Show 321 - Garbage In, Garbage Out

Speaker 1 Fiercely independent. It's common sense with Dan Carlin.

Speaker 1 I want to read you

Speaker 1 a paragraph from Richard Nixon, former President Richard Nixon's memoirs.

Speaker 1 And those of you who've listened to everything we've done, and there are a few of you out there, will know that I've quoted this phrase before, this paragraph before, because it's shocking.

Speaker 1 But if we're not careful,

Speaker 1 it's where we're heading again. It's from the section in Nixon's memoirs that deal with the year 1970.

Speaker 1 And Nixon writes, quote, from January 1969 through April 1970, that's 13 months, folks, there were, by conservative count, over 40,000 bombings, attempted bombings, and bomb threats.

Speaker 1 an average of over 80 a day. Over 21 million, that's more than 143 million in today's dollars, over $21 million in property was destroyed.
43 people were killed.

Speaker 1 Of these 40,000 incidents, 64% were by bombers whose identity and motive were unknown. End quote.

Speaker 1 1970 was smack dab

Speaker 1 in the center of one of the last real extremist eras in American history. We may be heading towards that again now.

Speaker 1 And those of you who fought forest fires in your life will be very aware of what I'm talking about now, but I'd like to draw an analogy.

Speaker 1 In a forest fire, you often have, obviously, raging flames, but once you've knocked those down, you have, you know, areas of hot spots, burning embers that glow, and that if you're not careful, can be reignited back into full-blown

Speaker 1 infernos.

Speaker 1 And the history of the United States is rife with these periods where those glowing embers can get stoked again into something extremely dangerous.

Speaker 1 The most dangerous times are when the glowing embers on both the right and the left extremes blow up into forest fires at the same time.

Speaker 1 Let me read you something else. This is from

Speaker 1 the works of H. L.
Mencken, who's known as the sage of Baltimore.

Speaker 1 And Mencken is not as as revered as he used to be because, well, you know, he had some tendencies too that people look back on and go, well, he's not a very

Speaker 1 admirable figure in some respects, but he's writing here before the Second World War about his opinion of Americans.

Speaker 1 And the reason that I use this piece is to show

Speaker 1 that there was not some mythical period where, you know, America was great and everything was wonderful.

Speaker 1 When you hear what Mencken is saying, you'll be able to say, gosh, he could have written some of this yesterday, couldn't he? And Mencken writes, quote,

Speaker 1 It is, for example, one of my firmest and most sacred beliefs, reached after an inquiry extending over a score of years and supported by incessant prayer and meditation, that the government of the United States, in both its legislative arm and its executive arm, is ignorant, incompetent, corrupt, and disgusting.

Speaker 1 And from this judgment, I accept no more than 20 living lawmakers and no more than 20 executioners of their laws.

Speaker 1 It is a belief no less piously cherished, he writes, that the administration of justice in the Republic is stupid, dishonest, and against all reason and equity.

Speaker 1 And from this judgment, I accept no more than 30 judges, including two upon the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Speaker 1 It is another that the foreign policy of the United States, its habitual manner of dealing with other nations, whether friend or foe, is hypocritical, disingenuous, knavish, and dishonorable.

Speaker 1 And from this judgment, I consent to no exceptions whatever, either recent or long past.

Speaker 1 And it is my fourth, and to avoid too depressing a bill, final conviction, that the American people, taking one with another, constitute the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages, and that they grow more timorous, more sniveling, more poltroonish, and more ignominious every day.

Speaker 1 End quote.

Speaker 1 So, let us purge ourselves from some idea that there was this time when all was well and we have fallen from you know the heights of our former greatness

Speaker 1 the more things change the more they stay the same

Speaker 1 those of you who are getting this program soon after we recorded it will know that we had a

Speaker 1 storming of the u.s capitol about a week or so ago

Speaker 1 an outbreak of mob violence, which reminds me of mob violence that we've had lately on on the other side too. We've talked about this when it came to Black Lives Matter protests and whatnot.

Speaker 1 And I specifically pointed out that it is impossible to control mob violence and that to slam organizers of protests, to

Speaker 1 take offense at the killing, for example, of black folks by police officers, that this stuff is

Speaker 1 likely to involve elements in the protest that the protesters themselves and the organizers of the protest do not want, do not favor, and cannot control.

Speaker 1 Ever been to one of these things?

Speaker 1 Try controlling it, right? Who's in charge? Who's got any authority over the people in the protest, right?

Speaker 1 So the dynamics of the mob violence that you saw at the Capitol building the other day are similar. Not the same, but similar.

Speaker 1 And you'll often hear supporters of that cause say, say, well, most people were peaceful, but some people, you know, did things that none of us are proud of, or whatever the justifications will be.

Speaker 1 This is true.

Speaker 1 The same problem exists, except for one difference. I can't think of a single human being, not Barack Obama, not anyone I can come up with who could have gone to some of the more

Speaker 1 out of control, because many of them were peaceful, and many of them were out of control because

Speaker 1 of police activity sometimes.

