The Views of Brandi Kruse: On DarkHorse Podcast

Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast inside rail. I am delighted to be sitting in studio with Brandy Cruz. Brandy Cruz is an independent journalist and commentator. She was a broadcast journalist in Seattle for a decade. She now runs her own show, which is undivided. That's in camel case. The first word is not the un, it's not even a word is it, but un is not capitalized and divided is capitalized. Brandy Cruz, welcome to the dark horse. I'm excited to be here. Whenever somebody who's smarter than me wants to talk to me, I think it's the highest honor. And then I also get very concerned, but I already learned something from you because before you started, you told me about camel case. I never heard about it. So I'm already learning things, but no, I'm super excited to be here and thank you. Cool. Well, I'm glad you're here. It's obviously not so convenient to get here, but you as a dyed in the wool, Washingtonian are familiar with the fairies you managed to navigate that without difficulty. So well done. Yeah. You were recently at the White House. Yeah. For a symposium or a what was it? They called it a round table on Antifa. And it was the weirdest thing. I mean, I was at home on a Monday. And I like to tell people that a bald eagle dropped a note down my chimney asking me to come to the White House, but I really just got a text message. And I was like, this must be a joke. And they said, Hey, you know, the stone. So with the White House, do you want to come to the White House on Wednesday for a round table on Antifa? And this is a mid all the anti ice stuff that had really ratched it up in Portland and tool lesser extent, Seattle. And I said, of course, you know, and they were kind of apologetic, like, sorry, it's short notice. And all these guys, like, I will be there. We'll make it happen. And actually I went with a lot of people who I already know, who you know, Andy knows some other independent journalists across the country who have had interactions or been involved in covering radical left wing extremism in the United States. And we got there and then they didn't even tell us until the day of that the president of the United States would be there. So I was under the impression it was a private meeting with a few people from the administration to talk about how to deal with this scourge. And then the day of their listing everybody that's going to be there. And so then I got a little nervous, but it was such a cool experience and an issue I care so passionately about so to get an opportunity at a level like that to talk about it was insane. Yeah, it's an amazing invite. I've not been invited to talk to you. Well, you got to go to a congressional hearing, didn't you? Oh, I've been to a couple of those. It is cool. 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Let's sleep apnea less back pain fewer temperature problems so go to helix sleep dot com slash dark horse for 20% off site wide that's helix sleep dot com slash dark horse for 20% off site wide make sure you enter our show name after check out so they know we sent you once again that's helix sleep dot com slash dark horse for a seriously comfortable mattress. So you were there yeah talk about antifa you were there with Andy know just for those who have been long term fans of dark horse I think Andy know was my first guest awesome and Andy know has famously been violently attacked twice I was there for one of them I went into the protest in the lesser of the two incidents where I think the assault. Milk shake had been thrown on him and I think he had a minor minor head to the head but not not that minor but in any case I was at the incident I wasn't right within feed of him but we had gone together to look at what was going on because I desperately wanted to understand what I was seeing I of course had seen a lot. At evergreen as evergreen melted down and was certainly aware of this thread before evergreen became famous for for its meltdown now I understand from a brief discussion right before the start of recording. You actually have an evergreen incident of your own from long before evergreen meltdown but while I would have been there as faculty happily teaching evolutionary biology to my students so what was your incident when was it now that I know you were there I really feel like maybe you were in black block and you were one of these people who asked me so there had been and I'm going to get the timeline off because it was so long ago but this was really my first introduction to this weird faction of left wing extremism. That was very prone to intimidating journalists and I think that's the aspect of antifa that's hasn't been covered as much because it's always you know they harass an intimidate journalist that they deem as conservative but at the time I was pretty young I was probably 21 22 had just arrived in Seattle I was working as a reporter at the CBS radio affiliate. I came here for radio job initially before I went to TV and there had been some sort of incident at evergreen where a photographer was trying to cover a meeting and these antifa type of guns which I didn't know what they were at the time and I mean that's what I call them through his camera equipment off the balcony and so we had gone down there to do a story on you know this sort of group that seemed to have cart blanche to carry out these kind of activities down there and I was a radio reporter at the time so I didn't have a lot with me I didn't scream reporter you know camera I was like I'm going to be a reporter and I was like I'm going to be a reporter and I'm going to be a reporter and I'm going to be a reporter and I'm going to be a reporter and I'm going to be a reporter and I'm going to be a reporter and I'm going to be a reporter and I'm going to be a reporter and I'm going to be a reporter and I'm going to be a reporter and I just had my recorder and stuff and so I was trying to be a little serp tissues about going about and seeing what this meeting was about and as soon as they I did me as a reporter it was like a mob to get me out of the room and again I was super young had never dealt with anything like that so I think throughout the years I covered a couple stories there of things like that journalists for the Olympian who had been harassed by them but yeah that was my foray into kind of covering this these type of people interesting now it's funny that I don't remember that event I am a photographer and amateur but a serious one and I will tell you that throwing somebody's camera equipment off of anything really is considered very impolite so yes that I didn't know about this event maybe I've forgotten it and all that's happened since I will say my sympathy for Antifa lasted like three minutes good for you and what I'd amounted to was the first time I heard that term I thought anti-fascist sound like my people right yeah and then as it was described to me by students what actually was the objective now I think most of them are fully convinced that they're fighting fascism but when I understand what it is that they are actually doing and in what way they are doing it I was very alarmed by it so I was never sympathetic to that militant militant militarized branch of liberalism I still consider myself a liberal though I find very few other people who are marching under that banner are even understandable to me anymore I feel like the liberalism I grew up with has evaporated yeah that the party that is supposed to be liberal now stands for everything that I thought we were about now very liberal yes very liberal there against free speech they seem to be the party of war I don't understand how everything got inverted but it did and a lot of people I think are just paying attention to the fact that the color of the jersey is the one that they remember feeling fond of but in any case okay so you had an evergreen incident and you were still in broadcast journalism at the time you've now gone independent you've been to the White House you've been what was what was the experience and it's captured I've seen the video yeah your statement what was it like yeah I mean it's I don't want to act like I'm too cool because no it was really cool it was a really cool experience to be at the White House but that is that one of the issues that I care about the most and so it meant a lot that the president and people actually wanted to have us there now I know people said it was sort of a song and dance and maybe there was some aspects of it that were but it was important and Andy and I know and I had talked a lot and communicated a lot in fact Andy knows the reason I was there because Andy told them because they had reached out really to Andy to try to figure out who should be on this roundtable and he said I think it's very important you have an actual former member of the mainstream news there and so I thank Andy for for for getting me there to talk about it because they want to act like this far left faction only attacks the conservative sort of influencer types which I think there's a lot of that but I was attacked multiple times by Antifa very seriously so when I was on TV and when I wouldn't have considered myself a conservative I mean I didn't embrace the law and I was a label of conservatism until probably a year and a half maybe two years ago so it doesn't really matter and that's what I wanted to get across to the White House I think a few things I mean I made a joke that I was kind of annoyed got most of the attention from my statements and I had before I went I'll just tell you the story before I went I didn't know the president was coming get there in the morning find out the president's going to be there I was a never Trump or big time Trump derangement syndrome to the point where I almost let it ruin my life like when I met my sweet now husband I just knew in the back of my head he voted for Trump I just knew it I met him at a rodeo in Ellen's Berg Washington and so I made a conscious decision I'm not going to ask him who he voted for because if I find out he voted for Trump I will break up with him that's how bad I was well yes and thankfully I just never asked I came around I eventually voted for Trump in 2024 and then I'm at the White House with him and I decided I was talking to a few people should I tell the president who you know is a little bit sensitive yes you a lot sense to to descend to any sort of disagreement I said should I tell the president that I used to have Trump derangement syndrome my husband said no everyone I asked brandy do not do that don't go into someone's house and say you didn't like them so I was waiting to see what his sort of what his demeanor was and he was in a good mood and if we found out it's because there was going to be peace in the Middle East right and he had come in right before that and so I was maybe the second or third speaker and I just said Mr. President you know I've been told not to tell you this but I'm going to tell it to you anyway and I see Caroline levitt the press secretary's eyes get big because she's probably freaking out like what is she going to say to the president and I just told him I had TDS for eight years and severe Trump derangement syndrome and this is this issue of left wing extremism is one of the things that brought me out of that place and we can discuss that more and I made a joke that I got more attractive after I got rid of my TDS and so that was of course everybody's like oh brandy you know kissing Trump's ass and all this stuff and I did get more attractive because I stopped just hating one person so much that it was poisoning me from the inside out but um well let me just say yes I don't I heard you say it I got that it was a joke I thought it was funny but that doesn't strike me as wrong at all because the fact is derangement is not attracted it isn't it it is it is a red flag yeah and so it is one of the things that people who are carrying this do not understand what they're doing they are broadcasting a repellent signal into the world right and it wasn't meant literally I mean did I literally look better I don't know I'm older so I don't know if I look better or not but I'm happier I mean think of me going about my life dating this guy and I'm telling myself every day don't ask if you voted for Trump and my husband is a catch I weigh I I don't know how I got him I don't know how I deserve him and I think about that often I stew on that like what if I had asked this man who we voted for back in 2018 we never would have gotten married I can't even imagine my life because I just can't imagine it without him and so these people are letting all this toxicity just brew up I mean I have family who after I was at the White House and made that joke to the president my mother was embarrassed my uncle who I grew up with who was like a father figure to me was saying publicly horrible things about me online like I sold my soul to Trump and all this stuff and I'm just thinking oh my god these are two retiree age people and I just see them miserable every day online and I Trump all this stuff so anyway I got the joke out of the way everybody focused on that but more important to me is what I wanted to tell the president is let's stop caring whether the media buys into this idea of antifa why do we care anymore I said you have three years left nothing's guaranteed let's try to try to deal with this in the best way possible and we don't need the buy-in from Democrats or from the media to do it because I think they're always looking for that he's like oh why won't you acknowledge antifa's a real thing why won't you use the word antifa it's like I don't care what you call them if they engage in criminal conduct the way they're doing let's just arrest them and put them in federal prison well I certainly agree with you that the wanton lawlessness warrants prison and that one of the hidden features of the system is that this is actually tacitly sanctioned by a legal system that sets a double standard and if you're you know in Portland as Heather and I were literally on the ground watching the riots break out every night for a hundred straight days the antifa black block are attacking federal officers and the courthouse in a way that I know if I had gone up to the courthouse with a hammer and tapped it I would have been arrested yes and prosecuted these people had cart blanche and so there's a question about why why are they being encouraged and and maybe I should just put that question to you I struggle with this a lot it's one of people don't like when I say this especially I get apparently my family and friends January 6th was my turning point on president Trump and that sounds crazy right because that should be one of the lowest points of his presidency now I didn't he's still looking back I feel like I have to say this January 6th was an embarrassing day for the country and I've told conservatives still if it had been BLM that did exactly that you guys would been like put them in federal prison and never let them out you know you wouldn't have been talking about prison political prisoners although I do think there was an immense over prosecution of J Sixers and but you know when I write when January 6th happened we had just lived through in Seattle six months of what I characterized as left wing terrorism they took over six blocks of the city patrolled it with air 15 rifles which the attorney general at the time was banning and I literally there was a warlord of chop who handed them out of the trunk of his car to random people on video to patrol this area people were killed there the city of Seattle just lost a 50 million dollar judgment against them because of some of the death that happened there and every step of the way leaders here leaders democrats downplayed it or ignored it governor J insley at the time notoriously was asked about it two days into this chop occupation he said chop I haven't heard about chop what's that I'm just like we're stunned the attorney general at the time Bob Ferguson who's now our governor uh he didn't say anything about it you will not find a press release from Bob Ferguson from that period of time the state's chief law enforcer about the occupation of the this autonomous zone and the mayor of Seattle called it what a summer