Brandi Kruse, a former Seattle journalist turned independent commentator, recounts her 2018 Evergreen State College mobbing and Antifa’s violent, illiberal tactics—including AR-15 distribution in CHOP—while criticizing Democratic leaders’ silence. She links left-wing extremism to systemic betrayals like education failures and chemical exposure, contrasting it with conservative gun culture’s responsibility. Washington’s HB 2320/2321 (criminalizing 3D-printed firearm codes) and plea-downs for gun violence cases expose Democratic hypocrisy, she argues, as policies worsen crises while scapegoating Trump. Advocating cautious, adaptive reforms over rigid socialism or market extremism, Kruse warns polarization risks escalate when media literacy and safety culture collapse. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast Inside Rail.
I am delighted to be sitting in studio with Brandi Cruz.
Brandy Cruz is an independent journalist and commentator.
She was a broadcast journalist in Seattle for a decade.
She now runs her own show, which is Undivided.
That's in Camel Case.
The first word is not the un.
It's not even a word, is it?
But un is not capitalized and divided is capitalized.
Brandi Cruz, welcome to Dark Horse.
I'm excited to be here.
Whenever somebody who's smarter than me wants to talk to me, I think it's the highest honor.
And then I also get very concerned.
But I already learned something from you because before we started, you told me about Camel Case.
I never heard about it.
So I'm already learning things, Brent.
But no, I'm super excited to be here.
And thank you.
Cool.
Well, I'm glad you're here.
It's obviously not so convenient to get, but you, as a dyed-in-the-wool Washingtonian, are familiar with the fairies.
You managed to navigate that without difficulty.
So well done.
You were recently at the White House.
Yeah.
For a symposium or a, what was it?
They called it a round table.
A round table.
On Antifa.
And it was the weirdest thing.
I mean, I was at home on a Monday and I like to tell people that a bald eagle dropped a note down my chimney asking me to come to the White House, but I really just got a text message.
And I was like, this must be a joke.
And they said, hey, you know, this so-and-so with the White House, do you want to come to the White House on Wednesday for a round table on Antifa?
And this is amid all the anti-ICE stuff that had really ratcheted up in Portland and to a lesser extent Seattle.
And I said, of course, you know, and they were kind of apologetic, like, sorry, it's short notice and all these.
I was like, I will be there.
We'll make it happen.
And actually, I went with a lot of people who I already know, who you know, Andy knows, some other independent journalists across the country who have had interactions or been involved in covering radical left-wing extremism in the United States.
And we got there and then they didn't even tell us until the day of that the president of the United States would be there.
So I was under the impression it was a private meeting with a few people from the administration to talk about how to deal with this scourge.
And then the day of, they're listing everybody that's going to be there.
And so then I got a little nervous, but it was such a cool experience and an issue I care so passionately about.
So to get an opportunity at a level like that to talk about it was insane.
Yeah, it's an amazing invite.
I've not been invited to talk to you.
Well, you got to go to a congressional hearing, didn't you?
Oh, I've been to a couple of those.
It is cool, and I love that.
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Voted For Trump00:12:21
So you were there to talk about Antifa.
You were there with Andy No.
Just for those who have been long-term fans of Darkhorse, I think Andy No was my first guest.
Awesome.
And Andy No has famously been violently attacked twice.
I was there for one of them.
I went into the protest in the lesser of the two incidents where I think the assault milkshake had been thrown on him.
And I think he had a minor minor head to the head, but not that minor.
But in any case, I was at the incident.
I wasn't right within feet of him, but we had gone together to look at what was going on because I desperately wanted to understand what I was seeing.
I, of course, had seen a lot at Evergreen as Evergreen melted down and was certainly aware of this thread before Evergreen became famous for its meltdown.
Now, I understand from a brief discussion right before we started recording that you actually have an Evergreen incident of your own from long before Evergreen's meltdown, but while I would have been there as faculty, happily teaching evolutionary biology to my students.
So what was your incident?
When was it?
And now that I know you were there, I really feel like maybe you were in Black Block and you were one of these people who harassed me.
So there had been, and I'm going to get the timeline off because it was so long ago, but this was really my first introduction to this weird faction of left-wing extremism that was very prone to intimidating journalists.
And I think that's the aspect of Antifa that hasn't been covered as much because it's always, you know, they harass and intimidate journalists that they deem as conservative.
But at the time, I was pretty young.
I was probably 21, 22, had just arrived in Seattle.
I was working as a reporter at the CBS Radio Affiliate because I came here for a radio job initially before I went to TV.
And there had been some sort of incident at Evergreen where a photographer was trying to cover a meeting and these Antifa type goons, which I didn't know what they were at the time.
And I mean, that's what I call them, threw his camera equipment off the balcony.
And so we had gone down there to do a story on, you know, this sort of group that seemed to have carte blanche to carry out these kind of activities down there.
And I was a radio reporter at the time, so I didn't have a lot with me.
I didn't scream reporter, you know, on camera.
I just had my recorder and stuff.
And so I was trying to be a little surreptitious about going about and seeing what this meeting was about.
And as soon as they ID'd me as a reporter, it was like a mob to get me out of the room.
And again, I was super young, had never dealt with anything like that.
So I think throughout the years, I covered a couple stories there of things like that.
Journalists for the Olympian who'd been harassed by them.
But yeah, that was my foray into kind of covering these type of people.
Interesting.
Now, it's funny that I don't remember that event.
I am a photographer, an amateur, but a serious one.
And I will tell you that throwing somebody's camera equipment off of anything really is considered very impolite.
So I'm surprised that I didn't know about this event.
Maybe I've forgotten it and all that's happened since.
I will say my sympathy for Antifa lasted like three minutes.
Good for you.
And what it amounted to was the first time I heard that term, I thought, anti-fascist sound like my people, right?
And then as it was described to me by students, what actually was the objective.
Now, I think most of them are fully convinced that they're fighting fascism.
But when I understand what it is that they are actually doing and in what way they are doing it, I was very alarmed by it.
So I was never sympathetic to that militant, militarized branch of liberalism.
I still consider myself a liberal, though I find very few other people who are marching under that banner are even understandable to me anymore.
I feel like the liberalism I grew up with has evaporated, that the party that is supposed to be liberal now stands for everything that I thought we were about.
Very illiberal.
Yes, very illiberal.
They're against free speech.
They seem to be the party of war.
I don't understand how everything got inverted, but it did.
And a lot of people, I think, are just paying attention to the fact that the color of the jersey is the one that they remember feeling fond of.
But in any case, okay.
So you had an Evergreen instance and you were still in broadcast journalism at the time.
You've now gone independent.
You've been to the White House.
What was the experience?
And it's captured.
I've seen the video of your statement.
What was it like?
Yeah, I mean, it's, I don't want to act like I'm too cool because no, it was really cool.
It was a really cool experience to be at the White House.
But that is one of the issues that I care about the most.
And so it meant a lot that the president and people actually wanted to have us there.
Now, I know people said it was sort of a song and dance and maybe there were some aspects of it that were, but it was important at Andy.
And Noah and I had talked a lot and communicated a lot.
In fact, Andy knows the reason I was there because Andy told them because they had reached out really to Andy to try to figure out who should be on this roundtable.
And he said, I think it's very important you have an actual former member of the mainstream news there.
And so I thank Andy for getting me there to talk about it because they want to act like this far left faction only attacks the conservative sort of influencer types, which I think there's a lot of that.
But I was attacked multiple times by Antifa, very seriously so, when I was on TV and when I wouldn't have considered myself a conservative.
I mean, I didn't embrace the label of conservatism until probably a year and a half, maybe two years ago.
So it doesn't really matter.
And that's what I wanted to get across to the White House.
I think a few things.
I mean, I made a joke that I was kind of annoyed got most of the attention from my statements.
And I had, before I went, I'll just tell you the story.
Before I went, I didn't know the president was coming.
Get there in the morning, find out the president's going to be there.
I was a never Trumper, big time Trump derangement syndrome to the point where I almost let it ruin my life.
Like when I met my sweet now husband, I just knew in the back of my head he voted for Trump.
I just knew it.
I met him at a rodeo in Ellensburg, Washington.
And so I made a conscious decision.
I'm not going to ask him who he voted for, because if I find out he voted for Trump, I will break up with him.
That's how bad I was.
Wow.
Yes.
And thankfully, I just never asked.
I came around.
I eventually voted for Trump in 2024.
And then I'm at the White House with him.
And I decided I was talking to a few people.
Should I tell the president?
Who, you know, is a little bit sensitive.
Yes, he is.
A lot sensitive to dissent or any sort of disagreement.
I said, should I tell the president that I used to have Trump derangement syndrome?
My husband said, no.
Everyone I asked, Brandy, do not do that.
Don't go into someone's house and say you didn't like them.
So I was waiting to see what his sort of, what his demeanor was.
And he was in a good mood.
And if we found out, it was because there was going to be peace in the Middle East, right?
And he had come in right before that.
And so I was maybe the second or third speaker.
And I just said, Mr. President, you know, I've been told not to tell you this, but I'm going to tell it to you anyway.
And I see Caroline Levitt, the press secretary's eyes get big because she's probably freaking out.
Like, what is she going to say to the president?
And I just told him I had TDS for eight years.
Severe Trump derangement syndrome.
And this is this issue of left-wing extremism is one of the things that brought me out of that place.
And we can discuss that more.
And I made a joke that I got more attractive after I got rid of my TDS.
And so that was, of course, everybody's like, oh, Brandy, you know, kissing Trump's ass and all this stuff.
And I did get more attractive because I stopped just hating one person so much that it was poisoning me from the inside out.
But let me just say, I don't, I heard you say it.
I got that it was a joke.
I thought it was funny.
But that doesn't strike me as wrong at all because the fact is derangement is not attractive.
It isn't.
It is a red flag.
Yeah.
And so it is one of the things that people who are carrying this do not understand what they are doing.
They are broadcasting a repellent signal into the world.
Right.
And it wasn't meant literally.
I mean, did I literally look better?
I don't know.
I'm older.
So I don't know if I look better or not, but I'm happier.
I mean, think of me going about my life dating this guy.
And I'm telling myself every day, don't ask him if he voted for Trump.
And my husband is a catch.
I weigh, I don't know how I got him.
I don't know how I deserve him.
And I think about that often.
I stew on that.
Like, what if I had asked this man who he voted for back in 2018?
We never would have gotten married.
I can't even imagine my life because I just can't imagine it without him.
And so these people are letting all this toxicity just brew up.
I mean, I have family members who after I was at the White House and made that joke to the president, my mother was embarrassed.
My uncle, who I grew up with, who was like a father figure to me, was saying publicly horrible things about me online.
Like I sold my soul to Trump and all this stuff.
And I'm just thinking, oh my God, these are two retiree aged people and I just see them miserable every day online, anti-Trump, all this stuff.
So anyway, I got the joke out of the way.
Everybody focused on that.
But more important to me is what I wanted to tell the president is, let's stop caring whether the media buys into this idea of Antifa.
Why do we care anymore?
I said, you have three years left.
Nothing's guaranteed.
Let's try to try to deal with this in the best way possible.
And we don't need the buy-in from Democrats or from the media to do it because I think they're always looking for that.
He's like, oh, why won't you acknowledge Antifa is a real thing?
Why won't you use the word Antifa?
It's like, I don't care what you call them.
If they engage in criminal conduct the way they're doing, let's just arrest them and put them in federal prison.
Well, I certainly agree with you that the wanton lawlessness warrants prison and that one of the hidden features of the system is that this is actually tacitly sanctioned by a legal system that sets a double standard.
And if you're, you know, in Portland, as Heather and I were literally on the ground watching the riots break out every night for 100 straight days, the Antifa black bloc are attacking federal officers and the courthouse in a way that I know, if I had gone up to the courthouse with a hammer and tapped it, I would have been arrested and prosecuted.
These people had carte blanche.
And so there's a question about why are they being encouraged?
And maybe I should just put that question to you.
I struggle with this a lot.
It's one of people don't like when I say this, especially apparently my family and friends.
January 6th was my turning point on President Trump.
And that sounds crazy, right?
Because that should be one of the lowest points of his presidency.
Now, I didn't, still looking back, I feel like I have to say this.
January 6th was an embarrassing day for the country.
And I've told conservatives still, if it had been BLM that did exactly that, you guys would have been like, put them in federal prison and never let them out.
You know, you wouldn't have been talking about political prisoners.
Although I do think there was an immense over prosecution of Jay Sixers.
And, but, you know, when I, right, when January 6th happened, we had just lived through in Seattle six months of what I characterize as left-wing terrorism.
They took over six blocks of the city, patrolled it with AR-15 rifles, which the Attorney General at the time was banning.
And I literally there was a warlord of CHOP who handed them out of the trunk of his car to random people on video to patrol this area.
People were killed there.
The city of Seattle just lost a $50 million judgment against them because of some of the death that happened there.
And every step of the way, leaders here, leaders, Democrats, downplayed it or ignored it.
Governor Jay Inslee at the time notoriously was asked about it two days into this CHOP occupation.
