Show 320 - Steering Into the Iceberg

He's Dan Carlin, and this is Common Sense. The question that I get asked most often these days, and there's no good way for me to answer questions other than this, isn't that what's locked me into doing a show at this point when my natural inclination is to not do one, and the one question we get is why aren't you doing one so maybe explaining what why my natural inclination is as it is would preclude me getting a bunch of emails maybe i get it though i mean i see what people are wondering about i mean, the times are absolutely wickedly fraught with menace at the moment.
And so why aren't we speaking out about it? So I think that leads us into questions of, call them of a personal nature, maybe. Things I'm going through that I hope is, you know, the way I frame it when I'm in a good mood is that I've always tried to say that wisdom requires a flexible mind, right? You know, we have this little slogan, we put it on t-shirts, but sometimes you, you find yourself trying to avoid the label of hypocrite and trying to live up to your own hype.
And so I'm trying to be flexible on what the data seems to be showing me living through the current events we're living through right now. But it's tough to be flexible when it's not so bad if you have to tweak something in your in your mental paradigm or your worldview, for example, you can tweak, you could say, hey, according to the data, this is this is So I'm going to alter my viewpoints 8% to 8 degrees to starboard right or whatever as a way to match reality and the way I see the world internally.
But when the adjustment required in your internal paradigm is large, I worry about my flexibility level. i'm a little worried everything might just break

foundationally speaking if i have to uh try to incorporate the logical um and they may not be

logical they just might be the ones that occur to me first which is why doing a show like this

is difficult because i don't feel like i'm far enough down in the logical um argument chain um

to be of at a helpful point yet i mean i feel like i'm still trying to figure out

Thank you. far enough down in the logical argument chain to be at a helpful point yet.
I mean, I feel like I'm still trying to figure out what to do with what I think the data tells me. I mean, how do you explain this? Well, if you know me, you know that there's certain things that I think about myself and we all do this.
I think, you know, I only took basic psychology in college but I remember that they were teaching us about things like totems which if I understood it correctly but I was not an A student in psychology it has to do with one's self-image and how one sees oneself and I think we all have this and I think as we get older that self-image maybe becomes even more it becomes more like cement that's drying right at my age now this is hard cement the way i think i see myself which is not always the way others see us right as we all understand uh that that's a long time discussed um you know dichotomy in life right the way we see ourselves versus how others see us but um i've always been a we the people kind of guy i always describe it in in the traditional american lines of uh of thought that i'm a jefferson man i always say that i want an america that matches the marketing material and when one looks at the history of the marketing material and the slogans used and the people that did all that most of the time, I think you'd be pretty safe saying that Thomas Jefferson is probably the guy that deserves the most credit for the way it sounds, the language. Right.
And Jefferson, like almost every other hero or great person from the past that you can think of, is a flawed character. right i mean nobody lives up to the current standards, just like we're not going to live up to future standards.
And so I always try to transpose people, though, through, you know, history needs to be graded on a curve over the different eras might be a way to think about it. And I always think about Jefferson in the time machine.
And then while you're in the time machine, coming from the late 18th century to now you go through the historical curve and you say okay jefferson's views in relation to let's call them the center of the political spectrum during his own time period transposed to now and jefferson's a righteous dude i mean listen go read the marketing material that's mostly his fault And I don't care if you're a Black Lives Matter protester or a hardcore President Trump supporter. It sounds good, doesn't it? Especially if you apply it in the way that we would apply it now.
Right. So it's not just for white males who own property, you know, in Virginia.
I mean, it's something that encompasses. I mean, and that's how Jefferson woulderson would be today if he went through the grading you want a curve synthesizer on the way to now um jefferson would be when compared to the senate i mean he might be at some of these black lives matter protests um but my problem with this and because you know when i look in the mirror i see a guy who sees himself as a jeffersonian right i'm not one of those andrew jackson guys i'm not one of those god forbid john adams guys i'm a jefferson guy we the people guy i have to tell you something though um john adams is all of a sudden much more understandable to me than he's ever been which is scaring me because i'm not a john adams guy but i'm reading him going yes that john adams i finally get what he meant when he said this or that now let's understand something john adams is kind of a jerk as a guy as a president the whole thing he just doesn't come off as one of these people you you want first of all he doesn't look like any hero you ever saw right but you read what he says now and you go back i was reading a um a recent uh book on adams and and and when you read and the wonderful thing about all these guys by the way that makes them so fun is that the letters exist and that's something that's sad that we don't do letter writing anymore because you're going to miss that but there are letters from adams to his son and adams to his wife and adams to other famous people that they have and you can read them and and just like any other kind of writing uh you you get a

little a little glimpse into the personality in the brain of the person who who who wrote the

piece and for as a younger man Adams just looked like a kind of a I mean just a I couldn't relate

to him because I was this we the people kind of guy and and Adams always had a healthy suspicion

