The Culture War #51 The California Secessionist Movement & National Divorce In 2024
Host:
Tim Pool
Guests:
Louis Marinelli @LouisJMarinelli (X)
Jeff Mayhugh @Jmayhugh28 (X)
Producers:
Lisa Elizabeth @LisaElizabeth (X)
Kellen Leeson @KellenPDL (X)
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Or maybe not even civil war, but considering that there has been so much talk about the political conflict in this country, considering that, for those that have been following the news just the other day, the prosecutor, the DA who brought charges against Trump and his associates, is under fire for potentially lying to the courts, may get even disbarred.
Things are getting a bit spicy.
And now you've got many political activists in the United States arguing that the case against the DA, who's going after Trump, this Fannie Willis, is politically motivated attacks from fascists to try and disqualify those who are trying to bring accountability.
And in the meantime, everybody else is kind of paying attention is like, yo, I think this lady is corrupt and was funneling money to her boyfriend.
And they're as crooked as you'd imagine.
There's a lot of things happening politically.
New York, for instance, Donald Trump is going to be going on trial for hush money payments.
It's apparently some kind of criminal charge.
Trump says, this is not criminal at all.
You've got fraud charges.
Things are getting pretty wild in this country, not to mention over the past several years we've seen an escalation in street violence and political violence.
So instead of just going into all the modern context, we want to get into the, I suppose, the political activism element here.
We talked a couple weeks ago with Texit, the Texas secessionists, and now we've brought in some activists advocating for a form of California exit.
And, uh, we've brought in an individual journalist and researcher to talk to us just in context about the Civil War, so, I don't know, uh, would you like to start, good sir, and introduce yourself?
unidentified
Yeah, well, my name's Louis Marinelli.
I'm one of the founders and creators of the California Secession Movement, known as Calexit.
And we started that back in 2014 together with who I consider my brother, Marcus Ruiz Evans.
And it kind of started off originally as a campaign not for California to secede.
We wanted to kind of make California more independent in the United States.
And so we started with a campaign we called Sovereign California.
Problem with that was we ran into a lot of people who were confused about what that campaign was about.
Are you sovereign citizens, for example?
Are you some kind of religious movement?
With the word sovereign, there was a lot of religious connotation with that.
So we ran into some problems with that, and it was at the same time that the, if you recall, the Scottish independence referendum was happening.
And so that's when we kind of adopted that branding.
And we said, we're going to pick up the flag for the cause of self-determination in North America.
We picked up that name, Yes, Scotland, and branded it for California.
So I thought it would be cool, you know, so we asked the California secessionist movement, come on board, let's talk about this.
But I thought it would be great to grab someone locally who had some expertise or knowledge in the area pertaining to the first Civil War, hopefully the only, but you know, we'll see.
And then the idea of secession and, How this could play out in the 2024 election, because we certainly talk about it quite a bit on our shows.
But let's just start here first.
What specifically do you want, sir, with California?
Do you want the entirety of California to just become its own country?
What is it?
What is it?
What is your you like if you won the lottery of political activism?
What would happen with California?
unidentified
Well, that's an interesting way to phrase it because a lot of people have the misconception that our campaign has a set goal and I think that's what makes our Organization unique is a lot of organizations out there have a specific agenda that they want to achieve and ours is more abstract It's it's let the people vote And so we've always said, whether the people want to secede as a whole, let that happen, if that's what the people say they want to do.
There are other movements in California to have the state, as you mentioned, separate into different numbers.
I think given Tim Draper wanted to do six Californias, there's been other campaigns for there to be two or three.
We have actually a couple different plans of our own, one of which we call Calix 3.1, which is to divide the state into two.
To create what would be a country called Pacifica on the most western coast of California, the San Francisco Bay Area.
And leave the remaining part of the state in the United States.
The goal of that is really kind of what we call ideological divorce or national divorce.
We started talking about the idea of divorce in 2018.
Marcus and I were in Sacramento.
We were holding signs that said it's time for a divorce.
At the time, of course, we were talking about California divorcing itself as a whole from the United States.
Since then we've, we've come to, or at least some of us have come to the conclusion that it's maybe not the right thing for California as a whole to secede because there are tens, millions of Californians who would not want to do that.
There were conservative voters.
I think that I've heard that there are even more Trump voters in California than in any other state, even though it's the, one of the bluest states in the union.
And so I think that would be kind of counterproductive to the whole idea of self-determination.
If you're going to say that California and its current borders.
Would secede from the union and force, you know, 10, 15 million people who don't want to go with them to go with them.
So why not we, why not draw the lines in a different place?
I kind of, I'm stuck on this idea of why do we have to adhere to the existing geographical and often abstract lines that we've, we've drawn on the map just out of nowhere.
And so why not redraw those lines in a way that makes sense economically and also ideologically?
Right, so this, the Pacifica thing, this is basically creating, it's just this small strip going along the Pacific Ocean, and then the eastern part of California, which is more conservative, more farmland, would remain with the United States, or would it become its own state, or how'd that work?
unidentified
Yeah, so it's actually interesting.
In this scenario, both of those would still be dominated by the Democratic Party.
Let's just get that right.
So a lot of people say, for example, you want to create a red state, change political dynamics in Washington.
That wouldn't be the case, because the part of the state, the western part, as you're referring to, actually including the northern and southern part, would still be, I think, 60% Democrat.
So it's still going to be a blue state.
It's just not going to be, uh, you know, 80% Democrat like it is now.
And so, uh, what happens is then the Pacifica, we have a going along the central coast of California and the San Francisco Bay area.
That is your super ultra left wing, 80% Democrat, uh, country.
And so we say, well, you know what?
Let them have their, uh, progressive utopia on the West coast and see how it goes.
There's, uh... It's fascinating, there's this viral video from earlier in the week of a woman who's 28 years old, and she filmed herself, I'm surprised she was willing to do this, but I respect her for doing so, saying, I can't be the only one who did not know you can eat fruit from a tree.
I'm not joking.
She said her friend came to her house and saw a bag of store-bought lemons in her fridge and said, why do you have a bag of lemons in your fridge?
And she goes, well, because, you know, I use them to cook.
And she goes, no, no, but like, you have a bag of store-bought lemons in your fridge.
And she's like, yeah, because I cook sometimes.
And she's like, Carly, you have a lemon tree outside.
And she's like, just take the lemons from the tree!
But this is not surprising to see a video like this.
You know, having grown up in a city myself, and I'm sure you guys, even to a certain degree, yourselves, all of us... I mean, I think it's fair to say...
Someone's going to watch a show like this or anybody who's learned to a certain degree understands you can eat fruit from a tree.
There are a lot of young people who have no idea where food comes from.
And this is what I think leads to, as you called it, what a progressive utopia they want to put together.
And the reason why I said they'd starve is a lot of these people, not all of them, but like, I mean, you look at what happened in Seattle with the Chaz and they tried making the farm, whatever you want to call it.
These people don't know how The environment works.
They don't know how farming works.
They don't know how to sustain themselves.
And so, you know, back to the bigger picture of all of this.
You know, when talking about California secession, or fragmentation, or whatever you want to call it, I don't know that it's so much you would create a red state and a blue state, or two new blue states.
It seems like you'd create a wealthy state and a chaotic, dystopian nightmare.
Right?
The area of California that produces all of the food, I think would do mostly okay, but these tech bases could not survive.
You know, Democrats like to talk about how We generate all the wealth in our cities and subsidize, you know, the rural areas.
And I'm like, yeah, but if there were borders and tariffs and food could not enter your country without specific agreements, you would be extremely impoverished.
No one is going to trade all of their wheat for your Twitter.
But that's basically what they've done, the access and influence.
So I actually see the possi- like, if Pacifica were to exist, I don't think they'd survive.
unidentified
Well, I think you bring up a good point, but I think that what we always try to stress is that the divorce that we're advocating for, if it does come to pass, wouldn't necessarily have to be something that would be, uh, you know, create a negative relationship.
I mean, I think that the two could separate and that's kind of what the purpose is because I think that right now we have a situation in this country where You know, the left and the right were in each other's hair and let's just get out of each other's hair and we can live our lives the way we want to live our lives.
And then I think in that type of environment.
There might be a way to maintain that, uh, tranquility as, as, as we refer to in the Declaration of Independence, that tranquility and peace among Americans, because we're not interfering.
We're not imposing a left or right ideology on the other.
And so let's let each other live the way that we want to live our lives, whether it be you're on the left wing in Pacifica or you're on the right wing and somewhere in Texas.
And I think that we could have a situation in North America where we can maintain that peace and tranquility.
I'm not convinced that there could be a secession of any portion of this country from the country itself without resulting in some kind of violence.
But I'm curious, Jeff.
What do you think?
unidentified
So, I 100% agree with you.
If there was a secession, we would have violence.
Just the nature of people.
There are going to be, like you mentioned, there are going to be people in California that want to leave and people that don't want to leave.
I think the core of what the secessionist movement is, it says that we as people are not represented in our country, we don't have freedom, we can't do what we want, and I think the answer to that is not necessarily secession, but a decentralized power structure.
So in Federalist No.
10, Madison talks a lot about factions, and what's the best way to control factions, and his answer is to have more factions.
Now we talk about the Civil War.
What led to the Civil War?
Everybody always talks about slavery, but why was slavery able to be kept and then advanced and preserved?
And the answer is the Three-Fifths Compromise.
The Three-Fifths Compromise gave the slaveholders significantly more power in Congress than the non-slaveholders.
So they were able to use that power to advance their cause and advance the causes of their party.
And what this did is it created a massive divide, regardless of whether you wanted slavery or not, maybe you disagreed with the slaveholders on other policies, but you had no power to stop them.
So it just created more of a problem. - In a modern context with California, the issue of illegal immigration is giving disproportionate power to blue states.
They're getting extra congressional districts and electoral college votes based on people who are not even citizens of this country, who are not paying in the same way as many others.
We often hear arguments that, oh, but they do pay taxes.
Well, of course, everybody pays sales tax.
There's a lot of taxes you'll pay no matter what you do when you're buying gas or whatever.
But in terms of paying taxes to the same degree as your average American citizen, they're not.
And so, for those that aren't familiar with this, I know a lot of people who will listen to this probably do, but I'll explain.
California is a sanctuary state.
There's many other jurisdictions that are sanctuary jurisdictions.
What that means is they will not cooperate with the federal government on deportation or apprehension of non-citizens who have illegally entered the country or who have remained here illegally beyond their permits.
The census counts those individuals As residents, Donald Trump wanted there to be a citizenship question on the census and that was blocked basically.
I think even the Supreme Court said no.
And so what happens then is it has been estimated by various organizations it could be as low as one extra congressional seat in California and as high as seven It is estimated, worst case scenario, California gets seven extra votes in the Electoral College for president because of the non-citizens who have illegally entered the country, violating our laws, and don't need to vote.
That's there.
So it's fascinating you bring up the three-fifths compromise, that it disproportionately empowers these slave states in Congress, and we're seeing something not too dissimilar right now with With the illegal immigration crisis, the border crisis that everyone agrees on, this is giving disproportionate power to the Democrats once again!
unidentified
But there's a reason for that.
And the reason for that is the Permanent Appropriation Act of 1929.
So in leading up after the Civil War and after the Gilded Age, or during the Gilded Age, immigration became a major part of American society and it started to give more power to the northern states the same way that the slaveholders were able to first import slaves and then grow slavery inside of their states and gain power, the northern states were able to do that through immigration.
And you had this massive disagreement because the house is fixed at 435 because of this act but before that it grew with the population to maintain a decentralized power structure to give people a voice in their government but we capped it 1929 and we capped it for that exact same that reason that you just brought up brought up is the fact that they couldn't decide who was supposed to be counted for purposes of apportionment Was it supposed to be just American citizens or was it supposed to be all persons?
There was an argument on each side of it.
It got stalemated in Congress for over 10 years and eventually they just kicked the problem to the executive.
They wrote this temporary act which became permanent because they just stopped doing it.
But ultimately that's the answer right there.
It's Congress's job to apportion representatives to the people so they can actually run their government and they've consolidated that power into themselves.
So, the Three-Fifths Compromise is fascinating because the average person, I would assume, I mean, in my life growing up, they think that it was these slave owners who thought that slaves were not a full person.
The reality is, the Confederacy wanted the slaves to be whole persons for the purpose of counting individuals and voting and all that, and the North was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, you can't claim them to be property and full persons for the purpose of voting and all that.
So, the South wanted them to be counted because it would give them more power.
The North said, no way you can't have it both ways.
unidentified
Well, that's because it wouldn't be their power.
It wouldn't be the slaves power.