He said, chop?
Cleaning Products Revolution00:02:23
I haven't heard about chop.
What's that?
I'm just like, we're stunned.
The attorney general at the time, Bob Ferguson, who's now our governor, he didn't say anything about it.
You will not find a press release from Bob Ferguson from that period of time, the state's chief law enforcer about the occupation of this autonomous zone.
And the mayor of Seattle called it, what?
A summer of love.
Right.
And so I had just got off those six months.
And now all of a sudden J6 happens.
And it's like, oh, this is the end of our country as we know it.
And I'm looking around like, you didn't just see Minneapolis burning to the ground and LA.
And so that showed me that there was never going to be any moral consistency on political violence from the left.
And it started, I started to think differently about the media coverage of the president.
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Betrayal And Deindividuation00:15:03
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So I want to pause here because everything that happened in Seattle related to the chop or the chazz, as it was sometimes referred to, was previewed at Evergreen.
The whole playbook.
And Because I don't know if you realize this, but as Evergreen melted down, ostensibly at first about me and a very standard position that I took that we shouldn't be excluding people from campus based on race, that basically the place had an obligation to treat people equally and teach them as well as we could.
But when the place melted down, the president of the college, who was new to the place and had designs on it, he wanted to reformulate it in a way that he did not have the power to because Evergreen faculty was empowered by the founders of the college so that the administration was just weakened because the founders had a traditional view of labor versus management.
And so they hobbled management in an effort to enable labor.
And that gave the faculty the ability to shut down the president.
And so he basically ceded a race riot in order to make his dreams come true.
But the point is, as the place melted down, the president, George Bridges, ordered the police to stand down, literally to lock themselves in their police station, which then ceded the campus to the most militant of the protesters, who then did start patrolling the campus with weapons, actually looking for me, stopping traffic on a public road, searching cars.
So the whole idea of autonomy, self-governance, the strange behavior of the authorities withdrawing police enforcement rather than recognizing that this is actually a serious situation and it can't set a precedent.
So Evergreen set that precedent.
And then Chop and Chaz takes it to the next level.
There was a version of it in Portland.
There was a version of it in Washington in and around January 6th.
But you're right.
No consistency whatsoever and no recognition that we have a structure, a legal structure.
It is not perfect.
Injustice happens under our structure all the time, but it is far better than we face if we withdraw that structure.
It's like you can have this imperfect structure in which an injustice happens a fair amount, but if you withdraw it, you effectively end up with warlords.
Yeah.
Raz Simone was the name of the Chop warlord.
His real name, I think.
I remember this guy.
And so anyway, I feel like the left, the self-declared left, is playing with tropes that they don't understand because many of them have never traveled to a place in which governance is much less effective, right?
In which we don't have the high quality constitution that we have here.
And so injustice is just a much more common feature of life.
And so it's like, I'm watching this, people who nominally at one time might have been on what I would regard as my team.
I can't seem to make the point.
You are playing with fire and the world you are threatening to create is not one that you're going to like at all.
You're going to lament the destruction of this one.
And I'm sure you're going to blame somebody else for it, but it's actually you who's jeopardizing it.
And the message doesn't land and we're seeing it in Minneapolis this week.
Yeah, because my biggest annoyance is every time I bring up some sort of left-wing extremism, which happens not infrequently in Seattle, they always bring it back to January 6th, you voted for the president.
It's like you can't use January 6th to excuse thousands of examples of regular left-wing rioting in cities like Seattle and Portland that had like an ice occupation outside the ICE building there for three months over the summer.
So you're dealing with people who just are not grounded in any sort of reality.
And, you know, to your point about, this is kind of mean.
Okay.
So is it though?
I don't know.
Sure.
I characterize, I've been covering these people for a long time.
So from the Occupy movement into BLM, into the Summer of Love and George Floyd stuff and all of that, and now into this anti-ICE, anti-Trump, whatever it is.
I categorize them.
So you have the loners.
And these are people who are like borderline homeless, sometimes homeless, looking for somewhere to belong that participate in these things like Occupy and whatever it is.
Sometimes I think that there's people even with learning disabilities who are caught into that because I see a lot of that, right?
So it's sort of like oddball, sort of disability, low IQ faction that I believe makes up 80% of these crowds you see.
Certainly was the case in Portland over the summer, was the case at CHOP, every mass sort of event.
Mean, fine, it's the truth.
And then I think there's 10%, especially lately, that are sort of your geriatrics, for lack of a better phrase, pretty much harmless, but I think they're at the end of their life looking for something very meaningful, maybe reliving the 70s.
I don't know.
And then I think the rest of it are the tried and true anarchists who will kill for the cause.
Now, why they feel so strongly, why they want to throw this wrench in all these aspects of society, maybe they feel like society has wronged them in some way.
Those are the really dangerous ones.
A lot of these people are sort of hangers on.
But that 70% I mentioned who are 70 to 80, who are kind of low IQ, looking for a place to belong, mob mentality is such with them.
They are so easily influenced.
If they're, if somebody, I experienced this at CHOP, we were broadcasting live.
This video was seen everywhere.
You've probably seen it.
And all of a sudden, you know, we put her cameras on to do a live hit and one person starts yelling at me.
Fox News, F this, F that.
We're not going to let them go on the air.
So all these people who I've been there all night, all night.
This is the night CHOP formed.
All these people come down.
They don't know my name.
They don't know anything about me.
But all of a sudden they're screaming and spitting and mobbing.
And it was this insane.
So that is, it's just, that's the, that's what I see unfolding.
People who are really set on anarchy and then they find these sort of weirdos, for lack of a better phrase, that are looking for belonging that will find belonging in any movement.
All right.
So we got a lot of ground to cover right here for a number of different reasons.
One, the story you tell is a perfect demonstration of the myth of anarchy.
Yeah.
Okay.
Because the point is these people should, if they're right about their self-governance, they should be proud for you to see it.
It will spread the word.
Actually, this is working.
Yeah.
Right.
They're not.
And in fact, what they want to do is police speech right away.
Yes.
Right.
So, okay, that's a tell, right?
This is not going to create a world you're going to like because what it's going to do is it's going to put whatever becomes powerful in that world, a warlord handing AR-15 trunk or whatever.
It's going to put that person in charge of deciding which speech they want to allow to happen.
Great.
Now you've, you've entered us on the road to help.
Yeah.
Okay.
The second thing, though, is, first of all, I was a participant in Occupy, an enthusiastic one.
What happened was I, like many Americans on both ends of the political spectrum, was livid over the bailout following the financial collapse of 2008.
I thought it was the mask slipping and that was the revelation of what was really going on in our economy, that we were being taken advantage of by players who broke the system, evaporated trillions of dollars of wealth and left us with the bill.
So I was irate and I still think I was right about that and I think the Tea Party was right about the same issue in the same way, even if they had a different sense of what should happen.
However, having participated in Occupy, what I immediately saw was the takeover by the anarchists.
This stopped being a protest about an obscene federal policy, and it started being about a whole bunch of other things that had no business there.
So I saw it close up, and my disillusionment with Occupy was pretty rapid because the takeover was very quick.
But I think it's important to do what you're doing, the parsing of who's there.
Now, you're about to see my liberal side.
Okay, go ahead.
And it's not kind, but in a way, you'll see the purpose of it.
I see the same dysfunctional people, broken people.
And I see two things.
I see the deindividuation you're talking about, and I see the danger that these people, because they've de-individuated and because they are so angry and messed up, are very dangerous.
However, even though I refer to them as team loser, they are team loser in my mind, not as a way of dismissing them, but as a way of pointing out that actually this puzzle has two pieces.
I think the reason that they are so angry is that they actually have been betrayed in many different ways.
Not only have they been given an absolutely crappy educational system that has not armed them to compete in this system, which is, I think, why they want to overthrow it.
You've got a competitive system in which you're destined to be on the losing end every time because you don't have the capability of competing in it.
Of course, you want to overthrow it.
Not surprising at all.
So my point would be communism is not an invention of Karl Marx.
Karl Marx describes something, but what he's really describing is that if you have a capitalist system that does not take care of everybody in some way so that everybody is armed to compete in that competitive system, what it does is it produces a large cadre of people who have an interest in overthrowing it.
And if that cadre becomes large enough because you've betrayed enough people, it topples, right?
And then it becomes briefly an experiment in something that will never work.
And then, you know, you have to claw your way back to a civilization that functions.
So I'm angry at the left for being suckered.
I'm angry at the right for being stingy and not recognizing that even those crazed looking people over in Antifa have a legitimate gripe.
They may not be able to spell it out, but they've been betrayed chemically maybe, right?
They've been fed food that has garbage in it that causes you to end up with a lower IQ than you might have had.
That wasn't their choice.
I wonder, though, why then you don't see that same sort of, with a few exceptions, that same sort of group behavior, group think on the right.
Because I'm, you know, when I say low IQ, I'm like, these are individuals who are like lemmings, right?
Like you're just going to follow whatever anybody tells them to do.
But there's people like that individually on the right.
But why do they maintain more individualism?
Because they've also been, when you look at why President Trump, I think one, he spoke to people like my brothers.
You know, my brothers who we had a dad who died homeless, was alcoholic, drug addicted, horrible, horrible upbringing.
You know, they just white men kept getting put down later in life, had a hard time making ends meet.
My brother spent time in prison.
You know, there are, and now they're very pro-Trump, very conservative.
And these are like the left-behind Americans that President Trump talks about.
And I think that that really was something that people were ignoring this huge swath of Americans.
But like my brothers don't act like that.
And they've had, they've been the victims of a system that hasn't worked for them.
Well, my guess is your brothers aren't as betrayed as the people that we see emerging as anarchists and Antifa.
I do see, well, if you end up maimed by chemicals in your water or your food or something that you've been injected with by doctors, if it ends up disrupting your normal development so that you then perceive, actually, the tools I have aren't going to work in this system, I think you end up in that group.
So I would bet you would find people in the anarchist collective are more messed up.
I think there's betrayal across the entire system.
I think we're all being betrayed by a, frankly, thoroughly corrupt system on both sides of the political aisle.
And I do see deindividuation on the right too.
The identitarian right does de-individuate, understandably so.
I think they are in some sense responding to the same issue with a different policy orientation.
You know, let's gather together and throw the bad people out, that kind of thing.
So I see it, but it manifests very differently.
With all of that said, I did want to cover there are two issues that I think arise here.
One, I heard you in your meeting at the Trump roundtable where I'm frustrated that the table was not actually round.
They never are.
No.
Rectangle.
Yeah.
What is that?
A U or something.
But here's another place where you're going to hear what I would say is a hard-headed liberal coming out.
Love it.
I hear Antifa described by the president and others as terrorists.
And I have a very strong reaction to this.
Constitutional Rights at the Border00:07:50
Sure.
And it has two parts.
One, by the literal definition of that term, which I take to be the use of terror to get your opponents to make decisions they would not otherwise make, the manipulation of your opponent through fear.
Antifa does this.
That's kind of what they do.
However, I don't want anyone labeled with that term.
And the reason is because what happened to that term in the aftermath of 9-11 is that it was turned into a legal category which alienates you from your constitutional rights without your knowledge that it's happened.
In other words, when the Department of Homeland Security came out and declared misdis and malinformation forms of terrorism during the pandemic, it was hilarious, but not hilarious.
Terrifying.
What they were really saying is, oh, if we don't like what you're saying, and we've got three categories, we've got mistakes, we've got lies, and we've got true things that make you distrust power.
You do any of those things, we can privately declare you in this special category.
And then we're free to look into your life in any way we want.
We're frankly, according to the rules of the NDAA of 2012, allowed to drag you off any street in the world, including American streets, to disappear you, to not acknowledge we have you.
You don't get your right to see a lawyer.
You don't get the right to see the evidence against you.
You don't get the right to cross-examine witnesses.
All of these things vanish.
And so my feeling is, A, I think we need to recognize that the marginal people who are showing up as violent anarchists on the streets of our cities have a legitimate gripe, even if they can't or don't phrase it.
And B, that they are being endangered in a particular way that should offend all Americans.
Sorry, I just had a palpitation.
Oh, no.
The phrase endangered talking to people who are endangering others is so hard for me.
So let me just understand your position on this quick.
So when you say you don't want anyone labeled a terrorist, do you mean literally anyone?
Like a terrorist from overseas, like Hamas?
Let's put it this way.
A Hamas terrorist doesn't have constitutional rights.
So the alienation of their constitutional rights is not a problem for me.
I don't want them to have constitutional rights.
They don't have them.
They're not Americans.
So I'm really talking about Americans.
And my feeling is, and I don't know that anybody's going to be able to process this kind of nuance.
And maybe this is me tilting at windmills.
But my point is what happened, not only with the Patriot Act, but with the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, signed by Obama late in the day in Hawaii on December 31st.
He remembers before he went out.
I don't know.
Why?
Why was it December 31st?
It didn't need to be.
There was no legal reason it needed to be December 31st.
And there is no reason it needed to be late in the day from Hawaii.
But if you were signing something late in the day in Hawaii on December 31st, America is already drunk.
