Dan Carlin (0:00)

There's a disease that's affecting fully 60% of Americans. It's dividing families, poisoning minds and stealing our children's future. It's partisanism and it's completely preventable. Stop partisanism before it stops you. Finally, a show for those who aren't rabidly partisan. Independent thinking a la mode. Taking you to non partisan places you've never been to and leaving you there. Negotiating his way through the minefields of the left and the right and occasionally blowing up. He just doesn't believe we have to destroy what made this country great in order to save it. Fiercely independent. Your canary in a coal mine. Since 1994, it's common sense with Dan Carlin. It's been a long time since you've heard a common sense show. However, it has not been a long time since I've done one. I did one two days ago. I did one a couple days before that. I've done about 12 to 14 of these things recently. I had laryngitis for an excessively long period of time. So a bunch of the takes conked out in the middle, but I finished a bunch of them. Didn't release any of them because none of them were right. But I had an interesting experience cause I don't normally get to see 12, 14 different versions of the same show because every one of them was different. Cause we improvise. And so I found that they all had a different vibe. And a lot of it's what side of the bed you wake up on in the morning, right? I had a golfer friend of mine tell me that once that golf is so dependent what side of the bed you wake up on. And I seized on that because, you know, talking for a living is the same way. And all those shows had a different vibe. Most of them were angry, that would be the prevailing vibe. But some of them were analytical, like a coach who was trying at halftime to explain why we were getting run on. Then I had one and my wife never listens to my stuff, but I played it for her because I really want to get this right. And she said, you sound like a detached monk in a monastery observing the events around you from afar. Completely detached. And I figured that's a pendulum swing from one of the more angry shows. When I had laryngitis was when Trump first started going and I couldn't talk. So I started writing and I ended up with a mini book just going into every little detail of every little thing they were talking about at the time, like it was going to actually happen or whatever. Ended up with a bunch of material that was just useless. And it's not a show when you look at all that. I had to cull that down and sort of shape it and frame it and turn it into what I have around me right now, clogging up my studio and invading my personal space in a way that is going to make it inevitable that as I become excited and start flapping my hands around, you're going to hear me hit a piece of cardboard or something. So when that happens, that's what that is. One of the things, though, that I noticed in these shows is that some of them I would be speaking to Trump supporters, some of them I'd be speaking to Trump opponents. Some of the time I'd be trying to speak to the people caught in between the two. I'd really love to fuse that because I think there's something. There's something for everyone in this, maybe except the most hardcore of the. Of the cult followers. But I have to say, there's something even interesting in that. I was in the car the other night and I never listened to talk radio. And I was listening to talk radio for two seconds, and what I heard was so detached from any sort of reality that the rest of the ride home, all I could think about is if that's all you're hearing, really. I mean, you go from, like, the mainstream media, which is compromised and which really blew it years ago in terms of trying to maintain any level of credibility. Get that? So on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being most compromised. Yeah. Okay, the media is at a 7. But the stuff I was hearing in the car was crazy town stuff, at least in my mind, let's just say, in my own humble opinion. And if that's all you're getting for your steady diet of information, analysis and exhortation, I can understand why the bubble that those people live in is so unpierceable. So I'm not sure I'm gonna do anything on that front either. But there's a lot of people that don't fall into that category. And I wanna talk to you. I'm gonna try to talk to the people in the middle. I'm gonna try to talk to the people on the far other side, because we're all in this together. I've said this a million times. If you never heard the Common Sense show, the basic attitude was the same as my radio show. You know, you're talking going back to the late. I mean, early 1990s, and the tagline, you know, at the top of every hour is, I'm Dan Carlin. We are your independent alternative to the partisan voices you normally hear. That was a tagline. That's our branding, that's our marketing, that's our imaging. As they say in radio, you're trying to set up the expectation in the minds of the listener. What are you going to get? You're going to get this independent alternative to the partisan voices you normally hear. And a lot of people mistake what that means. It doesn't mean I'm an independent party member, by the way. There is one of Those in the U.S. no, I'm not that. And it doesn't mean. And this is where people get it wrong. I'm not some neutral arbiter. I'm not someone who claims. I'm going to look at the facts and then I will rule like some judge on which. Not at all. You've completely misunderstood it, if that's what you think it is. Because I am extremely passionate about a lot of positions. They're just not positions either shared or reliably shared by any of the parties or people out there. So I maintain the right, along with a lot of other political independents, to do what my soul, my mind, my conscience and my standards sort of require me to do on any given issue, circumstance, person or policy proposal, I can do whatever I want. That's what it means. Doesn't mean I'm neutral. I am like Treebeard, the Ent in the Lord of the Rings, right? When they asked him what side he's on, and he goes, I'm not altogether on anybody's side because nobody's altogether on mine. And that's exactly where I stand. I'm antish, you might say. But I only set that up and tell you that and point out how long it's been that way, because a lot of people just discount how anyone else feels by suggesting, you know, that some of these things we're talking about now we're only talking about because of Trump. I have a book in front of me right now I'm going to bring into the conversation, and this wasn't a part of any of the earlier takes, except the last one, because I just stumbled into it on my bookshelf, hadn't read it since it came out in 2010, and it sounds like Nostradamus. So I want to bring a little of it into the conversation because the constitutional law scholar who wrote that book was writing during the first year of President Obama's first term. So it can't be Trumpish, right? Predates all this, but tells you where we are right now in his section on future predictions. So a little Nostradamus, like, we'll get into that. And I don't know where to start, though, from an independent perspective. First of all, let me just say, and I'm perfectly upfront about this, the president is the kind of person that I don't want being president. And I think many people realize that. I'm sure I come across that way. But forget any policies, forget any of that kind of stuff. I mean, he's just not a good guy. And I don't mean. I know that sounds kind of like. But he's just not a good guy who has his hand on the nuclear button. And when I say not a good guy, I mean, look, there's two things I think you can say about this person that are hard to argue with that is not a partisan position. Again, I can't reach the people, you know, who are listening to that brainwashing I heard the other night. But look, the guy has no empathy. It is really bad to have a person with their hand on the nuclear button who has no empathy. And he is a narcissist. I want to point out that if you looked at US Presidents and said, is the degree of narcissism that you're likely to run into amongst the people who get that job higher than the general population? I'm going to say, yeah, I think Bill Clinton was a narcissist. Richard Nixon might have been a narcissist. I mean, LBJ might have been a narcissist. I mean, you see what I'm saying? So, I mean, maybe it's something where people, I mean, I've always said that the people that I would like to be president aren't the kind of people that would say, yeah, you know what? I think I should be the president. And that's part of the problem, isn't it? So just from a personality standpoint and not the kind of person that I would vote for. And I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, well, that seems a stupid way to. To choose a leader. Don't you care about results and not about, you know, circumstance? You know, he's not nice enough for you. Listen, how do you think Americans have voted for president since the very beginning? The word wasn't nice, though, because that makes it sound like a wimpy word. The word that they used to use was character, right? And that sounded strong, didn't it? We would want people of character. And I don't think the man's got character. I don't think you could trust him. I don't think you could trust him around your daughter. I don't think you could trust him around your. I just, I don't think he's honest. And I don't want that kind of person to be president because that's a job with all sorts of responsibility. And this is where I'd like to start because I have a problem with presidents. Not this one specifically, although this one specifically, but all the other ones too. So it's not a personal thing. I had a problem with the last President. We could talk about his age. People say, what about Joe Biden, Dan, where were you all those years in Joe Biden's goose stepping on the White House lawn? I didn't hear anything from you. Every show I ever did was about Joe Biden though. Cuz Joe Biden was the ultimate representative of the status quo in this country. And we talked about that for years, didn't we? Since like 1993. So if I did a show specifically about Joe Biden, it wouldn't sound all that different from a lot of shows we've already done. The man was president. The man was vice president twice. He was in the senate for about 175 years. That is the status quo, folks. So not a whole lot new to say about Joe Biden except that it is interesting and there's room to have a discussion about his last few years in office and say to ourselves, hmm, he was clearly old. We were clearly not getting a chance to nail down the President in a way that would have made it clear years in advance that he should retire. Things like that, I mean, or amendments that we already have on the books to deal with stuff like