What can the states do to fight back against the madness of the federal government? In this episode, I'm joined by author and podcaster Tom Woods to discuss how the states can do their part to protect their citizens.
00:03:35.420Well, first of all, I think remembering that the states exist in the first place as something other than units to carry out the will of the central government
00:03:46.440is an important step one, because up until very recently, maybe even up until COVID,
00:03:53.440I think people have been brainwashed into thinking you can't talk about the states having a role,
00:03:58.100because otherwise you favor slavery, you know, you're a segregationist or something.
00:04:04.400But the states were conceived of as having an essential role in keeping the federal government limited.
00:04:12.560Now, obviously, they haven't succeeded in doing that, but they were supposed to have that role.
00:04:16.880And, you know, and so if we go back, I'll get to the 2024 in a second, but you can go back to the time of the Constitution,
00:04:25.300the first decade or two of the early republic.
00:04:28.960And James Madison has a report of 1800 where in which he says the executive branch, the legislative branch,
00:04:38.460but also the judicial branch can violate your liberties.
00:04:42.740It's not that the president and the Congress can be terrible, but the judges are infallible.
00:05:42.220If you give the federal government a monopoly on interpreting the Constitution or a monopoly on deciding what its powers are,
00:05:50.980well, we can predict how that's going to turn out, and we can now see how that's turned out.
00:05:55.520And I'll say in parentheses, by the way, my wife and I, sometimes we do question cards at dinner.
00:06:01.280And one of the questions was, if you could have a conversation with three people, living or dead, like on a road trip, who would your three be?
00:06:09.840And one of mine was Thomas Jefferson, because I wanted to explain to him the blind spots he had about some of his opinion.
00:06:19.060He's great on some things. He's actually rock solid on some things, and particularly on this question we're talking about today.
00:06:26.000But I said, Jefferson's going to have to sit in the front, because we really have to go over a lot of things that went wrong,
00:06:33.680and he needs to understand what went wrong.
00:06:35.760But he has less to learn than, let's say, an Alexander Hamilton has to learn.
00:06:40.400I think some people on the political right, they like Hamilton because he hates the masses, and we think, yeah, we don't like the masses either.
00:06:48.200But you know what? The average guy, the average American trying to make a living is not really my enemy.
00:06:53.700And I tend to be inclined in his favor.
00:06:57.480And, you know, it's the Hamiltonians who feel like we need to have one powerful, irresistible central government.
00:07:04.920And then in the early 20th century, the left liberals of the New Republic magazine added to that, and that strong central government needs to be run by experts.
00:07:14.900And we're now seeing the kind of result that that yields us.
00:07:19.060So I think something like a Florida during COVID is an interesting model.
00:07:25.820Now, Ron DeSantis did not actually, he didn't break any laws, like he didn't violate any federal legislation,
00:07:31.900but he took every bit of authority he had as a state governor.
00:08:44.940But I will say that the courses of action we can take can range in, let's say, severity.
00:08:51.080So we can go from, I'll give you an example.
00:08:56.100In Utah, you find, I don't know if it's the entirety, but it's a big chunk of the NSA is located there.
00:09:05.280And their machinery that they use basically to listen to you and me requires an absolutely ungodly amount of water to keep cool.
00:09:14.980And so my friends at the Tenth Amendment Center, who really are the people with the clever ideas, wondered, what if Utah just shut off the water?
00:09:23.580I mean, there's no constitutional obligation that Utah has to supply water.
00:09:29.060You know, so sometimes the states can simply refuse to participate, just refuse to collaborate with their oppressors.
00:09:48.400But the Heritage Foundation has an enormous budget.
00:09:50.880And this kind of idea would never occur to them.
00:09:52.820And in fact, they would go on TV to criticize us for this because we have to, I don't know, always be losers and sit back and take it all the time the way the New York Times expects us to.
00:10:03.360But they actually came up with that idea.
