← Common Sense with Dan Carlin
Common Sense with Dan Carlin
Show 316 - The Day of the Dove
01:00:18
Politically-related violence in the U.S. heats up as talk of "Civil War" goes mainstream. What would a "Civil War" in the U.S. even look like? Dan has some thoughts on this and ways to potentially avoid such a fate.
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Dan Carlin
Today's show is sponsored by audible. Go to audible.com forward/dancarlin and get a free audiobook with a 30 day trial membership. Dan Carlin, Common Sense so the other day we had a guy show up to the ball field where the people in the House and the Senate practice for their traditional baseball games against the baseball team of the other party made up of the Senators and Congress people. And we were told by a witness that this person walked up to somebody and asked whether those were Democrats or Republicans playing on the ball field. When told they were Republicans, he allegedly then went over there and began to open fire on them. And several people were wounded, including a congressman critically. The gunman was killed in a shootout with security people. Afterwards, when investigators checked out his social media and began to piece together a little bit about this person, allegedly he was a big Bernie Sanders supporter, big Trump hater, and living in a van. The only thing missing from that is the rest of the Saturday Night Live down by the river. This, of course, comes a few weeks after the the situation that happened here in my neck of the woods in Portland where some guy begins to verbally harass and sort of, you know, menace is a good way to put it. A couple of young ladies, one of them dressed in Muslim garb, and then when he's confronted by several Good Samaritans, he whips out a knife and stabs three of them, kills two of them, and then shows up at his arraignment while the video cameras are rolling and proceeds to scream out a bunch of stuff that would have been, well, it would have looked like an alt right manifesto, some of it. Both of those people, I think it's pretty safe to say, at least I think so, represent the people on the psychological margins of our society. But it's a warning sign. It's a wake up call. It's a canary in a coal mine for our society. Because these are the people that break first when things heat up to a place where, well, you get past breaking points. We talked about pressure and you think about valves or think about your body and the veins and the arteries and your blood pressure. And one of the reasons the blood pressure is dangerous, right, is it puts pressure on everything and any weak link anywhere could burst. The guy in Portland was a weak link. The guy at the congressional ball field was a weak link. But the higher the pressure goes and the more these weak links begin to go, the more you start an almost cascading, like an avalanche of things. I mean, you get into rhythms and cycles and you Begin to get dynamics involved, like Hatfield and McCoy. Tit for tat, you know, revenge cycles already. You can go to websites where they're listing all of the things the other side did now, which essentially then legitimizes any action on your part, because they started it, whoever they were. It's interesting trying to talk people out of violence. I had said in the last show that I disagreed a lot with this whole idea of the validity, or the good idea of punching Nazis, as it's called. And my critique was mostly based on outcomes. I mean, other than giving somebody a bloody nose, does it get you any closer to what you want? A lot of people were mad at me about that. I got one guy particularly cutting email about we don't need your liberal old man solutions, which cut me on many levels, by the way. But nonetheless, you know, I get it. I might have written a letter like that once upon a time myself. Nonetheless, I've never been into the violence thing because I have a very hard time linking that as a means to an end. I want to get from A to B. How does the violence get you there unless you're planning a takeover and then a violent suppression of your opposition? I don't know how this works. I mean, it's like I was talking to somebody about a civil war the other day, and now everyone's talking about a civil war, aren't they? But I was saying to my friend, a civil war for what? What is the intention? What is the goal, if somebody's ready to use violence, against whom? And for what, by the way? I don't know if you've noticed, but we've gone from a time when you had to go to fringe websites to hear people talking about civil war to where we are now, where you can go to the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Wall Street Journal and read their establishment columnists talking about it. Take, for example, former Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan at the Wall Street Journal with her piece the other day entitled Rage Is all the Rage and It's Dangerous. Now, this is basically a piece that slams one side of the political spectrum more than the other. The liberal side, the three major networks, the MSNBCs, those kind of people for going after Donald Trump in an unfair fashion and making one side think everything is set up against them, but the other side is doing the same thing in labeling the talk radio hate. I mean, Michael Savage the other day said, we really need to avoid a civil war or something, and then blamed everything on the bad guys, which is half of our society. I mean, in other words, just showing why we're so polarized. But the Peggy Noonan column is interesting because, well, let me read you a little bit of it because remember, this is the establishment here talking and this is how they see it. Now, this is not tinfoil hat stuff. This is current, sober analysis by places like the Wall Street Journal which advise you on where to put your money and whatnot. She writes at the beginning of the June 15, 2017 piece at the Journal. I encourage you to go take a look. If you haven't seen it, Quote, what we are living through in America is not only a division but a great estrangement. It is between those who support Donald Trump and those who despise him, between left and right, between the two parties and even to some degree between the bases of those parties and their leaders in Washington. It is between the religious and those who laugh at your make believe friend, between cultural progressives and those who wish not to have progressive ways imposed upon them. It is between the coasts and the center, between those in flyover country and those who decide what flyover we'll watch on television next season. It's between I accept the court's decision and bake my cake. We look down on each other, fear each other, increasingly hate each other. End quote. Then she talks about what we've talked about on this program, too, what a lot of other people have too, that there's a machine in this country that gives the people what they want and what they want, according to the consultants and the people who analyze this stuff and spend hours breaking down programming on things like radio stations and whatnot. People want heat, they want anger, they want controversy. They want somebody to focus their dissatisfaction on as part of the problem. Which is why you've been pushing this stuff for more than 20 years hard for ratings, for clicks, for views, for likes, for retweets. What's the effect of that? Well, Noonan says from the middle of the piece, that's what we're doing now, exciting the unstable not only with images but with words and on every platform. It's all too hot and revved