And the biggest hurdle that he's been up against is that the government kind of worked pretty well. It got a lot of shit wrong, it served the interests of the rich over the general public, and it waged a lot of war. But in terms of functioning, it was pretty reliable.

I think it's more easily and dangerously corruptible than I had previously imagined.

So, right off the bat, you can hear how important state sovereignty is to Alex at this point in his life, where he holds the position that the federal government could pass any law it wants. But as long as he and his buddies don't give up, it's going to be impossible for the government to enforce anything on the state level.

The part he's right about is that as long as the extreme right wing will stay heavily armed and pissed off about everything, the federal government will not be able to do anything without risking violent reprisals.

It is most likely the case that Rushing wasn't charged with the crime involving tampering with a mailbox because that's a federal crime, and the feds probably didn't want to get involved. Ironically, the fact that the federal government didn't step in to press charges on Kelly kind of disproves Alex's narratives about how the feds are all trying to stop his patriot movement.

One of the main issues here is that Alex doesn't want to deal with this issue sincerely because as it stands now, the federal government doesn't control water fluoridation. It's handled much more locally than that.

And I think part of the reason is because what's actually going on and the tension that's actually going on there is a little bit boring. backing of a bunch of states saying fuck you to the federal government. Sure. And that isn't going to come to a head until it comes to a head. Right. And in the meantime, when it doesn't come to a head, it can bore people who are into sensationalism and who make their market on that. Right. Secondarily, the razor's edge. Of January 6th cuts in two directions. So there was a lot of talk about that convoy that was going to go down, and I think Alex was pretty excited about that. Everybody likes a convoy in this world. The problem is, as it's happened, it appears from some of the reporting I've seen that a lot of people are afraid that it is a setup. Right. Because, you know, January 6th was a setup. Everybody got set up by the feds. And so the numbers are not nearly as... Would have been expected by the people who are promoting this in advance.

The disillusion with the federal government being able to address the problems that people have has a tendency towards drawing people towards this.

Five, the federal government didn't refuse Trump's request to send to the National Guard.

And what really forced my hand was the fact that he talked about Portland a little bit, in a way that I haven't really heard him cover the situation at all. So it's really, really relevant to our interests and our coverage to see him be in support of the federal government, because it's a tool and a weapon that can be used against his true enemies.

If you're supposedly anti-homelessness and anti-government doing anything, and you learn that federal coordination and aid has been shown to be incredibly effective in addressing the problem of homelessness, you have to either drop your anti-government position or accept that you really don't have that big of a problem not having anywhere to live.

He creates hysteria and paranoia around this imagined intention behind the purchase, when the truth is that they were buying the ammo for training and shooting range purposes, and that the contracts they were looking to fill were for the next five years. It's not like they wanted 1.6 billion bullets to show up ready to go tomorrow. It was over the next... The course of half a decade. And their idea was that if they could lock in a contract with a huge purchase, the federal government might be able to get a better price on them.

San Antonio Assistant City Manager Colleen Bridger, who has a Ph.D. in health service research and a master's in public health, has gone on the record and said that immigrants have all, quote, been screened by the federal government before being released into the United States.

The feds are cracking down on anybody who cares about animals.

The mailbox is technically considered to be property of the, like, federal government or whatever. So you can't interfere with the, like, distribution and collection of the mail.

And then, you know what happened? Columbine. The feds false-flagged Columbine in order to get federal control back in.

He's talking about systematic racism. The federal government needs to get involved because otherwise local state bodies are not taking care of the issue.

Because money is fungible, which means it can be moved around, one dollar here is the same as one dollar there. It's all... Do you mean dollars mean dollars no matter where? Yeah, and when it's all money coming in, it can be used in different directions.

Yeah, so he's afraid that they're going to take out all AM and FM stations, television as well. He goes a little bit further into this. Why would they take out all the AM and FM stations? Because they don't want Alex jumping on any of those stations, just in case. I mean, it's not that. He doesn't say that, but that's my assumption. No, that's the implication there. They don't want people to be able to communicate, especially patriots.