00:10:05.000Now, they weren't able to get it through the legislature, but you can keep trying.
00:10:08.260And the idea is we never thought of that, right?
00:10:10.960I mean, the state could just simply refuse to go along.
00:10:13.380But if we are willing to go back a little farther in American history, go back to the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of 1798, Thomas Jefferson's view, stated multiple times, was that in an extreme case where the Constitution is obviously being violated, then the state governments can restrict the enforcement of it, actively interfere with the enforcement of it.
00:10:41.900Now, you may say, well, I don't know if we could get away with that today.
00:10:46.080You know, what would the federal government do?
00:10:52.280But I do know that for the longest time, the left comes up with ideas that are out of the mainstream.
00:10:59.320And within 30 years, they are not only are they everywhere, but you can't even object to them or your career is ruined.
00:11:06.660And I feel like, you know, I think there's been enough times that the left has gotten away with that.
00:11:10.600What if for once, for once, we do something that's not allowed and the experts say you can't do it?
00:11:17.800You know, why does the left get to do this all the time?
00:11:20.320And I was just in an online symposium on this very subject, and a lawyer said to me, the ideas that you have about the states resisting the federal government, why, they're very unpopular.
00:11:29.940And I said to him, I can think of a whole bunch of left wing ideas that started out with no supporters at all.
00:11:36.640And yet here we are living in the world they made.
00:12:01.580So that's an important thing to remember.
00:12:03.480If a Republican governor does something, as you pointed out with Ron DeSantis, not violating any laws, not directly actually attacking any anything that's been passed by Congress, but just using his own executive power rigorously to oppose, especially a lot of edicts.
00:12:21.860So much of this is actually just inside the administrative state.
00:12:25.860It's not even laws being passed because so few laws actually matter in the United States at this point.
00:12:30.800It's just regulations getting pushed through civil rights divisions or that kind of thing.
00:12:35.760You know, that's actually most of what he has resisted is just mandates that come down through the bureaucracy, not not direct laws passed.
00:12:44.580And so there's this moment where just acting as an actual executive is seen as authoritarian.
00:12:51.320We see these scary articles from, you know, these liberal outlets all the time.
00:12:55.620Ron DeSantis is an authoritarian in Florida.
00:12:58.440He's just ignoring all of these things.
00:13:00.120And what they mean is he's actually acting with the powers of his office, just like if Trump actually drained the swamp, which hopefully he might do this time.
00:13:10.260But, you know, if he was to do that, he would just be decried as an authoritarian for acting the way that article two says that the executive branch should actually act.
00:13:19.580So there's a lot that can be done in the modern day.
00:13:22.260But let's go back historically because you are a historian and you make a good case in this sense.
00:13:27.720So I want to lay the groundwork there before we talk about the practical things that can be done today.
00:13:33.180But if you look at the historical examples, as you point out, most people who, oh, you're starting about state rights, the state right to do what?
00:13:40.560Right. They're going to immediately go to the Civil War and slavery and these kind of things.
00:13:45.740But a lot of people and you wrote a book called Nullification on this topic.
00:13:51.320A lot of people are going to say, well, not a lot of people, but the couple of people who had a decent history teacher are going to wait.
00:13:56.980Wait, I remember sitting through high school and there's something called the Nullification Crisis.
00:14:00.720Did we already kind of address this issue?
00:14:02.440All right. Well, when they talk about the Nullification Crisis, they're talking about a specific episode in U.S. history involving South Carolina, 1832 to 1833.
00:14:13.040The long and the short of that was there was a belief among many southern states that the protective tariff was having a disproportionately negative effect on them
00:14:24.380and that it was having a disproportionately favorable effect on the northern states.
00:14:29.040And they believed that the protective tariff, that tariffs are obviously constitutional, but a protective tariff, they weren't so sure because they thought it was an assumption of the Constitution that the tariff is there to raise revenue.
00:14:43.400But a protective tariff doesn't really raise a lot of revenue. It has other purposes.