of love right and so I had just got off those six months and now all the sun J six happens and it's like oh this is the end of our country as we know it and I'm looking around like you didn't just see many apples burning to the ground in LA and so that showed me that there was never going to be any moral consistency on political violence from the left and it started I started to think differently about the media coverage of the president our final sponsor this week is branch basics which makes simple all natural non toxic 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shop at target target dot com amazon and of course branch basics dot com tossing the toxins has never been more convenient and for anyone grabbing the premium starter kit you can still get 15% off at branch basics dot com with code dark horse just use code dark horse for 15% off the premium starter kit at branch basics dot com after you purchase when they ask where you heard about them please make sure to mention our show so I want to pause here because everything that happened in Seattle related to the chop or the chance as it was sometimes referred to was previewed at evergreen the whole playbook and you know because I don't know if you realize this but as evergreen melted down ostensibly at first about me and a very standard position that I took that we shouldn't be excluding people from campus based on race that basically the place had an obligation to treat people equally and teach them as well as we could yeah but when the place melted down the president of the college who was new to the place and had designs on it he wanted to reformulate it in a way that he did not have the power to because evergreen faculty was empowered by the founders of the college so that the administration was just weakened because the founders had a traditional view of labor versus management and so they hobbled management in an effort to enable labor and that gave the faculty the ability to shut down the president and so he basically ceded a race right a race riot in order to make his dreams come true but the point is as the place melted down the president George bridges ordered the police to stand literally to lock themselves in their police station which then ceded the campus to the most militant of the protesters who then did start patrolling the campus with weapons actually looking for me stopping traffic on a public road searching cars so the whole idea of autonomy self-governance the strange behavior of the authorities withdrawing police enforcement rather than recognizing that this is actually a serious situation and it can't set a precedent so evergreen set that precedent yeah and then chop and chas takes it to the next level there was a version of it in Portland there was a version of it in Washington in and around January 6th but you're right no consistency whatsoever and no recognition that we have a structure a legal structure it is not perfect injustice happens under our structure all the time but it is far better than we face if we withdraw that structure it's like you can have this imperfect structure in which an injustice happens a fair amount but if you withdraw it you effectively end up with warlords you know people handing it yeah yeah razz Simone was the name of the chop warlord his real name I think I remember this guy and so anyway I feel like the left the self declared left is playing with tropes that they don't understand because many of them have never traveled to a place in which governance is much less effective yeah right in which we don't have the high quality constitution that we have here and so injustice is just a much more common feature of life and so it's like I'm watching this people who nominally at one time might have been on what I would regard as my team I can't seem to make the point you are playing with fire and the world you are threatening to create is not one that you're going to like at all you're going to lament the destruction of this one and I'm sure you're going to blame somebody else for it but it's actually you who's jeopardizing it yeah and the message doesn't land and we're seeing it in Minneapolis this week yeah because my biggest annoyance is every time I bring up some sort of left wing extremism which happens not in frequently in Seattle they always bring it back to January 6th you voted for the president it's like you can't use January 6th to excuse thousands of examples of regular left wing rioting in cities like Seattle and Portland that had like an ice occupation outside the ice building there for three months over this summer so you're dealing with people who just are not grounded in any sort of reality and you know to your point about this kind of mean okay so is it though I don't know sure I characterize I've been covering these people for a long time so from the Occupy movement into BLM into the summer of love and George Floyd stuff and all of that and now into this anti-IS anti-triple Trump whatever it is I categorize that so you have the loners and these are people who are like borderline homeless sometimes homeless looking for somewhere to belong that participate in these things like occupying whatever it is sometimes I think that there's people even with learning disabilities who are caught into that because I see a lot of that right so it's sort of like oddball sort of disability low IQ faction that I believe makes up 80% of these crowds you see certainly was the case in Portland over this summer was the case at chop every mass sort of event mean fine it's the truth and then I think there's 10% especially lately that are sort of your geriatrics for lack of better phrase pretty much harmless but I think they're at the end of their life looking for something very meaningful maybe reliving the 70s I don't know and then I think the rest of it are the tried and true anarchists who will kill for the cause now why they feel so strongly why they want to throw this wrench and all these aspects of society maybe they feel like society has wronged them in some way those are the really dangerous ones a lot of these people people are sort of hangers on but that 70% I mentioned who are 70 to 80 who are kind of low IQ looking for a place to belong mob mentality is such with them they are so easily influenced if there if somebody I experienced this at chop I we were broadcasting live this video was seen everywhere you've probably seen it and all the sudden you know we put our cameras on to do a live hit and one person starts yelling at me fox news after this after that we're not going to let them go on the air so all these people who I've been there all night all night this is the night chop formed all these people come down they don't know my name they don't know anything about me but all the sun they're screaming and spitting and mobbing and it was this insane so that is it's just that's the that's what I see unfolding people who are really set on anarchy and then they find these sort of weirdos for like a better phrase that are looking for belonging that will find belonging in any movement all right so we got a lot of ground yes cover right here for a number of different reasons one the story you tell is a perfect demonstration of the myth of anarchy yeah okay because the point is these people should if they're right about their self governance they should be proud for you to see it you'll it will spread the word actually this is working yeah right they're not and in fact what they want to do is police speech right away yes right so okay that's a tell right this is not going to create a world you're gonna like because what it's gonna do is it's gonna put whatever becomes powerful in that world a warlord handing AR 15 times tronk or whatever it's gonna put that person in charge of deciding which speech they want to allow to happen great now you've you've introduced to on the road to help yeah okay the second thing though is first of all I was a participant in occupy an enthusiastic one okay what happened was I like many Americans on both ends of the political spectrum was live it over the bailout following the financial collapse of 2008 I thought it was the mask slipping and that was the revelation of what was really going on in our economy that we were being taken advantage of by players who broke the system evaporated trillions of dollars of wealth and left us with the bill yeah so I was irate and I still think I was right about that and I think the tea party was right about the same issue in the same way even if they had a different sense of what should happen however having participated in occupy what I immediately saw was the takeover by the anarchists this stopped being a protest about an obscene federal policy and it started being about a whole bunch of other things that had no business there so I saw it close up and my disillusionment with occupy was pretty rapid because the takeover was very quick yeah um but I I think it's important to do what you're doing the parsing of who's there now you're about to see my liberal side okay go ahead um I and this and it's not kind but in a way you'll you'll see the purpose I see the same dysfunctional people yeah broken people and I see two things I see the de-individuation you're talking about and I see the danger that these people because they've de-individuated and because they are so angry and messed up are very dangerous yeah however even though I refer to them as team loser they are team loser in my mind not as a way of dismissing them but as a way of pointing out that actually this puzzle has two pieces I think the reason that they are so angry is that they actually have been betrayed in many different ways not only have they been given an absolutely crappy educational system that has not armed them to compete in this system which is I think why they want to overthrow it you've got a competitive system in which your destined to be on the losing end every time because you don't have the capability of competing in it of course you want to overthrow it not surprising at all so my point would be communism is not an invention of Karl Marx Karl Marx describes something but what he's really describing is that if you have a capitalist system that does not take care of everybody in some way so that everybody is armed to compete in that competitive system what it does is it produces a large cadre of people who have an interest in overthrowing it and if that cadre becomes large enough because you betrayed enough people it topples right and then it becomes briefly an experiment in something that will never work and then you know you have to claw your way back to a civilization that function so I'm angry at the left for being suckered I'm angry at the right for being stingy and not recognizing that even those raised looking people over in antifa have a legitimate gripe they may not be able to spell it out but they've been betrayed chemically maybe right they've been fed food that has garbage in it that causes you to end up with a lower IQ than you might have had that wasn't their choice I wonder though why then you don't see that same sort of with the few exceptions um that same sort of group behavior group think on the right because I'm you know when I say low IQ I'm like these are individuals who are like lemmings right I'm either just gonna follow whatever anybody tells them to do but there's people like that individually on the right but why do they maintain more individualism because they've also been when you look at why president Trump I think one he spoke to people like my brothers you know my brothers who we had a a dad who died homeless was alcoholic drug addicted horrible horrible upbringing um you know they just white men kept going put down a whole later in life had a hard time making ends meet my brothers spent time in prison you know there are and now they're very pro-Trump very conservative and these are like the left behind americans that president Trump talks about and I think that that really was something that people were ignoring this huge swath of americans but like my brothers don't act like that and they've had they've been the victims of a system that hasn't worked for them well my guess is your brothers aren't as betrayed as the people that we see emerging as anarchists and and tifa but what but reals I do see well if you end up maimed by chemicals in your water or your food or something that you've been injected with by doctors if it ends up disrupting your normal development so that you then perceive actually the tools I have aren't going to work in the system I think you end up in in that group so I would I would bet you would find people in the anarchist collective are more messed up yeah I think there's betrayal across the entire system I think we're all being betrayed by a frankly thoroughly corrupt system on both sides of the political aisle but um and I do see the individuation on the right too um the identitarian right does the individuate understandably so I think they are in some sense responding to the same issue with a different policy orientation yeah you know let's gather together and throw the bad people out that kind of thing so I see it but it manifests very differently yeah um with all of that said I did want to cover there are two issues that I think arise here one um I heard you in your meeting with at the Trump brown table where I'm frustrated that the table is not actually around they never are um rectangle yeah what is that a you or something yeah uh here's another place where you're going to hear the uh what I would say is a hard-headed liberal okay coming out love it I hear Antifa described by the president and others as terrorists yeah and I have a very strong reaction to this sure and it has two parts okay one by the literal definition of that term which I take to be the use of terror to get your opponents to make decisions they would not otherwise make the manipulation of your opponent through fear Antifa does this yeah that's kind of what they do um however I don't want anyone labeled with that term and the reason is because what happened to that term in the aftermath of 9-11 is that it was turned into a legal category which alienates you from your constitutional rights without your knowledge that it's happened in other words when the Department of Homeland Security came out and declared misdiscent mal information forms of terrorism yeah during the pandemic right it was hilarious but not hilarious no it's terrifying what they were really saying is oh if we don't like what you're saying and we've got three categories yeah we've got mistakes we've got lies and we've got true things that make you distrust power you do any of those things we can privately declare you in this special category and then we're free to look into your life in any way we want we're frankly according to the rules of the NDA of 2012 allowed to drag you off any street in the world including American streets to disappear you to not acknowledge we have you you don't get your right to see a lawyer you don't get the right to see the evidence against you you don't get the right to cross examine witnesses all of these things vanish and so my feeling is a I think we need to recognize that the marginal people who are showing up as violent anarchists on the streets of our cities have a legitimate gripe even if they can't or don't phrase it and be that they are being endangered in a particular way that should offend all Americans sorry I just had a palpitation oh no the phrase endangered talking to people who are endangered and others it's so hard for me so let me just understand your your position on this quick so when you say you don't want anyone labeled a terrorist do you mean literally anyone like a like a like a terrorist from overseas like Hamas let's put it this way okay a Hamas terrorist doesn't have constitutional rights so the alienation of their constitutional rights is not a problem for me I don't want them to have constitutional rights they don't have them they're not Americans so I'm really talking about Americans and my feeling is I don't know that anybody's going to be able to process this kind of nuance and maybe it should maybe this is you know me tilting at windmills but my point is what happened not only with the Patriot Act but with