Should Good People Break Bad Laws? with Topher Field

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey everyone and welcome to the 252nd episode of the Atlas Society Asks. I'm Jag. I'm CEO of the Atlas Society. I have been looking forward to this interview for weeks. Topher Field is one of Australia's leading human rights activists. He was on the front lines of the protests and the pushback against the draconian lockdowns and interventions in Australia. He was on the ground in Melbourne. He has been awarded three times by the Australian Libertarian Party and won 14 awards for his documentary Battleground Melbourne, which we're going to put the link in there. I highly recommend. I am excited to have him here to talk about his book Good People Break Bad Laws, Civil Disobedience for the Modern Age. And as the viewers can see, I've got many, many bookmarks here. So you can bet I really enjoyed it. So Topher, thank you for joining us. And at such an ungodly hour. I think it's 7am there in Melbourne. [00:01:09] Speaker B: Well Jack, thank you very much for having me. Look, I am normally up, I'm normally an early riser. I had a big day yesterday and I was counting on having one more hour between now and when we started because I got my time zones wrong. But I've rushed and I'm here and I am looking forward to it. I do love the Atlas Society Society's work and can I say credit to you for being an interviewer that actually takes the time to really read these works. I've had so many people just try and wing it and it doesn't usually go quite as well. So credit to you. You take what you do very seriously. It's good to see. [00:01:37] Speaker A: Well, I like to say that actually being able to read these books is one of the best perks of the job. And I wouldn't want to impose upon somebody's time just, you know, to have a filler based exchange. So I really thought it was just a wonderful, wonderful and very brave book. So now I was in Australia, I had an experience last year. I traveled to Perth to interview mining magnet Gina Rinehart and present her with the Atlas Society's lifetime achievement award. And I was also going to speak at this conference and as part of part of that I wanted to speak about the lessons learned from the lockdowns. But to my surprise the conference organizer said at a largely liberty oriented wanted to put this behind them and that really surprised me. Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised because I get the same kind of pushback sometimes here in the US So what do you think is going on. Is it that people are embarrassed by the experience? Maybe they'd prefer not to confront their own behavior during, during that time? Or is it that, you know, maybe a lot of folks still kind of bought into this narrative that all of these restrictions were necessary and helpful? Or, you know, speaking of self reflection, maybe it's me, maybe I'm the weirdo for just not being willing to let this go. [00:03:05] Speaker B: Yeah, look, it is a little bit of a complicated one because there's a lot of good people who are fantastic in lots of other areas and domains of life who really got the COVID response really quite well. And it is a difficult thing for them to admit and it's a difficult thing for people like me to really shove down their throat. People like Gina Reinhart, very, very wealthy Australian, very successful in business, and I respect that a lot. She's been tremendously generous donating to Australian sports as well as to from time to time to various Australian political causes that I happen to agree with. She's one of the better people in the world. But she was among the people who really got this very wrong along with, along with, frankly, most Australians. It was a very, very lonely place to be. To be on the side of the dissidents, to be on the side of, of common sense and more like a Swedish response rather than the panicked response that we had here. But it's also, it's worth. [00:03:55] Speaker A: Sorry, no, go ahead. [00:03:57] Speaker B: It's worth thinking about the psychology of this for a moment because for the people that went along with the government narrative that this was a once in 100 year pandemic, this was a life and death situation, they bought into the rhetoric. And being in the us you may not be aware of some of the rhetoric that happened here in Australia. I'm sure it'll be familiar to you, but it was extremely intense. Things like staying apart keeps us together, you know, Orwellian newspeak. And by the way, this is the shirt that I've chosen for this interview. Too much 1984, not enough 1776. That's, I think, what is wrong with the world today. Big fan of Orwell and his work. But we see a situation where they bought into that narrative that we're saving grandma. This is a 1 in 100 year pandemic and we're on the team and this is a really important thing. They were on the team that was doing the right thing. This was the rhetoric going on. Now what happens in a normal society, you know, everyone is somewhere on Maslow's hierarchy of needs you remember the hierarchy of needs, sort of that triangular thing. And up the top is self actualization, sort of living your ultimate life. And down the very bottom is desperate for survival, can't even get by. And everyone's somewhere inside that, that spectrum. And most of us in Western society are somewhere around the middle. And, and you know, yes, some people are worse off, some people are better off, but overall we very wealthy overall as, as a society. What happened when Covid came along was it split everybody in two and it pushed a bunch of people down towards the very bottom, especially here in Australia, where there were harsh lockdowns, people couldn't work, people couldn't run their businesses, they couldn't earn money, they couldn't pay bills. People were pushed into a very, very desperate situation very, very suddenly and through no fault of their own. But there was another class of people that were laptop workers or welfare recipients or these sorts of people who could work from home. And they weren't actually, they weren't just left alone. They were given the opportunity to rise to the very top of Maslow's hierarchy. And the reason is this. Most of us lack purpose in life. And at the top of Maslow's hierarchy is this thing called self actualization, where everything is aligned in your life towards purpose. You have a sense of community, a sense of belonging, a sense of achievement, a sense that you're doing good in the world and by whatever means you define that. And Daniel Andrews, the Victorian premier, our equivalent of a governor, was on television every single day at 11 o' clock in the morning using these kinds of Orwellian phrases to suck people in psychologically and say, you've got purpose, you're part of the team, you belong, you're one of the good people who's saving the world and it couldn't have been easier. Save the world by sitting on the couch? Come on, who doesn't want to do that? But what he did was he actually helped to hold people to, to lift people closer to the top of Maslow's hierarchy than they'd ever been before. And here's the thing, they will never be back there and they know it. They will never again have that same sense of belonging, the sense of achievement, with such ease. Sitting on the couch is achieving something amazing. And so what we've got now, I regret to say, jag, is that when we talk to these people, we're not talking to them about policy and whether the COVID response was right. We're talking to them about the best years of their lives, the Years where they felt the most fulfilled, the most connected, the most purposeful in their entire life, I regret to say. And so when we challenge the policy, we're actually challenging the best years of their lives. And that's why they won't, they don't want to let it go. [00:07:09] Speaker A: Well, I think that's a very generous interpretation, a novel one that I hadn't really thought of before. But I think that, you know, there were voices, your voice, my voice, Jennifer Tse, who was our guest last week. And we also had the example of Sweden choosing from a left, more left leaning government, choosing a very reasonable path which has, I think panned out pretty well for them. But you know, when it comes to Australia, I think many Americans in particular were shocked by the severity and the brutality of the lockdowns and the police actions against protesters. And maybe that was part of some kind of fantasy, misinformed by this idea that, you know, Australia, the Down under is a land populated by all these rugged individualists. So maybe just paint for us a little bit of a picture of what happened. And also, was it different in different parts of the country? [00:08:12] Speaker B: Yeah. So there's a, there's an expression that I think the world needs to know about Australia and I regret to say this because I am Australian and I do still love Australia, despite everything that's