Fri Episode #2186: Federalizing Police to Deliberately Provoke Conflict
01:01:14 — America Trapped Between Federal Force and Street Mobs
Knight frames the crisis as citizens caught between militant federal enforcement and violent activist mobs, with no legitimate authority protecting the public.
01:01:46 — Federalization of Policing as a Deliberate Provocation
Knight argues Trump is intentionally federalizing law enforcement to manufacture conflict rather than resolve immigration failures.
01:03:20 — Sheriff Mack and the Supreme Court Ban on Federal Commandeering
The discussion revisits Mack v. USA, affirming that the federal government cannot force local sheriffs to enforce federal law.
01:12:20 — Sheriffs as the Constitutional “Double Security” for the People
Mack explains the sheriff’s role as a locally accountable check against both state and federal overreach.
01:14:35 — The Renee Good Shooting and the Failure of Police Restraint
Knight challenges the use of lethal force in Minnesota, arguing escalation was unnecessary and accountability was deliberately avoided.
01:20:44 — ICE Raids Without Warrants and Citizen Terror
Knight details cases of lawful residents violently detained without investigation, showing how enforcement chaos destroys trust.
01:27:11 — Interposition: Peaceful Resistance to Federal Abuse
Sheriff Mack outlines interposition as a lawful, non-violent means for local officials to block unconstitutional actions.
01:46:21 — Trump Uses Conflict as a Tool to Manufacture Emergency Power
Knight and Eric Peters argue Trump deliberately provokes confrontation to justify Insurrection Act–style authority.
01:49:39 — Conservatives Cheer the Police State That Will Target Them Next
Knight warns that celebrating state violence ensures it will eventually be turned inward.
01:54:18 — Normalizing Military-Style Kidnappings on American Streets
Knight warns Americans are being conditioned to accept masked agents, unmarked vehicles, and disappearances as normal.
02:00:01 — Probable Cause Is Dead and Dragnet Policing Is Normalized
Knight connects ICE tactics to sobriety checkpoints and forced blood draws as part of Fourth Amendment collapse.
02:22:14 — Connected Vehicles Mean You Don’t Own Your Property
Knight closes by warning that AI-controlled, remotely disabled cars prove modern ownership is conditional and revocable.
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In a world of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
It's the David Knight Show as the clock strikes 13.
It's Friday, the 23rd of January, year of our Lord 2026.
Well, today we have two never-before-aired interviews about current events.
We have Sheriff Richard Mack of Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association.
And of course, Sheriff Mack in the past has had a Supreme Court case that he won fighting the federal commandeering of local law enforcement.
And this is something that I think is really relevant to what is happening in Minnesota.
And when we look at what is happening as Trump is federalizing policing, creating conflict, the question is, could sheriffs play a role in easing this transition?
Could they be the adults in the room?
And as we see these warring gangs of anti-FA and ICE attacking each other, attacking innocent people, we're going to have someone in the second half of the show who is not on either side of these different tribes that are warring with each other.
Eric Peters of EricPetersAutos.com is going to be joining us.
And of course, Eric Peters is not on either of these sides.
He's on the side of liberty and of mobility.
I think you'll find it an interesting show.
Stay with us.
Well, joining us now is Sheriff Richard Mack.
It's a real pleasure to talk to him.
And I wanted to get his take on the things that are happening in Minnesota and elsewhere with ICE.
And of course, Sheriff Mack has Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association.org, CSPOA.org.
And he's very strong on the role of sheriffs and peace officers under the Constitution.
And Sheriff Mack has been famously involved in Mack versus USA challenging the Brady Act.
And remember, Ronald Reagan signed onto that in 1991, but he publicly supported it.
But it's actually Clinton who signed the law in 1993.
And a key provision of that, which I think is kind of relevant to what we're seeing right now, is the fact that the federal law was compelling sheriffs to enforce federal law.
And Sheriff Mack pushed back against that, and the Supreme Court agreed with him.
And so that's something that we've seen now supported many times.
People talk about non-commandeering.
If the federal government has some law or issue that they want to enforce, they cannot commandeer state law enforcement or offices to enforce federal law.
That was a key outcome of that Supreme Court case.
There's also the issue of nullification.
So we've got a lot of people out there saying we want to get rid of ICE.
And so I want to talk about all these issues with Sheriff Mac.
Thank you so much for joining us, Sheriff.
Well, you're welcome.
It's great to be back with you.
And you always bring back a lot of old memories.
Well, that's what happens when we're old, isn't it?
That's all you got is memories.
The MAC VUS, you know, that was my calling card issue.
As a matter of fact, it's the only reason you and I know each other.
Yeah, that's right.
Absolutely.
Yeah, let's talk about your take on what's happening with Minnesota because, again, I know you and I both know that the federal government has the authority to enforce immigration.
That is a delegated power to the federal government by the states.
And so it doesn't apply to the 10th Amendment protections.
It doesn't apply to nullification issues as well.
But then in my mind, there's an issue about how the law is going to be enforced and a disturbing trend that we see of federalization of law enforcement, which I would think that you would be opposed to as you support the sheriffs.
And I think it's key to have sheriffs who, more than any others, are directly accountable to the people because they have to stand for election.
So what is your take about what is going on as we see this rolling out?
Well, I'm glad you reinforced the existence of ICE because the federal government does have that delegated authority.
Yes.
And how about Article 4, Section 4 that even clarifies it rather stronger that, and boy, wouldn't you love to see this happen, that we actually followed Article 4, Section 4, where it says the United States shall guarantee to each state a Republican form of government.
Wow.
Wouldn't that be wonderful if the federal government was Republican and that all the states were Republican instead of these made-up dictatorial democracies, which emphasizes America was never supposed to be a democracy in the first place.
That's right.
Let alone a dictatorial one.
But yes, and then right after that, it says, and protect them from invasion.
And I'd say after 20, 30 million people have invaded our country, that's probably qualifies as an invasion.
Yeah, I call this an invasion from the very beginning, and we got some pushback and some criticism from mainstream media for calling it.
Well, what would you call it?
Yeah, that's what I called it.
It was an invasion.
Well, they even in their debates, they got into the awkward situation of trying to straddle this idea as to whether or not people who come here in violation of the immigration laws were actually committing a crime, whether they were here illegally or not.
And so I think we all agree on that.
I think the issue, however, is, you know, we look at the end versus the means issue.
And I think that's a very key issue.
And when we look at how this is being done, we have to pay attention to that.
You know, we've had the sanctuary cities that are out there saying that we're going to give sanctuary to people who come here illegally in violation of the law.
And they don't have any constitutional authority for that.
We've had some sanctuary cities for the Second Amendment.
And of course, you know, you were very supportive of the Second Amendment.
That was the key issue that was there in addition to the commandeering of local law enforcement to enforce federal law.
But the central issue, of course, was gun control that was there.
And so you can have a sanctuary city to protect the Second Amendment or to protect any other rights that are especially the ones that are particularly enumerated in the Constitution that we have, but they don't have any authority for a sanctuary city for immigration.
Well, the states cannot.
And this is really close to treason, probably is treason.
Well, and the Democrat Party has been committing treason for a long time.
And even with the immigration issue, a nice issue, they're showing that all the more.
But first of all, let's be sure that we know what we're talking about here.
And most of the blue states don't have any clue what's going on.
You cannot, AGs, governors, and state legislatures, you cannot pass, quote, laws or pretended legislation, as the Declaration of Independence calls it.
You can't enact pretended legislation that violates a law.
Okay.
You can't make murder a sanctuary.
You can't make illegal immigration a sanctuary issue where you're actually giving them asylum and you're aiding and abetting.
Read the definition of treason in Article 3 of the Constitution.
You will see that aiding and abetting the enemy and giving comfort to the enemy is treason.
Does it take very long for you to see what has happened with us allowing and actually encouraging and literally flying them in, the cartels, international terrorist groups, such as the Somali terrorist groups that are here, and even electing one of them to the United States Congress who is so totally anti-American, we're not just giving her aid and comfort, we're giving her position in Congress.
Yeah, I absolutely agree with that position on that.
And, you know, when you look at nullification, it's there for situations like, let's say we have a Democrat administration heavy on gun control.
They decide they're just going to take all the guns Australian style.
Well, it would certainly be incumbent on the people at the state level who have also sworn to uphold the Constitution to uphold the Second Amendment rights.
That's where the sheriffs come in.
That's right.
So they would be there to nullify the federal actions that are trying to violate the Constitution.
So these principles of non-commandeering and nullification are very strong, important principles there with the 10th Amendment.
However, things start to get blurred when we look at the actual contours of how this is working out.
You know, is it, again, we understand the end of all this and we understand that we do want to have borders that are controlled.
I just have an issue when we have a situation that has gone through Republican and Democrat for the longest time.
They've used this as a football, the open border issue.
And we saw with Trump at the beginning of his administration, that was one of the key issues that he got elected on was to build a wall and to stop it.
Well, they didn't do that.
And immediately after Trump got elected in 2017, there was a huge falloff in terms of people coming across the borders because they thought Trump was going to be really tough on it.
And then they realized that he really wasn't doing anything about it.
So then we started having the caravans.
They escalated it.
And so when you have a situation like that, you have the escalation of Biden coming in and rewarding this.
You have the unconstitutional welfare state that then is applied to illegal aliens who are criminally here.
And you put them on welfare.
I've talked about the welfare magnet.
I said, stop the magnet.
I mean, even if you have a wall, you can be pulling people through the wall, over the wall, under the wall, around the wall with that magnet.
And so you have to stop that.
So there's a lot of things like that that can be done without the phony solution of having an authoritarian federalized police that are also militarized who do not have to be accountable to the law, evidently, because I see things from JD Vance talking about how they have absolute immunity.
I don't think that is the case.
And so I'd like to get your take on that.
No one's supposed to have absolute immunity, and that includes judges.
And if we would just hold judges accountable, that would be an amazing step towards restoring justice to America.
But look, this is the problem.
And I'll quote my Supreme Court case just real quickly.
Scalia actually quotes some of the Federalist papers in my most powerful constitutional decision.
He takes us through a history lesson and he says at one point, hence a double security arises to the rights of the people.
How does that happen?
Quoting again, the different governments will control each other.
So it's actually the job and duty of the sheriff to control out-of-control government.
And when they come into the states and say, you're going to do this, you're going to enact gun control, you're going to take guns away from people, or you're not going to do anything about illegal aliens coming into your country and committing all sorts of crimes, human trafficking, sexual exploitation of children, fentanyl trafficking.
And the cartels and international terrorist groups are now joining forces and setting up shop in America.
And that's all happening.
And now we've seen, of course, the ubiquitous, humongous, gargantuan fraud that these organizations, that these newly formed illegal aliens have formed all across America, the worst cities being Columbus, Minnesota, and Seattle.
And Seattle is right now not going after them, but they're going after the sheriffs.
They're attacking the sheriffs for trying to help with deportation.
Now, let's be very clear on this issue.
Deportation, whether or not the sheriffs or local authorities help or don't help, is up to them.
No one.
And I've talked to Tom Holman about this, and he totally agreed with me.
No one can force the sheriff either way.
That includes the state legislatures and governors and AGs who are trying to do that in Washington state right now.
