The Culture War #36 - This May be THE LAST ELECTION w/Stephen Marche & Phil Labonte
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Tim Pool and it's the guy with the butterfly and he says, is this Civil War?
Because that's me!
We talk about it quite a bit.
But I do think, while funny as it is and I love to roll with the punches, it's entirely fair.
I didn't just one day come up with this concept, there have been many much smarter individuals than I who have argued we may be facing another civil war.
Especially with what we're seeing now politically with legal disputes, legal challenges, and this bifurcated culture in the United States.
Yeah, maybe.
And this may be the last election.
Don't take my word for it, ask Roseanne Barr.
Because she came on this show and she said, she doesn't think there's, she said, there will not be another election.
The argument made was, Are you saying that they'll quite literally just have no ballots, no voting?
No, not necessarily.
It could be that we get a North Korea-style election where no one just believes it's actually happening.
But, I wonder.
So joining us this morning on The Culture War is the author of two books.
We have Stephen Marsh.
He's recently written, I think with Andrew Yang, The Last Election.
So we talked a long time ago, actually, about your previous book, The Next Civil War.
I thought it was a really great conversation.
I think we disagree on a wide range of things, but I think we agree on basically everything in your book, like what's causing this, where it might end up.
Then I saw that you and Andrew Yang put out another book, The Last Election, and we got to talk about it.
So are you saying that 2024 may be our last election in the United States?
unidentified
Yeah.
I mean, Andrew came to me and wanted to talk about this because he's extremely worried about the electoral system and its vulnerabilities, the particular vulnerabilities of the American electoral system.
And it's constitution and along with all the other stuff that we talked about You know when I wrote the next civil war like I was very consciously trying to write stuff that I only felt certain of Which is very hard to do in the American context because everything gets caught up in you know flame wars and so on and I only wanted to write about things that I know and that's why I never ended up writing a chapter on On electoral politics, right?
Because everyone you talk to, you're just trying to triangulate opinions, and everyone has an agenda, and you don't actually know how things work.
And Andrew came along and said, like, why don't I explain to you how American politics actually works, and we'll put it in a thriller.
And, you know, to his credit, he, you know, I asked him for two things.
I said, you know, if I call, you have to return my call.
Like, yeah, I know you're important and you're out fundraising and stuff like that, but I, you know, I need, I need the information quickly.
And also I want you and your whole staff and everyone, you know, to tell me the actual truth.
And that way I figured, you know, whatever happened, I would at least know how American politics works.
So you've got, so again, this is a fictional depiction based on all of these things you've seen and what's currently going on and what you, like, it's kind of like what you feel could happen.
unidentified
Yeah.
I mean, there's two, there's kind of two aspects to it.
So one is like the campaign stuff.
So that was like, you know, like I asked Andrew, like, what are the three most important dates in a political campaign?
Like where I'm trying to plot a novel here, like what are the dates?
And he was like, first campaign fundraising report, second campaign fundraising report, third campaign fundraising report.
Right.
And you realize talking to him like, you know, so like, you know, like one guy I talked to was a humanization coach who is an expert.
This is a literal human being who is an ex-Broadway actor who goes around the country teaching politicians how to talk like a human being.
Right like and he does some things like I am not surprised and he does things like he does things like say something and then put a piece of Lego on another piece of Lego or I'll ask you a question and then I'll throw you a wiffle ball and you catch the wiffle ball and they do all these acts and this man does it because their lizards.
No, the reason is that because their job is fundraising.
So what they do is they go into rooms and they give the same spiel 70,000 times and by the time they've given it the 35,000th time that they're asked the same question and they give an answer, they naturally, like it's not really their fault.
Right?
It's just that they tune out, right?
And so it was him and like, you know, I talked to a real live opposition researcher.
And I mean, you talk to one of these guys for five minutes, you think, you realize like everything I wrote in The Next Civil War, not an optimistic book, but like five minutes talking to this guy, I was like, oh, it's way worse than I thought.
I mean, it's way worse.
Like talking to Oppo researcher, they kept saying like, you know, I'm trying to plot a book.
So it's like, okay, when do you release the scandals on this guy?
And they kept saying, well, like, We unload the book here, and then it's like, well, you wait for their fundraising report to come out, and then you unload the book on them.
And then after a while, I was like, hold on a minute, when you say unload the book, is there a book?
And he's like, oh yeah, there's a book written on every American politician.
And I was like, can I see one?
And he's like, well, they're illegal to own, but I'll put one up on Google Docs and you can pull it down.
As a Sherlock Holmes fan, I was like, this is the lowest form of Sherlock Holmes that's ever existed.
However, I do like in the story where, to use my pop culture references, he finds the semi-automatic pistols.
It's like turn of the century 1900s and it's Moriarty basically saying, war on an industrial level is coming and I'm going to own it.
And it was this interesting idea that The idea they're giving you is that, for all of us right now, we understand industrialized warfare with machine guns and air raids, but before the Industrial Revolution, it was much more difficult to make weapons.
For instance, I was reading about, researching about Civil War weaponry, and the advances In rifle technology.
They're like 50 years apart.
It's like they use smooth-bore muskets for hundreds of years.
What you're describing with opposition research today seems like the industrialization of politics, industrial, like of political lawfare, where it used to be that there was a scandal on somebody, they'd bring it up.
Now it's every politician has a book, Yeah.
They're gonna make up anything they have to and everyone is in a heightened sense of like rabbit level, you know, exhilaration and fear.
unidentified
Well, I would say it's partly that, but also the thing that I was amazed by, it's funny, you know, because of course when you say it out loud it's totally obvious, it's like politics is about money.
Like, I knew that, we all knew that.
I just had no idea that it was 12 hours of a politician's day.
That is the job.
It is gaining attention in order to get money in order to gain attention.
So it's partly the celebrification of this stuff and the memetic warfare aspects of it, but what they do all day is fundraise.
That's what they are.
Do you think that's why Trump was such a unique Political figure?
And that's not trying to have a positive or negative cast on it, but do you think that he was different and in a way that, or a different type of politician because of the fact that he, not that I know that he did or did not have a book, but do you think that like they were scrambling, we got to come up with this with the oppo research now when he came down the elevator?
Because people would, he had teased it for so long.
When Obama killed that kid, Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki.
unidentified
No, it was not.
Scandal free.
Opposition research very clearly, and they speak of it just this way, is like you are not looking for the bad things that they did.
What you are looking for is the good parts of them that you then sour.
Right so like what you like what is it's there's a gosh I can't remember it but they like you're not looking for bad things you're looking for the best part of people to and suddenly to make it seem garbage so it's partly swift boating but actually what you're doing is you're going into their base and just skewing it.
For people that don't know what swift boating is it was it was looking at something that John Kerry had done he was talking about something for uh in for Vietnam vets I believe And they, which was ostensibly a good thing, and they turned it around and made it seem like he was against vets, against everybody.
Yeah, he was a Vietnam vet.
George W. Bush was a deserter, you know, not a deserter, but like got out of it.
And they managed to turn that.
That is opposition research.
So with the case of Trump, There's nothing to sour.
What they actually should have done, from an opposition research point of view, is made fun of his hair, made fun of his virility, and made fun of his money.
The fakeness of the money.
They couldn't quite bring themselves to do it.
Trump is invulnerable to the kind of opposition research that other politicians are absolutely vulnerable to.
So you mean innovations then?
Well, he's totally innovative.
It's kind of funny because it's like, is he an innovator or did he just react to a changing world?
