In this episode, we discuss the growing threat of civil war in the United States and the possibility of it happening in the near future. Author Stephen Marsh joins us to discuss his new book, "The Next Civil War," and why he thinks a civil war is inevitable.
00:00:28.000This Black Lives Matter activist was bailed out by BLM, by Black Lives Matter in Louisville, after he was arrested over the attempted assassination of a Jewish Democrat.
00:00:41.000Other people have pointed out, it's been reported, that he was actually advocating for a black nationalist organization called, what was the name of it?
00:00:54.000No, it was a similar group to the black Hebrew Israelites.
00:00:58.000And so when this stuff happens and you're getting the, you know, attempted assassination of politicians, it's coming right after Adam Kinzinger said, you know, he believes that it's possible a civil war could start.
00:01:08.000And if it does, you will see targeted assassination.
00:02:29.000And I think there's like a core that we completely agree on, but then there's like a divergent worldview we have based on, you know, different political parties, which I think will be a really interesting conversation.
00:02:41.000Well, I think it's, you know, people are forming.
00:02:45.000At the time we read the article, it was easy for me to pull out the excerpt and be like, you mentioned something about people are sort of tribalizing.
00:02:53.000They're focusing more on, you know, their own in groups and things like that.
00:02:56.000And that's causing this like outward spread.
00:02:58.000You've talked about things like cancel culture.
00:03:39.000And what I keep saying is, you know, to a lot of people who maybe are on one side or the other, it doesn't matter if you think you're right.
00:03:45.000What matters is both sides think they're right.
00:03:47.000Well, I mean, there's that old expression, would you rather be married or right?
00:04:03.000We can definitely talk about Canada, but what we're seeing in Canada is essentially a proxy conflict for the hyper-partisanship in the United States.
00:04:11.000And I think of myself like, I think when you think of Canada, you think left.
00:04:16.000But honestly, as I've crossed the United States writing this book and as I've interviewed the experts, I'm not part of these tribes, right?
00:04:23.000Like, I'm outside of all of these tribes.
00:04:25.000So it's not really that we have a difference in tribalism, so much as I have a different perspective because I'm a different citizen of a different country.
00:05:52.000I am stoked for this conversation with our northern neighbor.
00:05:54.000Canadians are always incredibly nice guests and very nice people in general, and it's been a really interesting conversation before the show.
00:05:59.000It's going to be a great one, so glad you're here.
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00:06:14.000Now, truth be told, because of how we're going to be handling today's episode, it'll be a little different.
00:06:18.000Normally, we focus on, like, topical news.
00:06:19.000I don't think we're going to have a members segment, because I think we're going to try and hit every possible point we can in one big conversation.
00:06:26.000Whereas normally, we try and, like, create, like, a special segment for members.
00:06:29.000So I think we just might go a little bit longer than usual, but let it be open and free to the public for everybody to just watch.
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00:06:54.000Let's just jump in to the first article we have here from January 4th by a man named Stephen Marsh.
00:08:42.000It's actually what they call a complex cascading system.
00:08:46.000So, it's things feeding into each other.
00:08:49.000So, on one hand, it's political illegitimacy.
00:08:51.000On the other hand, it's effects of climate change.
00:08:53.000On the other hand, it's the levels of inequality, which are at unprecedented levels.
00:08:58.000You know, literally levels that haven't been seen since 1776.
00:09:02.000And all of these things contribute to each other and factor into each other.
00:09:07.000And that's why the United States is kind of in a unique position because, you know, all these things are happening in the rest of the world as well, but it's the way that they feed into each other that creates such a dangerous situation for the United States.
00:09:17.000Are there specific things that you found factored across multiple potentials that you just kept showing up?
00:09:22.000Like, this is one of these things that it seems to be in all these scenarios.
00:09:26.000Well, the big... I mean, there are a few ones that are big.
00:09:29.000Like, I don't really separate them out because I do think they feed into each other.
00:09:33.000But, like, the decline of faith of institutions, so the fact that only 20% of Americans believe their electoral system is fair, you know, that's right.
00:09:42.000That's a condition that's just right for civil war.
00:09:44.000The fact that 33% of Americans think that it's okay to use violence if your side loses, and that's...
00:09:51.000Hey, it's Kimberly Fletcher here from Moms4America with some very exciting news.
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00:11:31.000So I think, you know, just leaping off from there, we have the story about the Black Lives Matter activists
00:11:37.000accused, allegedly shooting this Democrat.
00:11:40.000Certainly there have been instances where far-right and right-wing groups have engaged in violence.
00:11:44.000But if you look at institutional support, When it comes to, say, Black Lives Matter in 2020, you get Kamala Harris soliciting donations to bail out rioters.
00:11:56.000You have a Black Lives Matter activist who's arrested for the attempted assassination of a politician, and Black Lives Matter fronts $100,000 to bail him out.
00:12:03.000You don't have that same kind of thing on the right.
00:12:06.000Well, let me answer that question in two ways.
00:12:09.000Okay, so the first thing is that the process that civil war experts talk about, and this happens all over the world, happens in Chile, it happened in other places that had civil war, is called complementary radicalization.
00:12:22.000So what you have is left-wing groups or right-wing groups taking extremist positions, and this causes people on the other side to get more radical.
00:12:31.000So that's an area that transcends, you know, Partisanship like that's that's another that's a process that's underway.
00:12:40.000Yeah, where as things get more extreme on the left They get more extreme on the right that causes the left to get more extreme that then causes the right to get more extreme Right, and so that's that's a very toxic Process that is extremely hard to escape from now.
00:12:55.000The other thing I would say is that when I talk to You know, this is just let me just give you this perspective.
00:13:03.000It might not be but when I talk to like members of Secret Services of other countries and they're thinking about what a collapsing America looks like they're not really afraid of the left because the left is inherently self-defeating.
00:13:18.000It is much less organized than the right like and it's also it's much less effective as it as a group.
00:13:25.000So like when you look at a group like the Oath Keepers They have it together.
00:13:34.000Whereas when you look at left-wing institutions, like the Women's March after the Trump inauguration, it had somewhere between half a million and a million people at its opening rally.
00:13:45.000It imploded in internecine politics almost instantly.
00:13:52.000And the term woke institution basically doesn't exist because they eat themselves, right?
00:13:58.000So all I would say is both these processes are underway, but I would say that when I talked to experts on civil war from other countries and people who are worried about the stability of the United States, it was definitely far-right extremists that were their primary worry.
00:14:18.000I don't think you're wrong, but the way I see it is the right I would describe as sharp, the left I would describe as blunt.
00:14:26.000Black Lives Matter was able to raise, you know, what, tens of millions of dollars for relatively nebulous causes, but that attracted thousands of people to riot in the streets over 2020.
00:14:39.000The damage caused was severe and it did result in a lot of death, but it was very, very widespread.
00:14:44.000So typically what we see a lot of, especially at the start of Donald Trump's run for the
00:14:49.000presidency, I was actually on the ground at a lot of these Trump rallies, you see
00:14:53.000a blunt level terrorism. It never exceeded the, it was political violence.
00:14:58.000Terrorism to me is a technical term that would not apply to that.
00:15:02.000In terms of this book, like, Terrorism is very specific.
00:15:11.000I'm not to say that we're not dealing with political violence.
00:15:15.000Political violence to me is a better term.
00:15:17.000So the political violence you'd see on the left would be rampant, but low scale.
00:15:22.000So there'd be a lot of instances of someone getting punched in the face, or someone getting pushed in the street, or people running around and knocking over garbage cans.
00:15:39.000But see, to me, as an outsider, who's right and who's wrong, and the nature of the violence is less important to me than the stability of the system.
00:16:30.000Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, which is probably the number one example of left-wing resistance to federal authority.
00:16:39.000I mean, that is a subject in the book, but it has very little impact when compared to the militias.
00:16:49.000So I can name a ton of things like Chazz, the Chazz Chop, that was in Seattle.
00:16:55.000Then you also had the Portland attempts.
00:16:56.000You had the occupation in Minneapolis.
00:16:59.000Well, the Oath Keeper List, I mean, they have, well, obviously January 6th, I mean, would be at the top of the list, but, you know, as a very highly destabilizing action.
00:17:09.000But, you know, like the other thing about the right is that they understand the importance of institutions in a way that the left does not.
00:17:22.000When you look at the Oath Keeper list, when it came out with that 40,000 names, they'd infiltrated very deeply into police departments, into school boards.
00:17:33.000When I talked to Michael German, who was an undercover agent with the FBI in far-right movements, he was like, once they discovered I had no tattoos, they were like, you're never going to talk to anyone rough ever again.
00:17:45.000We're going to run you on a school board.
00:17:49.000What I mean to say, just because I want to make sure I can let Daniel come in, is I think one of the reasons there's a lot of people who don't think that the far right elements, many people on the right don't think that there's a big threat from them because they don't see it a lot.
00:18:04.000The way to describe it is it's sharp versus the left's blunt.
00:18:09.000I think you're right when you say that they know the importance of institutions.
00:18:12.000The right talks about losing institutional control at the time.
00:18:15.000What the left doesn't understand, what they have is numbers.
00:18:18.000People will go out in the street and march and smash things, but a day later, where are those activists?
00:19:06.000There is a huge number of ungovernable... To me, as a Canadian, when you look at the big Build Back Better bill or whatever it's called, that's a budget.
00:19:16.000That's a Wednesday in a mature democracy.
00:19:19.000Like, you just pass a budget and that's it.
00:19:22.000In the United States, those basic functions of government are increasingly impossible or extremely difficult, and that leads naturally to a politics of rage, right?
00:19:33.000Where it's like, because you can't ever enact policy, Whether you're left or right, everything becomes aesthetic.
00:19:44.000Everything becomes an aesthetic, artistic gesture of your own anger and your own beliefs
00:19:49.000in a concept that transcends essentially real actions, real government actions.
00:19:57.000And that's a huge, to me, that's maybe the number one factor.