this. But not accounting for the fact that people around a president might not want to lose their jobs, even if the president maybe should lose his. I mean, so there's a lot to talk about. And I don't like presidents not so much because of the people in the job, but because of what the jobs become. So to understand my problem here, you have to understand the lens through which I view reality. We all have that and it influences the way we see politics, doesn't it? Different people have different priorities. I mean, if you, for example, make Christianity your number one priority in the world, that's one lens to view reality through. Everybody's got those lenses. It's worth knowing what mine are because people have different words for those lenses. They might call them biases or blind spots or some people Might say priorities or principles. My number one most important thing on my triage list of things that matter to me and become the lens through which I view reality is freedom. And I figured out years ago, as a person who talked about current events for a living, you know, you're going to get, you know, nailed in some corner at some live event by somebody who disagrees with you, and they're going to start dialing down on your belief system, and you're going to have to know why you believe what you believe in a way where you could, you know, fight back in a contest like that. And so a long time ago, it's just smart, by the way. But a long time ago, I sat down and sort of triaged what's important to me and what the order of importance is. And I came to the conclusion that everything that was important to me in life is downstream of freedom. My family can't think of anything, on balance, more important to me than my family. But if I'm not free, and if I don't live in a free world and some Gestapo or secret police or NKVD unit or whatever can break into my house or take my family away from me or take me away from my family, well, then I'm at the mercy of that. In other words, I need that freedom in order to handle priority number two, which is to take care of my family and all the other things that are downstream of that right, to make a living, to fill in the blank. Now, my kids think I have OCD about freedom. They think I'm touchy about it. They think I worry about it when I have nothing to worry about. Sometimes, and I admit it, sometimes I am overly willing to mobilize my own personal militia in my mind to seize the high ground on this thing and proclaim that I'm ready to fight for freedom and then find out I have to stand down. False alarm. Sorry. Didn't mean to get you all excited over nothing. But I'm happy to do that because I've learned over 30 years doing this that if you don't sort of defend freedom in the forward position, it becomes impossible to take back later. Because I've seen this happen many times. It's weird. You go from the time before anything happens. Since I've been on the radio, this has happened three or four big times. Where you go from people saying, dan, you're a crazy person. This is never gonna happen. It's not something I told. What are you talking about? This is just the way it is. Well, it's not Even arguable at this point. And we sort of skip over that whole time in the middle where we always assume we're going to be fighting for this. It somehow just ends up happening. So I've learned that you need to sort of attack these problems overtly. You need to have a forward defense position. And then if you have to stand down because you freaked out about some non existent threat to your freedom, well, that's better than losing the freedom and then trying to take it back. And the reason I don't like presidents is because since this country was formed, they've been getting more and more powerful and now we have an unbalanced system that is open to horrible things happening to it. If not from this guy, then the next guy or the next guy. In other words. And you know, I'm sorry for all the longtime common sense listeners because this is stuff we have discussed forever. They're some of the principal things on the show, right? Freedom, the constitution, hyper partisanship, corruption in government and the duopoly. Boom. Right? The pillars of the show and hyper partisanship. Holy cow. How do you do a common sense show where that used to be our warning in the future? We live in a fully star bellied, sneetch like binary society now, don't we? And it's closed off everyone's minds from everyone else's minds. And now we're stuck, aren't we? We're stuck where the biggest threat to our freedom is fellow Americans. That's crazy. Unless of course it's Canada, Greenland, the eu. I mean, first of all, let's just talk about that. Can we just bring. There's a couple of things on here that I just, that I just shake my head. There's gonna be a political scientist somewhere that says, listen Dan, if you knew what you were talking about, you would know that. Blah blah, blah. Okay, so I don't. What the hell, 51st state, Canada. What the hell? There's a lot of what the hells, if not exactly in this administration, then surrounding it. And I don't think I have tds Trump Derangement Syndrome to point that out. I mean, please, Canada, you're our 51st state. I'm just sitting here gesturing. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the sort of thing his cult followers will call a negotiating position. You don't ruin a long standing relationship with a partner that you've had, a fantastic geopolitical partner that you've had since the early 1800s for a temporary negotiating position. If we even want to pretend that's what it is. It looks more like it's bat crap crazy and it's stupid. I mean, there's a lot of stuff here that's stupid. And if it's not stupid, then I want you to fill in the blanks what it is, because it's possible it's not stupid. But stupid might be the nicer thing we might call it. Can we talk about the hand gestures for a minute? Because people tell me I don't need to be worried about this administration, but I said I kind of have OCD about freedom, so I tend to get worried more quickly than most people, so cut me some slack on that. But, I mean, what's with all this stuff out there that is almost geared toward making a person who's number one priority on his triage lists of things that matter in life freedom nervous? Let's go through the hand gestures first. Elon Musk. What was that? I mean, I'm not going to pretend to know if we were looking at a Roman Imperial salute or an Italian fascist salute or a Romulan salute. I don't know what it was. It was, at best weird and at worst scary. And just like so much with this administration, I just go, what the hell? But I want you to know that none of these things I'm about to talk about here move the needle by themselves. I'm happy to let any of them roll off my back individually. The Elon thing, listen, he's different, right? We know that Elon's gonna be Elon. You don't even know what that was. He might not have known two seconds before he did it that he wanted to do it. He might not have thought about what it was. I'm gonna cut him some slack, okay? But then when Steve Bannon does it, you know, I don't know what it was a week, 10 days, 2 weeks, something later in front of a lot of people. Okay, he's had the benefit of seeing the reaction that Elon had, Right? He should know better. And what does he say afterwards? The very predictable that liberals are just seeing Hitler in everything and. Okay, so we get back to, is it stupid? Well, I don't think it's stupid, but stupid would be the nicer alternative. Because if it's not stupid, what is it? All right. But again, ladies and gentlemen, I let these things roll off my back, and I have tds, right? So I'm not even in a position to judge, you know, without a sort of a jaundiced eye on these kinds of things. But if you have this sort of freedom Thing that I have. Aren't you gonna be a little nervous when the President of the United States. Ben, was it. Was it from the official White House account? I don't know for sure. When he tweets out, or whatever we wanna call it, with a picture of Napoleon Bonaparte, a guy who was an absolute dictator, a quote that may have only been in a movie, he who saves the country violates no laws. How is a person, you know, with TDS and OCD about freedom? How am I supposed to react to that? When should I be worried? Now, I ask you this because. And again, I find that in every version of this show I've ever done, I start speaking to a certain audience, and I'm finding myself speaking to the Trump supporters here. And I don't know why. I don't know why I'm picking on you and not talking, and maybe I'll switch over, but I'm a little baffled about some of this stuff, and I want you to understand why, and I want you to tell me when I should be nervous. And I want your standard to be. Please, just for consistency's sake, I want our standard to be, if all of the stuff we're talking about here were being done by Kamala Harris or AOC or some Democratic president in the future, as yet unknown, would you be worried? Okay, so you tell me when to be worried. When I've got a president tweeting out, he who saves the country violates no laws. And I have people I know who will say, that's a Trump joke. He's owning the libs. You have no sense of humor. Well, let me suggest something my stepfather would have said, and he was just focused on effectiveness. That was his thing. But he would say something like this motivates the people who are going to push hard against your own agenda. And so what you're essentially doing is creating pushback. If owning the libs comes at the cost of more people more motivated to oppose what you want to do, how is that smart? And again, I go to, is it stupid or is it something else? And if it's something else, what is it? All right, if you don't want me to be nervous, don't want me to be worried. What's with all the. Well, they were snide jokes a couple of days ago when I was recording a version of this. Since then, Steve Bannon's come out, some congresspeople have come out, there's talk, and again, tongue in cheek, when we want it to be about Trump for a third term. Now he's 78. So we don't know what that means. But if you don't want me to be nervous, people who think I have tds, what's with all the jokes? I mean, my biggest fear in life as a freedom person is an autocrat. This is autocrat stuff. And if you want to tell me it's all jokes, then we're joking towards or about autocracy. That is stuff that's geared to make a freedom nut like yours truly nervous. And the presidency has become something where all of us should have been nervous all along, long before this guy. For me, this is a potential critical mass moment. But, you know, the metaphor we always used, I believe, was like straws on a camel's back. And the camel being the constitutional system we have here, and since the founding, we've been putting straws on its back. And the camel's