It would be their power.
Exactly.
And so, and that's the argument is like, well, you can't, you can't have it both ways.
And that's an example of the, of the history been written by the victors.
Because I remember, like you just said, in high school and middle school, you learn that storyline that the Southerners were for slavery And they were the bad side, right?
And so they wanted to consider the slaves to be less than human, therefore three-fifths of a person.
But in reality, it was really like you're saying about the northern states didn't want that extra representation in the south.
Well, to be fair, I think they, in many ways, on that core issue, is vile.
Of course.
Like, as bad as you can get.
Like, these people should be counted so we have political power, but we will dictate what they do.
I'm surprised.
Look, the North was very racist.
You know, this idea that they were like, oh, I can't believe how racist these Southerners... No, they were all racist.
But it is shockingly despicable to be like, we will own people, they will get political power, and we will wield it.
Dirty.
To put it lightly.
unidentified
So I think it's not that the Northerners It's difficult to understand.
They all kind of, I mean, Thomas Jefferson was a southern slave owner, okay?
And he was the proponent of the Northwest Ordinance, was the first ordinance that kind of described how to bring new territory into the country, and it said that you couldn't have them as slavery.
Our founders did not like slavery.
They did not want slavery.
They grew up with it.
It's hard to change an economic system overnight, right?
You have to change it over time.
And they kind of set forward a plan to do it.
I mean, they get a bad rap for all this stuff, but the reality is, it's not them that messed this up.
It's the next generation of American leaders.
It's starting in the antebellum period.
It's starting with John C. Calhoun and all the Southerners that that see that their power is going to slip away and they change the argument of, well, slavery is a necessary evil to slavery is a positive good.
And I think history will look back on the United States today and they'll be like, how could they have been so evil that they let their government just bomb countries they weren't at war with?
I mean, it's shockingly insane.
You look back, we look back at someone like Thomas Jefferson, who, southern slave owner, and tried getting in the Declaration of Independence this basically attack on the crown for advancing slavery in the colonies, despite being a slave owner himself.
And you take a look at today, and there are many individuals who have benefited from war directly, funding it, who oppose it.
There are many people in this country every day that, in some way, are involved in, inadvertently or otherwise, in many different things, and in the future they may say, I can't believe they were supportive of that.
How could you vote for a president who would ever advocate for these kinds of military excursions into foreign countries illegally?
It's shocking, right?
But you take a look at where we are with Donald Trump and with Joe Biden, And while Trump is, in my opinion, the best we've had in my lifetime in terms of foreign war, he still fired 59 Tomahawk missiles into Syria.
He still had drone strikes in the Middle East.
He inherited that.
And it may come in the future.
They'll say, you know, Donald Trump opposed war and wanted our troops out.
And then someone say, yeah, but he was he was dropping bombs.
He was doing all these things.
This is the nature of politics.
You can't just snap your fingers and end or change these things no matter how bad they may be.
Back to the issue of, you know, Thomas Jefferson, for instance.
We get this narrative from many people in this country that they were evil slave owners, but they actually were trying to stop it.
And then the interesting thing about...
What happened with civil war in this country for, uh, I was, and you can probably speak to this better than I could, but there was talk of civil war in the 1820s.
I was reading some articles about 1812.
unidentified
I mean, the war of 1812.
I mean, they wanted, uh, the, uh, the Northerners wanted to secede because of the war of 1812 because they didn't like war.
I mean, war is not a good thing, right?
I mean, it, it, it hurts the people overall.
And so there's always, there's always going to be a group of people that feel left out.
And they're the first instinct for people in that scenario is to take their ball and leave.
You know, and that's sometimes it's good because if you have somewhere to go and you can be safer somewhere else, then by all means do it.
But if you don't have anywhere to go, you kind of have to stick around and figure out how to solve the problem.
There's that saying, any fight you can avoid is a fight you've won.
And I like to reference this video that's viral on the internet of this like martial arts black belt, you know, sensei teaching his students.
And he's like, I'm going to teach you the one technique The one master technique to win any fight, no matter what.
And everyone's all excited, and they're sitting down.
And then he goes in front of the guy, and then as soon as the fight starts, he runs from the room, waving his arms in the air, and just disappears.
And then everyone laughs and claps, and he comes back in, and he was like, you don't want to fight.
You do not want to fight.
You've won if you've not fought.
And so that's an important message that I think a lot of people don't understand, especially as you're mentioning that the North didn't want to.
But let's bring it to a modern context.
I was saying, I don't think there's any scenario where there could be a, like in terms of Cal Exit or secession, there's talk about like the state of Jefferson, what greater Idaho perhaps, or what's the state of Jefferson, or breaking California into Northern and Southern or East and West.
If they're within the United States, I can see that as a potentiality, long shot, billion to one.
But if that happened, I'd be like, oh wow, here we go.
I mean, it's possible.
And because of the overarching structure of our government, law enforcement, military, if, say, Idaho had a vote and Oregon went to Congress and they approved it, and then a portion of Oregon went to Idaho and a portion of Northern California did, I don't see violence in that regard.
I just see it being politically impossible for the most part.
It's substantially more likely, in my opinion, that a state simply just says, we out.
But then you get violence.
So I'm curious your guys' thought on, you know, whether, I think you were saying earlier, secession is not what started the Civil War.
And it's not what causes the violence.
The initiation of violence starts the war.
And so I'm curious if you guys want to dive into this.
What do you think happens should California, or Texas, or any other state say, we're leaving the United States?
Where does that go?
unidentified
Well, I would say, first of all, we have politically motivated violence right now, and no states are seceding.
So, I mean, this idea that we're going to have violence because of it is just going to be a continuation of that.
Maybe it'll get worse.
But if the intent of the secession is to try to alleviate the core reasons of why that political violence is growing in this country, I think it's a noble cause.
Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't work, but I think that I would like to have the opportunity to say that we at least tried to avert
Civil war if we could maybe it's you can call me an idealist or call me naive or something I just think that we should try to avert that we shouldn't be trying to drum it up and if we can recognize That there are some core problems that are causing political division in this country political violence to become more common, maybe we can do something to alleviate that and me the idealist says let's try to redraw the lines at least and so I think that that's an important point there.
But I think that what you're saying there with dividing these different lines up with California, for example, and Oregon, I think that it's possible to do that without there being the so-called civil war.
And I think that it's important to kind of define what the civil war is.
I mean, there's a lot of people, and I kind of Agree with them to say that maybe you completely disagree with me as being a historian here, but the civil war, I don't really consider it to be a civil war.
The first one, because it was a war of secession.
It was a, uh, a war for the North to keep the South in the country.
It wasn't a war between, let's say hordes of people in streets is what I, my vision of civil wars, like unorganized.
And the American civil war was actually just a union breaking apart with the, the union pro-union forces trying to stop states from leaving the union and the confederate states wanting to not be a part of their union.
So they weren't fighting for control of one government.
unidentified
Yeah, that's what I mean.
I guess you said it more eloquently than I. They weren't contending for who's going to control Washington, right?
They had their own capital.
They had their own president.
And so they had their own confederation with their own union.
So that, in my view, I guess, I don't think it qualifies as a civil war.
And I guess in my mind, when you think of civil war, I see Unorganized hordes of people in the streets or militias in the streets fighting each other, but it's not the necessarily government versus another government.
This is interesting because you know we look at world war one and two you have these European powers which then bleeds out into the second world countries that are fighting with each other and we call that the world war.
But World War I and II would be not too dissimilar, necessarily, from what the American Civil War was.
These states were sovereign.
They viewed themselves as their own state, as it were, as part of a bigger union.
And the southern states believed they wholeheartedly had the right to leave at any point, and the union said, no you don't.
unidentified
But they didn't have the right.
And this was a topic that had been talked about from the founding.
It was talked about during the Aliens and Sedition Acts.
Jefferson and Madison wrote the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions.
Jefferson actually he he supported nullification but fast forward and Andrew Jackson and John C Calhoun when it came to nullification 1828 uh Andrew Jackson said no you cannot do that.
These guys considered themselves unionists for the most part that led the south.
John C Calhoun even included in that fact he did not want to leave the union.
He did not believe that the south had the right to leave the union.
He wanted to find a solution to the problem.
It wasn't until he died and the rest of the leaders kind of died that we ended up in civil war.
It's like It's like a marriage, right?
You're married together, you're responsible as individual states for the people of your states, okay?
Not all the people of the South wanted to leave the Union.
If the slaveholders took power, they had significantly more power in their states over the non-slaveholders.
There were white people in the South that didn't own slaves, which means they had no representation.
And so the South was overwhelmingly not slave owners.
unidentified
Absolutely.
And the thing is, those 5% held so much power and they used the power of the federal government over and over and over again during the antebellum period to expand Manifest Destiny, the Mexican-American War, Texas annexation, to expand slavery so they can maintain their power because they wouldn't give it up.
And so, It was a civil war.
It was a small group of people fighting against everyone else saying no.
And once they had lost, once the — because what it is, is we're a decentralized, factionalized society, right?
And the Democratic Party had consolidated itself with the slaveholders into this one massive party, and it took the Republican Party being formed, consolidating all the different factions, that didn't necessarily agree or disagree with slavery.
They didn't really care.
What they did care about is they wanted a little say in their government and they weren't able to have it.
We had a Rep Massey on IRL, Timcast IRL last night.
And I'm looking at this list of all of these members of Congress who voted to oust George Santos.
Whatever your opinion is on the guy, you don't have to like the guy.
But he's not been convicted of wrongdoing, he's been accused of wrongdoing.
But a bunch of Republicans teamed up with Democrats to remove him, and with this, the example that I gave is, look, Democrats would not expel Senator Menendez, despite his now second, I believe, indictment, or actually more than two, but principal criminal charges.
They march in lockstep.
They are a big party.
They fall in line.
The Republicans are basically the catch-all for the disparate group of varying ideologies that are at war with each other.
There are members of Congress that are, as Rhett Massey described them, DIBs.
What do you call it?
Defense Industrial something?
I don't know.
Military Industrial Complex, we refer to it as.
There are Republicans who, they're always going to vote for military spending, war, foreign policy.
And then there's Republicans that are libertarian and say no expansion, no more spending.
These people are not the same group.
They are not united.
So what's happening now is as long as Democrats are ideologically homogenous, they're going to exert disproportionate amounts of power.
So long as they're playing games like sanctuary states and cities, they're going to give themselves, grant themselves disproportionate amounts of power.
And I think what we're seeing now with Donald Trump is kind of like what you're describing with the Republican Party.
Donald Trump has created a party within a party, essentially.
And I shouldn't say he did.
I believe he's the avatar of this this formation and now you have a probably the largest and strongest faction within the Republican Party is MAGA or America First and it is expanding it is winning and it will grow so maybe we won't see Critical mass anytime soon, but it's certainly bubbling up.
I wonder if, you know, we're 8 years away, 12 years away, maybe this elect- because of the speed of internet and information, it's much faster than we realize, but it certainly seems like, as you've described it, we're in a similar period.
unidentified
Yes, we are very much in a similar period, for different reasons, obviously, but I mean, and it can change very fast, but it can also change for the good very fast, right?
There are so many people out there, you know, I got into politics just like three or four years ago, just a regular person watching TV, kind of a little scared, you know, I've got kids, I'm like, what are my kids' futures going to look like?
I'm gonna go volunteer for... I was... Junkin was running for governor.
I was knocking doors.
They don't give you... They don't tell you what to do.
They just give you stuff.
They say knock on doors and give these people this stuff.
So I started asking questions like, what do you not like about your government?
And the first thing I kept on hearing is Congress, Congress, Congress.
Congress is crooked.
Congress is corrupt.
And so it's like, well, what if you actually had politicians that actually talked to those people?
Because the apps have you knock certain doors.
I just knocked every door.
I didn't want to waste my time.
Why not just talk to everybody instead of just talking to the people that you're told to talk to?
And then ask the same questions, and you realize that the reason that you only knock those doors is because those are the people that voted for you, and those are the people that voted for them, and you don't want to actually have a conversation with them.
And what you learn when you do is they all don't like Congress.
Why did they not let Congress?
Congress because Congress is unrepresentative of them because they're too small of a body.
So if you had a group of people or a politician that spoke to those people and said, hey, we're going to give you a real plan.
We're going to say, hey, we're going to clean up corruption and this is how we're going to do it.
We're going to decentralize power.
We're going to expand the house.
We're going to bring more people in.
We're going to make the district smaller.
Maybe we're going to break some of the big states up into smaller states because it's actually a very good idea.
The power of the government is just a lot of work and the individuals doing that work are probably just overloaded.