up. This week we had a tragedy. If we don't cool things down, we'll have more. Okay, this is a good place for us to be in terms of the sitting back, analyzing the problem stage. Because once we agree, okay, this is the downward slope of a rollercoaster ride. We may have been coasting on a plateau for a while, but everybody can see that unless something changes, we are heading towards more. We don't Know what more is. We don't know who more will come from. We don't know who more will be directed at. But unless something changes, it is logical to expect current trends to continue. And for every incident that happens to add fuel to the fire, you know, that precipitates the next incident. This is a cycle, as I said, you get into a dynamic here, begins to have a momentum its own. It not only is pushed, it is pulled from the other direction, if you will. But there's an interesting way of looking at this and that's that our society, for all sorts of reasons, money, politics and a million others, is kept at sort of a slow bubbling boil when it comes to politics and current events. At our anger level. Just angry enough to be manipulatable and to care, but not so angry that we go off the deep end and do anything that would hurt things. I mean, you know, it's nice to be a little perturbed and angry at those dastardly people on the other side of the political spectrum and let's vote them out of office in this next election versus you know, let's burn stuff down and cause problems. And what would causing problems be? So let me change now from the fact that the establishment's talking about civil war to what the heck civil war would even be. It's an interesting term, might mean different things in different places. In the United States, inevitably we think of our own Civil War 1861-1865, and immediately you realize it's going to be nothing like that, that that's not even a term that should be applied because you're not going to have a secession by a big block of states. I mean, one of the interesting parts of that war that sort of determined everything that came afterwards is that things divided relatively conveniently, geographically speaking. Yes, there were a few misfit states. Your Kansas, you know, your West Virginias get created out of that. But by and large it's a giant chunk of the south of the country against a giant chunk of the north of the country and its governments. Basically on the north it is the US government, but in the south it was all these southern states working together, the governments of them. So in effect it was a government government to government war, which is your usual type. Less of a civil war than a war between sovereign states, at least in form and design and function. And if you're looking for parallels, I mean, the only thing I can think of that looks similarly to what a civil war of the kind we're not going to nail it down because who the heck knows? That might be started by the radical Trumpists, for lack of a better word. I mean, I don't have a good word for that side or the punch the Nazis in the nose. The people that think to punch the Nazis in the nose, people are soft on Nazis. So the people to the more extreme of them. So I don't know who's going to do any of this or just people who are crazy. I mean, if you had a civil war in air quotes today, wouldn't it be the equivalent of having like the 1861, 1865 Civil War? But if none of the states were actually contiguous with each other, the ones that wanted to secede, so all the states that wanted to stay and all the ones that wanted to go were all mixed up across the continent, that's more like what this would be, except there'd be even less involvement of any governments. Right. Because in all likelihood, if there's any, again with air quotes, civil war in this country. The governments of the states, I would imagine almost uniformly, maybe one or two interesting examples that might surprise us, but I think almost with unanimity, would side with the federal government. And so in any civil war, I think the governments of the United States at the local, state and federal level are all going to be on one side. So this will be an operation by non state actors one way or the other, against one would assume the overriding authorities, but maybe also their opponents on the opposite side of the political spectrum. I mean, if there's a civil war in this country, who's the enemy and what's the goal and what are the victory conditions and what happens to the people you defeat if you win? Now I just so, you know, am perpetually in these sorts of discussions on the side of the people that are the killjoys in these kinds of conversations. I remember back in the days when I would be involved in movements and things like that, and you always would have these discussions, these policy discussions and ways to approach things. And there were people I always referred to as the verbs. And the verbs were the people that just thought I was the biggest killjoy in the world because the verbs believed in action. Doing something, don't talk about something, get out and push the envelope. And things happen when you do that. That's the theory. You create opportunities. Yes. There's no logical place to strike, strike anyway. And things happen. And then there were people like me who would say, yes, but we're trying to get this done. Does what you want to do get us closer to that, and sometimes the answer was, I don't know. Until you try it, you don't. And so these are the perpetual discussions. If you want a civil war, if you're talking about a civil war, if it excites you to think of a civil war, who's the civil war against? And what do you hope to achieve, right? What's the best case scenario you see? And what happens to the people you most dislike in this system once you get what you want? This is the kind of ugly questions that come into play when we get to where we are in this country, where for more than 300 common sense shows and for many years in talk radio beforehand, you know, I had a triage list of things the United States was dying from. And you know how triage works, right? You take care of the worst things first, right? If the patient's got a bullet hole in the head, you deal with that broken finger later. And on my triage list, corruption and constitutional questions were the two things at the top of the list. Now, given current events, the way they've been going for 20, 25, 30 years, those were always long shot fixes, but that didn't mean you couldn't win battles here or there, or occasionally maybe things get bad and so obvious that public opinion swings in your direction and you have a brief shining moment of glory when things get, you know, repaired a little bit. The things you care about, the top things on your triage list. And believe me, that's kind of how I felt a couple years ago. You almost felt like as bad as everything was getting, the problems that were being acknowledged were the ones that meant something to you, the ones on your triage list. So that was the best case scenario for me. It's a little like being told, hey, listen, the patient is rallying, the blood pressure looks better, we may have a miracle here. And then having them come out of the operation room and going, you know what? The patient died. I'm sorry. Got my hopes up. But now the problems on anyone's triage list have changed. The top ones anyway. We'd be stupid to say that the constitutional questions and the corruption questions had gone away, but they've been leapfrogged by something that will kill the patient faster. And it's this hate. It's this. And