00:20:00.000Yeah, people think they're supposed to be creating policy, they should be stripping
00:21:42.000And that's, that's, that's just a completely different condition in the United States.
00:21:46.000I don't know if we lost the point you were trying to make before, Daniel.
00:21:48.000No, I think it's, it's, it's worth bringing back, not just because it's my point, but I think it touches on what you were saying of institutions.
00:21:57.000So you mentioned the Oath Keepers and we were also talking about Black Lives Matter in the sense of institutional dysfunction and how I love that you said the right sees institutions as inherently necessary or valuable.
00:22:11.000Well, as opportunities for advancement of their own program.
00:22:16.000Both sides now are destroying institutions.
00:22:21.000But one of the things that I'm curious about is when you take a group that is, I think, incredibly polemic, and that does cause a lot of division, which is something like Black Lives Matter, institutionally, they're golden. You have Bank of America who writes them
00:22:35.000checks. You have the NBA. You have major institutions that support what I think is a purely
00:22:41.000political entity, but it is held up to this level. And I think that causes a lot of rage because
00:22:47.000the Oath Keepers, regardless of what you think of them, would Bank of America ever write them a
00:22:51.000check? They probably couldn't even get a loan at Bank of America. So I think there's institutions
00:23:42.000My Canadian small-time politics stuff.
00:23:46.000And then there's the other fact that while Republicans are pro-business and so on, 70% of American GDP comes from Biden-voting counties.
00:23:56.000That seems to me like one of the key facts that's going to determine the future of this country In civil war or out of it or at the end of it and so like I think there's that I will acknowledge I find it confusing like where where money goes to where is coming from like where what it is supporting and what it wants.
00:24:17.000I find it confusing that certain political causes are objectively accepted to receive money, or to be on the board, or write a check to, and others are not, because those causes are aligning more and more towards people's beliefs.
00:24:33.000Well, the Koch brothers wrote a lot of checks.
00:24:34.000I mean, the Carr brothers wrote a true love show.
00:24:36.000know they do know they do absolutely but I mean but you're never going to go to a
00:24:43.000a Knicks game and at the halftime show have them give a $500,000 check to this
00:24:49.000political cause but you will see it for something like Black Lives Matter you
00:24:53.000will see it for something like Planned Parenthood you will see
00:24:56.000So the philanthropy of politics, I think, has become very, very divisive, because certain philanthropic groups are tolerable, and others are not.
00:25:06.000And real quick, it's only one Koch brother.
00:26:33.000I was playing Heroes of the Storm last night on Blizzard, and I was like, if I type F the CCP, am I gonna get banned off of Blizzard?
00:26:39.000I didn't test it, but I was wondering.
00:26:40.000Well, there are certain things that YouTube banned, but to the point about politicizing everything, video games did used to have a lot of politics in them, but it was more of background, acceptable American views.
00:26:56.000When they started becoming very different, at core, having some kind of Marxist tinge to a lot of them, What do you mean by Marxist?
00:27:06.000I will say, in America, that word has a meaning that you don't understand.
00:27:11.000In the true sense of Marxist ideology of oppressed versus oppressor.
00:27:15.000Well, okay, I mean, to me Marxism is, there's lots of oppressor versus oppressor ideologies, but Marxism to me is strictly a class-based struggle.
00:27:53.000I mean, you know, I think it has come to mean something in this country that I just don't recognize in my own readings of Marxism, in my own readings of... To me, that's an identity politics formulation which is a completely separate thing from Marxism.
00:28:11.000Well, when it comes to Roblox, you want to talk about video games enslaving people in a class-based system?
00:28:17.000So, critical race theory, specifically, Kimberly Crenshaw wrote that Marx didn't understand American racial politics, and that the idea of oppressed versus oppressor can't just be class-based when race is inherently tied to class.
00:28:30.000Yeah, but I mean, that's inherently a rejection of Marxism, right?
00:28:34.000Like, I mean, right, like that, like Marxism, like in the Jewish question he says, you know, there are, there are no, there are in effect no ethnicities, all there is is class.
00:28:44.000So to me, this whole reading of Marxism... It's a semantic issue, though, is what I was saying.
00:28:49.000I guess so, but it does seem to me pretty important that... Because Marxism conjured so much evil in the world, because it conjured so many totalitarian regimes, to call something Marxist to me is...
00:29:04.000I mean, that's kind of the ultimate insult because it was ultimately so evil, right?
00:29:09.000And that's not what applies to these other forms.
00:29:20.000So, you know, I end up streaming and stuff, but it started out with conservatives, libertarians, liberals, and leftists all in one place saying, we very much oppose the bailouts, the corruption in the system, the revolving door policies.
00:29:32.000In the first week, there was so much talk about these big banks got bailed out.
00:29:37.000The guy who works for the pharmaceutical companies gets a job with the FDA.
00:29:41.000The guy from the war machine, Halliburton, becomes the vice president.
00:29:46.000But within about two weeks, Critical race theory took over, and all of a sudden you couldn't speak at their assemblies if you were a white man, and if you wanted to speak, or I should say you're at the bottom of the list on their progressive stack.
00:29:59.000So it started out as essentially Marxist, the class-based oppression.
00:30:05.000Quickly turned into a bunch of intersectionalists, critical race theorists coming in and saying, no, no, you guys don't understand.
00:31:04.000Well, Occupy Wall Street resulted in a massive shift of wealth from for-profit to credit unions.
00:31:09.000And it resulted in, I think, the Democratic Party pulled their money out of Bank of America and moved it to Amalgamated, which is a union-operated bank.
00:31:24.000Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network.
00:31:30.000Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.
00:31:37.000There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election.
00:31:46.000We do all that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer.
00:31:50.000Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts.
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00:31:55.000Well, tens of millions, I mean, like, we're talking about the United States of America.
00:31:59.000But it's a big, you know, you plant the seed of a cultural shift and that matters.
00:32:04.000So when I look at Occupy Wall Street and I see the rise of what was effectively a form of, I think it was overtly critical race theory, It then makes its way into something bigger, into media, it expands.
00:32:16.000That was the first experience I had with it.
00:32:18.000It was kind of a crazy experience to see how racist they were.
00:32:21.000I mean, overtly separating people into different racial categories to make them vote on policy was insane.
00:32:27.000Do you think you would qualify as someone who was comp- like the process of complementary radicalization would apply to you?
00:33:30.000Well, January 6th, I mean... But look, January 6th you had 800 people?
00:33:36.000Well, I mean, certainly, like, they're... Relatively disorganized.
00:33:39.000Okay, well, the extreme right in the United States is, of course, really hard to figure out.
00:33:44.000You know, the way I think of it is as a, like, a smorgasbord of ideologies, some that are completely incompatible, and some that are... So there's... It's true for the left, too.
00:33:57.000I mean, for my own sake, I think we can just dismiss the left as a force in America, because it is so disorganized and it eats itself.
00:34:09.000So what you see on the right is there are sovereign citizens, there are three percenters, You know Oath Keepers there. There are sagebrush rebels.
00:34:18.000There are as you know Second Amendment absolutists there are tax evasion people.
00:34:24.000There are Tax avoidance people so there's a whole what have they done?
00:34:28.000well of the political murders of every year which are amount to like about 70 on average since
00:34:35.0002015 I think the number don't quote me because it's in the it's in the book and I don't have it on my fingertips
00:34:42.000but I think it's like 72% are far far right and like 7% are far left and the middle is like
00:34:51.000So, like, I would say, like, when I talk to the experts, the fear of political violence is much clearer from the right.
00:34:59.000And that's why I said I feel like the far right is more sharp, right?
00:35:02.000When they do take action, it's extreme.
00:35:05.000Well, you know, we're also dealing, I think we should acknowledge this because we are all trying to stay human beings here, is that we're dealing with a lot of people who are on the line between mental illness and political affiliation.
00:35:17.000We're dealing with a lot of people who are criminal.
00:35:20.000You were just simply criminals and use politics as a cover for their violence and like that has to be acknowledged too, right?
00:35:27.000And that this and that this political radicalization gives them cover for mental illness and for and for their violence, right?
00:35:34.000So those things all like to also those numbers like to be clear are not from the FBI.
00:35:41.000They're from journalist reporting organizations who are going through newspapers to figure out what are violent crimes.
00:35:47.000And they're defining who's far-right and who's far-right.
00:35:49.000Well, they're trying to pick up the pieces, but honestly, this work has not been done at a government level, and it's been done at an academic level, so it's not ideal.
00:35:57.000I want to get back to that point, because I don't think we've got a chance to flesh it out.
00:36:00.000So, my point was that there's substantially more far-left polarization and extremism compared to the right, and to make my point, Let me ask you a question.
00:36:14.000Would you fear violence against you at a right-wing rally?
00:36:20.000I've always gotten along really well with far-right people.
00:38:09.000You want to know what I saw in Portland?
00:38:11.000I saw the far-left screaming the N-word over and over again at right-wingers.
00:38:16.000I saw the Proud Boys with a bunch of different people of different races, and there was a black Proud Boy who was walking down the street, and Antifa was screaming incessantly the N-word at him.
00:38:25.000I've been on the ground on all these things.
00:38:43.000And we booked him to speak at an event called Ending, what was it called?
00:38:47.000Ending Violence, Racism, and Authoritarianism.
00:38:50.000He was our keynote, our headline speaker to talk about de-radicalization.
00:38:54.000Antifa threatened to burn the theater down, so they canceled on us.
00:38:58.000The after-show venue refused to back down, so Antifa came and protested.
00:39:03.000And he said, look guys, don't worry, I'm gonna go talk to him.
00:39:06.000And when he went out there, they started screaming at him, chanting at him, and wouldn't let him speak.
00:39:10.000He wrote a Facebook post, which went viral, where he said, I've never experienced anything like this.
00:39:15.000That I was able to go and talk to Klan members as a black man, but he couldn't even talk to these leftist activists outside without them screaming at him.
00:39:21.000Well look, all I can tell you is the experts I talk to, the people that study this stuff, are much more afraid of the right than the left.