I agree.
Yeah, you can't force them.
They're independent and they need to stay that way.
That's right.
You can't force them to help.
You can't force them to not help, you know, which is what you're talking about in Washington.
You got sheriffs who want to help with deportation and the state is saying you can't help with deportation.
But the sheriff is independent and accountable to the people and taking an oath to the Constitution.
Technical Lethal Force Controversy00:15:30
So they need to be able to make that determination themselves.
That's what you're saying.
I agree with that.
And so you've got to save.
Let's look at one other issue in Minnesota, though.
Yeah.
And that was the shooting of Renee Good.
Sure.
First of all, if you look at the technical requirements for using lethal force, I believe in most cases that are similar to this, that she brought this on.
She caused it.
And whether she hit the officer or not isn't really the issue.
Did she try to hit the officer?
Did she accidentally hit the officer?
It doesn't look like much of an accident.
She's very arrogant.
She doesn't care.
She's trying to get in their face.
She's trying to make them mad.
I don't do anything you say.
I'm not going to do what you say.
And she's smiling about it.
And then she hits an officer.
Did she kill him?
Did she hurt him?
Did he have internal bleeding?
I don't care.
She hit the officer.
And at that point, she committed an aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
He has the prerogative to shoot her.
Now, let me be very clear.
That's where you and I would disagree.
I would disagree with that strongly.
Let me finish.
I said, according to the technical terms of using lethal force, no other cop there used it, though, did they?
Just him.
That's right.
And I will tell you right now, I would not have shot her.
Well, I'm glad to hear that.
I would not have shot her.
I would not have jumped in front of the car like he did.
We could see that from his own video.
And when you see, you know, you got a couple of different conflicting commands being given to her.
She had let cars go through, including his own car.
And so, you know, when you look at that and look at the fact that she backed up, she could have put it in drive and run over him if she wanted to.
She backed up, turned her wheels.
Yeah, she turned her wheels, though.
And you can see that both in his video and you can see it from the initial video behind you.
You can see that her wheel is turned.
And so I don't agree with that.
As a matter of fact, there have been.
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
There was lots of officers around who told her to stop, who told her to get out of her vehicle at that point.
Yeah, but Sheriff Mac, there has been New York City policy for the police department.
There are many other police departments since the early 1990s saying you don't fire into a car if the person isn't using any other deadly weapon.
In other words, if they're just driving, because of a couple of pragmatic reasons.
First of all, you may not hit the person.
You might hit other people.
You're confusing the policy.
There's two different policies.
You're not supposed to fire at a moving vehicle and you're not supposed to fire from a moving vehicle.
But if that vehicle is being used as a lethal weapon or even actually.
But he was standing on the side.
He was standing.
He shot into the side of her car.
He was not in any danger at the point where he fired two of the three shots.
And arguably in the first place.
That remains to be seen in court.
That remains to be seen in court.
Well, again, there's not going to be a hearing because the federal government has shut down any investigation of this.
And you've got JD Vance saying he's got absolute immunity to do whatever he wants.
And I've seen conservative podcasters out there saying, show your hands, obey the commands.
But you're confusing civil court.
Yeah.
And that civil court, he does not have civil wrongful death or wrongful death suit is still there on the table, no question.
And they're going to sue, okay?
And probably should.
But the question is, did he believe reasonably that, okay, he got in front of her.
Stop your car.
Stop the car.
Put the brake on.
Okay.
But still, the technical application of lethal force, I believe the protocols were met.
But again, utmost and foremost on what I'm saying to you is there's no way I would have shot her.
I was in a similar incident before where I should have, quote, should have shot somebody, but I didn't.
And I'm glad I didn't.
And most officers I tell that to say, oh, you should have shot that guy.
Look, taking another human life is the last resort that any cop wants to get involved in.
And I thank the good Lord the 20 years I was in law enforcement, I never shot anybody.
And I prayed for that every day that I wouldn't.
There's some cases that I could have never handled.
Most shooting incidents where an officer kills someone, it ends his career.
50% of them, a little over 50%, never put the badge back on after that.
And rightfully so.
It tears us apart.
And I would have never lived with a situation like in Ohio, they had Cleveland where an officer shot a kid, a 12-year-old, with a fake gun.
It was a toy gun, but it looked very real.
I remember that.
Paul, that there's a kid with a gun and he kills the kid.
And I could have never lived with that.
I remember that case.
And I thank the good Lord I never had to.
But even if that was a real gun, I couldn't have lived with shooting someone, especially a young kid.
Yeah, I remember that.
And in that particular case, they got a report and they drive up and it's almost like he jumped out shooting.
It was just instantaneous to that.
But in this particular case, after she was shot, of course, the reports have now come out from fire and emergency services saying she was still alive.
They denied medical help.
There was a video of a guy saying, I'm a doctor.
Can I help her?
No, get back, get back.
You're not, you know.
So we see that kind of attitude.
And that's the bigger context of this, Sheriff Mac.
And that is the attitude of these federalized police who are not doing an investigation.
They're not getting search warrants.
Yeah, in many cases, they don't even know who they're arresting.
I mean, we just had another case a couple of days ago of a guy who was a legal immigrant, one of the Hmong people that was persecuted in China.
And they picked him up, drug him outside in sub-freezing weather with like shorts and crocs on.
I mean, an elderly guy.
You know, the crowd is there filming it.
They throw him in the back of the car, drive him around for an hour until they figure out that he is an American citizen legally here, and then they just dump him back out of his house.
Again, if they had followed legal procedures, if they had gotten search warrants, done investigation, all the rest of this stuff, that wouldn't have happened.
And so that tells us something about the methods that they're doing.
And I think it's also very provocative.
I don't agree with any of that.
I don't want them doing that.
I agree.
But the question is: do they have a right to be there in the first place?
Do they have the authority to be there?
Well, they do.
And this is part of the problem.
I agree with that.
I'm very concerned, though, with the federalization of the police.
Sheriffs are not involved in this enough, and they are there to protect and conserve the peace.
They should be there.
They should be there every time the ICE is there.
Make sure, one, that they're following the law, and two, that citizens are not getting in the way, that citizens are being safe, and that, yes, the federal government has the authority to conduct enforcement of the border laws and immigration laws.
So what are the sheriffs doing in Minnesota?
Are they just kind of a wall?
You know, they're not there in Los Angeles and in Portland.
And it goes on and on.
The only one that does, like the city of Los Angeles, as you know, is in Los Angeles County.
What is Sheriff Luna doing to work with the chief and the mayor to make sure that all of this is peaceful and safe?
Nothing.
And they're not doing anything.
So if ICE comes in, they come in.
Now, remember, historically, JFK sent troops into Montgomery, Alabama.
Why?
To make sure that black students could go to college at the University of Alabama.
And they did.
There was no violence, but they stopped the insurrection and they stopped Governor Wallace from upholding segregation customs and culture.
And they ended it.
And I'm glad JFK did it.
But he sent troops in and he did the right thing.
And did he have the authority to do it?
Yes, because the principles of freedom come first in every state and every county.
And if the sheriff's not going to do anything, the chief of police isn't going to do anything, the state's not going to do anything, and they're ignoring the violence, they're ignoring the crime, they're ignoring the destruction of our constitutional laws and rule of law, then yes, the final recourse is the federal government.
I agree.
And I don't even believe that.
And again, we're looking at the end versus the means.
And so, you know, when you have the situation you're talking about, it was done peacefully with that.
And they didn't come in dressed for war, wearing masks and shoving people around.
And so that's the key that I think there is that what they're doing seems to be almost deliberately provocative.
But I might wear a mask too if the governor and other authorities are putting it out on YouTube and internet who I am and where my family lives.
So this is a catch-22 that really the states like the Attorney General in Minnesota, he's doing nothing.
They're doing nothing about going after the criminals that invaded that church on Sunday.
ICE, they're objecting to ICE, but they go into a church to do it.
I understand.
Yeah.
But you don't get to violate the rights to freedom of religion because you think that ICE is violating rights.
How hypocritical.
And Minnesota is going to do nothing about that.
And every one of them should be arrested.
Every person who entered that church should be arrested.
Yeah, I understand.
I talked about that.
Yeah.
And I was glad to see that the Department of Justice used something other than the FACE Act.
I was very disappointed to see a lot of conservatives and Christians say, use the FACE Act against them because the FACE Act is basically an abomination.
It needs to be ended rather than used against, you know, used by you.
It's called criminal trespass.
Yeah, exactly.
And there's plenty of laws to stop this.
And so when we look at things like hate speech laws, for example, usually if there's a crime, there's plenty of laws that already address that.
And so when you start to bring in things like hate speech laws, the FACE Act and stuff like that, now you're starting to trend on fundamental liberties like free speech and other things like that.
When, as you point out, criminal trespass is sufficient.
Those protesters could have stayed outside and been protesting the whole time and been okay.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, I agree with that.
But in terms of what we're looking at in terms of using the military and all the rest, since we've seen the way that they're doing this, and that's the key issue, I think, is the means that they're using, not necessarily the end goal.
I understand the federal government has been delegated the authority to do immigration control.
I agree with that.
I agree with ICE as an institution.
If the local authorities were helping and keeping the peace, ICE wouldn't need to be ready for war.
And some of them have even threatened ICE.
Some of the local police have and public officials have threatened ICE.
So what do they do?
Well, that's a good, I mean, again, the law is on the side of immigration enforcement.
And so that would be the determining factor, I think, in this conflict between two different organizations.
But let's say that you've got a situation where they're doing gun control.
You've got the federal government doing gun control.
And the sheriff says no.
And it comes to loggerheads because the federal police say we're going to take the guns and the local police on the side of the Constitution.
Would a threat be justified in that case?
No, I think, look, we have already stopped gun control lots of times.
Sheriffs have.
And it's the doctrine of interposition.
Yes.
You stand in the way.
And that is a peaceful process.
It's bold and it's strong, and they get the message.
When I was sheriff, I sent the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers packing because they threatened to arrest the county commissioners.
I said, you're not arresting anybody in my county.
And if you try, I will arrest you.
But I try to get along with everybody.
So I hope you're not that stupid.
They didn't do it.
They left town and everything went fine.
But if I had never said anything and never stood in the way, they would have arrested the maintenance workers on this bridge and they would have arrested the county commissioners.
And I'd even like the county commissioners, but I would have protected them.
I would have protected them.
But no.
So look, the states have got to step up.
The county sheriffs have got to step up.
And if you want to keep things peaceful, don't just yell at people.
Go there.
Be there, bring your deputies, bring your posse, and let's keep this peaceful for heaven's sakes.
Yes, I absolutely agree.
And what you're talking about, they're within their position.
I've talked to Matt Trohal many times about his doctrine of the lesser magistrate.
He's got a very good book explaining that to people.
And it's based on Christian principles, but it's also something that has been understood by the Romans as well.
And so this is a very important document or doctrine, I should say, understanding of the interposition.
And so, again, it comes back to, I guess, when people look at what is happening in Minnesota and other places, you know, I'm conflicted with it because I agree with the end.
I agree with the authority that the federal government has in this particular case, but I don't think that, and it concerns me when I see the border situation, as I said before, is something that has been festering and has been fed by both Republicans and Democrats, including Donald Trump in his first term.