Thank you. I couldn't relate to him because I was this we the people kind of guy.
And Adams always had a healthy suspicion of the people, didn't totally trust them. And I was always the kind of guy who knew that I could always pull out, if you'll pardon the pun, my trump card in any argument with anybody about anything.
Especially if I knew that I had the vote on my side, I can always pull out the Trump card that, hey, you know, yes, you make a lot of good points about your argument. Why don't we let the people vote on it? How do you think they'd vote then? I used to pull this one out in the argument over U.S.
foreign policy all the time, whether or not we should have a military in 180 some countries and all these kinds of things, the money we spend on it. And, uh, and somebody would always have a thousand different wonderful points from the national security establishment point of view.
And I'd finally, you know, if you couldn't, if you couldn't argue your way out of that, I'd always pull out the, well, you know, Hey pal, why don't we let the American people vote on this and see how they feel? And they know that you had them because it's like the nuclear card in, the u.s in the in the u.s i grew up in in the in the argument days when there was things like we used to pretend anyway there were things like evidence and sources one could trust and and agreed upon truths and a zeitgeist that most of us saw similarly i was telling ben the other day day, I used the term mutual zeitgeists. And then I said, that's not a term that's supposed to be plural, is it? But it applies to now, which should tell you something.
But once upon a time, we sort of pretended, 95% of the people out there sort of pretended that we had a similar reality that we lived in. You could have an argument from there.
And if the argument went against me long enough on a subject like the one I just mentioned, I'd just simply say, hey, pal, what if we voted on it? And if that guy said, well, there'll be none of that. We can't have the American people voting on something that is so important, you know, because they might vote wrong.
There is no argument when I was younger that went that way. That's a checkmate move there to say, hey, let's the people vote on it.
Now, somebody might say, well, let's let the people vote on it, see how it goes. But on some of these issues, the governmental policy was so out of whack with popular sentiment that the people who were supporting that policy knew.
I mean, if you vote on it, we're going to lose. So I guess what I'm saying is there were three words that just moved me my whole life.
Three really powerful words. They were sort of the opposite of the Mao statement.
You know, Mao, the communist Chinese leader, supposed to have said power emanates from the barrel of a gun or something like that. with in the country that I grew up in, whose marketing materials i definitely believed as a child i was raised with all that i like that stuff for the most part i want to be that country uh the three most powerful words when you strung them together the fountainhead of all power in our system and maybe all power everywhere was we the people we the people hey pal you like your foreign policy idea how about we put that to a vote and if you don't want to put it to a vote what does that mean you try being an american politician no matter how you really feel about that subject and going up in front of the electorate saying oh listen that's a subject that the american people should not weigh in on.
That's a nuclear boomerang right there for your career, because it was a position that is not really, it's a not allowable position, I guess you could say, right? It's a not allowable, you're not allowed to be, you're not allowed to have a sentiment in this country that I grew up in that said that the people should not be the ones deciding that. You might live that.
That might be the way you really do things. You might find 900 ways to avoid having that subject ever come up.
There's a lot of ways to play three-card Monty in our system so that the electorate never has that choice. But you can't say openly, oh, no, no, if the American people overwhelmingly didn't want to do that, I don't care.
Not going to work work so that's the guy i am or was or always saw reflected back at me when i looked at a mirror right the totem of my self-image but i'm scared all of a sudden of we the people i'm scared first of all i don't like mobs as an individualist. Mobs have never been my thing.
Mob thinking. And we have more mob thinking because of the social media and the ability to have created a giant virtual mob.
Everybody, all of us collectively broken down into our various sub mobs have. It's funny how I mean, there's going to be studies done someday, and I'm sure there already are some preliminary ones where they're going to look at how tendencies human beings have always had but they used to have to be analog right you have to get a crowd together in the public square once upon a time to do what you could do now virtually with a giant group message or a tweet I keep trying to my oldest kid, you don't understand that you are a guinea pig generation.
And one can say that we've had guinea pig generations now for several generations, because when the pace of change started speeding up mid-19th century, I don't know when you want to label it, but when that started to to happen human beings who were growing up in a world that was changed because of those changes were the first generations that had ever had to deal with things so i mean let's just say the growth of modern media radio television i mean that stuff is wildly destabilizing right that's a guinea pig generation who grows up with that but it's almost like we keep trying to see if we can top ourselves with the um the wild uniqueness of each experiment because we've never lived with anything like what we're experimenting with now we have and let's remember this when we talk about what we're going to talk about today folks we live in a world that when we're talking about political institutions,

things like countries and international organizations and even things like corporations,

these are legacy structures. These are things developed in an analog world that we are trying

to make fit into whatever the hell world we're on our way to now the likelihood that it's going to be flexible enough to do that is nil now some areas are going to be flexible enough to do that that's without question some areas will be and the fact that some areas won't be is built into the pie right that's the creative destruction you hear it. Yes, well, that kind of industry has to die out now just because, you know, the new jobs will be created at 10 times the rate in these new industries that are making them go out of business.
I mean, you hear that all the time, too. So the idea that everything's going to survive what we're going through now, nobody believes that, not even the optimists.
But which legacy systems are going to go down versus which ones are going to survive versus which ones we never needed anyway and we're creating i mean if if one of the legacy systems that goes down just throwing it out there for argument's sake is the united states of america you know a country an analog founded country with a contract clearly from an analog era, an Enlightenment era inspired contract? I mean, what happens when something like that goes down? That's a legacy system. Can that sort of legacy system survive what we have now, what this modern world has wrought? I don't't know what the right where i don't want to put a spin on it negative or positive but at the moment when you look at it the effect it's having on the current climate um you know it's a wonderful thing this uh giant species communication um if you think that the giant hive mind of human beings out there is recommending first of all in good faith that they're not all trolling everybody else for the fun of it for the laughs um but i mean it's one thing if you believe that the giant hive mob uh is right about anything and you say well listen this is just we the people in digital form right instead of just uh having the people that could show up at the public square for the vote and to weigh in on the matter the entire world can just tweet in their opinions this is this is you know the public feedback right i've heard people argue that the president's style that seems so uh breaking with protocol with earlier presidents because he's the he's the first tiktok era president a twitter president this is a this is what it's like in the short attention span era where you know uh a a reality tv pro wrestling sort of an approach is a way to reach more people it's a communication style that this generation understands right much more applicable to them in that old fashionedfashioned sort of uh i mean the the way presidents talked from obama before that that's like hearing shakespeare now this thou that so much easier to say something like you know they're crooked they're a loser and we throw in a few expletives now and uh you know that's the new protocol and we get so used to it that it becomes difficult maybe to make distinctions between a president who uh everybody thought was kind of funny when he's calling his opponents in primary debates short crooked ugly you know fourth grade playground schoolyard taunts but you know basically harmless it's a style question dan you don't like his style to a guy who can utter lines like this and have people basically brush it off because they're so used to brushing off the stuff that maybe is harmless schoolyard taunting we've somehow conflated that with this this.
I actually wrote this down from the video of the speech. This wasn't filtered through any news outlet.
And I watched him do it more than once. So it's written in the speech.
It's a talking point. It's not an off-the-cuff remark.
The president said, the only way we're going to lose this election is if this election is rigged. Remember that.
It's the only way we're going to lose this election that is not calling a an opponent that you're running against a derogatory name that's not making fun of someone that's not little pro wrestling little reality tv schmaltiness thrown in for communicative purposes right relatability thatatability. That is scary, scary laying the foundation for civil war stuff.
Folks, there's only two ways you can interpret that. They're both negative for the president.
The lesser of two negatives is that this is somebody who believes he might very well lose this election. I'm not sure at all that and if he does he's laying the groundwork for a mike tyson bites the ear and never has to say holyfield beat him moment in the ring although donald trump would say he got his ear bitten and he was disqualified but but a chance to run off start the trump network on an on a cable station and continue to to play this same role he plays from outside the hard work of the White House.
And never have to admit he lost. And you could even play the statesman, you know, walk away and say, I won.
But for the good of the country, I'm leaving. And, you know, Trump.com will begin airing my podcast next week.
But that's the charitable interpretation. The other thing that you would have to insist if it's not that is that the guy is essentially saying that anything other than my victory at the polls is ipso facto evidence that this election was stolen, that the rightful winner that you voted for did not get the office and your adversaries, your opponents, your enemies stole this election from you and they're going to destroy the country, that this is a ipso facto evidence of sedition, traitorous act.
And what does it imply? It implies that, well, you know, now's the time for all good people to rise up and defend the republic and blah, blah, blah. I mean, I've never seen a president do this in my life.

