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Feb. 23, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
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PREPARE OR REPAIR Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep776
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This week, the community of Burnsville, Minnesota is mourning the loss of two police officers and a firefighter involved in a tactical response to a domestic violence incident.
Three men lost their lives defending in the way that we expect our law enforcement and our EMS community But this may not be the most common response.
In fact, these heroes who sacrificed their life for the community are becoming less frequently available, not just because people are not willing to do it, but because there are less of them out there.
Today, we're going to be talking to a friend of mine named Peter Johnson.
He's the founder of Archway Defense, and we're going to be talking about the problems that modern law enforcement faces.
Is this country getting more Western?
Stick around. This is the Dinesh D'Souza show and I'm Kyle Serafin guest hosting for Dinesh.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
As I just said, two police officers and a paramedic are dead this week and the community mourns their loss.
Men that basically rose to the highest calling, I think, that you can have both as a servant of the public, as a Christian, as an American to lay down your life for your community and for a complete stranger because of an oath that you took and a responsibility that you took on, that duty to act.
We're going to be talking to Peter Johnson in just a few minutes about sort of where that's going and why that is not the best way to rely on.
But I want to do a little tribute just to these men, these fallen heroes.
There's a gentleman who's two police officers.
One of them's name is Matthew Roosh, 27 years old.
Paul Elmstrand, 27 years old.
And Adam Finseth, who was 40.
He was the paramedic. I want you to think at where you are in your life and how you can relate to the idea that you would lay it down at 27 or at 40 years old.
With all the things that come along with it, generous parents and kind people that are living out there right next door to you.
They wake up, they put on their pants one leg at a time, just like everybody else.
And that may be the day that they answer that highest call, a 911 call of a subject who is engaged actively in a sexual assault of a child.
And that's your last moments on earth, engaging somebody who has decided to do real evil, really evil things to someone related to them, and then take the life of complete strangers who are just responding the way that you'd hope.
We're going to get into this story about understanding it.
But the first thing that you have to accept, and I think Peter will agree with me, and his website even says the same.
Evil is real. It is out there in the world.
And you may confront it.
And as this country moves into a crazy, crazy time, this year 2024, we saw riots and unrest that happened because either side thought they may not get what they wanted in the last couple years.
Politically, that takes a real toll and it makes you take on a personal responsibility that you may have to respond and protect yourself.
I follow guys on social media and I've been watching them for a long time.
Guys like Mike Glover, former Green Berets, people who have experienced real violence in other countries and other societies.
And they're all saying the same thing.
You must become your own first responder.
And so some of the things that I've done in my own personal life, both as an FBI agent and as a paramedic and as a military veteran, I've always tried to cultivate that.
I'm going to try to give you a little taste of that today, talking to my friend Peter.
But I also want you to walk away thinking, if nobody else shows up, what level am I at to be able to respond and defend my own life and defend those of those I love?
My children, people I may be responsible for, elderly parents and so on.
And if it's not high enough, then use this podcast as a reason to take action to Use it as that first stepping stone, even if it's just reading the books that we talk about or engaging in some of the studies because this is a real personal responsibility and there's nothing more American than taking on responsibility for your own actions and your own sort of consequences as you go and live your life.
Stick around for this interview with Peter Johnson, founder of Archway Defense.
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All right, ladies and gentlemen, we're going to have an interesting conversation with a friend of mine, someone that you're going to enjoy hearing from.
His name is Peter Johnson, and he is the owner, he is the founder of Archway Defense.
He's also got a pretty interesting background that's going to be worth hearing.
We're going to be talking about a crisis in law enforcement at the end of this, but for starters, I want to just kind of lay into it early.
Peter, welcome, and let's tell people a little bit about who you are and then how you got to be where you're at.
Yeah, so... First, thank you for having me.
Founder of Archway Defense, a training company that travels coast-to-coast, border-to-border, training state, local, and federal law enforcement in active shooter, active threat, active terrorism response.
Started that, as you know, in 2014 when I was still a Fed.
So before Archway Defense, I was an air marshal out of New York field office.
Did that for five years.
Woke up one day and realized I didn't want to be traveling to 50-plus countries a year.
Before that, actually, I worked at Burnsville PD part-time, 38 hours part-time, while I was finishing up my undergrad in criminal justice and law enforcement.
And then before that, served in the military right after 9-11 for six years.
And there's a little thing that's on your website, which I think is really important.
It says, evil is real.
Then it says, let's get training.
