| Time | Text |
|---|---|
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Met Militia Members
00:02:44
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|
| Saying that you have a constitutional crisis, then, Gordon, do you think that this could spark like a civil war of type or anything like that? | |
| Well, that's an interesting question. | |
| I think what happens very often is the more militant people, you have a Michigan has several kinds of militias and so on. | |
| And these are people that feel very strongly about their Second Amendment rights, the right to bear arms and to open carry. | |
| and as the governor said, brandishing arms and ammunition. | |
| And they do. | |
| I've seen this. | |
| I've witnessed this. | |
| This has been going on for years. | |
| And on occasion, they'll show up. | |
| But I have also noticed that in contra distinction to the photograph that was published, I think, a week ago, Thursday, where there was a gathering at the state capitol of Michigan. | |
| And people gathered there were exercising their First Amendment rights to free speech and free assembly and their Second Amendment right to bear arms. | |
| I did not see any of them agitate law enforcement officers or other people. | |
| They were actually very respectful. | |
| They were angry, they were frustrated, but I didn't see any of them agitate or incite violence ever at all. | |
| And the photograph that was widely published around the world, actually, I saw it in the BBC news, was of a man who was apparently shouting or really screaming. | |
| It looked angry, but he wasn't spitting in the face between the two state police officers. | |
| If you look closely and you look at the perspective, this is something that journalists do frequently because you can shift the perceptions by shifting the perspective of an image. | |
| And it was made to look like he was disrespecting the law enforcement. | |
| So I talked to some of those law enforcement officers. | |
| I know some of them. | |
| And they did not feel this. | |
| They felt there was a lot of anger, but none of them that I have spoken with felt that they were in jeopardy or they were being threatened. | |
| So a lot of this is symbolic. | |
| And I think the news media generally plays on this. | |
| By the way, that was the militia types were probably 1 or 2% of the people present there. | |
| And I met people, I went to this rally to see for myself what was going on. | |
| And I met people who were graduate students, PhDs. | |
| I met professors. | |
| I met people of all, I met first frontline providers of health care services from Detroit. | |
| I met African Americans. | |
| I met minorities of all stripes. | |
| Of course, they were ignored by the mainstream media because it didn't comport with the narrative they wanted to present to the public. | |
| But these people were frustrated. | |
| By the way, it was bipartisan. | |
| I met people from a variety of different political persuasions and virtually no political persuasion and all different ages. | |