I've never seen a president come close to doing this. This is the sort of stuff that most presidents do everything in their power to defuse.
Because when you have a triage list of national problems, there's one thing that jumps right to the top of the list if it's even a question that's in play. A civil war.
so and who justifies flirting with this line as sort of a, well, this is the art of the deal, Dan. This is Trump, you know, and he's going to pull back from this negotiating position, but he's scared everybody into concessions.
I mean, folks, flirting with a civil war is like flirting with a bullet to the heart, right? And you can argue all day long about, hey, Trump's fixing this patient's long-neglected look at that wonderful job nobody could have done it better but if if if bullet to the heart is on the triage list doesn't matter what are the things you accomplish you negate every good thing you want to claim the president's done if the guy gets us into a civil war and he's the only guy i've ever seen running this country, steering into it. We've always used a sort of a mental image to describe the country and its problems.
The Titanic and the iceberg. I like the Titanic idea because it's like a vehicle and we're all on it together.
And it has a potential negative thing in our future. And somebody's driving this thing.
And as we always said, you know, if you're far away from the iceberg, whatever the iceberg may be, and we usually say that the iceberg is the partisan divisions that are pulling us apart. Well, holy cow, we steered right into that, right? But we got a guy who steers right into that for his own gain anyway.
What did General Mattis say? And I told you, I met Mattis once, and's a very impressive figure, a deep, wise, heavy duty reader, philosophical kind of guy.

Fascinating guy, by the way, very deep. And he's the one that said Trump's the only president he's ever seen that doesn't try to unite the American people.

He deliberately does the opposite. So he's doing it either the only argument you can make and he's doing it for the country because the things that I need to do for you are so important that it's worth.

Thank you. opposite.
So he's doing it either the only argument you can make and he's doing it for the country because the things that I need to do for you are so important that it's worth tearing the country apart a little to make, you know, these sorts of gains. You've got to burn down the village maybe in order to save it at least a little bit.
Or he's doing it for his own purposes. I can't stand the dynamic that we've created that is right out of the Roman Republic.
I mean, if anybody, if you want to talk about what we lost, not studying more of this in school, that more people don't see that we've done the whole Julius Caesar deal here on Trump, where if, I think it's in New York State, Ben, New York State's the one that's got some legal things hanging over his head. But the argument is, and he's probably right you can't prosecute the sitting president i mean something like that can't has to wait until i'm out of office well like the mongol commanders who always want to leave a nice path out of any group that they surround i want to leave the president a nice easy path out of office should things go that route.
I don't want to like the Mongols always worried about if you surround an enemy, they fight to the death. Right.
Then then all bets are off. Anything is legal.
Right. Leave him a nice way out.
I don't want to create the conditions like these Roman consuls had where they were going to be legally eviscerated by their opponents, but they couldn't be touched while they were consul. But the minute the consul ships over, they're vulnerable.
So you had guys like Caesar going, listen, maybe I would have left, but my enemies will get me if I leave. So what the hell? I'll cross the Rubicon, roll the dice and see how it goes.
I'd prefer the president have a nice, easy way out of office. I don't want him thinking, well, shoot, if I leave, if I concede this this election new york's going to prosecute me maybe that's just me but i don't think that's so smart right now this is the most scary election folks that i've ever lived through and there's nothing close the people that are out there on message boards right now and commenting after news stories and as i I've always said, we have no way of knowing how representative they are.
If this is a trolling expedition, either something organized by another country's government and secret services or a bunch of teenagers in a whole bunch of countries looking for laughs destabilizing the USA, it is having a wild effect on our country. Wild.
And to hear Trump administration officials, by the way, talking about buying ammunition, all these little I mean, what was it Roger Stone said the other day on was it Alex Jones's show that that the president, if he loses the election, should declare martial law, should arrest Zuckerberg and Tim Cook from Apple, should prosecute Mattis for sedition. And you may say, oh, that's just Roger Stone being Roger Stone.
It's all these things added up together, folks. This is not the equivalent of calling Marco Rubio Little Marco.
But it's provided a weird cover where people are laughing off comments that if President Obama had said any any of these things do you know how many of the second amendment types would be out in the streets and let me ask that for a minute because as a guy who did radio here in the pacific northwest all through the 1990s i had a lot of people call in a lot of listeners a lot of people that i would converse with regularly try to understand find meeting in their minds with people that fall into that camp and when you're a constitutionalist like i am right when you're a liberty oriented person like i am there's places where you can have a meeting of the minds these were always the people that saw themselves as the um you know modern day descendants of groups like the sons of liberty all these organizations that cropped up as part of the revolutionary times you know very anti-king anti-dictator you know sort of a we the people kind of group so you always feel like well listen worse comes to worse dan they'd tell me you don't have to That's why the Second Amendment's out there, to protect us from anyone who might seize control, disregard the Constitution, set themselves up in an authoritarian kind of position. Folks, I got to tell you something.
If you're looking at this election coming up now, who's the more authoritarian threat? You can talk about cabals and stuff.

Oh, Joe, oh, Biden has dementia.

It's just going to be a cabal of Democrats.

It's going to be antifa-leftists.

I mean, you can make all those little conspiracy things you want,

but you've got to invent that kind of.

Trump's open about this. I said way back, two months after his inauguration,

I called him an authoritarian.

It was Dave Rubin's show.

I said, he's an authoritarian.

And I didn't mean he was like a hitler i meant he wants to run the country like he's the ceo of the country uh disregarding the fact that that's not the job and that we have this constitution the other thing the guy is is he's he's he treats the american people like a marketer he sells sizzlele, not steak. I had a marketer tell me that once,

that you sell the sizzle of the steak,

the sound and the smell,

as opposed to the meat of the matter.

And I was always a meat guy.

I was a steak guy, not a sizzle guy.

The president sells sizzle.

And by that, I mean,

he makes a lot of hay with the patriots in our country,

hugging flags in photographs, right?