It's drunk and not paying attention.
And it literally didn't show up in the New York Times the next day.
I've checked the paper one.
It's not there.
So my feeling is our Constitution evaporated because a president in Hawaii signed something late in the day when others could be counted on to be drunk.
And that ought to have caused every American to say, what just happened to us?
Yeah.
Right.
In light of that, I feel on a very lonely quest to say, hey, don't use the magic term that has been imbued with all of this power because it is a magic term.
I'm not saying you can't describe the terrorist behavior of Antifa, but I want everybody to say, hey, we can't use this term because it's, you know, it's been loaded, right?
It's been filled with tannery.
I don't know what it is, but that term is so dangerous and it's been pointed at me.
Am I guilty of malinformation saying things that cause you to distrust government that are true?
Yeah.
So I'm a terrorist?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Now, my feeling is I don't have a lot of common cause with Antifa, but maybe on this one issue, don't use that term for Americans.
Yeah, and I have so much to say about that, but I also, I guess, have more questions.
Maybe that's the reporter in me that needs to just fully understand.
Am I wrong about my interpretation of constitutional rights?
And please don't feel bad, correct to me if I am.
I thought that even if you're not an American citizen, you're subject to the jurisdiction therein.
And so you do have constitutional rights that extend to you.
My understanding is that that is true to a limited extent.
Unless they send you to Gitmal.
Well, so, you know, there's all kinds of loopholes, including in and around the abuses of NDAA 2012, there was a whole lot of shenanigans played with the idea that, for example, your constitutional rights against, for example, illegitimate search and seizure do not exist at the border.
Yeah.
Now, we can all understand why that is.
Right.
Right.
We want to be able to control what comes into the country, which means we have to be able to search you if you decide to cross the border.
Right.
I'm on board.
Because you have an option not to cross and not to be served.
You've decided to cross.
This is one of the things you have agreed to.
It's like, it's, what's the term for your tacit consent when you drive on a road?
I've forgotten there's a legal term for implied consent.
That's it.
But what they did, amazingly enough, was they said, oh, your constitutional rights don't exist at the border.
And then, I kid you not, they took a fat marker and they outlined the border and not just the border with other nations.
They outlined the border with the sea, right?
They drew a fat line and they said for 100 miles on this side of the border, you're at the border.
Your rights don't exist.
Most Americans live inside that fat marker line.
So the point is, look, it's an obvious game to alienate us from our constitutional rights.
And what they did then is not let us see the tyranny around us.
What they then did was say, well, your constitutional rights that you think you have don't exist if you're within 100 miles of the border.
But they're now privileges.
So we'll treat them as if you have them so you won't notice that you don't have them until we decide, oh, you're a bad one.
You really don't have them.
So anyway, I don't.
I'm pretty close here, though, right?
Are you inside the marker or outside?
100% inside the marker.
I wouldn't, don't you think, though, he would be the one to move on an island right outside the marker?
That would be you.
Outside the marker.
I have tried to get them to move the island and they refused to do it for reasons that they claim are geological.
Yeah.
So there's a lot of things I love about what you're saying.
And I, and I, so this is kind of a nerdy story, but I talked about my dad a little bit.
He was a very disturbed man, but he was incredibly smart.
My dad, he was bipolar.
So he had days that were, he was brilliant.
He's still the smartest person I've ever met.
And then he had days where he'd like wake up drunk, right?
And so you got one or the other.
But the very first word my dad taught me to spell.
Government Overreach Concerns00:16:14
Do you want to guess what it is?
It wasn't chrysanthemum.
No, it was constitution.
Oh, that's a good one.
I know.
And I, and I didn't read, I didn't, I didn't even know what it was at the time.
I didn't even appreciate what he was doing, but I still remember it was like a drill sergeant, like C-O-N-S-T-I-T.
He would drill it into.
And I have this picture my mom still has where I drew a big trophy, like a gold trophy.
And the trophy says constitution.
And it's like, you know, I was in grade school and I probably didn't even know what the constitution was, but I knew from my dad it was this very important thing.
It was like a prize, right?
So I definitely understand so much of what you're saying.
And I was pretty young when 9-11 happened.
I mean, I'm 37.
I was born in 88.
But, you know, I still remember that switch in society.
I remember when we'd send my mom away on work trips and my dad would convince the pilot to let us sit in the cockpit and smoking a cigarette, you know, just weird stuff.
And so we gave up a lot as Americans because of terrorism.
And some of it, you know, little by little, maybe we could wear our shoes now, right?
Through the airport.
Maybe we realized some of that was too much.
So I do always worry about these sorts of things in the hands of our worst enemy.
You know, how would an AOC use, you know, all of these designations?
Because remember, like Moms for Liberty by certain organizations is considered a domestic terror organization, which is crazy.
It's literally just moms who don't want their kids to be indoctrinated in school.
So I understand that.
But I also said at the White House in my defense of, you know, trying to keep this all on track, I said, genuinely, I don't care really what we call them.
Like we have to judge their behavior and prosecute them based off their behavior.
Because I do agree that it's hard to say Antifa's, they're terrorists.
I do agree with kind of the sentiment of, okay, but what is Antifa?
How do we prove someone is Antifa?
So when I say they're domestic terrorists, I say it in the sense that they are terrorizing people in pursuit of a political and social agenda.
I agree with that.
But then there's going to be individual instances, you know, like the people who were meeting in the desert down in Arizona or California, getting ready to bomb a vent on New Year's Eve.
And they were members of the Turtle Island collective.
I'm dimly aware of this.
Apparently, the United States used to be called Turtle Island.
Turtle Island, right.
Yeah, by the natives.
And so it's called the Turtle Island Collective, but they're a far-left extremist group.
And they were like testing bombs out in the desert and they were going to blow something up in Los Angeles on New Year's Eve.
And the federal government using this new terror designation basically thwarted it.
So it's hard for me because I do believe that there are terrorists that deserve to be called terrorists.
I agree with you, though, that we can't just say, we certainly can't call ideology terrorism.
It has to be an action and it has to be spelled out in the law.
Well, but I think even there, if you understood the full horror of what's been done with that term, I think I would convince you of the following thing.
Yeah.
It's not that terrorism isn't a real thing.
And it's not that we shouldn't be allowed to accuse anybody of it because it's too extreme.
It's because we are all depending on that constitutional structure in a way that living people are not old enough to understand, right?
It is not visceral to us how important that document is.
I think COVID began to reveal it because there were a number of other states that looked every bit as free as we were who did way worse during COVID because they didn't have as good a constitution.
So my feeling is the Constitution, that's a bright red line for me.
And if you're threatening the Constitution, I'm more afraid of you than I am of whatever you're suspending it to go after.
Yeah.
Right.
I have my fears about Antifa.
I've confronted them myself.
However, I'm much more concerned about a state that wants an exemption.
And in this particular case, the structure of the exemption is in and of itself utterly diabolical.
It is not that we collectively got together and decided to suspend certain aspects of the Constitution under certain circumstances.
That is absolutely not what happened.
What happened is we built a structure in which we cryptically promoted the executive to the role of emperor, right?
Where the executive can literally define you as a terrorist based on evidence that they don't have to present to a court, and then you become one.
And the point is, well, obviously that's not going to withstand a constitutional challenge.
No, it won't.
But the point is anybody who believes that that's true, anybody who is, let's say, a federal officer or somebody in charge of a federal department who believes that that is true, then de facto enacts this constitution-free thing, which can't be checked because it doesn't even have to be acknowledged.
So it's like if you take the cleverness of the American founders, who I think incredibly highly, but if you take their cleverness and you imagine the inverse cleverness, how would you undo that without causing a riot in the streets?
You would do it cryptically in ways that are too technical for people to understand.
You would sign documents late in the day on December 31st so that nobody would, you know, so that their mind would literally have too much alcohol in it for them to be tracking, right?
So anyway, I'm not saying that we shouldn't be able to describe the terrorizing that Antifa does accurately and hold them responsible for it.
I want that.
But the magic term, I'm really not down with it.
Yeah, maybe we're coming to the same place and our understandings of it are just different.
And because I actually, there isn't like a domestic terror charge on the books, right?
I actually don't believe there's any federal statute that's like, I'm going to charge you with domestic terrorism.
But I think what you're saying is maybe something I don't understand, which is if, you know, the government has labeled them a terror organization, the government can bypass certain expected rights to be able to investigate them.
Right.
Yeah.
Because, I mean, and this is the horror and genius of the whole thing.
Why did we do that?
Yeah.
Well, we did it because we were terrorized into doing something into harming ourselves.
That was the, that was whatever 9-11 was, that was its effect.
Its effect was to get us to harm ourselves far more than the people who made it happen were capable of harming us.
We harmed ourselves much worse.
Yeah, because I do believe that these Antifa types, I mean, they're only getting worse.
When I started covering them, it was like they'd, you know, take over the campus of a college and then they would break some windows at some banks and police stations and do some graffiti.
Then they'd start throwing rocks at cops and then they'd be blocking freeways and the access to the airport and bridges and then they'd be taken over six blocks of the city.
I believe these are people who are capable of every bit as much violence and death and destruction as the terrorists who attacked our country on 9-11.
And so I'm very worried and scared about that faction, but I understand a lot of what you're saying.
It's like this power in the hands of my worst enemy or a president who believes I'm a terrorist, which I'm sure our governor believes I'm a terrorist.
Yeah, it's concerning.
I understand all of that.
Great.
Well, then this raises the next issue.
I don't know how many issues we're actually going to get to because they're all too interesting.
But I wanted to ask you something.
You have been, I think, rightly focused on this left fringe, which has in one sense done us a favor by creating, even if the purpose of the black dress is to obscure identity and to aid the deindividuation, they have labeled themselves in a way.
You know, the tattoos, the strange hair colors and styles and all of that weird stuff at least gives you a sense of who you're dealing with.
Yeah.
Right.
And, you know, Andy No has famously and I think for the right reasons broadcast their mugshots so you can just kind of evaluate who are these people who are being picked up and then set free and all of that.
But I see something, maybe it's a mirage.
I might be imagining it.
But when I look at what's going on in Minneapolis, I don't see that at all.
It is weird, isn't it?
What I see is rank and file Democrats of a kind I've long been frustrated with, but I recognize them.
These are people I've circulated amongst for my whole life who are now escalating.
So what we see now is not the, you know, some of them are homeless, never finished school types.
We're seeing people with nice vehicles.
ICU nurses.
ICU nurses.
We're seeing people who, in general, I think until now, have more or less viewed themselves as the heirs to the Vietnam War protesters, you know, where the idea was to document the abuses of the government and to call attention to victims who are in a poor position to defend themselves.
And they're now active.
and doing things that are dangerous.
And those dangers are in fact, you know, the thread that connects those rank and file Democrats to the Antifa is that Antifa, clearly, I would say, as somebody who was on the ground in Portland and watched it with my own eyes and talked to them and all of that.
Those people were deliberately trying to induce overreach.
Yeah.
Violent overreach for a purpose.
Yes.
I think these well-dressed, resourced, older, more sophisticated new protesters are inheriting that streak.
The game plan is the same.
They want overreach that they can then point to and see, say, see, we told you he was a Nazi.
Yeah.
The mask has slipped.
You can now see it on the streets of Minneapolis, blah, Right.
So it's a game of chicken.
Yeah.
They're trying to induce that same thing, just as Antifa did, but it's not the same people.
You're the first person I've heard articulate that.
And it is, there is a stark difference.
One, I am from Minnesota.
So I see literally like the chicks I used to drink boxed wine with in high school.
And it's so I'm looking at this from the lens of like, those are my, you know, fellow Minnesotans.
And it's a very weird thing when you know the sort of Minnesota nice that what we're seeing.
I think there's a couple things going on.
And I don't know for sure.
These are guesses based off of covering these radical groups for sort of what we're seeing.
I think that they have been given their, this behavior has been excused to an extent that even in 2020, it wasn't excused.
I mean, you have the lieutenant governor, a white woman, I think she's white, in Minnesota telling people to put their bodies on the line.
You have Governor Walls, like whitest of the white Minnesotan type dad dude, saying we're at war with the federal government.
And you have all measure of senators and congress members who are using similar language.
And like you said earlier, if, I mean, let's just be honest, if we were led to believe and convince that we were literally fighting Hitler reincarnate, what wouldn't you do to stop Hitler?
There are very few things I wouldn't have done to stop Hitler.
I probably could have killed somebody.
And so when you're convinced by all of these people and not just fringe politicians, look at Tim Walz.
I mean, when you're convinced that this is fascism and we're going to lose our country and our democracy, as Governor Bob Ferguson here in Washington State has said, Attorney General Nick Brown has said, I mean, you're really screwing with people's minds.
And then you have this white savior mentality that's happening.
We got to save these brown people from the fascist government.
I mean, we really do need to study what's going on with liberal white women between the age of 40 and 60.
Somebody needs to study them in a lab.
But I think there's this sort of white savior mentality.
Also, a third thing.
I feel like we're at critical mass with Trump.