Speaker 1 But I can't think of a single individual who could have gone to, say, one of these BLM protests that got out of hand and involved quite a bit of looting and whatnot and put a stop to it.

Speaker 1 Grabbed a bullhorn, told everybody to cease and desist and have an end.

Speaker 1 I think somebody could have done that at the Capitol violence the other day. The President of the United States played a unique role in stoking this.

Speaker 1 And it's not a surprise. What did we say at the last show? We called it steering into the iceberg.
Well, you know, icebergs hoe. Here we go.

Speaker 1 And when I read the comments by his supporters and when I read the comments by

Speaker 1 what I would consider to be people on the extreme opposite side of the political spectrum, it is amazing how much they sound like people on the two ends of the U.S.

Speaker 1 political spectrum from 20 years ago, 40 years ago, 60 years ago, 80 years ago.

Speaker 1 There are elements to it.

Speaker 1 I mean, for example, I was doing some research into the extremism on the right in the United States recently, and they have certain qualities, certain known aspects that are still apparent today.

Speaker 1 I mean, one of the things that is always pointed out is that there's a paranoid conspiracy aspect to the right-wing extremism in this country.

Speaker 1 You still see that now.

Speaker 1 I mean, William F.

Speaker 1 Buckley in the early 1960s, representing the more mainstream element of conservatism, criticized the more extreme element of conservatism represented by the John Birch Society by saying that it was far removed from common sense.

Speaker 1 In other words, that it was prone to paranoid and conspiracy ideas. Well, the difference between that era, of course, and now is that if you wanted to share such ideas,

Speaker 1 your options were limited.

Speaker 1 I mean, everybody who knows anything about the Kennedy assassination is familiar with the flyers, the leaflets that were posted on like telephone polls and whatnot in Dallas, you know, calling for the President of the United States to be prosecuted because he was a traitor, it said, right?

Speaker 1 Or when I was a kid, you'd come out of the grocery store, the supermarket sometimes, and you would see all the cars in the parking lot of the supermarket with flyers that had been placed underneath the windshield wipers.

Speaker 1 And and somebody had mimeographed a bunch of pamphlets, and that was the way that they distributed them, because there was no internet, right?

Speaker 1 What the internet has done is added a variable to the ability to spread these paranoid conspiracy ideas that the right has always been prone to in a more

Speaker 1 efficient fashion.

Speaker 1 The left has its own problems, and they are well diagrammed too.

Speaker 1 I mean, I was watching the other day there was another video posted, I think this was from San Diego, and it showed some Trump supporters trying to speak or do something and a bunch of black clad opponents who eventually sprayed them in the face with some caustic substance and then attacked them.

Speaker 1 This is a variation, I think, I don't think I'm out of line by saying this, of the punch Nazis idea, which I pointed out over and over again is absolutely counterproductive.

Speaker 1 Wasn't it Noam Chomsky Ben, the famous left-wing thinker who had said that Antifa was a gift to the right?

Speaker 1 Well, if you didn't believe that, take a look at how the people who are trying to somehow deflect criticism of the storming of the Capitol the other day use Antifa as their distraction, right?

Speaker 1 They just say, well, were you saying that with Antifa? I mean,

Speaker 1 Representative Matt Gates of Florida on the House floor when the blood is still flowing outside his chambers during the electoral certification has the gall to quote an article he said he read in the Washington Times that said that the people that just did this weren't Trump supporters.

Speaker 1 They were Antifa.

Speaker 1 A gift to the right indeed.

Speaker 1 But folks, these things play off of each other, right?

Speaker 1 As we said a long time ago on this show, if you don't have an enemy to contrast your own extremism with, then it is the extreme, let's just say in this case, the right, but the left works just as well, then it is the extremists against the rest of us.

Speaker 1 And that doesn't play too well. But when it's an extremist against another extremist and the regular folks are caught in the middle, that's a different story.
That's Weimar Germany.

Speaker 1 When you have Nazis able to blame communists and communists able to blame Nazis and the people in the middle are kind of forced to choose sides.

Speaker 1 Nobody's kind of allowed to choose the middle ground, right?

Speaker 1 It becomes an either-or, and both the either and the or are the glowing embers in the forest fire that are being stoked into a raging flame that, you know, in the case of Weimar Germany, will burn the whole place down.

Speaker 1 I mean, if you don't believe the idea that

Speaker 1 the extreme right is prone to paranoid and conspiracy ideas, I mean, look at the traitor mania that's going on right now. It is positively French revolutionary in its reign of terror-like qualities.

Speaker 1 And by that, I mean the second anybody steps out of line from the status quo, from the line of orthodoxy, all of a sudden a person who may have been manning the guillotine one second ago, the mob calls for them to be

Speaker 1 strapped to it and have their head chopped off. Hang Mike Pence!