back broke after the civil, you know, the Civil War. And then we replaced it, started piling new straws on top of its back. The Great Depression was a big straw. Second World War was a big straw. Civil rights era is a big straw. Vietnam War is a straw. War on terror's a straw. Covid's a straw. Trump's a straw. Big straw. And so if that camel's back in, ready to snap right now, it's not that far in the distance where we can expect that. And as I said, I'm gonna bring out a book in a bit that's gonna show that back in 2010, people who do a pretty good job of analyzing our system saw it coming long before Trump. He just becomes maybe the first president who feels uninhibited enough to openly grasp for power that has been in the reach of US Presidents now for quite a long time, as we used to say, also long before Trump. The only thing holding a president back at this point is the fig leaf of protocol. The idea that, well, you know, we just don't do things like that. Who would want to do something like that? And as we used to say, I'm gonna say that a lot, because for people that weren't there, this sounds like we just sort of thought about this yesterday. For people who listened to the show in the past, this is boring rehashing of the same old stuff. But when it comes to the restraints imposed by the fig leaf of protocol, sometimes you end up, just by the luck of the draw, with people who don't give a rat's ass about protocol. And then what's keeping the worst from happening? We have, over the last generation, generation And a half or so taken, the guardrails sometimes, you know, intentionally, other times for all sorts of understandable reasons, even technology. But the guardrails that used to protect us from an autocrat are gone and they've been gone now for some time. And if you think about this like an odds game, it eventually that weakness is going to be exploited or it's going to break your system down. It's just waiting for the right vehicle and the right time. Or if you are most afraid of something like autocracy, the wrong time. Little review, little bit of information for people outside the country who might not know. The design of the United States has this wonderful sort of symmetry, at least if you're a fan like I am, of something like the US Constitution, for all its faults, and that's what amendments were built for, right? To fix those things as they come up or as times change or whatever. But for all its faults, looked at in the context of its day, right. Graded on the historical curve, I am still a huge fan. And once you expand it out to include everyone, right. All people are created equal. I mean, you know, it's. To be operating even marginally under that 1787 penned document is fascinating to me. And it was always explained to me by my stepfather that the balance of powers in the government was done like a triangle. And each point in the triangle is one of the branches of the government. You have the legislative branch, the Congress, you have the judicial branch. Right. The judges, all the way up to the Supreme Court. And you have the executive branch, the president, and that of course being the only branch run by a single individual. So the other branches are decentralized, but the executive branch is not. That makes it the most dangerous though, the most likely of becoming an autocrat because it's the only one with one person clearly at the top. You could probably write some sort of dystopian novel where the Supreme Court starts ruling like a dictator or the speaker of the House takes on a Hitlerian role. But you really kind of have to reach the obvious person that would end up becoming a dictator. In the American system is the only branch of government that has a single person at the pinnacle of the pyramid. But in the design of the system, that person's balanced out because it's like a three way tug of war between those points on the triangle and between all three branches of government protecting their prerogatives and their priorities based on the ambition of the human beings in those systems. Right. Think about it like an 18th century Enlightenment era person might they're supposed to keep that three way tug of war sort of in the center, sort of balanced out. But over time that balance has changed. And this was a big thing we always talked about in common sense. The ever increasingly unbalanced system and the deformities that it was creating. So much of what we could see in the political system on a day to day basis, you could point to as an element connected to the dysfunction. And the dysfunction is part of, you know, a growing imbalance. And Democrats sometimes get angry when I point out that we got here in a, not just a bipartisan way, but a multipartisan way. They'd like you to just maybe blame Republicans. But you can't have a trend that's going on for generations and not have it be involving at least the two major parties. But remember, some of the deformities in our system you could blame the Whigs for or the Federalists for. Right. So everyone who's ever held power in this country at the top job has probably been involved in some of the deformities created in our system. And the presidents that are sometimes the best known or the ones who got the most done, sometimes those are the ones who deform the system the most. And here's the part that from a historian centered point of view. I'm not a historian, but you know what I mean, if we're gonna look at this like in a historical way, the way a historian would write about it, I mean, let's not take ourselves out of the context of the times. A lot of these presidents did these extraordinary things and pushed the limits of presidential constitutional authority outward even more because the people were screaming for them to do it. I mean, think about fdr, to just use one example, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He's elected in 1932, which is arguably the very worst year of the Great Depression, which is an historical event from an economic standpoint that is singular in US history and in the histories of a lot of other countries too. And the people needed something done. And the president before Roosevelt was much more trying to preserve, you know, the system. I mean, we're not gonna do things that are going to. I mean, he wasn't willing to go too far and the people were desperate. And Roosevelt was willing to go too far. Maybe his political opponent would have said he was willing to do whatever it took. And with you have starving children when you are migrating from one U.S. state to another in a literal grapes of wrath sense, you don't want to hear niceties like, listen, we'd love to help you. But it'll really not be good for the US Constitutional republic to have this as a precedent. I mean, you don't want to hear that. You want to hear elect me and I will fix it. And fixing it is much easier if you ignore the rules that constrained the people who couldn't figure out a way to fix it within the rules before you. So the temptation is ever present and people applaud when they get their president right from their party, saying that they're going to solve problems that matter to you and damn any constitutional limitations. And you can see it in the way that we do it. I mean, the growth in things like executive orders and the hypocrisies ever present. Ladies and gentlemen, Donald Trump, who loves the executive orders right now. When Barack Obama in 2013 did some of the same stuff and said, you know, Congress won't act, I will. Donald Trump, I'm going from memory here, but didn't he say it was like a craven power grab or something like that? And now, of course, he's got the executive authority. It looks very different, doesn't it, when your president has it and when they're doing stuff you like. What I'd like to point out, and this is where I was going with a lot of the previous shows, so many of us have an interest in seeing that this doesn't go the way it is currently going because the powers that the president has do not go away when he does. How long you many listeners who are tuning in right now have we said you have to imagine the new powers a president gets when they push the envelope. You have to imagine them in the hands of someone you loathe. Now, some people don't have to imagine that. But for those of you who are currently happy with it all, there's only one of two ways things go in our system from here on out. Way number one is Trump pushes the envelope on, you know, constitutional authority again, like other presidents have, although there was more room from the constitutional edge back in those days than there is now. We go that route and then Trump, 78 years old, leaves office eventually, and these powers become somebody else's, and then this somebody else after that, and eventually they fall into the hands of someone who scares the hell out of you. So remember, these powers don't leave the office when Trump does. Now, the other alternative, and you will see this online, and I've seen more Democrats online worried about this than anything else. And when Steve Bannon talks about we're gonna make a third term happen, yours truly, Starts worrying about it. That's the other fork in the road. One of these bots or real people I read online said, don't have to worry about pushing the envelope on constitutional presidential powers and authority, because the Democrats are never going to take the office again. I like to call that the Victor Organization of America. You know, he's the leader of Hungary. He's, you know, Trump likes him. Trump likes Putin. Trump likes him. I was watching some Tucker Carlson things from Hungary and his talk with Putin. I mean, I think Tucker Carlson, who is a communicator for a living, remember, it's his job to make us understand when he tells us and frames things for us, you know, what he believes. And I'm getting the feeling that if we went the Victor Orban route here in the United States, Tucker Carlson would not think that was the worst thing that ever happened. And when I read stuff on the right about what I would call the lure of Caesarism, I mean, there's a whole thing called Red Caesar. You can go look it up. I mean, there's people within the. Let's call it the Hillsdale College Claremont Institute Project 2025 crowd that are lured by the idea of Caesarism. And I went and read some of their stuff and the way they would frame it, if I'm gonna do them justice, and I do respect the idea that they're so open about it, it's easier to have a debate with people who at least say that's what they want than all the people that say, prove to me that Trump is really doing this. You're freaking out over nothing. It's hard to argue with those people. But these people that were talking about the Red Caesarism stuff, if I understand them, it's their belief that the system we all owed allegiance to, the American Republic of yore, is already gone. So it's a moot point whether