the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 signed by Obama late in the day in Hawaii on December 31st he remembers well but why before he went out I don't know why why was it December 31st it didn't need to be there was no legal reason it needed to be December 31st and there is no reason it needed to be late in the day from Hawaii but if you were signing something late in the day in Hawaii on December 31st America is already drunk okay it's drunk and not paying attention and it literally didn't show up in the New York Times the next day yeah I've checked the paper one it's not there so my feeling is our constitution evaporated because of president in Hawaii signed something late in the day when others could be counted on to be drunk and that ought to have caused every American to say what just happened to us yeah right in light of that I feel on a very lonely quest to say hey don't use the magic term that has been imbued with all of this power because it is a magic term I'm not saying you can't describe the terrorist behavior of antifa but I want everybody to say hey we can't use this term because it's you know it's been loaded right it's been filled with tannerite I don't know what it is but that term is so dangerous and it's been pointed at me yeah my guilty of malinformation saying things that cause you to distrust government that are true yeah yeah so I'm a terrorist okay yeah now my feeling is I don't have a lot of common cause with antifa but maybe on this one issue don't use that term for Americans man I have so much to say about that but I also I guess have more questions maybe that's the reporter in me that needs to just fully understand am I wrong about my interpretation of constitutional rights and please don't feel bad correct to me if I if I am I thought that even if you're not an American citizen you're subject to the jurisdiction therein and so you do have constitutional rights that extend to you my understanding is that that is true to a limited extent unless they send you to get mal well so you know there's all kinds of loopholes including in and around the abuses of NDA a 2012 there was a whole lot of shenanigans played with the idea that for example your constitutional rights against for example illegitimate search and seizure do not exist at the border yeah okay now we can all understand why that is right yeah want to be able to control what comes into the country which means we have to be able to search you if you decide to cross the border right I'm on board because you have an option not to cross right not to be served you've decided to cross this is one of the things you have agreed to it's like and it's what's the term for your tacit consent when you drive on a road I've forgotten there's a legal term for implied consent that's it but what they did amazingly enough was they said oh your constitutional rights don't exist at the border and then I kid you not they took a fat marker and they outlined the border and not just the border with other nations they outlined the border with the sea right they drew a fat line and they said for a hundred miles on the side of the border you're at the border yeah your rights don't exist most Americans live inside that fat marker line yeah so the point is it's an obvious game to alienate us from our constitutional rights and what they did then is not let us see the tyranny around us what they then did was say well your constitutional rights that you think you have don't exist if you're within a hundred miles of the border but they're now privileges yeah so we'll treat them as if you have them so you won't notice that you don't have them until we decide oh you're a bad one yeah you really don't have them so anyway I don't like you're pretty close here though right are you inside the marker or outside 100% inside the marker I wouldn't don't you think though he would be the one to move on an island right outside the marker that would be you outside the marker island I have tried to get them to move the island and they refuse to do it for reasons of the claim or geological yeah so there's a lot of things I love about what you're saying and I and I so this is a kind of a nerdy story but I talked about my dad a little bit he was a very disturbed man but he was incredibly smart my dad he was bipolar so he had days that were he was brilliant he's still the smartest person I've ever met and then he had days where he like wake up drunk right and so you got one or the other but the very first word my dad taught me to spell do you want to guess what it is it wasn't chrysanthemum no it was constitution oh that's a good one I know and I and I didn't read I didn't I didn't even know what it was at the time I didn't even appreciate what he was doing but I still remember it was like a drill sergeant like CEO and ST high T he would drill it into and I have this picture my mom still has where I drew a big trophy like all you know a gold trophy and the trophy says constitution and it's like you know I was in grade school and I probably didn't even know what the constitution was but I knew from my dad it was this very important thing it was like a prize right so I definitely understand so much of what you're saying and I was pretty young when 9-11 happened I mean I'm 37 I was born in 88 but you know I still remember that switch in society I remember when we'd send my mom away on work trips and my dad would convince the pilot to let us sit in the cockpit and this pali smoke at a cigarette you know just weird stuff and so we gave up a lot as Americans because of terrorism and some of it you know a little by little maybe we can wear our shoes now right through the through the airport maybe we realized some of that was too much so I do always worry about these sorts of things in the hands of our worst enemy you know how would an AOC use you know all these designations because remember like moms for liberty by certain organizations is considered a domestic terror organization which is crazy it's literally just moms who don't want their kids to be indoctrinated in school so I understand that but I also said at the White House in my defense of you know trying to keep this all on track I said genuinely I don't care really what we call them like we have to judge their behavior and prosecute them based off their behavior because I do agree that it's hard to say and Tifa's their terrorists by do agree with kind of the sentiment of okay but what is Antifa how do we prove someone is Antifa so when I say their domestic terrorists I say it in the sense that they are terrorizing people in pursuit of a political and social agenda I agree with that but then there's going to be individual instances you know like the people who were meeting in the desert down in Arizona or California getting ready to bomb a event on New Year's Eve and they were members of a the Turtle Island collective um I'm dim on you know of this apparently the United States used to be called Turtle Island right yeah by the natives and so it's called the Turtle Island Collective but they're a far left extremist group and they were like testing bombs out in the desert and they were going to blow something up in Los Angeles on New Year's Eve and the federal government using this new terror designation basically thwarted it so it's hard for me because I do believe that there are terrorists that deserve to be called terrorists I agree with you though that we can't just say we certainly can't call ideology terrorism it has to be an action and it has to be spelled out in the law well but I think even there if you understood the full horror of what's been done with that term I think I would convince you of the following thing yeah it's not that terrorism isn't a real thing yeah and it's not that we shouldn't be allowed to accuse anybody of it because it's too extreme it's because we are all depending on that constitutional structure in a way that living people are not old enough to understand right it is not visceral to us how important that document is I think covid began to reveal it because there were a number of other states that looked every bit as free as we were who did way worse during covid because they didn't have it as good a constitution so my feeling is the constitution that's a bright red line for me yeah and if you're threatening the constitution I'm more afraid of you than I am of whatever you're suspending it to go after yeah right I have my fears about antifa I've confronted them myself however I'm much more concerned about a state that wants an exemption and in this particular case the structure of the exemption is in and of itself utterly diabolical it is not that we collectively got together and decided to suspend certain aspects of the constitution under certain circumstances that is absolutely not what happened what happened is we built a structure in which we cryptically promoted the executive to the role of emperor right where the executive can literally define you as a terrorist based on evidence that they don't have to present to a court and then you become one and the point is well obviously that's not going to withstand the constitutional challenge no it won't but the point is anybody who believes that that's true anybody who is let's say a federal officer or somebody in charge of a federal department who believes that that is true then de facto inacts this constitution free thing which can't be checked because it doesn't even have to be acknowledged yeah so it's like if you take the cleverness of the American founders who I think incredibly highly but if you take their cleverness and you imagine the inverse cleverness how would you undo that without you know causing a riot in the streets yeah you would do it cryptically in ways that are too technical for people to understand you would sign documents laid in the day on December 31st so that nobody would you know so that their mind would literally have too much alcohol in it for them to be tracking right so anyway I'm not saying that we shouldn't be able to describe the terrorizing that antifa does accurately and hold them responsible for I want that yeah but um the magic term I'm really not down with it yeah maybe we're coming to the same place and my our understandings of it are just different and because I actually there isn't like a domestic terror charge on the books right I actually don't believe there's any federal statute that's like I'm going to charge you with domestic terrorism but I think what you're saying is maybe something I don't understand which is if you know the government has labeled them a terror organization the government can bypass certain expected rights to be able to investigate them right yeah because I mean and this is the the horror and genius of the whole thing why did we do that yeah well we did it because we were terrorized into doing something we into harming ourselves that was the that was whatever 9-11 was yeah that was its effect yeah its effect was to get us to harm ourselves far more than the people who made it happen were capable of harming us yeah we harmed ourselves much worse yeah because I do believe that these antifa types I mean they're only getting worse when I started covering them it was like they'd you know take over the campus of a college and then they would break some windows at some banks and police stations and do some graffiti then they'd start throwing rocks at cops and then they'd be blocking freeways in the access to the airport and bridges and then they'd be taken over six blocks of the city I believe these are people who are capable of every bit as much violence and death and destruction as the terrorists who attacked our country on 9-11 and so I'm very worried and scared about that faction but I understand a lot of what you're saying is like this power in the hands of my worst enemy you were president believes I'm a terrorist which I'm sure our governor believes I'm a terrorist yeah it's concerning I understand all that great well then this raises the next issue I don't know how many issues we're actually thinking is there all two interesting but I wanted to ask you something you you have been I think rightly focused on this left fringe which has in one sense done as a favor by creating even if the purpose of the black dress is to obscure identity and to to aid the de-individuation they have labeled themselves in a way you know the tattoos the strange hair colors and styles and all of that weird stuff at least gives you a sense of who you're dealing yeah right I mean you know Andy know has famously and I think for the right reasons broadcast their mug shots so you can just kind of evaluate who are these people who are being picked up and then set free and all of that but I see something maybe it's a mirage I might imagine it but when I look at what's going on in Minneapolis I don't see that at all it is weird isn't it what I see is rank and file democrats of a kind I've long been frustrated with but I recognize them these are people I've circulated amongst for my whole life who are now escalating so what we see now is not the you know some of them are homeless never finished school types we're seeing people with nice vehicles I see nurses I see you nurses we're seeing people who in general I think until now have more or less viewed themselves as the the heirs to the Vietnam war protesters you know where the idea was to document the abuses of the government and to you know to call attention to victims who are in a poor position to defend themselves and they're now active and doing things that are dangerous and those dangers are in fact you know the thread that connects those rank and file democrats to the antifa is that antifa clearly I would say as somebody was on the ground in Portland and watched it with my own eyes and talked to them and all of that those people were deliberately trying to induce overreach yeah violent reach yeah for a purpose yes I think these well-dressed resource older more sophisticated new protesters are inheriting that streak the game plan is the same they want they want overreach that they can then point to and see say see we told you he was a Nazi yeah the mask is slipped you can now see it on the streets of Minneapolis blah blah blah blah blah right so there it's a game of chicken yeah they're trying to induce that same thing just as antifa did but it's not the same people you're the first person I've heard articulate that and it is there is a stark difference one I am from Minnesota so I see literally like the chicks I used to drink boxed wine with in high school and it's so I'm looking at this from the lens of like those are my you know fellow minisotens and it's a very weird thing when you know the sort of minisota nice that what we're seeing I think there's a couple things going on and I don't know for sure these are guesses based off of covering these radical groups for sort of what we're seeing I think that they have been given there this behavior has been excused to an extent that even in 2020 it wasn't excused I mean you have the lieutenant governor a white woman I think she's white in minisota telling people to put their bodies on the line you have governor walls like white as to the white minisotent type dad dude saying we're at war with the federal government and you have all measure of senators and congress members who are using similar language and like you said earlier if I mean let's just be honest if we were led to believe and convince that we were literally fighting Hitler reincarnation what wouldn't you do to stop Hitler there are very few things I wouldn't have done to stop Hitler I probably could have killed somebody and so when you're convinced by all of these people and not just fringe politicians look at Tim Walls and when you're convinced that this is fascism and we're going to lose our country and our democracy as governor bob Ferguson here in Washington state has said attorney general nick brown has said I mean you're really screwing with people's minds and then you have this white savior mentality that's happening we got to save these brown people from the from the fascist government I mean we really do need to study what's going on with liberal white women between the age of 40 and 60 somebody needs to study them in a lab but I think there's this sort of white savior