Speaker 1 Remember that? Five seconds after Mike Pence is

Speaker 1 an ally. And they do this.
I mean, that's Robespierre, right? Gets his head cut off by the very reign of terror that he helped, you know, inspire and take part in. We're seeing that again.

Speaker 1 History is a wonderful, isn't it, a wonderful gauge to look at and go, wow, you know, the costumes change, the background sets change, but those human beings in the story are remarkably consistent.

Speaker 1 There are new variables. Like we said, the Internet is a new variable.

Speaker 1 It's a lot easier to spread a paranoid conspiracy message online than it used to be.

Speaker 1 The president himself is almost a representative of the Times. He's like the conspiracy believer-in-chief.
I mean, Trump has always been a conspiracy guy. Remember

Speaker 1 the fake birth certificate, Barack Obama, not born in this country. I mean, he was doing that long before he was president.
Now, there's two ways of looking at this, aren't there?

Speaker 1 Either he believes it or he doesn't. If he believes it, well, he's a paranoid conspiracy monger himself.

Speaker 1 If he doesn't believe believe it, he is a manipulator of the public consciousness, and the tools that he uses for manipulation are like throwing gasoline on those glowing embers of American extremism that are always hot and just one step away from igniting again.

Speaker 1 Either way, do you want to talk traitors? That sounds like a traitor to me, not to join the traitor mania of the moment.

Speaker 1 He is the only president I've ever seen, the only president I've ever heard of, that treats his followers and the people that voted for him as his own personal group and the other Americans who didn't do that as the opposition.

Speaker 1 Every other president, whether they mean it or not, and this is what General James Mattis' criticism of Trump was, that he had never seen a president that didn't consider him a president of all Americans.

Speaker 1 When President Trump is exhorting his crowd to go march down the Capitol to sort of stiffen the backbone of...

Speaker 1 Vice President Pence while he's certifying the election results so that he can do something he can't do constitutionally.

Speaker 1 I I mean, this is a person who's got, you know, our side against the other side, and he's supposed to be the president of everybody.

Speaker 1 If for no other reason than that, the president should have jettisoned his rights to be the president, because you can't be the president only of the people who vote for you.

Speaker 1 I mean, that should be obvious. That's a break with American tradition that, as far as I know, and I could be wrong about this, but as far as I know, that's never been done by any American president.

Speaker 1 And I think that's what James Mattis was saying. Now, the people can desert the president and say, you're not my president.
I mean, the South with Abraham Lincoln is an example of that.

Speaker 1 But that doesn't mean that Lincoln writes off those people as, you know, not his constituents, right? I'm not the president of Southerners. I'm only the president of Northerners.

Speaker 1 Lincoln didn't say that.

Speaker 1 In addition to trader mania, we also have the resurgence. And this is...
This is a right-wing extremist thing in this country and always has been.

Speaker 1 One of those glowing coals that never totally dies out.

Speaker 1 commie mania you see it everywhere don't you communist communist socialist communist communist I mean I grew up in an era that we were still making fun of the people right before my era who were so into this and it it's a spell

Speaker 1 I mean during the McCarthy era it was a spell and those of us old enough to remember remember and almost like an inoculation afterwards that was trying to be like a national vaccine to prevent that from happening again and we celebrated the line

Speaker 1 and it's a famous line from

Speaker 1 a guy named Joseph Welch, who during the mania of the McCarthy hearings said famously, have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency to Joseph McCarthy?

Speaker 1 And it broke the spell.

Speaker 1 And after, it's funny, only a few years after that, everybody was kind of going, well, this was something we got, that got out of hand, right?

Speaker 1 Thought we were just going to root out the communists in our country and ended up undermining many of the basic values that we want to have a country protected from the communists for.

Speaker 1 It's hard to blame people, though. And I've said this repeatedly for

Speaker 1 beliefs in conspiracy theories and for paranoia.

Speaker 1 and for ideas about things like fake news, because we are being lied to relentlessly right now from all sides.

Speaker 1 And we've talked, haven't we, about the difficulty in the times we live in right now of separating fact from fiction? It's never been easy, but there's so much more

Speaker 1 opportunities to get misled now than there ever were before and to hide in your own little bubble.

Speaker 1 I mean, those of you who are

Speaker 1 computer programmer types, you're familiar with the phrase. Many of you who aren't are familiar with the phrase too, garbage in, garbage out.

Speaker 1 I mean, a lot of these people who took part in this mob violence at the Capitol building the other day,

Speaker 1 I sort of pity and feel sorry for

Speaker 1 because they made what they think was a logical decision based on garbage evidence.

Speaker 1 Let me give you an example of what I mean. I read the comments that people write at the bottom of news stories.
I think that's interesting.

Speaker 1 I've never known whether or not you're reading a representative sample of public opinion out there, whether you're just reading an extreme example of the people willing to

Speaker 1 talk after the news story or make their opinions known. But I read that stuff on extremism, well, extremism, far-right and far-left websites.

