In this episode of the podcast, we discuss the possibility of civil war in the United States, and why it's a possibility that we should all be worried about. We're joined by the author of The Next Civil War, Stephen Marsh.
00:00:38.000This 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.
00:00:51.000Other 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?
00:01:03.000No, it was like it was it was a similar group to the black Hebrew Israelites.
00:01:07.000And 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 civil wars could start.
00:01:18.000And if it does, you will see targeted assassination.
00:01:20.000So I want to get into this, and we do have a lot of stories coming out now.
00:01:23.000We've got the National Guard deployed in New Mexico to be teachers and things like that.
00:01:26.000We've got the trucker convoy, obviously.
00:01:28.000That's up in Canada, but there's talk of an American convoy.
00:02:39.000And 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, the different political parties, which I think will be a really interesting conversation.
00:02:52.000I think it's, you know, people are forming... At 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, they're focusing more on, you know, their own in groups and things like that, and that's causing this like outward spread.
00:03:08.000You've talked about things like cancel culture, specific scenarios and stuff.
00:03:12.000So I'm like, I'm reading your articles and I'm like, I think we agree on those things.
00:03:16.000But then there's certain specific points in politics, I think, we'll have disagreements on.
00:03:20.000But that doesn't, you know, whether or not we agree on something like the trucker convoy, it doesn't change the fact that the core of what's happening, civil war, conflict, the escalation, we agree.
00:03:28.000Yeah, I mean, I definitely think a non-partisan observer can look at the United States.
00:03:34.000I mean, it's a textbook case of a country headed for civil war.
00:03:37.000It's not really a question of your political affiliation.
00:03:40.000It's really a question of deep structures that, you know, anyone can see.
00:03:45.000So those are not, I don't really think of that as a partisan issue.
00:03:49.000And what I keep saying is, you know, to a lot of people who maybe are, you know, one side or the other, it doesn't matter if you think you're right.
00:03:55.000What matters is both sides think they're right.
00:03:57.000Well, I mean, there's that old expression, would you rather be married or right?
00:04:01.000And like in America, a lot of people would rather be right than married.
00:04:04.000You know, that's, that's where you're at now.
00:04:06.000I mean, I should say, like, I don't really think of myself as a partisan in the United States cause I'm a Canadian.
00:04:10.000So my, like when I talk about Canada, We can definitely talk about Canada, but, you know, what we're seeing in Canada is essentially a proxy conflict for the hyper-partisanship in the United States.
00:04:21.000And, you know, I think of myself like, I think when you think of Canada, you think left.
00:04:26.000But 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?
00:04:33.000Like I'm outside of all of these tribes.
00:04:35.000So 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.
00:06:01.000I am stoked for this conversation with our northern neighbor.
00:06:04.000Canadians are always incredibly nice guests and very nice people in general, and it's been a really interesting conversation before the show.
00:06:09.000It's gonna be a great one, so glad you're here.
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00:06:24.000Now, truth be told, because of how we're going to be handling today's episode, it'll be a little different.
00:06:28.000Normally, we focus on, like, topical news.
00:06:29.000I 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.
00:06:36.000Whereas normally, we try and, like, create, like, a special segment for members.
00:06:39.000So 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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00:07:04.000Let's just jump into the first article we have here from January 4th by a man named Stephen Marsh.
00:07:28.000But I was but I was as I was getting into it and talking about how we've got these, you know, look, a potential political assassination attempt.
00:08:40.000And use the best available evidence that I could.
00:08:43.000So, you know, yeah, there's there's a process underway in the United States is a textbook case of a country headed for civil war on a number of fronts.
00:08:52.000It's actually what they call a complex cascading system.
00:08:55.000So it's things feeding into each other.
00:08:58.000So on one hand, it's political illegitimacy.
00:09:01.000On the other hand, it's effects of climate change.
00:09:03.000On the other hand, it's the levels of inequality, which are at unprecedented levels, you know, literally levels that haven't been seen since 1776.
00:09:12.000And all of these things contribute to each other and factor into each other.
00:09:17.000And 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.
00:09:22.000But it's the way that they feed into each other that creates such a dangerous situation for the United States.
00:09:27.000Are there specific things that you found factored across multiple potentials that you just kept showing up like, this is one of these things that it seems to be in all these scenarios?
00:09:35.000Well, the big, I mean, there are a few ones that are big, like, I don't, I don't really separate them out, because I do think they feed into each other.
00:09:42.000But like the decline of faith of institutions, so the fact that only 20% of Americans believe their electoral system is fair.
00:10:23.000So I think, you know, just leaping off from there, we have the story about the Black Lives Matter activists accused of allegedly shooting this Democrat.
00:10:32.000Certainly there have been instances where far-right and right-wing groups have engaged in violence.
00:10:36.000But 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.
00:10:47.000You 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.
00:10:55.000You don't have that same kind of thing on the right.
00:10:57.000Well, let me answer that question in two ways.
00:11:01.000OK, so the first thing is that the process that civil war experts talk about, and this happens all over the world, happens in Chile.
00:11:09.000It happened in other places that civil war is called complementary radicalization.
00:11:14.000So what you have is left wing groups or right wing groups taking extremist positions.
00:11:18.000And this causes people on the other side to get more radical.
00:11:23.000So that's that's that's an area that transcends, you know, Partisanship like that's that's another that's a process that's underway.
00:11:32.000Yeah, 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.
00:11:46.000The other thing I would say is that when I talk to You know, this is just let me just give you this perspective.
00:11:55.000But 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.
00:12:09.000It is much less organized than the right like and it's also it's much less effective as it as a group.
00:12:17.000So like when you look at a group like the Oath Keepers, They have it together.
00:12:26.000Whereas 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.
00:12:37.000It imploded in inter-Nicene politics almost instantly.
00:12:43.000And the term woke institution basically doesn't exist because they eat themselves, right?
00:12:49.000So 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.
00:13:10.000I 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.
00:13:18.000Black 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.
00:13:30.000The damage caused was severe and it did result in a lot of death, but it was very, very widespread.
00:13:36.000So typically what we see a lot of, especially at the start of, you know, Donald Trump's run for
00:13:40.000the presidency, I was actually on the ground at a lot of these Trump rallies, you see blunt level
00:13:46.000terrorism. It never exceeded the, it was political violence.
00:13:50.000Terrorism to me is a technical term that would not apply to that.
00:13:54.000I mean, in terms of this book, like, like.
00:14:31.000But 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.
00:14:39.000Right, like as a Canadian up north, like wanting America to hold on so that we can trade with you, like what I'm concerned with is the stability of the system.
00:14:48.000So, you know, like when defund the police happened, right?
00:15:52.000I 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.
00:16:01.000But, you know, like the other thing about the right is that they're they understand the importance of institutions in a way that the left does not.