You're not going to alleviate the issue of the Senate, and so I think splitting up Congress and making it more, I don't know, granular, more people, more representation, it's a good idea, but then you still, now it's just even harder to get unity around core issues, which again, It sounds great, unless you then bump into a Senate that is the same system, and the presidency and the executive branch that is the same system.
So there are arguments for expanding the Supreme Court that I actually think it does make sense.
The only problem is the argument is only being made for political power under administrations to give themselves more ideologically aligned Supreme Court justices.
But the idea for the Supreme Court was, each appellate district has a justice.
And right now, we have more districts than we have justices.
So the argument is, I think we should have 13 or whatever, there's one for each.
Instead, we have some that double up.
I like the idea.
The problem is, the only people advancing it are the ones who are currently in executive power, who would give their ideological allies seats in the Supreme Court to seize control, and thus we're at an impasse.
I think we would need, uh, if we're gonna expand Congress, I think the issue is not just Congress.
I think the Founding Fathers didn't expect the country to be at 300... I mean, I don't think they foresaw 300 million people.
I mean, it was what, 4 million people at the time of independence?
4 or 5?
unidentified
Yeah.
And I think that the biggest, uh, the gap between the populations at the time, I think it's like one to 40.
With, with what you're, uh, you're saying, Jeff, it seems like the logical conclusion is perhaps a regional, uh, layer added to the United States.
Or some kind of national divorce?
unidentified
Well, I mean, there's already a regional layer, and that's the state republics, okay?
We're a compounded republic, as Madison would say.
And so, when you said, well, yeah, if we expanded Congress, it would be more difficult to get people in line.
Well, is that a bad thing?
Do we want our federal government to be able to do whatever they want, whenever they want?
Shouldn't it be a more comprehensive system, so the federal government is doing only what the federal government is supposed to do, and then leaving the rest of the states as the Constitution declares?
But so, what I see happening is, You know, how is it that the FISA court vote died the other day, right?
The foreign surveillance stuff, widespread abuses we have seen for a very long time, lying to Congress, all of this really awful stuff.
Thomas Massey comes on saying, we were supposed to vote on it, and then they just shut Congress down.
They just, we're not gonna have, it's not gonna happen.
Imagine...
Where are we right now?
Joe Biden, certainly there are members of Congress, the Senate, the upper or lower chambers that are trying to fund foreign wars against the will of the American people because the American people don't want war.
But it happens anyway.
But I imagine a scenario where the president does something illegal.
I mean, I am of the opinion the Biden administration is one of the most crooked administrations we've seen.
Giving you one example, the Biden DOJ just arrested a witness and whistleblower against the Biden family.
I mean, whether or not you think this guy is a liar, this is purely inappropriate to make these moves, and that's what they're doing.
So I don't have good answers for you, but certainly if someone comes out and accuses the Biden family of criminal wrongdoing in politics, and then Biden's DOJ goes and arrests the guy, we have very serious problems.
We can't even get the current Congress to do anything about the abuses we have seen at the executive level for decades.
unidentified
But so you said it gets killed, right?
You can't debate it in Congress.
And why is that?
And I think Dean Phillips, who's running for president, actually tweeted about this recently.
He said, all the power of the House and the Senate are basically consolidated into the leaders.
Well, why is that?
Well, post-Civil War, during the Gilded Age, you had this guy named Thomas Brackett Reed who came into power.
He found it difficult.
They were fighting over representation.
They were fighting over power in Congress.
And he found it difficult to get things done with his Democratic, you know, Competitors and so he created something called reads rules where he started consolidate power into the speakership and that's what we have now so like you know the going back to the Civil War.
What was one of the big ways that the the slaveholders maintain power was with the gag rule the gag rule was a set of procedural rules they put in place where you couldn't talk about slavery in Congress.
Well, as an individual citizen, that's where my First Amendment right lays, is in Congress.
I have a right to speak with my representative.
I have a right to have my representative listen to me, and if he agrees with me, go into that body and speak for me and my community.
If Congress, the other people in Congress, have written a rule that says you can't talk about this thing, we're going to shut down debate, then they're not doing their job, and they're not allowing us, the people, to have a voice.
So, the one thing I want to add real quick, because I want to jump to secession again, but I believe that any state, that any person, does have a right to secede.
And I view it in sort of an American independence context.
When you have grievances that will not be addressed by your leader, the country should be coming from, what did Monty Python call it?
A mandate from the people or from the masses?
And not wet ladies distributing swords or whatever.
The crown did not care for the plight of the colonies and just smacked them around and said, you're nothing to us.
We will take from you and do as you please, shut up and accept it.
And so finally the people said, we are being oppressed, this is unacceptable, and so we say no.
And we won.
The United States won, I would say largely thanks to France.
You had, you know, the British crown was embroiled in war in a bunch of different ways.
And so forcing them, you know, the French were basically like, hey, the enemy, my enemy, right?
So let's assist the colonists.
You know, we view it like the French, the expeditionary forces came and assisted us in winning this fight for independence.
The French probably viewed it as we helped them winning their war against the Great Britain.
But Ulysses S. Grant, so in that regard, we respect what we did.
The United States says it was good that we decided we were being wronged and we left.
So these are the first battles that we say of the American Revolution.
A year and one month later, the Founding Fathers sent the Declaration of Independence.
So historically, we were already fighting for it despite never having declared it in the first place because the Founding Fathers were like, no war, no violence, we will petition and use pressure and economics to do it.
But what happens with, it was the, I believe it was the Intolerable Acts.
I could be wrong.
But basically the crown is saying, because you're dicks, Boston Tea Party, we are going to impose penalties on you.
And the colonists were like, you are beating us down.
You will not listen to a thing we've had to say.
So we reject your policies.
And so they said, okay, then we're going to occupy you.
And the founding fathers are like, this is getting out of hand.
We don't want this.
Shooting happens at Lexington and Concord.
We consider that to be the shot heard around the world, the first battles of the revolution.
unidentified
Well, don't forget about the exaggerated propaganda of the Boston Massacre, also.
Perhaps, but based on the population size back then, I think it was probably a big deal.
unidentified
I'm just saying that the use of the word massacre right and purposely Made to rile people up.
Well, I mean the propaganda was on both sides though Yeah, you know like I mean Sam Adams and Paul Revere they were they were trying to use it for their ends it was you know when you get in a situation like this the people in power tend to use anything they can to Nudge power in their direction.
And, uh, you know, historically we do mention, like, they were publicizing it as a massacre.
But my point ultimately was, um...
A lot of people think that if you watch any popular media or movies or whatever, cartoons, they depict the American Revolutionary War as the Founding Fathers declared independence, and then the Crown dispatched troops.
When in reality, they were already shooting and killing Americans and fighting was happening, and the Founding Fathers a year later were like, I think we should declare independence.
And it's like, well, you're already fighting for it.
But my point in this is, we look back at that because we are the winners.
And the good guys won.
It's like Norm Macdonald said, hey, I just read history and good news, the good guys have won every time.
The Civil War, it was, I read this letter and you may, I don't know if you've seen this because I don't remember exactly where it was, I was reading an academic paper on the Civil War.
Ulysses S. Grant wrote a letter after the Civil War saying, in essence, by all means you have the right to secede But no, you will go to war, and if you lose, you will be ruled by your betters.
And so, it's, I believe, the most apt perspective.
These are people who are the, what, I mean, effectively grandchildren or great-grandchildren of revolutionaries who fought against the crown and said, no, we'll be our own country, having to reconcile What's the difference here politically?" And his point was, by all means, try.
And we will fight you like they fought us, and if you lose, you will be ruled.
And that's what happened.
unidentified
And the Supreme Court, I think, actually said something about that in 1869.
There's this narrative out there that, you know, you say you don't have the right to secede, but the Supreme Court ruled that you do have the right to secede under certain conditions.
And they are, first of all, the consent of the states, which is what they wrote, their own words in the Texas v. White.
The states have the right to secede with the consent of the states.
The problem is they didn't define what that was.
Is that a consent of Congress?
Or is that literally consent of the states?
And at the time, how many states were there?
So what would you need 50% of the states, state legislatures to approve it?
That's the kind of the angle that we take at CalExit and says, if California is going to secede as a whole or any part of it thereof, that we would need the consent of the other states.
And I think that there would be 26 states.
The idea from Ulysses S. Grant, which was interesting, in this letter he says, the reason we will have a right to stop you is that we have sacrificed blood and treasure to admit you into our union.
The idea from Ulysses S. Grant, which was interesting in this letter, he says, the reason we will have a right to stop you is that we have sacrificed blood and treasure to admit you into our union.
And to paraphrase in a modern colloquial way, if I pay money to move you from your house to mine, you owe me and we have a deal.
And you're like, I'll help clean up.
I'll pay rent.
And then after all that, you don't pay the rent and you say, I'm leaving.
I'm like, whoa, bro, bro, come on.
I helped you move out here.
You said you were going to help me out with the rent.
I need to cover these costs and you're just leaving.
Well, you might get into a legal dispute.
Someone's gonna file a lawsuit and say, we had a contractual agreement as to what I would pay to help them come out, now they're leaving without paying their debt.
You're gonna get into a conflict.
Ulysses S. Grant is like, It was very hard for us to bring you in.
Blood and treasure.
You want to leave without paying your debt?
We're going to stop you.
unidentified
Yeah, and he's right.
And to your point about like...
But separating the states does not separate red and blue.
Each state has concentrated areas of both red and blue in it.
So, like, it doesn't really solve the problem, you know?
That's why, you know, what you really want is you... Our republic is supposed to be of small groups.
Governing by small groups.
Because small groups give you, the individual, more power.
So if you really want to like solve that problem, it's not, it's to create more groups inside of the group that we have, not to break the group apart.
And I agree.
And that's, that's why like I depart from Marjorie Taylor Greene, who kind of spoke about national divorce.
And I think that the message that, that at least a lot of people interpret it was, was a blue and red state divorce.
And I don't agree with that.
That's why I was talking about before about redrawing the lines.
Specifically because in California alone there's 10, 12 million Republicans who would just, like we've been talking about, might go to war to keep themselves in the country that they love.
The patriotic Californians in California who would not want to be pulled into the leftist utopia.
But this is... Man, I hear this so often and I genuinely don't understand where the perspective comes from.
When we talk about a modern context, a potential second civil war, people say, yeah, but nobody wants to fight.
And I'm like, whoever did?
Whoever, I mean, look, you got John Bolton, perhaps, he's itching for it, but he wants to send someone else to do it.
Historically, when you look at almost all conflict, the average person does not want to fight.
You die, you lose wealth, you lose luxury and comfort.
So it's typically smaller minority factions who reach that point, which start the wars.
unidentified
Well, I mean, I think what happens is a group decides that they want to fight and they work to make things difficult for the people that they need to fight for them.
And then they kind of pull them to fight for them.
Like what's happening today?
So like, you know, no, you're right.
Nobody really wants to fight, but when you can't afford groceries and you're struggling to pay your mortgage and all of these things are happening and now you're like, you know what?
You guys familiar with gambling and what's called EV?
No.
When you do like sports gambling, they'll show you the expected value, meaning that if you bet $100, if the EV is bad, If you win, you win only $90, so it's like, eh.
You know, so when there's a favorite, that's your expected value.
And so, uh, that's how people measure, like, is it worth it to make the bet?
There are some people who make stupid bets, like, I think this person's gonna win, you know, MVP for the season, and it's like, plus $1,000.
Which means a $10 bet wins you, you know, a lot more money than 100 bucks.
And so there's one funny meme where it said only 0.2% of tax returns are ever audited, giving you a 99.8% EV for tax fraud.
It's really funny.
But the reason I bring this up is...
You mentioned food and mortgage.
Basically, when the expected value of civil war exceeds the expected value of not, you get civil war.
If the average person says to themselves, The expected value of fighting a bloody war is higher than of just trying to pay my bills.
You're going to get people become active combatants.
When food, you know, we've talked about this a few years ago and over the past few years, but the cost of water.
Uh, in places like Detroit, Flint, Michigan, bring you to the- to the- to the breaking point of where you could start getting potential conflict.
Not so much in this context of, like, Flint, but if the cost of water exceeds the cost of labor, you're done.
Like, fighting theft, crime, will explode.
Because now what you're basic- like, water is the- as the most basic necessity for a human being.
I may be an air, but, like, in terms of what we need to pay for services, food is probably the- the most obvious.
Because people typically can find ways to get water, it's in the air, but food is a bit harder in big cities.
But if your basic necessities, shelter, food, water, and I think general security is considered one, like do you feel anxious all the time like you're gonna die?