again, it's not hate throughout the system, but it's a significant amount of hate on the sides, the wings, the edges of the system, an increasing amount. And the hate is deepening. And you can see people reaching a pressure point, a boiling point. And they have different places where they boil over. Like I said, the most psychologically vulnerable among us go first. But everybody's got their place. And believe me, you know, what's the there've been some movies made about this, but sometimes it happens to a person who's not even really that near the edge and then they have like the worst week of their life and it all boils over. And while I'm mad at those liberals anyway or I'm mad at those Nazis, you know, when you're dealing with the kind of numbers of people we have in this world and you say there's only a.000012% chance of that happening, it's still, you know, you kind of come up on your percentile die rolls occasionally. Nonetheless, as we said on the program recently, the problem with this Civil War question, this hate question being at the top of the list, is it defies legislative solutions. May have been a long shot, but at least the ideas of fixing corruption or constitutional problems is something that involves laws and bills and legislation and voting and things that at least the system is designed to do. And it's not wild to expect the system to do it. The system isn't geared towards solving emotional problems and how we feel now. And I say we, but I don't feel this way. And according to my wife, there's a silent majority, she doesn't feel feels this way. But there's a lot of people on the edges who do. They don't like their countrymen. And there's no amount of legislation that's going to change that. And having a politician get up there and say, I'm a uniter, not a divider, I'm going to bring Americans together. That doesn't do it either. You can't write the Make Americans Love each Other again act of 2022. I mean, this is one of those problems that's unfortunate in the sense that as corruption is sort of ingrained in the system and that makes it a tough problem to solve, this kind of hate is deeper than that. And again, I ask you, though, if you had your wildish wish come true, what do you do with the people that you can't stand once you win? That's the measure of who you really are. Because I mean, take for example these conversations that I have with people over the Nazis because we go right to Godwin's Law because some of these people are Nazis. And we'll have a discussion about where you cut off the discussion of dangerous beliefs. And so I will argue from a free speech perspective. And they'll argue that free speech could get you Hitler. And if it did get you Hitler, you would have said that anything that prevented you from getting Hitler would have been okay. And so then we start the road down okay, so if this is too far, is this free speech, that's one step less far too far. And you start going down the list and realizing that once you get rid of a sacred sort of standard that cuts off between something that advocates actual violence then and there and everything else, it becomes a slippery slope where you don't have any protection at all as time goes on and people's values become accustomed to new standards all the time. And you open up the door to people thinking that things like the ability to say what you want is not that important or that it is outweighed by the effect it has on other people. Once again, you can argue that point on a point by point basis and make it look just. But if you add up where that takes you, in the end, you're not going to like living there either. Not thinking about the very end result is a killer for our species and it's just not done enough. As I said, what's the intention of punching Nazis in the nose? What does it get you? What's the intention of shooting Republicans on a ball field? Was it in dc? What do you hope to achieve? What are you trying to do other than spark the other side into saying, listen, whatever happens to those people, they deserve it? Let me tell you where civil war is really going to lead. And I don't think this has been thought through enough. And I'll tell you, it doesn't even have to be civil war, because as I said, we're not having an old fashioned civil war, the kind of civil war we would have in this country, again in air quotes, just to analyze from a military perspective, what we'd be likely to have would be a civil war where you have what we would call today terrorists, domestic terrorists attacking symbols of authority and maybe their antagonists on the other side of the political spectrum too, if you wanted to find a parallel that was a little bit similar, you know, not the 1861, 1865 war between competing nations, which is what that's more like, but something where you have a, a chunk of, let's call them, radicals in US society that's angry at a lot of different people, but the government is the center of the target. And then let me ask you what you think would happen now in the climate we live in today, if you had the same number of attacks coming in the same space of time that they lived with in 69, 70, 71, 1969, 70, 71. Because people forget how amazingly under pressure, and you know, even I was gonna say amazingly under pressure everything was. But I mean, I was just thinking and my head was already going to the quote. If you read Richard Nixon's memoirs, he talks about this period and he even says in there, you know, people forget now how dangerous and scared and on edge everyone was. And you can relate to that, can't you? If in 30 years they're talking about how much we overreacted to nine, 11 in the future, we're going to sit there and go, hey, you have no idea what it felt like to be living through it. That's how it always is. But Nixon, biased as he is, and he was trying to defend a bunch of unconstitutional stuff as a reaction to this leftist new radical threat stuff. We wouldn't even blink at doing some of it today in the war on terror era. But nonetheless, he had a vested interest. But these numbers are real. And imagine if they happened today and follow that to the logical conclusion. This is from Richard Nixon's memoirs, talking about the so called New Left, along with the Black Panthers and a bunch of other groups that people forget about today, were creating a sense of chaos and danger in the United States in a period where also you had different sections of the country just loathing each other. Nixon writes, quote, from January 1969 through April 1970, so what is that, 14, 15 months? There were, by conservative count, over 40,000 bombings, attempted bombings and bomb threats, an average of over 80 a day. That's in the United States alone, folks, over 21 million in $1969 in property was destroyed. 