00:16:08.000This is, you understand, I'm not judging.
00:16:12.000Like they, like when you look at the Oath Keeper list, like when it came out with that 40,000 names, like they'd infiltrated very deeply into police departments, into, you know, school boards.
00:16:24.000Like when I talked to Michael German, who's like a, who was an undercover agent with the FBI and 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.
00:16:36.000We're going to run you on a school board.
00:16:40.000What 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.
00:16:55.000The way to describe it is it's sharp versus the left's blunt.
00:17:00.000I think you're right when you say that they know the importance of institutions.
00:17:03.000The right talks about losing institutional control at the time.
00:17:06.000What the left doesn't understand, what they have is numbers.
00:17:10.000People will go out in the street and march and smash things, but a day later, where are those activists?
00:17:57.000There 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.
00:18:08.000That's a Wednesday in a mature democracy.
00:18:11.000Like, you just pass a budget and that's it.
00:18:14.000In the United States, those basic functions of government are increasingly impossible or extremely difficult, and that leads naturally to a politics of rage, right?
00:18:25.000Where it's like, because you can't ever enact policy, Whether you're left or right, everything becomes aesthetic.
00:18:34.000Everything becomes an aesthetic, artistic gesture of your own anger and your own beliefs in a concept that transcends, essentially, real actions.
00:19:09.000Like when I hear them talking about parental leave or something, it's like, you guys can't pass, you can barely pass a budget.
00:19:15.000Why are you even having these conversations about parental leave or whatever?
00:19:21.000You're in a system that is increasingly non-functional.
00:19:24.000And the thing is, one of the most important models in the book is that that is only going to increase.
00:19:30.000Dude, I was watching Canadian Parliament go nuts and people were heckling, basically.
00:19:33.000I was like, in an American court, you'd be thrown out if you heckled.
00:19:37.000Well, have you ever seen the British one?
00:19:38.000It's like, it's like a, it's like a holdover from British.
00:19:41.000Like even the speaker was like, you guys cut it out.
00:19:45.000Like they're trying to like, it's 21st century where adults don't scream over each other, but it comes from, it did come from like British parliament where they're trying to interrupt the guy speaking.
00:20:34.000And that's, that's, that's just a completely different condition in the United States.
00:20:37.000I don't know if we lost the point you were trying to make before, Daniel.
00:20:39.000No, 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.
00:20:48.000So you mentioned the Oath Keepers, and we were also talking about Black Lives Matter, and the sense of institutional dysfunction, and how I love that you said the right sees institutions as inherently necessary.
00:21:07.000Like that's both sides now are are destroying the institution.
00:21:12.000But 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, right?
00:21:28.000You have major institutions that support what I think is a purely political entity, but it is held up to this level.
00:21:36.000And I think that causes a lot of rage because the Oath Keepers, regardless of what you think of them, would Bank of America ever write them a check?
00:21:43.000They probably couldn't even get a loan.
00:21:46.000So I think institutions have chosen sides and I think that's leading to a greater level of the division.
00:21:53.000Well, the money in American politics is really confusing.
00:21:57.000Because, for example, you saw the New York Times article about dark money that came out a week ago.
00:22:03.000Like, I mean, that to me is the most appalling story in American politics that I know of, where the money that $2.4 billion that decided the 2020 election, no one knows where it came from.
00:22:16.000Some of it came from foreign sources for sure, but nobody knows where it came from.
00:22:20.000Now, $1.5 billion went to the Democrats and $900,000 went to the Republicans.
00:22:33.000My Canadian small-time politics stuff.
00:22:36.000And then there's the other fact that while Republicans are pro-business and so on, 70% of American GDP comes from Biden-voting counties.
00:22:48.000That 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.
00:23:09.000I 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.
00:23:26.000I mean, the Karp Brothers wrote a check.
00:23:30.000But you're never going to go to a Knicks game and at the halftime show have them give a $500,000 check to this political cause, but you will see it for...
00:23:43.000Something like Black Lives Matter, you will see it, or something like Planned Parenthood, you will see.
00:23:48.000So the philanthropy of politics, I think, has become very, very divisive because certain philanthropic groups are tolerable, and others are not.
00:23:58.000And real quick, it's only one Koch brother, the other has passed.
00:24:02.000But just, you know, I thought that was right.
00:24:04.000Well, I think they also stopped giving money to political causes, too, like a few years ago.
00:24:09.000I think they give it to, like, reform things.
00:24:12.000They just decided they're not doing partisan politics anymore.
00:24:15.000There are a lot of wealthy individuals that are willing to fund either side.
00:24:18.000You know, Peter Thiel's got a lot of money and infrastructure.
00:24:21.000I mean, the point is really not who is giving money to who.
00:24:25.000The point is, like, all this money is destroying the system and making it inherently unstable.
00:24:29.000There's also the politicization of everything.
00:24:32.000Which is where you have homophobic chicken and you have LGBTQ positive cookies.
00:24:40.000Like, you know, like there were like literally every aspect of life is politicized.
00:24:47.000That also is classic prelude to civil war.
00:24:50.000But this is an interesting point because potentially what was the start of the culture war, depending on who you asked, Gamergate, you're familiar.
00:24:58.000This was a lot of people who identified themselves as left libertarian on the political spectrum being angered that everything was becoming political because you had these quote-unquote news organizations, video game, you know, news and video game companies increasingly putting very specific ideologies in their games and people were upset with that.
00:25:24.000I 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?
00:25:30.000I didn't test it, but I was wondering.
00:25:32.000Well, 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.
00:25:47.000When they started becoming very different, at core, having some kind of Marxist tinge to a lot of them, What do you mean by Marxist?
00:25:58.000I will say in America that word has a meaning that I don't understand.
00:26:03.000In the true sense of Marxist ideology of oppressed versus oppressor.
00:26:07.000Well, okay, I mean, to me, Marxism is, there's lots of oppressed versus oppressor ideologies, but Marxism to me is strictly a class-based struggle.
00:27:35.000So to me, this whole reading of Marxism... It's a semantic issue, though, is what I would say.
00:27:41.000I 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... I mean, that's kind of the ultimate insult, because it was ultimately So evil, right?
00:28:00.000And that's not what applies to these other forms.
00:29:56.000Occupy Wall Street resulted in a massive shift of wealth from for-profit to credit unions, and 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.
00:30:56.000So so how do you like how do you negotiate that?
00:31:01.000There's like do you like because you know, the way that they think about it, the way that the experts that I talk to think about it is like an inverse pendulum.
00:31:49.000Well, January 6th, I mean... But look, January 6th you had 800 people?
00:31:56.000Well, I mean, certainly, like, they're... Relatively disorganized.
00:31:58.000Okay, well, the extreme right in the United States is, of course, really hard to figure out.
00:32:03.000You 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.
00:32:16.000I mean, for my own sake, I think we can just dismiss the left as a force, right?