happened. But the problem with Australia, this is the expression, the problem with Australia is not that it is populated by convicts, but rather that it is populated by the jailers. So let's not forget that on the first fleet, yes, they brought a bunch of convicts and bread thieves over from England in their pursuit of building the perfect society. Back in England, they thought if we just export all the criminals out to the colonies, then England will become a paradise. Well, that's worked out really well for them, obviously, but they, they also sent all the prison guards and the jailers. And there is within the Australian culture a very strong bias towards rules, towards regulations, towards doing what you're told and towards this sort of authoritarian streak. And so these two things coexist side by side. And unfortunately, what I think has happened is in the early days of Australia, you rewind 150 odd years ago when they were just getting out into the inland. Australia was built off the back of the sheep, the wool trade, etc. The wheat trade is what built Australia. When Australia was rugged and difficult and life was hard then it was more the convict mindset, it was more of that mindset that actually won out because the realities were so harsh then as life Got more comfortable. We began to become more luxury focused and more comfort focused, and we began to become much more petty towards each other. And that's where the authoritarian streak has really started to come out, I would say, particularly in the last 40 years. So, unfortunately, Jack, I'm sorry to say that the, the, this idea of the rugged Australian is now very much a minority. And unfortunately, we are moving in the direction of this much more authoritarian streak. And that was so clear during COVID I come from a state called Victoria. It's one of the more southern states in Victoria, and of course, in our hemisphere, that makes it one of the colder states out of all of them. And it's also the state, I call it the California of Australia. It is the state that votes most consistently to the hard left. Let me run through some of the restrictions that we had, and keep in mind that these restrictions existed in some form for over 18 months. It was about 20 months in total that these restrictions existed. We were allowed to leave home for one hour a day, only 23 hours a day. We had to be inside our own homes in order to leave. We had to be engaging in one of the approved activities, which was exercise, shopping, essential work. So there were essential workers who were allowed to leave home for the purpose of going to work and for medical care. Now, medical care was only available for Covid. People died of other illnesses and other preventable issues. And so many people went without testing for cancers and various other things because you couldn't get any other medical care except for Covid medical care. We weren't allowed to go more than five kilometers, let's say it's about three miles roughly from our homes. And they had the police out there with number plate scanners, and they would scan your number plates, and if your address wasn't close enough to their location, where they scanned it, they would pull you over and they would demand to see paperwork so that you could prove that you were allowed to be more than 5km from your home. We had a thing called the ring of steel. Now, this is where they separated suburban Melbourne, the outer suburbs of Melbourne, from the rest of the state, rural Victoria. So Melbourne is a city of about four and a half million people. It's the second largest city and almost the largest city in Australia. The whole state has about six and a half million people. So there's about two million people outside of this ring of steel. And this was literal checkpoints manned by the military. They had Australian police and Australian military side by side holding up all the cars, stopping all the Traffic and without irony, demanding to see the paperwork to prove that that person or the people in the car had government permission to move from one part of the state of Victoria to another part of the state of Victoria. I could go on and on and on. There was an 8pm curfew that was violently enforced by the police. People got arrested for taking their bins out to the curb. Old ladies got arrested for the crime of being out of their house. They'd walked to a park as part of their one hour of exercise and they sat down on a park bench. And because they sat down, the police said, you're no longer exercising, you're no longer complying with the chief health officer's orders. We're going to arrest you. And in amongst all of that was people like me who were screaming from the rooftops, these are human rights violations. This is a complete overreach reaction. There is no medical justification and there is certainly no moral justification. And people like me got out there and started to protest. And we became public enemy number one. The media lined up to demonize us. Celebrities couldn't wait. They were falling all over themselves to do viral videos talking about how evil I was. And other people were at the premier in his daily press conferences. I mean, talk about, talk about an Orwellian sort of world. Every Single day at 11am Our Premier comes on and speaks, usually for over an hour, giving us updates about exactly how many people are sick and how many cases there are in Victoria and the little tweaks that he's made to the rules for today. The rules were ever changing. It was a moving target that you had to chase and that was on purpose. It was part of the psychology. You had to sit there and hang on his every word because otherwise you'd be out of date. You wouldn't know what the rules were today. And so all of this was going on. It's a truly terrifying thought when I think back on what it was. But at the time I was simply focused on trying to be one of the very few voices that was calling it out and saying, hey, this is wrong. [00:13:15] Speaker A: So let's talk a little bit about your personal experience and that of your family. What led you to describe as your bad law breaking point on April 25, 2020, when as a 38 year old with a perfect police record, you walked out the door with the intention to break the law. Tell us about that experience. [00:13:40] Speaker B: Yeah, look, I was raised as a goody two shoes. I'm a pastor's son, large family and always very taught, taught Very much to be respectful of the law. Do as you're told. There's a reason why these laws exist. You know, we've got a very peaceful society. We've elected these people. We need to trust these people. They know what they're doing. That was what I was raised with and I became a political commentator back in 2009. So I've been commentating and observing politically for about 16 years. And I actually moved away from being a conservative towards being a libertarian as a result of my time in the Army. I never deployed, I was never in, in combat or anything like that, but I was in the services, I was training with them. And I was looking at the reality of this organization, that as a good conservative, I'd been raised to venerate, to, to, to idolize, I would now say. And I realized that it wasn't worthy of that level of adoration, that level of obedience. And so that began my, my departure away from that super goody two shoes. But what happens inside your head isn't necessarily what you're willing or able to do in the real world. I still behaved like a real goody two shoes. And so I came to this departure point. I already had a public profile before COVID came along and I was known as someone who was willing to speak out against government nonsense, particularly around mismanagement of irrigation water for farmers and, you know, on the issue of free speech and taxation and various other things like that. So someone organized a protest on April 25, 2020. Now, April 25 is a very significant day for Australians. That is our Veterans Day. It's what we call Anzac Day, Australian New Zealand Army Corps. And that, that's when we celebrate and we, we honor our fallen and the, the veterans that have served and so forth. And so it's not a day that I would have chosen to actually hold a protest on, but I didn't have that choice. The organizer who had organized it for that day, this was going to be an illegal protest. The police were probably going to come and kick our asses. We didn't know at that point because it was very early days and it was on that day and she asked me to be the main speaker because I had sort of the most profile out of everybody that was, that was willing to speak out. And so I thought about it and I ultimately, I said yes, because I realized that what we were watching was the trashing of the very freedoms that our Anzacs had fought for. And so as much as I don't want to politicize Anzac Day, we don't honor our Anzacs by lining up in a parade and, you know, saying, yay for you, for fighting for freedom overseas whilst