mentality also a third thing I feel like we're at critical mass with Trump you know they've been telling us for 10 years like they're he's going to destroy our democracy he's going to take over he hasn't done any of those things and all these dire warnings about America as we know it season to exist and how the clock is ticking and they need something to manifest almost to justify I think their TDS over all these years so they're just like whatever we can do to not have been wrong about Trump you know I just feel like they're the closer we get to his last day in office the more unhinged and psychotic those people are about to act I agree and I'm afraid Trump is just not the right person to be on the other side of that conflict I see exactly what you're saying and I think because of who Trump is both yeah in his own mind and to his supporters that the tendency to just be fed up with this nonsense and it is nonsense I mean you'd literally have the governor of this state creating the problem that's going to get people killed right the whole idea that the state is itself obstructing this enforcement effort is making it much more likely that something horrifying will happen and to horrifying things already have happened but you don't even see it right like the failure of of of Minnesota to hand over people in state custody who ICE has a right to deport yeah this is standard practice yeah and to not do it forces these officers on to the street now are these officers the right people no I don't think so I don't think they're well enough trained I don't think they were they were hired with the right incentives I think they've effectively been told that they are licensed to do all kinds of things that they shouldn't be there's all kinds of horrors in the nature of the force on the streets but anyway you've got two sides playing chicken yeah well I only did I disagree a little because I was Trump did something I was really surprised about is he did back off a little bit in the sense that there was a little of an admission after Alex Freddie was killed and I'm not going to act like I know whether it was justified or not people want to pause every frame of the video and there's things I'd like about it there's things I don't like about it I don't know but Trump you know Bavino left and Bavino was this sort of character out there he wanted the cameras and he was going to show how tough he was and and then President Trump said hey I'm sending in Tom Homan and he said specifically he has not been involved in Minnesota so far that was Trump saying we need a fresh I was actually very surprised by that because that does make him look like he's he's re-evaluating and I was surprised he wanted to be seen as re-evaluating the situation and then Tom Homan came in and had a meeting with walls meeting with the Minneapolis mayor and both you know wall said good things about that meeting Homan said good things about that meeting and even he got the AG now to agree to hand over illegal aliens in state custody which is huge that is a huge component of sanctuary jurisdictions so I understand Trump is very compulsive right and I don't want him to push it too far either but that little moment showed me that maybe he won't so I have like a little bit of hope but also he could be in there doing everything by the book these could be the best trained ICE agents on the planet they'd still lose their mind about it it's it's they would still be out there well not only would they still lose their mind about right but there would still be errors and they would be captured right and they would be portrayed yes that's you could possibly do here is fail not terribly yeah there's no law enforcement agency on the planet that can be perfect and we should expect them to get as close to perfection as possible because them not being perfect can mean the loss of human life right there's no one more powerful badge and a gun to be able to kill people on the streets legally if they if they need to but now you have a situation where these officers are confronted daily with hostility people tracking them people threatening their lives people coming to interfere so you expect them to not only be perfect but to be perfect under those conditions not only that I just think it is important the whistles um air horns yes this is a neurological manipulation yeah these people are being put into a frame of mind in which it's almost impossible for anybody to do their job correctly so the fact that these people may not be trained enough to do their jobs correctly you don't want them doing their jobs correctly you're trying to make them make errors and so you know if you're trying to make them make errors the fact that they're not well enough trained not to make errors is a secondary situation you want the errors right that that is a tough one for me right trying to it you're claiming that the problem here is that innocent people are endangered by this effort while you are attempting to make that danger greater for the purpose of getting the right video that will finally match the story we've been telling yeah um and it's it's horrifying it's such a good point because you know they've called them a Gestapo and slave patrols and then wolves said they're untrained like a militia basically it's like okay let's say they are let's just give none of them the benefit of the down say they're the worst trained agents ever in the history of the world and they're just out there shooting people at random then maybe don't go out and confront them because the chances if they are who you say they are a chance are pretty high you're not going to leave that encounter so they don't they don't even buy what they're selling right yeah and some of these same agents also worked for other presidents and we're out there doing this kind of work but they weren't being harassed they weren't being stalked they weren't be put on camera and there were shootings by ice in previous years I mean it's just a different scenario and nobody people aren't looking at it clearly but you make such a good point about the the types of protesters and I think people need to be focused on that more I had a I don't know if I should say this but I don't think any of them will watch because they're very very liberal so I go to a yoga studio and well to do area outside of Seattle this is just happening today so little little yoga studio drama and I went because I just need to calm down you know just a political job and I'm like I'm going to start yoga because I get my whatever you call it and you zen or whatever and I knew I was like I'm going to feel so out of place here if people know who I am I'm probably not going to be welcomed and all the stuff but at this yoga studio I never experienced that never experienced it nobody bothered me got to go and even had a couple people say hey I love your show thanks for what you're doing kind of whisper it right because you can't yeah right like a conservative so anyway the yoga studio posted on their Facebook page this morning you know we have been facing you know some pressure to speak out about ice and stuff and we just want to keep this a political free environment which is great of course the yoga studio in a tiny little town full of rich people and all these white women are like saying this is saying something and you're saying that you would allow ice to come in and take your members and I'm just like oh my gosh these are 50 something women who have not a care really in the world no real problems in their life and they want to create drama and division at a yoga studio that's supposed to be for peace and reflection it's so indicative of what's going on well I mean it's part of a tactical playbook that most of the people who are participating in it do not understand right the game theory is we need you on our side short of on our side we need you to shut the fuck up right and here's how we're going to arrange that all of the stuff of life is going to become less accessible to you if you don't get on board with the program and in in the face of that almost everybody finds their own solution in their own head to how they're going to say enough stuff that the mobile move on to somebody else this is exactly what happened in Evergreen yeah it's what happens in all of these protests scenarios it was what it was the way BLM worked and it's irresistible yeah it spreads like a contagion but the problem is that that same tactical playbook is dovetailing with a vital part of our culture that we almost all picked up now I got a triple dose of it because I'm Jewish right and so the idea of it could happen here the people who died in Europe were the people who said it's terrible it'll pass right people who allowed themselves to be quote unquote resettle to the east whatever it was you needed to be more proactive and you needed to understand that it was all in the line and frankly if you got out too late then the question as well how much good can I do on the way out yeah right that's not where we are but a lot of people are talking themselves into believing that that's where we are and because they're talking themselves into believing that that's where they are as you say all kinds of things that are normally off the table am I going to kill somebody no yeah killer but you know if you put me in the right circumstance where I'm in the midst of a you know a genocide unfolding yeah I'm a killer yeah right so it's it we're primed for it somebody is actively triggering it it's part of a game theoretic contagious that spreads across a population and it is the reason I think that we can't talk to each other because you know I mean imagine imagine that you're trying to have a conversation like on either side of the fence of a concentration camp but one side can't see the fence yeah right and they're just like trying to understand you know what you're talking about but so anyway we can't understand each other I think and this is grown from my perspective which it sounds like you share I think one side is involved in a delusion that we are in that phase of history right for which we are all on the lookout for the signs and frankly I think both sides are being played that game of chicken that we're seeing on the streets of Minneapolis is useful to people we don't know yeah right they want something maybe what they want is for Americans to be so fiercely divided that for you know another couple of elections we still fail to go after the people who really are endangering us and we go after each other instead yeah sometimes I wonder if it's like a human force or if it's just the algorithm I mean I have to think of my algorithm because I'm on my phone all day right because I do what you do and we have a job and we have to stay informed and all these things and I mean I'll be sitting on my couch and I have to consciously realize that the algorithm is trying to make me upset at people I know and I take my phone and I throw it to the other side of the couch and I do that multiple times a day and so and I think of that with like my mom I mentioned is very anti-Trump and no matter how many times I ask her I don't want to talk about politics let's talk about your fishing trip or whatever it is she still can't help it she comes back and sends me something she saw on Facebook and it's just until we can break people free from this algorithm that's just shoving all this stuff at them every day I mean I think social media has a ton to do with it like the whole yoga thing I just told about would would that lady show up at this at the yoga studio and tell the yoga lady oh you would let ice come in here and steal people would she confront her like that never but she'll say it online you know right it's it's really wild I think every day about how are we going to break free from this what is the what is the end of this period of time we're in you know the risk of saying too much my parents their deliverables who raised me yeah they still read the New York Times as if it's a newspaper and that's very bewildering yeah New York Times the LA Times the Washington Post they feel like they're getting a whole bunch of sources and it's one source with you know different stylistic approaches and you know different stories I don't have this problem with my mom because she does exactly what you're suggesting you understand we can't see eye to eye and so she avoids it and says so there's no it's not secret my dad can't help himself my dad and it comes from a place of love I can tell that is constantly trying to wake me up to what I have not understood about the people that I pay attention to the people that I politically have supported and it's so you know he's getting a like it's it's like a a drip it's not more fiend it's the opposite right it's like a drip that just constantly keeps him on edge and you know I've I've tried to explain it I said look several things one it's your media diet that's doing yeah that's why we are constantly having this constant conversation to there isn't a source you can go to as an alternative to those things and I'm not claiming that's okay we all need a newspaper that we can go to for a basic discussion of the facts of what has taken place so that we can proceed from there it doesn't exist if it did exist I would subscribe I would ask you to subscribe it doesn't exist and you can't do what I'm trying to do which is to try to cobble together and understanding of what's taking place from sources that are decentralized and don't all agree with each other it would be a full-time job for you yeah not built for it you know frankly you're too old to even attempt it and those of us who are attempting it are not doing a great job it's you know it's not a substitute for a newspaper just the same way podcasts aren't a substitute for you know a proper science discussion just doesn't work yeah but it's better than nothing so anyway there's something about the people that we are trying to maintain our relationships with who haven't at least broken free of the thing that's feeding the toxin into our culture and I frankly don't know what to do about I don't eat there and I don't I it's a lot of it is an older generation and I think my mom's age and I love my mother love you mom if if you do watch this I don't think she's equipped to handle Facebook I don't think she's equipped to make judgments about AI to understand in the sense that maybe other people who are more media literate do about what the algorithm is doing so I don't I don't know what to do about it either but I think the frustration for me because people will treat me like I'm a trump ask us it right you and I both have been there and back and you know like you said about your dad's trying to convince you that you've been brainwashed it's like okay we weren't call me brainwashed when I didn't support president Trump you know and I for most of president Trump's time in the political spotlight I have not liked it and it was about a year and a half period of time where I started to switch a little bit and so it's like how could I be brainwashed if I was on the never Trump side and now I'm on this side and I never get a great example for that well people will say oh you did it for the money you know that you left your job and it was going to be better for you to be a conservative and I'm like well that's a stretch right so I don't know I don't know the answer to it and it's really frustrating because I do think about it every day well it does it does raise the part of it that's so troubling to me and it's you know primarily talking about my parents but I don't know how many of these situations I've been to where I've reached a conclusion that's admittedly outside the mainstream and it takes a long time for what I was seeing to become visible to the mainstream and I'm not saying I've gotten everything right I'm I try to be very open about the stuff I've gotten wrong I try to correct it publicly and as quickly as possible but I've gotten a lot right that sounded pretty wild to begin with when my people hear me say something that sounds like oh he's now finally lost his mind I want them to think huh that's not the first time I've had that impression and I've been surprised before I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt yeah I know him better than that I know he's not