You know, they've been telling us for 10 years, like he's going to destroy our democracy.
He's going to take over.
He hasn't done any of those things.
And all these dire warnings about America, as we know it, ceasing to exist.
And now the clock is ticking.
And they need something to manifest.
Almost to justify, I think, their TDS over all these years.
They're just like, whatever we can do to not have been wrong about Trump.
You know, I just feel like they're the closer we get to his last day in office, the more unhinged and psychotic those people are about to act.
I agree.
And I'm afraid Trump is just not the right person to be on the other side of that conflict.
I see exactly what you're saying.
And I think because of who Trump is, both in his own mind and to his supporters, that the tendency to just be fed up with this nonsense, and it is nonsense.
I mean, you literally have the governor of this state creating the problem that's going to get people killed, right?
The whole idea that the state is itself obstructing this enforcement effort is making it much more likely that something horrifying will happen and two horrifying things already have happened.
But you don't even see it, right?
Like the failure of Minnesota to hand over people in state custody who ICE has a right to deport.
This is standard practice.
And to not do it forces these officers onto the street.
Now, are these officers the right people?
No, I don't think so.
I don't think they're well enough trained.
I don't think they were hired with the right incentives.
I think they've effectively been told that they are licensed to do all kinds of things that they shouldn't be.
There's all kinds of horrors in the nature of the force on the streets.
But anyway, you've got two sides playing chicken.
Yeah.
Well, I only did, I disagree a little because Trump did something I was really surprised about is he did back off a little bit in the sense that there was a little of an admission after Alex Predi was killed.
And I'm not going to act like I know whether it was justified or not.
People want to pause every frame of the video and there's things I'd like about it.
There's things I don't like about it.
I don't know.
But Trump, you know, Bovino left and Bovino was this sort of character out there.
He wanted the cameras and he was going to show how tough he was.
And then President Trump said, hey, I'm sending in Tom Holman.
And he said specifically, he has not been involved in Minnesota so far.
That was Trump saying we need a fresh break.
I was actually very surprised by that because that does make him look like he's reevaluating.
And I was surprised he wanted to be seen as reevaluating the situation.
And then Tom Holman came in and had a meeting with Walls, a meeting with the Minneapolis mayor.
And both, you know, Walls said good things about that meeting.
Holman said good things about that meeting.
And even he got the AG now to agree to hand over illegal aliens in state custody, which is huge.
That is a huge component of sanctuary jurisdictions.
So I understand Trump is very compulsive, right?
And I don't want him to push it too far either.
But that little moment showed me that maybe he won't.
So I have like a little bit of hope, but also he could be in there doing everything by the book.
Killer Contagion Spreads00:07:14
These could be the best trained ICE agents on the planet.
They'd still lose their mind about it.
They would still be out there.
Well, not only would they still lose their mind about it, but there would still be errors and they would be captured and they would be portrayed as the best you could possibly do here is fail, not terribly.
Yeah.
There's no law enforcement agency on the planet that can be perfect.
And we should expect them to get as close to perfection as possible because them not being perfect can mean the loss of human life, right?
There's no one more powerful, badging a gun to be able to kill people on the streets legally if they need to.
But now you have a situation where these officers are confronted daily with hostility, people tracking them, people threatening their lives, people coming to interfere.
So you expect them to not only be perfect, but to be perfect under those conditions.
Not only that, I just think it is important.
the whistles and air horns.
Yes.
This is a neurological manipulation.
These people are being put into a frame of mind in which it's almost impossible for anybody to do their job correctly.
So the fact that these people may not be trained enough to do their jobs correctly, you don't want them doing their jobs correctly.
You're trying to make them make errors.
And so, you know, if you're trying to make them make errors, the fact that they're not well enough trained not to make errors is a secondary consideration.
You want the errors, right?
That is a tough one for me, right?
Trying to, you're claiming that the problem here is that innocent people are endangered by this effort while you are attempting to make that danger greater for the purpose of getting the right video that will finally match the story you've been telling.
And it's, it's horrifying.
It's such a good point because, you know, they've called them Gestapo and slave patrols.
And then Wolf said they're untrained like a militia, basically.
It's like, okay, let's say they are.
Let's just give none of them the benefit of the doubt and say they're the worst trained agents ever in the history of the world and they're just out there shooting people at random.
Then maybe don't go out and confront them because the chances, if they are who you say they are, chances are pretty high.
You're not going to leave that encounter.
So they don't, they don't even buy what they're selling, right?
And some of these same agents also worked for other presidents and were out there doing this kind of work, but they weren't being harassed.
They weren't being stalked.
They weren't being put on camera.
And there were shootings by ICE in previous years.
I mean, it's just a different scenario.
And nobody, people aren't looking at it clearly.
But you make such a good point about the types of protesters.
And I think people need to be focused on that more.
I had a, I don't know if I should say this, but I don't think any of them will watch because they're very, very liberal.
So I go to a yoga studio in a well-to-do area outside of Seattle.
This is just happening today.
So a little yoga studio, studio drama.
And I went because I just need to calm down.
You know, just a political job.
And I'm like, I'm going to start yoga.
Can I get my, whatever you call it, Zen or whatever.
And I knew, I was like, I'm going to feel so out of place here.
If people know who I am, I'm probably not going to be welcomed and all this stuff.
But at this yoga studio, I never experienced that.
Never experienced it.
Nobody bothered me.
Got to go in.
Even had a couple people said, hey, I love your show.
Thanks for what you're doing.
Got to whispered it right because you can't be like a conservative.
So anyway, the yoga studio posted on their Facebook page this morning, you know, we have been facing, you know, some pressure to speak out about ICE and stuff.
And we just want to keep this a political free environment, which is great.
Of course, it's a yoga studio in a tiny little town full of rich people.
And all these white women are like saying this is saying something.
And you're saying that you would allow ICE to come in and take your members.
And I'm just like, oh my gosh, these are 50-something women who have not a care really in the world, no real problems in their life.
And they want to create drama and division at a yoga studio that's supposed to be for peace and reflection.
It's so indicative of what's going on.
Well, I mean, it's part of a tactical playbook that most of the people who are participating in it do not understand, right?
The game theory is we need you on our side, short of on our side.
We need you to shut the fuck up, right?
And here's how we're going to arrange that.
All of the stuff of life is going to become less accessible to you if you don't get on board with the program.
And in the face of that, almost everybody finds their own solution in their own head to how they're going to say enough stuff that the mob will move on to somebody else.
This is exactly what happened in Evergreen.
It's what happens in all of these protest scenarios.
It was what it was the way BLM worked.
And it's irresistible.
It spreads like a contagion.
But the problem is that that same tactical playbook is dovetailing with a vital part of our culture that we almost all picked up.
Now, I got a triple dose of it because I'm Jewish, right?
And so the idea of it could happen here.
The people who died in Europe were the people who said, it's terrible.
It'll pass, right?
People who allowed themselves to be quote unquote resettled to the East.
Whatever it was, you needed to be more proactive and you needed to understand that it was all on the line.
And frankly, if you got out too late, then the question is, well, how much good can I do on the way out?
Yeah.
Right.
That's not where we are.
But a lot of people are talking themselves into believing that that's where we are.
And because they're talking themselves into believing that that's where they are, as you say, all kinds of things that are normally off the table.
Am I going to kill somebody?
No.
Killer.
But, you know, if you put me in the right circumstance where I'm in the midst of a, you know, a genocide unfolding, I'm a killer.
Yeah.
Right.
So we're primed for it.
Somebody is actively triggering it.
It's part of a game theoretic contagion that spreads across a population.
And it is the reason I think that we can't talk to each other.
Because, you know, I mean, imagine, imagine that you're trying to have a conversation like on either side of the fence of a concentration camp, but one side can't see the fence.
Yeah.
Right.
And they're just like trying to understand, you know, what you're talking about.
But so anyway, we can't understand each other.
I think, and this is drawn from my perspective, which it sounds like you share.
I think one side is involved in a delusion that we are in that phase of history, right?
For which we are all on the lookout for the signs.
Constantly Questioning Algorithms00:07:35
And frankly, I think both sides are being played.
That game of chicken that we're seeing on the streets of Minneapolis is useful to people we don't know.
Yeah.
Right.
They want something.
Maybe what they want is for Americans to be so fiercely divided that for, you know, another couple of elections, we still fail to go after the people who really are endangering us.
And we go after each other instead.
Yeah.
Sometimes I wonder if it's like a human force or if it's just the algorithm.
I mean, I have to think of my algorithm because I'm on my phone all day, right?
Because I do what you do and we have a job and we have to stay informed and all these things.
And I mean, I'll be sitting on my couch and I have to consciously realize that the algorithm is trying to make me upset at people I know.
And I take my phone and I throw it to the other side of the couch.
And I do that multiple times a day.
And so, and I think of that with like my mom I mentioned is very anti-Trump.
And no matter how many times I ask her, I don't want to talk about politics.
Let's talk about your fishing trip or whatever it is.
She still can't help it.
She comes back and sends me something she saw on Facebook.
And it's just until we can break people free from this algorithm that's just shoving all this stuff at them every day.
I mean, I think social media has a ton to do with it.
Like the whole yoga thing I just told about.
Would that lady show up at the yoga studio and tell the yoga lady, oh, you would let ICE come in here and steal people?
Would she confront her like that?
Never.
But she'll say it online, you know?
Right.
It's really wild.
I think every day about how are we going to break free from this?
What is the end of this period of time we're in?
You know, at the risk of saying too much, my parents, they're the liberals who raised me.
Yeah.
They still read the New York Times as if it's a newspaper.
And that's very bewildering.
Yeah.
New York Times, the L.A. Times, the Washington Post, they feel like they're getting a whole bunch of sources.
And it's one source with, you know, different stylistic approaches and, you know, different stories.
I don't have this problem with my mom because she does exactly what you're suggesting.
She understands we can't see eye to eye.
And so she avoids it and says so.
There's no, it's not a secret.
My dad can't help himself.
My dad, and it comes from a place of love, I can tell that, is constantly trying to wake me up to what I have not understood about the people that I pay attention to, the people that I politically have supported.
And it's so, you know, he is getting a, like, it's like a drip.
It's not morphine.
It's the opposite, right?
It's like a drip that just constantly keeps him on edge.
And, you know, I've tried to explain it.
I've said, look, several things.
One, it's your media diet that's doing this.
That's why we are constantly having this conversation.
Two, there isn't a source you can go to as an alternative to those things.
And I'm not claiming that's okay.
We all need a newspaper that we can go to for a basic discussion of the facts of what has taken place so that we can proceed from there.
It doesn't exist.
If it did exist, I would subscribe.
I would ask you to subscribe.
It doesn't exist.
And you can't do what I'm trying to do, which is to try to cobble together an understanding of what's taking place from sources that are decentralized and don't all agree with each other.
It would be a full-time job for you.
You're not built for it.
You know, frankly, you're too old to even attempt it.
And those of us who are attempting it are not doing a great job.
It's, you know, it's not a substitute for a newspaper, just the same way podcasts aren't a substitute for a proper science discussion.
It just doesn't work.
But it's better than nothing.
So anyway, there's something about the people that we are trying to maintain our relationships with who haven't at least broken free of the thing that's feeding the toxin into our culture.
And I frankly don't know what to do about it.
I don't either.
And I don't, I, it's a lot of it is an older generation.
And I think my mom's age, and I love my mother, love you, mom, if, if you do watch this, I don't think she's equipped to handle Facebook.
I don't think she's equipped to make judgments about AI, to understand in the sense that maybe other people who are more media literate do about what the algorithm is doing.
So I don't, I don't know what to do about it either.
But I think the frustration for me, because people will treat me like I'm a Trump ass kisser, right?
You and I both have been there and back.
And, you know, like you said about your dad's trying to convince you that you've been brainwashed.
It's like, okay, well, you weren't calling me brainwashed when I didn't support President Trump, you know, and I, for most of President Trump's time in the political spotlight, I have not liked him.
And it was about a year and a half period of time where I started to switch a little bit.
And so it's like, how can I be brainwashed if I was on the never Trump side and now I'm on this side?
And I never get a great example for that.
Well, people will say, oh, you did it for the money, you know, that you left your job and it was going to be better for you to be a conservative.
And I'm like, well, that's a stretch, right?
So I don't know.
I don't know the answer to it.
And it's really frustrating because I do think about it every day.
Well, it does raise the part of it that's so troubling to me.
And it's, you know, I'm not primarily talking about my parents here.
But I don't know how many of these situations I've been to where I've reached a conclusion that's admittedly outside the mainstream.
And it takes a long time for what I was seeing to become visible to the mainstream.
And I'm not saying I've gotten everything right.
I try to be very open about the stuff I've gotten wrong.
I try to correct it publicly and as quickly as possible, but I've gotten a lot right that sounded pretty wild to begin with.
When my people hear me say something that sounds like, oh, he's now finally lost his mind, I want them to think, huh, that's not the first time I've had that impression.
And I've been surprised before.
I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Right.
I know him better than that.
I know he's not doing it for the money.
I know he's not doing it because he's, you know, wants to be famous.