He hugs flags, but this is not a guy who's a constitutionalist at all. You ever hear him talk about the limitations on his power? You ever hear him say, yeah, well, you can't do that because of our wonderful constitution.
Ever hear him extol the other branches? Ever hear anything where he sounds like he's read it? So he hugs the flags for the photo ops. Same thing he did with the Bible, right? You hold the Bible for the photo op.
That's the sizzle, right? It's a right it's a message to the audience you know but never mind that you know you have to walk that walk a little bit maybe have to maybe go to church uh sort of regularly to to hold that up and and really claim that no no this is the stake this is me no it's the sizzle right you're selling uh the advertising side the photo op side but that's not who you are but why are my second amendment friends out there buying the uh the sales pitch when it is so clearly a sales pitch to most of us i mean folks can you not see i guess what i'm saying is how unnerving it is for the rest of us to have to have our countrymen so besotted with a figure out of politics that they support him no matter what he says and does i mean if he talks about something that would sound scary out of anybody else's mouth uh his supporters just write it off one way or the other that's folks that's dangerous right The Constitution is a document that creates a country that is ruled by laws, not men. And if we get into a cult of personality thing here, well, here's what I always say.
Go look at the countries where cults of personality have been in vogue at one time or another and go read about life under those time periods and ask yourself if that's what sounds good to you.

and if all this power that you're happy with the president talking about using if you think roger stone's right and the president should go out there and declare martial law and do all these

kind of things folks you better hope you better hope that there's never ever another election

and that there's never ever another president from the other party because what the heck will this president have legitimized and normalized that is marius and sulla from the roman republic that's exactly marius and sulla from the roman republic are the people who are who pride themselves on playing a role in this system that if it worked the way they've always advertised it to me would be the people defending us from donald trump right now and in front of them by the way it should never have gotten to this point i mean is there any better example what we talked about for years? This is another one of those icebergs we always had in the distance of our metaphorical Titanic. But the idea of the warping of the powers of our government and the way that the three supposedly co-equal branches of government have gotten like a spinning top that begins to lose its whole sense of rhythm.
They've gotten out of whack over time and the deformations have led to greater deformations is there any greater example of that than the fact that congress has done nothing of any sort of usefulness in preventing us from getting to this point i mean this is supposed to be a co-equal branch of government this is a firewall for us so that it never gets to the point where we're talking about civil war right where the heck is what robin williams had said about the u.n once but i think it works for the american congress just perfectly right now he said that the u.n was like a traffic cop on volume and that's how the congress feels this here is the perfect symbolic view of what the end result of all of these kinds of problems that for years we discussed is how how often did we say you have to imagine these powers you know fill in the blank what powers we were talking about that day in the hands of someone you hate but both democrats and republicans happily agreed to them as long as it was their side doing it at the time and causes that they favored right and then because we couldn't hold we were political hypocrites we couldn't hold both sides to the same standard slowly but surely things got passed things became laws all kinds of things you've never even heard of folks insurrection acts emergency powers stuff that we were always assured would never be anything we needed to worry about because they would always be in the hands of people who, first of all, the system had highly vetted. Right.
These are people that I mean, listen, by the time someone becomes president of the United States or a completely known quantity, these are people who are responsible people. They feel the gravity and weight of the office.
They adhere to protocol. You can trust them with these extraordinary powers that you will wish that they did have if something terrible happens.
If there's a nuclear war, you're going to say, why didn't the president have the power to do A, B and C in an emergency or insurrection? Right. But what happens when you inevitably get the person in there who doesn't adhere to protocol, who doesn't feel the gravity of the office, or who doesn't feel like it should inhibit him the way it inhibited all his predecessors, right? Now, all of a sudden, these powers begin to look a lot more ominous, don't they? And again, if you're a Trump supporter and they look good to you, you better hope, like I said, that this is the last president we ever have.
And if you do hope it's the last president we ever have how much of a patriotic constitutional liberty loving american can you be i mean let me just say it is a little bit weird and historically ironic that you know the second amendment anti-authoritarian firewall protecting this country from any would-be dictators are, well, in many respects, supporting passionately the guy who has friends talking about martial law and hanging corporate figures and sedition trials for generals. I mean, doesn't seem very respectful of the system he inherited right there.
Is that going back to America? Is that going to be the kind of thing that, you know, you're going to be OK with when the other side starting to do that stuff, too? I mean, if this is how we renew the country, you don't think it's always going to be in the hands of your side, do you? And what's good for the goose is good for the gander, as has been proven with our political hypocrisy stuff now for a long time so you okay with this one way or another it doesn't make you look like a great american either support a guy who's going to do away with elections or support the lowering of our standards to the point where the next time you get a candidate you hate they're doing this kind of stuff too there's a lot you could say about joe biden that's not wonderful but he's not this if authoritarianism is something as a second amendment rights holding american that you're worried about clearly we have one candidate that leans more in that direction than the other and in biden's case let's be real let's throw away the conspiracies for a moment let's talk about what you're really getting with this guy, because it's not all wonderful. It's not sugarcoated.
This is a return to the way things were. This is going to be the Obama administration part two.
OK, now, if you're one of these people that thinks he was the worst president who ever existed, ever, ever, ever, well, then, yes, your nightmare scenario will come true with Joseph Biden. But there's nothing radical about this guy.
Just ask the Democrats who wish he was more radical. Ask Elizabeth Warren supporters.
Ask Bernie Sanders supporters. This is a traditional, you know, over the last 30 years, traditional anyway, corporate new way Democrat.
And, you know, in that sense, he may be exactly what you don't want, but let's not pretend he's something he's not. He's no fire-breathing, revolutionary, you know, Antifa-type stooge, as many of these conspiracy websites would have you believe.
Listen, it's bad enough that he's a return to the swamp because the swamp is what got us to here in a sort of a roundabout way.

But there are times, as I said, where, you know, I've never been a person who believed in positional voting, voting for this person who I don't like to stop this other person I dislike more. But I'm making an exception to the rule this year because I think the stakes are that high.
I do think this is an election between an authoritarian candidate and a return to the pre-authoritarian candidate status quo, which I consider to be the lesser of two evils. As many of you know, I've not voted for a Democrat or Republican for president since 1992.
I voted for libertarian candidates for president. I voted for Green Party candidates for president.
I voted for independent candidates for president. I believe I've written in somebody's name once, but I'm voting for Joseph Biden this year because he will not steer deliberately into the iceberg, which to me seems like a pretty big deal right there.
That's almost a deal breaker right there. If you're going to steer into the iceberg, I don't vote for you for president.
He's also the guy I would rather have in charge of the other thing that should be at the top of any of our triage lists, but is not. I trust him more with nuclear weapons.
Then if you say Joseph Biden has dementia, Dan, you can't trust a guy with dementia with nuclear weapons, then I trust the national security establishment and the vice president and the system more run by that group of people than I would in the hands of Donald Trump. I think there's a lot of qualities you want in the hands of somebody who's going to have their finger on the nuclear button.
I think if we put this into into real terms, it's important to understand the American president of the United States is the most powerful person that has ever existed in world history. Let's phrase it another way that means

the same thing, though, in this case. He is the most dangerous person that has ever lived, more dangerous than Hitler, more dangerous than Genghis Khan, more, I mean, the most dangerous person who's ever lived theoretically.
OK, is Donald Trump the right person to have in the position of most dangerous human being who's ever lived.