doing it for the money I know he's not doing it because he's you know wants to be famous it's none of those things and it doesn't make me right but it does mean you can actually if you know me well then you can safely put aside all of the explanations that have to do with me suddenly being motivated by some self promotion or you know whatever it is just give me the damn benefit of the doubt I've earned it yeah right and that is not in evidence it is it is the one thing that it just it can't be made to happen is and and actually you know what this sorry I don't mean to rant so much but no I love it during the pandemic Heather and I had a secret weapon that allowed us to outdo almost anybody else in our lives you got the vaccine and triple boosted yes okay good and strawberry flavored no our secret weapon was each other and what it really meant was there was nothing that was going to get between the two of us that could cause us not to be able to at least figure out what we disagreed about right the fact that our relationship was not intermediate by a screen or a telephone line or anything like that and that we had a long history of going through all kinds of different situations and facing perils together and not seeing eye to eye the fact that we had all of that track record and then interpersonally could not be divided by anything that was going on on the outside world even if we didn't come to agreement about it allowed us to remain sane yeah and I saw all everybody who didn't have at least one person in that category become some kind of insane right so anyway I think the thing that wants to persuade us of stuff that causes us to behave in ways that help it it expense to ourselves that thing is getting better at bringing that about yeah we are getting worse at resisting our immunity is down and giving each other the benefit of the doubt based on the fact that you know I've known you for 25 years or 30 years I know you think that what you're saying is reasonable therefore I'm going to proceed from that understanding and try to figure out what we disagree over it's not that hard I think the younger generation is going to save us and I haven't felt that way about any younger generation except this one and I don't know what you call them now coming of age like out of high school into college right now Gen Z is it Gen Z still yeah strong independent streak I think that they've grown up with this very divisive environment and they're starting to want to detach from their devices you know I'm at the point where I will leave my phone dead for a couple days my producer hates it and I'm so I'm really getting sick of it but I'm seeing it there I have these neighbor kids who come walker dogs and stuff and watch them grow up a little bit they are not tethered to their phones anymore and in fact there was this little trend going around of them have you seen this analog bag trend uh-uh they this is trend and of course they talk about the trend on social media but they leave their phone for a day or whatever and they put all the things that their phone does for them in a bag like a book you know they put a book in the bag and they put some pictures of their friends in the bag and they just put some things in the bag that I don't know are supposed to be a temporary substitute for their phone just like a like a figure of dopamine or something it's like I can't scroll for my friend so you just pluck the pictures quick and look at it but I'm just sort of like actually it's brilliant I love it and I'm just thinking about it wow we could all use an analog bag where you leave your phone you pick up your bag and you just go out into the wilderness or something so I actually have a lot of hope for this younger generation so maybe we all just die off and things will be fine well the first part of that we're gonna get at some point um but look I don't know yeah so first of all I'm now that you say it I am unfortunately not good at calculating these things in real time but I don't know whether you're talking about the very beginning of gen alpha or the very end of yeah people know what I'm talking about like whatever the late teens right now the kiddos the youngins um here's the problem with the idea that they're gonna save us okay you just let me have that can't we just say they're gonna save us yeah that's what you really want um I mean no it's fine I'm already so far into my red pilling just keep disappointing me about life okay um and I'm gonna bring this back to some uh Washington stuff here in a second but um the problem is I don't think you can bootstrap the characteristics that are necessary to save us in other words gen alpha even if they have the right instinct about all of the stuff in the world that's making us crazy don't have the culture that tells you what to do when you face a world gone crazy and so there has to be some partnering with I think it's gonna be the rebels of each generation ahead right frankly they're even boomers who make sense right but they're not the mainstream boomers they're the boomers who saw a few things and woke up to what their generation was about but anyway the renegades in those generations are gonna have to figure out how to communicate with the gen Z's and the gen alpha's and it's not easy because ancestral speaking I don't think you would have a regular generation gap where you know if you go to latin america where a culture is more or less still intact they don't treat the old people as you know that's grandma yeah they're just not like that yeah right the point is grandma is a meaningful person to them and yes and they they honor that and yes there are things grandma's not gonna understand but in general the point is the elders are understood to be a part of that sort of river of wisdom that flows down to new generations and for folks in this part of the world what you have is you know like I was a computer early adopter I was a dyslexic kid and my dad got me a computer to help me do the stuff in school that I could not do and it actually allowed me to graduate high school and to go into college and eventually graduate school but so I was early in this computer thing I'm not one somebody who struggles with tech at all yeah but of course I struggle with my tech at this point it's become so bewildering and arbitrarily complicated that you know yeah of course I'm asking my kids to help me accomplish things that I feel certain I should be able to figure out how to accomplish and so the point is that you know to the extent of the younger generations just have native tech stuff in their environment yeah and the old people are all confused by it that is making it hard for them to relate to us but they need to figure out how or we need to figure out how to reach them because they're not going to be able to do it on there yeah well and especially if they start caring those analog bags we can't reach them at all walking walkie-talkie no I agree with you because I'm so embarrassed to admit it but I it doesn't matter and I'm really not that old it doesn't matter how many times somebody explains it to me I don't understand Bitcoin you could explain it to me a hundred times I will always ask I don't I will always say well it's not so it's not real I don't I don't understand it so yeah there are definitely some some huge divisions and they just take to things easier but here I can explain Bitcoin to you you want to be the hundredth-perfus person to try I got it okay you're gonna get it you're gonna get it right away it's like money unless the power goes out great great got it now I get it yeah a mining and though it just is like why I don't that's the that I'm blonde on a few things Bitcoin you're not a long and there are aspects that I struggle with too let me ask you question there's a segue here um the issue of my my contention that the younger generations are not going to be able to bootstrap our way out of this danger because they don't have a culture to draw on that would tell them what to do as a strange echo in the questions of what's going on in Minneapolis to me at least and what's going on in the state of Washington with respect to gun rights yeah so here's my uh thought that I had a few days ago when pondering the question of Alex Preddie's death which I take to be the death of um I see him as reckless for the way he behaved but he was obviously not guilty of some crime that warranted his death yeah um though it may have been a justified shooting based on the illegitimate fear that officers may have had in the moment so with that said it's surprising to see a guy with Alex Preddie's profile armed in the way he was I take it to potentially mean that there is a change over on the democratic left with respect to gun rights whereas instead of itching to disarm us they may be farming themselves which in one way I regard as a good thing because as much as I don't want crazy people who I think many of whom are involved in a delusion about where we are in history armed I do think that the reason that the founders gave us the second amendment and phrased it in the frankly kind of strange way that they wrote it was because they feared tyranny and that an armed populace is harder to tyrnize and I I just think that's true so I would actually like Americans to come together to come to understand ourselves as a people and to be armed in the way that conservatives are often armed right when I switch sides on this issue and it's one of the issues I have switch sides on I found that gun culture was overwhelmingly conservative it's overwhelmingly male it's often highly technical it is obsessed with responsibility yeah um and frankly it was welcoming anybody who wants to know is welcome in that culture but here's the sticking point for me I'm trying to imagine I don't know what Alex Prede was like I've seen stuff I don't know how prejudicial it is but if you find yourself structing ice in the streets of Minneapolis whether it's the right thing or the wrong thing to do I have a pretty good idea where you are politically my own interaction with people who are there politically is that they are allergic to conservatives yeah I think conservatives are out of patience with people on the left I deal with that a lot as somebody who's still on the left but they're out of patience with people on the left but just the nature of society they have to listen to them it's everywhere so they hear a lot of stuff that lefties are saying whereas lefties are avoiding hearing what conservatives say yeah so the punchline of this very long description is I'm wondering when I decided to get some guns and figure out what to do with them and how to behave responsibly with them I spent a lot of time learning from conservatives yeah because that's the people who were dispensing the information and so I got a lot of an understanding of how things looked through their eyes if you were allergic to conservatives and you decided to arm yourself I'm wondering if you fail to have access to a culture that would then tell you all of the subtle things that you need to know about gun ownership yeah it's interesting because I recently became a gun owner for the first time and remind me put a pin in it that I want to ask you what you mean by on the left later okay put a sharpie in it or pin in it so I got I have been a little adverse shot twice when I was younger whoa I've also had like six concussions we grew up you know on a farm little poverty you know you make up your own fun right and so I got in it wasn't like I say shot because it sounds cool doesn't it ricochet but only between us it was ricochet anybody else asks I was shot I had a ricochet off of my brothers were shooting at a half-barried tractor tire and then I had a ricochet that hit me here that my dad was shooting at a bucket full of concrete okay so you know guns were everywhere in my house laying around like in Minnesota they didn't even just really back in the 80s and 90s I mean I don't think we lived in the country people didn't lock them up that there wasn't this obsessive sort of locking up and my dad just wasn't a responsible guy but like we'd hunt they did hunting and all this stuff so I just have never felt the need to have a gun and wasn't a big gun person I wasn't opposed to it though because I'm you know like the constitution and so but my views have sort of developed a lot on this issue my husband has guns you know I my turning point was you know I my job has become a little more dangerous in recent years you know we've dealt with a lot of death threats at our house and having to rely on other people to protect me just wasn't something I was satisfied with but then I walked my two dogs down a path in a the safe place where I live down a trail by a river that I'd gone down a million times with the dogs and I'm coming up this isn't even near Seattle so it's not like we're used to drug addicts in the homeless coming up this guy on a bike driving towards me and I just think oh god and he stops right in front of me pulls out this fixed kitchen knife right my and I'm me my two dogs my dogs are useless and just like oh hello sir you know and I but he blocks my path pulls out this knife and thank god there was this guy and this woman walking up the path almost simultaneous when he pulled the knife out and then the guy just kind of started packing away it's in blackberry bushes like he was never gonna do anything to me with it I went straight to my local police department and applied for a concealed pistol license I still haven't really carried the gun because I guess as a woman I don't feel confident enough in my handling skills that I won't get it taken away so my husband has been methodical he has been we have some property he takes me out he does gun safety he helps me try to shoot all these things so I have a new relationship with guns but the the issue of kind of left picking up this is happening more and more there was a old weekly newspaper in Oregon you'll probably remember it kind of like the stranger in Seattle do you remember what it was called it's like an alternative um and there was a front page article and I've you saw it it was a man trans so a trans woman a guy who thinks he's a chick okay that's a trend in a you know where in addressing all these things with an AR 15 rifle and the headline was triggered and it talked about how the trans community is gearing up to fight back against Trump and I'm like oh Jesus I mean it really sounded like a threat right and I was sort of like for some reason looking at that just makes me very worried about this person with a gun and then when I was picking up my gun finally after like a month and a half because the process in Washington state is so crazy there was a man in a skirt who was picking up a rifle with a scope and I know it's bad and I shouldn't even admit it but my first thought was they're gonna go shoot up a place and I know that's horrible but for some reason the left bearing arms has made me uneasy but it's their right to do so I mean the sheriff Heath Swank in Pierce County Washington which is south of Seattle if you're not familiar he posted this question on X and he said should all transgender people be banned from owning guns you know who was most angry about that the right the right was like what are you talking about just banning gun ownership for a whole swath of people now I think that there are some questions about mental stability among the trans community but until you prove that they're a danger to themselves or others you can't just say you can't proactively own a gun so I don't know maybe that could be a bridge as more people on the left by guns because the person who sells them the gun the person they go to at the range those are all going to be conservatives who are going to try to help them fold into gun culture they might not know it but they are does that answer your question I mean no because I'm not convinced that the allergy to conservatives isn't going to keep the liberals away from the culture that they do need to pick up but they have to go to the gun shop you think they like won't go to a gun range because they'll be conservatives there um I think they're well I will tell you that for me the people I interacted with at the gun shop people I spent many hours watching on YouTube who frankly it's geeks it's gun geeks