we're simultaneously trashing those freedoms back at home, you can't, you can't do that. And so I decided, you know what, I'm going to step out, I'm going to do this. So I get in the car that day, I drive. This is not a valid reason to leave home. I'm exiting the five kilometer radius around my home and protest and public gathering is very much illegal. And we go out to the, to a park to the southeast of Melbourne and we gather there and the police, of course they know about the event and so they're waiting for us. There were about six police cars there when I, when I got out. And I will admit to having a very large internal struggle. I knew that this was not going to end well. And the thought of, hey, I could just get back in the car and drive home and no one needs to know, no one needs to be any the wiser. And so what I actually did was I pulled my phone out of my pocket and I started a live stream to my Facebook page, which had a few tens of thousands of people on it at the time. And that forced me to actually have to follow through because I would, I would be outing myself as a coward. And of course, none of us know whether we're cowards or not. Really none of us want to believe that we're cowards. But until we get tested, we don't actually know. And in reality, that was such as the privilege of my life. I've had a very, very good life. That was really one of the first main tests of courage that I've ever really faced. And so I used that phone and that live stream to force myself to do what I knew to be right. But everything in my body was rebelling against doing that. And my psyche and my upbringing and all of that came back and wanted me to not do that. Well, I did it. In the end, the police didn't know what to do, so they left. They told us, we're coming back here in one hour and if anyone's still here, you're all getting arrested. And what we heard was, you can carry on for one hour. And so we did that and we, we gave our speeches and we held our protest and I live streamed that. And then I drove home looking in my mirrors all the way, paranoid that the police were going to come and, and chase me. Of course they didn't. And I got home and discovered that that that live stream had over a hundred thousand views on it. Now let's remember in Australia, you've got to multiply that by about 13 to compare it with American numbers. That's like having over a million in America. And so over 100,000 views here in Australia. And that really became the moment where my entire future changed. Because from there there was no going back. I had, I'd stepped across that, that threshold and, and I was in now. [00:17:56] Speaker A: So let's dive into your book, Good People Break Bad Laws, Civil Disobedience in the Modern Age. And you have many examples of brave individuals who engaged in civil disobedience. One of whom I had not heard of before, that's Claudette Colvin. So tell us about her. [00:18:15] Speaker B: She is such an underrated hero and I'm so glad you brought her up. And I loved when I came across her story, I went, I need to help the world know about this. And so having the opportunity to put her story into my book was really wonderful. Think of her as Rosa Parks. Before Rosa Parks was Rosa Parks, she was in the same era in the segregated south and before there was any real movement to participate in. Nine months before Rosa Parks took her stand, or should I say took her sit on the bus and refused to move to the back, Claudette Colvin did actually exactly the same thing. Now Claudette, you could argue is the reason why Rosa Parks did what she did. And the reason why I say that is number one, Rosa Parks credits Claudette. She was aware of what Claudette did and she credits Claudette with inspiring her. But also Rosa Parks was actually working with a human rights organization, an equal rights organization at the time. And they were actually looking for an opportunity to say, well, how do we, how do we wage this campaign? How do we push this campaign forward? And the idea came up of her doing what she ultimately did. And it's questionable as to whether that idea would have ever come up had claudette colvin 9 months earlier not done what she did. Now interestingly enough, her particular story, she was a 15 year old girl. She refused to move to the back of the bus. She got arrested. She was charged with, you know, a fray. And you know, because obviously she touched police officers and what have you, a 15 year old girl assaulting police officers. I don't think so. Especially if you've seen photos of her. She was not, she was not a tall or powerful young girl. And so they threw the book at her. And the, the, the civil rights organizations at the time were going to Were going to defend her, we're going to include her in their, their, their sort of court cases going forward until she was discovered that she was pregnant out of wedlock as a, as a young girl, which obviously even now carries a lot of shame with it. But certainly back then that was, that was complete shame. And so she found herself both for political reasons, because she had defied the authorities. And there were a lot of people even in resented that, oh, you're bringing trouble down on us. Why are you causing trouble? Can't you just be a good girl like the rest of us? And then also with the social shame of being pregnant out of wedlock, she ended up having to leave her family home where her family had been for generations. And then actually she moved to New York. Now what's interesting with her was that the criminal charges stuck and she wore that label of a criminal until she was in her 80s. And off the top of my head, I do have the details in my book, but I believe she was about 82 years of age when they finally scrubbed her criminal record. And she was about 84 years of age when she finally got a certificate of congressional recognition for her courage and for what she did. So she lived her entire life as a criminal, as someone covered in this shame from her childhood and from her past when actually she was a hero. And she was someone who showed tremendous courage and tremendous foresight to be able to do what she did. And she touched on the very tactic that would later go on to be such a pivotal moment in the entire civil rights movement. And she, but she lived her life as a criminal. She lived her life showered in shame. She lived her life really unable to go home. She, she never went back. She spent her life in New York and rebuilt a new one there and went on to have kids. But there's a beautiful quote. She did an interview around the time she got that congressional certificate of recognition. She, and she had a beautiful quote. She was asked about whether it was worth it. And she said I was a spark. And the spark caught on. And I just, I think what a beautiful thing to live with, being labeled by the courts as a criminal, being labeled by family and friends and your culture as, as a, as a hoe or whatever it may have been at the time, as a 15 year old girl getting pregnant out of wedlock, having, having to flee and rebuild a life from nothing in a new city, but living with that knowledge. I was a spark. And that spark caught on. And that really became one of the guiding sort of quotes in the back of my mind. Her and August Landmesser, who's a German. I can talk about him if you'd like me to. But those two things sat ever in the back of my mind as I went through what I went through and kind of were like a cattle prod. Well, hey, if these people can do it, so can you. And, yes, their challenges were very different to yours. And I'm not making a comparison between Covid and what they did directly necessarily, but this was my challenge. This was my fight to fight. And the memory of Claudette Colvin, or the knowledge of Claudette Colvin and the knowledge of August Landmesser in Germany were two of the pictures in my mind. In my mind that would spur me on any time I felt like backing out. [00:22:51] Speaker A: So we're getting a lot of audience questions, and I'm going to turn to them shortly. But your answer made me think, you know, we can all look at Rosa Parks or Claudette Colvin and clearly see them as moral heroes. But what about, you know, the argument that if each of us start to decide which laws to obey and which laws to break, doesn't that kind of start us down the road of anarchy? [00:23:21] Speaker B: Well, it's a funny thing, because civil disobedience and the righteousness of a given action is much easier to see in hindsight than what it is at the time. And that's simply because by definition, at the time, they are in the minority at the time, they are defying the authorities. If that wasn't true, then the civil disobedience wouldn't be necessary. It wouldn't be happening. And so if we're a part of the culture, then by definition, the civil disobedience are defying the culture that we're a part of. And so we automatically condemn the people at the time. But then when we look back in history, the