00:14:47.240And they felt like this was at the very least a violation of the idea of the general welfare clause, that legislation should be for the general welfare, not the particular welfare of one section or another.
00:14:57.640So they argued. Now, we can we can we can nitpick South Carolina about whether it was right about protective tariffs being unconstitutional.
00:15:05.640But the issue is Andrew Jackson was going to was threatening to use force to make sure that his tariff got enforced.
00:15:14.520And what wound up happening was they reached a compromise where the the so-called tariff of abominations would be gradually lowered over time.
00:15:23.400So gradual so that it wouldn't hit northern industry all at once, but reduced so that it wouldn't harm the south as much.
00:15:31.380And so it was a it was a result that basically most both sides could live with.
00:15:35.240Now, that's not the way it gets taught in your history class, that last little interpretation that I put on it.
00:15:41.200But in my opinion, that's exactly how it was supposed to work, that a state would say, halt for a minute.
00:15:47.120We think that the federal government has done something unconstitutional. Let's stop and look at it.
00:15:51.940And at the end, they reached a solution that they they could live with.
00:15:55.360But long before that, and this is stuff that it doesn't matter how good your history teacher is, you will almost never hear about it in high school or probably college either, is that in 1798.
00:16:10.400Now, this part you might hear. You might hear.
00:16:13.320Virginia and Kentucky passed resolutions saying that the Alien and Sedition Acts were unconstitutional and therefore should not be enforced.
00:16:22.000Because they they really did say you could not criticize the president.
00:16:26.960And and that was a that was a weird situation because Thomas Jefferson was a Republican and he was in a administration run by a federalist.
00:16:37.760And this was really pro-federalist legislation.
00:16:41.860And it said you can't criticize the Congress. You can't criticize the president.
00:16:45.740But it skipped over Thomas Jefferson. Criticize him all you want.
00:16:49.320There is no protection for Thomas Jefferson, but you cannot criticize John Adams.
00:16:54.560And like this, you can't do that. You know, I mean, you just can't do that.
00:16:58.140So Virginia and Kentucky weren't going to go along with that.
00:17:01.380South Carolina would have joined them if they hadn't received the resolutions on the very last day of their legislative session.
00:17:07.840And there was at least one or one or two other states that were inclined.
00:17:11.040The New England states at that time were dead set against Virginia and Kentucky on this.
00:17:15.780But if you look at so your textbook, if it even covers this, will say most states didn't agree with Virginia and Kentucky.
00:17:22.780OK, let's look at those states, those states that actually bothered to say anything at all about Virginia and Kentucky.
00:17:31.840Almost none of them were saying this is a terrible constitutional theory that Virginia and Kentucky have.
00:17:37.840Almost all of them, because I actually bothered to look, were saying the Sedition Act is a wonderful thing that we should enforce because John Adams shouldn't be put upon by all these petty critics.
00:17:49.320That was why they were against Virginia and Kentucky, because they did want to put you in jail for criticizing John Adams.
00:17:54.900So, you know, if today that's your argument, then you're siding with the censors.
00:17:59.580And as we know, the censors are very rarely the good guys.
00:18:04.400Not even 10 years later, not even 10 years later, the very New England states who needed a fainting couch because of Virginia and Kentucky in 1798, those very states were issuing documents exactly the same to oppose the Jefferson embargo, which was very damaging to their maritime economies.
00:18:25.440And in my book, Nullification, from many years ago, I knew nobody would believe me.
00:18:31.420They'd think I'm just making this up because they never heard any of this in their classes.
00:18:34.720Half the book is documents, just to prove my point, because these are documents you just don't come across.
00:18:40.040I have some great documents from the governor of Connecticut.
00:18:43.260Can you believe I'm saying these words?
00:18:45.100Great documents from the governor of Connecticut.
00:18:48.840It's another world where the governor, Jonathan Trumbull, was saying it is the responsibility of the state governments to protect their peoples from overreach by the federal government.