who talk about the details of you know the danger of this the danger of that why you do it this way that culture is necessary if you look at this person and you think that's the enemy because I know that person voted for the other guy then you were not going to pick it up and my point is that actually responsible gun ownership is a culture yes not something you can afford to learn on your own because you can't afford a single serious mistake so I'm worried that the interaction will be minimal and that in the absence of that interact hey I think the interaction will be useful frankly useful on both sides right to have the forced interaction on the basis that yeah that you need to pick up this culture interact with you know the people who sell weapons all these things so a little cross are you are you asking that because like and I don't mean to speak about somebody who's dead because they can't respond or whatever are you asking that because Alex Freddie did so many unresponsible things with his firearm well I mean owned a firearm that firearm enthusiasts wouldn't even evolved well I agree and you know that that's a detailed discussion which when I've tried to raise it has turned some people off but even short of that yeah short of the particular there's one feature of the particular weapon that I think is absolutely central for people to understand and it doesn't involve the the defect of this month the famous demon the gun doesn't have a safety which means that your handling of it is risky right if especially if you have put around in the chamber which I don't know if he did and yeah there is some reason to think he may have but in any case going into a conflict zone with a weapon is dangerous once in a conflict zone stepping into a particular interaction with an officer engaged in what I think is an assault against a protester not a good idea so I see recklessness there and that's that it is exactly why I'm asking the question yeah well because and I'm not a gun expert so I want to make sure off the front end but I mean if you are trained with a firearm then not having a safety on a firemer is no big deal on fact people who are well trained prefer to have a gun without a safety you know one of my key things when I picked one out as I told my husband I want you know I want a safety on the grip yeah like we I just wanted some sort of safety I didn't feel comfortable just having because I don't feel comfortable with it I'm not well trained with it and I don't know Alex Freddie's training with a gun but if it didn't have a safety and he was trained then that's fine because you're not going to put your finger on the trigger right but yeah I mean so but hold on yes he's walking into the situation with a loaded firearm yeah yeah he's engaging in a confrontation with an officer yeah chances that he is going to end up being wrestled by this officer I mean it's one thing if he did the right thing and he yes made it clear that he was no threat at the point that you know the officer was taking him down if he had complied that'd be very different but doing anything that looks like resisting arrest with a firearm if it had a bullet in the chamber I would argue you can't be sure somebody's wrestling well I agree with that in the holster the chances that they're going to bump the trigger are too high they're not acceptable I agree that his yes I agree that the actions he engaged in with a firearm are created a situation that could have gone wrong very easily and obviously did and it brings this element of uncertainty and for the ICE agents right now we've got a person who's armed what is their intention but at the same time you know in Washington state I actually do believe it's illegal now to carry a firearm into a protest I don't know that past yeah I think around the capital because they did it for the capital campus there's certain areas you can't have a gun even if it's in protest like your open carry you know rights or whatever and then Democrats in California also tried to Gavin Newsom tried to ban carrying guns during a protest and Republicans fought back you know against that obviously so Republicans support the idea of having a gun to be able to protest they definitely can't wholesale say Alex Predation to have a cat gun right but it's very fair to say if you're going to interfere with federal agents and try to like wrestle them maybe that's not a situation that a responsible gun owner would have put themselves in well let me just say this is one of the places where the culture yeah because in gun circles yes what is said about this is I think universally said which is you have an extra obligation to avoid conflict while armed because any conflict you get into well armed is by definition a conflict in which there is a gun yes right so that slightly subtle piece of wisdom is important and you have to it's it's the same as the culture that says all guns are loaded right all guns are loaded is important it's obviously factually not true which is why it sticks right the idea that anytime you see a gun your initial orientation has to be that's a loaded gun you will notice that people who are around guns a lot reflexively check not just once but twice right they do that because these rituals these you know pieces of wisdom are what keeps you safe they frankly take a situation in which an error is made and they allow you to survive it because if you if you do all of the rules that come along with that culture there's a fail safe built in so it did look to me like I haven't complained that he had a gun yeah I've worried why he had a gun there yeah and I don't know I've left open the possibility that that was and you know a coincidence though I think later later videos that showed that he had been in a conflict with officers a week or two before and had the gun on him at that time suggests no probably wasn't but but it looked simultaneously like oh you don't usually expect a wacko you don't expect a Democrat to be concealed carry that's an interesting development but you also would expect somebody who would arm themself that way to really be well trained and this sure looked like it wasn't yeah I don't know a lot of conservatives that would have gone in armed into a circumstance like that a lot of like like my husband would never have done that obviously and so maybe you're right that you know they want to have guns but not the gun culture that goes along with it because they tie this sort of like NRA right wing whatever to it well there was a story out of and I'll forget what state he's running for Congress in but he was like exposed as a antiferatical and he was part of this gun club where all the sort of LGBTQ trans people would go and the far left militants would go and they teach each other how to fire guns and I'm sort of like does anyone in that group actually know anything about yeah and maybe they maybe they do yeah I will just point out there is one exception that I am aware of there's a guy named Madge Tarei who runs an organization called Black Guns Matter and his basic point is Black people need to be armed yeah and I'm going to pass on the responsible culture of gun ownership right and strikes me as the right model yeah you know what you have is somebody who is highly knowledgeable and responsible and his point is armed citizens is a good and reasonable thing and here's how you're going to become expert enough to make that safe yeah and I think it's fair to say the left and the right not neither of them are a monolith and I know people on the right who don't like guns don't want to be around guns and I know people on the left who are gun owners who have owned a gun for a long time but there is a cultural divide on that issue for sure it's an interesting topic I've never heard discussed about whether the left is less responsible gun owners because they won't fold themselves into the culture right well let's put it this way I hope that if probably they don't listen which is a mistake because as you've discovered I'm a liberal and I have a different perspective and that's always worthwhile to see when somebody who shares some or all of your values has arrived at a different conclusion yeah um but I would implore them it's a realm in which you can't afford a serious mistake I agree the way you avoid a serious mistake is is benefiting from the wisdom of that accumulated culture of people who have thought about every mistake conceivable ad nauseam and know how to describe them to you in ways that make the the right way to deal with it intuitive maybe that's how everybody bonds maybe that's how we fix society we bond over guns I don't think it's going to happen but we can wishful thinking well frankly if you take my argument about what the founders were up to yeah this is the right thing we you know the tyranny of the state is the frightening thing right and it's the reason that we frankly pay the price and there is a high price for having you know readily available guns in our society yeah and I've really come to just take a plain reading of the second amendment and I mean I make a living off the first amendment and so I don't want any other amendment that protects somebody else's rights they're passionate about to be eroded bit by bit like we're seeing in Washington state and I tell people I believe that people should have access to any weapon the government has you know with that oh oh because and I know that's extreme if you don't like it then change the amendment there's a process to go about doing it but nobody wants to go about that difficult process of changing changing the constitution but to me it's about being able to fight back against tyranny you know they had to cobble a bunch of guns together and hide them under haystacks until they needed them and they ended up needing them right and so they recognized that point might come for us too but I don't know I just have a very plain reading of it and and the way that we're seeing second amendment rights chipped away in states like Washington and California and elsewhere is really scary stuff for anyone who wants to talk about totalitarianism and dictatorships and fascism it's like well you're letting the government strip us of the one thing that would actually protect us from all that stuff right exactly now do you want to talk a little bit about there are a couple of bills that are in motion yeah state of Washington one of them is hb 2320 and the other is hb 2321 yeah you want to describe what's being proposed yeah so these are a pair of matching bills proposed by the same Democrat with some democratic co-sponsors no Republican support and on its face it sounds not so scary because he's have to do with 3d printing guns or the components for guns and I get it like being able to all these 3d printer print a gun get past a you know a security checkpoint or something I understand the concern about 3d printed weapons but the concerned Democrats have is they want everything to be traceable they want they want a society where they know where the guns are they want it registered they want to know where it's at so eventually when they decided to take them away from us makes the job much easier but the scary thing about this bill there's twofold so one basically makes it a crime to print print these guns and then the other one regulates the manufacturers of the printing machines yeah okay and I actually I have this pulled up because there's some excerpts I want people to pay attention to because they're all you know jargon and stuff but so can't 3d print guns but you can't even possess the code the digital kind of code and instructions to print a gun so the possession of that whether it's on paper or digitally is a crime you don't even have to print the gun for it to be a crime and then the other bill the companion bill is for the 3d printers before they're sold they have to manufacture somehow a kill switch if someone tries to print a 3d gun or a component for a 3d gun a component right and it's like a built in kill switch who is the kill switch regulated by whose compliance regulated by the office of attorney general that's some scary stuff and the other thing there's just a this was a section I had pulled up so the the attorney general there's always lines like this in bills whenever you see a line this in a bill it shouldn't matter what the bill is it should scare the hell out of you because it's basically a open ended cart launch for politicians so this has to do with the 3d printing regulations on the manufacturers of the printers so it talks about how the attorney general in consultation with research institutions government agencies or any other organization the attorney general deems appropriate shell adopt rules and regulations to establish standards for equipping a printer with the blocking feature required by this section and for providing the attestation required by this section so basically the attorney general is going to come up with the language for the manufacturer to a test that they have installed this blocking feature and then it says this the attorney general may adopt rules and regulations for any other processes the attorney general deems necessary to carry out the provisions of this chapter so blank check to basically say anything else like that that could be the attorney general gets to know who has a 3d printer what they're using it for at any time reports back to him it's really scary and then the other one I wanted to read is it's if you're caught with one of these digital blueprints or you've printed it off you are guilty until proven innocent that your intent was to manufacture a gun it says it says if you're caught with digital firearm manufacturing code for a firearm it creates a rebuttable presumption of an intent to unlawfully distribute the code or manufacturer firearm in violation of this section so it's a rebuttable presumption which means the presumption is that you intended to sell that distribute it use it to illegally make a gun and to me that's a glaring first amendment issue I mean I should be able to have a copy of the anarchist handbook or whatever without the government putting me in prison right and it's scary rebuttable presumption means the onus is on you to prove yes you did not intend to distribute or employ it right so this is all frightening crazy and we haven't even touched the fact that it is inconceivable that you could properly equip these printers to successfully recognize a gun or a component of a gun right it can't be done so a we are jeopardizing innovation and manufacture in the state of Washington maybe we're going to be jeopardizing the availability of printers because I don't know what liability the printer manufacturers are going to have if their code isn't sufficiently restrictive but the thing is preposterous it reminds me a little bit of the fact that in Great Britain there are regulations on knives knives are dangers yes they can be used to murder you and it happens but you can't regulate a society at that level right this is a encroaching tyranny to solve a problem at a level that a you couldn't conceivably solve it and that b it is unwise to try because the cost you will pay is so high for doing it so the it is the reflexive understanding or failure to understand guns on the part of the democratic left is so profound that it is deranging and it is causing policy recklessness that we're going to suffer for in ways that we don't even understand well and it's not about public safety it's absolutely not about public safety it's a sign this idea that oh we're doing this to keep the public safe because they're doing the opposite of what they would do if they want to keep the public safe I mean for instance they want the splashy headlines they're going to ban high capacity magazines they're going to ban quote unquote assault weapons which account for such a small small fraction of the fatal shootings in America they're really about regulating the guns most used it would be hand guns right and so that's just stupid they do it for the headlines because school shootings are bad and that's usually used in a school shooting but totally disproportionate and one thing I noticed so I started doing this work when I was at Fox 13 which is a local Fox affiliate in Seattle I was I was weird to me and this is kind of maybe I was like still