Saturday, June 4, 2011

The First Great Speech of the YouTube Age

Lew Rockwell earlier this week linked to a speech Tom Woods delivered last Saturday in Los Angeles.

A friend later emailed me:
Bob, in case you haven't seen this, I highly recommend setting aside forty-eight minutes and taking a look. You won't be sorry. Over the past few years, Tom Woods has become one of the most eloquent, powerful, and prolific champions of liberty and freedom of our time.
I finally had a chance to view the speech this weekend. Woods delivers the speech in masterly form. He educates, he entertains, he makes you think, he makes you see things more clearly and he speaks of ways the growing power of the federal government can be reversed and why it should be.

My initial reaction to this speech is that what Thomas Paine did in writing Common Sense during the age of the pamphleteer, Woods may have done here in the age of YouTube. Listen to the speech, yourself, and pass it on.

15 comments:

  1. Rockwell, Woods and Ron Paul. Three greater people I do not know.

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  2. I was there for that speech. It gave me goose bumps. I thought it was the best speech I had ever heard from him but I wasn't sure if it was just because I was there live. Now seeing the video I know for sure it was just a great speech, period.

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  3. Hmmmm... Need to dedicate some time tonight.

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  4. It's so funny how everyone is saying this is his "best" presentation. I wonder how many are saying that, because they were TOLD it's his best, before watching it... and the hypnotic suggestion is kicking in...

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  5. Awesome. We weren't at the event, but few places are in greater need of a speech like that than California.

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  6. I watched it a few days ago, right after it was posted, and thought that, at the very least, it is one of his best! It's hard to pick, however, because he is such an eloquent speaker. His presentation from the Meltdown era on the Fed is also great. He also gave a great presentation in Bozeman, MT that I attended a few weeks ago.

    It makes it even harder that the Liberty Movement is so full of great speakers. Tom Woods, Peter Schiff, Ron Paul, and Judge Napolitano are, at least for me, the stand-outs.

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  7. This might be the greatest speech I've ever heard. I want the transcript. I might make my own and holla back.

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  8. I had high expectations of the speech because of the positive commentary, and I wasn't disappointed.

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  9. "The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else." I love that by Bastiat.

    I wish Tom Woods would run for President. Could you imagine how he would do in the debates? Then imagine him giving a speech like this the night he wins the Republican Primary.

    I can dream, can't I?

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  10. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FFhSr1A1do wow!!!
    he is funny too.

    I never really understood ron paul's position on some "extreme" things, but the above Tom wood's youtube video clarifies lot of them in few min.

    This guy needs to be media spokesperson or publicity guy for Ron Paul campaign.

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  11. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  12. It's OK. It ain't great.
    But in a day and an age when people don't know what real oratory, real public speaking, - iow real rhetoric - is all about, it certainly will do.

    Anon - I understand he is the the ghost writer of RP's two books in '08 and his own Meltdown is a killer.

    To his credit, he does point out that "extremist" should be added to the list of smear words that indicate you are winning an argument with a regressive/neocon. (The others are: racist, sexist, homophobe, nazi/white supremacist.)

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  13. greatness heard @ 36:20

    Still Woods reinforces, albeit subtly, the left vs. right paradigm. This feeds right into the conditioned programming most US adults have undergone and will make his well reasoned prose un-absorbable by the so-called left or progressives.

    His pledge to not criticize books he hasn't read might be a fine personal pledge, but for a small burgeoning movement like Libertarianism, removing any strategically offensive (and effective) rhetorical tool might not be advisable.

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  14. I love the speech. How can I get or capture just the audio, an MP3 file? I want to share it.

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