or not something like this is treasonous. We're gonna have a Caesar, and they're just advocating for the GOP version of it rather than the Democratic version of it. I hope I did their autocratic idea justice. So, again, not to jump back, but if you don't want me to be worried, if you keep telling me I have tds, well, tell your own side to stop doing stuff where they're lauding the potential of something that is my worst nightmare. And if the shoe were on the other foot, wouldn't you be worried? All you have to do is imagine some of the stuff that's going on right now being done by the other side. And I snickered a little bit trying to come up with what the like scenario was. What's the bizarro version of what Elon Musk is doing with the Doge thing? And I thought, okay, well, if I really want to tweak the people who like that, I would say something like, well, you have to imagine like a George Soros and Barbra Streisand funded liberal arts humanities professor, maybe some young lady who is also training to be in the Olympics in the hip hop competition and worships a goddess and dances in class and sics her grad students on your treasury records and your Social Security files and your medic information and, you know, your car loans, even your credit reports. I mean, that's not gonna sound very cool, is it? And you might go, wait a minute, you can't do that. And then we're gonna say, well, wait a minute, we didn't change any laws yet to get Elon Musk the power to do what he's doing. What we're doing is normalizing it. And when you normalize something, you don't get to un normalize it. So if you like this, imagine this in the hands of the people you loathe. What is good for the political goose is good for the political gander. And there's a lot of Trump people out, don't want a stronger president, don't want a stronger government, theoretically. But like, what's going on now, right? This war on corruption, the penetration of the deep state, and you need this extra power to do that, don't you? But this extra power is not going away. You are inadvertently creating a more powerful person at the top of the American power pyramid. And that person's not likely to be your person forever. So, I mean, it's the same way, you know, when we Talk about the three CO/ of government, how you need them to keep us from having a chief executive that goes crazy and has all the power, is that the other branches of government are designed to thwart that. I mean, you can make an argument that the number one purpose of our constitutional design isn't anything like to be efficient at making laws, clearly, but to prevent us from ever having a king. And you have to put yourself in the shoes of the people in 1787 who wrote this Constitution. These are people who know what being under a king is like. And their king even didn't have full power or anything. Try being a Frenchman in 1775 or something. I mean, they understand kings is a good way to put it. They'd been through a revolution, you know, in their recent historical past, not their lifetime maybe, but where the king and the parliament went at it. So they have a view of things that makes something that we think about as a really far fetch, far fetched possibility couldn't be a king. Damn, we haven't had a king forever. Exactly. But they had had one not that long ago, and it was a big concern. And they keep trying to figure out with this constitution because, remember, this wasn't the first draft. We lived under an Articles of Confederation initially. And they kind of had to get rid of that because they erred on the side of even less power for the chief executive. But doesn't that show you where their concern is? Right, okay, well, we erred on the side of making it even less likely we'd have a king, but we begrudgingly get dragged into the 1787 version of it and give more power to the executive. And of course, that's the famous government where you're supposed to have had the line, I don't believe any quote ever happened anymore. It's all fake news. But supposedly the quote was from Benjamin Franklin, who, when asked what kind of government we had, and he said, a republic, if you can keep it. And you know, I'll probably end on that line. And we've ended on that line before, which shows you again, the continuity here. This is a lot. It is not hyperbole, in my opinion, ladies and gentlemen, to say the republic is threatened. The republic has been threatened a long time, but we haven't had a president in the top job who wanted to exploit the holes in the system until now. I think you have a guy that would like that. Because I think while all the previous presidents have enjoyed their power, don't get me wrong, I don't think any of them going back to maybe Nixon and, you know, maybe not. I don't think any of them enjoy the idea of dominating another human being. And this gets back to what we started with, the empathy thing. I think this is a guy who, like a mafia mob boss, likes that. Didn't he tweet out something like he could have made Elon Musk kneel at his feet and beg? Who does that? He's just owning the. I know, you know, making. He's negotiating. Okay. He wants to take Greenland. He's threatening. What is that? And ladies and gentlemen, let me ask the obvious question. Why do you like it? See, I'm addressing one group again, I don't want to be doing that. But there's a lack of understanding. And the Louis say things like, well, we really don't like everything he does, but we like what he's doing. Okay, but where's your line? It's like when people used to do crazy things, but they want their taxes lowered and it's worth it to them. Okay, but as a political independent, let me put my cards on the table right now. I have been disappointed and confused by the American voter forever. And the two parties too. I mean, listen, for a guy like yours truly, I'm in a really tough position right now. I am forced to depend on political parties that I am not a part of because they are all that stands between me and my biggest fear on my triage list. So when I go after the Democratic Party, sometimes people will get angry at me because they'll think it's counteractive to what we need to be doing right now. Dan, which is focusing on Trump. But what you're missing is that there's a yin and yang to the Trump phenomenon and that's the opponents and the opposition that he's had to contend with to gain power. And I would suggest that it has not been a very formidable bench that the Democrats have been throwing out there and it has not been a very good message geared toward winning elections to do what you have to do to get the majority of Americans to vote for you in a way that keeps a guy like Trump out of office. And I'm used to it. Don't get me wrong, I lived through the 1980s. That's when the bench was Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. The problem, though, you have to understand Democrats is if you force people to live in what amounts, if we're talking about real chances of winning the presidency, a two party system, and you are in a decades long slump or whatever it is, we are functionally in a one party system. And by the way, Republicans, I feel the same way about you. An independent like myself has to rely on you guys because of the systemic role you now play in our system. And you're the only thing that blocks the other side. So I need you to be viable. Otherwise we're screwed. And right now, and again, I don't want to criticize them, but oh my God, like we're having a competition to see if we can go back to the good old days of Mondale and Dukakis. I mean, I mean, it's kind of epitomized by Chuck Schumer, leader of the Democrats in the Senate, isn't it? Who in this passionate profiles encourage moment for Him. He sounds mildly annoyed at the whole thing. I mean, I don't know the guy. Maybe this is passionate for him, but maybe I'm just gonna suggest maybe a quadruple mocha or something. It works for me. But if you can't get worked up over this, I don't know what you can get worked up over. And we kind of need you for a little pushback. Now, a little more passion might be mandatory, but I don't understand how he can't be more worried, because he knows better than all of us about all these things we've been talking about, right? He understands what can be done with these executive orders. He understands the power of the President if he wants to declare an emergency and what he can do in the emergencies. He knows about the Insurrection act, and he understands all these things about war powers and presidential authority in wartime and how quickly we could be in wartime. He knows all these things. So if it's got me worked up, I don't know why he isn't a little bit more excited. But we mentioned earlier that the guardrails were taken off the American presidency some time ago. What do we mean by that? And apologies again to longtime listeners. I know you know this, and I'm sure many Americans know it anyway, and a bunch of people from outside the US might too. But over time, for sometimes very good and understandable reasons, sometimes through no fault of anyone's, powers that were balanced and checked once upon a time became unchecked. And I kind of look at. Everybody's got their own views, I suppose, but I kind of look at what the founders handed to us with a framework. It was a little like handing you a garden, and it was ready to go. And there were rules that they gave you about how to take care of it and everything else, but maintenance was required along the way. That's what amendments were for. All these other things, you sort of had to keep it in shape. And if you didn't, well, they probably would have believed in a very Enlightenment era sort of way that every sort of system has a lifespan. And eventually, like people, it would get old and degenerate. And who knows, a bunch of them, if you brought them back in the time machine today, might feel pretty happy it made it this long. Who knows? Those of us living, though right now might like it to last a while longer. All you have to do is examine, though, some of the biggest threats in terms of the powers that now don't have checks on them and not even worry about all the other ones, because these are the only ones you need to have. You don't even need smaller levers of power, which are all over the place too. But let's just focus on some of the biggies. For example, take wartime powers, because that's the most obvious deformity that you don't have to. I mean, you can just see happened. And one can make a case that the reasons it happened are completely understandable. I mean, nuclear weapons might make the old 18th century idea of Congress being the one who gets to declare war obsolete, but I imagine the founders might have said that doesn't mean you don't get to have no protection. More on that later. But the system they designed gave all this power to the President. That part we've kept. We like that part