Like, I mean, you could say it either way.
Like, I think I would be fine with either way.
But basically, he understood that politics had become celebrity before anyone else.
You want to get in the ring with this guy who knows how to hit someone in the back with a folding chair, and you've never experienced that, he's gonna roast you.
If you are wealthy, and you do not need to make phone calls and make promises, you've jumped the game.
unidentified
Yeah, and you still would have to do it, because the fundraising thing I learned is that it's not necessarily even the money, it's that when people give you money, They fight for you.
So, without spoiling the book, because I know it's a novel, let's walk through the fact-based points of what's going to happen next year that could result in this being the last election.
unidentified
Well, here's the premise of it, like the thing that it moves towards is the process in the Constitution called the contingent election, right?
Oh yeah.
So what happens, this has happened twice before, 1824 and then in a vice presidential candidate in 1828.
If no one hits the threshold of 270 electoral college votes, What then happens is that it goes to, and by January 6th, right, for whatever reason, whoever, what happens is it goes to the House and each House has a state delegation that gets one vote for president.
So the Republicans would win every time.
Right, like because they just, you know, Wyoming, they have more house, it hasn't, yeah there's different numbers on it, but I mean it's overwhelmingly in favor of the Republicans.
So this means that by this method, there's also a separate method for Picking the vice president through the Senate, which would, you could have a Republican president and a Democrat vice president, which would be, I mean, hilarious, but, um, but you would have, uh, like you would have, so it would goes to the house Republican.
It goes to the house delegates.
They each get a vote.
And so you have an election, which is constitutional, but which does not reflect either the popular vote or the electoral college vote.
Right.
And so what you need for that to happen is a third party candidate who takes a significant amount away.
RFK, I mean, some of the numbers they're showing are pretty like what's in here, right?
And if that happens, it's quite possible that no one at all would reach 270.
If you throw into that election denial and faithless electors, which has happened in American history, you get An election where the point is that no it would be constitutional but illegitimate i.e.
exactly like elections that you mentioned in North Korea or East Germany or whatever.
But if RFK wins, even a handful of electors, and then neither Trump nor Biden or whoever, I don't think it's gonna be Biden, it's gotta be somebody else.
But if they don't reach 270, then it goes to the delegations like you explained.
And so, we had Cenk Uygur on last week, and I believe he's incorrect in his broader view of this, but the general idea he said was, the plan for 2020 was to, with January 6th, was to disrupt the electoral vote count, which would, and Mike Pence, first, Mike Pence would say, I'm not going to accept these, they've got to go back to the state legislatures.
If that doesn't happen, He believed that January 6th's purpose was to disrupt the count entirely so that they would then say, well, it's got to go to a contingent election.
There's one guy who's going to jail now for two years or whatever, and he's on video being like, we did it, we're in the building, haha!
And it's like, what does that mean?
In the 1600s, perhaps occupying a building meant you were now in charge, but that doesn't mean anything today.
If Mike Pence did say, I think it was like even one state, if he said the state legislature of this state has disputed their election and is currently in litigation, I will not count these votes, Trump would have won.
It might have been two states.
unidentified
Well, technically, I think it'd be a little harder because the contingent election has to take place on the 6th.
So on January 6th, if he had done that, it wouldn't have made any difference, legally, because the certification has already happened.
So if the decertification does not arrive, For any reason by January 6th, then it goes into a contingent election.
But it has to take place on that date.
The US electoral system is both Chaotic and incredibly specific right right right like so it's well You know it's not like they can in Canada if something happens like this you just have another election In four weeks, and that's it right.
I mean you can't you have no mechanism for doing that An interesting point was brought up I think it was Ian last night and Tim cast IRL said we don't need to rush elections, and it's like he's he's right Like, if there's an issue, I don't see a problem with being like, okay, hold on guys, this is gonna take a bit longer to figure out, let's just chill and then we'll litigate.
Everything here is like, no, it must be this day, it must be done or else.
Well, I mean, look, it's a work of great genius, but it's a work of 18th century genius.
And we're living in the 21st century and it doesn't... I agree.
And like this part of this problem is...
the edge of it the resistance just to be clear like u.s constitution is a work of genius like i'm not no i think you're completely right but it's just it's just an antiquity the per the pushback that you that you are going to get from people that are that believe in the constitution or that are that favor the constitutional system is not so much that there are not things that could be better in the constitution
it's that if you allow someone to try to change it they're going to change it in a way that takes power away from the states and centralizes it.
And the whole point of the Constitution is not to centralize power.
I'm not going to disagree with that, but he was hobbled by, could he fire Comey and could he change things that a president should normally change?
He wasn't able to do it.
There were a bunch of other issues too.
He was hobbled in a lot of crazy ways when he tried withdrawing troops from Syria.
His advisors, the commanders, lied about the troop presence, lied to the American people, kept... That's insane to me!
And so, if we're talking about the last election, or whether or not we're in a civil war, we need to consider the context from 2016 onward, and probably before, like you mentioned, 2000.
unidentified
Well, I think the context from, like, elite institutional forums, like, every... See, it's so funny coming from another country, because, like, in every other country in the world, there's a civil service that Has the power, right?
And they run the country.
Politicians come in, they can change the civil service, but it's like steering a massive ship, right?
And I remember the reason I wrote The Next Civil War, honestly, is because I was in Washington for the 2016 inauguration and a journalist calls me at like 2 in the morning and says like, hey, come to this party in Georgetown.
And I was like, okay.
So I go out to this guy's house, and it was some low-level bureaucrat from FDA, or Department of Agriculture.
The kind of guy who's responsible for the price of wheat in 2080.
And he'd taken his chair, and he had all the presidential pictures, like the big presidential, and I said, what happened?
He said, no one came to replace us at the FDA.
Like, they turned out the lights at the FDA.
That's when I knew.
Like, all the other stuff, like the American carnage speech, all that stuff, that's when I knew America's in trouble.
Like, let's start to think about the deep structures of this.
Because, like, You can go without politicians, but without a bureaucracy, without a civil service, things fall apart very quickly, right?
But my point is with the electoral stuff, The problem is that no one believes that a legitimate election has happened.
From 2016?
From 2016, probably.
I think 2016 is really the marker.
Where it's like, they don't actually, like 20, 2000, it's like, well, there was some play and it didn't, like, but on the other hand, it's like, you know, this, like, we understand that sometimes mistakes happen, popular vote, but 2016, people were like, this was illegitimate.
2020, the right, I mean, still, they still believe it's illegitimate.
Considering Barack Obama was clearly the winner in 2008 and 2012, like clearly America was generally like, the center and the left were very unified, very, very pro-America.
So I think that because of that, 2016 is probably the most, it's probably more accurate to say 2016 was when it really fell apart.
The people beneath him who are instructed as per our constitution and the laws of this land lied to him to keep troops in a foreign country and lied to the American public, but that's some kind of coup.
unidentified
To me, it's perfectly natural that there'd be a tension between an executive and the people following it out.
I mean, that just, to me, that's life.
Certainly, whoever is the leader of Germany, what he thinks about all day is, why won't these people do what I'm telling them to do?
Yes, but the President of the United States is elected by the people to be the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and we never declared war in Syria.
unidentified
Listen, I just think when you're dealing with large-scale institutions, there's just all, like, you can call that a coup, but actually what that is is just a natural tension between an executive and a bureaucracy.
They've defied the direct order of the duly elected president.
Now, I'm not saying that's a hard coup where the military storms in and seizes power.
That is coup-ish.