Speaker 1 And I read one, although it's only slightly more extreme than many of the others on that website that said that after the election, the Democrats were planning on opening up concentration camps and putting conservatives in concentration camps.

Speaker 1 And instead of other conservatives on the far-right website saying, that's crazy, they were starting to riff off that possibility and what you would do if that happened.

Speaker 1 Folks, if you believe that, if that's the garbage in going into your computer, in your brain, and it's being amplified by other people whose views you respect and in conversations with people you take part in all the time, if they're they're amplifying those ideas and you truly believe that the opposition party in your country is going to lock your people into concentration camps, well, what's the right move then?

Speaker 1 We lost, well, we lost five people, didn't we, at the Capitol storming the other day? One of them was an Air Force veteran, multi-tour Air Force veteran, a young lady.

Speaker 1 Of course, at my age, everybody's looking kind of young these days.

Speaker 1 But she was shot by Capitol police officers, and she was there because she fervently believed some of this nonsense.

Speaker 1 But how difficult is it for her to discern what's nonsense and what's not? And if you truly believe the stakes are as high as some of these websites make them out to be,

Speaker 1 well, the garbage in might suggest that we're living in absolutely existential times.

Speaker 1 Well, if you think you're going to be in a concentration camp after the election is ratified, well, what's the proper response to that, right?

Speaker 1 So these people were coming up with ridiculous conclusions because the evidence that they were using to make their determination was false. Who's responsible for that?

Speaker 1 Well, once again, we have a diffused

Speaker 1 hierarchy of responsibility in most of these cases because just like Representative Matt Gates from Florida had said, he read it in the Washington Times.

Speaker 1 So is the Washington Times responsible for this? It's just one of thousands of outlets on all sides of the political spectrum spouting all sorts of clickbait garbage.

Speaker 1 But again, in this case, we have a slightly different situation. The president is stoking this stuff.

Speaker 1 If you believe the president of the United States, then you yourself are getting garbage implanted in your brain.

Speaker 1 And hence, when your brain, your computer, starts making the calculations, well, if two plus two equals five, what does that mean for everything else?

Speaker 1 You start thinking, well, we've got to go do this, right?

Speaker 1 This is where the president crosses the line in my mind from something that other presidents have done to something that makes him a uniquely divisive

Speaker 1 and dangerous force.

Speaker 1 You should not be allowed to do this. And he's done so many different things that have crossed the line from what other presidents have done that we've become immune to it.

Speaker 1 He lied. You know, it's funny because politicians lie.
Proverbially, they lie.

Speaker 1 And we've talked about this before. I've interviewed thousands of politicians and they almost think it's funny when you believe that their campaign promises are real.

Speaker 1 I mean, in their mind, I talked to one guy who was, he was fervently of the belief that nobody believes campaign promises. So it's okay that they're not kept, right?

Speaker 1 Because nobody actually takes them that seriously. And we've called in the past, haven't we?

Speaker 1 It's a pity there's no contracts. It's a pity you can't sue these people for saying, I'll do this, that, and the other thing, and then having no intention of doing this, that, and the other thing.

Speaker 1 So campaign promises are proverbially not worth anything.

Speaker 1 And it would be very difficult for somebody to go farther than that, right? To make it any worse. But the current president, in his ability to do everything better, bigger,

Speaker 1 more beautiful than anybody else, lies on a scale that no one's ever seen before in a president. Again, hard to do when political campaign promises are routinely broken the way they are.

Speaker 1 This guy lies so often we stop paying attention to the lies. That's almost a genius strategy, by the way, to lie so often that nobody even cares.

Speaker 1 And if you read his books, if you read the books that the ghost writers have written with him, he cops to this, but he frames it in a way like a P.T. Barnum.
People want big things.

Speaker 1 You want to exaggerate everything's the biggest, the most beautiful thing.

Speaker 1 Well, okay, that might be one thing as a businessman trying to hype his own persona and importance in the non-political world, but it's a very different animal when you're the president of the United States and people are going to believe you.

Speaker 1 Garbage in, garbage out, and an Air Force veteran of multi-tours goes to the Capitol, goes in there, and gets shot by a Capitol policeman. Who's responsible for that death?

Speaker 1 And for those of you who think that those people shouldn't have been shot, can somebody break a window in your house and crawl in and not have you respond to that?

Speaker 1 If somebody killed a burglar who did that, would you say, well, they ought to be locked up for shooting that person?

Speaker 1 95% of Americans are going to go, no, you shouldn't have gone in that person's house. And for those of you, and I've seen this too, who will say something to the effect of, that's the people's house.

Speaker 1 I paid for that. I should be able to go in there.
Give me, how much of that house did you pay for? Right?

Speaker 1 And if that philosophy were taken to its logical conclusions, well, my goodness, anybody could break the window. Any taxpaying American could break the window and just go, can you break way?

Speaker 1 Here's a better way to to look at it. Can you break the window that I paid for? Right? I mean, no, you can't.