00:32:23.000Because in America, because it is so disorganized and it eats itself, right?
00:32:28.000So what you see on the right is like, there are sovereign citizens, there are three percenters, there are You know oath keepers there. There are sagebrush rebels.
00:32:47.000well of the political murders of every year which are amount to like about 70 on average since
00:32:56.000I 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 but I think it's like 72 percent are far right and like 7 percent are far left and the middle is like various.
00:33:11.000So like I would say like when I talk to the experts the fear of political violence is much clearer from the right.
00:33:19.000And that's why I said I feel like the far right is more sharp, right?
00:33:21.000When they do take action, it's extreme.
00:33:24.000Well, 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.
00:33:36.000We're dealing with a lot of people who are criminal.
00:33:39.000You were just simply criminals and use politics as a cover for their violence and like that has to be acknowledged too, right?
00:33:47.000And that this and that this political radicalization gives them cover for mental illness and for and for their violence, right?
00:33:56.000Also, those numbers, to be clear, are not from the FBI.
00:34:00.000They're from journalist reporting organizations who are going through newspapers to figure out what are violent crimes.
00:34:07.000And they're defining who's far right and who's far right.
00:34:09.000Well, 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.
00:34:17.000I want to get back to that point, because I don't think we've got a chance to flesh it out.
00:34:19.000So my point was that there's substantially more far left polarization and extremism compared to the right.
00:34:26.000And to make my point, let me ask you a question.
00:34:32.000Would you fear violence against you at a right-wing rally?
00:34:40.000I've always gotten along really well with far-right people.
00:36:28.000You want to know what I saw in Portland?
00:36:30.000I saw the far-left screaming the N-word over and over again at right-wingers.
00:36:35.000I 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.
00:36:45.000I've been on the ground on all these things.
00:37:02.000And we booked him to speak at an event called Ending, what was it called?
00:37:06.000Ending Violence, Racism and Authoritarianism.
00:37:10.000He was our keynote, our headline speaker to talk about de-radicalization.
00:37:14.000Antifa threatened to burn the theater down, so they canceled on us.
00:37:17.000The after-show venue refused to back down, so Antifa came and protested.
00:37:22.000And he said, look guys, don't worry, I'm gonna go talk to him.
00:37:26.000And when he went out there, they started screaming at him, chanting at him, and wouldn't let him speak.
00:37:30.000He wrote a Facebook post, which went viral, where he said, I've never experienced anything like this.
00:37:34.000That 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.
00:37:41.000Well, 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.
00:37:50.000Could it be that they are on the left?
00:38:09.000My 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 because they have been pinned by
00:38:24.000the left as you are a Trump person you must be a racist. And I think I find that amazing that that
00:38:31.000that that's what has to be done but that is what happens. Don't you think the time has come to stop
00:38:36.000asking yourselves who is more to blame and start figuring out either how do we reconcile this or
00:38:43.000how do we come to some kind of conclusion that is not violent.
00:38:47.000I mean, you're talking about all of this stuff.
00:38:52.000You're getting yourselves really angry about this stuff.
00:39:04.000I'm just saying the point of this book It's really that the moment has come where you have to ask yourself, how do we get ourselves out of this cycle of, of those people are awful.
00:39:53.000In 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.
00:40:25.000Political violence, and they were done based on journalists who dug into the story and read it.
00:40:30.000In 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.
00:40:45.000They said that this is the cause of right-wing violence.
00:40:48.000And they said, although he is not, and if you read the op-ed, and I sent it to Lydia, because I was so apoplectic, as of now, he has not been identified to any right-wing groups, but this is Trump violence, this is an editorial in the Las Vegas Sun, after it came out that he was a Black Lives Matter activist.
00:41:05.000So you want to say to that editorial board, What are you doing?
00:41:10.000Why 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?
00:41:22.000But I'll answer that, and then I want to answer a point you made.
00:41:26.000I 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.
00:41:34.000And I would like to know how you see escaping from it.
00:41:43.000They're going to say what they need to say to support their side by any means necessary.
00:41:49.000And so you actually have groups called, like, by any means necessary.
00:41:52.000The 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.
00:42:02.000Like, I don't know you, but you seem to me like you would fit into that category that I've seen sociologists describe.
00:43:40.000So 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.
00:44:01.000When 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.
00:44:11.000You can see that independent voters, people who are unaffiliated, right now overwhelmingly agree with the right when it comes to issues of the economy, when it comes to issues of job, presidential performance, when it comes to black lives matter.
00:44:29.000Lots 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.
00:44:57.000But 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.
00:45:29.000So, 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.
00:46:53.000If 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!
00:47:56.000Of Donald Trump's illegal... I mean, he's about to be charged.
00:47:58.000Don't make the mistake of creating false binaries.
00:48:00.000Biden and Trump have nothing to do with each other.
00:48:02.000I'm specifically citing Joe Biden taking a very specific action with respect to Ukraine that any reasonable person can look at the journalism coming out of this and be like, wow, what he did there.
00:48:13.000Now look, by all means, call out Donald Trump for any criminal activity he may have done, but everyone seems to do it.
00:48:21.000He was under investigation for a hoax.
00:48:22.000The Russiagate hoax was just not true, but that doesn't happen to the establishment Democrat side or the leftists.
00:48:29.000Black Lives Matter engages in wanton destruction in some of the smallest towns in this country, over $2 billion in damage, and your perspective is the right is more dangerous.
00:48:42.000I would say that would be the general perspective of experts on civil war and the conditions of the United States.
00:48:48.000I mean, those are the models that I'm working from, right?
00:48:51.000But I would say, surely you can see that these sides, that each side has a case.
00:48:59.000And that the problem here is not that, you know, what has happened, but the fact that there's no way for anyone... You know, democracies only work when, if you lose, the other side is still valid.
00:49:17.000Those are the conditions of democracy.
00:49:18.000And so what you're saying to me and what I hear is that that's no longer possible.
00:49:21.000Didn't. And so that like what you're saying to me is what and what I hear is that that's no longer possible.
00:49:30.000And that's that's really what the book is about.
00:49:33.000And that is like I'm kind of like I'm imploring you as a neighbor.
00:50:26.000I now completely lost my train of thought.
00:50:28.000My 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.
00:51:47.000My grandparents were forced to flee numerous states because it was illegal to cohabitate and to have kids.
00:51:51.000This is something my family experienced.
00:51:53.000I grew up, once again, with my mom, who's mixed race, marrying a white guy and having a second generation mixed race family.
00:51:59.000And 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.
00:52:10.000It didn't matter what I was, or my Latino friend, or my Asian friend.
00:52:12.000We were all just friends in the neighborhood.
00:52:14.000And then I got to experience critical race theory.
00:52:16.000And 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.