I'm going to suggest that the level of introspection that I want in a person like that, I think you're going to need some empathy to be the sort of person that can weigh, whether we'll look weak in this sort of negotiation if we're afraid to use nukes versus let's not use nukes under any circumstance. It's the wrong thing do i mean i want a lot more i guess what i'm saying is is a man who is and i don't this is not fake news who is clearly narcissistic and narcissistic above and beyond what you can normally expect in a u.s president after all a lot of those people get a little full of themselves when they get that high up but this guy's on a level entirely.
I don't think a really powerfully strong, narcissistic personality should have their finger on the button. I'd rather have either Joseph Biden or the Democratic cabal with their finger on the button.
I'll feel safer. And if you're one of those people, because I hear this all the time from people who say things like, you exaggerate the danger of nuclear weapons, Dan.
There's a whole intricate series of controls that make sure that these are actually the safest weapons on the planet. And I'll get a lot of those speeches.
Let's remember something. And there's lots of books written on this.
There's lots of history on this. But go get Barbara Tuchman's book, The Guns of August.
It's one of the best examples of this dynamic. And her whole book is built around the dynamic.
And the dynamic is how you can think you're pushing events for a while, current events that will later become history. You can think you're in charge of them, that you're dictating them, that your decisions are equaling outcomes.
But history has this wonderful little trick it plays on all of us, where just when you think you're in control and you're pushing events like an ocean riptide it can grab hold of the momentum and start pulling and take you in directions that the people who set the dynamic in motion never intended or wanted to go happens over and over and over again and john f kennedy as a matter of fact gave the book to his uh staff people because he wanted them to apply this lesson about this this tendency of history to start pulling when you thought you were pushing into a nuclear context so that they would think about this possibility. When you think about that possibility, the person in charge of nuclear weapons and who that individual turns out to be is, in my opinion, and I would think the opinions of many, many important people out there, you know, not just an unimportant person like myself, the most important consideration we can have.
I don't know how you look at President Trump and think, you know, that's the guy with the stable genius qualities I want with his hands on the nuclear button. I want Donald Trump to be in the position of most dangerous man in the world because I trust him, his decision making power and his ability to properly weigh the facts and come up to the right conclusion and then take the right action really really so i'll vote for the guy that will steer away from the civil war iceberg rather than towards it and who i feel would be a safer person to have his hands on the most dangerous weapons arsenal that's ever been and that is actually in control of a single individual's um you know i mean the president may not have 100 total control but let's just say he has 95 control and that's enough to make that decision as i said uh what should be the ultimate consideration on all our part in in a voting triage of important, right? And listen, there's another reason.
I don't want a president who makes things worse in terms of our willingness as a society to buy into harmful conspiracies. And so far, the president has shown a willingness to steer into that iceberg as well.
We should talk about conspiracies for minute actually since uh since we're on that subject i mean this is where the we the people thing takes a hit right on the chin if you believe too many conspiracy theories i've come to the conclusion that you shouldn't vote that's not a very we the people like statement to make is it and it's funny because if you think about conspiracy theories i had somebody explain it to me once and i'm going to go from memory here but they were explaining how implausible it gets if you believe too many conspiracies so they said okay in any choice that you have you're going to have an occam's razor choice right what's what's the obvious thing that everybody sounds like they believe and then you're going to have what we'll call the conspiracy choice, but that's probably not the right name. But just the alternative unlikely option, right? That's a little bit more sinister.
But sometimes those things are true. So maybe you go with the conspiracy option with this first way of viewing the world, right? I don't think that's what we're really seeing, Dan.
That's the Rothschilds and the Illuminati controlling that. Okay.
Hey, you could be right. Every now and then you are.
Okay. So the next worldview decision, current events sort of analysis question comes into your mental paradigm and you weigh it again.
Okay. Do I believe the Occam's razor on this one or do I believe the conspiracy side? I believe the conspiracy again.
Okay. So now you're on your second analysis of reality and you've once again chosen the more unlikely of

the two options okay still could be true you never know every now and then you know rarities pop up twice but as you continue to go down the analysis if you're always or most of the time choosing the much more unlikely option eventually you're living in a fantasy world and you see it on whole programs devoted to nothing but confusing or antagonizing or arousing the american people with some conspiracy theory i mean the whole q anon um phenomenon is something that is absolutely symbolic of this era that we live in in the times that are so challenging now that we're all guinea pigs as a society i mean i'm trying to think of how the revolutions of 1848 would have gone if they'd had twitter instagram facebook and q anon you know what i mean that's a variable that's like throwing a weapon of mass destruction into some you know era of the past that's really not ready for it here ancient egypt have a nuclear weapon and this by the way is not to excuse you know the other side of the political ledger in this also because so much of what i'm decrying here is a as an extremist threat if you will a constitutional danger this is stuff that was fed and fueled and amplified by the conduct on the other side that became if we want to use the sporting term for it bulletin board material i mean when you have people i mean looting that's an easy one but burning of buildings and stuff all that stuff becomes fodder for the other side to use against you i mean gandhi knew this martin luther king knew this these are people who understood that listen there's multiple ways you can do this don't do it in any way that undercuts your cause and remember what you're doing all this for you're trying to convince the great mass of americans of the righteousness of your cause and believe me for five minutes everybody virtually everybody of goodwill was sitting there open to the conversation and the burning and the looting and the and the the the bulletin board material and it's everywhere and you just look and you just shake your head because I wrote on a piece of paper, we can't help ourselves. We just can't help ourselves.
People have to show up at protests with a mock guillotine. Really? And people at the protest think that's okay? You don't think that undercuts your cause? Remember what you're trying to do here? You're not forcing anybody into anything.
It's a hearts and minds war. Is that helping or is that hurting? Or how about the ready-made campaign ad that was, and you saw it shared on all these right-wing websites forever.
It was a kid at one of these looters get-togethers, and he ran in front of the the camera and said something like I'm paraphrasing, but we're coming for the suburbs next.

Folks, there is no better example of political slash current events slash historical bulletin board material than that.

Don't even have to edit that for the campaign ad to come from that.