And so I have a real problem with a federal government-created problem, and then the solution is an authoritarian one.
And that's the way I see this, the contours of the way that they're doing this.
I see it looks to me like they're looking for conflict for political purposes.
I think we've taken good care of the border since Trump has been in.
And I think if they would just now come together, all the these major cities get the red and the blue to come together and create a peaceful situation there.
But the governor of Minnesota and the AG are actually encouraging the violence.
Yeah.
That's where I really have a problem.
And again, you know, when you look at the massive Somali fraud that's there, that is really a case of auditors and investigations and other issues like that that need to take first priority instead of having some kind of a kinetic confrontation, you know, where it's violent.
Pushing for Accountability00:13:26
And so that's the key thing, you know, just like knowing who these people are, instead of going around and looking for people because and arresting people or harassing them because of the way that they look, I think that is also a reprehensible, quote-unquote, law enforcement tactic.
That's been shut down many times and justly so for people who are, you know, the profiling people just because the way you look, we're going to arrest you, that type of thing.
And so I think they need to do some investigation.
I think they need to be held accountable to the laws.
And as you point out, the sheriff should play a role in that.
Unfortunately, part of that is the sheriffs are not doing that because they're standing for election in those areas.
And those people there don't like our immigration laws and they don't, you know, they've set themselves up as sanctuary cities.
And so the sheriffs are reflecting that type of operation.
Some sheriffs in Minnesota have actually helped illegal aliens get driver's licenses, which makes it very much easier for them to get registered to vote.
Yes.
And quite honestly, let's make sure we understand here: the Democrats wittingly, knowingly brought these illegals into our country to stack the Democrat voter rolls.
That's why they did it.
I agree.
And that is treason.
I agree.
And of course, you know, the practical implications of this we're seeing with truck drivers that have been brought in and given licenses and they can't read or speak English.
And we've seen several horrific accidents because of that type of thing.
So we certainly understand the consequences of it.
And it was a long-term Democrat plan, Cloud and Piven, saying, yeah, the welfare state is not working.
We're not taking down the country into a welfare state of socialism.
So let's increase it by bringing people from all over the world in here and putting them on the welfare roll.
And so that's why I've said, you know, that's the very first thing that needs to happen is we've got to cut off all welfare for people who are coming in as illegal immigrants.
I would even cut it off for everybody.
Totally agree.
It should have never happened.
And saying, don't come into our country, but when you do, we'll give you all these freebies.
That's right.
Well, let's talk a little bit about this save the sheriff event that's happening in Washington.
Tell us a little bit about the facts of that case.
Again, it's the sheriffs there who are having conflict with a state governor and the attorney general in that area.
Is that correct?
Yes.
In fact, we just had a conference there a week ago, and it was very well attended and really appreciated the 400 more than 400 people who showed up for that.
I went with my wife and my son.
But this is it.
Sheriff Wagner in Adams County is being sued by the Attorney General because he's trying to get international terrorist groups, cartels, Terenda and Agua gains and similar gang members, human traffickers, and children traffickers out of his county and out of the state.
The AG says this is a sanctuary state.
We passed that law.
And Seattle is a sanctuary city.
But he says we're not a sanctuary county.
And he has continued to defy the county, the attorney general of the state, Nick Brown.
I know his name's Brown.
And isn't it astonishing?
And shouldn't it be absolutely appalling to the people of Washington that the AG is literally and actually spending more time going after the duly elected sheriffs trying to do their jobs as best they can, despite all the horrible criminal elements that have been brought into their state and county by the Democrat Party and Biden administration.
And then they go after him instead of going after all the criminals that are there, including the 539 fraudulent daycare centers that the Somalis are doing also in the Seattle and greater area of King County.
Yeah, I absolutely agree with that.
I absolutely agree with that.
Oh, and they already appoint the sheriff of King County.
He's no longer elected.
That's what they're trying to do statewide.
They're trying to get rid of the sheriffs and steal the authority and stewardship of the people.
Well, I agree with that.
I'm just very concerned with the way that I see ICE agents acting.
And I think it's very confrontational, deliberately so.
I think they're looking for chaos and confrontation.
And I'm very concerned about the federalization of the pushing that the lack of response and help from the states is pushing that more than I believe ICE is.
Either way, I don't like it.
I don't like it either way.
But if you're not going to do your job as a sheriff and local authorities, what do you think you're going to get?
Yeah, it is a difficult situation, and it is a real problem that we see developing here.
And again, a lot of this is the polarization, but we understand this issue for a very long time.
And for the longest time, Republicans haven't been really interested in doing any kind of immigration enforcement either.
So when we look at this, it's been a festering problem for a long time.
They've used it to get elected in a sense.
The Democrats bring in voters to get elected and the Republicans complain about it to get elected.
That's what we've seen for the longest period of time.
But I think it matters as much as anything the way that the laws are enforced and that there not be an appearance that the so-called law enforcement agents are given a go-ahead to do whatever they please.
I think that they need to bend the other direction as much as possible.
Yes.
And I really appreciate your perspective.
And we agree on most everything here.
I want all your listeners, though, and your viewers to know that CSPOA, the Constitutional Sheriff's Peace Officers Association, is something for them.
And we offer a solution.
We are solution-oriented.
Yes.
And peace, we're probably, I would say we said this in Washington.
We're probably the only true and dedicated, peaceful, and effective solution left.
And this is about sheriff.
And I agree with that.
I really do agree with that.
Local law enforcement, you know, for the longest time, John Birch Society was always talking about, you know, support your local sheriff.
And we don't want to have federalized police and we don't have militarized police.
And I absolutely agree with all that.
And if they see their role as one of a peace officer, as you pointed out, you got a conflict with the federal government or some federal employees coming in, you can talk to them rather than immediately getting into a pushing and shoving match or something like that.
And I agree with that.
I look at what is happening both in Minnesota as well as with January the 6th.
And I look at this and it's like, it should not be a crime, for example, to film the police.
And, you know, it's not.
That's just really absurd.
That is the epitome of absurdity.
Yeah.
And yet that's the way it's treated.
You know, situations where at least two situations that I've covered, you had people who were following them around and filming what they were doing, which if they're not doing anything wrong, they shouldn't have a problem with that.
And instead, what happens is they get their cars rammed by the ICE agents that are there.
So I have a big problem with some of the things that are happening there.
And I think when you look at that overall context, that's one of the reasons why people immediately are questioning the interpretation from the federal government about what happened with that shooting of Renee Good.
Yeah.
And well, it's really sad that she's dead.
The bottom line is all the officers knew that she wasn't, the likelihood of her getting away was not very high.
Even if she did, they had her license plate.
They can go and arrest her later.
Absolutely.
The minor charges.
It didn't need to escalate to a shooting.
And yes, I do blame her for some of that.
But at the same time, the officer's response should have been a lot more measured.
And yes, he was dragged by another vehicle two months prior.
That has nothing to do with this.
It has absolutely nothing.
It might make him a little bit trigger happy, but he has no right to use something that happened in another situation to use it there.
And everyone, I want you to know, we offer you a position with the CSPOA.
It's people-oriented.
We have a CSPOA posse.
We need all of you to join that.
Become part of the solution that's both peaceful and effective.
And we train you every Wednesday.
Tomorrow we have our webinar.
We train you every Wednesday how to work with your sheriff, gain a relationship with him, and make sure that he's doing his job because he reports to you.
He has no other boss.
And that is key to this solution.
You've got to understand that.
And the people of America have got to be part of this solution or it's not going to work.
That's right.
Yeah.
And I appreciate you being a voice of reason with all this and a voice for being a peace officer.
You know, one of the one of the clips that I played is a sheriff in Michigan who was talking about situations like that and said, you know, we had a situation where we had a guy who was trying to kill a couple of our officers.
They wound up shooting him and then running to his aid and giving medical aid to this guy that was just trying to kill them, which is exactly the opposite of what we saw in this Renee Good shooting.
You talk about the fact she's not going to get away.
They got our license plate and all the rest of this stuff.
If there was a charge to come against her, they could have done that peacefully, arrested her, and that type of thing.
And that's why, in many cases, a lot of law enforcement organizations have said, we're not going to do these high-speed chases anymore.
You know, we know where this person is, and we're not going to, you know, get in a road race with them where we might kill innocent people in an automobile.
Traffic violation.
Most of them are just traffic violations.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And so that's the key issue.
And we do agree on that.
And again, it's the means by which they're doing this that gives me a lot of concern from what I see, the rhetoric that is coming out of Washington.
It's very combative.
Every time things come down, there's not any sense that's coming out publicly, I think, from the Trump administration, from Christy Noam or others.
There's no sense that I get, or a lot of people get, that they are taking a reasonable, even-handed approach to any of this stuff.
It's highly partisan, highly charged, and in your face, pushing and shoving people, I think, is what we're seeing here.
That's the thing that really concerns me.
If there's any mistake Trump has made, Christy Noam was one of them.
That's definitely true.
Yeah, that's the, I would agree with that for sure.
Absolutely.
And it was clear from the very beginning, she had not watched anything, and she was just making up comments about what happened with that shooting.
I mean, her narrative was they were stuck in the snow, and then they were attacked with her car, you know, and everybody could see that none of that was true.
Yeah, she was overhead as governor of South Dakota.
She didn't support the farmers there.
She didn't support land rights.
She doesn't know what she's doing.
And she's just another cute face in Washington.
And she's not qualified for the job she has.
I agree.
Yeah, the ice barbie.
She's kind of role-playing out there, dressing up and showing up and getting in front of the cameras.
I absolutely agree with you on that.
But everybody go to cspoa.org, become a part of the solution.
Yes.
Okay.
Become a part of the solution.
And we help you do that.
And we hand that to you on a silver platter.
So do it.
Make sure you're a part.
And you have a questionnaire that people can give the sheriff since we get to vote for the sheriff.
You have a questionnaire to find out where they are.
And when you come as part of an organization, that gives you a little bit more clout to talk to the sheriffs.
And perhaps you might be able to get them to move in the direction that you want them to go if they're not there already.
And so that's a very important thing.
That direction is the Constitution of the United States.
And if we return to that, there's part of the solution right there.
I agree.
Absolutely agree.
Thank you so much, Sheriff Mack.
And thank you for what you do.
And we desperately need some peace officers out there, especially if people are going to pay attention to the Constitution.
So thank you for trying to bring that issue to the forefront.
Thank you so much.
Have a good day.
Great talking to you.
Again, it is cspca.org.
CSPOA.
CSPOA.
Sorry, CSPOA.org.
Government Workers Not Accountable00:04:51
And we'll have that up there in the description as well as on the screen so people can get that, even though I'm a little bit dyslexic here.
So thank you again.
Constitutional sheriffs and peace officers, thank you so much.
Have a good day.
Well, again, I think the thing that we need to be concerned about, the thing that really concerns me, is that we are setting up a precedent here that government workers are not accountable to the law.
How do you call yourself law enforcement when you don't have to obey the law yourself?
And so that is the fundamental issue.
And I think this is a deliberate thing by Trump.
I think that he really wants to have provocation.
That's the way that he moves his agenda forward, is always by conflict.