people that won have now become part of the culture. So we look back on Rosa Parks, we look back on Martin Luther King Jr. We look back on. On so many of these people, and we say, oh, well, obviously they were right. But we're only saying that because what they said became a part of our culture later on, right? And so we're still actually only. We're boxed in with our own cultural frame of reference. And that's what we're looking at. And that's why when someone does civil disobedience at the time, it's very difficult to accept because they're defying our culture. And we look back and say, well, you're not like those Heroes of the past. You can't compare yourself to them. Well, no, no, no, no. What I'm doing is the same thing. Your cultural frame of reference accepts them and rejects me. That's, that's what's actually going on here. So your question's a very valid one. I mean, we've got people, I'm sure you have the same thing in the US We've got people running around doing nonsense things like gluing their hands in the middle of intersections and calling it civil disobedience, hanging themselves from wires over train lines so that coal trains can't carry the coal out to port and these sorts of things and making themselves a nuisance. And they apply the label of civil disobedience to themselves and claim protection essentially under, under this concept of, well, this is righteous civil disobedience. No, nothing could be further from the truth. And I go into detail in this, in the book Good People Break Bad Laws, I apply two specific tests. There have to be two tests in order for a law to be considered bad and civil disobedience to be considered good. And even then, we have to be very careful how we go about the civil disobedience. I dedicate an enormous number of chapters to this whole problem. The first test is a principles based test, and it's simply this. Would obeying this law or enforcing this law do more harm than not obeying it or not enforcing it? So in, in Psalm 94, in, in the Bible, there's a verse there that says, wicked rulers cannot be allied with you. They use the law to cause injustice. All right, so there's this idea that the law can actually be a source of injustice itself. And when that's the case, we have an obligation not to be allied with them, not to obey them. So that's the first test. Does obeying or enforcing this law do more damage than breaking this law would? And if that's the case, well, then you've got a potential candidate for civil disobedience. But then there's, that's a, that's a very pragmatic test. And that can, you know, utilitarianism can kind of be twisted a little bit. So I never make a decision on purely utilitarian grounds. I also reference back to a principles based test as a libertarian, and I ask myself, does the government have the authority to do this in the first place, irrespective of whether the outcome is good or bad? Put aside utilitarianism just at a principled level, is this something the government has the authority to do. And in order to answer that, we have to ask ourselves, where does the government get its authority from? And again, I dedicate another bunch of chapters to exactly that question. In a society that says the government gets its power from the people, the delegation of authority from the people, well, what does that mean? Because we can't delegate something that we don't already have. And so we can begin to calculate what the limits of government power might be, if that is, in fact, where they get their power from. So, again, that's something that I spend a number of chapters on. And when you put the two of these together, that's when you have a candidate for civil disobedience, when obeying that law or that rule is worse than disobeying it, it would do more harm. And it's not something the government has the right to do in the first place. Now you have a candidate for civil disobedience. And I would say the COVID restrictions well and truly met both of those criteria. But we still have to go further, because just because the government has written a law that is evil, that doesn't eliminate everyone else's property rights, that doesn't eliminate everyone else's human rights. And so saying, oh, well, the government is putting CO2 into the atmosphere, and that's bad for us, because I believe in climate change and it's going to kill us all. So I'm going to go and glue my hand to the middle of an intersection and deprive everyone of their ability to travel and go to work. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on, hold on. Okay, so you're going to now deprive everyone else of their property rights, their right to life, liberty for the freedom of movement, the ability to use. What is that, that public roadway, by gluing your hand to it? Because government bad. Well, hang on. But one of these things does not follow the other. Just because government bad doesn't abrogate everyone else's human rights, doesn't abrogate everyone else's property rights. And so what we have is a disconnect. And what's going on psychologically for these people, it's particularly the Greens movement that seems to do it, is there is a virtuous corruption that comes in where they say, I'm so virtuous because I'm fighting for the future of humanity. I'm so virtuous that I can now do anything. And it's justified in that virtuous goal, the pursuit of that virtuous goal. And that's a deeply dangerous fallacy to fall into. So coming back to your question, it's a simple matter of saying is this still civil disobedience or has this just become vandalism? Has this just become nuisance? Has this just become depriving other people of their rights? Because what we did, for example, and in protest against the lockdowns was we would go shopping and we would. Initially, my first ever protest was very, very timid. I'm not. Sorry, not first ever protest. After that protest that I spoke at, I organized a protest where we would all go to the supermarket with messages written on our masks. I wasn't even advocating for people to not have masks. I was saying go there with messages on your shirts and on your masks. And then over time things escalated as the police brutality got worse and kind of the gloves came off. But we never, never went out there for the purpose of depriving people of access to roads or parks or, or etc. I mean when you've got 10000 people walking down a street, yeah, okay, the cars can't move until you've passed by. But we're not blockading roads, we're not gluing ourselves to things. We, we never engaged in vandalism with the exception of a handful of just hot headed idiot individuals that we pushed out of our group and handed over to the cops very, very quickly because we didn't want them and we didn't want to be associated with them. And so civil disobedience is the choice not to obey the rules that the government has made because obeying them will do harm and because the government doesn't have the authority to make those rules. But it does not give you permission to go and become a vandal, a wastrel, a public nuisance. Those, the human rights of the people that you live amongst still exist and are still enforceable even if the government is doing the wrong thing. [00:29:50] Speaker A: Well, that is a very helpful distinction. Okay, as mentioned, a lot of audience questions, which is great, lock, stock and barrel on YouTube, asks, as an American, I've heard about the authoritarian measures taken in Australia. Out of curiosity, what rights slash liberties do you think are the most ignored in Australia and which are the most protected? [00:30:14] Speaker B: Yeah, we have almost no protections here in Australia. So we inherited from the, from the British, we inherited their common law system. And if you've read the Federalist Papers in the, in the US there was a big debate about whether they should enumerate their human rights or whether they should not. And ultimately with the argy bargy back and forth, I'M sure you all know the history. They ended up creating the amendments to the Constitution and articulating and enumerating a number of human rights, the First Amendment, etc, Second Amendment, etc. In Australia, we had a similar debate, but we went the other way because the argument was we have all of these rights already in common law. These are, these are our rights. They're contained in common law. The right to freedom of movement, the right to, to be left in peace unless you're being accused of a specific crime, the right to not be searched without, you know, a warrant, et cetera. All of these rights that were enumerated in the U.S. amendments to the Constitution, where essentially they were just writing down the rights that were contained already in common law. The argument was, can we rely on common law to, to bring those rights into our legal system and to be enforceable going forward, or do we need to write them out specifically? That was the argument. And we had the same argument in Australia, but