consider I mean I've always been an independent but like definitely was becoming very right of Seattle center they would always plead down gun crimes and because they're soft on crime and oh my gosh you know criminals and I covered this story it's not too many years ago where this guy you know had a girlfriend here moved across the country together wasn't working out he was abusive so she moved back well he stalked her across the country and he executed her in her new apartment she was moving into south of Seattle I covered this case and the parents had called me because they were about to give this guy seven years in a plea deal he used a gun to execute his girlfriend they're going to give him seven years in a plea deal she was white he was black they tried to make it about race and all these things that all disproportionately impacted one of the things they did is they pled away the firearm enhancement so in the state of Washington if you use a firearm in the commission of violent felony you're supposed to get a firearm enhancement which is five years hard time that means that you can't earn a single day good time on that time it is five years on top of anything else you got and you will never be able to earn a day off that sentence and so I thought in a state like Washington that's supposed to take gun gun violence so seriously are they pleading away this enhancement that actually punishes people who actually use guns to commit violent offenses and we started looking through documents thousands in thousands of cases in King County which is the county Seattle's in almost every case we found of a crime committed with a firearm they were pleading away the firearm enhancement they were cutting a deal with the suspect at the same time in Olympia they were introducing bills one of them would have taken drive-by shootings off the list of crimes that that are aggravated murder so they wanted to reduce the punishment for drive-by shooters who murder someone so like wait a second you're passing all these laws because you say gun violence is a problem and we need to control guns and then you're letting the the only people who actually have a problem with firearms off the hook that tells you everything that you need to know they just want good law abiding citizens to be restricted in their gun ownership and they want hell on the streets so they can have another excuse people feel so unsafe they can have another excuse to control people's lives well you know this is the concern amongst conservatives is that many things are used to justify an eventual radical reduction or elimination of guns from the populace which then does raise the question about how much more vulnerable we are to tyranny of the kind that we've seen in Australia in Britain or worse right as bad as tyranny is in those two places it's far better than it might be so far that's why so many conservatives have boating accidents I've heard that yes very common amongst conservatives yes now the trying to figure out how to how to address it the pattern is that they're if the hypothesis in conservative circles is accurate that something is attempting to justify the elimination of some are all guns then you would expect exactly the pattern that you're talking about the violence is useful as part of the argument for why guns have to be taken away so the attempt to reduce the actual violence is anemic whereas the portrayal the violence is not only accentuated but it is in my opinion divorced from reality in the following way as a ardent supporter of the Second Amendment I believe that a discussion of the impact of guns has to include the high price that we pay for readily available firearms sure that is part of the but I don't take anybody seriously who's not also willing to talk about the contribution to things like mass shootings of SSRI's I'm not telling you what that contribution is but I'm telling you if you're want to talk about the guns and you don't want to talk about the contribution of mental health issues if you don't want to talk about the number of trans people who have been responsible for recent shootings if you don't want to talk about the contribution of SSRI's not only to mass shootings but also to suicides if you don't want to talk about those other things it's because you have a political agenda and you're not really interested in the violence that you want the rest of us focused on yeah all of it has to be on the table the contribution of the guns is part of it but it is by far not the only component and we have to talk about all of these things and to be regulating 3d printers as if you're serious about gun violence when in fact when gun violence actually happens you're not serious about prosecuting the people who are engaged in it in a way that is you know sufficiently deterrent then this is not that discussion and the public has been dragged in as if you know we're fighting to protect our children and the answer is no the people who are interested in focusing on one side of this issue and not the others are demonstrably not interested in protecting children if they were they'd want to talk about all of it yeah 100% I mean everything and I sorry but if you're interested in protecting children but you also support politicians who support the mutilation of children that's an issue I just cannot abide by which I just lose my mind over but yeah I mean if I'm a reasonable person I think can you call yourself a reasonable person is that allowed you can but an unreasonable person would definitely do it oh okay great well the take it how you want it I'm a reasonable person if we we're doing everything if we were enforcing all the laws on the books and there really was teeth and punishments and all these things that were sufficiently as you said to sufficient to stop the behavior and we were still dealing with a lot of crimes committed with a gun I would sit down at the table and say what is not working here right we have these laws we have these enhancements you're using them why do we continue to have so many people but until you do that I'm not having a conversation with anybody but gun control right ever no I mean look the problem is we have way too many killings yes that's true but in addition to all of the other factors that we have put on the table the failure to be honest about the number of times that somebody with a gun does stop a violent time is also tele point is any reasonable citizen should want a net analysis what is the net impact of this how could the net impact be made far more positive these are all questions every reasonable person should be interested in but that's that conversation is simply not happening because one side wants to portray the analysis as utterly black and white and those of us who see it otherwise yeah well and I it took me a month to get a gun after that knife incident I'm sorry this is America like what what if you have a domestic violence situation where you think you're going to get killed and now we have all these police departments in these blue states that are dramatically understaffed and I think this is all by design too I could get into my conspiracies about it but you know you have life or death emergencies sometimes with Seattle PD that takes him 11 minutes to get there imagine being raped and it takes police 11 minutes to get there imagine being you know shot and your bleed and out takes police 11 minutes to get there you know so people who need to protect themselves against rising rates of crime low police staffing there's more reason than ever before to be armed but it took me a month to be able to go through the process to get a firearm in Washington state and starting I believe in 2027 and I'm sure somebody will correct me you know have to go and take training even somebody whose owned guns for their whole life if you want a new you have to go take training at a range and it's all designed to make it so prohibitive and so time intensive to arm yourself that you don't arm yourself at all and I'll also just point out and you can check the statistics on it since Washington state banned the sale of so-called assault weapons and since they banned the sale of so-called high capacity magazines which is any magazine that holds more than 10 rounds shooting some gun up the instances of individual shots fired so if it's one shooting you shoot five bullets more shots fired homicides have gone up so those laws which you said we're going to make us safe I don't know if it correlates but certainly we're not there's not less gun crime it was certainly not effective it was certainly not effective yeah yeah that's fascinating all right um seems to me that there are a couple other questions I had one question maybe the two of them are are going to end up being two sides of the same coin I am perplexed when I look at what should be my my folks over on the left and I watch them repeatedly vote for things that make life worse and not better yeah right the idea of voting for a city government that makes excuses for criminals that fails to control homelessness drug abuse on the street this makes life worse in the places where people vote for it yeah and you would think I would think at least that having thought that certain things were true that if we vote for these policies things will get better and then watching them get worse would cause them to rethink and say huh that that did not turn out to be true maybe I need to rethink something yeah the failure to do that over the course now of decades mm-hmm shocks me yeah you're voting to make your own city worse yeah right I could imagine you voting in ways that affect other people far from you in that way it's hard for me to understand how you make an error that causes your own street to be inhospitable to your own children yeah it's especially perplexing when the left and it is true likes to talk about how they're the educated ones and it is true people who vote Democrat are more educated and that just makes no sense to me it's like if you are more educated you must see this and we see in Washington's day and the same is true for the other very blue progressive states you know the leaders here have made a good they've done a good job at making everything about Trump since 2016 and the Trump brand is so toxic here his is approval rating is horrible and so this has just become a very convenient way for them to do people into not paying attention to the destruction of the state and it's like you could have and we do record homelessness record crime record on affordability record drug overdoses you could have all those things you have record number of businesses leaving taxpayer leaves Washington state every 27 minutes you could have all those things be true and then they just say but Donald Trump people like you got me there and I just can't even as someone who used to have TDS I can't fathom that and it's bothers me and I've taught I thought a lot personally about running for office in Washington I don't know if it's something that I that I would ever do because people are so loyal to the Democratic Party that has done nothing for them besides virtue signal and like we can talk about abortion I'm very liberal on on most of the social issues I think that's maybe just a generational thing but I can't explain it I have no explanation for a business owner in downtown Seattle that's seen their taxes go up 14 billion dollars in new taxes just last year that's seen crime that has homeless people in drug addicts and people pissing and defecating outside their doorstep that's like more of this because Donald Trump is bad Donald Trump is not to blame for the decline of the West Coast West Coast leaders have been on a slow steady decline for 20 years yes and there's a part of me it doesn't make immediate sense but there's a part of me that looks at for example the tax regime in the West Coast states and thinks there's something just odd about this because as much as I used to scoff at conservatives who thought that lowering taxes was going to increase revenue you know to a point it can but in this case if you've got punitive taxation that is driving businesses to go elsewhere then the people who you would like to lift out of poverty or austerity or whatever it is the downtrodden people that you're trying to protect are suffering from the tax policy that is driving away the businesses that would create wealth in the state you want to state to create wealth and the question you should just simply ask yourself which of these things will work better to help the people I'm trying to help would it work better to make the state hospitable to business and do nothing about trying to socially engineer place have there be more jobs because there's more business going on and those jobs yes will flow unevenly to different people and you'll have some people who can't be helped by jobs because they can't hold one down but would more wealth creation in the state be better than social engineering right I think that's an obvious question right and I think the answer is pretty obvious too especially once you've lived under the tax regimes in you know I've now lived in Oregon and Washington and California and the point is it's actually one really feels like they're being punished oh 100% and you um you know this is unpopular but I said this I did an interview it's like two hours long you should really watch it with a socialist state lawmaker Sean Scott is an avowed socialist he was elected by Seattle proper to represent them in the state house in Washington for whatever reason he agreed to come do an interview with me and the only the clip you might have seen because it kind of went everywhere was I asked him to give me a good example of socialism and do you know what he said I know what I would have said well he said Cuba I just thought because in my head I was like oh he's going to give me some soft European example of like socialism light that's underpinned by capitalism no he went Cuba and I was just stunned and I thought Sean people like die on rafts to flee from Cuba how could you so this is the mindset that we're dealing with I mean he said during this interview and look you could say well this is just one no he represents Seattle he said that um it would be better to get rid of Amazon and replace it with a collective of workers that could replace what Amazon does so you're dealing with like a very broken mindset there's so many concrete examples of taxation that make no sense for example Seattle has something called the jumpstart tax it's attacks on high paying jobs so I think it's over like 120,000 I might be a little off on that you basically get taxed so it's really meant to focus on the Amazon's and the tech so these are the same people who say pay a living wage then it's like well not that much maybe people that much we're going to tax it and and it's scared jobs out Amazon immediately announced we're moving 10,000 jobs to Bellevue which is a more affluent suburb of Seattle and so now 10,000 jobs and people failed to understand what goes away with those nice high paying jobs well you need less coffee shops when the jobs go away you need less you know gyms you need less dry cleaners so now you've all screwed over with your virtue signaling the people you say you're trying to help right it doesn't and if you thought this was true then you should detect that it didn't work and and you should change course but what's your example of good socialism the fire department oh no look at my my we're going to country but okay go ahead my real argument is this and this is going to spook all the conservatives in my audience please be calm and hear the whole thing okay don't be calm no be calm because I'm your friend um but but here's the point socialism cannot work as a system right period the end for an obvious reason the point is it punishes those who are highly productive and it rewards those who are lazy and any system like that is going to tear itself apart yeah however as an ingredient there are times when you need more of it and there are times when you need less of it and the fire department is a great example it's a wonderful thing that you can pick up the phone and you can have highly trained mostly dudes but whoever is highly trained and capable of doing the job show up and bail your ass out because something went