00:21:56.160Now, I guess I was going to say I'm not an expert in politics, but I guess I have a show, so I can't exactly say it.
00:22:03.520But the point is, you know, I'm not a constitutional scholar.
00:22:08.040No one's hired me on, you know, to do any, you know, tactics for a wider political movement.
00:22:14.440But just from the cheap seats out here, when I see a moment like that, I say, wow, well, here's two governors who have made it clear that they can kind of take actions and push back against the government.
00:22:26.240And the federal government actually just can't do anything about it, they can't take any action, there's no consequence, there's really no pushback.
00:22:34.460And yet, it seems that no GOP governors have learned anything from this.
00:22:40.620You have Mike DeWine saying, oh, actually, it's fine if the government goes ahead and, you know, replaces the population of cities and towns in my state.
00:22:49.940I just wish they would send us more money.
00:22:52.020You know, you have Kay Ivey saying, well, you know, I don't like that they're doing this.
00:22:55.860I'm going to write a strongly worded letter to Congress, but no action taken whatsoever.
00:23:04.140Why are so many people who should be defending, you know, and are supposed to be the opposition party inside the United States and supposed to should be defending their state, their constituents, their citizens.
00:23:16.840Why are they so willing to just go along with anything that the federal government is doing and provide no pushback?
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00:23:53.220I think I'm going to have a really dull and uninteresting answer for you in this, which is that the Republican Party sucks mostly.
00:24:02.100You know, I mean, there are signs of life in the old girl yet, I will admit.
00:24:06.200And I want to encourage those good signs.
00:24:08.260But my gosh, the old guard is hard to get rid of.
00:24:12.140And these are people who they don't in the old days, they would give a pretty speech and then they'd get in power and do the opposite.
00:24:19.300Now we don't even get the pretty speech anymore.
00:24:21.960Now they're repeating left-wing talking points when they're running for office.
00:24:26.060So here, yeah, if there's no will on the part of a governor, then, you know, I think there's an interesting lesson here, though.
00:24:33.960But when you mentioned Abbott and DeSantis, it occurred to me during COVID, you know, Abbott was a little bit all over the place.
00:24:42.460You know, like there were businesses being shut down and ruined.
00:24:45.100And I mean, there was a lockdown, you know, brief lockdown in Florida, too, where we live.
00:24:49.980But I think Abbott became much bolder right after he saw the reception that DeSantis got at CPAC.
00:25:00.900I mean, he got an absolutely roaring standing ovation.
00:25:09.480Like, conservatives really, really liked what he was doing.
00:25:12.020And I think that gave Abbott the backbone to start doing some of the things that he did that were better.
00:25:18.640And I think he, because I think he thought to himself, the pathway to stardom in at least part of the current Republican Party is defiance.
00:25:29.220And so, of course, you notice that I'm not appealing to these governors on the grounds of this is the right thing to do.
00:25:35.640I'm appealing to them on the grounds of this will help your advancement, because I know that's all you care about is your advancement.
00:25:42.340And there is a chunk of America that would that would absolutely go to the barricades for a governor that stood up and said, look, we're living in unbelievably insane clown world.
00:25:54.720And we get up every day and just feel defeated, like and demoralized, like it just has to go on forever.
00:26:00.360Well, I'm governor of only one state, and I can't dictate the destiny of the rest of the country.
00:26:07.660But I'll tell you something right now.
00:26:16.940That would bring about, we would all be cheering for something like that.
00:26:21.880So the question becomes, like, if we had 10 governors or 15 or an amazing thing, 20, who were all willing to say, we're not going to do the following things.
00:26:32.520If they can't stop Abbott, what are they going to do about 20 governors, you know, who once again, who finally are realizing or maybe even for the first time, the power they hold in their states.
00:26:44.100It's been cast aside so long because of this narrative that if you even talk about the states, you're some kind of a racist.