43 people were killed. Of these 40,000 incidents, 64% were by bombers whose identity and motive were unknown. End quote. That's what a civil war, I imagine, of the sort that's being thrown about now would be like. No governments, shadowy groups. And remember, you know, it may have been the New Left doing this in the late 60s, early 70s, but we had a similar, although smaller scale scare. More lives lost, though, in the 1990s with the whole Turner diary, people like Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing. So we've seen that from both sides of the political spectrum in the last 40 or 50 years. And then to give you a sense of the pace of these things, Nixon says starting in August 1970, quote, In August, a policeman was killed and six others were wounded in a series of gun Battles with the Black Panthers and another black militant group. In Philadelphia. That same month, a bomb planted in a research center at the University of Wisconsin took the life of a graduate student working there. Four other people were injured. On October 8, there were several bomb explosions, reportedly the work of the weathermen at the University of Washington. And in two Northern California towns, five buildings were hit by dynamite blasts. In Rochester, New York on October 12th. A research center in Irvine, California was demolished by a bomb on October 18th. On March 1st, 1971, the US Capitol was bombed by the Weather Underground. End quote. Now, I've read accounts by people who were in the Weather Underground that talk about how they were deliberately trying to destroy stuff and not kill people and blah, blah, blah. Okay, but people died. And in Timothy McVeigh's case, people were. I mean, people were supposed to die. And we as a people reliably freak out at things like this. I mean, individually we can all be courageous as hell, but we revert to the mean once we get into groups and we're like herds of scared horses shying away and flinching at every move, which is why we are so easily manipulatable by terrorists. And in this case, can you imagine what we would do in this country Today in this post 911 climate if we had 40,000 bombings, bombing attempts and bomb threats over a 14 or 15 month period here? 80 a day, we would tear ourselves to shreds. There's a guy named Steven Spender who wrote a book on totalitarianism and he talked about totalitarianism often being a reaction to chaos and that eventually, if the chaos goes on long enough, people are almost asking for the totalitarianism to free them from the chaos. He writes, quote, perhaps the totalitarian impulse, the craving for absolute order in times of frightening chaos transcends the philosophical differences over who should own the means of production, over whether nation or class is paramount that once made fascism and communism seem so fundamentally opposed. No immunization against political chaos has yet been found. And so nations return again and again to a drastic and terribly destructive cure. The irony of all this is that the people that would think a civil war would be a good thing are probably going to be the ones that legitimize whatever it takes, or to quote Malcolm X, by any means necessary to restore and preserve order. They will become the excuse for the government doing things in response to 40,000 bombings in a 15 month period, or attempted bombings or bombing threats that we would never put up with before there were 40,000 of those. Same way we are with 911 we put up with things now that we would never have put up with before that because, well, we've got to respond to the current threat level and what's going on, right? And when we demand it once again, before we blame people for this, if the government didn't do a bunch of weird, wild stuff, as Johnny Carson would have said after 9 11, to at least give the impression that we're making changes to protect us, I mean, we would have voted those people out of office and replaced them by people who promised to do a better job, wouldn't we? I mean, can't you sort of draw a direct line between our current reality and the modern age of terrorism, 911 and afterwards? Because we had terrorism before then. But 911 is the real dividing line. And what terrorism has done, hasn't it, is really turn the volume up on the societal stress level, you know, from a 5 to an 11. And we're dealing with the fallout of that, aren't we? If you took terrorism out of the equation, does any of our modern world even look like this anymore? It is fascinating what a tactic has done in terms of discombobulating and deconstructing and fragmenting these societies like ours that had seemed so stable at the end of the Cold War. Once again, what's the defense against that? Not the terror attacks themselves, but the fear and overreaction and paranoia and demands to do something, anything to keep us safe. How do you defend yourself from that? If terrorism's goal is to create fear, how do we prevent the fear so that we don't do something we don't like in response to it? I mean, that line from FDR was patently absurd when he said it. We have nothing to fear, but fear itself makes a little more sense now, though, doesn't it? Maybe you would say we have a lot of things to fear, but on the triage list, fear might be up near the top. How about that? Leave it to me to edit FDR make it better, right? Just here I am editing great presidential speeches and making them better. I'm a humble man, Ben. You know that. We have a terrible track record, though, as human beings, finding that nice mix of, you know, that nice balance between freedom and security. Because as a people, I think we're just. You know, I was reading something the other day, and this is actually a tangent, but it may. But it's connected to the whole idea. And it was something about, you know, sometimes why these massacres used to happen in the Old west of peaceful native tribes that would be just Camping by some city or town or whatever. And on a disturbing number of occasions in US history, the townspeople would get a posse together and go out and kill all these peaceful Indians and you'd be like, okay, why did they get massacred? They were peaceful. They were, you know, and I was just reading a book on genocide that was just saying that that's just that same human quality that even if you tell those people, listen, those Indians are peaceful, the attitude is, well, I'm not. I mean, so they're peaceful right? Now you want me to take a chance? I mean, it's basically killing just in case it's overreacting to be on the safe side. But in a funny way, to be so afraid turns off your natural filters, right? You're no longer thinking that the things that you're sacrificing for this extra security are valuable at all. I mean, if you go to somebody after 9 11, which, you know, some of us did, and try to say, listen, don't tear apart the Fourth Amendment any more than you already had, or you'll be sorry. Do you know how many people threw back at us? Then you'll be responsible the next time somebody hits us with a terror attack because we weren't able to read their transactions or transmissions because of your precious Fourth Amendment. That's how that goes. And if your kid burned up in one of the buildings that fell apart on 911 because planes ran into them, because people drove those planes into them, you're going to say to me, listen, Dan Carlin, if your precious Fourth Amendment had to go to save my kid's life, I'd have given, you know, any day of the week. Right? That's the human reaction and it's the thing that terrorists take advantage of. I have to tell you the truth, and I've said this before, and people don't always like to hear it. I think the world we live in now is the world that terrorism created. We had a big terror attack since the last show we did again in London, and it just keeps going. And let me step back again because we've had this conversation before and it's distressing for people to hear me analyze the tactic sometimes because it divorces us from the human question. And what makes terrorism so particularly abhorrent to people like us, to everyone, is that it strikes against innocence. You're not even going after the people who sworn to do their duty and protect the state. You're going after little kids and helpless people. I mean, so right away it's awful in intent, but if you can say to yourself, let's divorce ourselves from the way this is actually