held has been a failure.

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And that’s not objective.

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It has been a failure.

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When you see someone like that who is on the ticket running against you in that position, how do you feel? I feel like identity politics was how she got in there.

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Here’s someone that at the time of protests across the country against police brutality and against abuses in the criminal justice system, they picked the architect of that system, Joe Biden, and one of its most brutal prosecutors, Kamala Harris.

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Right.

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And so now you see the obvious and logical conclusion of that.

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Actually, on my show, on our show, Buddy Waters of Freedom.

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We have a segment called Deep Thoughts with Kamala Harris and it is where we have some segment of something she said where we then try to figure out what it was she just said.

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Clearly she didn’t know it.

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Right.

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So what’s next for you? Well, what’s next right now is we’re working on growing you or the Power.

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If anyone wants to get involved, we’d be happy to have you.

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Koduyouarethepower Net and we are doing grassroots local activism to grow the Liberty movement in the local grassroots level where it needs to grow.

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Fantastic building out from there.

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Now, are you going to be touring with this? You’re going to be out speaking all over the country? Oh, absolutely.

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The thing I do is more so than speaking at events.

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We show up to city council meetings, we tell them what they’ve been doing wrong and what they need to do to change it.

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We’ve been speaking to sheriff’s department, school board, city councils, county councils, and we’re just getting started, man.

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Very cool.

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Spike, where do people find you? You can find me either@spikecowen.com.

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You can find me@youuthepower.net if you’d like to join you or the Power, and if you look for me on social media, you can find me on Muddy Waters Media or Spike Cohen on all over social media.

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Or if you ever get lost, the North Star is just go to any ATF post and you will find me there.

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Cyberbullying, front and center.

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Front and center.

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I love it.

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One more quick question for you.

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Are you going to run again? I don’t know yet, man.

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My focus right now now is on growing the movement and we’ll see from there.

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Good.

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Spike, thanks for being with us.

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Great to see you, buddy.

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My pleasure.

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Thank you for doing what you’re doing.

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Stop in again later today or tomorrow sometime.

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That would be fantastic.

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This is Freedom Fest life.

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Freedom Festival.