Speaker 1 Those people who broke into the Capitol, and you know, you can go watch the video of it, and started climbing in the windows that they just broke in the Capitol building are lucky that the Capitol police at that moment did not open fire on them and killed 10 of them.

Speaker 1 Very lucky. And most Americans would have been okay with that.

Speaker 1 It is a travesty, what was was done. An absolute travesty.

Speaker 1 But that's the dynamics of mob violence, folks. I imagine there were Trump supporters at that rally looking at what was going on in horror from a distance.

Speaker 1 When they started beating up Capitol Policemen, I saw, and I watch these videos over and over again, I saw the one guy who was held down, there's a wonderful still photo, held down by the neck while people beat the back of him with a baton, in one case, crutches.

Speaker 1 But you know what? If you watch the whole video, there were several people that grabbed that guy and surrounded him and tried to protect him from the very mob that was beating him.

Speaker 1 And they're all on the same side, ostensibly. That's mob violence, folks.
It's the same thing you saw at the most out-of-control of the BLM protests, too.

Speaker 1 Go to a riot sometimes, ladies and gentlemen, and see it firsthand and then try to imagine how on earth you could control that.

Speaker 1 But in the case, as we said, of this particular one, there was one guy who could control it, and the members of Congress were beseeching him to do just that. Go on TV, have a national address.

Speaker 1 Even the president-elect Biden said that to the president. Go on time.

Speaker 1 And there's something wrong with the president of the United States.

Speaker 1 And we've said this before, whether it's a narcissistic thing or a personality disorder, where he is loath to criticize supporters, whether they are people that voted for him in the election, people who wear his Make America great hats, or people like, you know, foreign dictators or, or strong men in other countries who say nice things about him.

Speaker 1 When this guy was elected, we told you he's a man with a personality disorder. Clearly.

Speaker 1 Now, that doesn't mean we haven't had other presidents with personality disorders, but once again, this person elevates the bar to an entirely new level.

Speaker 1 That guy I quoted earlier, Richard Nixon, who I consider to be almost

Speaker 1 a Greek tragedy kind kind of figure because he had a marvelous brain. Marvelous.
Read his books.

Speaker 1 You'd give your right arm for somebody with that kind of brain today, but he had moral problems and he had paranoia problems.

Speaker 1 But once again, Trump has managed to eclipse Nixon in the history books as a president whose personality disorders overshadow everything and color everything he does.

Speaker 1 And now you see the results in the country. I quoted the Richard Nixon line about all the bombings because look at all the death threats we have.

Speaker 1 And if you said to the right-wingers out there, what's with all these death threats? They'll say, well, what about all these anti-Fat people going to legislators' homes?

Speaker 1 Or I saw a video from Portland a couple of days ago where I think it was the mayor of Portland is having dinner in a restaurant and a bunch of

Speaker 1 I hesitate to label them because you don't want to label somebody and have it be the wrong group.

Speaker 1 Let's call it an antifa type couple of people go in there and start assaulting him verbally. I think he says one of them actually slapped him in a restaurant, called him horrible names.

Speaker 1 It's all on video. That is so unbelievably wrong.

Speaker 1 So to sit there and go, well, what about the other side? An eye for an eye makes you know the whole world blind, as the saying goes. And the same goes for these extremists on both sides.

Speaker 1 You want to go punch Nazis? What happens when the Nazis punch back and then everybody's punching everybody?

Speaker 1 And then the people in the middle of the road, the great mass of the Americans out there, are torn between you know, which of the extremes do you naturally hate the most?

Speaker 1 There's a line from Dwight Eisenhower that I like. And Eisenhower is one of these presidents that I think is underrated, including by yours truly.

Speaker 1 I've come to appreciate Eisenhower more and more as I've gotten older.

Speaker 1 And he had a line that was sort of in response to some other politicians around the world who've made comments about the middle of the road, right? So we're talking about extremes here.

Speaker 1 And the middle of the road would be not too far left, not too far right. The traditional, you know, the celebrated American part of the political spectrum, I would say.
And

Speaker 1 the line always was that, you know, the middle of the road is where the roadkill is or where people get run over.

Speaker 1 Margaret Thatcher said people who are in the middle of the road, meaning politically, get run over by both sides, right, by the left and the right. And Eisenhower's response to that was this.

Speaker 1 You know, Eisenhower, obviously, Republican president, 1950s, and he said, quote, people talk about the middle of the road as though it were unacceptable.

Speaker 1 Actually, all human problems except morals come into the gray areas. Things are not all black and white.
There have to be compromises. The middle of the road is all the usable surface.

Speaker 1 The extremes of right and left are in the gutters.

Speaker 1 End quote.

Speaker 1 We're in the gutters now, folks, and heading towards

Speaker 1 worse.

Speaker 1 All this talk that you hear,

Speaker 1 for example, from President-elect Biden about unity,

Speaker 1 that's because unity right now is the only way out of this mess. Is it possible? That is debatable.
But there is no alternative to it.