once the war is declared. But Congress gets to decide when that is, and that's the part that changed. And you can see without having to be a genius the problems that could create, right? President gets to say, well, when wartime happens, I get extreme authority. And then he gets to say, oh, by the way, it's wartime would be a big problem if that ever happened. Right. But of course, you know where I'm going with this, right? That's the way it is. Now, famously, Harry Truman, in the first good sized war the US got into after the Second World War, when the Korean War broke out in 1950, well, that's the first war that the United States fought since the advent of atomic weapons. And so rather than declare war maybe the old fashioned way, he thought it more prudent to sort of market it under a different term. He called it a police action. Therefore we don't need to declare war, because after all, it's not a war. And since that little sleight of hand, we've never declared war again. Which is a wonderful example of how the whole presidential bleeding of power from other branches works. As I said, it's why I feel like you sort of have to defend freedom in the forward position. Because if you blink, it's gone and you're left going, wait a minute, what just happened? I used to own that power. If you're Congress, yeah. Haven't seen it again since then, have we? The last time the US declared war was in the middle of the Second World War, which of course is the 1940s, folks. But we've had no shortage of wars since then, right? So there you go. Now this is an obvious problem. I mean, a deformity that anyone could see, right? And then we get back to sort of the fig leaf of protocol thing. We Have a bunch of these in the system. Because when everybody realizes, oh, my God, that's a crazy loophole to leave, we put a fig leaf over it, pretending like we've closed the loophole. In the case of this obvious problem where the president can declare a war or just go to war by himself and then have extreme authorities for the length of the war, it was something called the War Powers act, there's gonna be a couple other major areas where we in the system have done the exact same thing. We have gone in and just sort of papered over it in a way that really doesn't change anything. In the War Powers act, the president still can put troops you where he needs to put them. And then eventually Congress gets to come in and go, well, we don't think it's a good thing, so we'll cut off funding to the troops. No, they won't. And everybody knows it. What Congress in their right mind is prepared to face the electoral pushback you're gonna get if you deny troops fighting in the field, right, Their lives at risk, our sons and daughters denying them the bullets, the artillery support, the food. I mean, everything they need to. I mean, nobody's gonna do that. So that's a fig leaf. And once you put the power into the hands of the president to decide to go to war, you've screwed the pooch in terms of our constitutional system. And if you don't believe me, believe somebody who was probably the greatest Republican president who ever lived, the first one, Abraham Lincoln, who in 1848, more than a dozen years before he is President of the United states and about 60 or so years after the Constitution is penned, is writing someone and explaining why the President cannot be the one who decides to take the country to war and then have the power to fight it. Now, I should say before I quote this letter, there's a bunch of it that apparently Lincoln italicized. I'll try to emphasize that with a change in my voice rather than continually stopping and saying italicized. But Lincoln starts off by just trying to clarify the point that his friend is making here and says, let me first state what I understand to be your position. It is that if it shall become necessary to repel invasion, the President may, without violation of the Constitution, cross the line and invade a territory of another country. And that whether such necessity exists in any given case, the President is to be the sole judge. End quote. Now, this is Lincoln trying to clarify what his friend is saying. He said, are you really saying. And we should also point out that by the standards of their day, when they say invade another country sort of defensively, that could easily mean bomb a country today. What he means is start killing people in another country. And he's saying, are you saying that the President's to be the sole judge of when we decide to do that? And Lincoln says, before going any further, consider, well, whether this is or is not your position. If it is, he writes, it is a position that neither the President himself nor any friend of his, so far as I know, has ever taken, end quote. He then goes on to lay down their specific position in this case he's writing about, but then goes back to what he's talking about here, about a President having sold authority to start killing people in another country and drag the country into war. And he says, quote, but to return to your position, allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect after you've given him so much as you propose. If today Lincoln writes he should choose to say he thinks it's necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, I see no probability of the British invading us. But he will say to you, be silent. I see it if you don't. The provision of the Constitution, Lincoln writes, giving the war making powers to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following. Kings had always been involved and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, he writes, our Convention, the Constitutional Convention, understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man, again italicized, should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter and places our President where kings have always stood, end quote. So writing some 60 years after the Constitution was penned, the guy who will be the future President of the United States, a lawyer himself, right? A bit of a constitutional law scholar, lays it out in ways that all the Supreme Court decisions and all the little parsings and all the little legal adjudications and assessments and assertions by one branch of government to another can lay out. That's pretty darn clear. He's basically saying, what fool puts the power of going to war into the hands of the same branch who then gets to do whatever they want once they've gone to war. And it would take nothing to imagine tomorrow the president striking a country like Iran, claiming we were doing it because we had intelligence that they were just about to get a nuclear weapon, and then claiming extreme wartime authority from that point on would. It didn't seem like the first and greatest president of the Republican Party thought that there's another fig leaf over the other kind of emergency powers a president can have. He can declare an emergency. The Constitution really doesn't have anything specific about declaring emergencies. And what they do write that constitutional scholars have sort of interpreted as maybe referring to something like a constitutional emergency or just an emergency on the ground. And who would handle it seems to go to Congress. But there's nothing in there that says the President shall have the power to nothing. But he does. And we use it in our society. It's like executive orders. We use them more and more. And it's part of what constitutes the deformities that have ruined the system. Right. Jimmy Carter declared two of them, Ronald Reagan declared six. The first, George Bush declared four. Clinton declared 17, Bush declared second, Bush declared 12. Obama declared 13. Trump declared seven in his first term. We are currently living, I think, under more than 20 ongoing ones right now, and something north of 60 of them have been declared all time. Most of these things are things that we want them to declare emergencies for, right? You have a hurricane, a fire, a flood, an earthquake, you darn well want an emergency declare. It's what we expect. If you look up how many emergency powers the President has, I think they've identified something north of 120 of them, maybe 130. But there are surely ones we don't know about. It just makes sense. But here's the thing. The wildest ones that they know about are crazy. I mean, they're like post nuclear war type powers. But it's everything from shut down transportation, shut down the media, ignore private property, ignore habeas corpus, throw people you know in detention, take my. It's everything, no private property, everything you can imagine, right? It's basically full on dictatorial powers. Most of the emergency powers the President has have never been used. Although you can hear that Trump knows about him. I mean, I heard him talking on a clip once to a governor about something in their state. And he said something to the effect, if you have emergency powers, why don't you use them? And you never hear Trump talk about what he can't do under the Constitution. But he has said a couple of times, and I don't remember the exact quote, but it's something like, he can do whatever he wants and he'll cite Article 2. But here's the thing, folks. I'm not saying Trump is lying. I'm saying Trump is right. He can do anything he wants because he can declare it an emergency and then the emergency powers he has are crazy, but he needs them. You know the book that I just keep teasing, the book we're gonna quote, but the author of that book points out that the very same powers that we want the President to have that are the good powers that the good presidents that we all look back in the history books and loved use these powers, those same powers are the bad ones, too. Just depends on how you use them, folks. It's Sauron corrupting all the good those other rings can do. It just depends. So the same stuff, we love it when our President uses them for good things as we see them through our lens of triage priorities, right? We love those powers and we just hate them when the other side does them. And the problem with that is that we then ignore what both sides using them or all sides using them are doing to our system and what they're making possible in the future. When somebody who shouldn't have those kinds of powers because maybe they don't have any empathy or maybe they're too narcissistic, or maybe they like to dominate other people, or maybe they just want Greenland and Canada as a 51st state, when they get their hands on the power that we all thought was good, when our guy had their hands on the power, we're all going to pay. Maybe Canadians most of all, or Panamanians or Iranians. I mean, you can see some circumstances, can't you, where it wouldn't take five seconds of difference and we'd be living in something where you'd go, what the hell just happened? We could start bombing somebody. We could invoke the Insurrection Act. I