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An Interview with Presidential Candidate John McAfee

Photo of John McAfee by Gaga Skidmore CC BY-SA 3.0

Restore the Fourth previously reviewed the candidates seeking the Democratic Party’s nomination for President of the United States, and in an upcoming post we take a look at the 2020 nomination process for the Libertarian Party, America’s largest third party.

The 2020 Libertarian National Convention remains up in the air, a virtual convention is a possibility, and the party is considering moving the date of the convention from late May until sometime in July.

John McAfee, an antivirus software pioneer, cryptocurrency promoter, and someone who has been called the most interesting man in the world, is again seeking the Libertarian Party nomination for President after coming in 3rd place at the 2016 LNC. He is currently campaigning in exile, as he is wanted on tax fraud charges. From an undisclosed location, McAfee graciously took the time to speak with RT4 over a Skype call, using an anonymized internet connection to conceal his location. You can listen to the entire 18 minutes of audio from that interview here. Since doing the interview with RT4, he has said that he is also seeking the Libertarian Party’s nomination for Vice President as well.

“I am probably the most surveilled Americans outside of America,” McAfee laughs when asked for his opinion on NSA warrantless mass surveillance. “The CIA is watching me, and the NSA. The FBI is illegally watching my e-mails. Why? Because, even though I’m not on American soil, Google is an American company.” McAfee explains how the FBI was watching his wife, Janice McAfee’s, e-mails. Oddly enough they notified her a few months back, which means that they’ve stopped monitoring her, yet they continue to monitor his e-mails. “We are in a surveillance state, people.” “Go to any city in America, stand on any street corner, and just look up and count the cameras that are analyzing faces, movements. Taking photographs of license plates as they go through stop lights.”

“Use your smart phone to talk to a friend, on any medium you want to, about something specific, like brown penny loafers, and if you don’t get an ad for brown penny loafers within 5 minutes on some channel, Facebook, social media, an e-mail, then I’ll eat my shoe. ‘cause you know its true. How many times has it happened to you?”

McAfee believes marketeers have demanded that manufacturers build surveillance capabilities into their products to help them sell things and advertise to people. But if advertisers can surveil people, government and bad guys can as well. “Everything you say and do, and soon, everything that you even think will be known by our government.” He believes one of the greatest tricks ever played on the people is that they have convinced people to pay for their own surveillance. He says that him and his wife don’t have phones, but they still use the internet.

I ask him if his administration would then oppose mass surveillance programs and he admits that he will not be elected, even if he wins the Libertarian Party’s nomination for President. “It doesn’t matter who the President is anymore.” “The true power are our covert agencies, the CIA being one of them.” It seems he is running to get his message out to the people.

When asked if he thinks privacy coins like Monero give people financial privacy, he thanks me for bringing the topic of cryptocurrency up. “The only value of cryptocurrency to me are privacy coins and stable coins,” McAfee says. “Privacy coins, I use Monero, of course, everybody uses Monero. Why? It can’t be traced, no matter what you do. No one will ever know how much money you make, and what you spend, if you use Monero; and nobody should have the right to know, including your own government, for heavens sake. I don’t pay taxes. They are constitutionally in America illegal. And plus I paid $50 million or more in taxes in my lifetime, and I have not received $50 million in services. Ten years ago I said I’m not paying anymore, do what you want. They left me alone for 8 years until I went on a national stage and said I don’t pay taxes and you don’t have to either, use privacy coins and distributed exchanges, you’ll never have to pay another penny in taxes. Then they convened a grand jury to charge Janice and I with tax fraud. Well that’s bullshit, I haven’t committed tax fraud, I didn’t pay, big difference. You can only commit tax fraud if you lie. I didn’t send anything, I haven’t even filed, how can I lie? Do you understand the absurdity? Nevertheless, they have the power and they will always win, that’s just the way it works.”

Getting back onto the subject of cryptocurrencies, McAfee believes that the government will come after those making privacy coins. “They’re going to make Monero illegal, and they’re going to make distributed exchanges illegal, but who cares? Marijuana has been illegal for 75 years in America and most states, it didn’t stop a single person from smoking weed, neither will a law against privacy coins stop a single person from using them,” McAfee said. “You can’t stop it. Make all the law you want, laws that cannot be enforced are not laws and should be ignored. If they can’t be enforced it simply means they are not valid. Valid laws can be enforced because you have the support of the populace.”

McAfee believes that much of the computer hardware that people use is already vulnerable. “End-to-end encryption is useless. End-to-end encryption was designed to thwart what was called the man-in-the-middle attack. Someone who is monitoring the communication but because its encrypted cannot see what’s there. There is no man-in-the-middle anymore. Your smartphone, do you realize, before you send an encrypted message, you have to type it in in the clear? Has that occurred to anybody? And since everything you do is being watched, who cares if it’s encrypted after you’ve typed it in, or after you’ve loaded the unencrypted file? And on the receiver end, who cares that it was encrypted? I want to see it on my fucking screen. Well to do that you’ve to unencrypt it, who cares that in the middle it was encrypted? There was nobody there anyway. It’s the biggest scam going people. Christ almighty, encryption is useless. And the government’s attempt to end it is a smokescreen. A smokescreen so that we don’t notice that it doesn’t matter anyway. Please people, it is useless, no one is in the middle, they’re on both ends. You’re carrying the spy device which decrypts it, puts it on the screen, which is then captured and sent to whoever wants to fucking see it.”

“They’re all scams,” McAfee said of apps touting end-to-end encryption, and called the Tor Project “that network owned by the CIA.” “Who owns the fucking nodes? The CIA. Maybe not by money or bought, but they have all been compromised through malware. There is no safety through TOR, people you have no privacy, please stop searching for it. It does not exist and will not exist until we change this fucked up system.” “At some point of course” the system will get better, “it always does, because … at some point the people just rebel.,” McAfee said. “We’re approaching it pretty fucking rapidly if you ask me.”

“Revolution will come, I want it to be a revolution of the mind, where we voluntarily opt out of the financial system, which tens of thousands of us have done. We do not use fiat currencies, I get paid in cryptocurrency, when people work for me I pay them in cryptocurrency; buy a car, I buy it with cryptocurrency. We stayed in a hotel in London before we went underground back in July through just cryptocurrency. It’s coming people, come over to our side. This is how we win. We don’t win by fighting them, we win by leaving them. When we have all left there is nobody left to support the corruption and the excess that’s been created by our governments. McAfee went on to praise Edward Snowden for “shining a light on truth” and gave some life advice, which you can hear by listening to the entire interview.

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