This is the PR style that he learned from WWE wrestling.
And so that is my concern.
And you and I are caught between these two warring tribes that increasingly want to kill each other and increasingly will misidentify people that they're at war with.
We've seen this happen both by anti-FO mobs in Minnesota as well as by the ICE mob that is in Minnesota.
And so coming up, we're going to have somebody who's not on either side with this.
He's not Treebeard.
You know, Treebeard said, well, I'm not altogether on anybody's side because nobody is on my side.
That's the way I feel about this stuff.
So does Eric Peters.
Eric Peters is on the side of liberty and of mobility.
And so he's going to be joining us right after the break.
EricPeters.auto, ericpetersautos.com is his website, and it is devoted to liberty as well as mobility.
So stay with us.
We're going to have an interesting discussion with Eric Peters to see how he sees all these different events.
Night Show.
All right, joining us now is somebody who's no stranger to this show, Eric Peters.
Always great to have Eric on.
I had him on, well, I didn't have him on.
I had his article on, the same as having Eric on, talking about what was going on in Minnesota.
He and I are of the same mind on all these different things.
So I wanted to get him on to talk about what's going on with cars as well as what's going on with the insanity in this country right now.
Thank you for joining us, Eric.
Oh, absolutely, David.
But I do I get a medal.
I need money.
If you don't give me a medal, there's going to be repercussions.
I'm back every peaceful thing.
You know, somebody put together a clip of him saying, we're not going to have men taking women's medals, you know, about the tranny stuff, right?
And then they had a clip of him saying, yeah, she gave me her peace prize.
So it truly is amazing.
But it was also the intimidation that you see he's able to put on people, foreign and domestic.
You know, she has to give him this peace prize because if she doesn't, she's going to be on his bad side.
Who knows what he'll do?
I think it's kind of interesting that they continue to refuse to say that this guy they kidnapped is actually the head of state.
Due Process Resistance00:12:24
They say he's not legitimate.
They had an election and he didn't win the election.
And so it's like, okay, well, you know, then you got a couple of people that you got in mind that won the election, right?
Machado was the head in the voting.
And so she got taken away.
She wasn't allowed to stand in the election, but another person, Gonzalez, was.
And so you would think that if they wanted to support quote-unquote democracy, that they would put one of the two of them in.
But instead, they're going to have Marco Rubio be viceroy.
Of course.
They don't seem to have a problem with the dictator of Ukraine.
This guy who canceled elections and continues to be on the receiving end of vast amounts of American materiel now indirectly through our proxies in Western Europe.
But nonetheless, the incongruity of it, the cognitive dissonance of it is just, it's something to behold.
It's huge.
Yeah, it is.
It is the corruption.
And, you know, it's funny, even Bill Gates, we had a quote we played of Bill Gates saying, well, you know, Ukraine has been understood by everybody to be the most corrupt country on earth.
It's like, oh, why do you think our politicians are handing them money?
Because they can get it back in the back door.
That's a real admission, I think.
Sure.
And, you know, the precedents that are being set right now are going to come back to bite us, I think.
And that's one of the most disturbing things about everything that's going on with regard to what's been happening in Minnesota.
A lot of these conservatives and people who are red hat people are cheering it on.
And I wonder to myself, how it is that they can believe that the police state that they're cheering isn't going to end up policing them.
It's already happened.
I mean, we had this back in January 6th, all the January 6th stuff, right?
We had a lot of people who showed up and they were peacefully protesting.
You had some people who got violent and it's like, okay, fine.
You can punish those people.
But even for everybody, even violent people, the punishment was extreme, unusual, and not valid because of that.
But then they had other people who were just there.
They were treated like they were violent.
And you had a woman who was shot in the head when the police officer was not threatened and got away with it.
But, you know, the conservatives who were outraged about that before are now cheering it when it's done against the people that they hate.
That's the amazing thing.
Well, yeah, and it's going to make it very difficult for me to have much sympathy for them when it's their doors that get kicked down the next time around.
Maybe they think that Trump is going to be LHA dictator in perpetuity, but the man's almost 80 years old.
I suppose he could spend the midterms and I suppose that we could end up having an American Brezhnev until he's 90.
Maybe.
Well, you know, I mean, he does have amazing healing capabilities.
He got shot in the air and there's no visible sign of it either then or now.
Here's a dark thought that I've been entertaining as I'm out in the garage wrenching on my Transam.
I think to myself, this is so gratuitous.
The only explanation that makes any sense to me is that it's purposeful.
Like he's deliberately wanting to inflame passions to trigger an event so that then he can claim that there's a necessity for declaring the Insurrection Act, martial law, whatever it is, getting everything so chaotic that he can assume actual overt dictatorial powers.
He's already the de facto dictator in a lot of ways.
He's just declaring anything he does.
It's an executive order.
Everything's an emergency, right?
Oh, yeah.
Literally anything that he, you know, whenever he wants to do something, it's an emergency.
Yeah, that's right.
And that is exactly my take on it.
We always see things exactly alike, Eric.
You know, I just covered Wayne Allenrud, who talked about this.
He had some, his memo to Trump, he had like five or six things he wanted to do.
One of them was to rename ICE NICE because that should fix it, right?
But the other thing he said, he said, and I said this from the very beginning, 90 days ago, and I said, yeah, I said the same thing as well.
Don't go to the places where you're going to have known conflict.
If you want to deport people who are healed illegally, you could easily go to the Republican states and they would help you to do that.
And there's a lot of things that they could do that would not be confrontational.
You know, if you're going to have a situation where governors and attorneys general double down on the massive billions of dollars of fraud, like half of the amount of money that they were spending on daycare and food issues was fraudulent in Minnesota.
But they want to protect those people.
They want to say that you're not going to investigate them.
They actually said the quiet part out loud in Washington state.
And so if they're going to aid and abed that kind of welfare fraud, there's other things that you could do to the leaders.
But instead, what they want to do, they want to go door to door.
They want to get in people's faces.
They want to challenge them to push them.
There was one clip that I played where people had set up a little memorial to the woman who was shot, Renee Good.
And there was a big fat cop and he comes over and he starts kicking the stuff.
And the guy says, what are you doing?
And this is a memorial.
And the guy walks over to him, gets in his face and keeps walking, making him back up.
He goes, back up, back up, back up.
The guy kept backing up and he kept telling him, back up, back up.
And he's trying to get the guy to shove him so that he could get violent with a guy because now he's in threat for his life because the guy resisted this stuff, right?
He resisted his bullying.
And so that is basically the Trump administration's goal, I think, in a nutshell.
And what Wayne Allenrud, as a cheerleader for Trump, didn't see is the fact that Trump wants the conflict.
I mean, he thrives on this professional wrestling thing.
That is his gimmick.
That's his calling card is conflict.
He wants conflict everywhere.
Yeah, the whole thing is so disingenuous.
Here's some math.
They claim the administration claims something around the order of 75,000 of these illegals have been rounded up and deported thus far.
So one year in 75,000.
Okay.
So if we factor that out over the remaining three years of Trump's president, what, about 300,000 people?
Now, on the low end, we're told that roughly 10 million illegal aliens have come into the country over the course of the Biden second term.
So it's a rounding error.
It has no meaning.
If they round up and deport 300,000 of these people, it means nothing and nothing fundamentally changes.
So why are they doing it?
And I believe that the reason that they're doing it, among other things, is to normalize people, normalize the presence of military enforcers on American streets and getting Americans habituated to seeing people literally grabbed.
And I'm not defending illegal immigration.
I'm saying that there's something unsettling about seeing people grabbed and stuffed into the back of unmarked vehicles and taken away from, you know, who knows what, what, what, you know, anybody, that could happen to anybody.
And that's just the point.
It's going to happen to everybody if this is normalized.
That's right.
We've gotten used to as a culture having to stand there with our legs spread at the airport and let some government goon touch us and go through our things in the name of protecting us from the terrorists.
This is exactly of a piece.
It's the same thing.
It's just getting Americans used to something.
And once they're used to it, then it will be expanded.
You're absolutely right.
That's what I say to people.
They be very wary when the government that has created both parties have created a problem, you know, like the open border immigration thing.
I've said for the longest time it's the welfare magnet stupid.
You know, it's not a wall.
It's not anything else.
Just stop paying people who come here to live for free, right?
The welfare system is bad enough.
We don't need to extend it to the entire world.
But, you know, when the government creates a problem and lets it fester for a long time, and then they come in with some authoritarian solution, you know, always be aware.
I mean, that is the biggest tell that's out there, isn't it?
Absolutely.
And as you say, if they were being genuine about this, the easiest way to solve the problem is to cut off the benefits to people who aren't American citizens and not entitled to them.
You and I, we go to the pharmacy to get over-the-counter cough syrup and we have to present ID.
American citizens have to present ID for all sorts of things.
Okay.
So if somebody applies for government benefits, they should have to produce ID establishing that they are minimally legal residents, if not citizens, in order to access these benefits.
And if they can't do that, no benefits, you know, and then you get rid of most of the problem.
And another thing you could do is do something about these big corporate employers that hire these illegals, sanction them, make them pay for the local services that, you know, that are incurring costs because of all the illegals.
Fine them financially.
You don't have to turn America into a police state.
You don't have to have body-armored, automatic weapons hoating soldiers on streets.
It's very simple.
Just stop the, as you say, stop the incentivizing.
Stop offering free things.
The people who are here want to work, you know, the productive ones.
I don't have an issue with that.
One of my oldest friends is a guy who has some of these guys working for him, and they work hard.
I don't mind those guys.
They're not taking money out of my pocket.
I don't like the leeches and the parasites.
And most people don't.
And it's reasonable to not like that.
But that's what they're manipulating us with.
That's what they're using against us to get us to go along with this burgeoning police state.
You're absolutely right.
Yeah.
I have called Donald Trump precedent Trump for the longest time because that seems to be what his role is.
Let's set a precedent and we're going to take the gun and do the due process later type of thing.
And, you know, we talk about them arresting innocent people.
I talked about the, I'm sure you saw the situation of the Hamong guy.
I think I'm pronouncing that correctly, H-M-O-N-G.
They're from Laos.
And they took this 56-year-old grandfather, 10 to 15 guys crashed through the house, drug raid style.
Okay, this is something straight out of, I'm sure you're familiar with Brazil, done by Terry Gunn.
This is straight out of Brazil, right?
And so they're looking for buttle, but they go after Tuttle, right?
And they kick the door down.
They grab this guy.
He's sitting in his living room.
He's in shorts with no shirt.
They drag him out in the 10-degree weather, wearing just crocs, his shorts, and he grabbed the blanket from his five-year-old grandson before they took him outside.
And that's it.
You know, that kind of harassment that's happening.
He was the wrong guy.
He was not the guy they were looking for.
They put him in the car.
They drive him around for an hour.
He keeps telling them, I'm an American citizen.
He has been for over 30 some odd years.
He's never had any legal issues with anything.
And so after they finally check him out, they bring him back and just dump him off like nothing ever happened, right?
And this is exactly what Trump was talking about doing with guns.
Take the gun and do the due process.
Now they're going to grab the man and do the due process later.
It's like, why don't you do an investigation?
Why don't you get a search warrant?
Why don't you know who you're coming after?