00:39:30.000Could it be that they are on the left?
00:39:35.000So the answer is yes, they are on the left.
00:39:38.000If they're from Belgium, yes, they're on the left.
00:39:42.000I'm going to go back to one thing you said.
00:39:44.000I haven't been to a far-right rally, I've been to Trump rallies.
00:39:50.000My experience has been that if you are a black woman, people will go so much further out of their way to be accommodating because they want to demonstrate that much more that they are not racist.
00:40:03.000Because they have been pinned by the left as, you are a Trump person, you must be a racist.
00:40:09.000And I think I find that amazing that that's what has to be done, but that is what happens.
00:40:14.000Don't you think the time has come to stop asking yourselves who is more to blame and start figuring out either how do we reconcile this or how do we come to some kind of conclusion that is not violent?
00:40:44.000I'm just saying, the point of this book is really that the moment has come where you have to ask yourself, How do we get ourselves out of this cycle of those people are awful, or our people are awful, but that's in response.
00:41:01.000The crisis that is facing you is no longer one of who is right, but how do you work out these structures into a way that is civilized?
00:41:34.000In part of the book, I'm imagining what it would be like to have a negotiated settlement with the United States, which would have to be internationally monitored.
00:42:05.000Political violence, and they were done based on journalists who dug into the story and read it.
00:42:10.000In five years from now, if a journalist reads an op-ed in the Las Vegas Post, which talked about the Black Lives Matter attempted murder in Louisville, They called him a right-wing Trump supporter, basically.
00:42:25.000They said that this is the cause of right-wing violence.
00:42:28.000And they said, although he is not, and if you read the op-ed, and I sent it to Lydia, because I was so apoplectic.
00:42:34.000As of now, he has not been identified to any right-wing groups, but this is Trump violence.
00:42:40.000This is an editorial in the Las Vegas Sun after it came out that he was a Black Lives Matter activist.
00:42:45.000So you want to say to that editorial board, What are you doing?
00:42:50.000Why are you writing a story saying this is a right-wing extremist who shot a Jewish, tried to kill a Jewish man running for mayor, when all of the evidence there says he is a left-wing radical?
00:43:02.000But I'll answer that, and then I want to answer a point you made.
00:43:06.000I don't want to hear your answer to my question, because I think you're a very interesting case of somebody who has lived through complementary radicalization.
00:43:14.000And I would like to know how you see escaping from it.
00:43:24.000They're going to say what they need to say to support their side by any means necessary.
00:43:29.000And so you actually have groups called, like, by any means necessary.
00:43:33.000The reason why there is no escape, so you asked me if I am, I forgot how to phrase it, but like if I am subject to complimentary Well, I'm curious.
00:43:43.000I don't know you, but you seem to me like you would fit into that category that I've seen sociologists describe.
00:45:20.000So the Democrats support Black Lives Matter to try and earn votes, which then gives funding to, say, the federal government gave funding for COVID relief that the Illinois government then gave directly to Black Lives Matter.
00:45:41.000When you look at civics data, civics, if you're not familiar, they're a polling organization that have a massive map, a time spread going back like five years of all these different issues.
00:45:51.000You can see that independent voters, people who are unaffiliated, right now overwhelmingly agree with the right.
00:45:58.000When it comes to issues of the economy, when it comes to issues of job, presidential performance, when it comes to black lives matter.
00:46:10.000Lots of people on the right call themselves independent, but if you talk about voting behavior, people who actually shift, vote Democrat sometimes and vote Republican sometimes, that percentage in America is negligible.
00:46:38.000But what we're seeing now with Pew data is that there's a specific graph showing hyperpolarization, and you have a larger portion of Democrats becoming Republican, Independents becoming Republican, than the inverse.
00:47:10.000So, but, you know, to have, in this country, people who are uninformed on policy or a specific industry try to regulate it and then fail repeatedly, that's exactly why, one of the reasons my position's on this changed.
00:48:34.000If a guy comes into my- If I'm in the middle of a field, and I watch two guys, and one guy's, like, hanging out with his kid, and they're playing catch, and then some dude in a black mask walks up and punches him in the back of the head, he turns around and starts fighting, I'm not gonna be like, oh no, a fight!
00:49:14.000No, no, no, but I'll give you an example.
00:49:16.000Joe Biden, based on all available journalism and research we've done, engaged in a very serious criminal act with Ukraine.
00:49:24.000As opposed to the fully legal activities of Donald Trump?
00:49:26.000report we have his own statements we've got Matt Taibbi's reporting we have
00:49:30.000sworn affidavits out of Ukraine from Victor Shokin as opposed to the fully
00:49:33.000legal activities of Donald Trump well give me a specific example of like I'm
00:49:37.000Donald Trump's illegal I mean he's about to be charged don't make the mistake of
00:49:39.000creating false binaries by nothing to do with each other specifically citing Joe
00:49:44.000Biden taking a very specific action with with respect to Ukraine that any
00:49:48.000reasonable person can look at the journalism coming out of this and be
00:49:51.000like wow what he did there Now, look, by all means, call out Donald Trump for any criminal activity he may have done, but everyone seems to do it.
00:50:31.000Like, but I would say, like, surely you can see that these, these sides, that each side has a case.
00:50:40.000And that they, and that the problem here is not, the problem here is not that, you know, what has happened, but the fact that there is no way for anyone, you know, democracies only work when, if you lose your side, the other side is still valid.
00:50:58.000Those are the conditions of democracy.
00:50:59.000What you're saying to me, and what I hear, is that that's no longer possible.
00:51:01.000And so that, like what you're saying to me is, and what I hear is that that's no longer possible.
00:51:10.000And that's really what the book is about.
00:51:13.000And that is, like, I'm kind of, like I'm imploring you as a neighbor.
00:52:06.000I now completely lost my train of thought.
00:52:09.000My point, though, is that as someone who is concerned for your country and as someone who wants you to have a stable country, you are going to have to get to a point where you either come to some kind of divorce, which seems to me like when a marriage reaches the point that the United States is at, you'd sit the kids down and say, like, it's over.
00:53:34.000I grow up, once again, with my mom, who's mixed race, marrying a white guy and having a second generation mixed race family.
00:53:40.000And I genuinely believed when I was a kid, growing up in Chicago, like we had come to this position where we recognized race was less important.
00:53:49.000It didn't matter what I was, or my Latino friend, or my Asian friend.
00:53:53.000We were all just friends in the neighborhood.
00:53:54.000And then I got to experience critical race theory.
00:53:57.000And these people looked me in the eyes and said, I don't know what you are, so you're not allowed to be in any of these groups.
00:54:03.000But all the white people go there, the black people go there, the Asians go there, and the Mexicans go there.
00:54:07.000That's what they did at Occupy Wall Street.
00:54:08.000They were called spokes, the spokes council.
00:54:12.000And they said there were working groups and there were caucuses.
00:54:15.000And the caucuses were race-based and gender-based.
00:54:20.000And so they quite literally said, if you want to vote on how we spend money, all the black people have to go in the group of black people and decide how black people want money spent.
00:54:29.000And I will fight against that tooth and nail because my family experienced this.
00:54:34.000In this past election in California, they tried to repeal their civil rights amendment from their constitution.
00:54:40.000I ask you, you say that we've got to come to this position where we come together.
00:54:44.000Would you be willing to allow a bunch of white people in a majority white state to discriminate against black people in the name of peace?
00:54:52.000You know, I don't think I'm going to be faced with that question.
00:54:55.000And certainly the world is perplexing to me enough without what ifs, but I'd actually like to ask you a question because I don't, I don't know the answer to this.
00:55:05.000Even after I spent five years writing this thing, like, how do you think this is going to end?
00:55:12.000I mean, I've heard you say there's going to be a civil war.
00:55:30.000Like, America's so big and so diverse and so geographically huge that those numbers are probably not as meaningful as they are in the rest of the world.
00:55:36.000But on the other hand, I think we're in agreement, right?
00:55:41.000No, it's the standard metric, but it's still not, like, You know, America's America's different, right?
00:55:47.000Like America is a very different place.
00:55:48.000Like I don't think America is an exception.
00:55:50.000I don't think the laws of political gravity don't apply to the United States, but like when you're applying these standards, it's just a little it's just a little more complicated than it would be for Canada, right?
00:56:01.000But on the other hand, do you think political violence is going to become normalized?
00:56:08.000That there's just going to be a lot more assassination?
00:56:10.000Do you think there's going to be street fights?
00:56:25.000So this is like this becomes like this is classic anocracy.
00:56:28.000So, you know, civil wars tend to happen in like civil wars don't happen in full democracies like Denmark and they don't happen in autocracies like Russia.
00:56:38.000They happen when there's a in the gray area.
00:56:53.000I mean, going back to since Gore and Bush, it's just been, and even then you still had some degree of strife and insanity with previous elections, but it was really bad starting then.
00:57:07.000There's a bunch of different ways I see this.
00:57:12.000I don't think the right wants to control the left, but the left does want to control the right.
00:57:17.000Well, the right wants to control the country.
00:58:00.000As you were traveling the country writing this book, when you were in State X, were you like, wow, I really feel a burgeoning civil war here.
00:58:10.000New York City, I'm from New York City.
00:58:21.000Yeah, I mean, it was extraordinary to me where I would find it.
00:58:26.000Like my friends who are in media in the Hudson Valley, they feel very much under threat.
00:58:31.000Like they feel, they feel like if you run for dog catcher as a Democrat in Hudson Valley, someone will send you a picture of a gun saying we're coming for you.
00:59:34.000And when Russiagate was a hoax, when the Covington Kids was a hoax, when Jussie Smollett was a hoax, at a certain point don't you say to yourself, maybe they're lying to me?
00:59:42.000Well, then there's the, you know, then there's January 6th, and then there's, then there's Trump calling up the tanks in Washington on the 4th of July.
01:00:01.000Listen, if you're going to mix... I don't do the rage.
01:00:05.000So if you want to have someone on to explain to you the crimes of the right, you can definitely find a lot of people.