Let's talk about kind of the evil is real and what you see, why you have this sort of training company for folks.
Yeah, so the concept is...
When you understand the why of what we're doing within any training, whether it's firearms or defense training or anything that you're trying to learn, if you don't understand the why of why you're trying to learn it, it will slow down the learning process.
If you understand that evil is real, and I know that you understand that with your background, that evil is real and there are actors in the world that We'll not live in peace with others.
So part of it is to drive home that why, which is our favorite question in training, is why are we doing this?
Well, evil is real. If you go into a school to murder innocent kids, you are the embodiment of evil on this planet.
So because that evil is real, we need to train because it is.
You guys train civilians as well as law enforcement.
Let's talk about the kind of people that come out to a training course.
I think a lot of people are scared.
They have that instinct to maybe do something defensive.
They have that instinct, maybe I should be involved.
But there's a barrier to entry.
And you and I had a private conversation about that.
I wonder if you'd share that with the audience here a little bit.
That barrier, that bro culture that kind of keeps people from doing it.
Yeah, so the hard thing, especially with our backgrounds, we were fortunate enough to go through a significant amount of Significant amounts of training, whether it was military law enforcement or in the federal side.
So we were brought through this in a very systematic manner, and it was our job to be what we call professionally violent.
Anyone can be violent. Professional violence is very precise and tailored, and it stops immediately when that suspect action changes.
So for someone who never went through any of that, To take those first steps, it is actually a pretty scary thing when you go on, especially with social media.
You go on and you see these guys wearing night vision helmets and they have big beards like me and they're talking about, well, if you don't do this, you're a clown.
Or if you don't do this, you're not serious about it.
You have to have a...
Night vision, thermal imager, and a jacked up truck.
No, you don't. The key is taking charge of your own personal self-defense is really what it's all about.
At the end of the day, no one is coming for you.
And that sounds harsh, but what I mean by that is there's, what, 330 million, 340 million people in the country, roughly 800,000 cops.
It's math. It simply takes so long for an officer to get to you.
And they will show up.
Like Burnsville, the officers showed up to protect innocent life.
But there's a gap from the time that 911 happens to the time that law enforcement and professionals show up.
What we encourage people to do is, you don't need to be that Delta Force, Navy SEAL, space shuttle door gunner.
You simply need to have the skill set to fill that gap between 9-1-1 when law enforcement arrives on scene.
And that's not just shooting, by the way.
Everybody looks at the shooting.
That also just starts with situational awareness, situational avoidance, but then goes into medical on top of it, which nobody wants to talk about.
And we had a chat not too long ago about the importance of medical, whether it's medical training or the pharmaceuticals that you can use.
Heaven forbid something happens.
All the way to that very last line, which is firearms or self-defense with a weapon.
And that's generally where everybody focuses, unfortunately.
So there is a huge barrier to entry, and I would say the barrier to entry is more of a psychological barrier to entry.
It is scary starting from zero and trying to figure out what to do.
For sure. Maybe some of that barrier has been released, or at least people have been motivated to overcome it in the last couple of years.
You started in 2014.
In 2020, with the COVID shutdowns and the uncertainty that that produced in a lot of the American psyche, we saw a lot of first-time gun buyers, a lot of people that were going out there.
Did you see a change in the dynamic of people showing up for your civilian courses?
I think it was Gladwell who talked about a tipping point.
I think the COVID compounded with the riots that hit across the country was a huge tipping point for a lot of people who wouldn't identify as left-right, the political spectrum, and they weren't engaged in that from Second Amendment rights or any of that type of...
That wasn't on their mind.
They were going to work. They were building their homes with their families and trying to build up their 401k and all that other fun stuff.
But at the end of the day, none of that matters if your family isn't safe or you don't feel safe in your own home.
So the people going out and doing the purchasing, a lot of the firearm purchasing post-COVID or during COVID and during the riots were It wasn't what people would say the right side of it because most of the right had already been doing that.
It was the middle people and even people slightly leaning left who realized that it's a scary thing.
We did a video in Minneapolis after the riots interviewing people in Minneapolis who called 911 because people were shooting guns off and they said, we have nothing.
We can't send anyone to you.
you're on your own.
That wakes people up pretty quickly when they realize that they are their own best self-defense.
The sort of idea that you are your first responder, the concept that American self-reliance going all the way back to the beginning, like the idea of calling 911 is relatively new for human history.
Would you agree with that? Yeah.
Well, the whole concept of professional policing is relatively new for human history.