00:27:21.000I've said this so many times, but I'll say it again because I believe it's deeply true.
00:27:25.960Trump is entirely unworthy of the movement that he has, but he has the movement because people are so desperate for any kind of leadership.
00:27:34.740And even the small head fake towards, you know, towards, you know, just pushing back, saying no, fighting back against the media, taking it to the establishment that Trump does is enough to basically get the, like, you know, ride or die loyalty of a large chunk of the nation.
00:27:53.100And as you say, you know, DeSantis is in a similar situation.
00:27:56.300Look, I lived through this last, you know, stage four hurricane.
00:28:58.780Even if you don't have any principles and you're just in it for the power and the advancement, this is still in your interest.
00:29:05.340This is still something that you should get involved in.
00:29:07.760And that's why it's so confusing that more and more governors are not taking this kind of action because they should see that this is successful.
00:29:15.380And this is gain, uh, this is garnering public support and they should be willing to go ahead and put themselves out there in a similar way.
00:29:23.000Now, I think there's a couple of, of answers as to why they aren't doing this.
00:29:27.000Some of it is just, as you point out, they're very lame.
00:29:34.680Um, they're in many cases bought and sold.
00:29:36.900I'm, I'm on board with all of that, but I think a huge part of this is how dependent, uh, state and, uh, municipal governments have become on federal money and, and, you know, that, that they have become so tied to these regulations.
00:29:51.840They're terrified to push back against these things because they're worried that their federal funding or some, some part of that will be pulled.
00:30:00.260And because of that, they're unwilling to take actions or push back even in the most minute areas.
00:30:08.900And so then, you know, there are a couple of approaches to that, but they're, they're not very promising.
00:30:13.840One of them is you have to decide, um, you know, is, is, you know, is, is, um, is this important enough to you that you're willing to say, you know, we'll pay for our own damn highways.
00:30:29.980You know, we'll, we'll hold a raffle, you know, like we'll figure it out, but you couldn't bribe me enough to go along with this requirement.
00:30:39.840Like, I, I, I don't care if we don't get the highway money, if, you know, if we're not putting tampons in the boys' room, you know, that's okay.
00:30:49.320I will, I'll deal with some potholes for a little while on the highways until normal people come back into office.
00:30:54.920Like it just, at some point, you just have to ask yourself, what's your, what are your priorities?
00:30:59.340Now, if we were really bold, if the federal government were in, were in a far more advanced stage of decay than it is now,
00:31:06.200then you could think about like, well, we're going to take people's federal income tax payments and hold them in escrow.
00:31:12.620And we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll deduct what, what we should, should have gotten.
00:31:28.820Well, by the way, you know, that reminds me, there was a moment, I mean, you know, that sometimes when we hear rumors that the federal government is thinking of doing some particular thing,
00:31:38.660and then they deny it, they deny that they ever had the intention of doing it, that in fact, that rumor was a trial balloon.
00:31:46.600They did actually let that rumor get out there.
00:31:48.780They wanted to see what the reaction would be.
00:31:50.560And, you know, as a fellow Floridian, I remember distinctly during COVID that the White House was very unhappy with how DeSantis was handling the situation.
00:31:59.360And the rumor was they were considering blocking interstate traffic into Florida for everybody's safety.
00:32:05.840You know, even though Florida's numbers were better than those of many states.
00:32:24.260I don't know what would have come of that.
00:32:25.600But I have to think there are at least some Americans who would have been uncomfortable about the federal government having a military showdown with Florida.
00:33:26.360Each state had its own understanding of traditions, values, heritage, you know, a moral vision.
00:33:32.500And while they had a unifying overcoat of the United States, it was distinctly understood that the character of the states were specific to those peoples.
00:33:42.000And the fact that that has fallen apart for people, especially in kind of the post-war consensus, the modern world, every state is more or less the same.
00:33:50.420It's fine if you move around for economic opportunity.
00:33:53.280It's fine if you, you know, you leave constantly.