01:00:12.000If I'm going to cite overt, widespread lies, and then you cite January 6th, which is unrelated to what I was talking about, I'm going to ask you... Oh, I think you're asking... Well, I mean, if I were to count Trump's lies...
01:00:25.000I mean, how many hours do we have here?
01:00:27.000If we're going to talk about the lies of the right, any Trump speech has 30 of them.
01:00:33.000I don't like comparing Trump and Biden.
01:00:42.000He's a symptom rather than a cause, for sure.
01:00:46.000But if you're asking me, are there any right-wing people who lie, That's not what I'm saying.
01:00:50.000I'm saying you'd say that Black Lives Matter would accuse me of lying.
01:00:54.000And my response is, Jussie Smollett, that thing was an obvious lie, but it was picked up by actors and celebrities and every mainstream news organization.
01:01:01.000Russiagate was three, four years of outright lying.
01:01:05.000Ukrainegate, all of it turned out to be lies.
01:02:01.000But like it's, that's actually, that's a, you know, when I talked about a complex cascading system, that's, that feeds into both sides in different ways, in asymmetrical ways.
01:02:10.000But, but, you know, like one, one way of thinking about this struggle is that it is a mimetic struggle in the Jeff Jazea, you know, definition of it.
01:02:21.000Here's the point I'm trying to get to.
01:02:23.000If you look at the politically homeless faction, the intellectual dark web faction, the post-liberal faction, conservatives, and even hardcore MAGA Trump supporters, they all agree, for the most part, on a typical worldview, except for certain Q elements, which don't make up that many people.
01:02:40.000I don't think I can really agree with that.
01:02:43.000I mean, maybe it is my own failing, but I mean, part of my job was trying to figure out, like, what are the intellectual coherences that you find in this?
01:02:52.000And I found that, I mean, one of the things I find really interesting about the American right in general is their love of esoteric information, right?
01:03:01.000Like, an esoteric knowledge, where, like, something becomes more valuable because it's less believed.
01:03:06.000What's an example of that, if you have one?
01:03:08.000Well, QAnon would be like the ultimate example.
01:03:37.000So if you base your perception off a faction that is lying to you nonstop, of course you're going to believe, well, that both sides must be bad.
01:03:44.000Marjorie Taylor... Do you not understand that I've had this exact conversation with people on the left?
01:03:49.000And I've actually stated exactly this in 100 plus shows of this, that the reason civil war, in my opinion, is inevitable is because you have two sides both saying, I'm right.
01:04:07.000You come across, you're walking down a road and you come to a fork in the road and you see there's two paths and you know that one road will lead you to imminent death and one road will lead you to safety.
01:04:20.000There are two men standing on each side.
01:05:06.000But... That's actually a really good way of putting it.
01:05:11.000So if that's the condition where one's the angel and one's the devil and you don't know which one is right, Like, surely we have to come up with something more clever than the other side's wrong.
01:05:24.000I suppose the issue is, the reason I use the Biden example is because if you were to ask the average journalist in this country, did Joe Biden engage in a quid pro quo in Ukraine, they will tell you no.
01:07:24.000I mean, if you're writing about a civil war and there have been accusations made against Donald Trump in terms of a quid pro quo... Donald Trump does not figure in this book.
01:07:42.000The structural problems that the United States faces are so profound that all of the politics, to me, that consumes everything is all irrelevant.
01:08:07.000I start documenting things, and I say, I just want to show people what's happening.
01:08:10.000I ended up getting a job at Vice and being the founding member of Vice News, doing on-the-ground reporting in Ukraine and Brazil and Venezuela.
01:08:17.000And then from there I went and joined ABC Univision's joint venture, once again trying to do news, but that's where they got hyper-polarized.
01:08:24.000Within six months of me being there, they said, we're far left.
01:09:02.000I'm talking a lot this one, but I do want to make this point, is that, as a baseline, I've been reading the news and doing the research and the fact-checking on all of these stories, and it's come to a point where the right tends to be correct on these things, and the left goes off into Wally world every time.
01:09:18.000UkraineGate being a really great example of the corporate press, the establishment Democrats, and the left all lying about what Joe Biden did with respect to Ukraine, when more and more reporting keeps coming up proving he actually did this, even based on the mainstream media's own previous reporting, say from Politico.
01:09:36.000Politico publishes a story, as does the New York Times, that Ukrainians meddled in the 2016 election in an effort to help Democrats.
01:09:44.000Not that the Ukrainian government did, but that elements of higher-ranking officials in Ukraine did.
01:09:52.000Joe Biden engages in a quid pro quo where he brags about it on camera.
01:09:55.000But if you come out and say that, you're called right-wing.
01:09:58.000They say it's fake news, you're lying, and it's not true.
01:10:00.000I live in a world based on, do you have sources for that?
01:10:03.000Just the other night, we got reporting that the person who tried to assassinate the Democrat was a BLM activist, and I said, no, no, no, no, no.
01:10:10.000It is not confirmed until we can get official confirmation on the story.
01:10:14.000Even though there had been, I just hadn't seen it.
01:10:15.000Because if I don't have the official reporting from a trusted source, it didn't happen.
01:10:19.000But every single time I go to the news, a good majority of what's considered mainstream corporate press is outright wrong and they defend it.
01:11:21.000And so I remember and I was like, yeah, that's that's the government I like they give out This is what happens but listen Do you do you honest are you honestly telling me that you feel like when you see something on Fox News?
01:11:35.000You feel like it's probably correct and that it's not and that it's and that it's and that you've never seen a story on Fox News That was not was a lie No, I call out Fox News, it's just I call them out less frequently.
01:11:47.000And Fox News is one station compared to... The problem here is the informational networks.
01:11:54.000But what ends up happening is, after a decade of this...
01:11:58.000It has become so divergent that you cannot convince an 18-year-old who's voting for these policies that the majority of their life was based on lies.
01:12:08.000So I'll give you another example of what's caused all this, and I don't know if you looked into this, but have you looked at the LexisNexis data on critical race theory and woke terminology?
01:12:21.000At the end of the 2000s, LexisNexis tracks massive spikes in the New York Times saying things like white privilege, racism, class privilege, etc.
01:12:29.000You don't need LexisNexis to tell you that.
01:13:20.000But just to be clear, my point here is really this, that the crisis that your country is facing is so severe that these debates are increasingly meaningless because they take place in a context of Essentially, semantic collapse.
01:13:41.000Dude, you can see people in the metaverse wearing with black avatars and with white avatars.
01:13:45.000It doesn't matter if they're black or white in real life, but you'll see them segmented into their little avatars in the game, and they're going to act like real life, as if it's real.
01:15:01.000I wouldn't say he's either, but... Well, then maybe, like... The right has been decimated on social media.
01:15:06.000And so these companies see the algorithms favoring... Certainly the left would say the other thing.
01:15:11.000But when Mike.com starts off libertarian and then becomes woke, when Vice.com starts off as an edgy bro frat boy kind of punk website and becomes feminist, when ABC News funds hundreds of millions of dollars and then six months later says, we're going woke everybody, it is not going the other direction, it's flowing one way.
01:16:20.000So racial resentment is like, well, it's a pretty complicated sociological thing, it's a bunch of different factors, but it's like, it's not necessarily racism per se, it's whether you feel threatened.
01:16:33.000And so that and so that that number like rather than being an ideology like rather than being a Ideology as in I am a racist it is like how you feel about certain aspects of life But so that and those numbers were identical for Democrats and Republicans in I think 1990 and then they again Don't quote me on that, but I won't address the semantic yes, because I would really like You know we're here.
01:16:59.000We're doing this show people are listening to it right now What are we doing to prevent semantic breakdown?
01:17:54.000The left and the right, the right has a traditional view of language, like we use words that mean things they meant 20 years ago, and the left has redefined things.
01:18:03.000Well, the left is involved in a language etiquette that is totally destructive and just as self-consuming, as I said.
01:18:12.000As Mark said in the German ideology, there was a man who thought, if I define river differently, no one will drown.
01:18:20.000And that's what the left has become, where they think that definitions will change reality.
01:18:26.000I have a good example of what I think is contributing to the breakdown and why I think there's no solution.
01:18:32.000I feel like many on the right are looking for an anchor.
01:18:34.000Like, just tell me where we stand and where we are, and I'll try and figure out what's going on.
01:18:39.000Whereas the left just says, I will do as the tide flows.
01:18:43.000So the example on this is... But the left eats itself.
01:19:46.000I mean, people are doing this on the, well, that's just, you know, stuff happens.
01:19:53.000Like, you're just trying to figure out what the hell happened.
01:19:56.000I am not saying, you know, fault on either side of this, what I'm saying, one of the things that is causing a divide is people have different tolerances for a change in information, or they have expectations.
01:20:05.000That's possible, although it seems to me like the radicalization is happening, you know, at the same level, and happening, and don't you feel everyone's out there looking for an anchor?
01:20:19.000I mean, God knows the people I talk to on the left are desperate for some kind of stability.
01:20:23.000I mean, that's the one hope I have is that, you know, the chaos has become so intolerable to people that they need some kind of, they really start to crave structure.
01:20:35.000They're scared to step through the fire.
01:20:37.000So again, to throw it back to Jussie Smollett, for instance, Covington kids, big cultural moments that were absolutely wrong.
01:20:45.000For a lot of people that, you know, we've even had on the show, they've said, this was the moment I said, I just can't live this way anymore and I need something solid.
01:20:53.000And so I said, I can't trust these people who keep lying to me and I look for something else.
01:20:57.000I mean, those are very specific moments.
01:20:59.000Like what's the, what's the technical term for the fallacy where you take one example and exclude it to everything else?
01:21:04.000I mean, you know, everyone has their example.
01:21:14.000Because they never apologized, they never admitted it.
01:21:16.000See, I think, not to be too much of a salesman, you actually have a lot of information about this that I don't have, but I think what I try to do in my book is go 30,000 feet in the air.