mean, I was on the ground the last time the Insurrection act was invoked in my hometown, working on the assignment desk at the ABC owned and operated station down there. And then it all starts and then it grows in intensity every day. And then curfews invoked. And then when you have a press pass and you're going out helping the reporters in the field, you get to see what it's like. And by the time we went from like police officers to National Guards troops to army troops on all the street corners, you know, with rifles, and they were very nice Because I'd be out after curfew, they'd all be waving. Everybody was very nice. But there's a very big difference between when you have soldiers on the ground in your hometown because they're helping after a flood and they're pulling drowned kittens out of street, you know, gullies and whatnot. These people were armed in case they had to use that on the populace. And it's a different vibe, even if they're nice to you. So the Insurrection act, nothing to sneeze at. And the last time the President was in power, I think it almost happened then. And so to imagine the Insurrection act being called out for political reasons is. Well, to me, these are lines, folks. These are places where you look and you just go, okay. By a 21st century interpretation, we're not looking at this like, well, you know, back in Lincoln's day, by a 21st century interpretation, if the President today were to call out the troops by hook or by crook, there's many ways you could do it. Insurrection act is a perfect example. Let's say we have another big protest, which I think that the odds on. Thing is, we're gonna have mass protests, maybe we should have mass protests. And when that happens, there is going to be a huge temptation for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. There was a lot of pressure on him, especially from the influencer crowd and the hardcore true believers. And you could see Trump maybe wanted to call out the Insurrection act, invoke it, but the people around him back then, you know, said, Mr. President, not a good. Talked him out of it, let's put it that way. Those people are gone now. And he's surrounded by the most groveling group of sycophants I have ever seen around a President of the United States. They will serve him poorly. And unfortunately for all of us, we're not talking about some private company that's gonna go down, because the advice from the board of directors and the underlings is. And we're talking about people that run the country, and we're talking about people that have their eyes out for doing all kinds of things. Let's not ignore. You know, it's interesting how much, and we all knew it when Trump was saying, I don't even know who these Project 2025 people are. Okay, come on. There's a major strand of DNA now running through this whole thing. That is clearly their line of thinking. Go read their stuff now. If you like that stuff, that's fine. But that is a road to autocracy. And I mean, far down the road to autocracy. It depends on whether or not you think Viktor Orban's kind of government in Hungary would be a good thing. Right. Like we said, this is a fork in the road moment. Either all these powers go to the next guy, which should make you Trump supporters right now very concerned. Right? Do you really want these powers in the hands of the Bizarro Trump or they're not. And the only way the not happens is if we turn into like, like the kind of a government Viktor Orban has. So Viktor Orban does not have a single party state. It's not a one party state like North Korea, it's a multi party state. His is the power though, that he's consolidated into the hands of the executive. All of the choke points, all of the little levers that matter. And then you can let the other elements of the government function any way they want to. They can have all the parties, they can get different seats in government. Doesn't matter. In the end of the day, the one job that matters is the one job that's not changing hands. And so for people who like that, you know, go look up the Red Caesar thing, they'd like that. Tucker Carlson might like that. I don't know. I think there's a few people around the President right now that might like that. Maybe the President would like that. And that freaks me out. When should I be worried? And would you be worried if this was, you know, AOC doing all the stuff we've talked about already and having these powers that we've just discussed? Don't worry, there's a fig leaf for this one too, because it's so obvious the government realizes this is there. That's how you know, by the way, you need to be freaked out about it because they saw the problem and then they put a fig leaf over it and now it's still there. But if they responded to it, they knew it was a big issue. In 1976, looking at the Richard Nixon administration in the rearview mirror and thinking, wow, maybe he shouldn't have had his hands on all the levers of power in terms of a personality type with certain flaws that you might not have wanted to have his hands on the levers of power. Sound familiar? Maybe they enacted some reforms and one of them concerned these emergencies and their reform was that Congress by a majority vote could cancel it. Right. So if the Senate and the House, by majority vote in each house says, Mr. President, we don't think it's an emergency, we're canceling it wonderful. Right? That's all we need. That's all we're asking. That's all anybody would want. Preserves the president's power to respond to a hurricane, flood, fire, earthquake, but protects us all from something bad happening and takes the power out of the hands of a single individual. Right. We like decentralized power, we freedom people. You know, all my libertarian friends would say that I'm not libertarian, but we speak the same love language when you talk about freedom, liberties, civil liberties, civil rights. Don't want centralized power. Right. But this way we can still have our emergencies and eat it too. Right? Have our cake and eat it too. But something happened in the early 1980s, the executive branch. They're remarkably. I mean, as I said, it's not just this guy. The executive branch likes more power and they claim it and they protect it the way the founders assumed all three branches of government would protect it, but don't. They are jealously guarding what they have and they're taking more. And the executive branch in the 1980s complained, said this was a separation of powers violation. So they went back, renegotiated the whole thing because again, the Congress understood it's a glaring danger. Red alert, flashing sign here. So you have to fix it somehow. So they turned it into a joint resolution. This might sound like protection, but it's a fig leaf because listen how the joint resolution works. So now if the President declares an emergency and the Congress says, whoa, this is a authoritarian power grab, let's stop it now, the House and the Senate each need to vote for this thing, then it needs to go back to the President. It's essentially like a bill, and the President can decide to sign it or not sign it. And if he just declared the emergency and wants the emergency, he's not gonna sign it. So he's gonna send it back just like he would a bill. Now, this is where, you know, it's a fig leaf. The House and the Senate can override the president here, but you need a 2/3 vote of both of them. It's a little like what it would take, except you'd have to do it in each state to, like, alter the Constitution. Once again, it's there, but the likelihood of it working, I mean, it's a fig leaf. Ladies and gentlemen, if Donald Trump today decided he wanted to declare an emergency, he can. And there's no way this Congress is gonna stop him. Congress has been a joke for like three decades. We've been talking about that for. We're essentially, you know, when you have three CO/ government, and they're supposed to balance each other out and keep us from having an autocrat. And you are down a branch. Well, you know, I get nervous. I go back to folks when should I be worried? I'm down a branch of government that's supposed to protect me from an autocrat. Which leaves me with the judiciary, which we should talk about for a second, because the president and his supporters are going after it hard. The Republicans are going after the judiciary hard. And I don't care what you think about the judiciary right now, Ladies and gentlemen, if you're applauding this, these are the same judges who are gonna protect you when the bizarro Trump gets in there. And you can't depend on the Congress. They failed for 30 years to be the king protection society that they're supposed to be. We're left with the judiciary. You undercut it now, and what are you left with later? You better hope it Victor organizes or you're screwed. What's good for the goose is good for the political gander. And you're gonna miss these judges if they're gone. You don't have a problem with Eileen Cannon, do you? Or. This is where it looks kind of fascistic to me. Right off the bat, though, Trump and his supporters, maybe that's you are going after the judges that they don't like. The partisan judges they call them. In other words, the judges that would vote against our agenda. This goes back to, like, the Victor organization Play card. The blueprint also, where actually the Roman Empire blueprint as well, where you don't change anything, but you change everything, Right? So you keep the forms, but the functions are all undercut. So let's say you don't want to look like you're going after the judicial branch. You just want to go after the Obama appointees and the Clinton appointees and the radical leftists in the judicial branch. In other words, all you want are judges that are going to back whatever you say. So that's what I mean about some of these systems that seem to be cropping up all over the world. Now, fascist is not the right word, and people always point that out. But they're something, aren't they? Maybe the term hasn't been invented yet for what will describe all these different systems, but they appeal to some people, clearly. I bet there's, you know, 10% of our country right now that if you said the Victor Organization of America, they would go, thank God. All right, well, you know, can't talk to those folks because there is an eternal lure of Caesarism. It is understandable. We see it over and over in human societies. I get it. But remember, the downside of something like a Caesar is you lose the Republic with it. So if that's how you feel, I would ask humbly, if you would please, in the Instagram postings and all the marketing and imagery, if you would stop using my American flag and get your own flag, because you're for something different than what I'm advocating for. And I need this system because I'm a freedom person and I need a system that protects my freedom. Now, the old system, the Joe Biden, the guy