00:52:22.000But all the white people go there, the black people go there, the Asians go there, and the Mexicans go there.
00:52:27.000That's what they did at Occupy Wall Street.
00:52:28.000They were called spokes, the spokes council.
00:52:31.000And they said there were working groups and there were caucuses.
00:52:35.000And the caucuses were race-based and gender-based.
00:52:39.000And 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.
00:52:49.000And I will fight against that tooth and nail because my family experienced this.
00:52:53.000In this past election in California, they tried to repeal their civil rights amendment from their constitution.
00:53:00.000I ask you, you say that we've got to come to this position where we come together.
00:53:04.000Would 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?
00:53:12.000You know, I don't think I'm going to be faced with that question.
00:53:15.000And certainly the world is perplexing to me enough without what ifs.
00:53:19.000But I'd actually like to ask you a question, because I don't I don't know the answer to this, even after I spent five years writing this thing.
00:53:27.000Like, how do you think this is going to end?
00:53:31.000I mean, I've heard you say there's going to be a civil war.
00:53:41.000In a technical sense, you are already technically in civil strife.
00:53:44.000And that was 27 deaths per year or something?
00:53:46.000No, it's 25, but America's a funny country.
00:53:50.000America'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.
00:53:56.000But on the other hand, I think we're in agreement, right?
00:54:45.000So this is like this becomes like this is classic anocracy.
00:54:48.000So, 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.
00:54:58.000They happen when there's a in the gray area.
00:56:20.000As you were traveling the country writing this book, when you were in State X, where you were like, wow, I really feel a burgeoning civil war here.
00:56:41.000I mean, it was extraordinary to me where I would find it.
00:56:45.000Like my friends who are in media in the Hudson Valley, they feel very much under threat.
00:56:51.000Like 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.
00:56:59.000The thing about America right now is that everyone feels under siege.
00:57:07.000Everyone feels under siege from one kind or another.
00:57:09.000Whether it's cultural siege, whether it's political siege, whether it's siege from political machinery.
00:57:53.000And 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?
00:58:02.000Well, then there's the, you know, then there's January 6th.
00:58:07.000Then there's Trump calling up the tanks in Washington on the 4th of July.
00:58:20.000January 6th was... Listen, if you're gonna make... I don't do the rage.
00:58:25.000So if you want to have someone on to explain to you the crimes of the right, you can definitely find a lot of people.
00:58:32.000If 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...
00:58:45.000I mean, how many hours do we have here?
00:58:47.000If we're going to talk about the lies of the right, any Trump speech has 30 of them.
00:58:52.000I don't like comparing Trump and Biden.
00:59:13.000And 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.
00:59:21.000Russiagate was three, four years of outright lying.
00:59:25.000Ukrainegate, all of it turned out to be lies.
01:00:20.000When I talked about a complex cascading system, that feeds into both sides in different ways, in asymmetrical ways.
01:00:29.000But one way of thinking about this struggle is that it is a mimetic struggle, in the Jeff Jesea definition of it.
01:00:40.000Here's the point I'm trying to get to.
01:00:42.000If you look at the politically homeless faction, The intellectual dark web faction, the post-liberal faction, conservatives, and even hardcore MAGA Trump supporters.
01:00:52.000They all agree, for the most part, on a typical worldview, except for certain, like, Q elements, which don't make up that many people.
01:01:00.000I don't think I can really agree with that.
01:01:03.000I 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?
01:01:11.000And 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?
01:01:20.000Like an esoteric knowledge, where like something becomes more valuable because it's less believed.
01:01:26.000What's an example of that, if you have one?
01:01:28.000Well, QAnon would be like the ultimate example.
01:01:57.000So 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.
01:02:03.000Do you not understand that I've had this exact conversation with people on the left?
01:03:26.000But... That's actually a really good way of putting it.
01:03:31.000So 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.
01:03:44.000I 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.
01:05:44.000I 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.
01:05:57.000Like what Marjorie Taylor Greene said, what Ted Cruz said today, irrelevant.
01:06:02.000The structural problems that the United States faces are so profound that all of the politics, to me, that consumes everything is all irrelevant.
01:07:24.000As 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.
01:07:38.000Ukrainegate 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 out proving he actually did this, even based on the mainstream media's own previous reporting, say from Politico.
01:07:56.000Politico publishes a story, as does the New York Times, that Ukrainians meddled in the 2016 election in an effort to help Democrats.
01:08:03.000Not that the Ukrainian government did, but that elements of higher-ranking officials in Ukraine did.
01:08:11.000Joe Biden engages in a quid pro quo where he brags about it on camera.
01:08:15.000But if you come out and say that, you're called right-wing.
01:08:17.000They say it's fake news, you're lying, and it's not true.
01:08:20.000I live in a world based on, do you have sources for that?
01:08:23.000Just 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.
01:08:30.000It is not confirmed until we can get official confirmation on this story.
01:08:34.000Even though there had been, I just hadn't seen it.
01:08:35.000Because if I don't have the official reporting from a trusted source, it didn't happen.
01:08:39.000But 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.
01:08:49.000Jen Psaki goes on TV and says we were never going to give out crack pipes.
01:08:53.000That's a lie easily proved by looking at the organizations they were contracting who give crack pipes.
01:09:00.000I pulled up two different sources, international and national, that say safe smoking kits include meth and crack pipes.
01:09:05.000Yet when the right comes out and says this, Snope says, false.
01:09:10.000All of the corporate establishment press are saying it's not true, there were never any crack pipes.
01:09:14.000Then Jen Psaki goes on TV and says, no crack pipes.
01:09:17.000Why was there an objection to them giving out crack pipes?
01:09:19.000The right felt it would exacerbate crack pipe smoking.
01:09:24.000See, in Canada, I remember in the 90s, there was a... I remember going to parties and there was a government program to give out straws for snorting cocaine.
01:09:35.000Because it was because it was being AIDS right being communicated nasally And so I remember and I was like, yeah, that's that's the government.
01:09:44.000I 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?
01:09:55.000You 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.
01:10:06.000And Fox News is one station compared to 70.
01:10:09.000The problem here is the informational networks.
01:10:14.000But what ends up happening is, after a decade of this...
01:10:17.000It 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.
01:10:28.000So 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?
01:10:41.000At the end of the 2000s, LexisNexis tracks massive spikes in the New York Times saying things like white privilege, racism, class privilege, et cetera.
01:10:49.000You don't need LexisNexis to tell you that.
01:11:40.000But 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.
01:12:01.000Dude, you could see people in the metaverse wearing with black avatars and with white avatars.
01:12:05.000It 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.
01:14:39.000So 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.
01:14:52.000And so that number, rather than being an ideology, as in, I am a racist, it is how you feel about certain aspects of life.
01:15:05.000And those numbers were identical for Democrats and Republicans in, I think, 1990.
01:16:14.000The 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.