But what they did was they backfilled all this stuff with lies from Christian Ohm's department.
They had her secretary come out and say that, well, they were looking for two guys who were convicted sexual predators that were there at that address.
And the family came out and said, no, we don't know anybody.
We don't know who those guys are.
They've never lived here.
We don't know them at all and our guy doesn't have any issues with it.
And they put out the pictures of these guys and they're young men.
This guy's 56 years old.
There's absolutely no way that you would mistake this guy for those guys.
Everything that they do, Eric, is a lie to start with.
It's just like Christian Home and that Renee Good shooting.
The first thing she says, well, they were stuck in the snow and they were attacked by a car.
And it's like, none of that is true.
Right.
Everything has been reversed.
It used to be that there was the presumption of innocence and that it was understood that it was necessary that the government be hobble to some degree in terms of what it does to people in order to protect people.
You know, now the impetus is, well, everybody's guilty of something.
Systematic Sobriety Checkpoints00:09:44
And, you know, it's up to the person who is accosted to establish that they aren't guilty.
And this is not new.
This is something that has been systematically imposed over a long period of time.
I've been ranting for decades now about these sobriety checkpoints.
No longer is it a case of you have given a cop probable cause to suspect that you might be drunk driving because you're, you know, you're driving erratically.
Let's say you're wandering across the public.
Instead, they just set up these dragnets where everybody who just happens to be on that road has given zero probable cause.
They have to prove to the satisfaction of the cop that they're not drunk.
And how do you prove it?
In Texas, they had involuntary broad draws.
I mean, these are people going to pull you over and they're going to strap you down if you don't want to do it and take blood out of you to prove that you're not drunk.
It's like, that's insane.
They expect people to perform roadside gymnastics.
Most people aren't athletes and gymnasts.
So, you know, you're pulled, you're out of your car with a light shining in your face and you're supposed to stand on one leg and recite the alphabet backwards.
And if they set it up so that it's guaranteed you're going to, you know, you're going to maybe waver a little bit.
And then, as you say, that becomes the pretext for dragging you to the hospital in a forced blood draw and all of this stuff.
And all it is is a complete vitiation of the Fourth Amendment.
The Fourth Amendment says, you know, that you're not supposed to be subjected to searches, absent probable cause or a warrant issued by a judge.
Nobody cares about that anymore.
That's right.
If they were to do that to me since my stroke, I would fail.
Stand on one leg and whistle Dixie.
You know, it's like, I can't do that anymore.
So, yeah, it's insane.
But you got an article about a, tell us a little bit about that, the background of this story where there was a guy who didn't have a tag on his motorcycle.
Oh, yeah, this is really an appalling story.
Again, it's another example of the escalation that ensues over these trivial, pedantic, no harm involved to anybody offenses.
There's a guy out riding his motorcycle.
He's got his girlfriend or wife on the back of the bike.
And apparently he didn't have a plate or a valid plate on the bike.
And so, you know, a cop rolls in behind him and lights him up and he's going to pull him over.
Now, you know, I'm not suggesting that it was right of the guy to take off, but I understand.
You know, he's potentially facing, you know, having to pay hundreds of dollars in fines, maybe getting his bike seized.
He wasn't speeding or doing anything.
He's just out riding his bike.
Anyway, so he takes off and a pursuit ensues.
He ends up wrecking and dying.
He and his passenger are both killed.
They lose control in a corner.
And that's it over this sort of nonsense, high speed of chase.
And an additional facet of it is that in the course of pursuing this guy, the cop is driving with extraordinary recklessness on these backcountry roads, taking corners in the opposite lane or halfway in the opposite lane, blind corners.
What looks to me to have been 80, 90, 100 miles an hour on a road with a 35 mile an hour speed limit.
At one point, he barrels through this kind of a small town looking thing.
And you could just imagine somebody's walking across the street or, you know, they're pulling out from a side road and boom, you know, there's a catastrophic wreck, all because this guy just had to catch that guy, you know, on the bike, had to get him for, you know, affronting the authority of the state because he wasn't displaying his proper ear tag.
Yep, that's right.
And, you know, that really does reflect back on this Renee Good thing as well, because you look at the situation that's there.
And I don't really know what's going on.
It doesn't appear from the videos that were taken and from the cop's own video.
It doesn't appear like she'd really even panicked or trying to flee.
There were people that, you know, one person said, get out of here.
The other one says, get out of your car.
So there was a little bit of perhaps confusion on that part.
But even if she was trying to just drive off, there wasn't anything that looked like she was trying to, you know, she was moving pretty slowly.
And the fact is that she backs up and then turns her wheel immediately.
And I looked at that and it's like, all these people are saying, well, that shows that she's trying to run him over.
It's like, no, she's turning her wheel away from him.
It's like, have you ever driven a car?
Do you know how this works?
A three-point turn.
Do you understand how that operates?
And you can see that's what she's doing there.
And then you can see from the cop's perspective of his own footage that he rushes forward and still he doesn't get hit.
And so I think that that was really what was happening with it.
But, you know, in terms of the high-speed chases, a lot of police departments have said, we're not going to do that because it puts a lot of people's lives at risk.
There are a lot of police departments that have said since the early 90s, the New York Police Department is one of them, that we're not going to fire into a car if somebody doesn't have some kind of weapon that they are firing.
You know, we're not going to shoot into a car just to stop the car because number one, you may not hit it.
You might not hit that moving target.
And you might hit other people, including other cops that are there, right?
And then if you do hit the person, what you wind up with is an unguided missile, right?
The driver is not driving anymore.
Their foot might mash down on the accelerator, which we saw a little bit of what happened with that.
And so all of that makes absolutely no sense.
When I was living in Houston, when Karen and I first got married, there was a situation where they had these really huge flyovers.
And there was a motorcycle cop who pulled over a car and pulled them over like at the top of this large flyover on the curve.
And as he's there riding this ticket that is so important, this gasoline fuel tanker comes along and hits them.
And everybody died.
Okay.
The cop, the people that were getting the ticket, the person who's driving the truck, everybody dies in this fiery crash.
And it burned down the concrete flyover that was there.
It was so intense.
It was amazing to see what happened.
All of that was over a ticket, which is where this goes back a small thing.
And they escalate it to that extent, to a deadly extent.
In Minneapolis, I think one of the most egregious aspects of that situation was that clearly this woman wasn't some sort of gun-toting felon that just robbed a bank.
She had been haranguing the ICE people.
They had her plate.
Why not just go to her house later?
They knew who she was.
They want to give her a ticket for obstruction or whatever, whatever charge they want to give her.
Fine.
It wasn't necessary to escalate it to the degree that they did.
I see it as protectual murder, frankly.
I think that that cop deliberately put himself in a position where he knew he could get bumped by the fender.
And at that point, he has the justification to unload on her, which is just what he did.
He just easily stepped out of the way, just let her go, whatever.
It's just some lady in a car who was obnoxious to us.
We can give her a ticket later.
Yeah.
And in that context, I see this entire operation in Minneapolis just like that, except it's Trump who's doing the provocative in your face.
Come on, take a swing at me and let's see what happens.
Right.
The people out there saying FAFO, you know, that's what they want.
They want to provoke that.
And so he's not just setting precedents.
He's out there deliberately provoking things to set precedents.
He doesn't have an emergency.
He wants to create one.
An adult might have said something to the effect of, you know, this is a horrible tragedy and we're sorry that things spiraled out of control the way that they did.
Instead, there's this callousness in the way that he responds to these sorts of things.
Yeah.
Almost a glee.
You know, she deserved it.
You know, it's a good thing that an American citizen was shot dead in the street like that.
Well, the thing that really ticked me off was the response of the MAGA influencers that are out there that are trying to make an excuse for all this stuff.
They were even worse than Trump and Christy Noam and JD Vance and all these other people who are commenting on it.
One guy had a podcast.
I don't remember his name.
I played the clip.
And he said, here's what you need to remember: hands up, show your hands, obey commands.
It's like, what are you talking about?
Is this a police state that you're talking about where I have to always obey the commands of the police and show my hands?
But they have to come up with these little juvenile rhymes like click it or ticket, you know?
So show hands, obey commands.
And it's like, that really set me off.
I have read, and I have not been able to confirm this, but I think it's true that a lot of police departments send cops over to Israel to be trained by the IDF in these immediate submission tactics that are imposed upon the Palestinians over there, where even the slightest questioning or sign of resistance brings down an extreme response.
I can remember when I was in college back in the 80s, when I'd get pulled over for speeding, it was routine to get out of the car and walk over the cop and have a conversation.
That was common, believers.
Get back in the car now.
It's like, yeah, now if you step, if I were to get out of my car, much older me now, to get out of the car and the guy would probably draw a gun and say, scream at me, get on the ground, get on the ground now, now.
Yeah, I know.
I know.
It's crazy.
Yeah.
When you look at how long is it before we have the situation of the IDF where they've got this yellow line somewhere in Gaza and people don't even necessarily see it.
But if you cross that yellow line, we perceive you as a threat.
Stephen Miller's Dangerous Precedents00:04:20
And now we have the ability and the government will stand behind us.
We can kill you right there on the spot because we felt threatened because you crossed that yellow line that you didn't even see.
Yeah.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Of respect for life and the, again, the callousness and the brutality is something that should be concerning to everybody.
That's right.
Because once this thing starts to metastasize, you get into a point where life is cheap, you know, and you end up in like in these hard third world countries where people just, you know, you see a dead body in the street.
Some guy just got shot and everybody just keeps on walking.
It becomes commonplace.
It becomes nothing to even to remark about.
Well, again, and you look at what President Trump is doing when he kidnapped Maduro.
I thought the funniest take on all that was Jon Stewart, who said, we imported this guy.
We didn't deport him.
We imported him.
That's hilarious.
That's exactly right.
But, you know, when you look at the kidnapping of Maduro, immediately you had people saying, well, you know, we should do the some Russians were like Alexander Dugan hardliners were saying, why doesn't Trump do that to Zelensky?
And then you had the UK defense minister saying, why don't we do that to Putin?
I mean, I like to turn that around.
How about Putin send a team of Spetsnaps guys to snatch Trump?
Exactly.
I mean, it's just, it just starts, it kicks off this domino thing like that.
I mean, they always love their domino theories for wars, don't they?
But really, what we see is when we see these kind of criminal acts of aggression, what do you think about Stephen Miller?
You know, Stephen Miller's out there saying, Well, you know, if you have a territory, historically, we've seen that you need to be strong enough to be able to keep that territory, or the stronger people are just going to take it away from you.
Those are the rules under which we operate.
And one person said, He seems pretty, he seems psychopathic, sociopathic, too, like so many people associated with Trump, unfortunately, seem to be.
Sadistic people, cruel people, including Christy Noam, who I like to refer to her as the Ilza, the she-wolf of the SS.
Somebody put out a meme of Stephen Miller in the Nazi uniform and captioned it and said, pee-wee German.
Yes.
Because that's basically what he's talking about.
And one person said, well, he just gave authorization for a bigger guy in his neighborhood to steal everything he's got in his house, right?
That's basically what we're talking about.
You know, I just take whatever I want.
And they're making the world a much more dangerous place.