we gave the opposite answer. And I would suggest to you that the Australian experience probably proves that the Americans got this one right, that writing them down and actually enumerating them was a very, very important thing for you guys to do. And we should have done the same thing because in practice, we have no rights here in Australia. All of the rights that we should have inherited through the English common law system have now been all but eradicated. Covid really was a bit of a last nail in the coffin for that, where they actually were explicitly violating our human rights, our enumerated human rights under the UN Charter of Human Rights and under various Australian legislation. But all they had to do was simply say, yes, but we're doing it to save lives. And at that point, our Australian Human Rights Commission, our Victorian Ombudsman and others pretty much just rolled over and said, oh, okay, well, you can do what you like then. And so what we have, what we have now in a situation in Australia is a situation where what was our rights that were contained in English common law are no longer really enforceable in our courts. I mean, there are people who try. There are many people who go in there and they, they sort of fight the good fight. But increasingly the system just, just railroads them, runs straight over the top of them. And they can sit there and say, well, that's unjust and that's not how it should have gone. They can do that all they like. But in the end, the courts have access to the police and the police have guns and, and the rest of us don't. So they Kind of win. So we're in a bit of, a, bit of a tricky situation here and we've made it worse for ourselves by re electing our labor government just last weekend here in Australia. This is kind of like the Canadians re electing their, their party under obviously the new leader, Mark Carney. You know, we've done a similar thing here in Australia and it's, it's pretty ugly. It certainly concerns people like myself because freedom of speech, for example, to name one, is very, very, it's central to what I do. I've been doing this for 16 years. I'm an outspoken social commentator, political commentator, and Christian. And all of those things are being criminalized gradually here in Australia. It's literally true in Australia. Just to cite one example, if someone were to come to you with thoughts of gender confusion and you were simply to say to them, hey, listen, can I pray with you that you, that you come to terms with your body as it is and that, and that maybe we can work through this and I'll support you through this and, and maybe we'll get to the point where you could, you know, you could accept that you've been made the way you are and that's a good thing. You're now a criminal in Australia. You cannot say or do anything that might cause someone to not proceed with a, with a gender transition. Just to give you, to give you one example. So what we've got now is a situation in Australia where not only is our freedom of speech dead, but so many normal conversations, healthy conversations, have been completely criminalized. And it's getting quite difficult. I have to be quite careful how I say what I say as a political commentator so as to not make myself very vulnerable to either civil litigation or criminal litigation. And I've got some friends in the US and they keep saying to me, well, just come over here, just come over here. And I've got to say, as time passes that, that thought becomes a little more appealing. [00:34:15] Speaker A: Well, I have a similar situation because I live in California and I have friends in Texas and Florida that does just, you know, come over there. But, you know, some of us need to stay behind and try to, to fight some of these bad laws. Okay, two part question by my modern Gault. Did Australia have their version of an Anthony Fauci and are there still powers like emergency measures granted to the government that still have not yet been withdrawn? [00:34:44] Speaker B: Yeah. So our version of Anthony Fauci was a guy called Anthony Fauci. He was all over our television as well. And not just Yours. He really became God worldwide, certainly in the English speaking world. But we did also obviously have our own local authorities. But they were largely just parroting and repeating whatever it was that Anthony Fauci and the World Health Organization were saying. So do we have those individuals? Yes, but they really were just sock puppets. They were saying whatever the premiers and the Prime Minister here in Australia wanted them to say. And they were saying whatever they were told to say by Anthony Fauci and by the World Health Organization in Victoria, because that's where I know best. I've moved out of Victoria now. So I fled California. I fled our version of California jag. And it is, it's been a wonderful change, but I am still in Australia. In Victoria, they introduced a thing called permanent pandemic powers. And you'd be familiar, I'm sure, with the World Health Organization and the pandemic treaty that they've been negotiating and trying to ram through. And it's a, it's a pretty terrifying, draconian piece of the. Of work. We've already passed something largely similar in Victoria. And what it allows the Premier of Victoria to do is to unilaterally declare a pandemic. Including, by the way, the, the terms of reference are so broad. If there is the potential for a pandemic anywhere in the world, he can, he or she can trigger these powers. These powers allow him to declare entire groups of people to be illegal on the basis of what they believe. So, for example, it was targeted at people like me for believing that Covid wasn't that bad and we shouldn't be locked down. And he can then send out the police to mass arrest and incarcerate those people for up to two years. And they do not get a lawyer, they do not get a phone call, they have no rights. They do not get a trial. They can be held without trial, without charge and without a lawyer and without contact with their family or anyone else for up to two years under these powers. Now, he hasn't exercised those powers, but he was obviously putting them in place in preparation for using them against people like me. And that's what we saw coming and we kept protesting regardless. And if you watch the documentary Battleground Melbourne, you'll see a lot about that. The, they were escalating their violence and they were moving towards essentially concentration camps. That's what the legislative pathway was being laid for. And they were physically building facilities that, where they could mass incarcerate large numbers of people or those facilities still exist, the laws are still on the books, but the, the, we managed to stop the political momentum for it. We broke the will of the Victoria police essentially by just continuing to come back and come back and come back until they escalated their violence up to the point where there was nothing left for them to do but start killing people on the streets. And they, you know, there was a question of whether they would actually go that far. Such was the hysteria, the mania that had taken over my state. Thankfully they didn't. But yes, those camps still exist. Those laws are still on the books in Victoria. I don't expect they're going to get used anytime soon. They could sit dormant for 20, 30, 40 years, but they're there. And at any moment in time a future government could turn around and go, ah, those are useful laws. Yoink, we're gonna, we're gonna go and make, make use of those for our own political purposes. [00:37:48] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's an important point to remember that, you know, maybe you are in political power one day and you think that these kinds of restrictions are terrific, but, you know, you might be out of power, your party will be out of power another day and you know, these camps or these emergency powers are there and they can be used by the other party. So. All right, another question. By elation on YouTube, he asks, do you think that Australia's proximity to China influences its internal or external policies? [00:38:29] Speaker B: Not so much our proximity to China, but the infiltration of China into our political parties. So we have politicians who are openly pro China. And I don't have an issue with that. Just, you know, I'd rather they be openly pro China than covertly pro China. But the problem is we do have both. And here in Australia we had a Communist party through the 1980s and obviously in 89, the Berlin Wall fell. In 91, the. The USSR broke up and the Australian Communist Party disbanded. But they funded, they provided a few million dollars in seed funding into a thing called the Search foundation here in Australia. And that has basically carried on the communist ideals. And their members have gone one of two ways. A number of them went into the Greens Party. So the Greens Party was a fledgling movement at