Speaker 1 At least the dampening down of the extremes is the only way to avoid that 1970 you know, 40,000 bombings, bombing attempts, and bomb threats that we quoted from Nixon's memoirs, right?

Speaker 1 You want to go back to that again?

Speaker 1 Because it doesn't lead anywhere positive. You end up at the same place afterwards, just after all the damage has been done.
So why not just cut out the damage and head to that place?

Speaker 1 Why not try to break the spell of this reign of terror moment we're having, the sort of the French revolutionary freak out time period, right? The traitor mania time period?

Speaker 1 Because either one of two things is going to happen.

Speaker 1 First of all, banish, if you're sympathetic to one extreme or the other here, banish something from your thinking right away and then try to recalibrate after you've done so.

Speaker 1 Banish the thought that you're going to win because you're not going to win, right?

Speaker 1 This is not a struggle where eventually the right wing is going to be victorious and we're going to banish Americans who don't think like us and we're going to split off into another country.

Speaker 1 It's not going to happen. And for the left, there's nothing you can do that is going to make the opposition people that you want to punch in the face right now go away.

Speaker 1 They're not going to go away because you punch them. They're much more likely to band together and try to punch back.
The middle of the road is the only usable surface.

Speaker 1 All of these things that we're seeing right now.

Speaker 1 Are you upset that things like social media are being constrained right now? Well, guess who you have to thank for that? A bunch of people who go on websites and

Speaker 1 print stuff like civil war is coming and get your guns ready. And for those of you who say, I read these people, go, oh, this is crazy.

Speaker 1 This is an unbelievable imposition on my freedom of speech rights.

Speaker 1 When America was great, and I don't know when that was, no one has ever actually said, well, America was great between this time period and this by 1789. I mean, I don't know when America was great.

Speaker 1 Remember that quote we did from H.L. Mencken? Was America great then? When he's saying such terrible things about everything, right? That was the 30s or 40s.
So is that when America was great?

Speaker 1 But if you thought that you could go and start calling for the overthrow of the government or killing your fellow citizens or any of the stuff you say.

Speaker 1 The stuff that gets people thrown off of social media now, because it's a violation of terms, if you wanted to do them both in the analog era when I was a kid, you either did it the way that Kennedy treason leaflet was done, right?

Speaker 1 In the dead of night, you post it up on some.

Speaker 1 telephone poll, or you do it like people like the cult leader Tony Olamo was doing at the supermarkets in Southern California where his followers would, in a clandestine way, sort of put them under the windshield wipers of all the cars.

Speaker 1 Or you did it like Lee Harvey Oswald did with the Fair Play for Cuba picket signs that he would do, in which case you would be outside of maybe the federal courthouse with a placard that would say something to the effect of, you know, Second Amendment time, time to take out the traders if the president does not get the electoral vote overturned, in which case all your neighbors would have seen you and the FBI would have probably come and had a little conversation with you outside the federal courthouse.

Speaker 1 So, the ability to do this in a way that is supposed to be, in your mind anyway, anonymous, is something that has allowed us to do in the digital era something that was not doable really in the analog era.

Speaker 1 And go look at the laws on the books, folks. There are laws against incitement to riot.
There are laws against inciting violence. Those things are from when America was great.

Speaker 1 So, if you're saying somehow some sacred right that goes back to Thomas Jefferson is gone now because you can't say something on parlor that you used to be able to to say. You're wrong.

Speaker 1 It is only because of the wild west nature of the internet in the early 1990s when regular people first started using it.

Speaker 1 So when the mosaics and the netscapes and the alta vistas and those early web browsers made it possible for non-super geeky experts to begin to go on the internet and use message boards and bulletin boards and BBSs and all those kinds of things, that this ability first arose.

Speaker 1 And it was because of a lack of institutionalization, right?

Speaker 1 It was a wild west. And it's just now I read something from the UN where they were saying it's time to start regulating the internet.
And I don't want that.

Speaker 1 But you can see why they do, because the difference between what you can do online versus what you could do in the analog world is becoming more and more disconnected.

Speaker 1 They want to create the same sort of conditions online that existed in the analog world. You can't call for civil war in the analog world without getting in trouble.

Speaker 1 The fact you could do it online is a manifestation of the way the internet developed and the fact that it's been relatively light touch in terms of the ability to monitor it and enforce it and police it.

Speaker 1 Now, I don't want it to be policed, but I don't want

Speaker 1 people calling for civil war and incitement to violence and all that stuff either. So you have two choices.
That either has to stop or something has to be done.

Speaker 1 You can't live with the internet options being so out of whack with what you're allowed to do in the real world. And when America was great, you couldn't do that stuff, certainly not anonymously.

Speaker 1 Of course, we all know how anonymous all this stuff really is now, don't we?

Speaker 1 Obviously, there's another problem.

Speaker 1 And we alluded to it earlier when we said that we are being lied to. relentlessly.