Everything they do, they claim is national security, and yet they're threatening our security because they're threatening everybody else's security.
They're also styling it law enforcement, which is an interesting concept.
How does the United States have jurisdiction over Venezuela, legally speaking?
And if it does, then why couldn't other countries essentially make the same argument?
How about Netanyahu?
He's actually been indicted for something.
He's indicted.
He's been indicted for war crimes, and yet Trump welcomes him, receives him with honors in Washington.
He doesn't get, you know, Netanyahu doesn't get arrested.
Well, they appeal to the precedent that George H.W. Bush did.
He's like, oh, yeah, we went in and we got what was the guy, a strong man, Manuel Noriega.
We got Noriega, so we can do that again.
And that's the danger of these precedents.
Once somebody does it, you're going to have another president that comes down the line and says, well, so-and-so did it, so I can do it as well.
I call it what about ism, because every time you point out something that is wrong or criminal about Donald Trump, you always hear the MAGA apologists say, Yeah, but what about what Hillary Clinton did, you know, or this or that?
So it's always what about ism, as if that somehow excuses it again.
We're at a point in the history of this country where principles don't matter.
Everything's situational, everything's subjective, and ultimately it comes down to which party is in power, which wing of the party is in power.
And it just reminds me, it's so mirror-like of Orwell's 1984, where he talked about the he created this wonderful scene where Winston Smith, the character, is attending a party rally, and the party orator is giving a harangue to the crowd.
Elon's Flock Control00:15:16
And somebody walks behind the party order and hands them a piece of paper.
And immediately the order changes from a rant against the war being, I think, with Eurasia to a war being with East Asia.
And the crowd, it immediately percolates through the crowd that the political position has changed.
And they just continue to roar their approval of the diametrically opposed position, having understood that, you know, this is the new orthodoxy that has to be cheered.
Yeah, that's right.
Well, while we're talking about orthodoxy, that has to be cheered.
I mean, that's one of the things about AI and the way that it is going to be used to make people, you know, there was just, they've already started putting out robo-cops in China.
For right now, they're just kind of surveillance devices and, you know, meter-made safety nannies that are out there nagging people and things like that.
But they're making them to look humanoid, actually making biped versions of them now, and they can walk from place to place.
It's not that much further out that they're going to start replacing these human robots that are dressed up as armed government workers.
Pretty soon they're going to be replaced by the mechanized armed government workers that are out there, I think.
But you got an article about AI along for the ride.
Talk a little bit about that.
Yeah, well, it focuses on a new Volvo electric vehicle.
I think it's the EX60.
And they're incorporating Google's Gemini AI into it.
And of course, it's being presented as a helpy helperson kind of a thing because they created this problem of having these touchscreen interfaces in the car that make it difficult to control things while you're driving because it's kind of hard.
It's ridiculous.
So instead of that, now you're going to have a conversation with the Gemini AI and ask it to do things.
So if you need the stereo to change its station, it'll do that.
It'll do all sorts of things.
It can make all sorts of adjustments while you drive.
But beyond that, ultimately, what people don't see is that this is going to be used to control us, monitor us, and control us.
In this case, Volvo is not only incorporating the AI, in addition to that, they are giving their AI access, direct feed access to the cameras that are in the car.
You know, about the flock cameras that are being put up all over the country.
Yeah, well, there's a flock that you drive.
So, you know, the cameras that are in your car that are sweeping the surroundings feed that data to the AI and then transmit that to the hive mind.
And it's a mechanism by which ultimately they will have real-time 24-hour access to all of our movements.
They'll be able to know exactly what we're doing all the time.
And even creepier than that, a lot of these new cars have cameras inside the car to watch you, which again, they present that as a safety feature.
You know, we don't want people to be drowsy behind the wheel.
So we're watching, you know, you're watching your eye movements and your face.
And, you know, and that way the car can let you know it's time for a coffee break.
It literally says that.
A little icon will come up.
Time for a coffee break.
Well, you know, ultimately, they'll be able to just shut the thing down if they decide that you look angry.
You express something politically incorrect about what's going on in Davos, whatever it might be.
It's horrible.
Lance, whatever comes, Gemini, tilt the air vent up.
No, a little less.
Wait, go back.
No, not too far.
That's what you're going to wind up doing.
Why can't I just have a little mechanical thing that I just reach over with my hand and move it?
Right.
What is the problem with that?
Do you remember the reboot of the Battlestar Galactica series that aired back in the early 2000s?
No, I never saw that.
It was really good.
One of the interesting things about it was that the ship that survived the Cylon attack, the Cylons are these AI robots.
They came back into the fleet because the fleet used AI.
So they turned off all of their defenses except for this one old antique ship that was analog and still had everything hardwired.
So that one ship, which was the Galactica, managed to escape.
And that was the premise.
And I think there's actually a lot to that.
I think that us being connected to what they refer to as the Internet of Things is going to be our undoing.
And I think that it is the smartest, wisest thing we can possibly do to disconnect from all of that.
That's right.
We're going to have these flock cameras everywhere, have flock cameras in the car.
We're going to flock around and find out, aren't we?
Right.
So, yeah, that's been one of my pet peeves about this interface that began with Tesla, where they put that touchscreen in the middle because I guess it's a lot cheaper than making mechanical knobs that are going to last for a while.
And, you know, again, even changing the air vents that are there and it's unnecessarily complicated.
It's difficult to use.
And isn't it interesting?
And I think you and I have talked about this before.
The fact that they can do that kind of an interface and it's very distracting because you're trying to pinch and zoom and there's no tactile feedback.
So you've got to take your eyes off the road to do it.
And yet, if you are using a cell phone, they'll give you a ticket.
But if you're driving one of these cars, hey, that's all just fine.
Not a problem at all, but it is very distracting.
I have rented cars that have had that kind of stuff in it.
And, you know, it is impossible to do anything while you're driving with them.
Even the simplest things, you know, changing the volume of air or the direction of the air or the volume of the radio or that kind of stuff.
It makes it impossible to do that.
And then they take things like the door handles on the Teslas.
We've had a lot of reports about how people have been trapped inside because they have an accident.
Now the door handle that's under software control doesn't work anymore.
I had a friend who has a Tesla, and he got stuck inside of his car for quite some time.
Fortunately, he had his phone with him and he could call tech support, but he had to call tech support to get the door open on his car.
It's like, this is crazy.
Absolutely crazy that we turn our life over to these complicated systems.
And I think if we look at the bigger picture, that's kind of what has happened to our entire infrastructure.
We are on the cusp of something really, really bad happening to us.
And it's such a complicated, interconnected, just-in-time delivery system that it wouldn't take much to disrupt all this stuff and create total chaos and havoc because of the complicated, unnecessarily complicated many ways, system that we live with.
Yep, I agree.
It's gratuitously complex.
And by the way, while Tesla was the first to pioneer those, they're flush-mounted door pulls that they extend when you approach the car.
And so then you have something to grab to open the door with.
The problem is that if there's an electrical failure, then you can't get in the car.
And compounding that problem, Teslas have laminated side blasts that's very difficult to shatter.
So you remember that, I think it was the, what was it?
I can't remember the family relation of Mitch McConnell, a woman.
She's like some tech lady, big billionaire person.
Anyways, she was apparently a little bit drunk and backed her Tesla into a pond.
And it was something that was completely survivable.
It wasn't a high-speed thing.
She just rolled backwards into the pond, but they couldn't get her out of the car because the car shorted out in the water and they couldn't get the doors open and they couldn't smash the windows open.
So she drowned to death.
Wow.
And again, it's not just Tesla.
A number of higher-end vehicle manufacturers now are emulating it and they've got the same types of door pulls.
And it's totally gratuitous complexity.
I'm not, I just don't like technology for its own sake and complexity for its own sake.
There's no meaningful improvement.
I mean, is it that difficult really to pull a handle?
It's geekism, right?
It's like, yeah, look, guys, this is really cool.
Look what I can do with this.
It's like these systems are fragile.
You know, a car is subjected to a lot of environmental harshness.
You know, it's hot.
It's cold.
It gets jostled and bumped.
So what works when the thing is new maybe isn't going to work so well when it's eight, nine, 10 years old.
You know, there's going to be a failure at some point where it wouldn't have happened before.
And the failure is going to involve a lot of money and hassle too.
You know, having something simple like a pull, you know, I mean, you know, a monkey could change a door pole with a screwdriver and a few basic handles.
But when it's this complicated electronic system and you've got body control modules and computers and all this stuff, you know, now it's something that you end up having to have the thing towed to a dealership for and end up spending orders of magnitude more money to have the problem fixed.
It's just, it's stupid.
It's almost a childish fascination with tech for its own sake, like a seagull that is like dazzled by a piece of tinfoil at the beach that keeps pecking at it.
Speaking of foolish complications, we've got bricked Porsches.
You've got an article about that.
I just saw that they've been doing really well the last couple of years.
They'd had very good years.
This last year, their sales were flat or declined slightly.
Is it because of this or is it something else?
What is this about the bricked ones?
Well, this particular thing touches on what we have been talking about.
Nominally, it's about their anti-theft system.
I think the acronym is VTS.
And apparently, it's one of these systems where if the hive mind senses that the car hasn't reported in after a while, then it will disable the car because it thinks that the car was stolen.
In other words, it's some kind of an anti-theft device.
But it points out that the cars can be disabled.
These Porsches in Russia, I should back up.
All these Porsche models that are in Russia just don't work anymore all of a sudden.
They've been effectively bricked and turned off because a signal was sent out to the cars telling them to shut off.
That's the key point.
That's the key take-home point.
And it's not just Porsches.
You and I have discussed this before.
Connected vehicles, which means any vehicle that can receive over-the-air updates to the software that runs the computer.
These have become essentially standard now, and they have been since around 2015-ish.
So, you know, for about 10 years now, all the vehicles that have been sold, not just high-end cars like Porsche's, are connected.
You know, they receive updates over the air.
And implicit in that is the ability of an external force, whether it's a hacker, or it could be the government, or it could be the vehicle manufacturer, it could be a variety of different sources, is capable of interfering with the operation of your car and of shutting it down.
Another example of it goes back to- So let me ask you, is this happening in Russia?
Is this happening because Germany doesn't like Russia, so they're disabling Porsche's?
Well, it could be.
One of the theories that's been put forward is that, yeah, it's kind of a punishment to Porsche.
And it may well be.
It may well be in that particular case.
But I think the thing that people listening to us should really take to heart is that if they have a newish vehicle, something that's built after 2015 or so, that has this ability to receive over-the-air updates.
Implicit in that is that somebody else can get into your vehicle and control it.
They can turn it off.
They can change the parameters.
There was an incident several years ago where there was a hurricane.
I think it was in Texas.
You may remember this.
This hurricane was projected to come down, you know, come down to that area.
It was supposed to be a bad one.
So Elon Musk, in his great beneficence, sent out an over-the-air update that increased the driving range of Teslas, you know, to get so that people could get out of the way of this hurricane.
And he was widely lost.
Look what a humanitarian, what a nice guy Elon Musk is.
And I think I was maybe the only person who said, well, wait a minute, that's great.
You know, if Elon can increase the range of your car, that means he could also decrease it or give you no range at all.