When these things are threatened, people just say, look, I'm gonna die anyway, I can't eat.
Might as well fight for what I need to survive.
You know, right now you have certain politicians saying that all the crime we're seeing is because people need bread.
And I'm like, bro, that TV is not getting them bread.
They just, society is breaking down.
No one cares about each other.
But in terms of moving now into secession, the reason why I think no matter what happens, if there is a state seceding, you will get violence, Is because of regional resources and federal resources, states will require them.
I'll put a pin in that real quick and say, there is also the idea that civil war in this day and age would be impossible.
And that's because of the ubiquity of cell phones, the internet.
It's a lot harder To engage in violent, murderous conflict.
It's hard to police.
I mean, you get a video of a cop doing something that is even... There was one cop who was almost stabbed.
This was a few years ago.
A woman rushed with a knife and he shot her.
And even with that video, they were calling for him to be fired, for him to go to prison.
Like, hard enough to do your job as a cop, let alone have an invasion force, a National Guard, go into a state to suppress, you know, a voted... Let's say Texas and Greg Abbott.
They send troops to the border to secure it.
The idea that the federal government could dispatch armed troops to combat them in fight and bloody violence.
Biden would be gone.
Congress would go deep red.
It would be Republicans win overnight because people are like, are you nuts?
You can't do that.
That being said, when I look at California, for instance, Southern California is extremely reliant on the Colorado River, which means if they can't negotiate properly with Nevada, Arizona, Utah, or whatever, uh, Colorado, Millions upon millions of people are going to be without water.
So let's say California says, hey, we out.
And then the federal government says, we're going to damn this waterway.
We don't care about you.
You're downstream from us.
What can California do about it?
California might say, no, no, no, no, just because we secede doesn't mean you could take away our water source for a large portion of our people.
Diverting from the Bay Area down south would decimate a lot of the farms in the Delta, in the Bay Area.
California would have no choice but to actually send some kind of physical combat force to try and secure access to this water.
That's just one example.
unidentified
No, I disagree with that.
I think that the relationship between California and other states that provide that water is mutually beneficial and mutually dependent.
If they want to continue to get grapes and everything else that California grows, California needs water for it.
And there are no other states in this union that grow much of the produce that are staple products in American kitchens across the country.
And so, if Colorado wants to set off their water to California, then they're not going to have more grapes, you know?
So what are the people going to do then?
They're going to import them, they're going to have more expensive food from other countries, so it's a mutually dependent relationship.
My point is, right now you have California's massive representation in Congress preventing something like this from happening.
But should California secede, I see the federal government outright being like, well, now we got you by the balls.
Look, grapes and avocados are fantastic, but we can import those from Mexico.
We have your water.
I'll tell you what we're going to do.
We're gonna cut your water off for six months.
Then you come back to us and tell us how much you're willing to sell your avocados for.
But after the violent mobs burn down your home and oust you from power, the next guy who comes in is gonna bend the knee to us and we'll get everything we want.
So you make your choice.
unidentified
Yeah, I hear you.
It's certainly a complicated issue.
I just don't think that they're going to, you know, cut off a huge sore.
I mean, there's, I mean, I think even dairy products in California are a significant part of the national food stock.
So I think that there's so many things that are grown and produced in California that it would be unnecessary.
Why, why, why would they try to agitate the situation?
I mean, if it's a peaceful situation, like we're trying to have.
Why try to agitate the situation?
You could have brotherly relations between California if it seceded in the other states.
Yeah, but it's not peaceful.
Like, it's not peaceful.
But it could be done peacefully.
You're literally, if you're saying, like, I'm, I don't, look, we're married, okay?
We've been married for a really long time, and now all of a sudden you don't want to live in my house anymore, okay?
Your feelings are going to be hurt.
Sure.
There's going to be resentment there, and now you've got a kid together.
I don't I don't want you to have them on the weekends.
So the idea would be, California leaves and now we gotta figure out there's a divorce.
Okay, who's getting what?
Well, the only problem is, In many circumstances, historically especially, the woman leaves.
She says, I want to keep the house.
It is the trope, the man gets kicked out.
I think that's sexist and absurd.
Why should the guy have to go find a different place?
And so nowadays, actually really interesting because there are divorce lawyers telling the guys do not leave the house under any circumstances, but there is a dependency.
This is why we have alimony.
Let's call alimony the Colorado River for Southern California.
How many women fight tooth and nail in court and refuse to give up until they get alimony and that guy has to pay for it?
So, the funny thing is, you can have a woman initiate a divorce and then demand the resources from the husband and the courts agree.
In a national divorce, that makes literally no sense.
It would never happen.
If California decides to leave and for some reason it ends up happening, the federal government says, okay, you've left.
I'll put it this way.
I think it is fair to say violent confrontation would be extremely difficult in a modern context.
In 1861, how long did it take for word to travel that a war even started?
You know what I mean?
I mean, the fascinating thing is Fort Sumter, we say it started a civil war despite the fact that it wasn't actually really a fight.
It was, you know, one guy died in an accident or whatever.
The battle, first battle of Manassas, Boran, was crazy.
And people didn't even think they were in a civil war when that fight started.
You take a look at A modern context, could Joe Biden, or Donald Trump, or whoever is in the government at the time, dispatch, under the Insurrection Act, troops to California to suppress a secession?
Potentially.
But what this would mean is, California was not wholly resigned to secession.
Let's say that all of California, unanimously, in their statehouses and the Senate and all that stuff, the governor, they all agree, we are seceding, we don't care what the Constitution says, we don't care, it's unanimous, sign it, bang.
In this circumstance, to prevent this, the only way I see it being possible, Insurrection Act is declared, U.S.
forces are dispatched to California, who walk into government, and the governor and the state reps and legislatures put their hands up, and they say, you win!
And then the federal government occupies the state, and there's no conflict.
unidentified
However... Occupies the state with who?
Federalizing the California National Guard to turn on their own people?
In the event that California is not wholly resigned to secession and they do not fight, the federal government could dispatch troops under the Insurrection Act and take the state over.
In reality, if it came to the point where California unanimously decided it should not be in the United States, they're gonna fight.
The union would not be able to get into a bloody conflict in San Francisco.
Nobody would support that.
The rest of the country would be like, are you insane?
This is crazy.
People would turn against whatever the administration was.
They wouldn't need to fight.
The federal government would say, okay, California, we hear you.
Congratulations on having your own state.
We'll be securing the border post-haste.
We'll be dispatching troops, not under any insurrection act or anything, just under standard CBP border patrol procedures.
Every highway into and out of California will be checkpointed.
You will need a passport to enter the United States.
And of course, you'll need to renegotiate your water treaties with us.
I mean, California, their economy would collapse overnight.
People who live there wouldn't be able to go to Vegas anymore.
They'd go and they'd be like, do you have a passport?
We don't recognize the country of Pacific or California, so you can't enter the United States.
These people would be in revolt.
The United States government would likely then create some kind of amnesty program.
Any resident of California who wishes to retain US citizenship need only leave California and declare themselves as Americans.
It's impossible.
unidentified
I think that assumes that there's this line between California and the rest of the country, that the rest of the country would be opposed to California leaving.
There's so many people in this country, outside of California, that would love to see California, as they say, fall off into the ocean.
So there would be support for California secession in Washington too, that would be voiced to the representatives in Congress.
It wouldn't be like a united front against California.
I gotta be honest, I would assume that it's actually a large You might find a plurality of the people of this country who would support California secession, and they don't live in California.
Because the California government is like, no, no, no, no, no.
We have so much power over this country disproportionately through lying, cheating, and stealing.
Why would we give that up?
unidentified
Yeah, and I think that even the blue states would come to California's defense in Congress to prevent these kind of draconian measures being taken against the state.
The blue states are going to argue against Cal- if the entire Democrat government of California was like, we are seceding, nah, Washington, Oregon, New York, Illinois, they would be like, no you're not!
you better not leave because then they're the minority. - They become, yeah.
unidentified
So that you bring up an interesting point that like all political power is broken down into three factions.
It's the majority power, the minority power and the powerless.
And for most of us, we're part of the powerless.
And the moment that you decide to leave your faction of power, you're now powerless too.
And that's what California would be doing They would be significantly, they'd be creating their own little power over here, but it would be significantly dwarfed by the power of the United States government.
How do they do that?
Because, I mean, we were talking before about how Congress is locked in at 435, right?
So if California were to secede from the Union, they don't just suddenly lose 50-some votes in Congress.
Those seats get reapportioned to the other 49 states, and that would benefit blue states as well.
The number of seats in Congress was still before 35.
You just have more seats in Washington, more seats in New York, more seats in Maryland.
But I kind of feel like secession is such an extreme idea that we don't actually know what would happen with these other laws as to how we handle congressional seats.
I mean, the secession of a state that were to go through, it's going to have just...
Let me give you an example of a potentiality.
When it came to the Supreme Court hearing just recently about Trump's immunity, and it seems like it's gonna be, or what was it?
No, no, I'm sorry, eligibility.
The immunity one hasn't happened yet.
Whether Trump could be removed under the Insurrection Act.
What Trump's lawyers argued is, if you rule on this language in this clause, it's going to impact all of these other provisions in the constitution and our law, because we use the same term numerous times.
It is not just an issue of California seceded, they're no longer part of the United States.
It's, what does that mean for Senate seats, congressional seats?
What does it mean for the laws?
What does it mean for the Clean Water Restoration Act?
There's so many laws on the books that will be like just changed in some way we can't foresee by secession.
unidentified
Yeah, and so to your point, they would be reapportioned.
And so what that would do, it would take, you're decentralizing the power.
You are taking some of that majority power and some of that minority power and you're giving it to some of the powerless.
And you don't know what those powerless are going to do.
You're not going to know what they're going to want once they get in there.
It's going to have a massive ripple effect as you describe it.
But California right now, it's overwhelmingly blue.
So they would be giving up a two-to-one advantage for a one-to-one.
unidentified
I mean, it would be interesting how math, there's a, there's a complicated formula and there's an Excel sheet that you can download, actually kind of play around with it.
I can get it somewhere, but it's interesting to see where those seats would go because it would go based on population.
And so inevitably, like we're saying here, some of the states would, would benefit.
There were blue states, but also red states.
And it would be interesting to see exactly how that laid out.
But until we actually put in that formula, it'd be speculation.
I don't think it would be that bad of a deal for the Democrats.
And it would, a lot of states would, would benefit from it.
We've had a lot of conversations about what could the catalyst of civil war be in this day and age, and slavery being this, like, moral inflection point clearly was a catalyst for civil war.
And we've argued on Timcast IRL, I should say I have, along with several others, that abortion could be that issue, and I'm not so sure right now.
The general idea was...
Abortion is a constitutional personhood question.
There is a disparity in the states between whether or not a person has rights or doesn't, or whether or not a baby is even a person.
I don't know how you argue that a human being at any stage is anything but a human being.
I think it's only for political power that you'll get people on the left arguing otherwise.
But therein lies the problem.
So actually, you know, when Roe v. Wade was overturned, my attitude was kind of like, good, send it to the states.
It probably makes more sense.
Decentralized power.
Now I disagree.
You know, I've had several arguments from then.
I'm like, no, actually, I think I agreed generally with Roe v. Wade, but not completely.
And the issue is, it should not be a state question as to whether someone has personhood.
I mean, think about the ramifications of the federal government saying, we will not determine who is a person or who isn't.
Giving the state the right to say this person has rights and doesn't is insane.
It should be at the federal level.
We know who is protected under the Constitution and what restrictions the government has as to how they violate those rights.
I'm not so sure it's abortion anymore.
You know, but maybe.
What I was looking at is something like Colorado and Oklahoma.
Oklahoma's banned abortion outright.
Colorado has unrestricted up to the point of birth.
And I'm like, man, that is a recipe for disaster.
Someone who lives near that border, you know, if someone, we've already had some states say if a woman plans to leave the state for an abortion, it's a criminal conspiracy.
So we may be getting to that point.
Plus you've already had violence against abortionists in the past and things like this.
So there's certainly a risk there.
I wonder now if the issue is actually immigration.
Immigration being the catalyst for potential civil war, considering the extreme degree to which we're seeing the border crisis, the degree to which we are seeing Democrat jurisdictions try to grant voting rights to people who are not citizens, and what could happen if this country goes to war in itself over the idea that non-citizens are actually full citizens.
And so the question is personhood and rights of people who are not full citizens and whether citizenship even matters.
Certainly I think the Democrats, the military-industrial complex, and the powerful corporate elites would love the idea of citizenship being erased.
These corporations extend beyond borders.
They do not care for the protections of the United States.
So certainly they would fund and be on the side of California.