00:33:55.980You move every few years to find a new job or get this degree or, you know, whatever.
00:34:28.520You know, obviously COVID was the catalyst, but there are a lot of things like trans issues and abortion and others that are forcing people because of the more polarizing legislation to move.
00:34:38.300And as those states consolidate populations that share worldviews, I think we're going to see more and more states being willing to go to the mat like this because they actually have the popular mandate necessary to do it.
00:34:54.700I cannot believe it didn't occur to me that the natural sorting that's occurring is going to have the effect of giving a backbone to that rare politician that would like to have one.
00:35:05.560You know, because he'll know he's got an awful lot of people behind him if he goes out on a limb like this.
00:35:12.740I remember when when nullification came out in 2010, ABC News did this thing where they were talking about in Idaho.
00:35:21.100Now, Idaho, there is real America right there.
00:35:23.320I got a lot of friends in Idaho, but in Idaho, they were the state legislators were reading that book and passing it along to each other.
00:35:31.060Now, I wish they'd each buy their own copy, but they're passing it around.
00:35:34.160And they made and this made the news that, oh, my gosh, our legislators are reading this radical book about the powers of the states.
00:35:41.960And then on that segment, one of the state legislators said, yeah, you know, and I I asked the governor.
00:35:47.600It was Butch. I can't remember his last name.
00:35:49.840I actually met with him, had breakfast, told him all about it.
00:35:52.640Like he asked me to come meet with him.
00:35:54.680And and this legislator said, I asked the governor if he wanted to borrow my copy.
00:35:59.320And he said, no, I don't need to. I've already read it.
00:36:01.040And I thought, what world is this? Right.
00:36:04.000I mean, that was only Idaho. But Idaho had already been sorted, is my point.
00:36:07.340Like once you're in Idaho, you know what you're in for.
00:36:10.040You know what the lifestyle is. You know why you're in Idaho.
00:36:12.300So if if the states do start to have more distinctive identities, at least morally and philosophically, well, you know, maybe they'll pass it around in other states.
00:36:23.880So this is something and, you know, we've talked a little bit about this because we talked about the book, my book on your show.
00:36:32.020But one of the things that I kind of traced in my book, The Total State, is this is this tendency of power to consolidate Bertrand de Juvenal, of course, lays this out beautifully.
00:36:42.840And Hoppe does the same. You know, he follows it. I always forget. Is it Hoppe or Hoppe? I mess it up every time.
00:36:51.340Thank you. Yeah. Someone will always make fun of me when I do it one way and they'll make fun of me when I do it the other.
00:36:55.300And I completely forget. So Hoppe borrows this this metaphysics of power from de Juvenal and does a great job, you know, expanding on it as well.
00:37:03.340But, of course, you know, we both know that the story of the United States is the story of the betrayal of the Constitution. Right.
00:37:11.260Like, yeah, throughout history, power wants to consolidate.
00:37:15.000And I think a lot of people believe that due to the principles in the Constitution, due to the restrictions in the Constitution, ultimately we would be spared this fate because, you know, we designed this novel piece of political technology.
00:37:30.100You know, the Founding Fathers had staked this this amazing claim to rights and liberties and restrictions.
00:37:36.200And so therefore, we just weren't going to see this. But step by step, there's always an excuse.
00:37:41.440There's always a reason. There's always a 14th Amendment.
00:37:44.800There's always something, you know, that allows you to basically just run roughshod over this and centralize your power more and more.
00:37:52.280And I guess my question is, at this point, though, I think your arguments for constitutional, you know, nullification for states acting in this way are entirely based in history and fact and valid.
00:38:07.320The problem, I think, ultimately, is there's just a practical issue that power, you know, in order especially to compete in a geopolitical climate, wants to centralize and create the leviathan.
00:38:21.260And, you know, the reason that people are willing to do this is that it does have some positive impacts on their life.
00:38:28.860Like, they do see some advantages from this. Let's just be clear, you know, being an individual is hard work.