I didn't do any shows on when he was goose stepping through the White House, right, He represents a system where my freedom was being eroded. Trump represents the worst nightmare for me. The first personality type that's gotten into office that has looked at the powers of the office, and instead of thinking, well, my goodness, who would ever use the powers to dominate and to, you know, do things that were maybe reprehensible or not, not up to our standards, our ethics, the way we comport ourselves in the world? The first guy that looked at the fig leaf of protocol that's protected us from that up to now and said, who gives a rat's ass about that? You make a T shirt out of that phrase, couldn't you? And right there, even if I agreed with the guy's policies, I'm out. And here's the thing, too, as an independent, there are things that the Trump camp sometimes proposes that I can find myself agreeing with. It's not heresy. You want to make government less wasteful. I'm on board with that. I was on board with that when Clinton and Gore were. What were they doing? It was a reimagining government. No, it was reinventing government. I mean, this has been a long running thing. Everybody knows large bureaucracies, wastewater, they just do. There's an amount of bleed that happens. One of the big things on the Common Sense show that we always talked about was corruption. And part of the bleed happens because of the corruption. But many of the same people that are on the side of the people looking into corruption now are the people who've been a part of the corruption. But, I mean, it's incestuous here. It's like what we've done here is we're trying to get the foxes on board to redesign the chicken coop and make the public think that what they're really doing is protecting the chickens. I mean, it's. There's some Three Card Monty going on here and the amount of disinformation, I mean, what was it, Was it Bannon who said, you know, flooding the Zone with crap? Basically it's. Well, I said, I turned on that radio and I listened to this for three minutes. And you're just sitting here thinking to yourself, people who are buying into this, look, you're gonna get a distorted sense of reality by listening to the regular music media, but that media is giving you a completely altered state. I mean, if this is your smell, your taste, your hearing, if this is your senses explaining to your brain what the world around you looks like, you're not seeing reality. And I understand then maybe why some of this is happening. I don't know how to prevent it. And I will tell you something. It is partially a one of those stresses that we talk about all the time in the modern world that if you zoom out here and look at how a historian is going to write about this, if we have historians, and isn't it nice, not only am I not a historian, but I can tell you what they're going to write about histories in 500 years. But I mean, imagine if when they're looking at it from a much more zoom out perspective and they can see all the different trends and forces and stuff working on us now in ways that we can't. I mean, I'm fascinated. Just as an aside here, I would love to know how much the intelligence services of many, many countries are acting on many, many other countries and maybe even the rest of the world through online interaction, posting under names and bots. And I mean, there's something going on here that you can feel without being able to gauge or put your finger on or trace back to anybody in particular. Although sometimes you can. But I mean, that's having an unquantifiable effect on our system. I'd love to know more about it, but I'm not gonna be around to find out. Someday they'll know, though, and they'll be able to say, oh, those people back in 2025, if they'd only realized that blah, blah, blah was happening. But that's the nature of the beast, isn't it? That godlike perspective is only available to people in our future if there are a lot of people in our future. But we've talked about this before, that we have a lot of analog legacy systems in this world that are trying to adapt and evolve to handle this digital reality we live in now. And some of the most important of those systems, and it's things we don't think of as systems, but I mean, take for example, nation states. I mean, they always say that nation states were created with the Peace of Westphalia, all those kind. Okay, take it with a grain of salt. What were kingdoms beforehand? But, okay, so nation states, we'll say from the 1600s, that's an analog legacy system right there. And. And there were things that the nation state controlled that it had no way of even imagining not having control over. I mean, look at the 1950s, which is relatively recent history. Look at the way information was controlled even in free societies, right? The United States. Look at how information was molded, shaped, controlled. The kind of digital communication that we have now is nothing that they could have contended with in 19, 19, 50, for example. And that analog system was able to evolve and absorb earlier disruptive technologies. But with the pace of change being what it is, I mean, by the time, if you're lucky, the analog legacy system, that is, you know, global governments adapts to MySpace, they get Facebook, then they get iPhones. I mean, it just goes on and on and on. You're getting continually battered by successive waves of disruptive change, and there's no end in sight, ever. So if you said to yourself, well, I'm pretty confident these analog legacy systems, like nations, will be able to withstand the battering forever. And what would it look like if it were starting to crack like a bunch of straws piling up on a camel's back until it snaps? Writing in a book published in 2010, which means much of the writing was probably done the year before 2009. A professor at Yale University named Bruce Ackerman, the Sterling professor of law and political science at the time, author of something like 19 or 20 books now. And I should have gone and read a more recent one instead of picking up one from 2010, but the one from 2010 was on my bookshelf since 2010, and I don't remember if we actually used it in one of our shows or if we just. If it just sort of helped me better understand some of the systemic problems in the US System, but that's red meat for me. So he wrote a whole book about it, and for me, that's, you know, right up my alley. I don't know what drew me to it the other day, but I opened it up, and as I said, it looked like Nostradamus. He absolutely predicted, for example, that there would be a president who shows up, who just denies the election results. He talks about how in the early 1970s, they were so worried about the growth in presidential power that books were coming out entitled the Imperial Presidency, because compared to what the founders had envisioned, the president was already far more powerful. And as Ackerman points out several times in his book, the president today is far more powerful than that imperial presidency of the early 1970s. So what does that make today's presidency in terms of the proper adjective to describe it? He talks a lot about the system and how it's likely to create different kinds of personalities that show up and run for office compared to what we're used to. Professor Ackerman's book that I'm quoting from now and that we used at least to educate me back in 2010, is called the Decline and Fall of the American Republic. And it really is a book that talks about the systemic deformities that have built up in our system, creating the conditions for a disaster. And he's predicting this long before Trump. So the people that think that this is all about Trump can put that concern to rest, because Ackerman's talking about problems we have with the way things have gone in our system, our design. And he writes, quote, the system is also promoting different personality types to the White House. Nominees of major parties are no longer absolutely required to convince a broad range of senior politicians of their fitness for the job. While establishment support is generally an asset, the winning candidate may owe his presidency more to the media consultants and movement activists who've sustained his momentum throughout his lengthy presidential campaign. Charisma, he writes, counts more. Seasoned judgment counts less. A career of political achievement is always nice, but a successful career in the movies or television may be even better. Ackerman goes down, by the way, president to president to president, and shows where they had contributed to this problem. For example, when Bill Clinton ran into things that were preventing him from doing what he wanted to do in terms of reforms and changes and achievements, he made some of the same claims that you hear the current presidency making. And Elena Kagan would write in the Harvard Law Review that even though his efforts created problems, it was worth it for the goal. And Ackerman writes, quote, kagan notes that Clinton's presidential pretensions generated recurring bouts of lawlessness as the bureaucracy tried to fulfill the president's directives. Nevertheless, she concludes, the dangers of charismatic lawlessness are outweighed by the president's unique claims to democratic legitimacy. If he is to fill the high hopes that Americans have invested in the presidency, he simply must be in a position to overcome the bureaucratic inertia and the tunnel visions that prevents fulfilling his electoral mandate, Ackerman then continues. In treating the risk of lawlessness as an acceptable price to pay for presidential centralization, Kagan's essay played a key role in building a bipartisan elite consensus in support of strong executive prerogatives. It is no surprise, then, that both Bush and Obama have continued down the centralizing path blazed during the Clinton years. I mean to challenge this Beltway consensus, he writes. The larger framework presented in this chapter permits us to glimpse a darker possibility. By constructing a new form of presidential administration, centrists like Clinton and Obama are preparing the way for a tragic future in which extremist presidents take the center of the bureaucratic stage, especially when confronting congressional opposition, he writes, they will use their White House staff to give the bureaucracy marching orders to implement their charismatic visions. In generating a steady stream of presidential directives, the super loyalists in the White House will refuse to defer to expert assessments of the facts or traditional understandings of the law provided by the agencies. They will call upon the entire executive branch to join in the exciting enterprise of executing the president's mandate from the people. And these instructions will receive an enthusiastic reception, since the bureaucracy will be under the command of presidential appointees who gained their deputy assistant secretaryships on the basis of their partisan loyalties. Is this what we really want? He asks in 2010. Pretty Nostradamus like right there. Finally, I have one more long quote from him because it was so hard to choose. He basically runs down a list here of very important things that is worth knowing, even if none of you go back and read the original book. And he lists seven predictions and writes quote, I predict that one. The evolving system of presidential nominations will lead to the election of an increasing number of charismatic outsider types who gain office by mobilizing activist support for extremist programs of the left or the right. 