01:16:23.000Well, the left is involved in a language etiquette that is totally destructive and just as self-consuming, as I said.
01:16:31.000As Mark said in the German ideology, there was a man who thought, if I define river differently, no one will drown.
01:16:40.000And that's what the left has become, where they think that definitions will change reality.
01:16:46.000I have a good example of what I think is contributing to the breakdown and why I think there's no solution.
01:16:51.000I feel like many on the right are looking for an anchor.
01:16:54.000Like, just tell me where we stand and where we are, and I'll try and figure out what's going on.
01:16:59.000Whereas the left just says, I will do as the tide flows.
01:17:02.000So the example on this is... But the left eats itself.
01:18:05.000I mean, people are doing this on the, well, that's just, you know, stuff happens.
01:18:13.000Like, you're just trying to figure out what the hell happened.
01:18:15.000I 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.
01:18:25.000That'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?
01:18:38.000I mean, God knows the people I talk to on the left are desperate for some kind of stability.
01:18:43.000I 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.
01:18:54.000They're scared to step through the fire.
01:18:57.000So again, to throw it back to Jussie Smollett, for instance, Covington kids, big cultural moments that were absolutely wrong.
01:19:05.000For 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.
01:19:13.000And so I said, I can't trust these people who keep lying to me.
01:19:30.000Because they never apologized, they never admitted it.
01:19:36.000See, 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.
01:19:49.000I think your book buys a lot of information I don't have.
01:20:08.000But it wasn't a joke in the sense of the way institutions latched onto it, the way elected officials latched onto it.
01:20:15.000The media latched onto it, and 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.
01:20:26.000Small 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, it was a gender-neutral Artist of the Year, and in her acceptance speech, she said, I wish it weren't, I won't fake a British accent, I wish it weren't, although she's Cockney, I wish it weren't Artist of the Year, I wish it were Woman of the Year, because I love being a woman.
01:20:51.000That turned into Adele's trying to cancel the trans movement, Adele should be banned on Spotify, stop buying Adele.
01:20:58.000I don't ever see that on the right, and proof of that is, two years ago, The NFL, they kneel at the anthem.
01:21:20.000I don't know exactly like the Civil War could happen, but look at the movement to get Taylor Swift to pull her record off of Spotify because of Joe Rogan.
01:21:31.000I don't think you see that on the right.
01:23:01.000If you actually want to know what I believe, it's the Charter of Rights and Freedoms of the Canadian Constitution, which is incredibly specific.
01:23:07.000It was written in 1982 and contains all of this beautifully articulated in a simple way.
01:23:13.000But my point really here is, Like, whichever side you're on of this, these two countries can't coexist.
01:23:36.000And, you know, the beauty of America, its great gift, has been its capacity to hold contradictory ideas at the same time.
01:23:44.000Um, like that is, that is the glory of America.
01:23:48.000And because it's a constitutional republic, it's able to.
01:23:50.000Well, 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.
01:23:58.000And also, you know, it, it believes in, it believes in, in struggle as it believes in disagreement.
01:24:04.000I mean, that's the, that's the amazing gift of the American constitution is that it believes that You don't need unity.
01:24:11.000You need disagreement to get to the best answer.
01:24:36.000It's a really fascinating Book because he worked because he predicts exactly where you are right now, like exactly where you are right now.
01:24:45.000And he did it, you know, on his retirement.
01:24:48.000I imagine you did a lot of research on the first American civil war.
01:24:53.000Like I would never call myself an expert on that.
01:24:55.000Like I definitely read a lot of books about it, but just, you know, I'm not, I would never, there's some things in here that I do consider myself an expert on, but that there are so many civil war experts.
01:25:04.000Just because you asked me earlier what I thought was going to happen.
01:26:14.000Like, even 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...
01:26:22.000Nullification crisis and the bloody Kansas.
01:28:23.000There are countries that negotiate separation, like Czechoslovakia, where they do negotiate in goodwill, and that's what happened with Norway and Sweden.
01:28:46.000I think it was YouGov data showing the different five different regions of the U.S.
01:28:49.000You've got the Midwest, the South, and they were all basically saying, yeah, let's break off.
01:28:54.000You know what you will really like in that book is the psychometric data, which is like different personality types by region, which is actually fascinating and like goes to really deep seated structural differences between these groups.
01:29:07.000But the one that I had only had three.
01:29:10.000I like how Texas just goes back to Texas.
01:29:12.000Well, Texas, they have a very active nationalist movement that's quite together.
01:29:18.000And also, Texas would 100% work as a country.
01:29:25.000The only issue is I think it ends up with a bunch of war.
01:29:29.000Well, the problem is, first of all, to negotiate a settlement, you need goodwill.
01:29:33.000And then the U.N., to negotiate with the U.N., which I know sounds ridiculous, but, you know, you can't, no one will land in an airport until you have a U.N.
01:29:41.000agreement 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.
01:29:50.000So, like, it would be incredibly difficult.
01:30:02.000Of course, I did just write about it, something about it in Lit Hub, about, about the politics of abortion as a factor in, in polarization.
01:30:12.000I mean, you know, the most bizarre thing about it is that, you know, the, when, 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.
01:30:53.000If 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.
01:31:02.000That's what leads to declines in abortion rates.
01:31:44.000And 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.
01:32:10.000Like, that's not... I don't have expertise in that.
01:32:12.000Like, I'm sorry, but like, I just can't really give an honest or accurate answer to that question.
01:32:18.000I mean, I would say that once that happens, that... Like, one thing that I notice in this book is, like, the right has had concept of civil war for a long time, right?
01:32:32.000And it was a fringe position, but it sort of became more mainstream in 2008.
01:32:37.000But I think the left is actually starting to catch up.
01:32:39.000The left is actually starting to catch up to the idea that, like, this country isn't working, its institutions are failing, there's gonna have to be a response to this, and I think abortion could be a major trigger of it.
01:32:50.000Like, I think there are a lot of people who don't... You know, you asked me that question, like, what if healthcare was taken away from me?
01:33:13.000But 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?
01:33:28.000Well, 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.
01:33:37.000Like, are you going to start a DEA for abortion?
01:33:46.000But 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?
01:33:58.000There's been a huge amount of violence around that.
01:34:00.000It's kind of the question I'm getting to.
01:34:03.000When 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.
01:34:10.000Going up and killing an abortion doctor.
01:34:12.000But I, of course, would qualify it as that.
01:35:19.000Like, 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.
01:36:15.000Well, the Electoral College, yeah, I understand that.
01:36:18.000In the United States, non-citizens do have voting power in every single election.
01:36:23.000So when California says, we are going to allow non-citizens into this country and provide them benefits, they are seizing federal authority.
01:36:31.000The way it works is... I'm sorry, seizing?