Sir Robert Peel, he's credited with the founding of professional policing model.
That's relatively new in the span of human history.
So for the longest time, you were Humans were always responsible for protecting themselves.
It wasn't until relatively recently that we almost took that responsibility and pushed it on a group of people that well-meaning, committed individuals, but no matter what, there's only so many of them that can physically be working at any given time across a massive country if we just localize on the US for a second.
It's The math doesn't work out.
You have to be responsible for your own personal protection.
And if people want to take that first step, What do we think the culture is probably part of it, the idea that you might have to do physical violence?
What is the gateway?
What are the baby steps? I remember that movie, What About Bob?
You remember that? The baby steps? Yes, baby steps to the elevator, baby steps to the elevator.
That's right. So how do we tell people baby steps?
Let's say you don't want to be a violent person.
There's many women that have no business carrying a firearm because they know that they're physically not capable of it.
But that doesn't mean they can't be self-reliant in some ways.
So let's talk about mindset a little bit.
And the reason I'm prepping a lot of this for anybody who's going like, well, what are you guys talking about?
Look, 2024 has the potential of being every bit as wild as what happened in 2020.
I think that's pretty clear. And I think we're going to talk about a specific instance at the end of this and maybe the crisis that exists on the law enforcement end.
But there are some baby steps that people have to have mindset where they have to get themselves prepared to take some of that personal responsibility back, which I think is American.
All right, I'll just turn it over.
No, you're absolutely right.
And the fact is, the first step, and we get asked this question often, is where do I start?
And that's where evil is real.
Because if you don't understand or if you're not willing to intellectually accept the truth, that's capital T truth, not my truth.
Evil is real. If you can't bridge that gap, well, there's no discussion after that point.
But for the people who do see what's happening around them and around the world and the violence that is happening...
For those people, it's, okay, evil is real.
Now what? Well, now we look at, in a materialistic society, which unfortunately we are, we always talk about the object.
People are talking about gun violence, and then the very term, gun violence, is to put the blame on an object.
Well, the person is the one that presses the trigger, plunges the knife, or detonates the bomb, or uses her hands, or runs someone over the With a vehicle, it's not the vehicle.
So we focus on evil is real.
The very next thing is focusing on what does it look like?
What are the precursors to violence before it happens?
And that's what we call in our industry, left of bang.
So what happened before violence started?
And if we can teach you what those precursors to violence look like, what those pre-assault indicators look like for this very small pinprick of a statistical minority that choose to prey upon their neighbor, If you understand what those precursors to violence look like, as you and I obviously talk about often, then it's really easy for situational avoidance because the hairs start going on the back of your head.
You're like, no, we're going to get out of here before it gets worse.
The ability to use a firearm only comes at the very end where you have no other choice and you're in reasonable fear of great bodily harm of death for yourself or someone else.
Let's dig into that a little bit, too, because law enforcement tends to show up after something bad either has already happened to investigate or they're showing up to try to end something that is ongoing, but they're coming in step three or four.
They may be the first responder, but they are not the first party to the problem.
Would that be accurate? 100%.
We were just down in Texas working on active shooter response.
What people would call CQB or just simply how to move through a building faster for law enforcement responding to an active shooter.
The very nature of that response is it already started.
Violence was already directed at innocent people before they even showed up.
So the gap in there is the law enforcement will get there, but the average 911 response time in the country is three to four minutes depending on where you live.
If you live in Cities like, I don't know, Minneapolis that has less than half of their law enforcement staff, they're at half staffing right now.
Their minimums, they're not even hitting them.
And that's not because there's bad cops there.
It's simply because people don't want to do the work.
They don't want to, it's not worth it to them to keep doing the job in Minneapolis.
So let's say, and with our corporate clients, I talk about this with workplace violence.
If everybody at home is listening and Pull out your cell phone for a second.
Actually, Kyle, do you mind doing it?
Pull out your cell phone. Just go to your stopwatch app on here.
Go to your stopwatch, and then when you're there, everybody else follow with me in 3, 2, 1, press start.
Okay, we got it right. So there was just an act of violence wherever you are.
Let's say it was at your gym or your office or wherever.
How long is it going to take for law enforcement to get to you?
It's going to feel like eternity.
Yeah, how much time has passed since we started talking about it since the button was pressed?
20 seconds. They're not even close.
911 just got notified.
So... This is what we're talking about.
The self-realization of what needs to change.
That's assuming that somebody actually has the wherewithal to call 911 at that exact moment.