carried out and look at this as a military tactic, because if you don't, you will never figure out how to counter it as a military tactic. This terrorism question is fascinating and it's always been an interesting and difficult to counter tactic throughout human history. But now with the globalization and the tools available and the cyber side of this, and it's, well, it's become totally three dimensionalized and globalized. It's enough to make you wonder if there is any counter at all and if there isn't a way to stop this. Ladies and gentlemen, if this is modern reality, we get to live with these bad terror attacks now, forever, all the time. It seems to me one of two things is going to happen, right? Either it becomes the new norm and we just learn to live with it, which would seem to be the best case scenario, maybe if you can't wipe this stuff out, and I don't see how you could, or that we continue to react predictably and the way the terrorists want us to react, by the way, and continue to morph and alter society in response to terrorism in ways that if terrorism weren't here, you would never, ever, ever do. In other words, you don't want to live in that kind of world. But because of the terrorism, we get stretched and bent like a plastic table that's been heated up, you know, and then set into new positions in societies that look different and that value different things and that have a different relationship between the governments and the people they govern. Because the people they govern may very well be the bad guys, at least some of them. In the Cold War, at least the attitude was supposed to be that the good guys are in the countries of the free states. The bad guys are actually keeping their own people enslaved. But don't worry, we don't use the tool of the state on our own people. We use them on the other side, the bad guys, the people that you want them used against. Although the occasional need to find spies within our midst compromised that rule a little bit. It was a general thought. Nowadays everybody knows that bad guys and good guys are intermixed all over the place. So how do you find them without spying on everybody? In other words, this terrorism thing, obviously, and I'm not telling you something you don't already know, has transformed our entire way of looking at the people. We're not citizens, we are suspects. And once again, if we did not view it this way, there's a huge chunk of Americans that would be angry at their government for not doing so. The next time somebody who, if he had been viewed as a suspect instead of a citizen, might have been caught before he mowed down 30 co workers with a gun at a park somewhere. See how that goes though. You beg for the government to crack down on everything because everything that they're doing so far to crack down has been ineffective. And like the guy I just quoted said, I mean, you know, it becomes the only answer to chaos because we don't have anything better. So the idea of destabilization in order to, you know, as we said earlier, what's your intention? What are you trying to do? If civil war or destabilization is your goal, what do you think is going to happen when you get it? If you're worried that the government is turning into a fascist monster or a Orwellian totalitarian state, is your effort to give it a reason to be more scared going to help that cause or hurt it? I mean, I guess what I'm saying is, I think these are some arguable points in some cases, but have we thought about them? Or is this just going to be something that we go into as a country with people acting in a totally emotional fashion so that they end up going down a road that no matter what happens, they still don't get what they want? I mean, if the people that want to punch Nazis because they think that's a good thing to do end up getting a victory in a civil war, let's just put them in the civil war on one side. What happens to the people that are Nazis in their world? Do you lock them up? Do you send them to re education camps? Do you just say they're not allowed to speak, write, or espouse their beliefs? Or what if they still think them anyway? And that's bad enough? I guess what I'm saying is, when you have total control over these people that you are so angry at right now, what are you going to do to them if you break off and form your own country? You know, we break the United States up Brexit style, form a bunch of countries basically loosely based on the college football, you know, divisions that are out there. You have the SEC country, you have the PAC 12 country. You know what I mean? So you basically do it loosely that way. And you say to yourself, we're finally gonna rid our country. Let me just say, you know, we'll take the Michael Savage side. Liberalism is fascism, Liberalism is a disease. You know, all these kinds of things. We're gonna finally have our own country where people can succeed and their own merits. It's gonna be, you know, gonna be great. You start this country and you write your new Constitution and you go a generation, and guess what? You gave birth and some people found some books and they discovered liberalism, and now you have liberalism in your midst again. What do you do? And by the way, you can flip that entire scenario. You know, when you wanna talk about the west coast country of California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii, and what happens to them when they get some John Birch Society members growing up in their midst, you know, they discovered the Internet, found something weird and conservative emanating from that nation state of Iowa, and we're intellectually contagionized. What do you do to those people? If the goal of what you do still allows political freedom, you're going to end up eventually with a situation that's probably not that dissimilar to what you have going on right now. And let me suggest, by the way, that this may be, at least in terms, I mean, if we want to use some of those alt right terms, how about Western society? You know, when you go back and you read your Julius Caesar. And by the way, if you want an update on the history show's progress, we will do that at the end of this program. He says in his works, when he's talking about the Gallic Celtic people who maybe may have some institutions that flow throughout the course of European history and evolve so little, like proto institutions, that you can kind of go, well, I can recognize that. And Caesar says that every single Gallic tribe is divided into two factions and that the two factions sometimes even divide families. So if you just wanted to throw in a couple of names for those factions and called them conservatives and liberals or whatever, I mean, that would be an interesting, if you would, commentary on humanity, if you will, that these divisions are maybe more ingrained in the way we operate than we might think. We might trace our divisions to 1776 or really Britain. And even before then with the Tories and the liberal. Maybe even before that, right? Maybe those cavemen tribes were divided into the liberal cavemen, the snowflake cavemen and the conservative cavemen. I'd like to go back to the column though, by Peggy Noonan for a second because she hits upon something that we've discussed also, and we brought it up in the last show, and I think we used the analogy of an ecosystem here that we all live in that's like a greenhouse and that we are spewing high levels of hate and passion and vitriol into it. And we have no mechanism to release or transform that hot air. Right, to balance it out. And we've