the time in Australia. And the idea of a dedicated environmental political party actually comes out of Australia. Sorry about that, guys. But it came out of Tasmania in Australia and then went federal right around the same time that the Communist Party had to delist because the USSR had broken up and they were no longer politically viable. So where do their members go? Well, a bunch of them flocked across to the Greens Party, which is why we call Them watermelons, they're green on the outside and red in the middle. But also a number of them saw the Labor Party as their opportunity to infiltrate and they've done that very, very effectively. So for example, our Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, his office, the people that he's surrounded by and works with on a day to day basis includes a number of prominent public members of the Search Foundation. These are avowed communists. Our former Prime Minister Julia Gillard was herself in her, in her younger years and avowed communist and she wrote for, for a communist masthead essentially while she was in university. She went on to become our Prime Minister. And so we have for example, former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, now ironically, our Ambassador to the United States of America. Talk about someone who is completely unfit for the role that they've been given. He is very much pro China and he's been trying to align Australia with China the whole way through while he was Prime Minister as well as since then. The former Premier of Victoria, the man who committed the human rights abuses against me and so many others, a man by the name of Daniel Andrews, he was signing up to China's Belt and Road Initiative. Now this is a money based program that, where China are basically throwing billions of dollars at infrastructure all over the world, giving out loans essentially for the purpose of getting control, for the purpose of getting their clause into various jurisdictions. And the Victorian government under Daniel Andrews was very keen to sign up and take the money. And Daniel Andrews himself, while he was premier and also since no longer being premier, has been traveling to and from China and has very deep Chinese business ties over there and clearly very deep sympathies for them ideologically as well. So are we infiltrated by China? Yes, but it's not as though we have a bunch of Chinese spies running around. What we have is a bunch of useful idiots running around. And unfortunately, thanks to the Labor Party and the Greens, quite a lot of those useful idiots have their hands on power. [00:41:14] Speaker A: So getting back to your book, you wrote this quote, it's right to stand for what's right even when the rest of the world is wrong. And while it sucks to be right early, that's the only time that it matters. End quote. And you gave an example, I think you mentioned it earlier, about a Hungarian physicist and physician and scientist asking the somebody who was right early, tell us about him and how he's also an example of how having a, you know, argumentative, even abrasive personality actually helped him make an important medical discovery. [00:41:58] Speaker B: Yeah, so his name is Ignaz Semmelweis. You can look him up as there's quite a lot of information out there about him. And I, I came across him about 13 years ago when I was doing one of my first videos defending freedom of speech in Australia. And it was called the Forbidden History of Unpopular People. Because one of the things that I noticed as I researched the topic was that the people who, who we look back on and say they were right at the time. And we talked about, you know, Claudette Colvin and, and, and that whole movement at the time, they were regarded as being wrong, as being evil, as being criminal. They were, they were marginalized. And that, that was the cultural response at the time. But we look back on them, at them, and say, oh, well, these people were absolutely right. So the Forbidden History of Unpopular People was, was the thesis essentially of that particular video. And Ignaz Semmelweis was one of the people that I found. Now, Ignaz was a physician at the time. He was working in, in various hospitals. And at the time they still believed in bloodletting. They still had the theory of the four humors of the body and all of that nonsense going on. And child mortality was extremely high. But also the deaths of birthing mothers was ridiculously high. In some hospitals it was over 30%. And in fact, it was worse in the hospitals than it was out of the hospitals. You'd be better off being a poor person giving birth in the gutter of the street in front of the hospital than being a rich person giving birth in the hospital. You'd be more likely to die if you were in the hospital. There was a thing called puerperal disease. Peripheral disease. Illness. Peripheral disease. I can't pronounce it quite right. It's. It's a slightly weird word. And it was a fever. It was an infection. We now know that it was. It was an infection, but it was a fever that would overtake mothers postpartum and they would die in huge numbers. And it was thought to be incurable. It was. There's nothing you can do about this. Don't even bother researching it. Don't even bother looking into it. There's nothing you can do. It's just how it is. Then what happened was Ignaz, who was a. He was at a. He was teaching as a. As a physician. One of his fellow lecturers, one of his fellow teachers pricked himself with a scalpel while he was cutting up a cadaver and teaching students about the human body. And he died as a result. And his symptoms precisely matched this mysterious purple fever. And Ignaz was. He was a man very dear to Ignaz. And he went, well, hang on, how can this be? He can't have puerperal fever. He's a man. He hasn't just given birth. How could he have the same disease? And he then made that. That radical connection. And he said, hang on, what if there's something about a dead body which, once it's put into your body, hurts you and causes this illness? And he realized that what was happening was being a teaching hospital, they were cutting up cadavers and teaching students all day long. And then a woman would go into labor and they would all rush across and help her to give birth without washing their hands in between. And his theory became, what if we are transporting something from those dead bodies into those women that's causing this? And so he introduced. He was very senior in that hospital. He introduced a handwashing protocol. It was this horrible caustic concoction of Lyme and other things, of course, people's skin to peel, but, boy, it killed any germs. Not that they knew that that's what they were doing, but this is what he brought in as strict protocols. And he enforced them ruthlessly because he was a bit of a. Bit of a so and so and so. Once he said, this is what we're doing, that's what happened. And he was very unpopular amongst his own staff and his own students. But all of a sudden, the mortality rate in that hospital fell from over 25% to, I believe it was 2 or 3% for birthing mothers. So mothers suddenly stopped dying. And he went, hang on, we're onto something here. And he published this as a protocol, and he sent it to the medical authorities in Europe at the time, the highest sort of medical bodies at the time. And they mocked him. They said, well, this is ridiculous. There is no mechanism by which this. You haven't explained why this works. He said, well, yeah, but it works. I haven't explained why. I don't know why, but it works. And what he had done is he discovered germs. He just didn't know it at the time. Now, what actually happened with him was it was a bit of a complicated story, but to simplify it a little bit, he was a very headstrong, pugnacious man, and that's what made him outspoken. That's what allowed him to think differently to everybody else and to make that mental connection that no one else had made up to that moment in time. But that also made him very abrasive and very Much disliked. Now, in the end, he got involved actually in a political revolution that didn't end well. He survived, but he was now Persona non grata. So now the medical establishment had an excuse to ignore him. Oh, he's one of them, right? And they were able to, they were able to ostracize him. He ended up going back to Hungary where he managed to get a position as a teacher. There he introduced the same hand washing protocol and got the same result. And he documented the results and he began to write these letters to anyone, to kings, to physicians, to senior medical boards, becoming increasingly strident and basically saying, you are murdering women, Women are dying and this is on your watch because we can save them and you won't let me. And so what they did was they tricked him into going into an insane asylum, supposedly because there was a patient there that needed to be treated. They closed the door behind him, locked