2 All presidents, whether extremists or mainstream, will rely on media consultants to design streams of sound bites aimed at narrowly segmented micropublics, generating a politics of unreason that will often dominate public debate. 3 they will increasingly govern through their White House staff of super loyalists, issuing executive orders that their staffers will impose on the federal bureaucracy even when they conflict with congressional mandates. 4 they will engage with an increasingly politicized military in ways that may greatly expand their effective power to put their executive orders into force throughout the nation. 5 they will legitimate their unilateral actions through an expansive use of Emergency Powers 6 and assert mandates from the people to evade or ignore congressional statutes when public opinion polls support decisive action and seven, they will rely on elite lawyers in the executive branch to write up learned opinions that vindicate the constitutionality of their most blatant power grabs. These opinions, Ackerman writes, will publicly rubber stamp presidential actions months or years before the Supreme Court gets into the act. And they will generate heated debate amongst the broader legal community. With the profession divided, he says, and the President's media machine generating a groundswell of support for his power grab, the Supreme Court may find it prudent to stage a strategic retreat, allowing the President to displace Congress and use his bureaucracy and military authority to establish a new regime of law and order. These, he writes, are the dynamics of the decline and fall of the American Republic. End quote. Written in 2010, folks. Now, this talk of systemic stuff can make eyes glaze over sometimes, and the lack of sexiness and immediacy and visceral nature of this is what's missing. You need to inject the real red blood of reality into what this story means, the same way that if you were on the streets of Los Angeles in 1992 with a press pass and could see what was going on, it looks like some sort of black and white Twilight Zone episode, because it doesn't seem real. You have to think of the kind of powers we're talking about here and what the executive branch of the government has basically said without saying is the kind of power that they possess. And I take you Back to the 2008, I believe it is, hearings over the. What were called the Bush torture memos in front of Congress. We did a show on this. We talked a lot about it, because this was one of those things that is one of those huge straws on the camel's back at the time. So it's right up our alley, right? And long story short, some of these people from the Office of Legal Counsel, whose job it is to advise the President and Vice President, you know, what the powers they have are, are called to testify in front of Congress. If we imagine the Office of Legal Counsel as being something where you just have totally straight up lawyers, the kind of lawyers you would want advising your family in a domestic legal situation who are just gonna take a straight, narrow, you know, view of the Constitution right down the middle, that would be one thing. But the Office of Legal Counsel's more stocked sometimes. How's that for disclaimers with people who are the ones who make the most expansive, radical interpretations that they can credibly get away with? Because sometimes that's what the President wants, right? What do I want to Hear from my office of Legal Counsel. I want to hear that I can do this. Oh, we got a guy over there, Stanford, says you can do that. Bring him in. He'll be our guy. Right? We'll stand behind him, make him go in front of Congress in 2008 and explain to them, but don't let him admit to anything. We can't. National security. You can't say what we can't. It can't do. Go up there and tiptoe around. And when John Yoo, David Addington, those guys were in front of Congress. You can go see the YouTube videos even now if you want to. They sounded like Supreme Court nominees trying to tiptoe around a question on how they were going to vote on abortion if confirmed. That is the way we do things now. And John, you did a fantastic job, I thought not saying where the limits of presidential authority are, because here's where he was trapped. The one thing that Congress doesn't want to hear is that the president can do anything he wants. But that's what John Yoo basically believes. So how do you get out of that dilemma? Well, Congress, they're not idiots. They know that that's what he believes. So they have to trap him into saying that. But he won't because that's what he's not supposed to say. That's how he's gonna vote for, you know, on abortion. Can't say that. He can talk around. And so they're trying to nail him down. I believe one of the things. Oh, they tried to nail him down. I remember now. They tried to nail him down by eventually just throwing out things and saying, okay, well, since I can't get you to say this, could he do this? Could he do that? And one of them was something like, could he order someone buried alive? And John Hughes somehow tiptoed around that one. Good job. But then the one that his non answer, because theoretically he did his job and didn't answer it. But the non answer was itself an answer. And there are audible gasps from the room when he makes it. You can go, as I said, and see it. The question, and I probably get it wrong here, but the question was, can the president order a boy's testicles? I think it was crushed in front of his father. Just so we understand now there is a Kiefer Sutherland dystopian, dirty hairy spy versus spy way. You could write this where the scenario is that the dad planted a nuclear bomb somewhere in New York City and we gotta get it before it explodes and he won't tell us where it is. So we have to be able to crush his son's testicles, maybe in front of him. And you'd be glad your President had that power. If they did, you'd be, thank God he could crush that boy's testicles. But here's the thing, okay, but that's a lot of power in one person's hands. And if you can crush a boy's testicles in front of his father, what can't you do? And the answer from John Yoo to whether. And I tried to not answer it, and then they nailed him down. And the answer to whether the President could order a boy's testicles to be crushed was it would depend on why the President thought he had to do that. So whether or not the President thinks he needs to do that is up to the President, who John Yoo believes and many other people believe. And J.D. vance is out there, you know, setting the stage for this kind of belief can do anything in wartime. And of course, because the President now is the one who decides when wartime is, except for a fig leaf of protocol, he can declare war and then he has extreme wartime authority, which has no limits. And just so you know that I'm not pulling a random something out of my rear end that has nothing to do with what we're talking about here, the one degree of separation between you and Trump. In 2020, John Yoo wrote a book called Defender In Donald Trump's Fight for Presidential Power. And I don't know if Donald Trump reads any of these books, but people around him certainly do. They are not unaware of anything that we've spoken about here today, this isn't going to be news to them at all. And of course, the threading of the needle towards autocracy involved in the John Yoo question was presidential authority in wartime. Because even if you want to argue that the founding fathers believed that presidents should be able to basically be unfettered and do anything in wartime, remember, the founders weren't going to give that power to him to declare war. That was another branch's power. So we'll take that aside. But they also assumed that war was a temporary, short term state of affairs. Right. The two world wars were long wars. Right. But there's four or five years, whatever it might be. But you was making the argument that these war powers, these extreme wartime authorities, in a war that was never declared by Congress, are the presidents, for as long as the war lasts, in a war that both Democrats and Republicans were openly saying was, and this was the phrase used at the time, a Multi generational war on terror. End quote. If you have emergency wartime authority that will allow you to crush boys, testicles and bury people alive or anything else short of that you might need, and you have that a couple of generations, what sort of of democratic republic do you have left after that? When you're sitting around the ashes of a constitutional republic? Because a guy with no empathy who was a narcissist who liked to see people on their knees and dominated and sort of makes a virtue of it amongst some of his followers, who like when he does that, who puts out a social media post from a movie showing Napoleon an absolute dictator, responsible for the deaths of millions of people, of course, saying he who saves the country violates no laws and he's the one who gets to decide if whatever he did to save the country was worth it. That is too much power in the hands of a single person. We were absolutely fated to end up with someone who didn't deserve and couldn't handle and shouldn't have that power at some point. And for those of you who like everything that's being done by the current president, then realize, unless we go all Victor Orban on things, in which case get your own damn flag, somebody you don't like is gonna have that power too. And we will have normalized the idea that he or she who saves the country violates no laws. And who knows what kind of country they want and who knows what they'll be with willing to do to get there. You'll miss the judges if you don't have them. And if you don't have them, well, we know the answer to whether or not you know you can keep your republic, as Benjamin Franklin had said, right? A republic, if you can keep it, well, it's on the line in 500 years when you're reading the history. This time, the listening audience of whatever passes for a history podcast are going to get out the popcorn and they're going to love the moment we're in right now. It's going to be very exciting. Another quote that never really happened. May you live in interesting times, comes to mind.