00:38:36.080Being a community is hard work. And so a lot of people are just willing to push a lot of this off to the government and allow them to centralize in this way.
00:38:44.500Is there, in a modern world, a scenario in which we can actually restrain power in this sense?
00:38:52.820Or is this simply an inevitable process that we undergo because of kind of the current paradigm when it comes to these monolithic states that are forming?
00:39:04.020Well, I don't think there's any doubt that the trend is always is towards centralization.
00:39:10.980But I wonder if what is going to start happening is that, for example, a lot of these Western governments will have been found to have overpromised to their people.
00:39:21.380And they won't be able to deliver all the comforts that they thought they would.
00:39:25.520And then what if what if things start to break down in that way?
00:39:28.260Then people start looking for the next, you know, the the next level of authority, which would be the states.
00:39:34.620So it's entirely possible if there's some, you know, and people have been predicting it for forever and it hasn't really broken.
00:39:42.080But if there really is a major, major fiscal crisis and the federal government simply can't make good on its promises, then it becomes less less important in our lives.
00:39:53.820It can't deliver. So then people will will turn and look elsewhere.
00:39:57.000It's it's overpromised. But also, I think there's generally been a devolution of, let's say, if not political power, then then certainly we've seen a decentralization in the transmission of information.
00:40:11.920Now, I won't repeat obvious, you know, commonplaces about the Internet.
00:40:16.600But the fact is, in, you know, when when when my mother was born, she she had the three TV channels, you know, and now today nobody would even think of I mean, nobody would even even people on the left wouldn't say, I only want three TV channels.
00:40:34.560So again, everybody gets information now in ways that are harder to control, even though there are sensors, but they're harder to control.
00:40:43.080And so I think people are now instead of looking to that centralized information dispensing machine, they're not looking to that so much anymore.
00:40:52.380They're looking in other places. So the way we get information is being decentralized.
00:40:57.380I think, as you say, people are more conscious of the fact that they live in a really hostile world.
00:41:03.680And when I say people, I mean our people. They live in a really hostile world and they can't take for granted that their neighbors have their backs the way you normally can in a neighborhood.
00:41:13.520Your neighbor might want to call, you know, Department of Children and Families on you because you're not affirming your kid in some crazy gender ideology.
00:41:22.840You know, so there's a more of a as you say, I think there's more of a conscious effort to seek out like minded people.
00:41:30.220I mean, my friends at New Founding are investors who are looking to build like minded communities of like minded people like in Appalachia, for example, and in other parts of America.
00:41:42.340And so far, they've raised an enormous amount of money to do that because people are looking for that.
00:41:48.480So, again, that was that's a kind of a spiritual decentralization that's happening.
00:41:53.460So could political decentralization be trailing it at some point in the future?
00:41:59.580It would certainly correspond to what I think is happening to them in other ways in, you know, in their allegiances, in where they want to live.
00:42:08.340They're they're not looking at the world the way they used to.
00:42:12.720And so, you know, maybe this may have some especially if we here's the thing.
00:42:17.480The left talks about something and 20 years later, it's a reality.
00:42:21.640And the right sits there arguing with the left about its thing fecklessly because it still becomes a reality.
00:42:28.420Our side just doesn't do that for some reason.
00:42:30.840Now, it's started to happen over the past four to eight years.
00:42:33.480If you go on Twitter, people are talking about things they're not allowed to talk about.
00:42:37.920And that wasn't really happening so much on the right 10, 15 years ago.
00:42:44.740People are expressing opinions that aren't officially authorized.
00:42:47.620Well, that is that's a good first step.
00:42:52.600But if we were to start talking about radical decentralization as the solution, you know, I'm not saying that we would have the success that the left has.
00:43:01.620But let's at least get onto the playing field.
00:43:05.080You know, the left says we want gay marriage.
00:43:07.340And even Bill Clinton says, what are you crazy?