Brings them all in.
Texas is resisting it, but the Biden administration is all for it.
In the event this crisis escalates to a point of conflict, you've got a lot of states that could easily go to non-citizens and tell them, fight on our behalf.
And so there is a potential catalyst of, if they start giving overt voting rights, they're doing this.
New York's stuck in the courts.
Maryland has some areas where non-citizens have the right to vote in certain elections.
This is a recipe for disaster because there are people who are like, I've, you know, I'll put it this way.
The example I've used, Gen Z. Gen Z asking why it is they can't afford houses.
They can't afford to rent apartments even.
They can't find jobs that pay.
At the same time, non-citizens are being brought in and given welfare cards.
They're giving $3,000 debit cards.
They're being given luxury hotel rooms with their own bathroom and their own TV.
Meanwhile, Gen Z is in a shoe box for 2,000 bucks a month.
They can barely afford and there's no bathroom.
This comes to the point where there's gonna be a lot of people being like, my birthright's been stripped from me.
I won't accept that.
You know, when you bring up three-fifths compromise and disproportionate power, I think that is an issue that could lead to some type of violent escalation.
Because right now, we are in an era where California has more power than they should over our President and Congress, how we spend money when we go to war, because they've broken the rules.
They have violated the social contract that we as people decide how our government is run.
California said, you know, We're just going to bring in a bunch of people who aren't even citizens, and then count them, and get congressional seats to vote against you.
It sounds very much like what the South did with the Three-Fifths Compromise.
At a certain point, people are going to say no.
unidentified
So, the immigration thing I think is spot on.
I think that's exactly one of the issues.
Clarifying what a citizen is and making sure that only citizens have American rights are important.
And we can go back and we look at, look at the Texas Revolution, the annexation of Texas.
How did Texas come to be a state?
Well, Mexico had fought in a war, it freed itself from the Spanish Empire, it had all this new territory and it was difficult for them to manage.
So they actually invited American citizens to the Texas territory to settle the land.
Well, the American citizens brought their slaves with them, and Mexico outlawed slavery, and so there was this conflict over it.
And this is how you get the Texas Revolution starting, is you basically invited People into your country and they took over your country because you couldn't manage it because there was there wasn't a strong government, a set of rules for everybody to abide by and to enforce.
And so, you know, that's exactly what we're looking at here.
You know, you've got the California thing is spot on.
Someone wrote on Twitter, California was reliably read until amnesty.
And I was like, is that true?
Because that was like in the 80s.
You know, Ronald Reagan had this amnesty thing in California.
And it is more complicated than that, but it's true.
What ended up happening was, Ronald Reagan gives amnesty.
What this does is, it's not that many people, but it created large communities of people with voting rights.
However, their allegiance and their ties were not to California or the United States.
What ends up happening is, maybe half generation later in the 90s, Republicans and more conservative-leaning individuals just in general were like, we've got too many non-citizens and they're getting access to public benefits.
We can't do that.
I can't be paying taxes for someone who doesn't contribute.
So they passed a bill.
Non-citizens will not get access to public welfare systems.
There was a revolt, a political revolt among people who had family members who are not citizens, but they were, and they would not tolerate this.
For a lot of... It's not just about amnesty.
That's why I say it's more complicated, but it's mostly true.
But you have people who come to the country illegally, are allowed to stay, have kids, those kids are citizens, and then the government says, we are not going to give benefits to non-citizens.
Well, that kid goes, my parents aren't citizens.
Heck no!
And so what happens?
A political upheaval in favor of those who are not citizens.
This turned the state blue forever.
It's a very simple proposition.
What do you think happens when you live in a house with your buddies and you invite people in who are completely opposed to your worldview?
I always like doing these simple analogies, but let's just, you know, you live with your roommate and you both absolutely love spaghetti.
And every Thursday, it's family day or whatever, and you guys order out, and spaghetti, Italian is brought over, sometimes it's eggplant parmesan, sometimes it's chicken parmesan, but you love it.
Then you invite someone who hates it and only wants to eat broccoli.
Okay, well now you've got one vote for broccoli, two votes for spaghetti.
Then that person brings their friend in.
Now it's 50-50.
The third person who comes in, you'll never eat spaghetti again.
And so, with the issue of immigration right now, Democrats don't care about the core of this country, our values, our views, what we want to leave for our kids.
They care about getting power today.
And that's certainly true of a lot of Republicans, and I'm not trying to discount Republicans like, you know, the neocons and the industrialists of 15-20 years ago, who wanted cheap labor for their factories.
That's true too.
Many of those guys were the ones who started this.
But you bring in people.
You have the average American, let's say, living in the city in the suburbs.
They have kids.
What are they thinking about?
Oh man, I used to love going down to the old candy shop on 3rd and Main and whatever and my dad brought me there and I want to bring my kids there and then one day they go there and it's gone.
It's not there anymore.
They're upset.
The things that I thought were nice that I want to give to my kids aren't there anymore.
As more and more people who come in don't know or care about the old candy shop on Main Street, they're not evil people, they just don't care.
So eventually what happens is, you'll get an ordinance, you know, should we help support the businesses in Main Street with this provision that would revitalize the area?
And they say, we don't care.
Who cares about a candy shop?
And you say, I do, I want my kids to experience that.
Sorry, you're outvoted.
Then it's really, really simple, especially with remittances.
More and more people come who aren't from here.
They're given amnesty or work permits or whatever.
And all of a sudden, the money they make in your small town is being sent to a different country.
And so, the money you need to come into your city to expand, to grow, and to maintain is gone.
These are issues that I think are obvious and Democrats are fomenting because they don't care.
But the average person who's trying to preserve what they love, they're going to lose out on that.
And eventually someone's going to get angry, depending on how serious it gets.
It could lead to fighting secession.
Who knows?
I mean, I think it's beyond secession.
California should be kicked out.
The reality is, California should not have the Electoral College votes or the Congressional seats it does.
The non-citizens should not have representation for the rest of us.
I should not have to... My vote, as an individual, is countered in Congress by illegal immigrants.
So what did my parents fight for?
What did, you know, my grandfather fighting in World War II or whatever?
To give me what?
So that Democrats could give away everything he fought for and built for a better future?
If we are entering a society that does not care to protect the trees for whom shade our ancestors knew they would never sit beneath, if they won't protect that, then a society will grow weak.
I see conflict being an inevitability based on those factors.
That's why I think immigration could be a large catalyst for the next fight, and a large fighting body and population is being brought into the country who would defend Democrats can easily go to a non-citizen and say, do you want to stay here?
Do you want a welfare card?
Do you want a luxury hotel?
Okay, you're fighting.
And they're going to say, okay.
Now what?
I don't know.
What do you guys think?
unidentified
I mean, I think that it should be addressed in the Constitution.
I think we need a federal convention.
We need to write several constitutional amendments to solve these problems that go back all the way to the founding and then through the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era.
Specifically, addressing the citizenship question of who gets counted for purposes of apportionment is really, really important.
California, Congressional Democrat, will never support that because, what, 7% of their district is non-citizens?
Illegal immigrants?
And their kids are gonna be like, if you vote for that, we'll vote against you and you'll lose.
So the more power they gain from non-citizens, the more incentive and pressure they have to continually support dissolving this country.
unidentified
What if you proposed a three-fifths compromise?
Where you counted non-citizens as three-fifths for purposes of apportionment, knowing that you have to actually create a feasible immigration system before you do this.
And because you know that those people are going to be here, you know that they're going to have children who are going to be full citizens, and it gives them a little bit of power in their government that they're living in, and you're able to appropriately know the amount of people in your country for services and all those different things.
I gotta disagree with that because, you know what, you give the left an inch and they take a mile, and if you legitimize three-fifths vote for an illegal immigrant, they're gonna use that as a basis for a lawsuit in the future.
He's saying take away two-fifths of their potential abortion rights.
unidentified
They should have zero!
They should have zero representation.
Yes, but right now they have one.
So by giving them two or three-fifths or whatever the fraction is, you're legitimizing a portion of it, which is then going to be used as groundwork for them to go to court later and say, this is a human rights issue, they're a full person, they should be granted full representation.
Give them nothing, because if you give them an inch, they take a mile.
It's a civil rights issue that I, an American citizen, cannot speak with my representative because my representative represents over 756,000 people and they can't actually do their job.
I'm saying that the illegal immigrants shouldn't have any representation.
Can we get Look, if we got a hundred people to start filing lawsuits based on that argument, that's a good argument.
My ability to speak with my representative has been diminished because my representative is spending too much time talking to people who aren't even citizens.
Make the Supreme Court answer that.
And that could ultimately end up with a ruling that congressional representatives cannot allocate time and representation to people who are not citizens of this country.
unidentified
Yeah, and then California will lose a number of seats, not just one every ten years because of Gavin Newsom's policies, like they're already losing because the population lost, despite the fact that illegal immigration to California is surging.
Some very immigration-critical, I'll call it, organizations say they only get one extra seat.
And that's surprising to me because, you know, some of these organizations are like, no more immigration moratorium, and they said one.
But there's Republicans in Congress who have said it could be as high as seven.
So, how about We get some people to file a lawsuit against... I guess the lawsuit would be against your representative.
That'd be interesting.
unidentified
Well, you know what I could add to this is that I just went through a very long legal immigration process for my wife, who's from Russia.
And we spent 18 months going through the process.
And it was very difficult for us to get in contact with our congressional representatives because of the backlog of all the case work that their case officers were dealing with with regard to immigration and illegal immigrants.
And so we weren't able to get in contact.
I personally wasn't able to get in contact with my representative like you're talking about specifically because of this issue.
And I'm assuming I'm not the only American citizen who has sponsored a visa for his foreign wife or vice versa foreign husband who hasn't been able to reach their congressional representatives because they're so backlogged dealing with so many cases from everybody from everywhere.
And so and what happens in a system where it's overwhelmed and there aren't enough people to and because remember your congressional representative is supposed to be your voice it's supposed to be the administrator of the government the legislator right and And so, what happens in a country where you have this backlog and this issue where the administrators are overworked?
Well, it leans in favor with people who have connections and money, right?
So, again, regular Americans, and for the most part, what I would say is American families are left out because You know, that's the one thing that I've learned since getting into politics is it is not designed for people with children to be involved.
You just kind of have to show up all the time to have any sort of a right or a voice in the conversation.
And if you have to pick your kids up to school or drop them off at school or have to do homework with them, you don't have the time to show up at all these random events that they put together.
Yesterday, before the show on Tim Kessler IRL, Ian, he likes to advocate for this thing he calls the fourth branch of government, an idea that was, uh, I don't know if it was originally from, um, Mike Gravel, but Mike Gravel was a proponent of it.
This idea that you have a democratic system, so you have your representatives in Congress, but then the people themselves could also, uh, like, draft bills to be presented and vote on whether they make it forward.
I said, uh, The idea of a fourth branch of government comprised of the people who go out and vote on all these things is a tremendously bad idea because it favors the unemployed.
And so that means government will skew towards benefits for the unemployed, which is currently already true, as you're mentioning with kids.
It is easier for someone with no kids to participate in politics than someone with kids.
Therefore, over the past several generations, laws have skewed to benefit mostly people who don't have kids.
Same thing is true for the unemployed.
That's why we see the expansion of welfare benefits, That's a problem for a system that will eventually lead to its collapse.
So, you know, what's the answer to that?
unidentified
I mean, the answer is decentralizing the power, uncapping the house.
It's absolutely uncapping the house.
Everybody that's alive today doesn't understand how the system's supposed to work because they've never actually lived in it.
It's always been this concentrated power and, you know, all of the different You know events that have taken place.
It's kind of worked in our favor a little bit I mean we were at an advantage to have a concentrated power system during World War two to be able to fight against other sovereign powers But you know at the end of the day it hurts American families it hurts people that really just want to live their lives and build their communities and it gives advantage to people that are I find that an interesting point about this American families thing.
Do you remember the representative or politician, whoever it was, he recently said the quiet part out loud when he said that the reason that they want to bring the illegal immigrants into the country is because of population decline or the threat of population decline.
Well, if we wanted to address population decline, then why not adjust our laws and regulations to support American families who, as you're saying, are not able to participate in the system?
I 100% agree.
I mean, we want to have more kids, but I can't afford to have more kids.
Like, it's a big deal in my marriage with my wife, the fact that she would love to have another child, and I have to be the guy that goes, well, we can't feed another child.
So instead of you having more American children, natural-born citizens in this country, they're going to bring in illegal immigrants.
And they're going to give them a $3,000, and they're going to pay for their health care, and they're going to do all those things that I have to pay for.