It's none of those things.
And it doesn't make me right, but it does mean you can actually, if you know me well, then you can safely put aside all of the explanations that have to do with me suddenly being motivated by some self-promotion or, you know, whatever it is.
Just give me the damn benefit of the doubt.
I've earned it.
Yeah.
Right.
And that is not in evidence.
It is the one thing that it just, it can't be made to happen is, and actually, you know what?
This, sorry, I don't mean to rant so much, but.
Oh, I love it.
During the pandemic, Heather and I had a secret weapon that allowed us to outdo almost anybody else in our lives.
You got the vaccine and triple boosted.
Yes.
And strawberry flavored.
Gen Alpha's Dopamine Boost00:06:31
No, our secret weapon was each other.
And what it really meant was there was nothing that was going to get between the two of us that could cause us not to be able to at least figure out what we disagreed about, right?
The fact that our relationship was not intermediated by a screen or a telephone line or anything like that, and that we had a long history of going through all kinds of different situations and facing perils together and not seeing eye to eye.
The fact that we had all of that track record and then interpersonally could not be divided by anything that was going on in the outside world, even if we didn't come to agreement about it, allowed us to remain sane.
And I saw everybody who didn't have at least one person in that category become some kind of insane.
Right.
So anyway, I think the thing that wants to persuade us of stuff that causes us to behave in ways that help it at expense to ourselves, that thing is getting better at bringing that about.
And we are getting worse at resisting.
Our immunity is down and giving each other the benefit of the doubt based on the fact that, you know, I've known you for 25 years or 30 years.
I know you think that what you're saying is reasonable.
Therefore, I'm going to proceed from that understanding and try to figure out what we disagree over.
It's not that hard.
I think the younger generation is going to save us.
And I haven't felt that way about any younger generation except this one.
And I don't know what you call them now coming of age, like out of high school into college right now.
Gen Z. Is it Gen Z still?
Yeah.
Strong independent streak.
I think that they've grown up with this very divisive environment.
And they're starting to want to detach from their devices.
You know, I'm I'm at the point where I will leave my phone dead for a couple days.
My producer hates it.
And I'm, so I'm really getting sick of it.
But I'm seeing it there.
I have these neighbor kids who come walk our dogs and stuff and watch them grow up a little bit.
They are not tethered to their phones anymore.
And in fact, there was this little trend going around of them.
Have you seen this analog bag trend?
They it's this trend.
And of course, they talk about the trend on social media, but they leave their phone for a day or whatever and they put all the things that their phone does for them in a bag, like a book.
You know, they put a book in the bag and they put some pictures of their friends in the bag and they just put some things in the bag that, I don't know, are supposed to be a temporary substitute for their phone.
Like a little jigger of dopamine or something.
It's like, I can't scroll for my friends.
So you just pull up the pictures quick and look at it.
But I'm just sort of like, actually, it's brilliant.
I love it.
And I'm just thinking about it.
Wow, we could all use an analog bag where you leave your phone, you pick up your bag and you just go out into the wilderness or something.
So I actually have a lot of hope for this younger generation.
So maybe we all just die off and things will be fine.
Well, the first part of that wish we're going to get at some point.
But look, I don't know.
So first of all, now that you say it, I am unfortunately not good at calculating these things in real time, but I don't know whether you're talking about the very beginning of Gen Alpha or the very end of Gen Alpha.
People know what I'm talking about.
Whatever.
The late teens right now, the kiddos.
The youngins.
Here's the problem with the idea that they're going to save us.
Okay.
Can you just let me have that?
Can't we just say they're going to save us?
If that's what you really want.
I mean.
No, it's fine.
I'm already so far into my red pilling.
Just keep disappointing me about life.
Okay.
And I'm going to bring this back to some Washington stuff here in a second.
But the problem is I don't think you can bootstrap the characteristics that are necessary to save us.
In other words, Gen Alpha, even if they have the right instinct about all of the stuff in the world that's making us crazy, don't have the culture that tells you what to do when you face a world gone crazy.
And so there has to be some partnering with, I think it's going to be the rebels of each generation ahead, right?
Frankly, they're even boomers who make sense, right?
But they're not the mainstream boomers.
They're the boomers who saw a few things and woke up to what their generation was about.
But anyway, the renegades in those generations are going to have to figure out how to communicate with the Gen Zs and the Gen Alphas.
And it's not easy because ancestrally speaking, I don't think you would have a regular generation gap where, you know, if you go to Latin America where a culture is more or less still intact, they don't treat the old people as, huh, you know, that's grandma.
Yeah.
And they're just not like that.
Yeah.
Right.
The point is grandma is a meaningful person to them.
And they honor that.
And yes, there are things grandma's not going to understand.
But in general, the point is the elders are understood to be a part of that sort of river of wisdom that flows down to new generations.
And for folks in this part of the world, what you have is, you know, I was a computer early adopter.
I was a dyslexic kid and my dad got me a computer to help me do the stuff in school that I could not do.
And it actually allowed me to graduate high school and to go on to college and eventually graduate school.
But so I was early in this computer thing.
I'm not somebody who struggles with tech at all.
But of course, I struggle with my tech at this point.
It's become so bewildering and arbitrarily complicated that, you know, yeah, of course I'm asking my kids to help me accomplish things that I feel certain I should be able to figure out how to accomplish.
And so the point is that, you know, to the extent that the younger generations just have native tech stuff in their environment and the old people are all confused by it.
That is making it hard for them to relate to us, but they need to figure out how or we need to figure out how to reach them because they're not going to be able to do it on their own.
New Relationship with Guns00:15:59
Yeah.
Well, and especially if they start carrying those analog bags, we can't reach them at all.
Walkie-walkie-talkie.
How are we supposed to?
But no, I agree with you because I'm so embarrassed to admit it, but it doesn't matter.
And I'm really not that old.
It doesn't matter how many times somebody explains it to me.
I don't understand Bitcoin.
You could explain it to me 100 times.
I will always ask.
I will always say, well, it's not, so it's not real.
I don't understand it.
So yeah, there are definitely some huge divisions and they just take to things easier.
Here, I can explain Bitcoin to you.
You want to be the 100th person to try?
I got it.
You're going to get it.
You're going to get it right away.
It's like money unless the power goes out.
Great.
Great.
Got it.
Now I get it.
Mining and all.
It just is like, why?
I don't.
That's the I'm blonde on a few things.
Bitcoin, number one.
You're not alone.
There are aspects of it I struggle with too.
Let me ask you a question.
There's a segue here.
The issue of my contention that the younger generations are not going to be able to bootstrap our way out of this danger because they don't have a culture to draw on that would tell them what to do has a strange echo in the questions of what's going on in Minneapolis, to me at least, and what's going on in the state of Washington with respect to gun rights.
So here's my thought that I had a few days ago when pondering the question of Alex Predi's death, which I take to be the death of I see him as reckless for the way he behaved, but he was obviously not guilty of some crime that warranted his death.
Yeah.
Though it may have been a justified shooting based on a legitimate fear that officers may have had in the moment.
So with that said, it's surprising to see a guy with Alex Pretty's profile armed in the way he was.
I take it to potentially mean that there is a change over on the Democratic left with respect to gun rights, whereas instead of itching to disarm us, they may be arming themselves, which in one way I regard as a good thing,
because as much as I don't want crazy people who I think many of whom are involved in a delusion about where we are in history armed, I do think that the reason that the founders gave us the Second Amendment and phrased it in the, frankly, kind of strange way that they wrote it was because they feared tyranny and that an armed populace is harder to tyrannize.
And I just think that's true.
So I would actually like Americans to come together to come to understand ourselves as a people and to be armed in the way that conservatives are often armed, right?
When I switched sides on this issue, and it's one of the issues I have switched sides on, I found that gun culture was overwhelmingly conservative.
It's overwhelmingly male.
It's often highly technical.
It is obsessed with responsibility.
And frankly, it was welcoming.
Anybody who wants to know is welcome in that culture.
But here's the sticking point for me.
I'm trying to imagine.
I don't know what Alex Predi was like.
I've seen stuff.
I don't know how prejudicial it is.
But if you find yourself obstructing ICE in the streets of Minneapolis, whether it's the right thing or the wrong thing to do, I have a pretty good idea where you are politically.
My own interaction with people who are there politically is that they are allergic to conservatives.
Yeah.
I think conservatives are out of patience with people on the left.
I deal with that a lot as somebody who's still on the left, but they're out of patience with people on the left.
But just the nature of society, they have to listen to them.
It's everywhere.
So they hear a lot of stuff that lefties are saying, whereas lefties are avoiding hearing what conservatives say.
So the punchline of this very long description is, I'm wondering, when I decided to get some guns and figure out what to do with them and how to behave responsibly with them, I spent a lot of time learning from conservatives because that's the people who were dispensing the information.
And so I got a lot of an understanding of how things look through their eyes.
If you were allergic to conservatives and you decided to arm yourself, I'm wondering if you fail to have access to a culture that would then tell you all of the subtle things that you need to know about gun ownership.
Yeah, it's interesting because I recently became a gun owner for the first time.
And remind me, put a pin in it that I want to ask you what you mean by on the left later, okay?
Okay.
Put a sharpie in it or a pin in it.
So I got, I have been a little adverse because I got shot twice when I was younger.
Whoa.
I've also had like six concussions.
We grew up, you know, on a farm, a little poverty, you know, you make up your own fun, right?
And so I got, and it wasn't like, I say shot because it sounds cool, doesn't it?
Ricochet.
But only between us, it was ricochet.
If anybody else asks, I was shot.
I had a ricochet off of a, my brothers were shooting at a half-buried tractor tire.
And then I had a ricochet that hit me here that my dad was shooting at a bucket full of concrete.
Okay.
So, you know, guns were everywhere in my house laying around, like in Minnesota, even just really back in the 80s and 90s.
I mean, I don't think we lived in the country.
People didn't lock them up.
There wasn't this obsessive sort of locking up.
And my dad just wasn't a responsible guy, but like we hunted.
They did hunting and all this stuff.
So I just have never felt the need to have a gun and wasn't a big gun person.
I wasn't opposed to it, though, because I'm, you know, like the Constitution.
And so, but my views have sort of developed a lot on this issue.
My husband has guns.
You know, I, my turning point was, you know, my job has become a little more dangerous in recent years.
You know, we've dealt with a lot of death threats at our house and having to rely on other people to protect me just wasn't something I was satisfied with.
But then I walked my two dogs down a path in a safe place where I live, down a trail by a river that I'd gone down a million times with the dogs.
And I'm coming up, and this isn't even near Seattle, so it's not like we're used to drug addicts and the homeless.
Coming up, this guy on a bike driving towards me and I just think, oh, God.
And he stops right in front of me and he pulls out this fixed kitchen knife, right?
Like, and I'm me, my two dogs, my dogs are useless.
They're just like, oh, hello, sir, you know, and I, but he blocks my path, pulls out this knife.
And thank God that there was this guy and this woman walking up the path almost simultaneous when he pulled the knife out.
And then the guy just kind of started hacking away at some blackberry bushes like he was never going to do anything to me with it.
I went straight to my local police department and applied for a concealed pistol license.
I still haven't really carried the gun because I, I guess as a woman, I don't feel confident enough in my handling skills that I won't get it taken away.
So my husband has been methodical.
He has been, we have some property, he takes me out.
He does gun safety.
He helps me try to shoot all these things.
So I have a new relationship with guns.
But the issue of kind of left picking up this is happening more and more.
There was a old weekly newspaper in Oregon.
You'll probably remember it.
Kind of like The Stranger in Seattle.
Do you remember what it was called?
Trying to remember that.
It's like an alternative.
And there was a front page article.
I don't know if you saw it.
It was a man, trans, so a trans woman, a guy who thinks he's a chick.
Okay, that's a trans in a, you know, wearing a dress and all these things with an AR-15 rifle.
And the headline was triggered and it talked about how the trans community is gearing up to fight back against Trump.
And I'm like, oh, Jesus.
I mean, it really sounded like a threat, right?
And I was sort of like, for some reason, looking at that just makes me very worried about this person with a gun.
And then when I was picking up my gun finally after like a month and a half, because the process in Washington state is so crazy, there was a man in a skirt who was picking up a rifle with a scope.
And I know it's bad and I shouldn't even admit it, but my first thought was, they're going to go shoot up a place.
And I know that's horrible, but for some reason, the left bearing arms has made me uneasy, but it's their right to do so.
I mean, the sheriff Keith Swank in Pierce County, Washington, which is south of Seattle, if you're not familiar, he posted this question on X and he said, should all transgender people be banned from owning guns?
You know who was most angry about that?
The right.
The right was like, what are you talking about?
Just banning gun ownership for a whole swath of people.
Now, I think that there are some questions about mental stability among the trans community, but until you prove that they're a danger to themselves or others, you can't just say you can't proactively own a gun.
So I don't know.
Maybe that could be a bridge as more people on the left buy guns because the person who sells them the gun, the person they go to at the range, those are all going to be conservatives who are going to try to help them fold into gun culture.
They might not know it, but they are.