Where elements of the military have begun to defy the civilian government.
unidentified
Yeah, the military doesn't have the leeway.
No one in the military has the leeway by the book to say, we're not going to do what my superior officer said.
And the president is the commanding chief.
But this is also the premise of the book.
Like, that there's a military, like, it's not necessarily a coup, it's just that, like, what happens with the military in, this happens all the time in countries falling apart, in countries in civil war, is that the only institution that everyone approves of is the military, right?
And I mean, in America, that's just extreme now.
Yeah.
I mean, like, no one, no one has any respect for the Supreme Court.
Well, they're the last ones standing in this decline of faith in institutions, decline of faith in the media, decline of faith in the church, decline of faith in local government.
That is the mega-trend.
You were born in what, 1980?
86.
86.
You're almost exactly the point where the decline of faith in institutions begins.
Your whole life has been a decline of faith in institutions.
I mean I was 13, no I was 14 at the 2000 election.
- 13, I think, no, I was 14 at the 2000 election.
unidentified
- Right, right, and then you would have been, how old, you would have been 22 in the 2008 crash. - Yeah. - Right, where suddenly the financial system is a rave game, right?
Right, so this may be at the time outdated, because I've not followed up on it.
But the general idea is, I remember I was in some city, I'm doing some interview, and we get word that the Bosphorus Bridge has been occupied by a coup force under certain leaders.
A story that emerged was that these young men who served in the Turkish Armed Forces were given a lawful order to defend the Bosphorus Bridge from a terror attack.
They showed up, no idea what's going on.
Then, they were mercilessly beaten and dragged to the street by civilians because it was reported these people were attempting to stage a military coup against Erdogan.
So the argument is, in the United States, what may happen?
And a lot of people are like, you really think that the armed forces are gonna go and round people up or do X or do Y?
What will happen, or what could happen, is that there will be a simple lawful order that does not raise alarm bells for any, like, lower-ranking enlisted guy, and they say, we're getting reports of a potential riot, so the National Guard, we're gonna have you guys deployed to the streets, and then a bunch of National Guardsmen come out, surround a building, because they're like, I guess we're here to defend it, and then the news reports National Guard stages coup attempt and these guys are all, everyone points the finger at them, and it could be a mistake.
It could be intentional.
But the idea is you don't need National Guardsmen or military servicemen to decide to stage a coup.
They won't know what they're doing is the coup when they're given a lawful order.
unidentified
Well, I mean, the first chapter of The Next Civil War, I talk to the colonel responsible for drawing up what they call full-spectrum operations in the homeland, right?
So that's when, you know, they absolutely have... I mean, they have a plan for everything, right?
They're the U.S.
military.
They have a plan for conquering Canada.
They have a plan for... Yes!
Let's go!
There's no contingency plan that they don't have, right?
We were a bunch of colonies sprinkled across the northern part of North America, and then Lincoln's Minister of War was like, should we go take Montreal?
And we were like, we better get our ducks in a row.
Yeah, I mean it makes sense for the British side of the South because it splits the United States.
unidentified
Exactly.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I don't think they were thinking it was true.
I mean they weren't anywhere near that sophisticated.
It was just like we need stuff for our mills.
Yeah, but the but the point is like in these scenarios where the military is the last holder of value.
I mean, that's where you get Really nightmare scenarios for the, for the military, right?
Like they're faced with choices that are extremely bad.
I mean, that's the, that's the point of this book and the point of, of, of the next civil war is like, it's not to think about this as like good guys, bad guys.
It's like actually what you're dealing are people who are faced with terrible choices and terrible incentives.
So they decide For the sake of the 80%, we're gonna shut down violently and oppressively the 20%.
It's way more complicated than that, and this is probably outdated, just to be clear.
unidentified
Yeah, but also like the number one, like when you look at the metrics, the number one cause, the number one attribute that leads to having a coup is that you've had one before.
Right?
Like, and the more that you have them, the more that you're likely to have them.
We don't have gunfights in the street over politics.
I'm talking about high-level gunfights.
I understand there have been fights where people are throwing Molotovs and stuff, but I'm talking about dudes actually setting up L-shaped ambushes on opposing forces.
White power people go into black churches and kill everybody.
And real quick, for the people screaming partisanship, I think we'll just also bring up the trans shooter who went to the Christian school.
unidentified
Or the riots in 2020.
I understand, but the point that I'm making is that it's still different between, like, militarized units making actual attacks on, like, a police station to kill everybody and take the location.
With The Troubles, you have Occupation you have yeah, the British are in Northern Ireland in Seattle.
It is dominated by a left left-wing worldview in Miami for instance clearly dominated by a more right-wing worldview.
There's no reason I got to make this point because this one really bugs me people will say things like Civil War Tim Why don't you go outside and talk to someone do you think a civil war is gonna happen?
And I'm like go and talk to them.
I did but do you think During the Civil War, right before the Civil War started, a guy who walked out of his door in Atlanta and talked to his neighbor would conclude a Civil War was going to happen.
He'd go to his neighbor and be like, hey, what do you think about all this?
I completely agree with you.
Everything's fine.
What are you talking about?
The issue is Seattle and Miami are worlds apart from each other.
Physically and and ideologically.
Yeah, so you're not gonna get the troubles because Miami is not occupying Seattle But you are going to see an increase in violence.
We did see that with the with protests Yeah, and what I think people misunderstand about a potential civil war They think state state versus state.
unidentified
Yeah, don't need to be no no no That's not that's certainly not anything that I like the experts that I talked to that's not what we're that's not what we're talking exactly right like we're talking about like
The delegitimization of the political process, the rise of violence as a solution, the classic method of trying to tamp down violence by overarching state control, which then leads to more violence, and that is a process that's been played out literally dozens and dozens of times over history, and it never goes well.
I think it's Texas set up razor wire barriers to stop illegal immigration.
The federal government came in and got a backloader to lift the razor wire up and to allow hundreds of people to illegally enter the country.
This is, there is no way, it doesn't matter what your perspective is on immigration or otherwise, if the state law and the state is saying, we say no it's illegal and we buy a barrier, and the federal government says we don't care what you're doing, we're subverting your state sovereignty.
You know, this is something that's happening slower Like, I don't know about this particular example, but like, one of the things that's happening, it truly is bipartisan, is that states are using their resistance to the federal authority as a vote winner in their own states, right?
And that's, that's equally true in California, as it is for Texas, as it is for Florida, where they are, and that is just playing with fire.
I mean, that is, like, that is, I mean, for everyone.
Like, you were, you were dealing with, um, where you have this, you know, and you have things like, who was the Attorney General under Trump?
And this is a really good example of the various sanctuary ideas that are popping up.
But the point I wanted to make with the militias, when you have the state of Texas saying, by our laws and our borders, be it so, and the federal government in violation of its own laws and the state, uses the border patrol to act as the inverse.
It's almost like Fahrenheit 451.
The firemen don't put the fires out, they make the fires.
My fear is, it only takes five guys with weapons to go down there and say, if you won't do it, we will.
We have the law on our side.
unidentified
Oh, well, when you have a situation where you don't know what the law is, When you don't have a legitimate Supreme Court, this is how countries fall apart.
This is what happens in Brazil and Argentina.
You're not immune to this, just because you're super rich.
I definitely want to talk about the courts too, but real quick on this point.
We know what the laws are.
If you want to come to this country, you file the paperwork, you go through a process.
If Texas is trying to uphold the law and the federal government is actively subverting the law, you are going to get people in Texas saying outright, the state is illegitimate, it's breaking the law intentionally.