01:21:29.000I think your book buys a lot of information I don't have.
01:21:49.000But it wasn't a joke in the sense of the way institutions latched onto it, the way elected officials latched onto it, the media latched onto it.
01:21:56.000And I think one of the ways where, I don't want to say I disagree with you, but where we see the world differently, I do not see the right trying to cancel the left the way the left tries to cancel the right.
01:22:07.000Small example of that you have this lovely singer British chick Adele who won an award and Because of the current time period a week ago.
01:22:17.000It was a gender-neutral artist of the year and in her acceptance of speech She said I wish it weren't I won't fake a British accent.
01:22:23.000I wish it weren't Although she's cockney.
01:22:26.000I wish it weren't artists of the year.
01:22:27.000I wish it were Woman of the Year, because I love being a woman.
01:22:31.000That turned into Adele's trying to cancel the trance movement.
01:24:40.000So those are not... Well, I mean, if you actually want to know what I believe, it's the Charter of Rights and Freedoms of the Canadian Constitution, which is incredibly specific and was written in 1982 and contains all this beautifully articulated in a simple way.
01:24:53.000But my point really here is like, Whichever side you're on of this, these two countries can't coexist.
01:25:00.000It has to be one or the other, and it really can't be both.
01:25:04.000I'd like to see people democratically choosing where their tax dollars go, but also having some sort of republicanism.
01:25:17.000The beauty of America, its great gift, has been its capacity to hold contradictory ideas at the same time.
01:25:25.000Um, like that is, that is the glory of America.
01:25:28.000And because it's a constitutional republic, it's able to.
01:25:30.000Well, I think actually it's, when you go back to the original constitution, it contains a whole coast of political ideas that are in conflict.
01:25:38.000And also, you know, it, it believes in, it believes in, in struggle as it believes in disagreement.
01:25:44.000I mean, that's the, that's the amazing gift of the American constitution is that it believes that You don't need unity.
01:25:52.000You need disagreement to get to the best answer, right?
01:25:55.000But that only works if you have a concept of yourself as a unified whole.
01:26:01.000And when that evaporates, when that dissolves, you're left with irreconcilability.
01:26:09.000Have you read Washington's Farewell Address recently?
01:26:12.000I mean, it's really worth reading because it's a great work of genius.
01:26:16.000It's a really fascinating Book because he worked because he predicts exactly where you are right now like exactly where you are right now And he did it you know on his retirement.
01:26:28.000I imagine you did a lot of research on the first American Civil War Yeah, I mean There's so much work on it like I would never call myself an expert on that like I definitely read a lot of books about it But just you know I'm not I would never There are some things in here that I do consider myself an expert on but that there are so many Civil War experts Just because you asked me earlier what I thought was going to happen.
01:27:55.000Even though in hindsight it all seems perfectly clear and the structures are all there and it's like there's no way that it couldn't be a civil war after the nullification crisis and the bloody Kansas.
01:30:03.000There are countries that negotiate separation, like Czechoslovakia, where they do negotiate in goodwill, and that's what happened with Norway and Sweden.
01:31:05.000The only issue is I think it ends up with a bunch of war.
01:31:09.000Well, the problem is, first of all, to negotiate a settlement, you need goodwill.
01:31:13.000And then the UN, to negotiate with the UN, which I know sounds ridiculous, but, you know, you can't, no one will land in an airport until you have a UN agreement that you're a separate country, is really, really hard, especially with a country that has security, general, what's it called, security council placement.
01:31:30.000So, like, it would be incredibly difficult.
01:31:42.000Of course, I did just write something about it in Lit Hub, about the politics of abortion as a factor in polarization.
01:31:53.000I mean, you know, the most bizarre thing about it is that, you know, this is again looking at it from a foreign country, is like, Abortion in the United States should be one of the policies that everyone agrees on.
01:32:33.000If you were to ask yourself what the correct policy is, you would see that the policy is both like women get control over their reproductive health.
01:32:43.000That's what leads to declines in abortion rates.
01:33:25.000And so, man, we've had a bunch of people in here, we've had legal experts, and everyone seems to agree that Roe v. Wade will be overturned.
01:33:51.000Like, that's not... I don't have expertise in that.
01:33:53.000Like, I'm sorry, but like, I just can't really give an honest or accurate answer to that question.
01:33:58.000I mean, I would say that once that happens, that... Like, one thing that I notice in this book is, like, the right has said concept of civil war for a long time, right?
01:34:13.000And it was a fringe position, but it sort of became more mainstream in 2008.
01:34:17.000But I think the left is actually starting to catch up.
01:34:20.000The left is actually starting to catch up to the idea that this country isn't working, its institutions are failing, there's going to have to be a response to this, and I think abortion could be a major trigger of it.
01:34:30.000I think there are a lot of people who don't... You know you asked me that question, what if healthcare was taken away from me?
01:34:53.000But my question is, do you think there's any number of right-wing people, any small number, who would be willing to go to an abortion clinic the moment Roe v. Wade is overturned and say, with force, end what you're doing right now?
01:35:08.000Well, you know, the criminalization of abortion is one of the worst policy ideas it's possible to have, because you have to ask yourself all kinds of questions.
01:35:17.000Like, are you going to start a DEA for abortion?
01:35:27.000But do you think people would be like, do you think there would be a John Brown of abortion, who's going to walk up to an abortion doctor and just blow his brains out?
01:35:38.000There's been a huge amount of violence around that.
01:35:40.000It's kind of the question I'm getting to.
01:35:43.000When we're talking about the numbers of what constitutes political violence, that doesn't qualify as political violence in the stats that we looked at.
01:35:51.000Going up and killing an abortion doctor.
01:35:52.000But I, of course, would qualify it as that.
01:36:59.000Like, I think the left is starting to figure out, like, that would have been, those kind of defiant actions would have been typical of Red states for its whole history, but I think now oh, sorry.
01:37:10.000I've got it mixed up You know, you know everywhere else in the world red means left You know why that's right.
01:37:16.000Yeah, it was it was 2000 election, right?
01:37:18.000Someone explained it to me Yeah, but it used to be the other way around it used to be the other way around.
01:37:22.000Yeah But so now people on the left are figuring out We're gonna be in defiance of federal authority So we've had sanctuary cities on the left for a long time.
01:37:34.000We've had now California sanctuary state.
01:37:36.000Do you know how our elections work in this country?
01:37:58.000In the United States, non-citizens do have voting power in every single election.
01:38:04.000So when California says, we are going to allow non-citizens into this country and provide them benefits, they are seizing federal authority.
01:38:11.000The way it works is... I'm sorry, seizing?
01:38:34.000So when California allows in non-citizens, the census is done, non-citizens are counted, and they get extra congressional representation, which then results in, it results in disproportionate voting power, and it results in disproportionate power to elect the president.
01:38:48.000I think, according to the Heritage Foundation, California last election only got one additional electoral vote.
01:38:53.000But when we're talking about, you know, what is it, 538?
01:38:58.000That's a decent amount of gained power.
01:39:00.000And it's not just California, it's other sanctuary cities and states.
01:39:03.000So, the left likes to come out and say it's unfair that the Senate is comprised of, you know, X amount of senators who come from only a certain amount of states when they're engaging in defiance of federal authority to give themselves disproportionate votes in Congress and the Electoral College.
01:39:19.000But, I mean, it's really kind of much of a muchness because the problem here is, like, I think you're going to have an election relatively soon.
01:39:27.000Like, not, I don't know if it's 2024, I don't think, I don't know if it's 2028, might even be 2032 if you're lucky.
01:39:33.000Well, you're going to have a president lose the popular mandate by 10 million votes and still win the election.
01:39:38.000And that's the way it's supposed to be.
01:39:40.000Well, that's, I mean, whether that's the way it's supposed to be or not, you're going to have a huge number of people in your country who don't regard themselves as living in a legitimate democracy.
01:40:48.000Like, we have a minority population, French Canadians, who are, you know, who have to be protected from the majority rule by, like, just to keep the country together.
01:40:58.000So that's like a very distinct, that's a distinct thing.
01:41:06.000The fact that people choose to live in populous states, you actually need a functional control for that so people don't all just crowd into one tight space and they actually spread out.
01:41:59.000Because the cities had voting power and voted away the water from the people who actually had it.
01:42:04.000So what happens is the farmers, being a large portion of the United States' economy, said, we're going to have to drill deeper and deeper into groundwater.
01:42:11.000And they went down thousands, even tens of thousands of feet.
01:42:14.000The small family migrant workers could only drill about 30 feet and their water went dry.
01:42:21.000big cities inequality etc well it's not that so much as the water problem
01:42:25.000that the united states faces yeah i mean actually that was the
01:42:29.000that was the chapter that kept me up at night it's funny not any of the none of
01:42:32.000none of the politics stuff like it's funny the one that kept me up was
01:42:35.000talking to like an expert at the usda on corn did you did you uh look into the
01:42:40.000the lawsuit attempts to seize great lakes water Yeah, well, well, of course, in Canada, we're really obsessed with this because like we have all the water, right?
01:42:48.000Like we have one fifth of the world's natural water supply.
01:42:51.000And so what happens when you guys run out of your water is of great concern to us.
01:42:56.000So there was an attempt by, I could be getting this wrong, it's been a while, Arizona, I think, was filing a federal suit.
01:43:38.000Like we live in an era of completely cheap food, like artificially cheap food, largely driven by Midwest, the genius of Midwestern farmers who have innovated corn to a point of, you know, extreme productivity.
01:43:52.000And that's driven by this aquifer that is not renewable.
01:43:57.000That's just water they're taking out of the ground, that when it's gone, it's gone.
01:44:02.000And where they go from there, they don't really know.
01:44:06.000I want you to imagine a world where we don't have cheap food anymore.
01:44:10.000That's added to all this stuff we're talking about, right?
01:45:03.000Did you ever, in any of these, when you were thinking of all the potential possibilities, did you ever find out No, I mean, that was not something I looked at.