So does that answer your question?
I mean, no, because I'm not convinced that the allergy to conservatives isn't going to keep the liberals away from the culture that they do need to pick up.
But they have to go to the gun shop.
You think they like won't go to a gun range because there'll be conservatives there?
I think they're, well, I will tell you that for me, the people I interacted with at the gun shop, the people I spent many hours watching on YouTube, who frankly, it's geeks.
It's gun geeks who talk about the details of, you know, the danger of this, the danger of that, why you do it this way.
That culture is necessary.
If you look at this person and you think that's the enemy, because I know that person voted for the other guy, then you are not going to pick it up.
And my point is that actually responsible gun ownership is a culture.
It's not something you can afford to learn on your own because you can't afford a single serious mistake.
So I'm worried that the interaction will be minimal and that in the absence of that interaction, A, I think the interaction would be useful, frankly, useful on both sides, right?
To have the forced interaction on the basis that You need to pick up this culture.
You need to interact with the people who sell weapons, all these things.
It's a little cross.
Are you asking that because like, and I don't mean to speak about somebody who's dead because they can't respond or whatever.
Are you asking that because Alex Pretty did so many unresponsible things with his firearm?
Well, he owned a firearm that firearm enthusiasts wouldn't even have owned.
Well, I agree.
And, you know, that's a detailed discussion, which when I have tried to raise it has turned some people off.
But even short of that, short of the particular, there's one feature of the particular weapon that I think is absolutely central for people to understand.
And it doesn't involve the defect of this model, the famous defect.
The gun doesn't have a safety, which means that your handling of it is risky, right?
Especially if you have put around in the chamber, which I don't know if he did.
And there is some reason to think he may have.
But in any case, going into a conflict zone with a weapon is dangerous.
Once in a conflict zone, stepping into a particular interaction with an officer engaged in what I think is an assault against a protester, not a good idea.
So I see recklessness there.
And that is exactly why I'm asking the question.
Yeah.
Well, because, and I'm not a gun expert, so I want to make sure off the front end.
But I mean, if you are trained with a firearm, then not having a safety on a firearm is no big deal.
In fact, people who are well-trained prefer to have a gun without a safety.
You know, one of my key things when I picked one out is I told my husband, I want, you know, I want a safety on the grip.
Yep.
Like we, I just wanted some sort of safety.
I didn't feel comfortable just having, because I don't feel confident with it.
I'm not well trained with it.
And I don't know Alex Predi's training with a gun, but if it didn't have a safety and he was trained, then that's fine because you're not going to put your finger on the trigger, right?
But yeah, I mean, so.
So, but hold on.
Yes.
He's walking into the situation with a loaded firearm.
Yeah.
He's engaging in a confrontation with an officer.
Yeah.
Chances that he is going to end up being wrestled by this officer.
I mean, it'd be one thing if he did the right thing and he made it clear that he was no threat at the point that the officer was taking him down.
If he had complied, that'd be very different.
But doing anything that looks like resisting arrest with a firearm, if it had a bullet in the chamber, I would argue you can't be sure.
Somebody's wrestling for a gun in the holster.
The chances that they're going to bump the trigger are too high.
They're not acceptable.
I agree that his, yes, I agree that the actions he engaged in with a firearm created a situation that could have gone wrong very easily and obviously did.
And it brings this element of uncertainty in for the ICE agents, right?
Now we've got a person who's armed.
What is their intention?
But at the same time, you know, in Washington State, I actually do believe it's illegal now to carry a firearm into a protest.
I don't know if that's passed.
Yeah.
I think around the Capitol, because they did it for the Capitol campus.
There's certain areas where you can't have a gun, even if it's in protest, like your open carry, you know, rights or whatever.
And then Democrats in California also tried to, Gavin Newsom tried to ban carrying guns during the protest and Republicans fought back against that, obviously.
So Republicans support the idea of having a gun to be able to protest.
They definitely can't wholesale say Alex Preddy shouldn't have had a gun.
But it's very fair to say if you're going to interfere with federal agents and try to like wrestle them, maybe that's not a situation that a responsible gun owner would have put themselves in.
Well, let me just say this is one of the places where the culture matters because in gun circles, what is said about this is, I think, universally said, which is you have an extra obligation to avoid conflict while armed because any conflict you get into while armed is by definition a conflict in which there is a gun.
Yes.
Right.
So that slightly subtle piece of wisdom is important.
And you have to, it's the same as the culture that says all guns are loaded, right?
All guns are loaded is important.
It's obviously factually not true, which is why it sticks, right?
The idea that anytime you see a gun, your initial orientation has to be, that's a loaded gun.
Regulations and Risk00:15:22
You will notice that people who are around guns a lot reflexively check, not just once, but twice, right?
They do that because these rituals, these pieces of wisdom are what keeps you safe.
They frankly take a situation in which an error is made and they allow you to survive it because if you do all of the rules that come along with that culture, there's a fail-safe built in.
So it did look to me like I haven't complained that he had a gun.
I've worried why he had a gun there.
I don't know.
I've left open the possibility that that was a coincidence, though I think later videos that showed that he had been in a conflict with officers a week or two before and had the gun on him at that time suggest, no, probably wasn't.
But it looked simultaneously like, oh, you don't usually expect a wacko.
No, you don't expect the Democrat to be concealed carry.
That's an interesting development.
But you also would expect somebody who had armed themselves that way to really be well-trained.
And this sure looked like it wasn't.
Yeah, I don't know a lot of conservatives that would have gone in armed into a circumstance like that.
A lot of like, like my husband would never have done that, obviously.
And so maybe you're right that, you know, they want to have guns, but not the gun culture that goes along with it because they tie this sort of like NRA, right-wing, whatever to it.
Well, there was this story out of, and I'll forget what state he's running for Congress in, but he was like exposed as a antifaradical.
And he was part of this gun club where all the sort of LGBTQ trans people would go and the far left militants would go and they'd teach each other how to fire guns.
And I'm sort of like, does anyone in that group actually know anything about that?
Yeah, and maybe they do.
And I will just point out there is one exception that I am aware of.
There's a guy named Madge Ture who runs an organization called Black Guns Matter.
And his basic point is black people need to be armed.
And I'm going to pass on the responsible culture of gun ownership.
Right.
And strikes me as the right model.
You know, what you have is somebody who is highly knowledgeable and responsible.
And his point is armed citizens is a good and reasonable thing.
And here's how you're going to become expert enough to make that safe.
Yeah.
And I think it's fair to say the left and the right, neither of them are a monolith.
And I know people on the right who don't like guns, don't want to be around guns.
And I know people on the left who are gun owners who have owned a gun for a long time.
But there is a cultural divide on that issue for sure.
It's an interesting topic.
I've never heard discussed about whether the left is less responsible gun owners because they won't fold themselves into the culture.
Right.
Well, let's put it this way.
I hope that if probably they don't listen, which is a mistake, because as you've discovered, I'm a liberal and I have a different perspective.
And that's always worthwhile to see when somebody who shares some or all of your values has arrived at a different conclusion.
But I would implore them.
It's a realm in which you can't afford a serious mistake.
I agree.
The way you avoid a serious mistake is benefiting from the wisdom of that accumulated culture of people who have thought about every mistake conceivable ad nauseum and know how to describe them to you in ways that make the right way to deal with it intuitive.
Maybe that's how everybody bonds.
Maybe that's how we fix society.
We bond over guns.
I don't think it's going to happen, but we can wishful thinking.
Well, frankly, if you take my argument about what the founders were up to, this is the right thing.
The tyranny of the state is the frightening thing.
And it's the reason that we frankly pay the price and there is a high price for having, you know, readily available guns in our society.
Yeah.
And I've really come to just take a plain reading of the Second Amendment.
And I mean, I make a living off the First Amendment.
And so I don't want any other amendment that protects somebody else's rights they're passionate about to be eroded bit by bit, like we're seeing in Washington State.
And I tell people, I believe that people should have access to any weapon the government has, you know, with it only because, and I know that's extreme.
If you don't like it, then change the amendment.
There's a process to go about doing it, but nobody wants to go about that difficult process of changing the Constitution.
But to me, it's about being able to fight back against tyranny.
You know, they had to cobble a bunch of guns together and hide them under haystacks until they needed them and they ended up needing them.
Right.
And so they recognize that point might come for us too.
But I don't know.
I just have a very plain reading of it.
And the way that we're seeing Second Amendment rights chipped away in states like Washington and California and elsewhere is really scary stuff for anyone who wants to talk about totalitarianism and dictatorships and fascism.
It's like, well, you're letting the government strip us of the one thing that would actually protect us from all that stuff.
Right.
Exactly.
Now, do you want to talk a little bit about there are a couple of bills that are in motion in the state of Washington?
One of them is HB 2320 and the other is HB 2321.
You want to describe what's being proposed?
Yeah.
So these are a pair of matching bills proposed by the same Democrat with some Democratic co-sponsors, no Republican support.
And on its face, it sounds not so scary because these have to do with 3D printing guns or the components for guns.
And I get it.
Like being able to obvious 3D printer, print a gun, get past a, you know, a security checkpoint or something.
I understand the concern about 3D printed weapons.
But the concern Democrats have is they want everything to be traceable.
They want a society where they know where the guns are.
They want it registered.
They want to know where it's at.
So eventually when they decide to take them away from us, it makes the job much easier.
But the scary thing about this bill, there's twofold.
So one basically makes it a crime to print these guns.
And then the other one regulates the manufacturers of the printing machines.
Yep.
Okay.
And I actually have this pulled up because there's some excerpts I want people to pay attention to because they're all jargony and stuff.
But so can't 3D print guns, but you can't even possess the code, the digital kind of code and instructions to print a gun.
So the possession of that, whether it's on paper or digitally, is a crime.
You don't even have to print the gun for it to be a crime.
And then the other bill, the companion bill is for the 3D printers, before they're sold, they have to manufacture somehow a kill switch if someone tries to print a 3D gun or a component for a 3D gun.
A component.
A component, right?
And it's like a built-in kill switch.
Who is the kill switch regulated by?
Who's compliance regulated by?
The Office of Attorney General.
That's some scary stuff.
And the other thing, there's just a, this is a section I had pulled up.
So the Attorney General, there's always lines like this in bills.
Whenever you see a line like this in a bill, it should, no matter what the bill is, it should scare the hell out of you because it's basically an open-ended carte blanche for politicians.
So this has to do with the 3D printing regulations on the manufacturers of the printers.
So it talks about how the Attorney General, in consultation with research institutions, government agencies, or any other organization, the Attorney General deems appropriate shall adopt rules and regulations to establish standards for equipping a printer with the blocking feature required by this section and for providing the attestation required by this section.
So basically the attorney general is going to come up with the language for the manufacturer to attest that they have installed this blocking feature.
And then it says this, the attorney general may adopt rules and regulations for any other processes the attorney general deems necessary to carry out the provisions of this chapter.
It's a blank check to basically say anything else.
Like that could be the attorney general gets to know who has a 3D printer, what they're using it for at any time, reports back to him.
It's really scary.
And then the other one I wanted to read is it's if you're caught with one of these digital blueprints or you've printed it off, you are guilty until proven innocent that your intent was to manufacture a gun.
It says, it says, if you're caught with the digital firearm manufacturing code for a firearm, it creates a rebuttable presumption of an intent to unlawfully distribute the code or manufacture a firearm in violation of this section.
So it's a rebuttable presumption, which means the presumption is that you intended to sell that, distribute it, use it to illegally make a gun.
And to me, that's a glaring First Amendment issue.
I mean, I should be able to have a copy of the anarchist handbook or whatever it is without the government putting me in prison.
Right.
And it's scary.
Rebuttable presumption means the onus is on you to prove you did not intend to distribute or employ it.
Right.
So this is all frightening.
Crazy.
And we haven't even touched the fact that it is inconceivable that you could properly equip these printers to successfully recognize a gun or a component of a gun.
Right.
It can't be done.
No.
So A, we are jeopardizing innovation and manufacture in the state of Washington.
Maybe we're going to be jeopardizing the availability of printers because I don't know what liability the printer manufacturers are going to have if their code isn't sufficiently restrictive.
But the thing is preposterous.
It reminds me a little bit of the fact that in Great Britain, there are regulations on knives.
Now, knives are dangerous.
Yes, they can be used to murder you and it happens.
But you can't regulate a society at that level.
No.
Right.
This is a encroaching tyranny to solve a problem at a level that A, you couldn't conceivably solve it and that B, it is unwise to try because the cost you will pay is so high for doing it.
So It is.
The reflexive understanding, or failure to understand guns on the part of the Democratic left is so profound that it is deranging, and it is causing policy recklessness that we're going to suffer for in ways that we don't even understand.
Well, and it's not about public safety.
It's absolutely not about public safety.
It's asinine, this idea that, oh, we're doing this to keep the public safe because they're doing the opposite of what they would do if they wanted to keep the public safe.
I mean, for instance, they want the splashy headlines.
They're going to ban high capacity magazines.
They're going to ban quote unquote assault weapons, which account for such a small, small fraction of the fatal shootings in America.