That's why I wanted to talk a little bit about what you called left to bang, which is to say on a timeline, left to right, left being earlier, right being later.
We're talking about before things get violent, that pre-assault, that pre-violence indicator.
Can you talk about why being a federal air marshal gave you a unique sort of view into that?
I think a lot of people don't understand the federal air marshal service to begin with.
And you get some really, really specialized training that basically doesn't exist for other law enforcement because you're actually supposed to be there when something starts.
And that gives you kind of a unique position.
That's why I brought you on to talk about it.
I appreciate that.
Yeah, as the air marshals, a lot of people say, do you just randomly sit on a flight?
Well, no. There's a threat matrix and they deploy assets around the globe for different reasons.
But some of that is... When you have a known terrorist or an affiliate and you're tracking that individual.
So you're actually getting on a flight with a known terrorist or affiliate as they move through the intermodal transportation network globally.
But a lot of that comes down to what are those precursors to violence before they hijack the plane or detonate a bomb?
Because when you think about within the aviation field specifically, how fast does electricity move roughly?
Yeah. Roughly the speed of light and somebody online, you can comment.
Yeah, you're not going to be able to make a decision fast.
By the way, we're still shy of two minutes on that stopwatch just for fun.
Can you hold that up for everybody quick?
In the best jurisdiction around, the best jurisdiction, if they happen to be right there, maybe they're getting up to the door.
Maybe. In the best case scenario on the planet, maybe the officers are just getting to the front of the door.
And that's if they happen to be right next to it when it started and it Somebody called 911 at the right time, but going back to aviation.
So with explosives, specifically aircraft bombings, you don't have the time to wait till the bombing happened in the reactive sense.
So you need to see what are the precursors to violence from a suicide bomber?
What does that look like from a behavioral model?
What does the physical body do?
And we know that information on when somebody has an energetic device on them or they're building it on the aircraft.
So that is a very unique skill set from a behavioral detection model.
And that's pretty unique to the air marshal program because we are trying to get left of a bang.
And the first bang that would happen would be us stopping it before they had the opportunity.
And I guess the important thing is that you can teach those without having any firearms proficiency, without being an EMT. You don't need any special.
You just need eyeballs and an awareness.
And you can do it in your church and you can do it at your workplace.
You can do it in your school. I know you talked about your corporate client types.
Yeah, and we actually partnered with a company to take that training.
So we brought in friends from Secret Service who have a similar, as you know, similar situational awareness where they're, yeah, we're three minutes, not even three and a half minutes.
Secret Service is scanning crowds to find that left to bang.
Who's in the crowd that would be a threat to the protectee, whoever they're looking after?
Well, we partnered with an organization to take Eight hours of situational awareness behavioral detection training and put it into 20 minutes in virtual reality where you can go through it on your own and go through this.
And this is a product that's just launching now, so we're pretty excited to take a ton of knowledge and get it out at scale to anybody who needs it.
And the key is that we basically make people accessible to something that maybe they don't have eight hours a day.
I know you do a lot of volunteer work or you offer things at a very discounted rate to churches.
So I'm appreciative of that. We're going to take a quick little break.
We're going to come back. We're going to talk about sort of the crisis in faith and law enforcement and why being your own first responder is the way to go.
And then we have kind of a specific example of that.
So stick around, folks. We'll be right back.
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He also has fantastic hair.
If you're listening on the audio, you're missing a big beard and long hair, kind of tactical Jesus looking.
The man was a veteran of the United States Air Force.
He worked in local law enforcement and then also a federal agent with the Air Marshal Service.
A great guy to be talking about something.
While we were at the break, we were talking about how people have different kind of sexy words for conflict in America and how it might come out.
And the words that we are used to hearing in our line of work are things like spicy or violent.
But I rode an airplane, of all things.
We're talking about aircraft.
I rode an airplane with a young gal and she said, in this country in 2024, things could get Western.
How does that strike you as an analogy?
I actually like that.
You and I have heard spicy all of our lives.
And for the people at home listening, when somebody says this could get spicy, it means that Something bad could be happening, whether it's on a call or you're deploying, you're going down the road, this could get spicy.
Well, Western, I'm going to steal this.
I don't know what the woman's name is, but whoever you are, thank you.
I'm going to start using Western.
I like that better.
There's a big sense of self-reliance that has to happen.
You think about any Western movie, and of course, even the theme of this podcast, when you listen to the audio, it has a very Western kind of theme.
And there's a reason why we think of self-reliance and people going out to the American frontier.