01:45:11.000hey we're gonna supply your weapons and help you win when you give us states
01:45:14.000when you win we'll take Florida on no I mean that was not something I looked at
01:45:19.000I mean what I looked at was inequality levels which are of course like
01:45:22.000catastrophically high and you know they there are no examples of history of
01:45:29.000countries with inequality rates like the United States that don't end in war
01:45:33.000revolution or mass death like it's like it's a like it's a I have a lot of like, on the one hand this, on the one hand this, in the book, right?
01:45:44.000Some examples go this way, some examples go the other way.
01:45:46.000But when you look at inequality levels like the ones you have in the United States, they only go one way.
01:46:26.000I'm looking at structures here, but what I do know is that when you get to inequality levels with this kind of structural problem, it just creates huge amounts of turbulence.
01:47:37.000So, just to start this off, the same people who supported occupational protests with Occupy Wall Street and the CHAZ.
01:47:46.000See, I would never support any of those, and Canada wouldn't support any of those.
01:47:49.000But, um, in America, these same people are now in at odds and defiance.
01:47:54.000Well, if I can be honest with you, like when I hear the debate here about the trucker convoy, it is it's like, have you ever seen like a movie where you know what really happened?
01:48:05.000And like you see the movie and you're like, it has nothing to do with, like it's just so distorted that it has nothing to do with reality.
01:48:12.000The largest support for the Trucker Convoy I've seen in my life was driving here in Maryland and someone had a big sign up.
01:48:21.000I mean, you have to remember, like, here it's become, like, all this stuff about Trudeau and, you know, all this, like, the person who did the original Emergencies Act was Doug Ford, the Premier of Ontario, who's a populist conservative, and I personally have called him a tinpot Northern Trump in the pages of the New York Times.
01:48:43.000He would, like, this is a very, the political context of this in Canada is just completely separate from the political
01:49:25.000So for the most part... I would just say the reporting that I've seen in American sources from both sides, like, has really... Like, I was trying to think, like, how could I explain this?
01:49:35.000And I was like, well, you know, the Quebec premier, who is a conservative, like, he's definitely the right, a month ago proposed a tax on the unvaccinated.
01:51:14.000And like when they get sick, it takes a space like my cousin cam who's got problems with his heart and need surgery like when they're sick.
01:51:22.000When they're filling up the hospitals, he can't get the treatment that he needs.
01:51:56.000No, no, no, quite literally in the United States to claim that a certain person of a certain race has different susceptibilities or different traits based on race is overtly racist.
01:52:03.000I think sickle cell anemia was endemic to the African American population.
01:53:15.000So I'm like, I don't even know what to search for.
01:53:16.000But I would just say, when I see the American debate around it, I've yet to see an American left-wing source say that the number one enemy of the truckers is Rob Ford's brother.
01:55:00.000What I really wonder about it is, what if they made every province a state?
01:55:06.000So that would be, let's say, ten provinces a state.
01:55:08.000That would make America way left-wing.
01:55:11.000Suddenly, overnight, America would be a left-wing country.
01:55:17.000Wasn't there a belief back in the 80s and 90s when Quebec was doing its stronger separatist movement that Northwest Territories would try to apply for American statehood, giving us a direct road to Canada?
01:56:05.000This is a book of like, what's amazing to me, what's the most shocking thing, maybe one of the most shocking things that's happened in my life, is that somehow Canada has become the stable country and America has become the unstable country.
01:56:17.000I mean, if you told me that that would happen when I was 20, everyone would have laughed in your face.
01:56:23.000I think it's, in all seriousness, I do think Canada gets involved in whatever civil war happens in the United States.
01:56:48.000But Canada has resisted it in a lot of ways because of Because of a bunch of really odd policies like we have very strict immigration But we are very pro-immigration and we have we have we didn't 2008 didn't happen to us, right?
01:57:02.000Like we didn't we didn't have Occupy Wall Street because we are because we're so vulnerable We because we're not America like we had to protect our banks and our banks came through very safe It's the center of the Empire exactly what Montreal says are the most culturally diverse city in Toronto is Toronto.
01:57:22.000Toronto's more than half foreign-born.
01:57:29.000I mean, the thing that's funny is like Canada has multicultural policy even though we're about... Well, I'm sure Toronto is majority white.
01:58:04.000That's very different policies over in Canada compared to... Well, we're bringing in 400,000 immigrants next year, right?
01:58:10.000And that's in a country of 40 million.
01:58:15.000In Canada, the more patriotic you are, the more in favor of immigration you are.
01:58:19.000I think that's a huge difference and I think you were talking about abortion and how you think it's a polarizing issue and it is.
01:58:25.000I think should the civil war come, those who are not here legally should be the ones who are most concerned because there are parts of this country that they will ask for your papers and you will flee to California or Illinois or New York.
01:58:39.000Well, already in 2016, there was a flood of people across the border.
01:58:42.000You know how many, in a civil war, people would flood the borders that aren't natural, that would fight for a side to get their citizenship?
01:58:49.000Like, you'd have millions and millions of foreign people.
01:58:51.000Oh, like my great-great-grandfather, who was Irish, who fought for the North because he wanted to be an American.
01:58:56.000Except Ian, in New York now, you can vote as a non-citizen.
01:59:00.000So they're gonna just go to the state and be like, we're here anyway.
01:59:06.000So, you know, that point I made about taxes and geography before, I think one thing you might end up seeing in the map you have in your book might actually be an accurate starting point.
01:59:15.000Yeah, I mean, it's very much like... States will align based on... Yeah, I mean, it's like a, that's, that's like, you know, a bar room suggestion.
01:59:21.000Like, obviously, it's not, it's not like how it would actually happen.
01:59:24.000Actually, I think, interestingly, I would, I'd be willing to bet New Hampshire, at this point, would declare independence in any conflict.
02:00:19.000It would be between people who want disorder and want breakdown and people who are trying to keep the institutions alive by by force.
02:00:27.000And like and of course the problem is as America's learned in its counterinsurgency strategy and as you know I talked to an anonymous colonel who was responsible for drawing up what they call full spectrum operations in the homeland like the more you try to control the population militarily that
02:00:43.000just spreads violence unit you know i think you're right about that
02:01:56.000So we had Marjorie Taylor Greene on, and she said, when she went to Congress, she was confused because she's sitting there and there's like 10 Democrats, or like 5 Democrats and like 5 Republicans, and there's some random guy she doesn't know at the speaker's podium, pulls up a bill and goes, bill, assembly bill, you know, congressional bill 473, in favor, Democrats, and they go, meh, Republicans, meh, Democrats have it, next bill, They must have hated her.
02:02:22.000no one's even voting on the stuff right so she called a roll call vote which forced all the members
02:02:27.000of congress back to actually record their votes in a state of her and they
02:02:30.000could they come after her for it and that's probably why you hear these
02:02:33.000insane stories about her in the press because she's in defiance of
02:02:36.000and it's one work so we had time well nasi on
02:02:40.000with you know what their job is i mean you know Fundraising.
02:02:43.000I mean, when you actually talk to, I've been interviewing a politician lately about the inner workings of electoral politics for a possible sequel to this book, and, you know, it's staggering.
02:02:55.000Like, I had like a 20 minute conversation with this guy, and I was like, oh, well, no wonder this system is so screwed up.
02:03:02.000All they can think about all day is the three levels of fundraising.
02:03:06.000Dark money, social media money, and bundled money.
02:03:21.000So we did a little bit of longer show today because, you know, typically what we do with the members-only segment is we'll save like a spicier story for TimCast.com's segment.
02:03:32.000But I figured because we're going to be having kind of an amorphous conversation about Civil War and politics, it wouldn't really work out to do that.
02:03:38.000So I just, we extended the normal show.
02:03:51.000Wrestler Town says, If Mr. Marsh started writing his book five years ago, I'd like to know which right-wing activists he had to compare to the left at the conception of his book.
02:04:00.000His go-to January 6th example happened one year ago.
02:04:03.000Well, what inspired it was the Trump inauguration and the general atmosphere of violence.
02:04:10.000I mean, I wouldn't say at the beginning of it I was like... I mean, I went and talked to various prepper groups.
02:04:15.000I went to talk to various far-right groups.
02:04:20.000I talked to various members of the far-right and going and meeting them in Ohio and in the field research.
02:04:29.000So that's different than, I would say, icons or something like that.
02:04:34.000And I just, you know, I got along very well with them.
02:04:36.000And they, and also like, you know, Sons of Confederate Veterans and things like this, like, you know, and sovereign citizens and constitutional sheriffs and sagebrush rebels.
02:04:50.000And so, yeah, I would talk to all these different groups.
02:04:52.000Now, you know, like the specific violence that they're involved in is sometimes purely
02:05:55.000I guess, I don't think I... Which is like destroying 30 people dead.
02:05:59.000Well, I was dealing with murders, right?
02:06:01.000Like, I don't think I was... I think 26 of those were murders and 32 were just... I never did a comparative analysis of property value damage.
02:06:11.000I guess I probably should have done that.
02:06:38.000like we're there man like we look look how mullah harris
02:06:42.000Well, Donald Trump saying what, you know, how about the Republican Party saying January 6th is legitimate political discourse?
02:06:48.000What was the specific context around that?
02:06:50.000Well, I don't know, but like... Well, then I don't think you have a point.
02:06:53.000Well, I would just say that there's certainly been legitimization of violence on the right.
02:06:57.000Like, I don't really think that's debatable.
02:07:00.000You gotta give me a specific example, because I can name... January 6th.
02:07:03.000January 6th is one thing that happened one time, and I can give you over the past several years... I mean, the French Revolution is one thing that happened one time.
02:07:09.000Sure, but hold on, we're talking about 800 people, of which several hundred fought their way to the front tunnel entrance, and the other several hundred walked through the back door that was opened by police.
02:07:19.000But I can also go back to, like, Everett.
02:07:21.000Well, there's the Oregon state, the Oregon, Mike Nierman, when he let in the rioters who... I mean, the other thing... Nothing happened there!