Speaker 1 We alluded to it earlier when we said it's a case of garbage in, garbage out, and how I actually feel sorry for many of these people who are now going to be facing charges

Speaker 1 because of what they did when they broke into the Capitol building based on a bunch of information that I think they're probably starting to realize, at least some of them, was not true, right?

Speaker 1 If you think your family is going to be locked up in concentration camps tomorrow, well, listen, storming the Capitol seems like a logical response, doesn't it?

Speaker 1 But when you find out that that was never going to happen,

Speaker 1 well, then it's a crazy response. That's an obvious, you know, glaring hole right now in our body politic.
How does one get good information?

Speaker 1 Now, this is going to make a lot of people in the fake news

Speaker 1 crowd, the people who say that all this stuff is propaganda, you're not going to like hearing this, but I was watching 60 Minutes the other night and I almost almost cried when I saw one story.

Speaker 1 And I said to my wife after I saw it, I said, this is a reminder of what good journalism can still do.

Speaker 1 And it's so rare to see it, you know, especially on a big, sometimes you can find wonderful little stories on websites and go, that's a great story.

Speaker 1 60 Minutes did a piece sort of deconstructing the idea that there was election fraud in Georgia. And they did it wonderfully.
And they did it by interviewing the principals.

Speaker 1 And then they did it by showing what one of the main pieces of evidence that people cite is proof positive that the election was stolen in Georgia and proving that that's fake.

Speaker 1 And then showing that both President Trump and Rudy Giuliani, who've been going around saying, I mean, in that conversation Trump had with the Georgia officials where he named one person, say,

Speaker 1 she's a known vote fraudster or whatever, and they showed that this was not true, right? That the video had been edited by the Trump people and that both Trump and Giuliani knew it had been edited.

Speaker 1 In other words, they were lying. Giuliani should probably be disbarred.

Speaker 1 And then after showing you the whole video and having the Georgia officials themselves explain what happened, they interviewed these Georgia officials.

Speaker 1 They interviewed the CEO, the COO, I believe was his title in Georgia of the election, I think it was.

Speaker 1 And they interviewed the Secretary of State, the guy who that Trump talked to on the phone in that famous now phone call, that infamous now phone call.

Speaker 1 By the way, a two-time Trump voter and financial contributor to his campaign. And the COO of Georgia was also a Republican.
These are all friends, right? This is your side.

Speaker 1 And they both tore apart this this conspiracy theory that Georgia had been stolen.

Speaker 1 They asked, 60 Minutes asked the Secretary of State that they said Trump's, and I'm going from memory here, so don't hold me to account on the number, but the Trump campaign was claiming something like 5,000 dead people voted in Georgia.

Speaker 1 And 60 Minutes asked the Secretary of State, a financial contributor to Donald Trump's campaign, how many dead people voted in Georgia? And he said two. And the 60 Minutes questioner said 2,000?

Speaker 1 He said, no, two.

Speaker 1 A little bit of a a difference there, right? As he said to Trump on the phone call, your data is wrong.

Speaker 1 Either you know your data is wrong, in which case you are fomenting all of this mob violence based on a lie that you know is a lie, or you are the conspiracy believer in chief and you don't buy it yourself because you're unhinged too.

Speaker 1 In which case, neither one of those cases should you be president.

Speaker 1 One of my favorite pieces that should show how ridiculous the idea that the election was stolen is what Lindsey Graham said after

Speaker 1 the riots had been quelled a little bit, although blood is still on the floor outside

Speaker 1 the Senate offices or the House offices. And Lindsey Graham, whose opinion can change moment by moment, let's not give him any sort of credit for being consistent.

Speaker 1 But Lindsey Graham gets up there and says, you know, something like, I'm off the train, right? I'm not doing.

Speaker 1 And he said, and again, quoting from memory, so I apologize if the numbers are wrong, but he said he asked the Trump administration for ammunition, not because he's trying to argue with them about whether there was fraud or whether there isn't fraud, but because he wants to make the argument for them, right?

Speaker 1 I'm your ally. Give me some ammunition.
He says that the Trump campaign was telling him we have thousands and thousands and thousands of these pieces of fraud.

Speaker 1 And so Lindsey Graham said, you know, he's talking about the dead people voting or he's talking about these, these other, he says, he says, give me 10, right? Just give me 10.

Speaker 1 And he either said they gave him one or they gave him none. Now, this isn't a court of law that's going to dismiss this on standing.

Speaker 1 This isn't a court of law where Rudy Giuliani can't say something that will get him in trouble if he knows it's not true because he's under oath.

Speaker 1 This is a friend who's going to make your case for you, and you can tell him anything you want because if he's lying, if you give him a lie, he's going to lie for you. And they couldn't produce it.

Speaker 1 My stepdad's voice, he's been dead now since 1999, but it comes into my head sometimes.

Speaker 1 He was a wonderful rock to have me anchor my wild ideas to sometimes when I was younger. He'd ground you with certain common sense realities.
He always did it the same way. He'd go, Dan, Dan, Dan.