He could just send out an update to turn the car off.
And, you know, keep in mind, we're dealing with people who might say, oh, there's a climate emergency.
We can't have people out there driving.
So they just send out the signal and automatically they shut off the great majority of the cars that are out on the roads because most of the cars that are out on the roads now have this connected technology.
Yeah.
As a matter of fact, you're talking about a climate emergency.
Did you see that Germany just told Toyota that they had to turn off the auto start?
So, you know, people start up their car.
Oh, yeah, to warm your car up.
Yeah.
That's right.
You start the car early before you get in it so you can de-ice it and warm it up and that type of thing.
They said, no, we don't want your internal combustion engines idling needlessly.
So we're going to have to, you know, so Lexis and Toyota just did an over-the-air update to delete the ability to do that.
Correct.
Pretty amazing.
That just speaks to what we're talking about.
They have the capability to control all sorts of things about your car without your consent.
And it's a frontal assault against the whole concept of private property.
I mean, you bought the thing.
It's your property.
You supposedly own this.
Your name is on the title.
You paid for it.
And yet this external third party, this party out there can exert control over what is supposed to be yours.
And if somebody else can exert control over the thing, then it really isn't yours, is it?
That's right.
That's right.
And of course, adding to all of this, they're allowing EVs and hybrids to heat up early.
They get an exception to all of this stuff.
One person said, well, wait a minute.
I guess this is because the politicians can't tell the difference between a building and a car.
So, you know, it's like, we got both of those.
One of them you're allowed to heat.
The other one you're not allowed to heat.
Well, it's one of, again, it's one of the fatuities that has been a part of this whole EV thing since the get-go.
Idea that, well, it's okay to have carbon emissions, as they put it, if they come from some power plant, you know, or some centralized location where the power is generated, but it's a bad, bad thing, you know, if it if it comes out of the tailpipe of a car, even though you look at it, the amount of CO2 emissions, even if you buy into that whole thing that emanate from, say, you know, a natural gas-fired utility plant are enormous, you know, compared to the trivial amount that comes out of the exhaust pipe of a car.
Or something comes out of one of Elon Musk's rockets that are going on.
But it was a few years ago, you and I were talking about this very thing and pointed out that in India, the fuel, the power plants that were fueling, that were providing power to the grid were so dirty because they were allowed to make them cheap and dirty.
You know, the Paris Climate Accord 2015 that allowed India and China to build as many and as dirty a power plants as they wished.
No restrictions whatsoever.
And so the power grid was powered in India by power plants that were so dirty that if you had a car that was a gasoline engine, you would emit less than they did.
If you had a car that got 30 miles per gallon, you would be using less of their measured emissions than if you had an electric vehicle that was charged off of the power grid that was sourcing off of these dirty power plants.
And so we said, well, maybe what we could do is just put a great big balloon on the back of the tailpipe and just collect all of the gas until it gets really big.
And then you have to drive to a location of a power plant and let this thing go because it's okay if it goes in the atmosphere at a power plant.
Camaro Returns?00:12:46
It's just not okay coming out of your own tailpipe as you're driving.
It'd be funny if it weren't so stupid, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, just match their stupidity, I guess.
Oh, that's amazing.
Well, what else is on your radar here?
I see that you had an article up about Camaro may be coming back.
Yeah, there's that.
Well, there's a rumor.
There's nothing that's been confirmed definitively, but GM's president Mark Royce has hinted that they might bring back the Camaro.
Now, the Camaro was last available in 2024.
Previously, it had been available all the way back to 1967 as kind of a GM version of the Camaro, and it was a hugely successful car.
The problem was that over the years, it got progressively more complex and expensive, such that by 2024, even the base Camaro, the least expensive version of it, was nearly $32,000.
That's the problem.
You know, some people would say, well, it was an impractical car.
It had tight back seats and you didn't have a lot of room in the trunk.
Well, that never was a problem for Camaro in its heyday.
I did a little digging.
I know a lot about these generation cars because I'm been a fan of them for many years and I've owned a number of them.
Well, 1978 was the high watermark for Camaro.
And during that year, Chevy sold something like 270,000 of them, which is an astoundingly huge number of them.
And you and I can remember back in the 70s and 80s, they were everywhere.
Oh, yeah.
Just absolutely everywhere.
And well, that was because the base Camaro back in 78 was $4,400.
And if you plug that number into the government's sketchy BLS inflation calculator, which probably is way underestimating it.
But anyway, it comes out $22,000.
I kind of think if people could buy a Camaro today for $22,000, probably they would.
The difficulty is that the typical demographic for that car is mostly young guys, mostly guys under 35 buy Camaros.
It's that kind of a car.
The problem is that most young guys don't have $32,000 plus the insurance, plus everything else that goes along with it to buy the car.
So it's mostly an older guy's car.
And you get to be older and it gets to be hard to get into one of these little cars and unpleasant.
I can testify to that.
Yeah.
You're probably married and you got kids and it's just not that practical.
And unless you're very affluent, you can't afford that second impractical car, the fun car.
You know, you have to buy one car.
So typically people will buy a crossover or an SUV because it's, you know, it's suitable for a family.
It's practical.
So that's the reason why Camaro got canceled chiefly.
Now, what I'd like to see is them try to return to the roots of the car and bring back something that's much less expensive and something that's much more basic.
You know, in 78, the Camaro, it didn't have the standard Camaro did not have power windows or locks.
It had a manual transmission.
It had a 36-cylinder engine.
And that's just fine.
You know, it was a fun, sporty car that was affordable.
Now, if you look at like the base, I don't even know why they use that term anymore, base, the base trim.
The base trim has things that would have been considered high-end, luxurious things once upon a time.
Everything has power windows, power locks, climate control, power seats, a great stereo, cruise control.
And all of those things are nice if you can afford them.
That's right.
Yeah.
I had a Mustang, a 68 Mustang, and of course it had the windows were powered by my arm, you know, and no air conditioning, no back seat, really.
I can testify to how small that back seat was.
And that wasn't a problem.
It's still a very popular car.
As a matter of fact, no air conditioning, but even in Florida, they used to have those, you know, the triangle that is part of the, you know, right behind the A-pillar.
I don't know what you call that thing.
But yeah, I used to be able to open that thing up and I could turn it.
And so I would get a massive amount of water.
Water.
It was raining, it would be water, but usually it would be wind that's getting dumped into my lap and chest, you know, and that would really keep you cool.
The only problem with it was that the control that latched it kept popping off of the glass.
They didn't glue it very well.
And I had a hard time trying to get it glued back on.
But other than that, the thing was very simple and very, very fun to drive.
And when I got rid of that, I got a car that was even more simple.
And that was the Triumph Spitfire.
But it was also mechanically unreliable.
It had a lot more things than just the little shutting, the little thing, the little control on the window that popped off.
It had a lot of body integrity as well as engine integrity issues with that thing as well.
But I think the issue is there's a lag time.
Like everything that's on the market right now is premised on people being able to deal with the cost in terms of the monthly payment.
And that did work for a while.
But it's not the way it was.
The cost of everything else has increased so dramatically over the last several years that it's no longer feasible for most people to go out and pick up a $30,000 or $40,000 car on top of paying twice as much for groceries, on top of twice as much for car insurance, rent and everything else that has gone through the roof.
So that's why it's no longer, to use the favorite word of the progressives, sustainable.
So we went back to a situation where certain options were simply a la carte, like they used to be.
You know, you get the base car, there it is.
You know, you look at the options box and you see how much if power windows cost 300 bucks.
Okay, I'll go, I'll buy that.
You know, if I can't afford it, now I'm going to skip that this time.
I'd like to see things get back to that so that more and more people could once again afford cars and fun cars.
I think it's sad that most of the fun cars now are very expensive cars.
So only older people and the handful of other people who aren't older and have the money can afford to indulge in them.
And that's, you know, that's, that's undermining everything that, you know, that I like about cars.
The whole point is to have fun while you're driving and to enjoy the freedom of mobility.
And, you know, people are being turned off to that, especially the younger generations because they can't afford it.
Well, a good example of that is a good example is Jeep.
Look at what Stellantis has done with it.
They've added all the bells and whistles and luxury appointments to the Jeep that now they're not affordable to anybody.
They have completely lost sight of what their target audience was.
You know, these are people who wanted to grab this thing and go out in the rough with this stuff.
And instead, what they're doing is they're adding everything that they can think of to it so people can't afford them at all.
Well, there's some good news there, though.
A couple of days ago, Stellantis, which is the parent company of Jeep and Chrysler and Dodge and Ram Trucks, announced that they were, I love the phrase pulling the plug on their plug-in hybrid versions of Jeep vehicles.
They have been trying to sell, if you can imagine it, they tried to sell it.
They called it the 4XE version of the Wrangler.
And it costs $20,000 more than the Wrangler that didn't have the hybrid drivetrain.
And the big sell, according to Jeep, was, hey, you can drive this thing 20 miles on battery power alone.
That's worth $20,000 more.
They pushed the price of the thing up to nearly $50,000 for a Wrangler.
That's insane.
Yeah.
Especially because, you know, a lot of people like take this out and the outback or whatever.
And that 20 miles of driving without any gasoline doesn't really make any difference because you're going to be going a long way before you get to where you really want to play with the thing, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
They undermined everything that was the point of owning a Jeep, which is simplicity, ruggedness, durability, and turned it into kind of a rich suburban person's plaything.
And the problem with that is there are only so many rich suburban people who want to have like an image of being, hey, I've got a Jeep and I'm rugged.
Look at me.
As, you know, I park it in front of my McMansion.
That's right.
Hotness killing the motorcycle.
That's one of your articles there.
What's going on with that?
Well, that's a bit much, but I don't like the trend.
Yeah.
And they've done this in the past.
They're trying to broaden the market and they're trying to reach the younger demographic in particular by essentially taking the manual transmission out of the equation, which to me, if you do that, it's not a motorcycle anymore.
There's a name for what that is.
It's a moped or a scooter.
And you're not, and I'm not slamming either of those for mopeds and scooters.
You know, I don't have an issue with it.
They make a lot of sense for a lot of people, but it's not a motorcycle.
A motorcycle has a manual transmission.
Part of the experience is shifting through the gears yourself and having that additional level of control over the bike that you don't have with a moped or a scooter.
And I know, I understand the dynamic that they, you know, these, these, you know, a lot of the younger generation have never done what you and I did when we were kids, rode dirt bikes, you know, and learned how to ride a bike riding a dirt bike.
They've not done that.
So they're trying to get that new buyer demographic in because they understand that right now, the majority, the typical buyer of a new motorcycle is a guy our age, you know, and we're not going to be buying many more motorcycles.
You know, that's the bottom line.
They know that people are aging out of that market.
So, you know, they're trying to get the young crowd in, but I think it's self-defeating to do that because ultimately it really isn't a motorcycle.
Yeah, I've never really, I never used, I never rode a motorcycle, but I did enjoy riding little scooters on the beach in Daytona Beach.
I was really upset about the fact that when I took Karen back about a decade ago, and we went over to Daytona Beach, where my family used to go frequently, because it's only about four hours away from where we used to live in Tampa.
And they won't even let you on the beach anymore.