If they were really about regulating the guns most used, it would be handguns, right?
And so that's just stupid.
They do it for the headlines because school shootings are bad and that's usually used in a school shooting, but totally disproportionate.
And one thing I noticed, so I started doing this work when I was at Fox 13, which is a local Fox affiliate in Seattle.
It was weird to me.
And this is kind of maybe I was like still considered, I mean, I've always been an independent, but like definitely was becoming very right of Seattle Center.
They would always plead down gun crimes because they're soft on crime and, oh my gosh, you know, criminals.
And I covered this stories not too many years ago where this guy, you know, had a girlfriend here, moved across the country together, wasn't working out.
He was abusive.
So she moved back.
Well, he stalked her across the country and he executed her in her new apartment she was moving into south of Seattle.
I covered this case and the parents had called me because they were about to give this guy seven years in a plea deal.
He used a gun to execute his girlfriend.
They were going to give him seven years in a plea deal.
She was white.
He was black.
They tried to make it about race and all these things that all disproportionately impacted.
One of the things they did is they pled away the firearm enhancement.
So in the state of Washington, if you use a firearm in the commission of a violent felony, you're supposed to get a firearm enhancement, which is five years hard time.
That means that you can't earn a single day good time on that time.
It is five years on top of anything else you got, and you will never be able to earn a day off that sentence.
And so I thought, in a state like Washington that's supposed to take gun violence so seriously, why are they pleading away this enhancement that actually punishes people who actually use guns to commit violent offenses?
And we started looking through documents, thousands and thousands of cases in King County, which is the county Seattle's in.
Almost every case we found of a crime committed with a firearm, they were pleading away the firearm enhancement.
They were cutting a deal with the suspect.
At the same time in Olympia, they were introducing bills.
One of them would have taken drive-by shootings off the list of crimes that are aggravated murder.
So they wanted to reduce the punishment for drive-by shooters who murder someone.
So I'm like, wait a second, you're passing all these laws because you say gun violence is a problem and we need to control guns.
And then you're letting the only people who actually have a problem with firearms off the hook.
That tells you everything that you need to know.
They just want good law-abiding citizens to be restricted in their gun ownership.
And they want hell on the streets so they can have another excuse.
People feel so unsafe.
They can have another excuse to control people's lives.
Well, you know, this is the concern amongst conservatives is that many things are used to justify an eventual radical reduction or elimination of guns from the populace, which then does raise the question about how much more vulnerable we are to tyranny of the kind that we've seen in Australia, in Britain.
Yeah.
Or worse, right?
As bad as tyranny is in those two places, it's far better than it might be so far.
That's why so many conservatives have voting accidents.
I've heard that.
Yes, very common amongst conservatives.
Yes.
Now, the trying to figure out how to address it.
The pattern is that if the hypothesis in conservative circles is accurate, that something is attempting to justify the elimination of some or all guns, then you would expect exactly the pattern that you're talking about.
Voting Against Your City's Best Interest00:14:44
The violence is useful as part of the argument for why guns have to be taken away.
So the attempt to reduce the actual violence is anemic, whereas the portrayal of the violence is not only accentuated, but it is, in my opinion, divorced from reality in the following way.
As a ardent supporter of the Second Amendment, I believe that a discussion of the impact of guns has to include the high price that we pay for readily available firearms.
That is part of the equation.
But I don't take anybody seriously who's not also willing to talk about the contribution to things like mass shootings of SSRIs.
I'm not telling you what that contribution is, but I'm telling you, if you want to talk about the guns and you don't want to talk about the contribution of mental health issues, if you don't want to talk about the number of trans people who have been responsible for recent shootings, if you don't want to talk about the contribution of SSRIs, not only to mass shootings, but also to suicides, if you don't want to talk about those other things, it's because you have a political agenda and you're not really interested in the violence that you want the rest of us focused on.
All of it has to be on the table.
The contribution of the guns is part of it, but it is by far not the only component.
And we have to talk about all of these things.
And to be regulating 3D printers as if you're serious about gun violence, when in fact, when gun violence actually happens, you're not serious about prosecuting the people who are engaged in it in a way that is sufficiently deterrent, then this is not that discussion.
No.
And the public has been dragged in as if we're fighting to protect our children.
And the answer is, no, the people who are interested in focusing on one side of this issue and not the others are demonstrably not interested in protecting children.
If they were, they'd want to talk about all of it.
Yeah, 100%.
I mean, everything.
And I'm sorry, but if you're interested in protecting children, but you also support politicians who support the mutilation of children, that's an issue I just cannot abide by, which I just lose my mind over.
But yeah, I mean, if I'm a reasonable person, I think.
Can you call yourself a reasonable person?
Is that allowed?
You can, but an unreasonable person would definitely do it.
Oh, okay, great.
Well, then take it how you want it.
I'm a reasonable person.
If we were doing everything, if we were enforcing all the laws on the books and there really was teeth and punishments and all these things that were sufficiently, as you said, sufficient to stop the behavior, and we were still dealing with a lot of crimes committed with a gun.
I would sit down at the table and say, what is not working here, right?
We have these laws, we have these enhancements, you're using them.
Why do we continue to have so many people?
But until you do that, I'm not having a conversation with anybody about gun control.
Right.
Ever.
No, I mean, look, the problem is we have way too many killings.
Yes.
That's true.
But in addition to all of the other factors that we have put on the table, the failure to be honest about the number of times that somebody with a gun does stop a violent crime is also telling.
The point is any reasonable citizen should want a net analysis.
What is the net impact of this?
How could the net impact be made far more positive?
These are all questions every reasonable person should be interested in.
But that conversation is simply not happening because one side wants to portray the analysis as utterly black and white and those of us who see it otherwise as insane.
Yeah.
Well, and it took me a month to get a gun after that knife incident.
I'm sorry.
This is America like, what if you have a domestic violence situation where you think you're going to get killed?
And now we have all these police departments in these blue states that are dramatically understaffed.
And I think this is all by design too.
I could get into my conspiracies about it.
But, you know, you have life or death emergencies sometimes with Seattle PD that takes them 11 minutes to get there.
Imagine being raped and it takes police 11 minutes to get there.
Imagine being, you know, shot and you're bleeding out takes police 11 minutes to get there.
You know, so people who need to protect themselves against rising rates of crime, low police staffing, there's more reason than ever before to be armed.
But it took me a month to be able to go through the process to get a firearm in Washington State and starting, I believe, in 2027, I'm sure somebody will correct me, you now have to go and take training.
Even somebody who's owned guns for their whole life, if you want a new one, you have to go take training at a range.
And it's all designed to make it so prohibitive and so time intensive to arm yourself that you don't arm yourself at all.
And I'll also just point out, and you can check the statistics on it, since Washington state banned the sale of so-called assault weapons and since they banned the sale of so-called high-capacity magazines, which is any magazine that holds more than 10 rounds, shootings have gone up.
The instances of individual shots fired.
So if it's one shooting, you shoot five bullets, more shots fired, homicides have gone up.
So those laws, which you said were going to make us safe, I don't know if it correlates, but certainly we're not, there's not less gun crime.
It was certainly not effective.
It was certainly not effective.
Yeah.
It's fascinating.
All right.
It seems to me that there are a couple other questions.
I had one question.
Maybe the two of them are going to end up being two sides of the same coin.
I am perplexed when I look at what should be my folks over on the left and I watch them repeatedly vote for things that make life worse and not better.
Yeah.
Right.
The idea of voting for a city government that makes excuses for criminals, that fails to control homelessness, drug abuse on the street.
This makes life worse in the places where people vote for it.
And you would think, I would think at least, that having thought that certain things were true, that if we vote for these policies, things will get better, and then watching them get worse would cause them to rethink and say, huh, that did not turn out to be true.
Maybe I need to rethink something.
The failure to do that over the course now of decades shocks me.
Yeah.
You're voting to make your own city worse.
Yeah.
Right.
I could imagine you voting in ways that affect other people far from you in that way.
It's hard for me to understand how you make an error that causes your own street to be inhospitable to your own children.
Yeah.
It's especially perplexing when the left, and it is true, likes to talk about how they're the educated ones.
And it is true.
People who vote Democrat are more educated.
And that just makes no sense to me.
It's like, if you are more educated, you must see this.
And we see in Washington's day, and the same is true for the other very blue progressive states, you know, the leaders here have made a good, they've done a good job at making everything about Trump since 2016.
And the Trump brand is so toxic here.
His approval rating is horrible.
And so this has just become a very convenient way for them to dupe people into not paying attention to the destruction of the state.
And it's like you could have, and we do, record homelessness, record crime, record unaffordability, record drug overdoses.
You could have all those things.
You have record number of businesses leaving.
Taxpayer leaves Washington state every 27 minutes.
You could have all of those things be true.
And then they just say, but Donald Trump, people are like, you got me there.
And I just can't, even as someone who used to have TDS, I can't fathom that.
And it's bothers me.
I thought a lot personally about running for office in Washington.
I don't know if it's something that I would ever do because people are so loyal to the Democratic Party that has done nothing for them besides virtue signal.
And like we can talk about abortion.
I'm very liberal on most of the social issues.
I think that's maybe just a generational thing.
But I can't explain it.
I have no explanation for a business owner in downtown Seattle that's seen their taxes go up, $14 billion in new taxes just last year, that's seen crime that has homeless people and drug addicts and people pissing and defecating outside their doorstep.
That's like more of this because Donald Trump is bad.
Donald Trump is not to blame for the decline of the West Coast.
West Coast leaders have been on a slow, steady decline for 20 years.
Yes.
And there's a part of me, it doesn't make immediate sense, but there's a part of me that looks at, for example, the tax regime in the West Coast states and thinks there's something just odd about this.
Because as much as I used to scoff at conservatives who thought that lowering taxes was going to increase revenue, you know, to a point it can.
But in this case, if you've got punitive taxation that is driving businesses to go elsewhere, then the people who you would like to lift out of poverty or austerity or whatever it is, the downtrodden people that you're trying to protect are suffering from the tax policy that is driving away the businesses that would create wealth in the state.
You want the state to create wealth.
And the question, you should just simply ask yourself, which of these things will work better to help the people I'm trying to help?
Would it work better to make the state hospitable to business and do nothing about trying to socially engineer a place?
Have there be more jobs because there's more business going on and those jobs, yes, will flow unevenly to different people.
And you'll have some people who can't be helped by jobs because they can't hold one down.
But would more wealth creation in the state be better than social engineering?
Right.
I think that's an obvious question.
Right.
And I think the answer is pretty obvious too, especially once you've lived under the tax regimes in, you know, I've now lived in Oregon and Washington and California.
And the point is, it's actually one really feels like they're being punished.
Oh, 100%.
And you, you know, this is unpopular, but I said this.
I did an interview.
It's like two hours long.
You should really watch it with a socialist state lawmaker.
Sean Scott is an avowed socialist.
He was elected by Seattle proper to represent them in the state house in Washington.
For whatever reason, he agreed to come do an interview with me.
And the only, the clip you might have seen because it kind of went everywhere was I asked him to give me a good example of socialism.
And do you know what he said?
I know what I would have said.
Well, he said Cuba.
I just thought, because in my head, I was like, oh, he's going to give me some soft European example of like socialism light that's underpinned by capitalism.
No, he went Cuba.
And I was just stunned.
And I thought, Sean, people like die on rafts to flee from Cuba.
How could you?
So this is the mindset that we're dealing with.
I mean, he said during this interview, and look, you could say, well, this is just one.
No, he represents Seattle.
He said that it would be better to get rid of Amazon and replace it with a collective of workers that could replace what Amazon does.
So you're dealing with like a very broken mindset.
There's so many concrete examples of taxation that make no sense.
For example, Seattle has something called the Jumpstart Tax.
It's a tax on high-paying jobs.
So I think it's over like 120,000.
I might be a little off on that.
You basically get taxed.
So it's really meant to focus on the Amazons and the tech.
So these are the same people who say, pay a living wage.
Then it's like, well, not that much.
If you pay people that much, we're going to tax it.
And it's scared jobs out.
Amazon immediately announced we're moving 10,000 jobs to Bellevue, which is a more affluent suburb of Seattle.
And so now 10,000 jobs and people fail to understand what goes away with those nice high-paying jobs.
Well, you need less coffee shops when the jobs go away.
You need less, you know, gyms.
You need less dry cleaners.
So now you've all screwed over with your virtue signaling the people you say you're trying to help.
Right.
It doesn't.
And if you thought this was true, then you should detect that it didn't work and you should change course.
What's your example of good socialism?
The fire department.
Oh, no, look, it might.
We're going with a country, but okay, go ahead.
My real argument is this.
And this is going to spook all the conservatives in my audience.
Please be calm and hear the whole thing.
Okay.
Don't be calm.
No, be calm because I'm your friend.
But here's the point.
Socialism cannot work as a system.
Right.
Period the end for an obvious reason.
The point is it punishes those who are highly productive and it rewards those who are lazy.
And any system like that is going to tear itself apart.
However, as an ingredient, there are times when you need more of it and there are times when you need less of it.