And that's when you get people who, what happens is, you get the political equivalent of God is on my side.
unidentified
I mean, wasn't it Abbott who had the, what was the thing where they called in the militia against military exercises in Texas?
The first thing people need to understand is people really need to watch civil trials.
It really is supposed to be a judge as a neutral arbiter hearing arguments and then deciding which argument makes the most sense.
It really is as simple as that.
You watch a trial and the judge is like, what do you mean by 5%?
Are you talking about on the revenue?
And the guy goes, yeah, yeah, I'm saying when he agreed to this contract, the judge goes, well, how do you respond to that?
And the judge goes, interesting, I actually think he's right.
That's really how simple it is.
But now what's happening is with the hyper-partisan split, you are getting judges who are saying, My worldview is clearly on one side or the other, and they're going to issue their ruling on one side or the other, and the other side's going to be like, how could you possibly think that?
They're clearly corrupt.
And when this begins to happen, that's the... When you look at something like the history of Chile, that is what happened.
unidentified
Right?
Like it's like slowly, and then people start to lose faith in other systems.
And then it just becomes, it just becomes like my family versus your family.
Right?
Like, I mean, it becomes, it becomes really on that basis.
And you know, I remember having a friend who came back from living in Saudi Arabia for like, he was making money there for something.
And I said, what did you miss most about living in Canada?
And he, and like, I expecting like, you know, maple syrup or some shit.
Right?
Or something, you know, like I missed a hockey or something, right?
And he said, equality under the law, right?
He said, you know, if you're driving and you hit the wrong person in Saudi Arabia, even if it's not your fault, like you're done.
If you're a woman and you get raped, you go to jail for having sex out of marriage.
unidentified
And when you, like the ultimate luxury, the ultimate heritage that we have been passed down by our forefathers and foremothers is equality under the law.
The argument being courts and executive branches altered the rules of an election in the state where the Constitution says only the state legislature can do this.
The argument from Texas being if Pennsylvania's election is not sound, then their votes should not count against ours.
The Supreme Court said we don't care and refused to hear what's called original jurisdiction, state versus state, saying answer this constitutional question so we know, and the Supreme Court said no.
unidentified
And the reason they didn't is because they were afraid of having to To find in Donald Trump's favor or against him or against they they did not want to they didn't want to answer the question at all.
The problem here is that this system is from, you know, 18th century.
I agree.
This is the thing.
It's easy to get angry and it's easy to get like, you did this and you did that, but actually the problem here is that these systems mean that no one feels like their voice is heard politically.
Yeah, so right like conservatives keep sending Republicans to Washington to change it and it doesn't ever change and then they go and then they go and then they get really angry and they blame but it's like The lesson here is that no one is get no one is actually having influence I mean, this is what let me this is what like Andrew explained he betrayed his political class he told me the truth of how it works and when you look at the
And when you look at the influences, you look at the incentives for people, there's just no incentive to actually listen to the public.
I want to clarify, too, as to what at least my view is, and then I don't know if you agree or not, but the Constitution, as you mentioned earlier, a work of genius, but 18th century genius.
And I think that's correct.
The core ideas of why we did it and the ideas behind it are correct, But, we have way more people now, we have tremendously different systems of communication, and so... Let me ask you a question.
Just the final thought is, it doesn't mean... I'm not saying the Constitution is wrong or anything, I'm just saying the perspective of it is rooted in... It doesn't take into consideration a lot of things that are different today, and I don't know how you rectify that.
unidentified
Well, this is my question for you.
America is starting again.
America has a constitutional convention.
They get together.
What does the constitution that they make look like to you?
So what are the principles that actually unify the United States?
Today.
Right now.
Honestly, think about the fact that you're stunned by that question.
So, for the past 10 years, the start of the culture war in this country was social media platforms.
I'll give you the Twitter example, because this is the one I was involved in with Jack Dorsey, Joe Rogan.
Twitter says, if you misgender someone, we will ban you from this platform permanently.
And I said, what does misgendering mean?
Because conservatives, if you go to someone who's biologically male and say, she, you've misgendered them.
To liberals, if you go to someone who says, call me she, but you don't, you've misgendered them.
Two distinct worldviews, and you've chosen to enforce one.
Free speech would argue, You guys decide just keep it respectful.
No.
You look at Twitter and what do you get?
You got people on the left would post pictures of wood chippers for the Covington kids and people on the right would get banned for saying hashtag learn to code.
The left perspective in this country was if it is hurtful it's not free speech at the same time we're allowed to be hurtful.
unidentified
It's, it's one of the things that's fascinating to me about watching American politics.
I mean, it does bleed into Canada, but it's not anywhere near as intense as how the left comes up with ideas and then the right takes them on and just take, like book banning in libraries, like that was started by left-wing groups, right?
And then the right took it on and was like, let's do this for real.
There's 10% on either side who think those people should be annihilated.
There are extremists on both sides, fact, but it is the dominant left-wing view of suppression and the dominant right-wing view of open speech.
unidentified
No, no, no.
no no that's i i mean i just i think if you look i think if you look at the government actions if you look at government if you look at like florida's take on on on book i mean there are only in libraries it's only curation what you're talking about is curation you're not talking about banning you're talking about selecting what will and will not go into a library this is not whether or not you can get it curation is not banning okay okay things but this is why i was getting into the granular element of what is book banning
because what you're saying is children should have access to access to adult content well Well, what I would say, I mean, what I genuinely believe is, um, I mean, I believe in letting people read whatever the hell they want.
I don't think 12 year olds should learn about blowjobs.
People on the right, so we have a book over here called This Book is Gay.
Right.
A teacher had the police called on her because the book explains how to use Grindr, and she was instructing 10 to 12 year olds on how to use a gay adult dating app.
Well, if children were to use that app, they'd be not only in violation of the terms of the app, but they would be engaging in, not themselves, but illegal activity with those adults.
unidentified
You don't have kids, right?
No.
Dude, every kid who has a phone has access to the sum total of all grossness of information.
My point is, like, an actual book is probably better for them than if they go on their phone and say, what is a blowjob?
But my point is not what the kids should be doing.
My point is the distinction between the left and the right.
In this country, up until the advent of the internet, if a child walked into an adult bookstore and the person who ran the store let them in, they would be criminally charged for it.
When the internet comes out, we see the emergence of what we would describe as the modern left saying, yeah, well, you got a phone, the kids can see it anyway.
The traditional American position for the past hundred years has been, do not give kids access to contraband because they're not ready for it or for whatever reason.
And the left is, well it's there, so be it.
unidentified
See, listen, I think it's the same to me.
You know, I am somewhat of an outsider here.
But, like, the same thing is happening where it's like, you know, where they're banning, like, they're taking out all the offensive references in Roald Dahl.
Like, that's what the left does.
Right.
I hate it.
I hate it.
Like, it's totally unacceptable to me.
Like, the books are supposed to be left in their raw state for children to come and understand them and make their own minds up and deal with reality.
And it's the same thing to me with these other examples you have.
Like, First of all, this is not about what's the benefit for the children, because nobody knows what a book does to a child, right?
Amazon has fine but they're also a market but like my point is like that's I hate that but my like I hate that so my point is the argument that you're making about curation is not an argument about banning and it and And we're talking about this as if it is about banning.
This is not about banning.
This is about what goes into schools.
This particular topic is about what goes into school libraries.
And that makes a difference.
Because there has to be curation because there's no way you can have every book in a school library.