wrong right that's a good thing yeah and it didn't used to be this way used to be done by the market used to have to buy fire services so my feeling is hey well done this is a good example of where this is something we want we can talk about what role it should be playing in education I now as somebody who would have supported almost any investment in education and I'm now spooked as hell at what it is that we're disguising as education and funneling into people's heads in public education settings but nonetheless do I think the idea of us collectively investing in the upgrading of the population by giving them skills and insight and bringing them into the the good parts of our culture I think that's a good impreasible I don't trust any of these people to do it yeah but it's a it's a good idea as long as there's a path out I mean we could segment education but I just have to take umbridge with a firefighter example as you know much as I love our friendly neighborhood firefighters and when they you don't have to take their shirt off to resuscitate a tiny kitten they rescued from a tree sign me up does nothing for me but sign me up okay whatever you say but I mean palisades tell me that the socialist firefighters worked in the palisades I mean it would recruits are only saved his his shopping centers in there because he had private firefighters he could come in and save all these things I mean that was a failure of the government from the top bottom not to have you know the water available and all these things up it wasn't the firefighters at an individual level but you know a poorly run government with its socialized fire department sure let the palisades burn to the ground okay I think this is the perfect example because the basic point is what does it mean to say you know that fire department is a good example of socialism as an ingredient yeah I'm really applied well it doesn't mean that I want to see a lottery for who gets to be the firefighters yes I want to see a meritocracy with respect to who gets to be the firefighters and who gets to be the fire chief yeah right like I don't need a black queer fire chief I think that was fine with it if this was the most qualified person but I want the most qualified person to do that job and I want that person screaming bloody murder if the state is undercutting them by not allowing them to have the water that they're going to need in a perfectly perceivable fire or something like it so you know again it's an ingredient right salt is an ingredient do I like salt yes do I want to eat salt no I I want the right amount of salt yeah right and the right amount of socialism is the same thing um there's no right amount of socialism but I get your point there's no right amount of socialism unless it has it shirt off and I'm dressed okay yes for a tree okay um so and and you know to to my earlier point about the the part of the collapse that the right is not taking responsibility for yeah and I will just and this gets to the question I think we should close on yeah you wanted to know how the hell I could still be a liberal in light of all that I've seen and I want to answer that question for you um the first thing to say is if you don't like communism then you have to figure out how to address the problem of civilization so that communism does not keep evolving on you and my point would be every time you lean too heavily on the free market it's going to generate chronic losers who are going to want to overthrow your system if you generate enough of those chronic losers they will and they will do so in the name of communism and it won't work and we can't afford to have that as a cycle so I would argue the very best way to run a civilization is to immunize people from truly bad luck and not immunize them from bad decisions right if you have truly bad luck and you are facing you know ruinous medical bills having nothing to do with what you chose to eat or how to live your life you just had bad luck there's no reason in the world that that burden should fall on you we should distribute that burden right because it could just as easily have been any of the rest of us and none of us want to have our families wiped out over this on the other hand if you are choosing to do things that result in your misfortune that's nature's way of teaching you how not to do those things anymore and so we need to do a good job of protecting people against truly bad luck and we need to stop protecting people from bad decisions right if you do that then I don't think you do create a chronic class of losers who want to overthrow your system because it becomes possible to take yourself from where you are and to elevate yourself and that's really when society works best we create the most wealth not when a tiny number of people are really well armed to compete in the market and other people can't figure out how to do it but we all benefit we get richer when the maximum number of people have the tools to compete in the market and they have access to the market and they have an incentive to do it yeah if you if you create that world then the point is the reason for violence is radically reduced because you could be investing in violence and risking going to prison or you could be figuring out what needs aren't being met and how to meet them or you know what could be done better than something that's being done already and providing a superior product you can be investing in figuring out how to make wealth which it just makes the world better so see but I don't disagree with any of that of course and I don't call myself liberal but it's interesting because I guess when I look at that I think of it for different reasons society benefits when somebody I love the way you put that with bad luck right society benefits and I think also it's in the good nature of most Americans to want to do something about somebody who is truly just down on their luck yeah through no and so to me I see that as a conservative value as well which is yeah we don't want anyone to get to fall through the cracks through no fault of their own and the ultimate drain on society and if you want to look at it from a from a tax from a monetary perspective there's less of a drain on society if we can give them a hand up then if we just let them fall deeper and deeper into ruin turn to crime do all these things I think I I want to know why you say on the left or liberal at all why why pick a label for yourself yep I haven't told you yet why I've sort of set the stage by telling you what world all that I rudely interrupt to choose so you you vary you did not interrupt me at all um but the answer to your question is the following thing and I run a file of everybody's terminology I don't draw a huge distinction between a progressive a leftist a liberal I would say a classical liberal is really a conservative a classical liberal is conserving the gains of past liberals I am that but I am beyond that also an honest to goodness progressive liberal and I'll tell you why I think we are in a terrible crisis as a result of the fact that as brilliant as our founders were they couldn't have understood understood the world we live in right the world we live in has marched on for many reasons having to do with new geopolitical realities having to do with technological realities we don't have the wisdom for this it's not in our bibles it's not in our constitution we got a problem and so my argument would be the following thing my liberal fellows fail reliably on the following count they do not understand that they have ideas about how to make the world better but that they are inherently intervening in a complex and when you intervene in a complex system it is literally impossible to predict the outcome with any precision unintended consequences are guaranteed so you should be very cautious when you're intervening in a complex system to make sure that a it really does do the thing that you wanted it to do and b that the net effect is still positive in light of all of the things you didn't see coming that also flowed from the policy that you instituted so I have terrible trepidation about change the more radical the change the more dangerous however I'm even a radical because I don't think anything short of radical change is going to save us I think our our crisis is too severe and so what we need are hard headed people to look at the problems we actually face to make the highest quality guesses as to what might lead us in the right direction with respect to addressing these problems and then to pay ruthless attention to what actually happened as a result of the changes that we made rather than what we thought was going to happen or argued was going to happen yeah right only this way we can't blueprint our way out of this puzzle we certainly can't conserve our way out of this puzzle that's the reason I'm not a conservative and that's what I was going to ask because I think if I could learn something from what you just said the issue with conservatives being there too focused on the blueprint that that already exists well not thinking outside a box they're not here's the reason I get along with them so well yeah is that I think they are really focused on something vital which is taking all of the gains that our forefathers have made and protecting them right that's what I see conservatives doing they're looking at all of the stuff we've achieved and they're saying how dare you and you don't get to take that apart we we are keeping this and you can pry it from our cold dead fingers and frankly I'm with them on that but you can't conserve your way out of this puzzle you can take all of the gains we've made it's not enough right we have work we have to do we have to make progress it's frightening to have to make progress but that's the nature of this moment in history and so I want us to put our conservative minds together with our liberal progressive minds and figure out how we're going to get out of the nose dive while not destroying the gains of conservatives which frankly we're all made by liberals to begin with right the ideas of liberals are now conservative that's what it is no I think it's really well thought out and I believe you see even some signs of that with President Trump and I don't really think he's a conservative I agree um you know the thing he's doing right now with Trump accounts is a dramatically new idea and to get the private sector to buy in in a way that you have babies that are now being born starting off with the ability to build wealth in their lives which I think could it you know fix a substantial issue in our country that was born out of slavery which is a lack of generational wealth that has led to some of the discrepancies that we see in society so I agree with you I mean I think that conservatives can be a little stodgy and stuck in old ways but I'm okay with trying new ideas I'm okay with trying new things for a new era but as you pointed out the the the cider and whether that success is whether people can back away from it when it doesn't work it's so important yeah so I would just argue so I study complex systems and in my scientific side and the point is if you're thinking about blueprinting a solution you've already misunderstood the puzzle and this this is the problem with the democrats they know what they want to do and they know what's going to happen when they do it and they will convince themselves that it did happen whether or not that's the outcome the two modes of thought that you have to have are navigation and prototyping we are trying to go someplace that none of us have seen we can navigate there you know we can make a change we can we get closer to the thing we're trying to get to or farther away you know our values are the the North Star in that puzzle we are trying to build a civilization that matches our values better than our current one you make a move did it get closer or farther you make a different move the point is you can get there incrementally in that way and the other way to think of it is prototyping right you have an idea for a machine that's going to make life great yeah you build it the first version is so inefficient and clumsy and prone to failure that it couldn't possibly be worth the effort you put into it it's not going to save you more effort than you invested in making it but it will teach you how to make the second version which teaches you how to make the third version and sooner or later you get to something amazing which is what you had in mind but you couldn't get there directly right you're so smart i wonder so many people watch this show i've learned so much but it also you know it does challenge sort of my way of thinking of liberal versus conservative a little bit but it also makes you really revel at the founding fathers because that process you're describing there and you talk about you know how smart they were i mean think of us trying to do that now and they did they did a pretty damn good job amazing at navigating and they didn't even really have to i mean they did something nobody'd ever done and for the most part it's kept us kept us whole it has pretty cool and you know i'm far from the first person to say this but they would likely be shocked at how little we've changed the system in light of how much how different the world is from the one that they knew yeah and i think maybe they're maybe their biggest error was in sort of echoing the ten commandments with the bill of rights they made it more sacred and as much as i think we need to completely honor the things that motivated them and the objectives that they set forth they built a document that can't possibly keep up with the pace of change i don't want to give up any of the rights in it but we need to start thinking about how to how to build it out and um i mean that's frightening i i don't want to oh make it too easy we would i don't know we would be in quite the predicament i think if it in the last five years especially if it had been too easy to change those foundational documents oh yeah we're not up to it the population is not up to it we would i think you're up to it Brett i would trust you if i keep thinking very nice things about me i appreciate well that's because you know i want to be invited back one day all right but i think if we would put a little room of modern day founding fathers in who could really noodle on it in a meaningful way i definitely put you in that room oh thank you yeah i don't know who else i'd put in the room i have to think about that all right yeah do you know anything else about the room no i just thought maybe i thought i thought i thought maybe you'd respond by saying something nice about me but my efforts at trying to get a compliment that you have just failed i'm kidding i'm kidding no i just value it i mean i think that we it's it's so hard to have conversations like like this um you know and certainly in legacy news or any sort of form of regular media and i just continue to be so i mean there's there's too many podcasts out there can we agree on that i have i have a policy idea who are you thinking it's right no this is my policy idea if i'm ever president of the united states total embargo on on the importation of any new podcasting equipment the only way you can start a new podcast is if somebody stops there and gives you their equipment and i think that's really what we need to do but i'm grateful for this space because i just um i think you have a lot of interesting thoughts that make me rethink maybe how i perceive what's going on so unfortunately i know the flaw in your plan already we don't even have somebody all 3d print you're on product no they'll make that illegal okay um here's the flaw is that along the way to building a podcast you inevitably make so many equipment errors that every big podcast has a closet full i could start three other podcasts with the microphones that don't quite work yeah it's so it would take a while to exhaust all of that yeah built up equipment there's a lot of it yeah anyway it has been a real pleasure i will think very hard about how to take compliments better and deliver them so that next time you come i will be ready okay good um but anyway uh brandy crews it's been great and uh good luck fighting the good fight here in the Pacific Northwest thank you so much