Just put some words up on the screen afterwards right vote donald trump and listen the truth be told there might be a logical reason why we're seeing this so often and it might be the lack of centralized control or leadership in in this um in this affair i mean there is no uh central authority calling the shots and determining how these protests are going to go and what the rules are going to be and what the standards of behavior are and all these kinds of things, you know, what to do if you see somebody in the crowd breaking windows or what have you. So without that, we're left towards human beings behaving as human beings, in which case it's going to be quite variable, isn't it? You're going to have your people on good behavior, those who understand the ramifications of their actions, that everything's being filmed, that all

this can be bulletin board material, and you're going to have everyone else. Here in the protest

we had here in my little hometown, where I live now, we had a whole giant group of people, which

included a bunch of young people who happened to be homeless living in the park nearby, for whom

this was the most exciting thing that had happened in quite a while. And when windows started to get

Thank you. a bunch of young people who happened to be homeless living in the park nearby for whom this was the most exciting thing that had happened in quite a while.
And when windows started to get broken, they were at the forefront of that because that was much more interesting to them in this particular case, most of them anyway, than this movement which had dragged out a ton of principled people who had their eyes on the prize. But no one remembered that they came out here and protested nice and peacefully because, you know, the old line about if it bleeds, it leads applies to protests, too.
So not having anybody in control. And even when you have someone in control, it's difficult to make everybody behave.
But I'll give you an example of the counterproductive tactics. And you can see them all online.
I mean, they happen quite a bit. There was a woman, this was in Washington, D.C.
There was a Black Lives Matter protest that passed by where she was sitting outside at an outdoor table at a restaurant. And a crowd of people swarmed by her table get up in her personal space in a menacing sort of way.
I looked at the crowd. It looked to me to be overwhelmingly young and overwhelmingly white.
And the menace was connected to the idea that in order for this woman to get the crowd to stop doing this to her, the story said, and I read it on a mainstream news site, said that she had to raise her fist in a Black Lives salute in solidarity with the crowd. If this was the only time we'd seen this, I wouldn't have brought it up.
But you see it over and over again. It's a natural extension of this idea that we talked about in an earlier common sense show about the validity or righteousness of the idea punching nazis which was the statement that was in vogue for about five minutes earlier in the uh in the uh last several years general news cycle and my argument was punching nazis just ends up creating more of an animosity toward the people who punch them and creates a climate where eventually people who don't know better might sit there and just go, you know, both sides are bad.
Right. You create a dynamic where they write both sides off.
In other words, don't give bulletin board material to the other side because the other side will use it to equate your actions with theirs. Again, counterproductive.
But there's this little strain of this intimidation

or intolerance side on both of these extremes where they do not leave space for people to think radically different than they do. And there's a righteousness about them that precludes legitimate disagreement in their eyes, right? This is good and evil and shades of gray have nothing to do with it.
Or discussion, we're past discussion here. Or if you don't think like we do, you are ipso facto bad and deserving of whatever happens afterwards.
I'll give you an idea of how far this can go and how destructive it is to the idea of, you know, I mean, when you see, and I think I said this before, I mean, when you see the, when George Floyd died, you had another one of those moments in American history where lots of people who don't think about this issue very often, people of goodwill, were ready to have a conversation about this stuff. The way the conversation is handled, though, determines how receptive they are to it.
And all this sort of stuff muddies the waters. There was an incident in Compton the other day in Los Angeles where somebody, a gunman, walked up to a police vehicle with two police officers in it, opened fire, and sent both of them to the hospital with critical injuries.
OK, well, this stuff happens, right? But outside the hospital, as reported by mainstream news media, some of the people were chanting, let them die. And of course, the way the story is picked up, these might as well be the Black Lives Matter organizers, according to the right-wing media, right? Here's your talking points.
Everybody screams, let them die, which of course couldn't be further from the truth, right? There are a small number of individuals who showed up here, because that's what they wanted to say you know not commanded from anybody at a higher authority nor controlled nor monitored nor um you know downplayed i mean maybe you get your own people going to go hey man be cool you know this is going to look terrible on television if you're screaming there's nobody there to do that and so the entire movement and everyone who's associated with it gets tarred by the behavior of a small number of people, which if we think about it logically, folks, especially without any centralized control over these things, is inevitable. You know, I'm a Kurt Vonnegut fan.
I know many of you are too. One of my favorite authors, Kurt Vonnegut, of course, lived through famously the bombing of Dresden he was a pow in germany when the bombing happened and he like many of the other pow's had to get out and clean up the mess afterwards and if that doesn't make you a little cynical or misanthropic i don't know what will uh but over his lifetime and i didn't know the man i didn't know his family i just read a lot about him read his works and then read a lot of interviews as he got older and a lot of comments by people who either knew him or talked to him and the man as he got older seemed to just become disappointed with humanity not angry see anger is what i had at 26 when they used to call me the angry young wolf on the radio and i was angry because i thought we could do better and you get angry that we're not or that we're trying harder, or that nobody's leading the cause to make things better.

You get angry at humanity.

When you get older and you've seen this movie a few times, the emotion changes a little bit. And the emotion shifts to disappointment, I think, like Vonnegut had.
Because disappointment sort of acknowledges that you're not sure we could have done better, right? You don't get angry at what was unavoidable. I think the extremes of these human beings showing up whether it's at a right-wing rally and they want to dress in swastikas and carry torches and say things like jews will not replace us or people that show up at a at a hospital where two police officers have been critically wounded and say let them die i don't know how you control the edges of the human species.
I just know that rather than get angry at them, I'm just disappointed because it's predictable. And I don't know how you control it under the best.
I mean, I have a book by Mark Kurlansky called Nonviolence. And one of the things I like about it is it's a good book to dispel this idea that somehow nonviolence is wimpy when in fact nonviolence is the most dangerous form of protest to most governments unless they're toppled by violence right so anything any violent response to a government that doesn't topple the government is actually easier for most governments especially um especially governments in a free society to deal with than having gandhi show up and decide that they're not going to lift a finger against the government.
And anything you do to us, you're going to do to us, and there's not going to be a single piece of bulletin board material to muddy the waters on who's righteous here and who's not. The good guys and the bad guys will be clear because only one side will be striking, and only one side will be sucking the the pain and the wounds and the damage.
Kurlansky points out in his book though and he interviews a lot of people who know this subject very well non-violence is extremely hard to do because how you account for all those idiots out there who will do something that will end up on the YouTube video that will then be you know as not a single individual's out-of-control statements, but the views of the movement's central core leadership, right?

This, we're coming for the suburbs, Dan,

that's not a single looter's comment.

That's what they really are thinking.

He just voiced it, right?