him in, and less than two weeks later, he was dead. He got beaten by the guards and ironically, an infection from his injuries was ultimately what killed him. So he died alone in poverty in, in a, in an insane asylum. But it was only a few decades later that they discovered germs and all of a sudden they, they understood the mechanism that he'd already touched on in the intervening decades before. They finally then started introducing hand washing. Tens of thousands of women, if not possibly hundreds of thousands of women across Europe died of a preventable disease that he had correctly discovered and found a solution for in the form of that caustic hand washing protocol that he had. But he was a man who was a deeply unpleasant man. He was an opinionated, arrogant so and so. And one of the chapters in my book, and I apologize if I offend anyone, but I'm an Australian, we swear. One of the, the chapters in my book is in defense of. Because sometimes we need that person who doesn't care about your feelings, who is a so and so who is going to be outspoken regardless of what you think. Because sometimes those people are the ones who go first. They're the ones who were willing to defy the cultural norm and the zeitgeist of the time. They're people like me who were willing to step out and protest on Anzac Day when everyone else is locking down and obeying and doing exactly what they're told to do. Sometimes you don't need a hero, sometimes you need an asshole. And so we need to actually accept that that can be true and celebrate these people and try and shift how we think so that we can identify and celebrate them at the time rather than only ever in hindsight. [00:48:17] Speaker A: So tell us about Monica Smith. It was a name I hadn't been familiar with. I expect most in our audience aren't familiar with that name. Who was she? What happened to her and how did that impact the evolution of the protests against lockdowns? [00:48:35] Speaker B: Yes, so she was outspoken as well. She was amazing. And her story is quite incredible. She's written a book as well called cell 22. She was willing to be publicly organizing protests and, and encouraging people to go to them. And that was very much forbidden at the time. And so they harassed her, they, they arrested her multiple times at different protests. And then eventually they came to her and they arrested her in her car. And this was, this was kind of it. This wasn't catch and release anymore. They were arresting her and they slapped her with bail conditions. And so bail basically allows you to not stay in hospital. Sorry, stay in hospital, to not stay in prison. But you have to abide by the rules that you're. That apply to that bail condition. And the bail conditions they tried to give her was that she had to shut down her political party. So she was the president of a, of a fledgling political party at the time. She had to erase her website. She had to never speak in opposition to the government or the COVID restrictions ever again. And she had to shut down her bank accounts and basically wipe the slate clean and become an absolute nobody, disappear from public life completely. And she said, no, I'm not, I'm not going to do that. And they said, well, if you don't sign the bail conditions, you go to prison. And that's. This was the leverage they were using. They were, they were trying to shut people down and destroy them, not by, by keeping them in prison, but by applying these bail conditions to them where they effectively were in prison, even if they were still out on the street. And she said, fine, throw me in prison. And so she went to prison and she was in solitary confinement for most of it because of all of the COVID protocols. Oh, we can't let you mix with the wider community. She spent most of her time in solitary confinement for 22 days in prison before they finally agreed to much more reasonable bail conditions that weren't a human rights violation. I mean, imagine arresting somebody and saying, you can't get out of prison unless you shut down your political party. This is happening in a so called free country, in a so called free democratic country. She, so she showed phenomenal courage. And then when she got out, she went right back to Doing her work with some. With some changes so that she didn't just make herself jail bait to go straight back in again. But she showed tremendous courage during that time. I highly Recommend her book, Cell 22. It's a courageous book. She writes about more than just the COVID period. She writes about her life. And there's an enormous amount in there that I think is both inspiring and very thought provoking for us all. But she was just one of many, many amazing people when I directed this Battleground Melbourne, the documentary about what happened, what I tell people, and it's absolutely true, is I had the privilege of telling that story, but I did not write that story. That was written by the people of Victoria, people like Monica Smith and so many others who wrote this incredible story of courage in the face of government tyranny and government gone wrong. And I had the privilege of telling that story in the form of the documentary. But I'm only one of the many people in there. And you will hear a lot more about Monica's story in Battleground Melbourne as well. [00:51:14] Speaker A: So that's a great segue. In the few remaining minutes we have left, tell us a little bit about the documentary, how it got started, how you raised the funds and anything surprising in the process of producing it and also its reception. [00:51:31] Speaker B: Well, I was watching what was happening and the incredible courage I was seeing. And we had a moment in Australia where the police in Victoria lined up with rubber bullets like a firing squad and just started shooting at protesters. Unarmed, nonviolent, they weren't burning things down. When I say a protest, what I'm talking about in American terms is probably more like what you would think of as a rally. We weren't. This wasn't. Blm burned things down, mostly peaceful style nonsense, right? Peaceful, nonviolent people being lined up and shot with rubber bullets by Victoria police. And that was very nearly the end of the movement because we're not an armed population here in Australia. And when the government is willing to go to that length, well, the next thing is live ammunition. That's the only thing they haven't done yet. They had armored vehicles on the streets and militarized police firing rubber bullets at people. And so there was this moment in time where it was sort of everything hung in the balance. What's going to happen next, the day after that happens? Well, if we don't get out on the streets and protest, well, then it's over and Daniel Andrews has won and the tyrant has won. But if we do get out on the streets, we're Going to get shot again, and that's not pleasant. So there was this moment, and what happened was so beautiful because there were teachers and nurses who put on their uniforms, their white uniforms or white clothing, and they wrote on them how long they'd been a teacher, how long they'd been a nurse. And they stood silently with masks on in a park. This is the day after the shooting, and socially distanced, doing all the right things with masks on. And the police showed up with all their riot police and their horses and their armored vehicles and all the violence ready to go. And they looked at these women, mostly women standing there in this park, and they went, well, we can't shoot them. And if we can't use violence, we don't know what to do, because violence is the language of the state. And so. And then they kind of had to sort of back down. And that was the beginning of the end of the violence for them. It was only about two weeks after that that Victoria police publicly declared they were no longer cracking down on protests. And that began because of that moment. That was the fracture. That was the moment where they almost had a mirror held up to their faces, and they saw what they'd become. And I saw that moment unfold. I wasn't there in person, but I saw that moment unfold. And I said, someone needs to talk about this courage. Someone needs to tell the story of what these women have just done and what this whole protest movement has done over the last 18 months. And I looked around thinking, well, someone needs to do this. And I thought, well, I have to be the someone. I have experience in the film industry. I have connections to all the right people. I can get all the equipment in a studio to film in. I know the stories because I've been there from the very beginning. I've lived it. I know these people. They trust me. They will say yes to an interview with me, and I have an audience that I can ask to help raise the funds to be able to financially make it possible. So I put out the call for funds, and a week later, I was arrested. And I'd managed to avoid arrest up to that point in time, but they came for me