Because the American nationalist types, or whatever you want to call it, are being opposed by internationalist open borders advocates, which have basically opened our borders.
It's going to be really interesting if this does devolve into a civil conflict.
Who wins?
I can certainly see a historical record a hundred years from now that says, There were people in this country, politicians, who believed that you didn't have rights because you weren't granted a piece of paper.
How insane is that?
No, if you're a human being and you were here on this soil, you are entitled to full rights and benefits if anyone else was on the soil.
Wow, how insane.
Citizenship, what an evil thing.
I certainly think there are powerful elements within corporations, and as I mentioned, who would love to see the idea of citizenship abolished worldwide.
And it's not necessarily about one world governance, because each region could have its own governance, but it would be freedom of movement for anyone on the planet to any place they wanted to go without restriction.
You would just be subject to the rules within when you were there.
This would mean that your home will cease to exist.
The place you grew up and the things that you liked won't be there anymore.
And the argument from the left is, so what?
Who cares?
And the argument from the right is typically like, but I like the things that I grew up with, you know?
And I think this is... you can look at Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations and actually see... Let me pull up the Moral Foundations, actually.
Because I want to know which one this would fall under.
Moral Foundations Theory.
Okay, you have Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity.
But I believe the original is Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity.
You know, they ended up adding liberty as a sixth moral foundation because they found there were some people who had no moral foundations at all.
The only thing they cared about was, am I free to do what I want?
You be free to do what you want.
But purity, I think, has to do with disgust and contamination.
I think purity is the moral foundation that the right has, the left certainly does not.
The left only has care and fairness, typically.
They don't care about purity.
So if you take the moral foundations test, which I recommend everybody does, it's really fun.
Some of these questions are horrifying.
One of them is... Actually, let me see if I can find the actual test itself to give you an example.
Because we can show it.
Here we go.
IDR Labs.
Here's an example of one of the Moral Foundation's questions.
Oh, it's actually the question that I was looking for.
This is fantastic.
Hannah inherited an old flag of her country from her father, but has never used it.
One day when Hannah is cleaning the house, she discovers that she is out of rags, so she uses the flag as a rag to clean the house.
And there's varying degrees of, is it not okay, kind of okay, nah, not really okay, to it's totally fine.
I gotta be honest, I am filled with violent rage at the thought of someone taking a flag of their country and using it as a rag.
That fills me with a deep, violent passion.
You know, to put it simply, if I saw somebody grab an American flag, like, I'll put it this way, if you bought your own American flag from a grocery store and desecrated it or whatever, I don't like it, but it's yours, I guess.
If someone took a, like, actual, aged American flag that was literally used in any context, any context, flown it to school or whatever, and they tried to use it as a rag, I would physically stop them.
I would, I would, I would not, I'm not saying I would harm them, I would be like, you are not going to do that.
That's like, I don't know.
I don't like the idea.
And I can go into great detail as to why.
But this is something the right has, the left typically does not.
Not always, but typically doesn't.
Think about what that means for our country.
I see the American flag.
I see the blood, sweat and tears, the sacrifice of blood and treasure for all that came before us who tried to preserve this, to create a better life for their children.
To simply, to keep it simple, the American flag to me represents the tree that was planted that our ancestors knew they would never get to sit beneath.
And as the saying goes, society grows great when people plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit beneath.
For the left, they don't care at all.
They will chop that tree down so they can make tables and chairs.
And then we have no shade.
And I think that leads to a detriment.
It leads to suffering.
That's why I'm simply put, like, do not desecrate the flag.
It is a reminder.
It is the idea that must be preserved so we understand where we come from.
For those that don't remember the past, they're doomed to repeat it.
If the left doesn't care about this, that means you will have City center.
Uh, hey, how about a community center?
You grew up there.
You played basketball, you played hockey, your friends were there, you had bake sales, you had prom or whatever, and you're like, this was a wholesome, fun moment that was, it was, it was, for me, a major part of my development, and I want my kids to share that.
I want them to experience these good, positive things that led me to be a good, moral person, to have memories that I would never, never wanna forget.
And then one day you show up, and the police have taken over the building, and they've put a bunch of illegal immigrants in it.
Which is what they're doing now, I think it's in Massachusetts.
This is what the left will do to you.
They don't care about the good memories you have, and the things that helped you become a good person.
Literally don't care.
That's a terrifying prospect for what's gonna happen to this country.
unidentified
Well, they have an agenda of radical social transformation that they understand Americans who are born in this country will never accept.
And so that's why they need to import these foreigners to come to the country to eventually gain citizenship and then the right to vote so they can bring about this radical social transformation.
And so you're going to lose your identity.
You're going to lose your country.
I know Donald Trump says, If you don't have a border, you don't have a country.
If you don't have an identity, you don't preserve and protect your identity and your culture.
You also don't have the same country that you were born into.
And so I think it's really important to not only protect our borders from the invasion of illegal immigrants coming into the country, but also to preserve our culture and our traditions and our history.
Yeah, I mean, I agree with a lot of that.
I think what it's important to understand in the context of what you just described is that, yes, there are a portion of that power structure that feels and acts the way that you do, but a lot of them, they look at They're idealist.
They want everybody to have the same things that they have and they see this as a way to do that.
They don't necessarily see the repercussions of their actions.
They're part of the powerless that empowers the majority power in this circumstance.
And they're kind of just misled because this isn't the way to solve those problems.
This is the way to consolidate power.
If you actually wanted to solve those problems, it's to debate these issues in Congress, to write actual immigration policy, to create a real border with real security that you can actually stop bad people from getting in and also allow good people to come in and work in your country because we do have a population issue.
And if you want to be a strong sovereign nation, you need to have a strong population.
It helps the economy, it helps the communities, it helps everything.
And so there is a balance to be had here and our leaders just don't want to talk about it.
They just want to manipulate things to their side of the aisle so they can be either in the majority or the minority.
And it goes with what you were saying before about, I think, I think Tim was talking about how the Democrats act in lockstep with one another because they're on a war footing against this country in my view.
And so they're going to vote together as a single block.
They don't ever have, we never see in the news how, like you were saying, a couple of Democrats voted with the Republicans, right?
You always see the other way around.
The Republicans are giving way to the Democrats to do something.
And that's because they have this agenda of radical social transformation that they are behind and they don't like the History and the culture and the traditional values of this country and its founding.
It's why these symbols don't matter to them That's why they're willing to burn them or step on them use them as a rag.
For example, it doesn't matter to them They don't want that they remove these statues from our parks because they want to erase history not to restore and to protect our history and so we're talking about losing your country not just because you're being invaded by illegal immigrants, but because the people within our own government are Want to erase our history and don't respect our culture and our traditions.
I think what that is is insecurity.
Like I think it's just a bunch of insecure leaders that are, they look back at mistakes that we've made in the past.
They don't understand them and they're ashamed.
And there's really no reason to be ashamed at the decisions that people have made in the past.
Our job of living in the present is to learn from them and to grow from them and teach our children how to do better.
We shouldn't look back and feel that way about ourselves.
Yeah.
And like Vivek says, uh, you know, these people, they need some kind of cause to coalesce around and they don't know what that is.
And so they want to take down statues because it makes them feel good that the person that's represented in that statue, for example, Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner.
So it makes them feel good about themselves that they did something against slavery.
Cause that would be a noble thing to do to stand up against slavery and do something about slavery.
But slavery is abolished in this country.
So we don't need to have a campaign against slavery anymore.
uh so they are coalescing around these kind of fake pseudo campaigns because it makes them feel good inside but it really is detrimental to the country because we're losing our culture and losing our traditions and our history because of it i can't remember who said it but they said this country is a supply and demand problem when it comes to racism And that largely in the 90s and early 2000s, you saw whether it was comedians or just the average person on the street, right?
Things were pretty good.
And now that we've gotten so far and, you know, up until like, I'd say 2016.
That racism has become such a big thing now, right?
People aren't being racist to each other when they walk on the street now, but that statue that's been in the park for 100 years, oh, I'm oppressed, it's hurting who I am as a person, and I can't remember who said it, but it's true that they have nothing to rally behind, so they're kind of fabricating things.
And it's sometimes not even them that are offended.
They're offended on behalf of other people who themselves are not offended by it.
I mean, look at the situation with the Washington football team that calls up the commanders now, right?
That's a terrible name.
Isn't there, I think I heard that there are Native American groups that want to return the name of the Redskins to that team.
They're not the ones offended, but the people who got The NFL, or the football team that changed their names, are the ones who are offended on behalf of people who themselves are not offended.
So they're just looking for a campaign, they're looking for a cause, they're throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, and it's hurting the country, because everybody gets divided because of it.
He says, my strongest moral foundation is liberty, but I'm closest to that of conservative.
And it's actually really simple to break down.
First, I would say it doesn't mean I'm a conservative.
I think it actually probably means I'm more libertarian than anything.
But if you take a look at the Moral Foundations Test, we can pull this up, give you a general understanding.
So the blue graph from the test is left liberal, the red bar is conservative, and the yellow is libertarian.
Green is me.
So if you look at care and fairness, you can see that left liberals on average have very high care and fairness.
Loyalty, authority, purity, extremely low.
And liberty is a bit balanced.
Conservatives have care and fairness at about 60%.
Loyalty about the same, authority about the same, purity about the same, and liberty a little bit high.
So, uh, when you look at my moral foundations, they're actually very close to your average conservative.
Except, I'm a little bit more libertarian.
Which I think makes sense, because I talk about that quite a bit.
And if you take a look at the guests that we tend to have, that's the case.
This is actually, uh, worrying to me.
The idea that liberals don't care much for loyalty, authority, or purity.
And it's not surprising when you take a look at their politics.
This, I think, really does explain the divide politically in this country.
Very, very much so.
And it doesn't in a way that's outside the context of policy.
You could care about authority or not authority and be pro or anti-police.
You could have, you know, conservatives tend to be back the blue, right?
But you could be totally in support of police while condemning certain police actions and being an advocate for police reform.
That being said, what scares me the most is purity.
The left liberals have almost none.
And purity is rooted in avoiding disease, and like, disgusting food, and refuse.
So take a look at our cities, and the crime, and the- look at San Francisco.
San Francisco's exactly what you get.
You get poop all over the streets, just littered everywhere.
So I think, I love this moral foundations test.
It's usually, every time I do it, it's about the exact same, but sometimes it'll say I'm more, it'll say I'm a liberal or left-leaning liberal or whatever, even though it's like, I'm still always way more for purity.
And I'm surprised the authority was as high as it was, to be completely honest, that of an average conservative.
That could be due to, uh, changes in my views over the past few, uh, years due to what we're witnessing happen in this country.
And perhaps the realization that if we don't have some kind of order, you get nothing.
And this country just falls apart.
I don't know, where do you guys think you'd land?
unidentified
Like in terms of... I feel I'd probably land pretty similar to you.
I consider myself like a conservative progressive.
I want to preserve the things that deserve to be preserved, but I want to progress society forward to share that with everyone else.
It's actually difficult to interpret what it means to be okay or not okay.
I'm trying to see if I can trigger it again, because it's just, is there a way to like retake the test?
I don't know.
Some of the questions, it's like, it asks you if it's okay or not, but what does that mean?
Is it okay?
Like, it's not a yes or no, yes or no question.
One of them, you know, it's like a woman asks a guy on a date and he says, why would I date someone who looks like an overweight bulldog?
Is that okay or not okay?
Well, what does that mean by okay or not okay?
Are you saying, should this be allowed?
Or are you saying that guy's a dick?
Because for me, I'm like, that's not okay.
But I think it should be totally legal.
And I would laugh if I heard someone say it.
You know what I mean?
I'm saying like, I would not advocate someone do that.
You probably shouldn't.
But if someone did, I would laugh.
So what does that mean?
Is it okay or is it not okay?
I don't know.
How do you answer that question?
Some of them are good.
Anyway, building off of this, in terms of like these moral foundations, What's interesting to me is the geographical polarization we've been seeing.
And you mentioned with Gavin Newsom, you've got this, you know, decrease in population.
I'm just wondering, like, what happens?
I was saying Pacifica or whatever would starve to death.
You know, maybe that's unfair.
They would eat each other to death first.
So they'd be well-fed, but, you know, consuming human flesh or something, because, you know, people wouldn't want to die.
But I'm curious, like, what happens When you take this, this polarization we're seeing in the United States is clearly, you know, you look at this moral foundations test, you can see some people care about like the sanctity and purity of what this nation is and represents and what it can be.
Some people don't care at all.
What will these two distinct bodies look like?
You know what I mean?
Like, what will they be fighting for and why would they be fighting?
And what would that result in?