02:07:31.000They opened the door and the guy got in trouble.
02:07:32.000I can talk about... Well, the vandalism of the legislature.
02:07:36.000A guy went to the ICE facility with an AR and firebombed it.
02:07:40.000We had the guy Aaron Danielson get shot and killed.
02:07:43.000We had over 800 instances of low-tier, what I call, blunt force violence.
02:07:48.000This is something that has been repeated in this conversation.
02:07:51.000You say, show me an example, then I do, and then you say... He keeps saying January 6th.
02:08:48.000But this is so far separated from, like, how does that relate to a Trump supporter?
02:08:55.000Well, we're not in the realm... Well, they're roughly on the same spectrum.
02:08:58.000I mean, when you're dealing with the far right in the United States, you're dealing with a huge collection of ideas that are not coherently connected.
02:09:07.000And they marched together in the 100,000s.
02:09:08.000Well, and it also strips itself apart very quickly and is also filled with a lot of segmentation.
02:09:15.000So, like... Like, I mean, there's no... Like, I would say... All I'm saying here is, you know, you would say that your right wing Does not commit any violence.
02:09:28.000But if you're looking at, like, mass terms of violence, like, you have to look at things like sovereign citizens, or QAnon, or, you know, etc.
02:09:35.000Like, it would just not be reasonable to say that those are not right-wing political violence.
02:09:39.000But this is why I explained in the beginning that the right engages what I define as sharp, acute instances, and the left is... Well, let's stay with that.
02:09:46.000Because, like, that seems to me quite correct.
02:10:27.000The FBI is called the Administrative State or Deep State.
02:10:31.000J. Edgar Hoover was like the head of the FBI for 48 years.
02:10:33.000So, you know, the motto of Canada, the motto of America is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
02:10:38.000The motto of Canada is peace, order, and good government.
02:10:41.000The motto of America is, in God we trust.
02:10:42.000What I find with peace and order is you can have a slave state that's suppressed its population into peace and order, and they're still slaves and unhappy, but there's peace.
02:10:51.000So I think a good example of the breakdown, and there's no middle ground, right?
02:11:16.000I mean, I would say I'm talking about a specific category of ideologies.
02:11:20.000I'll tell you, you know, like, I'm doing research and I come across a story about a guy, no one say his name, seriously, And, uh, because if you do, YouTube will shut the show down instantly.
02:11:30.000That is, there's nothing, uh, on the left, so I sit down with Jack Dorsey, and we pull up a tweet of an Antifa account overtly calling for, organizing, and inciting violence and giving instructions on what to do, and they went, meh.
02:11:44.000Look, dude, there's lots of evidence of right-wing radicalization through social media networks.
02:13:33.000Your group is calling me far left, but when I was an Esquire columnist for years, I was considered like Norman Mailer and constantly called out for all these kinds of questions.
02:13:57.000But you haven't done the fact-checking.
02:13:59.000So, like, when the New York Times lies and makes up fake crap, and then we have to fact-check it and prove it wrong with evidence... This book is deeply fact-checked.
02:14:07.000This is why I used the joke... Deeply.
02:14:09.000I mean, I'm... I don't... I have a lot of failings.
02:14:13.000I have a lot of stuff to be humble for.
02:14:33.000And for some reason, So when the FBI doesn't prosecute Hillary Clinton, doesn't prosecute Joe Biden or even investigate these things, when you have the collusion between Twitter and Facebook shutting down the story about Hunter Biden's laptop, when Hunter Biden is publicly known to have illegally acquired a handgun or disposed of one, nothing happens!
02:14:55.000No, no, no, I'm saying the FBI hasn't done anything.
02:14:57.000Oh, well, I mean, you know, the number, like, everyone always says that about crime, and the thing about crime is, like, tiny, only tiny little amounts of crime are ever prosecuted.
02:15:05.000The DHS specifically comes out and says it's effectively the right that is the problem.
02:15:10.000Without talking about BLM and the billions of dollars in damage, people say they have no credibility.
02:15:15.000If you cite them, they'll say... Well, one side says that they have no credibility.
02:15:18.000I mean, the problem we're in is the one we keep going back to, which is, like, the sides are so divided now that, like, literally there is no common ground in fact, there is no common ground in narrative, there is no common ground, like, in institutions, there is no common ground in language.
02:15:51.000No, no, for anyone to say you are, because the reason why you're not far left is because you're here, because the real far left in America, and people may say the real far right.
02:15:58.000Well, you may underestimate my desire to sell books.
02:16:02.000They would not sit together and have this conversation, and that is one of the biggest problems.
02:16:06.000I mean, I do political debate for a living, even though I've been very taciturn this evening, but it is hard to find an open-minded And I'm sure they would say the same about us, but we don't
02:17:37.000Mike says a major pipeline project in Canada was attacked by 20 masked individuals with axes and flare guns deep in the woods this morning.
02:17:44.000Millions in property damage, destroyed heavy equipment and work camp.
02:17:48.000Well, the left would take that because like all of the indigenous protests about pipelines got broken up very quickly and quite aggressively.
02:17:57.000And like for you know, like the Ottawa police were sued for $60 million successfully for their for their brutality over the G7 with the leftist protests.
02:18:10.000So actually I think I mean this is that's a Canadian example.
02:18:12.000So it's actually not very relevant but You know, one of the things is, like, there are many people on the left asking, like, well, if these were left-wing protesters in Ottawa, would they be treated anywhere near as decently as they have been so far?
02:18:27.000Like, there's a lot of... And I, frankly, I sympathize with that.
02:18:33.000We have this super chat from, uh, Legamothegain.
02:18:37.000I'm probably pouncing that wrong all the time.
02:18:38.000He says, right-wing esoteric knowledge like QAnon is crazy, but is less insane and far less dangerous, mainstream and institutionally entrenched compared to standard progressive dogma.
02:18:49.000It's ridiculous to make an equation between the two.
02:18:54.000That's not in my book, and I find it one of the more fascinating things that I didn't answer.
02:18:58.000There are a few, like, mysteries that were kind of around the edges of the book that I... because I tried to be really specific and, like, really only say what I know.
02:19:09.000But, like, the fascination with esoteric knowledge on the right, I just find it fascinating.
02:19:15.000There was a... Are you familiar with the... You're probably not.
02:19:23.000So, in... I think it was 2012, Barack Obama signed into law in... Our National Defense Authorization Act reauthorizes, you know, spending on national defense and stuff.
02:19:46.000And so Dave Smith was telling a story on Joe Rogan's podcast where he said Brian Stelter was complaining that conspiracy theory videos about how, you know, certain tragic events didn't really happen were dangerous.
02:19:59.000And, you know, Dave's point was like, if some weirdo guy makes a YouTube video, it's like, sure, it's annoying, and Brian Seltzer's like, no, it's dangerous!
02:20:07.000And he goes, you know what's dangerous?
02:20:08.000That Barack Obama signed into law the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense Authorization Act, and the media didn't cover it.
02:20:16.000Yeah, I mean, I think there's so much that's dangerous right now.
02:20:20.000Like, you know when I called it a complex cascading system?
02:20:24.000These things all feed into each other.
02:20:26.000You know, like one of the things that I think is happening that's, you know, probably I shouldn't have brought up right at the end of this conversation, is like people's sense of what is real is fraying.
02:21:53.000Because I think, you know, one of the things I was making early, the point I made early on is that we agree on a lot of the core issues that's happening.
02:22:07.000A lot of people are commenting like, oh, he's wrong about this, he's wrong about that, you know, and he's wrong about civil... No, I think Stephen is very much correct about civil war.
02:22:14.000I think there's probably core political issues that we have different views on.
02:22:18.000But, like, that's why I thought it would be fascinating.
02:22:19.000But I don't know, I mean, I think when you actually... Like, you're in favor of universal health care, you're in favor of progressive taxation.
02:22:24.000I mean, the problem that we're dealing with here is that when you talk about politics... We've had this whole... We've talked for like two and a half hours now about politics.
02:23:02.000But the problem is I've been on the ground at all of these protests.
02:23:05.000I spent the start of my career going to different protests and talking to people and what did I find?
02:23:10.000When I would go to like a right-wing event, they would be very specific to the point of like, this is my thing, this is my thing.
02:23:16.000And so like a Trump rally, they'd say, my factory closed down, Trump wants to bring factories back and end free trade.
02:23:22.000I'd go to left-wing rallies and they'd say, I don't know.
02:23:25.000See, I had this experience when I was in 2015 where I covered the Canadian election and then I went down and covered a Trump rally and a Sanders rally, like right after each other.
02:23:36.000They were both in Iowa within three days of each other.
02:23:38.000And so this is what a Canadian debate is like.
02:23:42.000Sir, we need to spend $428 million on education.
02:23:56.000Then you go to America and it's God and socialism.
02:24:00.000These grand ideas that have no practical applications, that are incredibly vague, and just simply are essentially aesthetic categories.
02:24:12.000What we're talking about here is language.
02:24:18.000But if you were to actually sit... Like, I think the abortion question comes up here again, where it's like, if you were to actually sit down, like, what are our policy objectives?
02:24:26.000We want women to be in control of their bodies, and we want abortion rates to decline.
02:26:41.000It's like you have this idea of yourselves as a shining city on a hill, as a beacon for the world, whereas I think in other countries that are perhaps more stable, it's like, well, what are we doing here?
02:26:53.000How can we make life a little bit better?
02:26:55.000How can we make things, we're in these systems, how can we make these systems better?
02:27:01.000When you get to the systems questions, when you get to those policy questions, there's actually a lot of common ground.
02:27:07.000It's actually quite possible to build things together.
02:27:29.000When you said that there's a multicultural democracy and a constitutional republic, what you're, this country has always been a constitutional republic, albeit with politicians making improper statements about being a democracy or whatever.
02:28:37.000Well, also you could say it began at the beginning of the country.
02:28:39.000It began with the Three-Fifths Compromise.
02:28:41.000It began with all the compromises that were embedded in the Constitution that ultimately were between slave and free states that were not subject to compromise.