a week after I announced that I was making this documentary, and they. It was amazing. I won't go into detail on that particular story, but I was out on bail later that same day, and I carefully looked at the bail conditions, and I said, okay, I can work with this. I can. I can obey the bail conditions and still get this documentary done. And so I said, yes, to the bail conditions. I was back out later the same day. But because of the publicity as a result of my arrest, because I am something of a public figure in Australia and then there was a whole bunch of other public figures that when I got arrested, they amplified the message. All of a sudden people began donating to the documentary in large numbers. And I raised my budget within about 48 hours of being arrested by Victoria police. So I actually have a thank you in the dvd, in the, the booklet of the DVD to Victoria police for helping me to raise the funds for the documentary to tell the story. [00:54:53] Speaker A: Well, I understand you've got a story about the greatest day in your life. Maybe you can share that with us to close us out. [00:55:02] Speaker B: So, so the best day of my life. You have to go through the valley of the shadow of death to, to actually understand what a good day feels like. And for 18 months, my home state of Victoria and myself personally, we walked through the valley of the shadow of death. Because I was a public figure, people were reaching out to me, telling their stories, looking for hope, looking for help. I would spend my nights on my laptop responding to people's emails, emails of despair, emails of people getting divorced, people thinking about ending it all, watching their children fall into depression and despair, experiencing bankruptcy and poverty and so much suffering. And there were some really horrific stories. People got in their cars and ended their lives by setting their cars on fire. And people ended their lives in public ways, jumping off buildings and things like that. And the media wouldn't talk about it, but it was all in my inbox. And so I began to drink very, very heavily in order to try and cope with the weight of the world, so to speak, on my shoulders. And I began a spiral, a downward spiral into a very, very dark place myself. And every weekend I'd be going out to protest again, playing dodgem cops, trying to avoid being arrested. My wife and I had to make a plan for what would happen if I was arrested. We made an actions on document that involved who she needed to contact and why she was contacting them, what she needed to say and what she needed from them. A four page branching document of different scenarios. What if I'm hospitalized? What if I'm just missing and she doesn't know where I am? We basically had to make plans. I had to make off site backups of my phone and my computer. I had to live like I was a drug lord. And it pushed me into a really, really dark place. I would, I would sit up until 2 or 3 in the morning responding to people's messages. Because when you're getting those sorts of messages, those people need an answer, and they need an answer tonight because they may not have long. So I would sit up until 2 or 3 in the morning responding to these people. And then at 5 or 6 in the morning, the minute a car door closed on the street outside, I would get woken up with a start, because is that the police coming for me? Is that them? And I'd wait for an engine to start. Is that someone leaving and going to work is an essential worker going to work, or is that the police coming for me? And I lived like that for a number of months. And then, as I said, I finally got arrested. I made the documentary. And making the documentary was amazing. It was an illegal documentary. It's the definition of an underground documentary. We could have been raided by the police, and I would have gone to prison for a long time if that had happened. Thankfully, that never did. But as during that time was when the police finally backed off the nurses and the teachers shamed them, like I told you that story before. And the police said, you know what? We're not doing the violence anymore. And so the size of the protests exploded. Hundreds of thousands of people. All of a sudden, where we'd been, we'd had 70 people at the start, and for 18 months, we'd been showing up and getting our butts kicked by the cops because there were only a few hundred of us. And there would be. At times, there were thousands of police. And then all of a sudden, the numbers exploded. And I went to one of those protests, and I literally watched a dream come true, because for 18 months, I had been showing up over and over and over again, waiting and hoping and praying for the day when people showed up en masse. And finally it happened. And I had the privilege of speaking at that at the biggest of the protests. Now, by some reports, there were up to 400,000 people there. I don't think it was that many, but there was certainly over a hundred thousand people there at this protest. And because I'd been a face of this movement all the way through, I was invited to speak. And I had the absolute privilege of standing up there and. And delivering a message that I'm proud of to this day, and stepping off to the side, and because the violence had stopped, my wife could come with me. And so we stood there side by side in front of over a hundred thousand people, watching a dream come true, watching people rise in a meaningful way after 18 months of hell. And that wasn't the end of my own journey. I had to go through another two years of kind of hell before my own healing would really begin. I had to deal with the alcohol addiction. I had to deal with a lot of the trauma. And obviously, a lot of that's still very real for me now, as you can see. But that moment, you don't get a moment like that without having to go through hell first to stand there and watch this sea of humanity gathering around this cause. And I turned to my wife after I'd stepped off from speaking, and I said, I'm sorry, babe, but I think today qualifies as the greatest day of my life. And she squeezed my hand and she said, it's okay. It's. It's. It's a good day. You're allowed to. You're allowed to enjoy. Enjoy the day. And what I live with now as a result of that moment and as a result of this whole experience is a knowledge that I passed the test. And this is something that I wish everyone could live with, because it's like Claudette Colvin. I was a spark, and the spark caught on, right? Imagine living with that for your whole life. Imagine knowing that for your whole life. Doesn't matter what anyone else says about, you're a criminal, you're this, you're that. No, no, no. I was a spark, and the spark caught on. And you don't get to live with that if you're not willing to walk through hell. And so can I really encourage each and every person watching and anyone that comes across this. We all have our own fights to fight. It might be with the school board over. Over what the curriculum is. It might be with local city. It might be at a state or a federal level, or it might be something else entirely. So often people shy away from those fights because we're afraid of the darkness that we have to walk through. But if you ever want to stand on a mountaintop like that, you're going to have to walk through that valley first. [01:00:18] Speaker A: Well, thank you, Topher. What an incredibly inspiring story. Thank you for your leadership, for your courage, for waking up very, very early to join us. I wouldn't be able to tell it, but like you said, you're a morning person. I'm not. I don't think I'd be that energetic so early in the morning. Again, folks, the book is Good People Break Bad Laws, Civil Disobedience in the Modern Age. Are we going to. Are you going to be working on an audio version of this or. [01:00:47] Speaker B: There is an audio version out there floating around. It's not on Audible because as an Australian, if you sell on Audible, you you make almost zero dollars. There is an audiobook out there, but there's also a Kindle as well as, sorry, that's my first book as well as I've got a second book which is also available in Kindle and in paperback. Amazon is the best place to go. [01:01:06] Speaker A: Well, thanks again, Topher, and thanks to the audience, all of you who joined us and had some really terrific questions. I want to remind you, if you are interested in joining us in person in Austin, Texas, it's about a month out. We're having our third Galts Gulch conference. If you are a young person aged 18 to 30, we have scholarships available and we'll help to subsidize your travel from different parts of the country and different parts of the world. It would be wonderful to see you there. I hope that we will see you next week. I'm going to be joined by John Tillman. He's CEO of the American Culture Project. And we're going to be talking about why it's morally right to celebrate entrepreneurial heroes. Hope to see you then.