Once you get there, it becomes very hard

to avoid a situation where you're ready to come to blows because look at where you're at you think the other side's ready to come to blows with you you you you have this whole thing now equated as self-defense right dan we don't want a revolution we don't want a civil war they want the civil war we're just defending ourselves that's how you get here folks talk yourselves into it and you have nobody from the leadership side um giving you any sort of counter narrative to diffuse that and i think as we said earlier congress is um gone asleep at the wheel non-existent and then when you bring this up to them they just blame the other party well we'd get tons of things done but you got the party of in of intraction and duty you know i'm sorry people have been dealing with that since the republic began that's no excuse it's like when presidents say well i didn't have a congress to work with me well okay we don't give you too much slack for that president's been dealing with that forever i'll tell you what though the only positive benefit for me as a history nerd is that i get a chance to feel maybe what other times in history where the zeitgeist was the way it is now and it's never the same it's just a little smells a little like it did in earlier times and and uh you know you can read about that smell your whole life until you catch a whiff of it personally you don't know exactly what they were talking about and i feel like hmm get a little whiff of weimar right now a little chance to just sense what um you know watching the dynamic begin to pull us like the riptide so while i'm sad that we have to have the inevitable and predictable uh reaction then counter reaction then counter counter reaction the human beings when we get into large herds predictably do i mean for every reformation there's a counter reformation for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction and um the first time you see it as a young person watching current events you're going oh look at this i've seen this whole thing so many times now you kind of go we just can't help ourselves makes me wonder if that means we're not capable of really governing ourselves i don't know i don't know what the line is and i don't know if the lines moved over time i don't know if once upon a time life was simpler you know the 19th century life is simpler uh maybe uh the question of what it took to run one's life was uh you know at a lower level of need right not too hard to figure out this that and the other thing in the 1850s maybe maybe you can argue that in this world we live in now with the complexity level and the pace of change what it is uh that a person can't play their role as informed citizenry anymore uh with that level of either um understanding or involvement, right? You know, paying attention to the news, if you want to call, well, I don't even know if that would help you even now. I don't know how you become an informed person in a completely Orwellian news situation, which is what we have now.
There's so much, so many lies in the air, the truth can't even breathe, right? A needle in a haystack trying to find the truth. And I used to be a professional news person, right? So you would think I could cut through the BS, but I find it very difficult.
And so wondering how my fellow man, who maybe is trained in a completely different field, how they're managing it, I don't even know. But reading what people are writing online leads me to believe that the amount of understanding and what's going on now is so small that nobody seems qualified.
I mean, the number of people that if I had the Dan Carlin test for whether or not you should vote, the number of you who are going to pass it is going to be small. What kind of a we the people kind of government is that, don't recognize the guy staring back in the mirror at me these days when it comes to my political points of view but um my countrymen are starting to scare me and i don't know if it's their fault or the times we live in or you know there were theories going way back to the ancient world that democracies maybe had lifespans or that all systems governments had lifespans that eventually, you know, they got the, you know, if they didn't die from the the historical version of a heart attack or have a historical version of a stroke.

I can think of several countries that had the historical version of a stroke.

They live to a ripe old age.

Eventually, there's just a hardening of the arteries as they used to call it a deterioration you know a a mounting number of nagging little things that just drags it down some of the greatest empires in history were too strong to fall folks um what happened is they just sort of deteriorated like really old people on the world stage um i keep trying to come up with mental images of wild things that would reinvigorate that side of us that that if this is true if all this stuff i just said it has any validity at all you know what do you do to fix that and it's's funny contrasting the fact that I have nothing now with what I used to think might do that shows you the optimism of an earlier era where we used to talk about, you know, wouldn't it be interesting to be able to harness all this high tech stuff we have now to to more adequately involve people in the process?

In other words, to involve the citizenry more in the running of affairs and decision making and the guiding of where things i mean think about that so maybe if you want to be one of those cynical people from the ancient world writing or sneering about the downsides of a representative system maybe you just need to wait long enough for those downsides to become self-evident.

But I don't know how I'm supposed to incorporate that sort of information coming into my censors, given my self-image of the we the people Jeffersonian, right? Like I said, I can. This is more John Adams and the mob.
When I think of the mob, too, I think of like the old Frankenstein movie and they've got the torch and the pitchforks, and they're just this crazy group heading towards the castle to kill the monster. I just feel like there's about 500 of those groups now, and every single one of them has a different monster they're after.
Hopefully none of them are podcasters. And we had said in an earlier show, by the way, that one of the things you should keep your eyes on a mile post if you will on this darker road to where we might be heading was when you would have protesters and counter protesters show up at the same place and at the same time and leave people dead in their wake and when i said that before somebody wrote me an email said dan you know there have already been people who died charlottesville this that or the other thing and i i said no that's think about like a big lighter that takes a few tries a few sparks in the first couple of attempts before the flame actually takes off to me those were like the sparks but once you get the tit-for-tat retribution cycle primed you know they did it we're going to come in and pay them back and once you get that going which i think it is now because we've had people now dead on both sides um that mile post is now past the car and in the rear view mirror it's like the giant mob showing up to the castle to get the monster shows up into a counter mob there to defend the monster and everybody's got their pitchforks and their shotguns um and their torches and well here we are normally you would have a leadership do everything they could to defuse this crisis because this isn't going to be good if these two mobs go at it right and instead we're steering into the iceberg and listen the people that designed our country the framework the structures the laws the setup they understood as we said earlier that this is a contract between a bunch of different territories with different people and different histories and different backgrounds and different ideas and there were always a lot of what i always thought were elegant and clever little safety valve ideas built into our system that the founders had looked at other systems i mean they studied greece they studied rome they the venice democracy i mean they looked at all these things to try to figure out okay what what's what was the sticking point for them what did they have to and they tried to foresee some of this stuff

one of the things that was clearly understood is that it is tough to get a

whole bunch of different people with so many differences

over such a wide area and remember it was a much smaller area back then than it

is now to um live together in harmony unless you

provide space for them to live the way that they want to live. And this was basically sort of the practical value of this idea of federalism in the United States.
For those of you outside the U.S., a lot of you have federalized systems, too, where where the idea was that there was going to be a lot of local autonomy amongst the states. Now, the one place you couldn't have local autonomy is in places where the federal constitution superseded the state ones, and it wasn't supposed to come into play too often.
That's the argument, though, over things like slavery or later on things like the Jim Crow separate but equal stuff, right? The states could go very far towards determining their own destiny, you know, at one time. But when you cross the line to, yes, but now the majority in that state is violating the constitutional rights of a minority in the state, right, the tyranny of the majority, that's called.
So you're in violation of the federal constitution, so you have to stop. If that happens every now and then, on the most extreme issues on the edges of our discussion, that's one thing.
As a matter of fact, that's the sort of protection you want in a federal system, right? You don't want it to be able to go too far. But if you take away too much of the ability for the different people in the different parts of the country to live the lives that they want to live, then you turn every battle we have in the country into a life or death one.
Because in the old days where maybe you could say, listen, Alabama is going to have one sort of way of looking at the world and California is going to have another. As long as the people in Alabama can live the way they want to live for the most part, and the Californians can do the same thing, they're much more inclined to be tolerant of the way the other people want to want to live.
I mean, you can say, I'd never want to live in Alabama. California is the place for me.
But hey, that's the way they want to live down there there if that comports with the way that they do things that's fine as long as i don't have to live under it and the people in alabama are usually a little bit disposed to the same thing right those californians are wacky and crazy and immoral and godless and the whole thing uh the whole thing may just drop off and go to hell but uh you know what that's how they want to live they can live there i'm not moving there but when it it's a winner-take-all thing, if some senator from Alabama decides to push forward some law that gains traction in D.C. and somehow gets steamrolled and then the people in California have to live under something that people in Alabama love and people in California can't stand, then it becomes a time when, well, what do you do when that happens, right? That's when it becomes the kind of politics we've had in this country now for several generations.