01:36:36.000They're stealing disproportionate amounts of power within our federal... Well, I would say they're in defiance of No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
01:36:53.000So 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.
01:37:07.000I think, according to the Heritage Foundation, California in the last election only got one additional electoral vote.
01:37:13.000But when we're talking about, you know, what is it, 538?
01:37:17.000That's a decent amount of gained power.
01:37:19.000And it's not just California, it's other sanctuary cities and states.
01:37:23.000So 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.
01:37:39.000But 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, like 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, where you're going to have a president lose the popular mandate by 10 million votes and still win the election.
01:37:58.000And that's the way it's supposed to be.
01:38:00.000Well, 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.
01:40:23.000So what happens is the farmers, being a large portion of the United States' economy, said, we're gonna have to drill deeper and deeper into groundwater.
01:40:31.000And they went down thousands, even tens of thousands of feet.
01:40:34.000The small family migrant workers could only drill about 30 feet and their water went dry.
01:41:57.000Like 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.
01:42:12.000And that's driven by this aquifer that is not renewable.
01:42:17.000That's just water they're taking out of the ground that when it's gone, it's gone.
01:42:22.000And where they go from there, they don't really know.
01:42:26.000I want you to imagine a world where we don't have cheap food anymore.
01:42:30.000That's added to all this stuff we're talking about.
01:43:18.000News you can use, that's useful stuff.
01:43:22.000Did you ever like, in any of these like, when you were like stinging of all the potential possibilities, did you ever find out like, No, I mean, that was not something I looked at.
01:43:31.000hey, we're going to supply your weapons and help you win.
01:43:33.000When you give us states when you win, we'll take Florida on.
01:43:36.000No, I mean, that was not something I looked at.
01:43:38.000I mean, what I looked at was inequality levels, which are, of course, like
01:44:34.000I mean, it's always been normal, but, like, it's making stupid rich people.
01:44:37.000Like, kids that aren't qualified for the money are growing up with it, and hell is power.
01:44:42.000Well, as I say, like, I try not to judge anyone.
01:44:44.000Like, I'm not... Yeah, it's not every time.
01:44:46.000I'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.
01:44:55.000Obviously, you've pointed out problems.
01:45:56.000So, just to start this off, the same people who supported occupational protests with Occupy Wall Street and the Chazz and the George Floyd... See, I would never support any of those, and Canada wouldn't support any of those.
01:46:09.000But, um, in America, these same people are now at odds and defiance with these people.
01:46:15.000Well, 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?
01:46:25.000And 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.
01:46:31.000Like that, when I, the largest support for the Trucker Convoy I've seen in my life was driving here in Maryland and someone had a big sign up.
01:46:41.000I 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 the original Emergencies Act was Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, who's a populist conservative.
01:47:44.000So for the most part, I would just say the reporting that I've seen in American sources from both sides, like it has really like I was trying to I was trying to think like, how could I explain this?
01:47:55.000And I was like, well, you know, the Quebec premier, who is a conservative, like he's he's he's definitely the right.
01:48:02.000A month ago proposed a tax on the unvaccinated.
01:50:16.000Quite 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.
01:50:23.000I think sickle cell anemia was endemic to the African American population.
01:50:56.000Well, there's different... It really depends on how you read the numbers, but it's definitely the majority of the funding came from American sources.
01:51:04.000The only source I've actually seen on it... But that's the GiveSendGo.
01:51:34.000So I'm like, I don't even know what to search for.
01:51:36.000But like I would just say like it's when I see the American debate around it like I've I've yet to see an American left wing source say that the number one enemy of the truckers is Rob Ford's brother.
01:53:20.000What I really wonder about it is what if they made every province a state?
01:53:25.000So that would be, let's say, 10 provinces a state.
01:53:28.000That would make America way left wing.
01:53:31.000Suddenly, overnight, America would be a left-wing country.
01:53:37.000Wasn't there a belief back in the 80s or 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?
01:54:24.000This 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.
01:54:37.000I mean, if you told me that that would happen when I was 20, everyone would have laughed in your face.
01:54:42.000I think it's, in all seriousness, I do think Canada gets involved in whatever civil war happens in the United States.
01:54:47.000Oh, we're, we're, I mean, we're in trouble.
01:54:50.000Like, you're, well, this, the trucker convoy is already your political proxy.
01:54:54.000It's a political proxy conflict on our soil of your toxic discourse.
01:57:25.000So, 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.
01:57:34.000Yeah, 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.
01:57:41.000Like, obviously, it's not, it's not like how it would actually happen.
01:57:44.000Actually, I think, interestingly, I would, I'd be willing to bet New Hampshire, at this point, would declare independence in any conflict.
01:58:38.000It would be between people who want disorder and want breakdown and people who are trying to keep the institutions alive by by force.
01:58:47.000And 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 a population militarily, that just spreads violence.
01:59:04.000I think you're right about that point about ordering chaos.
01:59:07.000But my vision of it is the Democratic establishment, which used to be the Democrat-Republican like uniparty until Donald Trump came in.
01:59:15.000Then you ended up with these neocons joining the Democrats like Bill Kristol, the Lincoln Project people.
01:59:19.000The Democrats saw these far-left individuals, these progressives, as a way to bolster their ranks and get votes.
02:01:03.000I 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.
02:01:15.000Like, I had like a 20 minute conversation with this guy and I was like, oh, well, no wonder this system is so screwed up.
02:01:21.000Like, all they can think about all day is the three levels of fundraising.
02:01:26.000Dark money, social media money, and bundled money.
02:01:38.000I agree, and we need to go to Super Chats, so we did a little bit longer show today because You know, typically what we do with the Members Only segment is we'll save like a spicier story for a TimCast.com segment.
02:01:52.000But 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.
02:01:57.000So I just, we extended the normal show.
02:02:11.000Wrestler 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.
02:02:19.000His go-to January 6th example happened one year ago.
02:02:23.000Well, it was like what inspired it was the Trump inauguration and the general atmosphere of violence.
02:02:30.000I mean, I wouldn't say at the beginning of it, I was like, I mean, I went and talked to various prepper groups.
02:02:35.000I went to talk to various far right groups.
02:02:40.000I talked to like various members of the far right and going and meeting them in Ohio and like, you know, in the field research.
02:02:48.000So that's different than I would say icons or something like that.
02:02:53.000And I just, you know, I got along very well with them.
02:02:56.000And they and also like, you know, Sons of Confederate Veterans and things like this, like, you know, and and sovereign citizens and constitutional sheriffs and sagebrush rebels.
02:03:09.000And so, yeah, I would talk to all these different groups.
02:03:12.000Now, you know, like the specific violence that they're involved in is sometimes purely
02:04:45.000I mean, if you've got a mass movement funded by corporations that advocates, and the vice president herself is providing bail for people who are burning down buildings and smashing windows and killing people, we're there, man.