That's kind of the encouragement that I have, and there's a lot of reasons for it.
You just talked about the slow response of 911.
That's obviously a big issue.
We're talking about pre-assault indicators or pre-violent indicators.
Let's talk about a book that's out there called The Gift of Fear.
There's a guy named Gavin DeBacker who wrote that, and he's a famous trainer of security personnel.
Give how that kind of plays into the threat matrix that we've talked about earlier, if you would.
Yeah, so the problem is we've been so numb, and I say we as in modern civilization, because especially in the U.S., our country is phenomenal.
We have access to Great food, to medical care, to all these other things.
We don't actually have to worry about that much in the average day-to-day life.
So we've kind of dumbed down our fear response and we say, oh, no, that's nothing.
It's nothing. I'm not going to pay attention to that.
And so we've tried to push away that natural, what people call a gut reaction, like something wasn't right in my gut.
We dismiss it.
Opposed to, and specifically, go read this book, because it talks about how beneficial that is, not just for civilization, but you as an individual.
So leaning into that, that you don't live in a paranoia, because paranoia is not a healthy way of self-defense or self-preservation.
The Bond concept of ninjas falling through the ceiling at any moment, it's not happening at your home.
But the chance of A home invasion robbery?
Okay, there is a statistical possibility of that, so let's mitigate that one.
Now, for the female listeners out there, I want you to consider one of the examples that's really good out of that book, Gift of Fear, and I know Peter will back me up on this.
Human beings in modern America, you just described a beautiful place that has a lot of capabilities and options for us, and that we're almost settled into this false complacency situation.
Human beings in modern America are the only ones that will actually actively take steps and get into a closed box.
Imagine an elevator at an apartment building or a business with someone that you look over and you see as a threat, that you get that gut instinct, that fear.
If you look at Peter, and Peter, you're a tall guy.
How tall are you? 6'4".
He's 6'4", he's muscular build, he's got a big dark beard, long hair, and if you looked over and you thought, that guy is not smiling at me, he looks like he's going to do violence, you might still get in an elevator with him because of all the social conditioning we have.
And that's some of the stuff that we're talking about breaking, that sort of, that understanding that in a Western world, You don't do that.
And we're kind of moving a little bit towards that where we need to be more aware of our own sort of surroundings because we have a crisis that's going on in law enforcement.
So let's talk about, you mentioned the statistical probability of violent acts.
Your average person doesn't have that many.
How many sort of traumatic events do human beings experience in their life?
So, the numbers that come out, and there's some research with conflicting numbers, but we'll say a handful at best.
And by a traumatic experience, we're talking about, I believe it's called the DSM-5, which is the book on all mental health and what that looks like.
So, what is a traumatic experience?
And most people go through, everybody's different, but go through a handful of them in their lifetime.
And that could be the unexpected loss of a loved one.
So, somebody died unexpectedly in a car crash.
That was very close to you.
That would be a traumatic experience, naturally.
Well, in law enforcement, instead of a handful, in a law enforcement career, they're going through, researchers came out, they're going to 200 to 300, having 200 to 300 traumatic experiences throughout their career.
That is a massive burden, psychologically, on anyone.
And how you deal with that is, that's a totally different show.
But There is a pretty big disparity between the average American and then what they experience in trauma and what a law enforcement officer deals with throughout the course of their career.
So we can flesh that out for folks.
Imagine that you were standing in the line and waiting to get some money from the teller, or you're gonna make a deposit and the bank is robbed.
The idea that you might face that as a law enforcement officer could happen more than once a year.
That might be a once in a lifetime thing for you.
You attend a, you see a car accident that happens in front of you, or one of your loved ones, as you mentioned, like that's a daily occurrence for most law enforcement officers.
So we're talking about just a, the worst of the worst things that happen to average human beings are kind of in the order And a lot of law enforcement have been kind of shying away from talking about this until recently.
It's actually really important.
So when we look at these recruiting problems, and I think we were seeing that you just mentioned Minneapolis earlier, let's talk about the recruiting problems because it's not just the fact that they see awful things.
There's a lot more to it that's going on at the moment.
Correct. So the awful things have been there for law enforcement, as you know, for the entire history of law enforcement.
The very nature is you're responding to The worst human interactions on average then are by the nature of your job.
You're responding to horrific scenes, whether that's an accident or the attack on a child or suicide or any other horrific event.
Now, that piece has always been there and people still step up, they go through training, then they apply and they try to get a job in law enforcement, whether that be state, local, federal, etc.