Speaker 1 And then he'd bring you down to earth with comments that were hard to refute. And on this one, I can hear his voice in my head.
He would say, Dan, Dan, Dan.

Speaker 1 Do you know how many people would have to be involved in a conspiracy to steal an election like this in multiple states? Let's just say it's more than a handful, right?

Speaker 1 Probably hundreds, okay? Do you know what a person like that, if they decided to turn states evidence, and you'd have to have something, right?

Speaker 1 Some text messages, some emails, some taped phone calls, whatever it might be to back your case up, but you know, you probably would.

Speaker 1 Do you know how much a person like that would profit in dollars from doing that and reputation and get their names in the history books, some anonymous figure nobody's ever heard of, and all of a sudden you can be in the history books.

Speaker 1 All you have to do is bring the president real evidence and you'll get a book deal and you'll make millions and millions of dollars. And my stepdad would say, Dan,

Speaker 1 it's unrealistic to the nth degree to think that with all the people that would have had to have been involved in a stealing of the election like this, that somebody wouldn't go for the money.

Speaker 1 It defies human nature. And the only reason that you're willing to believe that is because you want to.

Speaker 1 All right?

Speaker 1 And if you want to believe the election is stolen and it wasn't, then what role are you playing in creating the kind of conditions where we're not too far away from a time where we could see those same kinds of figures that Richard Nixon gave for 1970?

Speaker 1 Again, when you could turn the United States into a giant version of Belfast, Ireland during the Troubles. That what you want?

Speaker 1 Or maybe, you know, you just like to see things burn. There's arsonists out there.
There's people. Listen, there were some people, there's no doubt.

Speaker 1 I see this at the BLM protests that get out of hand. I see it definitely at the Capitol One that got out of hand.
There's people that just look at this. It's fun and exciting.
It's stimulating.

Speaker 1 We're out there. I mean, go look at some of the footage, right? They're having, this is, you know, wild.
The adrenaline's going. Feel like you're participating in history.

Speaker 1 At what cost, though?

Speaker 1 At what cost?

Speaker 1 My goal, folks,

Speaker 1 as you know, I think a lot of people's goal is at this point, once you stare extremism on both sides and some kind of,

Speaker 1 like we said, some kind of nasty reality, stare it right in the face, my goal is to get us off this ledge.

Speaker 1 I've said for years that I felt like we were in a cold civil war, and all of a sudden it's not so cold anymore. So what happens after a civil war? I'm already looking towards reconstruction.

Speaker 1 How do we get back to a time when we cool these extremes down to a point where they're glowing embers? And you can't do anything more.

Speaker 1 I mean, glowing embers is the best you could hope for rather than, you know, gasoline-infused, raging infernos.

Speaker 1 A system like ours can survive with the extremes on both ends of the spectrum being 1% or 2%, just throwing fake numbers out there to make a point, right? Small, small numbers of people.

Speaker 1 But it can't survive when it's 20% extreme left and 20% extreme right. That is the very definition of Abraham Lincoln's a house divided against itself cannot stand type situation.

Speaker 1 It's easier for me to

Speaker 1 speak to the people who wrap themselves in the flag and call themselves patriots here because I know if you say you love the United States of America, how could you be involving yourself in stuff that gives you a pretty good chance of ripping it apart, of ruining it?

Speaker 1 right? So, if you love this country, you best not go down this road anymore because you're opening the door up to the most dangerous time this country's seen in more than a generation.

Speaker 1 And if you're on the other side, the far other side, let me just suggest that the backlash that you could get from

Speaker 1 your involvement in this, it's the people who think that punching Nazis is going to be a good thing because it makes it impossible for Nazis to speak,

Speaker 1 you're going to see that there's a backlash there too.

Speaker 1 When you lose the high ground and when public opinion starts equating you for punching Nazis with the Nazis themselves, you know, a pox on both their houses, both sides are bad.

Speaker 1 And you can see it, like Noam Chomsky said, right, Antifa is the greatest gift to the right. Because when people say, how dare you?

Speaker 1 storm the capital, look at the lives you've lost, look at the president you support who encourages you to do that. And they say, what about Antifa?

Speaker 1 What if they didn't have that excuse?

Speaker 1 Then it's just the far right against the rest of us. And you lose that if you're the far right.

Speaker 1 Remember, ladies and gentlemen, in a conflict where both extremes see the number one problem

Speaker 1 of America as other Americans,

Speaker 1 There is no decent way to fix that. And the sooner we realize that we're about to get ourselves into a national conflict against each other where there is no way to win,

Speaker 1 the sooner we can begin to decide that this is not a war worth fighting because there are no victory conditions, only a lot of bad crap that can happen on the way to wherever we're going to go anyway.

Speaker 1 How about we try to focus on the garbage in, garbage out process instead, and see if we can't try to find a way to break this log jam of misinformation that is fueling so much of this on all sides with real information.

Speaker 1 I mean, I'm reminded of the old biblical phrase, right?

Speaker 1 And the truth shall set ye free.