02:05:19.000You've got to give me a specific example, because I can name... January 6th.
02:05:22.000January 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.
02:05:28.000Sure, 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.
02:05:38.000But I can also go back to like... Well, there's... I can talk about Ferguson... How about Oregon State?
02:05:43.000The Oregon... Mike Nierman, when he let in the rioters who... I mean, Nothing happened there.
02:05:50.000They opened the door and the guy got in trouble.
02:05:52.000I can talk about the guy went to the ice... Well, the vandalism of the legislature.
02:05:55.000A guy went to the ice facility with an AR and firebombed it.
02:05:59.000We had the guy, Aaron Danielson, get shot and killed.
02:06:02.000We had over 800 instances of low-tier, what I call blunt force violence.
02:06:07.000Do you really... I mean, you've... Like, this is something that has been repeated in this conversation.
02:07:08.000Ben Stewart did a documentary called On Grip, if you want to hear about those people.
02:07:13.000How does that relate to a Trump supporter?
02:07:14.000Well, we're not in the realm... Well, they're roughly on the same spectrum.
02:07:18.000I 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.
02:07:27.000And they marched together in the line of thousands.
02:07:28.000Well, and it also strips itself apart very quickly and is also filled with a lot of segmentation.
02:07:35.000So, 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.
02:07:48.000But 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.
02:07:55.000It would just not be reasonable to say that those are not right-wing political violence.
02:07:59.000This is why I explained in the beginning that the right engages what I define as sharp, acute instances, and the left is blunt.
02:08:47.000The FBI is called the administrative state or deep state.
02:08:50.000J. Edgar Hoover was the head of the FBI for 48 years.
02:08:53.000So, you know, the motto of Canada, the motto of America is life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
02:08:58.000The motto of Canada is peace, order, and good government.
02:09:00.000The motto of America is, in God we trust.
02:09:02.000What I find with peace, 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.
02:09:11.000So I think a good example of the breakdown, and there's no middle ground, right?
02:09:17.000Well that's it, the middle ground is gone.
02:09:19.000Everybody in the chat perceives you as far left.
02:09:36.000I mean, I would say I'm talking about a specific category of ideologies.
02:09:39.000I'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, Because if you do, YouTube will shut the show down instantly.
02:09:50.000That is, there's nothing, 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.
02:10:03.000But a right-wing person- Look, dude, there's lots of evidence of right-wing radicalization through social media networks.
02:11:53.000Your 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.
02:12:17.000But you haven't done the fact-checking.
02:12:19.000So, 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.
02:12:27.000This is why I used the joke... Deeply.
02:12:29.000I mean, I'm... I don't... I have a lot of failings.
02:12:32.000I have a lot of stuff to be humble for.
02:12:53.000And 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!
02:13:14.000No, no, no, I'm saying the FBI hasn't done anything.
02:13:17.000Oh, 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.
02:13:25.000But the DHS specifically comes out and says it's effectively the right that is the problem.
02:13:29.000Without talking about BLM and the billions of dollars in damage, people say they have no credibility.
02:13:34.000If you cite them, they'll say... Well, one site says that they have no credibility.
02:13:38.000I 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.
02:13:45.000In fact, there is no common ground in narrative.
02:13:47.000There is no common ground in institutions.
02:13:50.000There is no common ground in language.
02:14:11.000No, 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... Well, you may underestimate my desire to sell books.
02:14:22.000They would not sit together and have this conversation, and that is one of the biggest problems.
02:14:25.000I 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 sit together.
02:14:49.000I do think, you know, some of these super chats are making points that we've probably already made and it's probably not relevant to make, but I do want to read them anyway.
02:15:57.000Mike says a major pipeline project in Canada was attacked by 20 masked individuals with axes and flare guns deep in the woods this morning.
02:16:04.000Millions in property damage, destroyed heavy equipment, and work camp media silent.
02:16:08.000Well, the left would take that because like all of the indigenous protests about pipelines got broken up very quickly and quite aggressively.
02:16:17.000And like for, you know, like the Ottawa police were sued for $60 million successfully for their for their brutality over the G7, the leftist protests.
02:16:29.000So actually, I think I mean, that's a Canadian example.
02:16:34.000But, 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?
02:16:46.000Like there's a there's a lot of I and I and I frankly, I sympathize with that.
02:16:53.000We have this super chat from, uh, Legama Thigayan.
02:16:57.000I'm probably pouncing that wrong all the time.
02:16:58.000He says, right-wing esoteric knowledge like QAnon is crazy, but is less insane and far less dangerous,
02:17:04.000mainstream and institutionally entrenched compared to standard progressive dogma.
02:17:08.000It's ridiculous to make an equation between the two.
02:17:13.000That's not in my book and I find it one of the more fascinating things that I didn't answer.
02:17:18.000Like, there 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.
02:17:28.000But, like, the fascination with esoteric knowledge on the right, I just find it fascinating.
02:17:34.000Are you familiar with the, you're probably not, you're Canadian, the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense Authorization Act?
02:17:43.000So in, I think it was 2012, Barack Obama signed into law, our National Defense Authorization Act reauthorizes, you know, spending on national defense and stuff.
02:18:05.000And 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.
02:18:19.000And, 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!
02:18:27.000And he goes, you know what's dangerous?
02:18:28.000That Barack Obama signed into law the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense Authorization Act, and the media didn't cover it.
02:18:35.000Yeah, I mean, I think there's so much that's dangerous right now.
02:18:40.000Like, you know when I called it a complex cascading system?
02:18:43.000These things all feed into each other.
02:18:45.000You 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.
02:20:13.000Because 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.
02:20:40.000I mean, I think when you actually like you're in favor of universal health care, you're in favor of progressive taxation.
02:20:44.000I mean, the problem that we're dealing with here is that when you talk about politics, we've had this this whole this we talk for like two and a half hours now about politics.
02:21:29.000When 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.
02:21:36.000And so like a Trump rally, they'd say, my factory closed down.
02:21:40.000Trump wants to bring factories back and end free trade.
02:21:42.000I'd go to left-wing rallies and they'd say, I don't know.
02:21:45.000See, 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.
02:21:55.000They were both in Iowa within three days of each other.
02:21:58.000And so this is what a Canadian debate is like.
02:22:01.000Sir, we need to spend $428 million on education.
02:22:16.000Then you go to America and it's God and socialism.
02:22:20.000These grand ideas that have no practical applications, that are incredibly vague, and just simply are essentially aesthetic categories.
02:22:32.000What we're talking about here is language.
02:22:37.000But if you were to actually... I think the abortion question comes up here again, where it's like, if you were to actually sit down, what are our policy objectives?
02:22:46.000We want women to be in control of their bodies, and we want abortion rates to decline.
02:25:00.000It'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?
02:25:13.000How can we make life a little bit better?