02:28:52.000Did you read about, I think it was the 1872 election in the United States?
02:28:58.000Where they basically were like, we'll just rubber stamp, you know, and negotiate who's the president.
02:29:03.000Well, I mean, you know, one of the subjects of this book is what an American occupation would look like.
02:29:08.000And of course, 1876 was the end of the first American occupation, which was the North's occupation of the South, which was a low level civil conflict, right?
02:29:17.000With lots of terrorist groups and lots of, and lots of conflict.
02:29:20.000And basically 1876 was, You know, the thing is, occupation never works, right?
02:29:25.000Like, it simply never... You can't really occupy people against their will.
02:29:31.000Well, I don't know, 20 years in Afghanistan, I think, proves you wrong.
02:29:35.000The North American settlers... I mean, when you read... Like, one of the guys I interview for the book is a guy named Daniel Bolger, who's a real expert in counterinsurgency and, you know, saw it in Iraq and saw it everywhere.
02:29:47.000And he's like, you know, there are basically no examples of this working.
02:29:50.000But when you read his book, you keep waiting for the... This book is called Why We Lost.
02:30:02.000I think if we were doing wargaming of your book, which we're not going to do because we'll go back to Super Chats, I think that the most important variable is who is what party, what faction is the president at the time.
02:30:15.000And that would be, I think the Civil War, the American Civil War, I think would have been very differently.
02:30:19.000It would have been very different if there was a different president of a different party.
02:30:23.000And so who controls DC, who controls the military, who controls the powers of the federal government, I think will determine an awful lot.
02:30:56.000When that's the backdrop, that's not good.
02:31:00.000But the generals in the Washington Post a few months ago openly discussed would the military fragment in the case of a contested electoral college vote.
02:31:10.000That's a whole level of terror that I didn't put in the book, but it seems to me entirely plausible.
02:32:32.000Like, I mean, I think that's the, the, the, the, when I go and talk to like NPR people and so on, I wonder if I'm the only person this year to talk to you and NPR at the same time, but, uh, possible.
02:32:42.000But like the, the part they find controversial is, um, that I say, if Hillary Clinton had been elected, all of this would be exactly the same.
02:32:52.000Right, like the Trump, like what we're dealing with here are deep-seated structural problems
02:32:58.000that are built into the, they transcend completely the outcomes of elections.
02:33:06.000This is why I can't stand the Trump fraud narrative that I'll give you a funny example. I have never once stated
02:33:14.000that Donald Trump won the 2020 election.
02:34:49.000So this is when... Think about what the purpose of war is, right?
02:34:54.000To gain control of an asset resource land or a people.
02:34:58.000When you look at what started the first civil war, it was these military bases and then eventually, like preserving the Union, gaining control and holding one government over the South because they were trying to secede and form their own country or whatever.
02:35:10.000What if you never had to fire a shot to accomplish that?
02:35:14.000So, fourth and fifth generational warfare is when you get into insurgency with fourth generational, and fifth generational is manipulation and propaganda.
02:35:22.000I mean, the thing I find pretty... I actually wrote about that for Foreign Policy.
02:35:26.000I think it's a really... You know, I actually think what's happening in Russia and the Ukraine, not to go off on a completely different thing, but I think it's one of the earliest instances of truly mimetic warfare.
02:35:35.000You know, Marshall McLuhan said the Third World War will be an information war fought with no distinction between civilians and military.
02:35:44.000And I think in that sense, if you were to think of the Civil War as a mimetic war, Or as an informational wars or diathetical war, which is what Lawrence of Arabia called it, that you are absolutely in it.
02:35:58.000That's why I think when we if we talk in terms of left and right, we've already lost the war because our mind has been changed by the mean to think in that way.
02:36:05.000Well, I think, you know, I think it's natural to have a left and a right, and I think it's natural to have disagreement.
02:36:12.000I don't think you need to be in a unified country that that's somehow better.
02:36:19.000You have to feel you're on the same team, though.
02:36:21.000It's true that it's natural to have a left and a right, but not to have two political parties in control of a government.
02:37:06.000And I knew, having seen your Twitter, we had these disagreements, but I thought, you know, we try inviting many other people of opposing views.
02:37:32.000Look, I understand if people are like, I don't want to buy his book because he doesn't deserve my money or it'll make him rich or whatever.
02:37:39.000I think they should read it because, as I often say, if you think he's wrong, wouldn't it be valuable if they knew all of your thoughts and ideas and research and where it came from?
02:37:48.000And then, by all means, you can take the book.
02:37:49.000We've actually had a couple people comment saying they did read your book and felt you were wrong or whatever, and that's the right answer!
02:37:55.000You know, at least almost 40% of the sources are Republican.
02:38:06.000No, but I mean, I read CNN all the time, and then I'm like, that one's wrong, that one's wrong.
02:38:11.000And then I read Breitbart too, and I'm like, that one's framed poorly, and that one's wrong.
02:38:16.000But like, because you have to read everything, and then try and figure out, on a lot of articles it's tough.
02:38:22.000So like, because when the New York Times says X is true, I'm like, you just said something.
02:38:28.000Like, how am I supposed to know it's true just because you said it?
02:38:31.000Well, as someone who's worked for a bunch of publications, I would say if something is in the New York Times, that's the most reliable news source of anything I've worked for, with the possible exception of the Atlantic.
02:38:41.000When you go to the Atlantic, when something's fact-checked by the Atlantic, it is fact-checked within an inch of its life.
02:38:49.000The New York Times, I caught in what I view as a major scandal of publishing a news piece, getting boosted in the algorithm, and altering it to an op-ed for sustained growth.
02:39:03.000But other than that, I mean, you look at what they did with Project Veritas, where they just lied about them, and then basically never fact-checked it, got sued.
02:39:12.000It was so egregious that they've actually, surprisingly, Veritas has gotten past the motion to dismiss, which is I thought the New York Times lost a lot of its credibility when they published Anonymous, and they said this was a high-level Trump staffer with intimate details of the Trump administration, and then it turned out it had like the same position I had in the Bush administration, where, you know, you have a job, but like their editorial board, their senior leadership allowed that to go forward, saying this is, they made it look like it was a cabinet position, and they did it for political expediency.
02:39:44.000What did you guys think of the Palin trial?
02:40:38.000For those that aren't familiar, Times v. Sullivan is the standard that basically you have to prove, if defamation is of a public figure, you have to prove they either knew it was false or were acting recklessly.
02:40:57.000Hurting is... In Canada, it's completely different, and it's so much easier to sue somebody for libel.
02:41:03.000In the U.S., actual malice doesn't refer to intention to cause harm, necessarily.
02:41:07.000It's that you knew it was wrong and you didn't care.
02:41:10.000Recklessness is that... Very hard to prove.
02:41:12.000Impossible, unless you get into discovery.
02:41:15.000Recklessness is that, for the New York Times, for instance, if they publish something, you'd have to prove that they didn't follow their standard procedure for verification.
02:41:23.000And if you can't get past a motion to dismiss, and you can't because of its own stance, it's insane.
02:41:30.000Someone, they outright make up stories about me.
02:41:34.000I can't get into them because of litigation and stuff like that.
02:41:37.000But they'll outright lie and make everything up.
02:41:39.000And then they're just like, we assume it to be true.
02:41:41.000Like we had a source who said it, therefore it's fact.
02:41:45.000That you should not be able to get away with that.
02:41:46.000And the anonymous sources stuff has gotten out of control.
02:42:30.000So I'll read, we'll just read two more because we've gone a bit long tonight and I think it was worth it.
02:42:34.000Papa Romano says, I disagree with him a lot, but a great guest.
02:42:37.000Yo, thank you people need like need to understand we would we would have a lot more guests That are more like mainstream journalists and leftists if they were willing to come on.
02:42:46.000Am I gonna become your pocket leftist?
02:42:48.000No Maybe the pocket Canadian Crossfire was one of the best shows of all time news wise and we need that's kind of what I want.
02:43:00.000I will say I We have made a lot of money off people not liking you.
02:43:04.000They're sending in superchats like, he's wrong, I don't like him.
02:43:06.000It's so good to have someone from Canada, because your perspective is invaluable for me as an American.
02:43:11.000I was grown in this system, so I need... Well, I do think we, as I say in the book, we're like Horatio to your Hamlet.
02:43:17.000We're this small, irrelevant country, right on the edge.
02:43:21.000I've lived in America, I have American friends, I love America, but I'm not American.
02:43:26.000Right, like, so I'm not part of this, you know, America's not my mother, right?
02:43:30.000Like, it's like when you say, like, with, like, healthcare, like, that, my blood goes up.
02:43:34.000With your stuff, my blood does not go up.
02:43:41.000Canada's, like, again, it's really odd because, like, nearly half of Canadian homes have a gun in it, but it's not the same gun culture at all.
02:45:22.000They have support from the left, though.
02:45:26.000I actually think they have a lot of broad support.
02:45:28.000Like Stephen Harper, who was the last conservative prime minister, he was the first person to acknowledge crimes in the educational system, and he actually made a very powerful statement about it.
02:45:42.000I want to I just read one more because we've gone long and we'll wrap it up
02:45:46.000But um cowboy ish says Tim the guy has demonstrated that he has bias
02:45:51.000Why is it wrong to give him our money to check for ourselves?
02:45:55.000So I think I wonder if this question is shouldn't it be wrong, right? Is that what they mean or?
02:46:01.000I wanted to read that because my point is, if you only get news from one source, you'll have no idea what you're arguing against.
02:46:10.000And then I remember I was working for Greenpeace and I was outside of a bookstore and I saw Glenn Beck's book, Arguing Against Climate Change.
02:46:29.000If someone's going to make an argument, and you're like, I completely disagree with this person, wouldn't you want to arm yourself with the facts and data to properly be able to argue your points?
02:46:49.000I think people might read through that and be like, oh, okay, this one has less to do with some of the stuff they talked about, because we have our bias on this show.