The difference is they were willing to deal with that for a long time, and there's many that still are, but when you have that piece, plus the lack of local support, because the police are the people and the people are the police, right?
The police come from the community.
Well, if you don't have the local support, now you're dealing with that trauma.
Now you're dealing with those horrific scenes, knowing that your local populace doesn't actually support you.
Then you put the legal aspect on it, where Even in the number of times I've had law enforcement officers, I've been training cops, coast to coast, border to border, me and my team, for coming on 10 years now.
And the number of times they call and say, every second of this call, in the back of my head, I was like, if I'm wrong, I'm going to prison.
So think about your own job for a second.
How many times do you make a decision at your work where you're truly legitimately concerned if you make the wrong decision, you're going to go to prison, you'll lose your house, you'll lose your family, and you're going to be locked up for making that decision?
Those burdens combined, I think, in certain jurisdictions is a byproduct of why we're seeing cops simply leave the job or move to a different jurisdiction, whether it be a different state or get out of prison.
Get out of an agency or an area that simply doesn't support them Now, they call that the Ferguson effect.
I know that there was some of that after Freddie Gray.
There was obviously some of the stuff that happened after the Derek Chauvin trial.
There has to be... I didn't plan on talking about it specifically, but since you live in the area, and I think you have a pretty good view on what goes on, let's talk about something like the most recent sort of exposure of what happened to Derek Chauvin in prison, but what also happened on that call as a basic law enforcement officer.
You look at it, you're a professional, you train these people.
You're watching that body cam, which recently came out.
I think it was called The Fall of Minneapolis.
And... What do we think when we see that?
I'm curious. We haven't talked about it privately even.
No. Without rehashing all of what happened with Floyd, the danger in law enforcement, let's take Chauvin out of it for a second.
Let's take the other officers that physically didn't touch Floyd, but they were there because a group was surrounding and they were standing there.
One of those individuals, I forgot the officer's name, he's in prison.
To my knowledge right now, he was convicted.
Not only Do you have to have the wherewithal to say, every decision I make, if I'm wrong, there's a chance I'm going to prison.
Not only that, now every officer is showing up.
This just happened in the Twin Cities.
There was a shooting, and I personally know, I'll keep the details out, and we're not talking about Burnsville, a different one.
There was a shooting that happened, and an officer was involved in what we call an OIS, officer-involved shooting, and the responding officers, this is what's frightening, the responding officers were What does that do to their psyche?
And what should that do for the individual people that are listening to this that are not police officers as you're hearing this?
What is the steps that they take?
And then also, can you talk about maybe some of the legal burdens that fall on civilian versus law enforcement?
Because again, there's a litigious burden that falls on you as a cop.
Maybe not the same if you're a civilian.
Yeah, so in every jurisdiction, this is very critical for anyone looking in self-defense who hasn't gone down this road yet.
You have to know, not heard of, you have to know what your local laws are as it relates to the use of deadly force to protect yourself or what self-defense laws.
Most of those are around the general concept of you must be in reasonable fear of great bodily harm or death of yourself or another.
So then you can distill that all down.
But the key is go get training.
Even if you're in a state that has a permitless carry or constitutional carry and you choose to carry, still go get training.
Obviously on the weapons side, but more importantly, on the legal side.
Um, and then there's great organizations out there like the U.S.
CCA, uh, which or legal shield or U.S.
Law Shield, which will give self-defense insurance because there's two huge fights on the citizen side of self-defense.
There's the surviving the fight and then they're surviving the legal aspect of it.
And you have to, before you ever get there, you should be prepared for both of those.
And all of that goes into the, the calculus, as we consider three and a half minutes, four minutes, maybe, maybe 30 minutes if you're in a rural area.
It turns out that rural people are probably a little bit more convenient or they're a little bit more rather comfortable with the idea that they're going to have to defend their own ground because that's the nature of being rural.
More Western. Yeah, a lot more Western the further out you get.
So that crisis of betrayal, which is what these cops you were talking about sitting in the car and doing that calculus, can I step forward?
Is leading to this recruiting issue and also even just a reaction time issue that we would otherwise expect.
It should lead people towards that instinct that, look, we've outsourced violence to the state, but you're still responsible for it.
Can you talk about the public versus the private duty that law enforcement has to people?
Yeah, so this one always shocks people.
And you can check me on it, but go look at the Supreme Court.
There's a couple Supreme Court cases that talk about the police have no duty to protect you.