And they're going to decide which ones are acceptable and which are not.
And to classify it as banning or call it censorship is to deceive what people are talking about.
My final point is, when Jen Cougar came on this show, We, uh, I think we had a great conversation and I tried to be explained to me so we can have a conversation and literally try to find where we're gonna win together.
Like, no one is ever going to be satisfied with the actual working out of the world, right?
Like, it's not like, it's not like, like, I mean, we have a huge housing problem.
We have got all these problems.
Like we got, we got, we got a lot of problems of our own.
On the other hand, I feel like we have a system for working them out.
What I feel in the United States is, I mean, one thing, you know, when you're a Canadian, it's like Americans are, They're great.
There's nothing wrong with there's nothing wrong with Americans, right?
Like Americans are great And if you have conversations with them, they they absolutely are sensible reasonable people it's just that the system in which they operate their politics is so defunct and and Collapsing that that no it doesn't matter if Like, everyone in this book, on either side, is a good person.
Right.
That is one thing we wanted to do in the book.
Because it's like, politics is not made up of bad people.
It's made up of actually good people with incentives that are so poor that it annihilates them.
I do think we have a lot of evil people in government.
unidentified
I actually don't.
I think there are idiots and there are players and there are people of this nature and there are people who become corrupt, but a good person in a system with evil incentives Cannot work any- is much worse than an evil person in a system with good incentives.
And I'm gonna convince them to give me money, and all I gotta do is save dogs.
And their intention is personal gain, profit, and power, but the path to doing it is saving homeless dogs and creating dog shelters, like... Yeah.
The best path for an evil person to gain power and do their awful things could be something we actually have no problem with.
Then there could be good people who are like, I want to save a million people, but I would have to change this policy, which is going to negatively impact a ton of people in a bad way.
unidentified
Oh, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I think there are people in situations like the reason you write a novel, like the reason we did this as a novel rather than a nonfiction book is because.
What the novel is about, what the novel does better than anything, is people in situations.
Like, how do people respond to the environments they're in?
I'll give you an example of one component I view to be evil.
I talk about malicious evil.
unidentified
This got super philosophical super fast.
We're going to be talking about St.
Augustine soon or something.
Before we go, I want to address that real quick.
The reason that we have such differing opinions and problems coming down on whether or not the First Amendment is worth saving is because people are now fighting about whether or not they believe in Enlightenment principles or if they believe in postmodern principles and it's a metaphysical, philosophical difference.
It's not because when the Constitution was written it was kind of a given that the Enlightenment was the way to... that the Enlightenment principles are what you should base your society on because you could come in contact with reality.
Since then, we've had Nietzsche, we've had Hegel, we've had Marx, we've had a lot of philosophers that have really kind of turned that upside down.
And now we're living in postmodern times where people are more... Well, it's identity-based.
It's not, well it's identity based because of postmodernism.
Because there is no truth, there is no right, there is no correct.
So the things that we're talking about boil down to metaphysical debate.
This is a prominent writer for a major publication who told me that their motivations, mind everything they do, was the destruction of stable society, of success, and to watch people struggle and burn because nothing matters anyway.
I remember talking to this researcher when I was doing this podcast on child rearing, right?
And we were doing this episode on spanking and shouting.
And whether you should spank or shout at your kids.
And I talked to the leading expert on the world on discipline, on childhood discipline, who believed, and I came to agree with him, that not only is spanking ineffective, but also shouting at your children is ineffective.
You shouldn't actually do this.
It's not necessarily that it's bad parenting, it's just it doesn't work.
And he told me a story once about how he was working in a lab with a guy who beat his kid every day.
And he was analyzing him and trying to figure out what he did.
And part of me was like, why didn't you just arrest this guy?
Surely a man who beats his son every day should just be in jail.
But he was this researcher by studying this person, by removing himself from the question of good and evil.
By analyzing it had come to the most powerful insights about child rearing that had ever existed.
Right.
So to me, like, yeah, there's, and he talked this guy out of doing that, by the way.
I mean, the man obviously wanted to improve and was trying to get the violence out of him.
And he talked him out of that.
And I always thought, I don't know how I feel about it.
I'm not sure what the correct response here is.
But I would say that what I feel my role is in this world is to try to understand so that we can get to better things.
Rather than just saying, you beat your kid every day, you're a monster.
We do not want, as human beings, someone to experience the death of their child and then to cry over that.
We want to figure out how to prevent that from happening.
You end up with various degrees of good and evil when it comes to these things, and what I mean by that is people who are trying to help other people experience love and joy, preserve the things that make them happy, and help make the world a better place, and there are people who are trying to extract from a system to benefit themselves either emotionally or through resource.
Yeah, well let's do this instead of just drifting off into philosophy, let's bring it back to earth and let's talk about the 14th amendment and Donald Trump's trials right now because we were talking about courts and legitimacy.
So Colorado, Minnesota, Michigan are currently in the legal process of determining whether or not Trump can even be president.
So the point I made was that If the Democrats succeed in having... I should even say this right now.
The fact that eligibility is even a question is already destroying what is left of our electoral system.
And the Supreme Court needs to come down, immediately bang the gavel within the next month, even today, and say, states cannot determine eligibility.
unidentified
And the reason for this is... But that's not the legal system you have.
It is not a question of the states to determine who can or can't be on the ballot, or who is eligible to be president, I'm sorry.
They do determine ballot access, which then creates an interesting question.
If the states are going to make the ballots for their own elections and determine who's going to be on it, there is a question of eligibility.
But, If the states have the ultimate juristic, ultimate right to say who is eligible or not, what will happen is in 2028, you will not have an election.
And the question of what's the most important day in a president, in a political campaign, it's going to be eligibility day.
And the lawyers for the politician will say, it's, uh, it's one year before the election.
Let's gear up our eligibility arguments to get this guy disqualified.
That way, when the election happens, we're the only one on the ballot.
unidentified
Well, even worse, it won't even be that because what they'll do is they'll just that the eligibility stuff will just be prep prep work for non-certification.
Yep, right and that's like so like so like because the non-certification is like if non-certification happens, it just goes to a contingent election, right?
So like it that is an automatic mechanism.
So all this other like Is it the state's right?
Is it this?
These are very complex legal arguments that there's multiple facets to and multiple sides, but the certification needs to be solved one day.
Real quick, I've been talking about this since the Trump thing started that, especially big yesterday, if the states go to eligibility arguments instead, then Trump's not on the ballot in California, then Biden's not on the ballot in Texas, but then what happens is, as you just pointed out, If they don't remove any names, come certification time, 10,000 lawsuits are filed saying you can't certify this person is not eligible.
unidentified
Yeah, and you have an election denier as Speaker of the House.
I mean, that's because the book is like, it's not a question of who the military has to, is going to be put in a position where they have to pick a side.
Yup.
And that's, they, they don't want to pick a side at all.
None of them.
Like, don't get me wrong.
Like they take their oath to the constitution.
I mean, it's the last thing holding this country together is the military's faith in their, in their oath.
I want to point, like, just one thing you said struck me.
The military's faith in their oath to the Constitution is the thing that you say that is keeping the country together or one of the few things?
I would say it's the only thing that I genuinely feel is stable.
The federal government has demonized people that would keep their oath to the Constitution.
If you're a member of the quote-unquote oath keepers, you're considered a bad guy.
I know what you're going to say, you're going to talk about nuance.
- Bad guy.
And it doesn't matter.
Listen, the new, I know what you're gonna say, you're gonna talk about nuance.