Like, imagine you took every conservative and put them in one place.
What are you gonna have?
American flags everywhere?
Is it gonna look like... World War II Italy or something?
Or is it gonna look like 1950s America?
Is the left?
What's that- what's that gonna look like?
Like, what does this become?
unidentified
I think that the left really thinks that they can achieve, I use this word utopia multiple times, and I think that their vision is based on a future where they think they can achieve this utopia.
And many societies in the past have pursued this idea of utopia and it always fails because the utopia is itself unachievable.
I think the default left liberal probably wants a utopia, but is in no way politically engaged or informed in any way, or even trying to bring it about.
Then you have powerful elites on the Democrat side or the progressive side, who know you'll never have a utopia, but know they can exploit stupid people for personal gain.
And then on the right, you have everyone arguing with each other over the right way to do things.
unidentified
Yeah, I mean, I agree.
I don't think that there's something they can achieve and that they're not going to be motivated to do it.
But that's, I think it's in their mind.
And a lot of people on the left, we call them keyboard warriors.
They're activists online, but they don't actually want to go out and do something.
That's one of the, by the way, one of the problems we had with CalExit was a lot of support for it online, a lot of support for it even in the polls.
But when you're getting people to go out and do something for it, they don't want to go out and do it.
I mean, it's just fervor passion or whatever, but they're just they're more organized.
unidentified
I I mean, at the end of the day, when I've knocked doors for Republican candidates and Democratic candidates, when you show up to knock doors for a Republican candidate, you show up at 9.
The person with the literature is there at 9.15.
There's supposed to be coffee and donuts.
There's no coffee and donuts.
All the literature is scattered in the back of a trunk.
They say, here's your pile.
You have to set you up on the app, and you're out the door at 10.
When you show up to knock at doors for the Democrats, you're Literature is pre-packaged, counted out for each door that you're gonna knock, your app is already set up, and you get there at 9 and you're out the door at 9.05.
Okay?
Oh, yeah.
It's just a more efficient way of getting things done.
Well, I used to work for, uh, when I did non-profit fundraising.
Various organizations that were for Democrat or progressive causes, environmentalism, things like that.
And I ultimately stopped because they're liars.
But, uh, yeah, you walk in, they hand you a binder.
It's got everything you need.
Sign-up forms, postcards, and it's fascinating You know, you'll get some 20 year old kid who has no idea about anything, but they're told, don't worry, this is how you do good.
And they go, okay, I guess.
And then you get a postcard and the postcard says, dear Senator, you know, what's his face.
Here's what we think.
Here's why we think it.
Here's what we want you to do.
They say, go out and fill out 10 of these every time you go out.
They're not mandatory, but we try to get these done.
And then what happens?
They get 50,000 of these postcards and mail them all at once.
And massive garbage bags full of, you know, these postcards land in a senator's office.
And he's like, what is this?
And they're like, take a look.
And it's all of these people saying, we do not want fracking.
And he's like, okay.
No fracking it is.
Guess what?
The people who asked other people to fill those cards have no idea what the card said.
And the people who filled it out don't care either!
But the Senator, the Congressman, they believe it.
unidentified
They buy it.
Because they can't actually talk to their community because there's too many people in their community.
So the First Amendment said, after the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one representative for every 30,000 until the number shall amount to 100, after which proportion shall be so regulated by Congress that there should not be less than 100 representatives, nor less than one representative for every 40,000 persons.
It actually kept it 50,000.
The idea was, once they got to 200 members of Congress, each rep would have 50,000 people.
It's now 775,000.
You ain't never gonna talk to your member of Congress.
They don't care what you think.
They care what their donors think.
unidentified
And so, what ends up happening... And it's not even, by the way, real quick, it's not even equal, 575.
There's some district that have 700,000 in California, some have 400,000 in Wyoming, so there's a discrepancy there as well.
What ends up happening though is, hey, you're a member of Congress.
You wanna get re-elected.
How do you get re-elected?
Okay, well it used to be, you would go to community gatherings in your district, that's 50,000 people, so you could reasonably, you actually could talk to them.
You would say, put out the word, send a letter to the local town, they'll put up notice, I'm gonna be there on this day, and you know, three, four hundred people show up.
And you do that 15, 20 times, and eventually you start getting to large portions of the actual voting base you've talked to.
Now, it's actually much simpler.
You say, I don't know or care who any of these people are, but there's this rich guy who lives in my district who's gonna give my pack two million dollars, and I can buy a lot of TV ads with that.
You will never have a louder voice than the guy who can fund a super PAC.
unidentified
Yeah.
And again, because the concentration of power, because the body is small, it encourages that thing.
Because when I walked into politics and I said, hey look, I started studying history and I realized that our legislative body is too small and Citizens United gave control to corporations.
And they said, well, you can't change that.
That's just the way it is.
You have to learn how to work inside the new system.
And I said, no, change the system.
Decentralize the power.
Give me power back.
Give my neighbors power back.
Give my community power back.
'Cause otherwise, how are you gonna know how to govern us?
Eventually you're gonna lead us off a cliff because back to the leaders are insecure They're insecure because they don't actually know what to do because it's just a lot of work.
Like at the end of the day, I kind of sympathize for the people in office because it's gotta be really hard to do their job because there are 200 million more people now than there were in 1910 when they originally capped the House.
Yeah, and in the House of Representatives, they spend most of their time just campaigning for the next election and raising money for the respective parties.
So when it comes to actually doing their work, They probably defer to their analysts.
And then what happens is party leadership in the House are the ones who get you elected.
So what we've seen in 2022, for instance, there were many great Republican candidates who were crushed by party leadership because they were like, no, no, we don't support you, we support the other guy.
And so then the people we actually wanted lose because they don't get the financial support from the machine.
I want to give a shout out to the fifth article, which became the Second Amendment.
A well-regulated militia composed of the body of the people being the best security of a free state.
The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, but no one religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.
If only that's what they actually ratified.
They didn't want to include the last bit because they feared that it would make it so they couldn't have conscription.
And we needed that.
How else do you conscript the militia, the armed men and women of the people, to fight if you say no one should have to do it?
The issue, though, is legally.
Had they included that, it created a clear distinction between regulated being a military force and the body of the people.
In its initial writing, there would be no argument.
Right now the liberals are like, a well-regulated militia means you are in the government, the government regulates you.
And so it's only about having a militia controlled by the government.
When the original was actually like, no, no, no!
You will not be compelled to render military service and you can keep and bear arms.
It meant anyone could have it.
So it's like, can we just go back to look at what they really meant when they wrote that?
Well, they got rid of that part because they're like, no, we want conscription, though.
unidentified
I mean, I think the most important part about the Second Amendment is if you think about it as far as your safety on us, you know, as a sovereign nation, if another nation invade you and you go to war, both militaries are going to expend their already, you know, trained officers.
And once that happens, Who does the advantage go to?
The country that doesn't have weapons, that needs to be trained how to use a gun first?
Or the country where everybody has a weapon in their house at some place and has gone to a firing range and understands how to use it?
The only way a Spartan, there's only one way a male Spartan and a female Spartan could get a gravestone.
The male Spartan had to die in battle and the female had to die in childbirth.
Otherwise you were not worthy of being remembered.
And so we look back on it like, man, it was so barbaric.
Like, I read that they would take a baby and leave it in the woods overnight or whatever, and if it didn't survive, it didn't deserve to.
Or, I don't know if that's true or not, but like these wild stories.
Imagine how wild it's gonna be in a hundred years.
What are they gonna say about us?
They're gonna be like, America was comprised of people.
Who engaged in combat play for fun.
Cultures of war as a game.
Going out and shooting guns, hitting targets, and destroying things.
It's kind of Spartan in that regard.
And so you look at these other countries and they're like, no, we shouldn't do any of that stuff.
And I'm like, well, you know, we're going to win if we ever go to war.
So a body of people who enjoy the practice of combat as a sport, where they're not actually hurting anybody, but you know, maybe paintball or airsoft or whatever.
We play with guns.
Like, you don't want to go to war with us.
It has nothing to do with our aircraft carriers and our nuclear missiles and our satellite tech.
It has to do with, you ain't never going to come here.
The moment you land a boat, everybody just points their gun out the window.
And they're like, now you can leave.
unidentified
Well, even when the British were, like we talked about in the beginning, occupying America, the 13 colonies, they had to stay near the shore.
They couldn't get food in inland.
90% of the population were living on farms at the time, yet they had to stay near the shore near their supply lines.
I do want to give a shout out too while we're at it though.
The third amendment, which was the sixth article.
No soldier shall, in a time of peace, be courted in any house without the consent of the owner, nor in a time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
What's fascinating about this is nobody cares about the third amendment.
It's never really come up, but it might actually come up now more because what I think the Supreme Court ruling on it, it's not about soldiers in your house.
It's about the government using your house, period.
So the Third Amendment says no soldier shall be quartered, but when it came to the actual argument, the actual interpretation is the government shall not be able to use the private property of an individual unless in a manner prescribed by law.
Only in a time of war, I guess.
Which has huge implications on eminent domain and things like that.
unidentified
Yeah, and I've seen some of the case law about that was even used to with respect to surveillance teams from civil police.
Right.
And so it's not just about the troops.
And I think when it comes to modern interpretations of it, we may need to have an expanded understanding to say that they can't force us to house illegal immigrants in our houses.
That could be a government use.
They're already using some of the community centers, the schools, other public facilities are being used to house illegal immigrants.
What if they started telling you you have to put them in your house?
They're already asking people to do it voluntarily.
And I think I saw a story about a couple in, I think it was Massachusetts or somewhere over in New England where they have agreed to do that, setting the example.
But, uh, that's, that's great for them if they want to house illegal immigrants, that's more power to them.
But I don't think that Americans should be forced to do that.
But what happens if we get to the point where there's so many of them here?
And there's nowhere else to put them.
There are no more schools to commandeer, no more community centers.
And all of a sudden, well, we can't have them out on the street.
The famous quote that I've said a million times the past month, Harriet Tubman, I freed many slaves, I would have freed many more if only they knew they were slaves.
What people don't understand about slavery, typically, is because they get their view of it from movies, where all slaves were being beaten in fields.
Which certainly happened, and it's horrifying.
But there were a lot of slaves who were like cobblers.
They worked in a shop in a city and they made shoes.
And they actually got paid money.
But they had no freedom, no rights.
They couldn't go where they wanted to go.
And the only reason they were able to hold and trade money was because it was easier for the slave owner than having to buy the clothes for them instead.
However, there were slaves who bought their freedom because they were able to earn enough money and then eventually paid.
And it was fascinating when I was reading about all this stuff, the idea that you could be a slave and buy your own freedom or buy the freedom of others.
It was like, yeah, but you know, you were sort of just exchanging value.
And most people don't understand what the actual slave economies were like in the South.
unidentified
So freedom is not the ability to maybe have a job and make money.
Freedom is the ability to have a say in writing the rules.
Freedom is having representation.
And when you have a country that's consolidated the power into 435, you've stripped the freedom out from a lot of people.
I'm not saying we're slaves, I'm saying that we're just in a really difficult moment in our time, and we just have to think critically about how to solve the problems.
There was this viral meme where it said something like the slaves of Egypt were only grant- had to give 20% of all of their labor to the pharaoh or whatever, and that was slavery.
And the idea of it back then was, It is not feasible for a monarch to control the economic pursuits of every single individual they own, who has no say.
And so it's easier just to say, you give me X percent of all the labor you produce, and then spend the rest as you see fit.
The big difference was the general idea is they have no say.
Gun rights are certainly getting better and better.
But the ability to write the rules and have a say in government, I don't believe exists so much anymore.
So large portions, around 40 to 50 percent of all of our wealth generated is taken from us for things we don't want, like war being the obvious one.
And if you want to change the rules, you can't.
You can't because the deep state will slide a picture of JFK across the table so you don't act up and your opinions don't matter to members of Congress.
unidentified
Yeah.
And if you, I mean, I agree that you do have generally free speech in this country and certainly a lot more free speech in this country than other countries, especially in some that I've lived in.
But on the same token, if you say something that is not accepted or the government or the establishment approves of and you make enough noise, they'll come after you.
And, uh, you don't have to be a politician for that.
You can be any activist.
If you ruffle enough feathers, rock the boat, and your unapproved, unacceptable opinion makes enough noise, you can find yourself under investigation.
I don't, I don't see a simple solution to anything.
Like decentralization, I get.
Um, but man, the ideological homogenization, uh, polarization, not homogenization, the ideological homo, uh, polarization that we're seeing in this country, How do you decentralize ideology?
I mean, if you call them a cult, no, you can't have a conversation.