talked in the past about how much. That's a money making question. I mean, that is literally the US media and the world media too, giving you what they think you want. And truthfully, how long has, for example, television news lived with the truism that the phrase if it bleeds, it leads, Right? I mean, if we want to grab eyeballs, we need controversy, heat, crime, murder. I mean, you know, a budget meeting does not grab a lot of Facebook likes. Not a lot of Twitter shares necessarily either. Another O.J. simpson chase. And, you know, we can make money off of that for years. My point is, is that we all understand the dynamics at work in this system. There is an amount of anger that the media gins up purposely, and they like us at a nice simmer, right? Warm enough to care and be involved and engaged, but not so warm that we're doing anything that would destabilize the very system that pays all these consultants and radio and television hosts and screenwriters and script writers and all these people in the process, right? Just simmering enough. We want to be able to show you just enough gun violence in the movies without having it spill over into society so much that they start talking about banning gun violence in movies. You see, there's a nice, happy medium everybody's aiming for here. The problem is it's tough to control the temperature at all times. You also run into something we've talked about earlier, where when it comes to a lot of this stuff, there's a similar sort of dynamic in play that you see with drug abuse and the need to always have more of the drug to get the same effect as you build up a tolerance. I remember years ago, Howard Stern in the Age of the Shock Jock, really discussing this problem that they have with these lines, because you continually have to go farther to get the same level of entertainment or engagement from the audience. But he was talking about their being like a hard line. Maybe you could call it a wall. So you can't go past the wall because they'll take you off the air. But eventually, when you hit the wall, how do you continue to give people an added dose all the time to get the same reaction? So that's a known problem. But when you hear these, for example, I always bring up the radio show host because that's the industry I was in the longest. But when you see them trying to outdo each other, they're not trying to sound like the most wise host. They're not trying to sound like the most correct in terms of their predictive value. They're trying to sound like the one that has pushed the boundaries the most a lot of times, because that's how you stand out. But it's allowed the country to move in a direction where you go from the intellectual and passionate in a political, intellectual sense, to something that is more visceral and emotional. As we said earlier in an earlier program, it's the difference between critiquing the views of other people or critiquing the people themselves. Right? If the problem is liberalism or the problem is conservatism, that's something you can work on. If the problem is liberals or conservatives, then that requires a different sort of solution and approach, doesn't it? It's a subtle change that changes everything. And as I look back on that period when there were, in that 14 or 15 month period, 40,000 attempted bombings, bombing threats, or actual bombings, they didn't have any of these variables we're living with now. This is what makes our current situation new. They hardly had Xerox machines to mimeograph stuff in 1969, 1970. I mean, that was new technology. If the president thought there was too much heat being generated by the media, he could call a meeting and in a room have three people representing the three broadcast networks, another representing the New York Times, another representing the Washington Post, and maybe two or three other people, and you had it covered. That's called a chokehold and a choke point on American content right there in 1969, 1970, if a president came into office today and said, you know, a little what Peggy Noonan is saying, that we have this hate machine that's generating this fear, and, you know, it's okay when it's simmering, but now it's boiling over, so everybody's gotta tone it down. Which is kind of what Peggy Noonan says. We have to be responsible here. We have to tone it down. But who do you tell? In 1969, you tell that room full of 10 people, maybe. Now, who do you tell? Which brings us, by the way, to another angle on this that somebody's gonna hit me for if I don't bring up myself. It's not just the fact variable where we're all broadcasters now and you can broadcast the most bizarre, edgy belief system in the world to everybody if you want to, whether we're talking about blogs, social media, podcasts, or even simply going to message boards and doing it or commenting after news Stories people have pointed out that this is something other countries can do, too. The people that see Russia behind every bush, and they're behind, a few of them, point out to me all the time, listen, this is Russia disinformation. Right away, they're posing as Americans and they're dividing your country by acting like they're your own people. And then they go after your own people, and it's like starting a fight. And by the way, if that's what's going on here, if that's even playing a significant role, wouldn't that be an interesting story? That's devious, man. That would be, you know, tearing the country apart through the accelerant, the gasoline. That is terrorism. And then through an ever increasing level of vitriol directed at one side or the other by Russian agents, by paid trolls working in conjunction, but not officially with American media, whose job it is to get clicks and likes and heat and controversy. And how, if they were going to act on Peggy Noonan's request to act responsibly and stop this, how would they even begin to. This is a machine I'm not sure they can turn off. And, you know, there's a Star Trek episode, isn't it funny how that happens? That comes to mind. The guy who was the star of it, the guest star, was the dad of a guy who went to school with the late, great Matt Ansara. His dad was Michael Ansara and he played a Klingon in a Star Trek episode called the Day of the Dove. And the idea in the episode was that there was this alien entity that fed on hate and fear and that it had invaded the starship, the Enterprise, and it was making the Klingons fight the Federation people over and over again because it fed off the hate. And then if at any time they started to. If the hate started to die down, the entity would do something to gin up the hate again. Right? Just to make sure. No, no, we're never going to have any peace here. And anytime anybody made an effort to overcome this, then I remember, like, at one point they go from modern weapons and the entity create swords instead, because it's even more visceral and the hate and the passion is even more strong. And of course, the way that the story ends is that they manage to defeat the entity by uniting in friendship and giving it exactly what it doesn't want. If we decided today that we have the virtual equivalent of that, like Peggy Noonan says, all these media entities that make money off this heat and controversy, they have to stop. Could they? And, you know, we've talked about trends and forces in history, in the history show a lot, right? This idea that sometimes, most of the time, average people or anyone really, we're all sort of dragged along by forces and things that are happening to us where we're caught up in a current, a historical