I mean, you go back and you look at, you know, Daytona 500 really originally was a race that was on the beach.
And so, you know, we used to have these little scooters that we could rent.
Even when I was in junior high school, I did that.
And, you know, they said you got to only drive it on the beach and you can't take it out anywhere else.
And, you know, they would only go like 30 miles an hour.
It was a lot of fun.
And now you can't drive anything on the beach.
So all that stuff, it's like a ghost town there.
It's amazing.
Everything is closed off.
I had a boardwalk there.
Nobody's allowed to do that anymore.
And so I've actually even got a bumper that I put up where I show some clips from back in the 1970s or so, and just crowded with people and cars and all this.
It's teeming with life and with fun.
And then I juxtaposed that with what's there now, which is nothing.
Yeah, that's all just.
The British Nanny's have taken over everything, haven't they?
At least they're trying to.
Now, there is some good news, and it's ironic.
The Indians have taken over a lot of the classic British brands like Royal Enfield, and they have been bringing back affordable, light, small bikes.
And they're actually doing quite well with those things because they're accessible to young people.
Under $10,000 will buy you a very nice Royal Enfield.
Oreo, what's the other one?
I can't.
I'm having a Biden moment, the big British brand of bike that's controlled by the Indians.
I can't think of it anyway.
It took the Indians to bring motorcycling back.
I guess the Japanese and the Americans are even more guilty of this.
Harley, you know, is selling $30,000 bikes to, you know, to 60-year-old guys with pleated leather chaps.
Yeah, of course, I guess the Indians could get the Indian bike, right?
But they haven't bought that one yet, right?
So I kind of hope that they do because they might actually bring back something that's elemental.
You know, one time a Harley was like the quintessential bike in an Indian, the same thing.
It was a frame, a gas tank, you know, and an air-cooled V-twin engine.
Yeah.
And it was specifically designed for, you know, lugheads like me, you know, to be able to work on them with a crescent wrench.
You know, now you have to go to the Harley store to get the computer hooked up and get your accessory flashed.
You know, it's, it's, it's, they've taken all of the bridging and all the personalization that used to be one of the huge appeals of these bikes.
You bought it and then you made it yours by adding stuff to it and customizing it and fiddling with it.
So your bike was not like everybody else's bike.
Now you got to go to the dealer and pay the Harley tech to do that for you.
That's right.
Because they've got control.
They really own the thing, not you.
And of course, you and I have talked about that, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the fights that were going back and forth and still are, I think, with John Deere and telling the farmers, no, no, no, you can't even buy the part from us and put it in.
You're going to have to have us put it in so that we can set this up properly.
Drive By Wire Control00:08:55
Otherwise, we'll brick your tractor.
I'm surprised that there hasn't been a revolt about that.
Well, people are not happy with it.
That's for sure.
They should just stop buying it.
I mean, I personally would never buy something like that that I don't have control over.
It's just a demeaning thing to think, okay, this item, whatever it may be that I've just paid money for that is ostensibly my property.
Well, somebody else can yank my chain, you know, at their whim and I'm holding to them and I have to go beg permission from them to be able to use my property that I paid for.
I don't understand people who willingly sign up for that.
That's right.
Well, you know, it kind of goes back to what we were talking about before, you know, AI on board and the control to be able to remotely alter or even shut down your car and that type of thing.
The first time I really started thinking about that was with the death of Michael Hastings, a reporter that I still to this day believe that they killed him and that they did it with the Mercedes because he was before it all happened, he had sent out some messages to people saying, you know, I'm working on this thing and I've got to go into hiding.
And he was looking under his Mercedes that he had and he had made comments to the person that he was renting the house from that he was very worried about what they might do with his car and everything.
We look at the way the thing crashed.
The engine went down the road in the direction that he was traveling.
It was going very fast.
They got pictures of it going very fast.
But of course, that could be done remotely.
And the engine went down the road in the direction he was traveling, whereas he went over in the right-hand direction and had a head-on with a tree that was not the kind of head-on that you would expect when there is a lot of speed going on with it.
In other words, it wasn't completely crushed, but it immediately burst into fire.
And all of that I thought was very suspicious.
But, you know, we'd already had people who've been part of security saying, yeah, we could use that to assassinate people.
And I think that's what they did.
And that, of course, as you point out, that's the most radical version of that.
But of course, they could also, just like they brick us and shadow ban us on, you know, we get debanked.
We get shadow banned on social media and other places like that.
They could brick our cars as well for the same types of things if they don't like what we're saying.
You know, certainly this is something people I think really ought to be aware of.
A lot of the systems in the car, for example, the accelerator pedal are now drive by wire.
And what does that mean?
Well, it means you have the illusion that when you push down on the accelerator pedal, that it's your physical action that's resulting in the engine speeding up and the car accelerating.
That's not so.
What's happening is that signals, data are being sent to the ECU, the engine controller.
And that in turn is telling the computer to increase the engine speed.
So implicit in that is that the engine could be told to speed to, you know, to race and rev and make you go barreling down the road.
Now you think, well, then all I have to do is if it's an automatic transmission, well, I'll just put it in neutral.
Well, the problem there is that the transmission is now drive by wire also.
You have the illusion that when you move that selector from park to reverse to neutral and drive, that you're engaging something mechanically.
You're not.
All you're doing is transmitting data to the computer, which then puts the transmission into reverse, neutral, drive, and so on.
Well, what if it stays in drive?
You know, you're trying to frantically put it neutral to get the car also steering now.
You know, they have these lane keep assist things with electric assisted power steering that can exert physical control over your steering.
That's right.
And, you know, that could make this car steer violently to the left or violently to the right.
All of these things are now part of the embedded software suite of pretty much all the new cars on the market.
I'm leery of that stuff.
I like mechanical things because mechanical things can't be controlled externally.
That's right.
So you got your accelerator, your brake, your transmission, your steering, all that is by wire.
All that can be controlled.
I remember Rowan Atkinson and he said, the modern cars, he said, you don't so much drive them as you manage them, right?
And so he was talking about some of the hypercars that he was able to afford, but that has now been extended pretty much to everything under this kind of regime of drive by wire, hasn't it?
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, it's a combination of synergistic things that aren't necessarily all malevolent.
It's a way for the manufacturers to reduce costs.
Because rather than when a car comes down the assembly line in the old days, they had to have a guy making the fine adjustments to things like a throttle cable.
The throttle cable had to be connected to the engine, and then it had to be routed through the firewall, and then it had to be connected to the pedal, and they checked the tension on it and make sure everything was working correctly.
Now it's just literally what they say, plug and play.
The whole assembly comes down the line, plug, plug, plug.
And it's cheaper from the standpoint of the manufacturer to do that.
Saves them money, increases their profits.
So it's not all evil, but it's still, you know, it's still unfortunate and potentially very dangerous for us all.
And again, to get back to what we were talking about earlier, it needlessly increases the complexity of the thing.
Back in the olden days, like in my Trans Am, if the throttle cable winds or snaps, I can easily find and fix it.
And a cable is like a $20 part.
Well, if the electronics that control the drive-by wire throttle fail, it's not likely you're going to be able to diagnose it yourself unless you've got the equipment to do it with.
And it's probably going to entail expensive sensors and computer-related stuff that you're going to have to pay a dealer to fix.
That's right.
You've got to have entire modules changed out and that type of thing.
Every time we talk about this, I think about what the guys at Flying Miato were looking at, the various generations.
The first generation, it's like, yeah, we can take out the small four-cylinder engine that's in there.
We can put in a big eight-cylinder Corvette engine.
And so it's just kind of a mechanical thing.
Can we squish it in there?
Yeah, we can do that with this one.
But then, you know, and so the first couple of generations, it was like that.
By the time they got to the third generation, there was a good bit of electronic control.
And so it got a bit complicated.
By the time they got to the fourth generation, however, it took them a very long time.
They had to go hire specialists who could reprogram things because everything was interconnected.
You couldn't just pull the engine out and put another engine in there because then it broke all these other supporting systems for ventilation and all this.
It was all tied together and it all had to be reprogrammed.
And that's really a good example of what's happening.
You take a very simple sports car like a Miata and you make it complicated like that.
Yeah, and essentially unrepairable except by a technician.
That's right.
You know, like I'm doing this project we were talking about before.
I'm converting my trans am from an automatic transmission to a manual transmission.
And it's all mechanical parts.
And as long as everything fits and lines up, it's going to work.
My engine doesn't care whether an automatic transmission or a manual transmission is bolted to it.
It'll work just the same.
But with anything modern, if it was assembled and made at the factory to have an automatic transmission, if you wanted to put a manual with it, you'd have to completely change all the computer stuff, reprogram everything to be incongruous.
If you even could do that, it might not be possible to do that.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, that's what's happened to everything in our life.
It's gotten hopelessly complicated and needlessly complicated, I would say.
You look at all the things that are out there.
Of course, it's made the guys who are the tech geeks in Silicon Valley, it's made them very, very rich.
But it is much worse even than the planned obsolescence that we've seen for the longest time.
Because what they've done is they've created things that are needlessly complicated, needlessly expensive, and under their control and continuing to be under their control.
So it's a disturbing trend, isn't it?
But especially when you start to see AI moving its way into cars, I'm sure the geeks thought, hey, this is going to be great.
We can talk to the car and it can talk back to us.
This is like Knight Rider or something like that.
Without the attractiveness of it, you know, there's a psychological aspect of it.
But it interests me in that it's a sad thing.
People are being alienated from their cars because they don't understand them.
That's right.
And even people who are mechanically inclined, the tradition of the feeling that you got of, hey, I can fix this or I'm going to do this to my car.
I can do it.
It's within my skill set.
Now, it's a car is just a two-ton cell phone and it works and you're happy that it works, I guess, until it stops working, at which point you feel completely inept and powerless, most people.
And I've got some friends who are professional mechanics of 30 years plus standing.
And because they can't afford to pay for the software updates, the proprietary diagnostic equipment, they can't diagnose and work on a number of new late model vehicles because they just don't have the necessary equipment.
Different Places, Same Mind00:02:18
And again, these are professionally trained people.
They can't do it.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's sad.
And that's really something that we're seeing happening in a lot of different facets of our life, of our culture that's happening out there.
It's always great talking to you, Eric.
Thank you so much for coming on.
You and I are of the same mind when it comes to this stuff.
We're seeing some very dangerous precedents that are being put in place.
Hopefully, it won't be too long before we talk to each other.
And hopefully, next time we talk, there won't be some new war in Greenland or Iran or wherever.
I mean, we've got Orange Man is really coveting Greenland, isn't he?
I hope I can get my Transam back on the road before the poo hits the fan so I can at least go out running over the zombies with my Super T10 four speed.
There you go.
That'd be great.
Thank you so much.
Have a good day.
Thank you, David.
Well, that's our show today, and I apologize that we were not able to respond to comments and tips today on Rumble.
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Have a good weekend.
The Common Man.
They created Common Core to dumb down our children.
They created Common Past to track and control us.
Their Commons project to make sure the Commoners own nothing and the Communist Future.
Exposing Hidden Truths00:00:47
They see the Common Man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary.
But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God.
That is what we have in common.
That is what they want to take away.
Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation.
They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us.
It's time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide.
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