The nuance does not matter.
The nuance does not matter. - The Oath Keepers are a malicious The nuance does not matter because they're demonizing the Betsy Ross flag, they're demonizing anything that is connected to our founding.
The government came out and said members of the military who post the Gadsden flag on their Facebook are extremists, and that is quite literally the license plate of Virginia.
unidentified
Yes, right.
Well, yeah, I mean, you know, it's interesting, the same thing sort of happened in Algeria, where, because it was a revolutionary constitution, like because it was formed by militiamen, fundamentally, they put, the constitution of Algeria has very similar problems and reflections of its militia past as the US constitution.
And it's the same thing, because it's like, you're a country founded by rebels.
I mean, how many, how many Oath Keepers are there?
unidentified
Well, they don't know, but I mean, it's like, but it's certainly in the tens of thousands, but again, the list had the list that got leaked was 60,000.
Wasn't it?
I have no idea.
And that was just, that was just, but that was just people bringing power.
The point of me bringing up the Oath Keepers was because you talked about the oath.
It's not specifically about the Oath Keepers.
It's about the demonization of anyone that looks to the Revolutionary War period as a core principle for the American people.
So it's not just the Oath Keepers or the Threepers or whatever.
It's about, oh, if you believe in the things that the founders believed in, you're a threat to the government or you're a threat to America.
Was that, uh, was that when they pardoned, uh, which one was it where, uh, no, that was Jefferson.
Jefferson, Jefferson pardoned the, uh, all the people who were, uh, in revolt over... Yeah, and there's a famous, yeah, and then somebody wrote an amazing short story about it.
unidentified
That's in the next Civil War, too.
But yeah, I mean, like, there is a constant tension between, like, which, you know, has kind of made America great.
That's intended, though.
That's imminent.
I really, like, as the fact that you feel defeated by the First Amendment and the freedom of speech stuff, I mean, to me, like, when you come to America, like, when you get off the plane at Reagan Airport or anywhere, anywhere in the United States, the openness with which people talk
Is I mean that is what I love about the United States like and I do love the United States very much right like it's not my it's not my country it's not my mother but like I I have a great deal of affection for this country and the biggest reason for sure is like when you get off the plane you feel like you can say what you want which you know to be frank even though you know we have the same laws and stuff like in Toronto you you people whisper People keep their thoughts to themselves.
In this video, a man interviewing a pro-Palestine activist is approached by facilitators who say, only our press liaison can do interviews, and they ask the Palestinian activist not to talk to the press.
It is an extremely common tactic.
It is the norm at left protests that they will not allow you to talk to anyone.
Only their official spokesperson can speak to anyone, even if you don't know them.
You'll show up, they will attack the journalist.
unidentified
I'll tell you what, man, I've known a lot of lefties, and they'll talk to fucking anyone.
We get inundated with emails from people who are post-liberal to conservative begging to come on the show and asking when and how do I get on the show.
On the left, they say, how dare you go on Timcast, you're platforming hate.
unidentified
But let me ask you something.
Don't you feel at least somewhat responsible for this state of affairs given that, not to be personal, but the fusion of journalist and activist.
I mean, like I think sometimes I write opinion pieces and sometimes I publish them, but I honestly think my best work, like the things I'm proudest of and the things that I think actually matter are things like this, where it's like, I got access to the machine and I can tell you how the machine works.
If you want to learn, if you want to know how politics works, you can read it.
I gave that.
That's my gift.
And I feel proud of that.
Whereas my opinions are just my opinions, right?
The fusion of activist and journalist seems to me to be the You know, the original sin here.
And it is right-wing and it is left-wing.
It is both.
And, I mean, I think it is something that is just destructive in itself.
So, however, there's a moral question over what is the problem with it.
Here, at Timcast, we have an eclectic bunch of people of varying different political opinions.
We have some employees who absolutely hate Israel, some who absolutely love Israel, and I'm not going to fire them for having very, very strong disagreements and posting things on the internet.
If you're committing a crime and a person, like if you were, if you rob a bank and the police guard has their gun up and the guy dies of a heart attack, you're going to jail for murder.
Wait, wait, wait, hold on, hold on, hold on.
It doesn't matter, like if you're... He didn't die.
Well, that... At least the report from the Washington Post is that it was a mild heart attack and from the, in the months since he has talked about it and he's not dead.
That, the writings you have are informed by your worldview and the articles you read, and I have no issue with that whatsoever.
unidentified
No, but here's the thing.
Like, what I try to do when I write, genuinely, this is my life's mission, and I think it's why, what I'm proud of as a writer, is I go in with assumptions, and I investigate, and I see what happens, and then I watch those assumptions die.
See, to me, to me, when I hear activist journalist, what it means is, I'm going to go in with an idea, And I'm going to prove it.
My point is, when Covington Kids, for example, I did not come out and say, look what this kid did, how dare he, despite the fact that my own subscribers were demanding I denounce him.
I said, I need to know what happened first and then talk about it.
And so I did.
So what we do on this show is typically, they call me a milk toast fence sitter.
Right at this moment, I mean, I don't know, I don't know what, where the hell I stand on, I mean, so much.
Like these, there's these structures that I understand about how these things work, but like the actual nature of my political views, I feel is, I mean, I am on unstable ground.
People on the right and in the center know what the people on the left think and they understand their arguments.
People on the left do not understand people on the right.
John Haidt wrote a book called The Righteous Mind and his- Yes, that's an excellent, that's exactly what we're talking about here.
Yeah, his analysis of people on the right and the left, the people on the left use only a couple metrics for their opinions, whereas people on the right- Care and fairness.
Yeah, Karen Fairness, and I'm not, I don't want to, I didn't want to say, or I don't want to say because I'll probably botch it, but I know that the people on the left use only, only two dimensions, whereas people on the right use all five dimensions, six dimensions, and so, and, and libertarians are kind of off on their own, own thing, but this is, this is real, and it's testable.
Another, another metric we use, Is people on the left consume, they get their news from 95% left-wing sources.
People in the middle get 60% from the left and 30 to 40 from the right, and people on the right get 60 to 70 from the right and 30 from the left.
This is like Pew and Gallup research showing when they poll people and ask them what your sources are, they find the people on the left almost only exclusively go to left-wing activists' media outlets.
People in the middle have a mix and people on the right have a mix.
unidentified
Listen, The reason I wrote The Next Civil War is because basically of one single theory called complementary radicalization, which is that as politics dissolves, in Canada there are left-wing people and right-wing people who have exactly the same policy objectives.
And they make them, right?
They, like, enact policies.
That's what they do, right?
Like, for example, I live in Ontario.
I probably will vote Liberal next election.
My whole family's in Alberta.
They all vote, they will vote Conservative forever.
There is no... We are absolutely fine with each other.
It would never be brought up.
It would not even be considered as a subject of... I mean, maybe a joke.
Maybe as a little light joke, but it doesn't really matter.
Here, this has become this huge dividing line, and as... What happens in complementary radicalization is that As the right gets more right, it makes the left go more left, which makes the right go more right, which makes the left go more left.
And also, as you separate from reality, i.e., government, i.e., what are we going to do with shared reality?
Or policy.
We have politics in order to enact policies for our thing.
But as we were saying before, conservatives have been sending this stream of people to disrupt Washington.
But I will give one example where the left at least has some, some, in that despite the fact that we are seeing people go around tearing down the flyers of the Israeli civilians who were kidnapped, Biden came out and said, we're going to combat Islamophobia.