Life or death, winner take all. The Supreme Court becomes the most important thing in the entire world because how we interpret these laws is going to determine who has to live under, you know, does California have to live under Alabama's laws or vice versa? In the original design, somebody would say, well, listen, that's why we created enough flexibility at the state level so that you hopefully could alleviate most of these sorts of disagreements.
But there's been a lot happening in this country over the course of the country, and most of it is positive. I mean, we've expanded who votes to many more people.
We've taken a system that was a very pretty strict republic when it started, and we democrat a lot of it right people forget once upon a time senators were appointed when you decide to let the voters elect senators that's one step away from a pure strict republic in the old roman sense of the word and one step closer to more of a democratic system which is why a lot of people call us a democratic republic now we're hybrid but if some of the things you lose in the hybrid are some of the very things that allowed you to coexist anyway the safety valves right the the um the things that in your system allowed the release of steam and pressure well then maybe it's no surprise that we've seen a steady growth in those things over my lifetime to the point now where there aren't just people who are talking about civil war. We've got a decent amount of people who are looking forward to it.
Licking their chops for it. and if you're someone who's doing that if a civil war sounds like a good thing to you

then you're another one of those people that I don't think should be voting. I don't think you have the foreknowledge of consequences versus actions and all that sort of stuff to be the kind of person that should be, I mean, I use the Titanic as a mental image, but a better one in a voting society rather than a titanic that we're all on that's that's uh steered by a captain or a helmsman and we hope they steer correctly to avoid the iceberg in a system where we the people are the fountainhead of authority it's much more like the nightmare uh version of the driver's education car many of us had when we were learning how to drive when i was a kid that the driver's education teacher had a special car that had a wheel for them and a steering wheel for the student and the steering wheel for the driver overruled the student so the student did something stupid or crazy or panicky or whatever the um teacher could use their wheel to correct the course of the student driver we're all instead of on our titanic here we're on a bus city bus school bus and instead of one driver like on the titanic at the at the helm we all have the steering wheel on this bus like the like the car that we learned to drive with the you know student driver steering wheel setup right 60 people on this bus 60 steering wheels and maybe maybe we could suggest that if 31 of us steer to the left and 29 of us steer to the right we go to the left although i'm inclined these days to think maybe as few as 20 of those drivers could make a wrong turn at albuquerque and we'd be screwed somehow and i keep trying to think maybe how we could create better drivers drivers if we're going to keep using that analogy.
At the same time, as I get older, you know, I think I went through the resentment stage when I'm younger. Now I'm just getting disappointed.
I'm disappointed that, you know, we are, we just have so many crazy drivers. So many people who don't know where they're going, so many people who don't know how to steer, so many people who don't.

I mean, I don't know how you fix that either, especially since I'm one of many people that played with the idea of greater democratic input over my career and discussions of political events.

Let's have more people involved. Let's have more direct democracy.
And what did I say? Let's have the people vote on that foreign policy view of yours pal and see how they go we the people uh may have more of a hive mind level of wisdom than uh you know you people in washington dc as corrupt and uh an insular inside the beltway bubble you all are well now i'm not sure i trust them or us and it's really hard as you might imagine for a person like yours truly to be trying to do a show when my whole stock in trade is in seeing the shades of gray out there the nuances the things that um allow us to walk what i always say my grandfather's line that he liked it wasn't his line of

sea it was a it was a famous line walk a mile in the other guy's moccasins that's how i behave in life that's i always try to see you know okay so how does this look from the other side right from from my fellow man my fellow american's viewpoint you know could i try to see how maybe they're seeing this as a way to better understand how there could be a meeting of the minds. But there's got to be a desire to have a meeting of the minds.
And both extremes today seem to eschew the entire idea. Right.
And, you know, again, I went after the protesters a little while ago, but but this is human work. I mean, you know how one of the people got shot at one of these protests? The Patriot side, the Donald Trump supporting side showed up at the protest with paint guns and ran right into the protest and shot paint guns from the back of truck.
What do you think is going to happen? Right. That's Americans steering into the iceberg.
And at 26, I would just think, you know, I'd be angry. Now I'm disappointed because I see it as almost something that's predictable and inevitable.
And of course, we're going to have that happen with some of our people. If we could just say it's some of our people and allow that to allow us to then take the views of the rest of the good people involved in any of these movements and talk about them seriously, that'd be one thing.
But you get one kid who says, we're coming for the suburbs next. And that's the face of the movement on one side.
and you get some of these other people on the pro-Trump side licking their chops for civil war and that starts to look like what the other side wants right they may not be representative of the great mass of people in this country but they're sucking up all of the uh the poster child time um mobs are dangerous. Country's full of them now.
I keep hoping that there really is a silent majority out there. And Trump likes to call people who are supposedly going to reelect him a silent majority.
Nixon used the term to mean people that would vote for stability and the conservatism of staying with the guy in the White House. But I'm hoping that the silent majority out there is just living up to the name and not commenting on message boards and after news stories because they're being silent and that this time the right move for a silent majority seeking to avoid something as dastardly and as crazy that we're talking about it as civil war, I hope that those are people who would vote

against the candidate that would steer into the sorts of ideas, policies, pronouncements,

conspiracy theories, and speeches that would make a civil war more rather than less likely.

And once again, I mean, how patriotic can it be to support the idea of somebody deliberately

We can't wait. And once again, I mean, how patriotic can it be to support the idea of somebody deliberately calling into question votes, the election system? I mean, these are the very foundations by which we trust each other that keep us from going at each other's throats.
And he's destabilizing all of them and as i said there's only two reasons for that either he's doing it because he thinks building a wall and all these other things that are so important to him saving western civilization as somebody said at the gop um convention uh that it's so important that it's worth flirting with civil war for or he's doing it for his own gain which is well again i'm not sure how you can be patriotic and support someone who's willing to treat the republic with such carelessness and risk you know there's a famous line supposed to have been uttered by ben Franklin right after the U.S. Constitution was decided upon because the people who decided upon it, the public didn't know what the decision was and what was being made.
And so the story is that someone came up to him right outside where it had happened and said, Dr. Franklin, what kind of government do we have? And I'm going from memory here, but it sounds much more ominous now than it used to.
He's supposed to have replied, a republic, if you can keep it.