No, hear me out. They have no duty to protect you.
Their job is to protect society.
The public. Correct, the public.
And that makes sense.
The courts would have to rule that because there's not physically enough cops to protect everybody and be everybody's bodyguard 24-7.
So if the courts are telling you that the job of the police is not to protect you as an individual, whose job is it?
Well, of course, it's yours.
You're responsible for your own personal protection.
And as we've seen with the riots, when 911, when cops are overwhelmed, there's no one to help you and no one's coming.
So on that end, but then, so we talked about the self-defense for an individual on law enforcement.
Those laws are changing constantly in certain jurisdictions like Minnesota.
There's a legal battle between a new law that was passed on use of deadly force by law enforcement where it was so convoluted that they had to sue.
I believe the Chiefs Association or some entity in Minnesota had to sue the state because at some point the state said that you had to value the life of the suspect, the victim, and the cop all equally.
That's not possible because there has to be a prioritization of life.
The victim is first.
The suspect is below the victim if deadly force is being used or needs to be used.
Because if you can't put the victim above the suspect, then you could never use deadly force to stop the suspect.
This is the insanity of some of the people that are And both sides of the aisle that are putting laws out there that handcuff law enforcement from doing the work.
It moves us more and more towards that Western attitude, which is that I guess like the state is going to handcuff itself from doing what it should do or what we think it should do or what we have that expectation of.
And so then it's like, well, it's every man for themselves.
And if you value your own personal safety more than somebody who's willing to try to hurt you or take it, then you're going to have to step up.
This also plays directly into what happened with that decision in Parkland, which I think outraged some folks.
They were shocked to find out that that law enforcement officer, that police officer who was a school resource officer, SRO, He didn't respond and he wasn't required to respond.
And so many people were shocked by that.
But I expected that decision, of course.
Correct. It would make sense because the legal precedent for it would say that anytime a cop was physically around and didn't save one individual's life, that that cop is now liable or the city or the government's liable for the death.
Again, it's math.
It's 800,000 law enforcement, 330, 340 million people in the country.
There's no way that they can protect everybody all the time, everywhere.
It's just, it's not even rational to assume it.
It's actually irrational to assume that the police will be there when you need them.
No, I think that makes perfect sense.
Let's give people a couple of criteria as we kind of wrap up.
When they evaluate training, obviously you're not everywhere.
Not everybody's going to be able to come to the Citizen Academies you do, and you're a busy guy.
There are quality trainings, and then there are sounds really good and have maybe sexy backgrounds, but bad trainings.
How should people evaluate what they want to put their money into as they prioritize?
Because it's a big investment, but it's also an emotional investment.
Yeah, an emotional and a legal investment, because the danger is if somebody's giving you Advice or training you to do something and building neuropathways and myelinizing them, which is reinforcing that neuropathway, and you respond accordingly under critical stress when you're in reasonable fear and it's wrong or it's not legally sound, it falls on you.
You're the one who made the decision.
So a couple things would be vet the instructors in the sense of, One, just talk to them.
Hey, what do you teach? How do you teach?
Why do you teach it? Talk to me about what your understanding of the legal structure in my jurisdiction is.
So if we're going to have legal in this, they should have a competency to, off the cuff, explain what the laws are, and you should be able to look those up and compare what they said to what the written word of the law is.
And if they're not willing, if they're not capable of articulating that at a moment's notice, Probably stay away from them.
Backgrounds are great, but teaching is more than just your background.
You and I have both worked with phenomenal individual performers who couldn't teach to save their life.
So don't just rely on the background.
The background helps, but it's us.
I don't teach, and none of our guys teach door breaching to SWAT teams because that's not our background, so we don't teach it.
If you want a door breacher, go find somebody who has a background in it and who can teach.
Make sense? Yeah, two things.
Both being able to do and then also being able to impart it on somebody else.
And a lot of that comes down to a personal comfort level, I think, too.
If people do want to find that corporate and especially that VR thing, which that's the first time I've heard about what your VR technology is going to be, where can people find things that either yours or stuff like it, where can they follow you if they're so interested?
Yeah, so website, archwaydefense.com, archwaydefense.com.
And then now that Elon bought Twitter and converted it to X, we're back on X because we were banned on Twitter because one of our contract instructors was involved in an officer-involved shooting.
We kept that post up, but we were banned when we challenged the narrative of the Associated Press and some of the people saying that the suspect was unarmed.
So on X and then archwaydefense.com.
Fantastic. I appreciate it.