Let me just say, Hasan Piker, the biggest left-wing live streamer to Gen Z and some younger millennials, adamantly condemns, criticizes Israel, supports Palestine, that perspective is still dominant and prominent among many on the left, and it's not going to break. - No, I think you're right, but what's happening is that I think you're right, but what's happening is that any kind of...
unidentified
Like, you know, I'll never forget a conversation I had with an FBI agent We were talking about extremists and we're like, I was like, so, you know, left-wing has extremists.
Why do they never form themselves into these?
Like you're out there trying to stop these groups that are violently armed on the right.
Why does the left never have these, the same kind of like armed figures?
He said they destroy themselves before they can get to that point.
Fair point!
They annihilate, they have so little solidarity that they annihilate themselves before they can ever get to the point where they have, where they form themselves into actual units.
Right, so I do agree that with something like right-wing militias, they understand hierarchy and authority and solidarity better than the left does, but the left has this bulk low tier in large numbers, Yes, but it's also you have to understand that they're institutions and they've been largely based in institutions like I went to the 2018 like you know a lot of these things happen on campuses and someone in Humanities departments and campuses are falling apart like if that's your enemy I don't think that's the issue.
The shot heard, in my opinion, the shot heard around the world for the next civil war, should it happen, will likely come from the right, not the left.
And it's not because I am saying that there's a far-fringe right-wing extremist who's going to go racist and say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
The left is a destabilizing force.
I call them chaos.
I call them fire.
But the right, what I fear, as I mentioned the border, the shot heard around the world is not going to be a bunch of people pulling up some new flag of, you know, a new American flag or whatever and screaming revolution.
It's going to be Fourteen guys in a militia saying the federal government is in defiance of state law and federal law, and we're going to go set up our own checkpoint on this road.
The federal government will pull up and be like, we're the authority here, and they're going to say, you guys are in violation of the law.
This is why I said watching the federal government raise the razor wire to allow lawbreakers to break the law was terrifying to me because that is the catalyst for a group of vigilante.
I can't even call it vigilante because they're effectively operating on the side of the law.
But more importantly, you have the risk of state versus federal violence.
If Texas says enough, they are in violation of state and federal law.
The National Guard will go in and stop the CBP from breaking the law.
Now you've got government versus government.
unidentified
No, that to me is highly unlikely.
I mean, I looked at that scenario, I talked it over with the colonel who drove, that's... I don't know.
That would just be... No, because first of all, one of the more interesting things that the US military did was, like in every other country, it tends to work by these battalions that are formed in local communities, and they That's like, you know, in Alberta, like when you get the soldiers for the Canadian military, they come from the same towns and the same farm towns and they fight us after the SEC, after the Civil War, the US was like, Nope, we're not doing that.
Because what happens is Yeah, because then it's like suddenly you got someone in the military who's from Georgia and like, do they owe their loyalty to Georgia or to the US?
So my fear is... And that was like, you know, the thing that was very interesting about that is like the United States was plural before the Civil War.
Either we do not uphold the law, and the law no longer exists, or the law is upheld, and the federal government... What needs to happen is, if you are going to take the lawful good approach of, we abide by the rules of this nation, we are a nation of laws, the sheriff must arrest the CBP, who are cutting the barbed wire.
unidentified
Then you have, yeah, then you have a real... Well...
But Afghanistan is a really great example of, we lost.
Oh, well, I remember one of the great stories a journalist told me about Afghanistan is he was like, in Afghanistan, he was with, he was embedded with the Taliban.
This was when they were fighting the Soviets.
And he saw that one of the Taliban fighters was fighting with a flintlock rifle from, that had been taken from the British from 1878.
And it had 1878 written on it.
unidentified
And he was like, whoever goes up against these guys is gonna lose.
When they created the political space in Iraq for elections in the surge, the violence that they had to commit to do that was so great that it made politics irrelevant.
And that's exactly what could happen in the United States.
If I was the sheriff, if I was the sheriff in the county where Eagle Pass resides right now, day one, when I saw a video of them sending barbed wire, I would instruct my deputies to arrest any of them on site immediately.
Well, like, there's other cases that they may like, you know, the the federal government, the constitutional sheriff change charges only five things for the federal government to do one is counterfeiting.
One of those piracy forget with the one I think one of them is kidnapping.
But and then there's and then there's a couple others that I forget.
You know what I would do?
I would arrest them for destruction of state property.
Well, you could try, but you wouldn't get anywhere.
All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
unidentified
This kind of moral clarity is so blinding.
We're in real situations here.
We're trying to deal with complicated, overlapping bureaucracies.
There is a big difference between a mandate from law for a cop to seize an asset under writ of a judge and a cop deciding to point a gun at a teller and demand money.
Nobody went and pulled up that thing without a mandate.
Let's say the bank is actually and the federal government is wrong and still does it.
A judge has to sign off on it.
Judge did not sign off on what we're seeing CBP do.
Look, you're bringing up this example that I don't know very well, but my point is that the federal government interferes with other institutions literally every minute of every day.
Sometimes they're right and sometimes they're wrong.
There are lines.
Sometimes they're right and sometimes they're wrong, and there are lines, but actually there aren't a lot of lines.
And the answer is not to witness crimes being committed, to say, well, you know, there's lines.
unidentified
No, the answer is to go to court and talk about it like reasonable human beings.
But my point is, ceasing someone from committing an illegal act.
Okay, like I'm just saying here, let's just... The problem here is that these debates have gotten so ferocious and so moralistic and so about fundamental principles.
I'll tell you why.
Because they're so removed that the actual business of governing, which is Texas disagrees with the federal government, they take their steps taken, things happen, you need to talk it over.
That gets removed and instead it's like, let's arrest people and let's play out these dramatic scenarios.
Right now you have almost every state in agreement the southern border is a crisis.
Eric Adams, New York City, several other governors are petitioning the federal government to do something about it, not just border states.
The simple answer right now is if the plurality, nay the majority of governance of this nation says stop and the federal government goes, we're going to keep breaking the law.
Well, I mean, the federal government's actually been... I mean, you know, as a Canadian, it's really funny because, like, we have this very pro-immigration policy, but where no one, like, illegal immigrants would absolutely not be accepted by anyone in Canada, right?
Like, it's a very rule-abiding place.
Like, the idea that there's, like, tens of millions of people illegally just seems insane to me.
Well, I understand that there are different reasons for it, too, and I understand that there's historical Context I understand that there's crazy so here's my voice and there's humanitarian reasons as well, and there's but like Surely this has got to be something that people like this is one of those things where it's like Surely everyone's on the same page like there's other obvious answers except the federal no no no I think the federal government is on this like they want both the solution and also my point is that restriction right if if if the states
Overtly, willfully are subverting the law.
I'm sorry, if the federal government is violating the rights of states, and there is no fair adjudication, you get system collapse.
Yeah, I mean, see, to me, the more critical problem, like, because illegal immigration is one of those problems that's like... Let's remove ourselves from this.
But I don't think you quite realize what a, like, that's the right problem to have.
- Because like people, it's a huge boost for your, but anyway, the abortion question to me is actually much more legally problematic. - I'll give you an example.
What's happening in Texas is a granular component of what's causing civil war, and I'll explain.
California in the past census had an extra congressional seat, perhaps two, because California violates federal law by allowing non-citizens into the country who are then counted in the census, and congressional seats and electoral votes are apportioned based on this.
They don't have the same thing in Texas?
So all states do the census based on total people count, not citizen count.