It doesn't matter what you call them.
But if you stand there and you, you know, if you walk into their neighborhood and you say, hey, I'm here knocking doors for the guy that normally doesn't knock the doors, what do you consider to be the problem?
And then they surprise you with saying Congress.
Congress is the problem.
And then you start talking about the issues and you find out that you have a lot more in common than you otherwise would have known.
I wanted to say David, I'm like, it's not David, it's Daryl Davis!
So we invited Daryl Davis to speak at an event we were having.
He's famous for being this, uh, he's this old black blues musician who one day said to himself, I don't understand how someone could hate me if they never met me.
So he went to Klan rallies.
And, uh, they were all racist.
They didn't attack him or anything.
He talked to them.
And he said, and they had a lot of views, and they were backwards.
And, uh...
Eventually, by getting to know him, a lot of these guys were like, you know, everything they told me was not true.
None of these things describe you, Daryl.
You're a good dude.
And that deradicalized him.
One of my favorite stories was that he met this, like, prominent Klansman who was very racist.
And he heard that the guy was a big fan of this, you know, rock and roll legend.
I can't remember the exact name.
This guy owned his famous car, and he was talking to him one day, and he asked him, like, you know, what kind of music he was into, and the guy mentioned he's a huge fan of this rock and roll guy, and Daryl, being a well-known industry musician, said, yeah, I can get you in the museum, you want to sit in the car?
And the guy was like, what?
And he's like, you come with me, I will get you in that car, the legendary car of this rock and roll superstar, and he's like, You're kidding me.
And the guy cried.
It's like his dream came true.
And he was like, I can't believe everything they told me about this is just a lie.
Daryl, you've made my dreams come true.
I can't believe it.
He de-radicalized all his people.
So we invite him to speak.
We say, come to our event, headline, speak.
He got a standing ovation.
Everybody was so inspired by the guy.
And all the story was, was let's talk to each other.
He told these great stories about how he shut up the Klan meetings and people thought he was crazy.
They're gonna kill you.
And it's like, no, they're not.
They just said nasty things.
They were insulting, but they talked to him.
So outside of our event, so first what happens is Antifa threatened to burn down the theater where the event was taking place.
The event was called Ending Violence, Authoritarianism, and Racism.
And it was a very libertarian event.
We had progressives there.
And so they threatened to burn the theater down.
They didn't want it to happen.
That's a cult.
The theater owner two weeks out said, they're threatening to burn the theater down, I can't do this, go somewhere else.
So we lost our venue of 1,000 seats, and the best we could do was go to a casino that had 500 seats.
We ended up having to refund tickets, we lost a lot of money from it, but the event happened anyway.
The venue that was across the street from the theater, that was going to host the after party, for those who bought VIP tickets, refused to back down.
They were moderate, liberal types.
They started getting inundated with phone calls from people saying you're racists, you're fascists, and it was really awesome.
Because I was there, and we were like paying a deposit, and someone called, and the woman who owned it, she was like, look at this, San Francisco phone number.
And so she answers it, and she's like, hi, what can I do for you?
And the guy was like, I'm wondering why it is you're hosting a bunch of fascists and I'm upset and I think that, you know, if you do this, then I will never be a customer at your establishment.
And she's like, where do you live?
And he was like, California.
And she was like, you've never been to my establishment.
You never will be.
So why are you calling me?
And that was fascinating to see some guy on the other side of the country who had no idea what was going on, saw on the internet and decided he would join the cult.
Here's what ends up happening.
We have the event.
It's fantastic!
Everybody's hanging out.
We got this $1,000 bottle of scotch and everybody took a little bit.
And across the street were far leftists.
Antifa, Black Lives Matter.
And so Daryl Davis, he's like, I'm gonna go talk to him.
And we were like, Daryl, look, be careful, you know?
And he's like, nah, come on.
He's like, I know what I'm doing.
What do you think happened when he went across the street?
And every time he tried to speak, they would start chanting so he couldn't.
He came back in and it was like, what the f... Just happened.
He ended up writing this viral post on Facebook about how never in his life has he experienced anything like that.
That his whole mission has been de-radicalization, speaking with each other, community, communication.
That he's been able to go to the most vile of white supremacists and talk to them, even when they hate him and never agree with him.
Some of them agreed and deradical- and got deradicalized and handed their ropes to him.
Others told him he was wrong and they would never agree with him.
But they would debate and they would argue with each other.
But when he tried approaching antifun far leftists, they screamed at him and refused to even speak in any way.
That's what we're dealing with.
unidentified
So, if you want to be able to have a conversation with them, you have to break their large group, which you mentioned, people from all across the country join this group, and it makes it look like they have more power than they do.
Well, in this physical instance, the people across the street were just from, I think, New Brunswick, New Jersey, or whatever, or Brunswick, whatever the city is, and it was like 17 people.
I'm not saying that there's not a group dynamic there.
I'm saying it wasn't like people from all over the country descended on New Jersey.
No, it was quite literally just like a small handful of BLM people from just north of where the venue was.
unidentified
And then, but again, and looking at it from the other perspective, it's 17 people and now you're... And one guy, one black man walks up saying, how do you do?
He was shocked they couldn't talk to these people.
And he was like, he's a black man walking up by himself to a group of some black, some white, asking them what's going on, and they screamed at him instead.
unidentified
Don't talk to them.
Go talk to the other people that are in their homes raising their families who nobody ever talks to.
Right.
Bring them out on the street and outnumber the 17 people that are radicalized.
That's how you change the system.
Well, they're taking care of their kids.
They're not going to come out on the street like we're talking about.
They're busy getting involved in the political process.
So, it's fascinating to look at the modern state of politics.
And it's almost impossible to get through to how radicalized so many people are.
Of course, they will claim we're the radicalized one.
And I'm like, we have disparate political opinions.
We argue with each other all the time.
Y'all are the cult.
And I got no problem saying that.
Look, when we have someone come on the show and I'm like, we're talking and I go, you know, when Joe Biden said, you're not getting a billion dollars unless you fight the prosecutor.
I mean, a lot of people see that as a quid pro quo.
He goes, that never happened.
And I was like, what?
And I pulled up the video and I played it for him.
He had never seen the video.
So it's good those conversations happened, but it certainly didn't de-radicalize him.
This guy's got a monetary incentive to keep going down the path he's going.
There are people who make videos every day intentionally misrepresenting the arguments we make on our shows for the purpose of generating money while claiming it's that what we're doing.
And then the problem is, every time our faction engages in conversation, we try to respect the position of our opponent while they lie about our position for political and financial gain, while claiming we're the ones doing it.
So if we're playing this game where we are opening up to conversation and desperately trying to convince people, and they use that against us to hurt us, I'm not advocating for anything else.
I'm just saying, you'll lose.
I don't have an answer for you.
I'm just saying that's why, with the hyper-polarization, that's why I'm kind of like, I don't see a path forward.
Adam Schiff lied on TV about having evidence that Donald Trump colluded with Russia.
Just outright lied.
Adam Schiff published the private phone records of an American journalist for political gain.
And he wins landslide victories in his district.
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter what he does.
Joe Biden, his DOJ just arrested a whistleblower accusing the Biden family of corruption and wrongdoing.
And CNN runs, the claims are now discredited.
With no conviction, with no trial, the Biden DOJ said, what did he accuse us of?
Bribery and corruption?
Arrest him.
CNN goes, well, that proves it.
He was lying the whole time.
Or Biden is arresting those who are trying to blow the whistle and bring up evidence against him.
unidentified
Yeah, and what we were talking about before with purity, I think that this is where some of the purity comes in, because within that left-wing cult, as you call it, and I guess I agree, you know, there is a purity test.
If you disagree with them on any one point at all, you're out.
Like, you have to toe the line on every single issue from abortion to zebras.
Anybody outside the group who tries to talk, they will start doing this thing called mic check over and over again so that no one can say a word.
And this is a group of like, I don't know, nine people.
There's one organizer commanding the group, and by doing something as simple as mic check, the premise of which is, I'm just trying to amplify my voice.
In reality, it shuts down anybody who even asks a question.
30 seconds later, she walks back, goes, delete that.
Delete that footage.
And I was like, no.
And she's like, but you don't have permission to record me.
And I was like, you walked up to me talking while I was filming.
She's like, but you needed to delete that.
And I was like, I'm not going to.
She realized, uh-oh, if people find out I gave opinions, I'm gonna be in trouble.
So, among these people, it's very much, I'd better say nothing.
Because you'll get cancelled, you'll get fired from your job.
You'll get coerced.
It's better to fall in line and say, yes sir, thank you sir, whatever.
On the right, Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson are fighting right now.
And Ben's like, Tucker, you've misrepresented me.
And Tucker's like, well, you want war.
And Ben's like, I am not an advocate for war.
This is the right?
They don't even agree with each other.
But anyway, I think that that about gets to the point.
We've gone a little bit over.
So maybe we'll just wind down if you guys want to give any final thoughts.
Otherwise, I'll just keep ranting.
unidentified
Yeah, I don't, I, you know, we got that campaign in California.
I don't know that we're going to be able to divide the state into one or two parts or keep it together or what's going to happen.
I just think something needs to happen.
I think that the, as we've been talking about, we have a country and a society that has a two diverging sets of values that are no longer compatible.
That's why we call for this national divorce and we say it's due to irreconcilable differences.
And I don't think that we can reconcile them as you're saying, for example, by coming to the table.
I think we've gone beyond that.
I think that it would be better to allow for the lines to be redrawn and maybe we can even stay together as a single country, but just redraw the lines.
If we had states that were with new borders and that those states, we could return to a form of federalism.
I think like you're talking about decentralization.
And that we can get out of each other's hairs, where the Republicans aren't imposing Republican values on Democrats and vice versa, we might be able to restore some peace and tranquility in this country without actually having any states secede from the Union, if we just redraw those lines.
And one thing I'd like to point out is, for example, I guess I'll become unpopular in the Northeast, why do we have to have seven or eight small tiny little states up there?
When California is a huge state geographically speaking, they have a combination of about 14 senators up there for this small piece of territory.
I know that the Senate was specifically designed to represent states, but really does Delaware need to exist as its own state anymore?
Uh, Rhode Island, for example, do they need to exist as states?
Why can't we combine and condense them into an area called New England or something?
I mean, Delaware isn't in New England, but the idea is why not redraw the lines in such a way where it makes sense economically, where we can keep, uh, Economic areas together and connected so we're not Dividing them and one thing I would point to is when I was living down in Uruguay.
I found that between Uruguay and Brazil there are a couple of cities that are straddling the border and The the border between the two countries literally goes through the city and the residents of the city on both sides of that border are free to pass it and live their lives as if there's no border there.
It's really interesting.
And you're, you're in one country and you cross street in the next country.
So a lot of people say, for example, national divorce, how are you going to divide the country when you're going to draw the line between red and blue and you're going to be breaking up communities?
And I don't think that needs to be the case because what they have in Uruguay and Brazil as an example, I think there's elsewhere as well, are these places called peace cities.
And what happens is if you're in the Brazilian side of the city and you cross into the Uruguayan side, you're good to go.
But if you want to pass in further into Uruguay, then you're going to pass this border checkpoint.
But the people in that city are living their lives without any kind of borders, no checkpoints, no walls, no barbed wire or anything like that.
So I think there's a way to do it where If we were to pursue a national divorce in such a way where we're drawing lines between ideological areas to not disconnect economic zones.
I know Marcus Rees-Evans, who helped me create this campaign, a lot of effort was put into Demonstrating that there are economic zones in California that are interconnected, and so why would we want to break them up?
We wouldn't want to break them up.
We can keep them together if we draw the lines, make sense economically, make sense culturally, make sense ideologically, but not breaking up the communities.
So obviously I'm a unionist.
I believe that we should hold together but I'm a unionist and a small group guy.
I think that we should decentralize the power.
And if you're out there and you feel frustrated and you feel scared and you feel like you're part of the powerless and you feel unrepresented, the answer to that is to become active, right?
Families don't have the ability to do that, but you can sacrifice a little bit.
Your kid doesn't have to play baseball every single season, okay?
Take a season off and invest in your primary congressional races.
There are good people running all across the country that you don't ever hear about because they don't have the money to reach you.
Go to them.
In my district, where the primary was run, there was only 16,000 people that decided who actually ran for Congress.
That's a small fraction of people making the decisions for the rest of us.
If you want to be represented, if you want to have some power, you have to get out in your community, you have to go find the people running for office, and then you need to support them.
Support them with your volunteership, support them with your donations, so they can have a voice and speak for you in your Congress.
And then when they get there, tell them to uncap the house.