Thanks for taking time out there.
And I hope that's valuable for folks.
But more importantly, I hope folks take that motivation and do the training.
And Peter, you're a good man.
Also, I love that you have Peter and Johnson, two names.
You are in the running for guys that are my military buddies with the most difficult names to go through basic training with.
The worst is my friend, Chafin Cox.
So he takes it number one, but you're number two, bud.
I appreciate it. As always, thank you for having me.
Yeah, bud. Folks, I hope you enjoyed that conversation.
I know I always enjoy talking to Peter.
He's such a good guy. I want to give you kind of a different taste of things, a little piece of some news that has come out this week.
And it's only peripherally related in so much as sometimes our system, even for all of its faults and failings, it works, and sometimes elements within the system are working against it.
We're talking about the criminal justice system specifically here.
And I want to quote from the LA Times.
Earlier this week, A local federal judge in Orange County, so a district judge by the name of Cormac Carney, dismissed charges for the second time in two years against two white supremacist defendants claiming that there was selective prosecution.
Now, there's a lot going on in this particular story, particularly because these individuals, one of them is the founder of a group that is in fact racist, and I personally was involved in some of the investigations on the surveillance end of this movement.
They're called the Rise Against Movement.
They're essentially like racist preppers.
And so on instinct, as decent human beings who listen to this show, you think, well, you know, I don't have any common cause with racists and I don't have any common cause with white supremacists.
Those people are not my people.
But they are still Americans.
And we should still, even the worst of us, if they don't engage in violence or physical activity that propagates that ideology, if they're just saying things that are odious to us, We really have to know that there is a historical precedent in America of defending such actions.
In other words, you have the right to be terrible in this country and have awful opinions.
And unless you take action on them, we shouldn't be prosecuting on a federal level.
Now, this case stems from violent physical interactions between Antifa, which is sort of the awful side of the political left, and these types who were protesting and they were pro-Donald Trump or something to that effect in 2017 in California.
The FBI, which I refer to as my ex-girlfriend, is a former FBI agent.
She was out there We're aggressively pushing investigations into these types, and I was actually asked to fly to Alaska and be part of one of the investigations where we essentially watched someone at any moment he could engage with other white supremacists.
It turns out you're actually allowed to be a white supremacist in America, as awful as that sounds.
That's actually the brilliance of our country.
In the same way that law enforcement doesn't owe a duty to act to individuals, they also cannot be out there policing the good and the bad ideology because then everybody's on a gradient.
So this judge...
Made a very groundbreaking decision in many ways and pushed the envelope in a way that most of us would be sort of uncomfortable.
Kind of a point of personal pride, I would think, that he stood on principle and said, if you do not enforce laws justly and evenly across the political spectrum, there's going to be a significant problem.
And that will come back in to essentially weaponize government.
Many of you have seen the movie Police State.
The argument in police state is that the political right is now suffering from exactly these kind of targeted prosecutions.
These prosecutions that take in ideology and then they decide to go after the person.
And if you saw the little glib that I'm in it, there's a little panel discussion that me and some other federal whistleblowers have where essentially the difference between a good American policing system and a secret police is whether or not we look for the crime first.
We look for the person and then we go find the crime.
And this is an example of that judge identifying federal prosecutors simply going after ideology first and then determining that they were somehow in violation of the Anti-Riot Act, which is a federal crime.
The federal judge threw out and released these people from prison.
Here's where it gets really interesting because we are living in times that are kind of unprecedented.
The Ninth Circuit in an emergency decision came back and reinstated, sent the FBI to To re-arrest this guy.
And so the individual who's the founder of this particular organization, who's the founder of this movement, his name is Robert Bowman, who's one of the two defendants.
The other one's name is Robert Rundo.
They're both named Robert.
That's kind of funny. Robert Rundo was actually re-arrested.
He was released on Wednesday and then re-arrested Thursday night by the FBI after the Ninth Circuit reinstated and said that he could not be released because he was a flight risk.
This unprecedented time of the law fighting against itself, we have a messy and ugly system and it's highly imperfect.
And that's another reason, another argument I would say, that as you go into this weekend, consider We're good to go.
If you don't take that on, there's nothing less American than that.
And this is just another example of the courts are not always going to get it done in real time.
It's happening all around you.
Folks, I hope you have a wonderful weekend as we close out this week.
I hope that you are safe and God bless all of you.
And I appreciate you listening. We will see you again the next time I guest host and you guys will see Dinesh again on Monday.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza show.
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