And so the issue is not whether or not they're counted, it's the willful act of manipulating our Electoral College and our Congress through intentionally violating federal law.
If Texas says, please help us get these people out of this country, we don't want them to be counted in the census.
And the Republicans, under Trump, said the citizenship question should be on the census, The Democrat state said no, the Supreme Court said no, and so what happens is California has a disproportionate amount of electoral power in federal government based on violating federal law intentionally.
Tim, you put me in such a weird position because when you say these things, it makes me want to argue the other side.
I'm not arguing for them.
The point is this, listen, real quick.
What I could say here at this point, what I could say at this point is like, well, if you look at Republican gerrymandering and all these things, it's all obvious.
But my point is really like, why are we, like, we all know that it's, we both know, you and I both know that this system is collapsing.
Absolutely.
And my point is this.
The reason is, for a lot of reasons, on both left and right.
My point is- They're just so powerless that you never hear from them.
They're like the- So now hold on, are you talking about- They're like the most powerless- Now you move the goalpost.
Are you talking about the power that they have or are you talking about which side has more or whatever?
Because there are plenty of people on the left, and I'm not saying there aren't people on the right, but there are plenty of people on the left who call for revolution, who say they don't want Joe Biden, they want revenge, all sorts of, any number of revolutionary discussions.
Look, all I would say is that I've spent a couple of years talking to the most dispassionate experts that I could find in, you know, I would concede elite institutions of If you're talking to lead institutions, you're getting one perspective.
It's like, you bring up these things from the left and it's like, that makes me say, well, you know, the other thing is happening on the right, but I don't want to be.
No, no, no, well- You're wrong about- I'm taking agency right now by saying, like, I don't like this process.
Though it's a single example, the reason I asked about the officer on January 6th is to make the point that you are coming from a left, liberal perspective as you approach this, and you think you're not.
I did not assert that there's more or less sedition on the right or the left.
You did.
What you don't understand is that I'm actually not on your spectrum.
On May 29th, when tens of thousands, we saw police stations burn down, we saw 90-plus days of firebombing of federal buildings, and we saw the White House actually get firebombed and the church in front of it across the street, St.
John's, was set on fire, where are the court cases over that?
Now, I'm not saying either, still, that the left or the right has more.
My point is, I do not find your metric to be absolute or enough.
My position is, I don't know if there's more or less on either side.
You believe you do know, but you've not asked me.
Well, it's not that I believe that I know, it's that I believe that the most impartial, best voices that I could speak to And the best investigations that I could come up with were unequivocal.
Like, I don't think it was... I don't think it had... I don't think it met... See, the criteria that I apply were from PRIO, which is the Peace Research Institute of Oslo, which, you know, they have the studies of civil war, right?
And, like, for them, an insurrection is very different than what happened on January 6th.
And I will clarify, the reason why I refer to 529 as an insurrection is a political point, not a literal statement.
Well, my point is that assassinating presidents is something that your country does on the regular, right?
You mean our presidents or their presidents?
Well, both, but like, you know, a Secret Service agent told me it's part of the political process, right?
Man, the 17th century, but that's after a long legal debate.
There's never been, like assassination is, so my point is that the threat to the president, I mean, you have to pay $2 million a day to keep the president alive, right?
Like that's what the going rate is to keep the president alive.
So the point is, what's a bigger threat?
A riot at the Capitol or people firebombing the home of the president and forcing him into an emergency bunker?
And that is my opinion, but I would also say that I don't think it fits neatly into a political category.
It certainly doesn't fit into the left-wing books that were written about the subject.
And neither did Barber's book about how civil wars start.
It fit into a political science metric.
I'm playing with a skateboarding you can't really I'm not really skating you could get arrested for that I hear that's true But my point is simply this I do not believe it is easy Easy enough or possible to quantify the greater threat of May 29th or January 6.
Oh I I mean, I think it has been quantified and the people that I that I've seen who have quantified it would be of one opinion And that is the bias.
And whether or not, and the court even agrees with my view on this, the question of why the McMichaels went to jail was actually whether they had the right to engage in a citizen's arrest, NOT that they were lynching a jogger.
The left maintains the false narrative.
I'm not here to drag the left for this, my point is simply this.
When it comes to how we approach a story, it's what can we answer as fact, which is simple.
Is 2 plus 2, 4?
The answer is yes.
That's what I'm looking for.
As to your moral question on what we should have done or what happens is immaterial to me, for the most part.
I have my moral opinions, you have yours, you're allowed to have them.
But it doesn't change the fact that 2 plus 2 is 4.
There will never be an instance where you take 2 apples, push them up against 2 apples, and 5 apples appear.
An extra apple just manifests.
It's not going to happen.
There are simple arguments about the nuances of decimal systems and fractions, and I'm not talking about that.
When it comes to the issue of May 29th versus January 6th, we have fact-based questions to ask and then ask ourselves why we believe one was worse than the other.
These are impossible questions because they're based on subjective morality.
So therefore, I would say January 6th is bad.
529 was bad.
I don't know how you quantify one being worse than the other.
You have just expressed the postmodern view Of news added up to an absolute perfect.
I think he meant that, I mean, his claim was- People are allowed to be wrong and argue for themselves.
unidentified
Yeah, people are- That's fair.
Your soul matters more than the world.
That's fair, but there is currently an argument that goes on online and Twitter, postmodernists, and it has filtered into the hard sciences, which is part of why it's a significant problem.
But there are people that will try to assert that no, 2 plus 2 can equal 5, and then they'll go ahead and they'll talk about different types of math that I can never articulate.
But the point that I'm making is the idea that 2 plus 2 can equal 5 is a postmodern idea because what you have to do is change the meanings of the words.
Look, dude, I'm just a journalist.
I'm out here trying to figure out what the hell happened.
So, uh, mostly my upbringing is articles online, and so that means sometimes I would read one page or two from like the Gulag Archipelago or something.
The reason why I'm ending on this is to make the point, I have pulled out single subjects and asked you about them, but I want to stress, I think you're mostly right.
You know and that's what and that's how it and I just I mean to begin with the way we talked like about how like left people don't come on right shows and like it's a problem.
I think it's like it's like and the right not going like.
The right goes on the left.
I mean like when they're allowed on because the left says you're platforming.
Yeah, but like the platforming thing is absolutely infuriating.
DeSantis Vive Trump.
I just like who do you think you are?
Like you like it's like this is not like you just you're just a person with an opinion.
Again when it comes down to it just like everybody else in this world.
unidentified
It really is the I really do think that the the philosophy We'll wind it down, so if you want to throw any final thoughts.
Oh, just buy my book, Last Selection.
If you believe that words are where power lives, then you don't want to have people saying things that conflict with your perspective or that would empower opinions you don't like. - We'll wind it down.
Andrew definitely, he explained how politics works, and if you actually want to know the mechanics and how the watch works, this is probably the best description you're going to get.
A lot of the stuff you were talking about was in there as well, just in a kind of more, I guess, formulaic way, like a more systematic way, but it's the same stuff you've been talking.
I'm gonna say it now, but we're not totally sure, but I believe the next episode of this show will be appearing on Tenet Media, where it will find its new home.
Clips of the show will remain on this channel, though, and we're gonna be expanding what we do with this channel with other stuff.
You may have noticed the Lauren Southern documentary that we've posted the trailers for on this channel and some clips of.
So there's a lot of big stuff happening.
Super excited for what Tenet is working on.
There's a bunch of really cool people involved.
And then we'll just post the link and we'll keep you informed as to where it's going to be.