And the fire department is a great example.
It's a wonderful thing that you can pick up the phone and you can have highly trained, mostly dudes, but whoever is highly trained and capable of doing the job show up and bail your ass out because something went wrong, right?
That's a good thing.
And it didn't used to be this way.
It used to be done by the market.
You used to have to buy fire services.
So my feeling is, hey, well done.
This is a good example of where this is something we want.
We can talk about what role it should be playing in education.
I now, as somebody who would have supported almost any investment in education and am now spooked as hell at what it is that we're disguising as education and funneling into people's heads in public educational settings.
But nonetheless, do I think the idea of us collectively investing in the upgrading of the population by giving them skills and insight and bringing them into the good parts of our culture, I think that's a good idea in principle.
I don't trust any of these people to do it.
Yeah.
But it's a good idea as long as there's a path out.
I mean, we could segue to education, but I just have to take umbrage with the firefighter example.
As, you know, much as I love our friendly neighborhood firefighters and when they, you know, have to take their shirt off to resuscitate a tiny kitten they rescued from a tree, sign me up.
Nothing does nothing for me.
Sign me up.
Protecting Gains Without Falling Through Cracks00:14:51
Okay, whatever you say.
But I mean, Palisades, tell me that the socialist firefighters worked in the Palisades.
I mean, Rick Crusoe only saved his shopping centers in there because he had private firefighters.
He could come in and save all these things.
I mean, that was a failure of the government from the top bottom, not to have, you know, the water available and all these things.
It wasn't the firefighters at an individual level, but, you know, a poorly run government with its socialized fire department sure let the Palisades burn to the ground.
Okay.
I think this is the perfect example because the basic point is, what does it mean to say, you know, that the fire department is a good example of socialism as an ingredient properly applied.
Well, it doesn't mean that I want to see a lottery for who gets to be the firefighter.
Yes.
I want to see a meritocracy with respect to who gets to be the firefighters and who gets to be the fire chief.
Yeah.
Right.
Like, I don't need a black queer fire chief.
I think that was.
I'm fine with it if this is the most qualified person, but I want the most qualified person to do that job.
And I want that person screaming bloody murder if the state is undercutting them by not allowing them to have the water that they're going to need in a perfectly foreseeable fire or something like it.
So, you know, again, it's an ingredient, right?
Salt is an ingredient.
Do I like salt?
Yes.
Do I want to eat salt?
No.
I want the right amount of salt.
Yeah.
Right.
And the right amount of socialism is the same thing.
There's no right amount of socialism, but I get your point.
There's no right amount of socialism unless it has its shirt off and it's rescued getting from a tree.
Okay.
So, and, you know, to my earlier point about the part of the collapse that the right is not taking responsibility for.
Yeah.
And I will just, and this gets to the question that I think we should close on.
You wanted to know how the hell I could still be a liberal in light of all that I've seen.
And I wanted to answer that question for you.
The first thing to say is if you don't like communism, then you have to figure out how to address the problem of civilization so that communism does not keep evolving on you.
And my point would be, every time you lean too heavily on the free market, it's going to generate chronic losers who are going to want to overthrow your system.
And if you generate enough of those chronic losers, they will, and they will do so in the name of communism, and it won't work.
And we can't afford to have that as a cycle.
So I would argue the very best way to run a civilization is to immunize people from truly bad luck and not immunize them from bad decisions.
Right.
If you have truly bad luck and you are facing, you know, ruinous medical bills having nothing to do with what you chose to eat or how to live your life, you just had bad luck.
There's no reason in the world that that burden should fall on you.
We should distribute that burden, right?
Because it could just as easily have been any of the rest of us and none of us want to have our families wiped out over this.
On the other hand, if you are choosing to do things that result in your misfortune, that's nature's way of teaching you how not to do those things anymore.
And so we need to do a good job of protecting people against truly bad luck.
And we need to stop protecting people from bad decisions, right?
If you do that, then I don't think you do create a chronic class of losers who want to overthrow your system because it becomes possible to take yourself from where you are and to elevate yourself.
And that's really when society works best.
We create the most wealth, not when a tiny number of people are really well armed to compete in the market and other people can't figure out how to do it, but we all benefit.
We get richer when the maximum number of people have the tools to compete in the market and they have access to the market and they have an incentive to do it.
If you create that world, then the point is the reason for violence is radically reduced because you could be investing in violence and risking going to prison or you could be figuring out what needs aren't being met and how to meet them or what could be done better than something that's being done already and providing a superior product.
You can be investing in figuring out how to make wealth, which it just makes the world better.
So see, but I don't disagree with any of that.
Of course.
And I don't call myself liberal.
I know.
But it's interesting because I guess when I look at that, I think of it for different reasons.
Society benefits when somebody, I love the way you put that, with bad luck, right?
Society benefits.
And I think also it's in the good nature of most Americans to want to do something about somebody who is truly just down on their luck.
Yep.
And so to me, I see that as a conservative value as well, which is, yeah, we don't want anyone to get to fall through the cracks through no fault of their own.
And the ultimate drain on society, and if you want to look at it from a, from a tax, from a monetary perspective, there's less of a drain on society if we can give them a hand up than if we just let them fall deeper and deeper into ruin, turn to crime, do all these things.
I think I want to know why you say on the left or liberal at all.
Why pick a label for yourself?
Yep.
I haven't told you yet why.
I've sort of set the stage by telling you what world we are.
Oh, and I rudely interrupted you.
No, you did not interrupt me at all.
But the answer to your question is the following thing.
And I run afoul of everybody's terminology here.
I don't draw a huge distinction between a progressive, a leftist, a liberal.
I would say a classical liberal is really a conservative.
A classical liberal is conserving the gains of past liberals.
I am that, but I am beyond that also an honest to goodness progressive liberal.
And I'll tell you why.
I think we are in a terrible crisis as a result of the fact that as brilliant as our founders were, they couldn't have understood the world we live in.
The world we live in has marched on for many reasons, having to do with new geopolitical realities, having to do with technological realities.
We don't have the wisdom for this.
It's not in our Bibles.
It's not in our Constitution.
We got a problem.
And so my argument would be the following thing.
My liberal fellows fail reliably on the following count.
They do not understand that they have ideas about how to make the world better, but that they are inherently intervening in a complex system.
And when you intervene in a complex system, it is literally impossible to predict the outcome with any precision.
Unintended consequences are guaranteed.
So you should be very cautious when you are intervening in a complex system to make sure that A, it really does do the thing that you wanted it to do, and B, that the net effect is still positive in light of all of the things you didn't see coming that also flowed from the policy that you instituted.
So I have terrible trepidation about change.
The more radical the change, the more dangerous.
However, I'm even a radical because I don't think anything short of radical change is going to save us.
I think our crisis is too severe.
And so what we need are hard-headed people to look at the problems we actually face, to make the highest quality guesses as to what might lead us in the right direction with respect to addressing these problems, and then to pay ruthless attention to what actually happened as a result of the changes that we made rather than what we thought was going to happen or argued was going to happen.
Right.
Only this way, we can't blueprint our way out of this puzzle.
We certainly can't conserve our way out of this puzzle.
That's the reason I'm not a conservative.
And that's what I was going to ask, because I think if I could learn something from what you just said, the issue with conservatives being they're too focused on the blueprint that already exists.
Well, they're not thinking outside a box.
They're not.
Here's the reason I get along with them so well.
Yeah.
Is that I think they are really focused on something vital, which is taking all of the gains that our forefathers have made and protecting them.
Right.
That's what I see conservatives doing.
They're looking at all of the stuff we've achieved and they're saying, how dare you?
And you don't get to take that apart.
We are keeping this and you can pry it from our cold dead fingers.
And frankly, I'm with them on that.
But you can't conserve your way out of this puzzle.
You can take all of the gains we've made.
It's not enough.
We have work we have to do.
We have to make progress.
It's frightening to have to make progress, but that's the nature of this moment in history.
And so I want us to put our conservative minds together with our liberal progressive minds and figure out how we're going to get out of the nosedive while not destroying the gains of conservatives, which frankly were all made by liberals to begin with.
Right.
The ideas of liberals are now conservative.
That's what it is.
No, I think it's really well thought out.
And I believe you see even some signs of that with President Trump.
I mean, I don't really think he's a conservative.
I agree.
You know, the thing he's doing right now with Trump accounts is a dramatically new idea.
And to get the private sector to buy in in a way that you have babies that are now being born starting off with the ability to build wealth in their lives, which I think could, you know, fix a substantial issue in our country that was born out of slavery, which is a lack of generational wealth that has led to some of the discrepancies that we see in society.
So I agree with you.
I mean, I think that conservatives can be a little stodgy and stuck in old ways, but I'm okay with trying new ideas.
I'm okay with trying new things for a new era.
But as you pointed out, the cider in whether that's success is whether people can back away from it when it doesn't work.
It's so important.
So I would just argue.
So I study complex systems in my scientific side.
And the point is, if you're thinking about blueprinting a solution, you've already misunderstood the puzzle.
And this is the problem with the Democrats.
They know what they want to do and they know what's going to happen when they do it.
And they will convince themselves that it did happen, whether or not that's the outcome.
The two modes of thought that you have to have are navigation and prototyping.
We are trying to go someplace that none of us have seen.
We can navigate there.
We can make a change.
Did we get closer to the thing we're trying to get to or farther away?
Our values are the North Star in that puzzle.
We are trying to build a civilization that matches our values better than our current one.
You make a move.
Did it get closer or farther?
You make a different move.
The point is you can get there incrementally in that way.
And the other way to think of it is prototyping, right?
You have an idea for a machine that's going to make life great.
You build it.
The first version is so inefficient and clumsy and prone to failure that it couldn't possibly be worth the effort you put into it.
It's not going to save you more effort than you invested in making it, but it will teach you how to make the second version, which teaches you how to make the third version.
And sooner or later, you get to something amazing, which is what you had in mind, but you couldn't get there directly.
Right.
You're so smart.
No wonder so many people watch this show.
I've learned so much.
But it also, you know, it does challenge sort of my way of thinking of liberal versus conservative a little bit, but it also makes you really revel at the founding fathers because that process you're describing there and you talk about, you know, how smart they were.
And think of us trying to do that now.
And they did a pretty damn good job at navigating.
And they didn't even really have to.
I mean, they did something nobody'd ever done.
And for the most part, it's kept us whole.
It has.
That's pretty cool.
And, you know, I'm far from the first person to say this, but they would likely be shocked at how little we've changed the system in light. of how much, how different the world is from the one that they knew.
I think maybe their, maybe their biggest error was in sort of echoing the Ten Commandments with the Bill of Rights.
They made it more sacred.
And as much as I think we need to completely honor the things that motivated them and the objectives that they set forth, they built a document that can't possibly keep up with the pace of change.
I don't want to give up any of the rights in it, but we need to start thinking about how to, how to build it out.
And I mean, that's frightening.
I don't want to.
We'll make it too easy.
We would, I don't know.
We would be in quite the predicament, I think, in the last five years, especially if it had been too easy to change those foundational documents.
Oh, yeah.
We're not up to it.
The population is not up to it.
I think you're up to it, Brett.
I would trust you.
You've been saying very nice things about me.
I appreciate that.
Well, that's because, you know, I want to be invited back one day.
No, but I think if we would put a little room of modern day founding fathers in who could really noodle on it in a meaningful way, I'd definitely put you in that room.
Oh, thank you.
Yeah.
I don't know who else I'd put in the room.
I'll have to think about that.
All right.
Yeah.
Do you know anything else about the room?
No, I just thought maybe I thought I thought maybe you'd respond by saying something nice about me, but my efforts at trying to get a compliment out of you have just failed.
No, I'm kidding.
I'm kidding.
No, I just value it.
I mean, I think that we, it's, it's so hard to have conversations like, like this, you know, in certainly in legacy news or any sort of form of regular media.
And I just continue to be so, I mean, there's, there's too many podcasts out there.
Can we agree on that?
I have a, I have a policy idea.
Who are you thinking of getting rid of?
Well, no, this is my policy idea.
If I'm ever president of the United States, total embargo on the importation of any new podcasting equipment.
The only way you can start a new podcast is if somebody stops theirs and gives you their equipment.
And I think that's really what we need to do.
Flawed Equipment Embargo00:01:04
But I'm grateful for this space because I just, I think you have a lot of interesting thoughts that make me rethink maybe how I perceive what's going on.
So unfortunately, I know the flaw in your plan already.
We don't even have to.
Somebody will 3D print their own product.
No, they'll make that illegal.
Here's the flaw is that along the way to building a podcast, you inevitably make so many equipment errors that every big podcast has a closet full.
I could start three other podcasts with the microphones that don't quite work.
Yeah.
So it would take a while to exhaust all of that built up equipment.
There's a lot of it.
Yeah.
Anyway, it has been a real pleasure.
I will think very hard about how to take compliments better and deliver them so that next time you come, I will be ready.
Okay, good.
But anyway, Brandy Cruz, it's been great and good luck fighting the good fight here in the Pacific Northwest.