02:25:14.000How can we make it, how can we make it, how can we make things, we're in these systems, how can we make these systems better?
02:25:20.000And like, when you get to the systems questions, when you get to those policy questions, there's actually a lot of common ground.
02:25:26.000There's actually, it's easy, it's actually quite possible to build things together.
02:25:48.000When 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.
02:26:56.000Well, also you could say it began at the beginning of the country.
02:26:59.000It began with the Three-Fifths Compromise.
02:27:01.000It 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.
02:27:11.000Did you read about, I think it was the 1872 election in the United States?
02:27:30.000of the first American occupation, which was the North's occupation of the South, which was a low-level civil conflict, right, with lots of terrorist groups and lots of, and lots of conflict.
02:27:40.000And basically 1876 was, you know, the thing is occupation doesn't, never works, right?
02:27:45.000Like it's simply never, you can't, you can't really occupy people against their will.
02:27:49.000It just is not, Well, I don't know, 20 years in Afghanistan I think proves you wrong.
02:27:56.000I 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, and he's like, you know, there are basically no examples of this working.
02:28:10.000But when you read his book, you keep waiting for the, this book's called Why We Lost, You keep waiting for the losses.
02:28:22.000I 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 the most important variable is who is what party, what faction is the president at the time.
02:29:01.000It was taken extremely, extremely seriously.
02:29:04.000I mean, one of the problems here is that the military is the last institution with widespread respect in the United States.
02:29:13.000which is not healthy right like that's not it when that's when that's the back the backdrop like that's not good but um you know the the generals in the washington post a few months ago openly discussed like with the military fragment in the case of a contested electoral college vote that's a that's a whole level of terror that i didn't put in the book but it seems to me entirely plausible So we have this one from Babak.
02:32:12.000There are organizations right now that, there's an organization that has raised tens of thousands of dollars off of the lie that I am a proponent of Trump's fraud narrative.
02:33:11.000Think about what the purpose of war is, right?
02:33:14.000To gain control of an asset resource land or a people.
02:33:18.000When 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.
02:33:30.000What if you never had to fire a shot to accomplish that?
02:33:33.000So, fourth and fifth generational warfare is when you get into insurgency with fourth generational, and fifth generational is manipulation and propaganda.
02:33:41.000I mean, the thing I find pretty... I actually wrote about that for Foreign Policy.
02:33:45.000I 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.
02:33:54.000You know, Marshall McLuhan said the Third World War will be an information war fought with no distinction between
02:34:02.000Right. Like and I think and I think in that sense, if you were to think of the Civil War as a mimetic war or as an
02:34:11.000informational wars or diathetical war, which is what Lawrence of Arabia called it, then you are absolutely in it.
02:34:17.000That'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 meme to think in that way.
02:35:26.000And I knew, having seen your Twitter, we had these disagreements, but I thought, you know, we try inviting many other people of opposing views.
02:35:52.000Look, so 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 richer or whatever.
02:35:58.000I 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?
02:36:07.000And then, by all means, you can take the book.
02:36:09.000We've actually had a couple people comment saying they did read your book and felt you were wrong or whatever.
02:36:26.000No, but I mean, I read CNN all the time and then I'm like, that one's wrong, that one's wrong.
02:36:31.000And then I read Breitbart too and I'm like, that one's framed poorly and that one's wrong.
02:36:35.000But like, because you have to read everything and then try and figure out, on a lot of articles it's tough.
02:36:42.000So like, because when the New York Times says X is true, I'm like, you just said something.
02:36:48.000Like, how am I supposed to know it's true just because you said it?
02:36:51.000Well, 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.
02:37:00.000The New York Times has written— When something's fact-checked by the Atlantic, it is fact-checked within an inch of its life.
02:37:08.000The 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.
02:37:23.000But 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.
02:37:32.000It was so egregious that they've actually, surprisingly, Veritas has gotten passed a motion to dismiss, which is crazy in public definition.
02:37:38.000I 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.
02:37:48.000And 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.
02:38:04.000What did you guys think of the Palin trial?
02:38:58.000For 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.
02:39:32.000And impossible, unless you get into discovery.
02:39:34.000Recklessness 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.
02:40:50.000So I'll read, we'll just read two more because we've gone a bit long tonight and I think it was worth it.
02:40:54.000Papa Romano says, I disagree with him a lot, but a great guest.
02:40:57.000Yo, 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 am I gonna become your pocket leftist?
02:41:07.000No Maybe the pocket Canadian Dude, Crossfire was one of the best shows of all time, news-wise, and that's kind of what I want.
02:41:19.000I will say, we have made a lot of money off people not liking you.
02:41:23.000They're sending in superchats like, he's wrong, I don't like him.
02:41:26.000It's so good to have someone from Canada, because your perspective is invaluable for me as an American.
02:41:31.000I was grown in this system, so I need...
02:41:33.000Well, I do think we, like, you know, we're, as I say in the book, we're like Horatio to your Hamlet, right?
02:41:37.000Like, we're the small, irrelevant country, right on the edge.
02:41:40.000We've, like, I've all, we've lived in, I've lived in America.
02:42:00.000Canada'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, right?
02:42:07.000So there's, like, and it's certainly much, much more regulated.
02:42:11.000And in Canada, cops kick in people's doors and go into their houses and arrest them, and it's harder to do in the United States.
02:43:41.000And so I would not put them... They got support from the left, though.
02:43:45.000I actually think they have a lot of broad support.
02:43:47.000Like Stephen Harper, who was the last conservative prime minister, he was the first person to acknowledge crimes in the educational system.
02:43:59.000And he actually made a very powerful statement about it.
02:44:02.000I want to I just read one more because we've gone long and we'll wrap it up but
02:44:06.000Cowboy ish says Tim the guy has demonstrated that he has bias
02:44:10.000Why is it wrong to give him our money to check for ourselves?
02:44:14.000So I think I wonder if this question is shouldn't it be wrong, right? Is that what they mean or?
02:44:21.000I 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.
02:44:30.000And 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, and I was like, I should read that.
02:44:38.000And I went, I was, I think I was like 21.
02:44:40.000I went to the bookstore and I started skimming through it to see like some of it, read a couple of chapters and I didn't buy the book.
02:44:49.000If 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?
02:45:00.000And not only that, I don't think people should take everything you've said here as everything that's in the book.
02:45:08.000I 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.
02:45:14.000But long story short, I understand them saying they don't want to give you money.
02:45:29.000It's not like you're giving me the money.
02:45:31.000I just think I'm a proponent of learning and reading as much as you can, and that's why I'll watch CNN, read what they're writing, and be like, when I come out and say, hey, this story was wrong, it's because I read the story, read about the author, looked at what they were researching, and said, here's what they missed.
02:45:47.000Not because I saw the headline and went, that's not true, bye, and then to close out the article.