current, if you will, if we can see this oncoming train coming, knowing that things are going to continue to get worse from where we are now unless something changes. But the things that would have to change are relatively large, like the media essentially coming up with an entirely new business plan for how they generate viewers and interest and all that. I mean, could they do it? Could we do it? I mean, if you are, for example, one of these professional dividers, I like to call them in radio, I mean, if you told the talk show host that said something and then the next day 35 people were mowed down by a gunman in response to it, could you tell that person, listen, I know your whole show you do is demonizing the other side, and that's what you do. But you've got to pull it back. We can't have another thing like that happen. And once again, in the same way that these sorts of civil war terrorist attack ideas would trigger a totalitarian response, I think, from the authorities and a desire for something like that from the population that just wants to be defended, I think that if the people out there who do these things, and I'm 100% of a free speech person, but if something happens like that, where you've got some event that you can directly tie to something that was said, for example, on talk radio radio, the lawsuits that could happen after that could have the sort of. I mean, it would be chilling for free speech on radio. If you go back to 1969, 1970, 1971, and you turn on the radio or you turn on television and you try to find something that has the same level of vitriol that we have today, you will not find it all. Talk radio back in 1970 sounded like NPR today with a couple of notable exceptions. I mean, Joe Pine was doing what was really the prototype for a lot of these programs today, back in that era. But he was one of the very few. And it was a novelty. It wasn't part of the public discourse. Right. He was a loon, was the way most of the country looked at the guy. Now he'd be mainstream, middle of the road. Isn't that a little interesting? And by the way, just because this would seem sometimes to be the sort of spewing you hear from the anti liberal crowd. Peggy Noonan points out that it comes from the mainstream side, too, and she goes after them. And I think it's worth pointing out that this is a it takes two to tango situation. Absolutely. She writes from later in the piece when she first says, listen, these gunmen, they're responsible for what they did. But then she points out that these people are operating as part of a climate, as we said earlier. They're the canaries in the coal mine for our society, in a sense. And it's the climate, she argues, that's going to create more of these situations. She writes, quote, but we all operate within a climate and a culture. The media climate now, in both news and entertainment is too often of a goading, insinuating resentment, a grinding, agitating antipathy. You don't need another recitation of events of just the past month or so. A comic posed with a gruesome, bloody facsimile of President Trump's head. New York's rightly revered Shakespeare in the park put on a Julius Caesar in which the assassinated leader is made to look like the President. A CNN host, amazingly, of a show on religion, she writes, sent out a tweet calling the president a piece of crap, essentially. And then she's quoting him again, who is a stain on the presidency. She continues, an MSNBC anchor wondered on the air whether the president wishes to provoke a terrorist attack for political gain. Earlier, Stephen Colbert, well known as a good man, a gentleman, said of the president in a rant, the only thing your mouth is good for as being Vladimir Putin's you know what holster. She says, those are but five dots in a larger, darker pointillist painting. You can think of more. End quote. And as I said, it's gonna be hard for the media to be responsible here because their money, their quarterly profits, what they promised to shareholders, all this stuff is predicated on reliable metrics that they have worked out over a very long time. And those metrics are tied to heat, things that generate public interest. If it bleeds, it leads. If you can talk about something that's emotional. And the word they used to use all the time was visceral, right? So you don't need smart people. If you can touch something viscerally, you will have a broad audience because anyone understands visceral. You don't have to have a college education to get excited about visceral. But if that's all of a sudden a key prime mover, an ocean current that governs the weather everywhere, Else, can you pull back on that? Can you turn it off if you decide you have to? I had a fantasy the other day when I was thinking about this, just thinking about what if there were billions of dollars to be made, hedge fund money, CEO pay type money, maybe Walmart or Amazon.com type money to take the pressure off. To get back to that greenhouse analogy from the earlier show, we said there's nothing on the other side to cleanse this air and remove some of the heat from the ecosystem. Well, what if there were billions of dollars in that so that there was something money wise to balance out the money to be made by adding to the heat? Well, it's just sort of a fantasy. I have no answers for that. But it seemed to me that that was what was missing. And it reminded me just, I have this, and this is a total stupid fantasy because it would never work out that way if we had it. But I've said often that, that when you read enough ancient history, and I know many of you do, there's something wickedly weird and interesting about ancient history. But you realize that our society now really lacks certain core pillars that a lot of earlier societies relied upon. We don't have any philosophers. I mean, we have people that study Kant and all these other people that call themselves modern philosophers, but they don't play the same role and they certainly don't have the same influence that philosophers in earlier civilizations had. And so you don't feel like you've got. I mean, this is the one thing. This is the one thing that these sort of. Well, I mean, take like the theocracies in places like Iran, they have these wise men who sort of sit above the political system. And it's awful, in my opinion, in the context of that. But it would be interesting to have august wise people play some sort of role in our society besides writing the occasional book that very few people read. And the ones who read it weren't the ones who had to read it anyway. I mean, can you even think of very many people right now who are august figures of authority that have widespread respect attached to them? Have you seen, by the way, some of the people that have been suggesting they may run for president next? I mean, we talked about whether, if Trump decided to resign tomorrow, if the system would snap right back with Vice President Pence into something that resembled the system before Donald Trump arrived. But he did do something in the same way Barack Obama, if he had done nothing more when he was elected president, sort of broke a ceiling that said, listen, you can be a racial minority in this country and be president because somebody's already done that. It's not theoretical. Well, Trump is the first non politician in forever to become president. And when we would talk about non politicians getting that job, even a few years ago, it sounded like pie in the sk. It sounded impossible. And now that he's done that, it's obviously not. And there's other people out there who are making noise. Some of them are horrifying, by the way, but predictably, they are following the road that Trump laid out. Basically, what Trump taught people and what he's established is that if you are a celebrity already, if you are well known, if you can command attention and stand out from a crowd of people that are eminently forgettable anyway, generally a charismatic celebrity will make the people, for example, that Trump was vying against in the Republican debates look like political midgets. You can make up for not having a lot of money. So all of a sudden, people of that ilk are starting to think maybe they'll run. And isn't it interesting to think that we're going to be talking about some television celebrity or some television performer or some rock singer, or maybe just somebody with a widely viewed celebrity sex tape running for president sometime? And you might think to yourself that I can't believe we finally come to this, and that when we wanted political outsiders, maybe that isn't what we were thinking of. But before you rule that out, let's remember, I mean, if it's Hillary Clinton who's making noise about possibly running again, I can't believe it, but there's noise. But if it's Hillary Clinton against Marco Rubio in a few years because Trump leaves the scene, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, after we've had months of the fatigue of watching those two go at it, the person with the 20 million views of their celebrity sex tape decides to throw their hat in the ring while wearing little else, you'd like to keep that option open. I guess I'm just saying that, you know, I mean, just because you rolled the dice once and got Trump, and some people are happy with that, by the way, you might roll the dice again and get lucky, or, hey, you know, as my dad used to say all the time when it comes to anything, I mean, the third time's the charm. So Trump, celebrity sex tape president, and then finally, the reformer we all deserve. Let's hope we're in good shape when the political messiah shows up. That is, unless you're one of those people that think they already I love this book I want to recommend to you on Audible. We've been telling you about Audible for years. Of course, if you've listened to this show, you've no doubt heard me discuss the phenomenon that is audiobooks and the fact that Audible is the place you should get your audiobooks when you want them, not if you want them. We're past that. When you want your audiobooks, you go to Audible because they have an unmatched selection of. While the categories are so broad that they really stretch far outside the realms of what we would just call a pure book. If you sign up for Audible with the monthly plan, you get access to their original content through their channels and all this. I mean, that's a perfect example. They start to recommend books to you. I mean, it's one of these things where you'll end up going there for something and you'll find yourself browsing like you would any sort of bookstore in the old brick and mortar world. I mean, that's how I came across the New York Times Book of the Dead. That is a perfect example of one of those concept books where you just know when somebody comes up with the idea, you go, oh, that's gonna be so good. You don't even have to see how it turns out. There's almost no way to screw up the content. But in this case, it seems like they just did the best job possible. It's the New York Times obituaries, the great obituaries over the years, 320print ones and 10,000 digital ones, you know, from all the famous and notable people from all these professions you can think of. For those of you who are like me and you like to read the obituary page for Lord knows why. But there's, I think it's history people, truthfully, and dark history people. But we like to see people's lives, you know, summed up in a couple of paragraphs. And these are some of the greatest people that have ever had obituaries written about them. And after perusing some of them, some of these obituaries are literary masterpieces in and of themselves. If you'd like to have that read to you, you can go to Audible. Get a free audiobook with a 30 day trial membership right now. Go to audible.com dancarlin to do it and see what all the fuss is about. And pick up Book of the Dead. It's a keeper. If you think the show you just heard is worth a dollar, Dan and Ben would love to have it for less than the price of a cup of coffee. You can help keep the common sense coming. A buck a show. It's all we ask. Go to dancarlin.com for information on how to donate to the show. Want to help the podcast? Just buy your Amazon.com products through the Amazon search window on Dancarlin.com it doesn't cost you a penny more, and it helps these guys out because they are nice young fellas. So we told you we would give you an update on the history show. You know, I love this gig, but I feel like I'm competing with myself all the time. And I know many of you out there, whether you're in an artistic field or not, understand this. I mean, how many salespeople understand having the best sales month of your life and then having your bosses readjust your quotas and your minimum standards to reflect that great month you had, which now becomes the month they expect from you all the time? It's a compliment. And yet at the same time, they're setting you up to have to compete all the time with your very best day. It's a standard dynamic. We're all aware of it, but we're dealing with it here. And we're 60 shows into this. So I'm trying not to repeat myself or repeat thoughts I've used before. And I'm not always sure what I have used before. Not just that, and this is squarely on my shoulders, but I have problems picking topics. Not just because I don't know a lot of stuff that's obvious, but also because sometimes I'll think a story will play out a certain way in my head. And then once I start the process of really breaking it down and evaluating it, I turn out to be wrong, which is what happened in this case, which means you can either muddle through and try to make it work somehow, or you can switch to a plan B topic, which we've done before on this program. But it's always a little scary because the plan B topic is never as well thought out. And if you just screwed up the Plan A topic because it wasn't well thought out enough, well, think about that. Opens the door to, you know, with the plan B topic. But once you go to a plan B topic, you're committed, right? You're done. That's what you're doing. So that's what we're doing. And I hope it works out well. It certainly would not have necessarily been the time period that we would have gone for. You know, I'd like to have a nice, diverse free feed up there so that you have plenty of choices. If you've never heard our stuff before. The first topic that we originally planned would have done that. This one's a little bit not so good on the diversity scale so we'll see if you like it. My problem is that it's slow going I'm afraid and we'll get it out when we can get it out and I actually have something that's going to break my momentum that I have to take care of right now which of course months and months and months ago when we planned this it looked like it'd be a good month but every podcaster understands that. In any case your patience is always appreciated. Of course you must know that we're working on it. We will get it to you as soon as we can and we hope it lives up to the weight as usual. Thank you for everything folks. I'm the most fortunate man in the world and much of that is thanks to.