Speaker 1: Hello everybody, ladies, gentlemen, brothers, sisters, comrades, friends. Got a
Speaker 1: bit of a special episode for you guys here, because
Speaker 1: even though I would like it if this was true,
Speaker 1: the world keeps moving, things keep changing, things keep happening
Speaker 1: no matter what my podcast schedule is. So in light
Speaker 1: of the recent assassination of political pundit Charlie Kirk and
Speaker 1: growing discussion about the rise of political violence, I thought
Speaker 1: it would be necessary to have a bit of a
Speaker 1: breakdown of what political violence is, what its deeper meaning is,
Speaker 1: and what maybe Americans, my fellow Americans, don't fully appreciate
Speaker 1: about it, and there really isn't anything good about political violence.
Speaker 1: I think that's kind of a spoiler alert for this
Speaker 1: conversation that you're about to hear. But I don't think
Speaker 1: it could have been made clearer by anybody other than
Speaker 1: two of my best pals in the podcasting world, that
Speaker 1: is Christops and Threeson's of the Eastern Border Podcast and
Speaker 1: Danielleblelly of History on Fire, both of whom have talked
Speaker 1: about this. Danielle very recently. He couldn't have timed his
Speaker 1: most recent episode of History on Fire better, but also
Speaker 1: Chris stops in a lot of his you know, coverage
Speaker 1: of the war in Ukraine and everything giving him particular
Speaker 1: insight too, political violence in a lot of ways too.
Speaker 1: So anyway, I'm showing everything that normally comes before these
Speaker 1: episodes because I want to get this out as soon
Speaker 1: as possible. I really appreciate everybody who supports the show
Speaker 1: and Patreon sub stack everywhere, so please consider going there
Speaker 1: to support this show. History Impossible dot subsec dot com
Speaker 1: and Patreon dot com slash history Impossible. If you like
Speaker 1: what's done over here. Now I'll shut up, I will
Speaker 1: get us going and please enjoy. As dark as this
Speaker 1: topic is, this conversation I had with Daniellebalelli and Kristeps
Speaker 1: and reasons.
Speaker 2: Well, let me to tell you what you would have
Speaker 2: seen and heard. I will not be pleasant listening if
Speaker 2: you're at lunch or if you have no appetite. Now
Speaker 2: is a good time to switch off the radio. An
Speaker 2: ancestor of my main change, if you eliminate the impossible,
Speaker 2: whatever remains, however.
Speaker 3: Improbable, evation Russian BANDI out of it.
Speaker 1: You don't the one who knows that laves by the
Speaker 1: thousand year.
Speaker 2: I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace
Speaker 2: is inside. I don't see the laughing dream.
Speaker 3: I feel an laughing night now.
Speaker 1: I pray if we.
Speaker 2: Hear for asues to Gail, if we care were asued
Speaker 2: to kill. Some say the world.
Speaker 4: Will end in fire.
Speaker 2: Some stay Anie.
Speaker 4: From what I have tasted of desire, I hold of
Speaker 4: those of flavor fire.
Speaker 2: But if it had to perish twice, I think I
Speaker 2: know him of hate to.
Speaker 5: Say that for destruction, ice is also great and looks sufficed.
Speaker 5: This is History Impossible.
Speaker 1: With Chris Stops Andresan's and Danielle Bolelli. I had to
Speaker 1: do the accents, but I'm really happy to have both
Speaker 1: of you guys here. This is a first uh though
Speaker 1: funny enough for people listening to History Impossible. They just
Speaker 1: heard your voice, Danielle, because I just put out our
Speaker 1: episode we recorded this summer just on a lark about
Speaker 1: the typing rebellion and Protestantism and all that stuff, and
Speaker 1: that that opens up a whole you know thing that we,
Speaker 1: you know, don't have to get into now. Because I
Speaker 1: want to talk to Chris tops about Russian Christianity sometime
Speaker 1: in the near future, because that seems really like a
Speaker 1: good rabbit hole go run. Yeah, I know, I already
Speaker 1: just I just did it doing.
Speaker 4: I'm doing my PhD on that stuff because Russian order,
Speaker 4: the duxx weirdness is messed up. It nice to be here.
Speaker 1: Yes, thank you both for coming. And we're obviously delving
Speaker 1: into what this past week has been in the United States.
Speaker 1: But I kind of wanted to broaden the discussion and
Speaker 1: I wanted to talk to, you know, two of my
Speaker 1: pals who Danielle is an American, but who both have
Speaker 1: a background that is decidedly not American and have perspectives
Speaker 1: that I think Americans are in sore need of right now.
Speaker 1: I just wanted to start out just to give some
Speaker 1: sort of overall context of what is going on. I
Speaker 1: have a couple of quotes I want to read to
Speaker 1: you guys, and then I'll just let you respond to those,
Speaker 1: and you know, just you know, give your perspectives on
Speaker 1: everything that's happened with particularly with the assassination of Charlie Kirk,
Speaker 1: which I believe has been I don't know, almost a week.
Speaker 1: I actually can't I don't even and yeah it's been
Speaker 1: over a week now, it's been about a week. But anyway,
Speaker 1: I want to give you get your guys immediate reactions,
Speaker 1: but also give you a couple of quotes. And the
Speaker 1: first one comes from, of all people, our friend Leon Trotsky.
Speaker 1: And I just got done reading his book Revolution Betrayed,
Speaker 1: and actually it was for school, and there was a
Speaker 1: line in it that just struck me that I just
Speaker 1: want to read out loud. Here. Individual terror is a
Speaker 1: weapon of impatient or despairing individuals, belonging most frequently to
Speaker 1: the younger generation. But as was the case in Czaras times,
Speaker 1: political murders are unmistakable symptoms of a stormy atmosphere and
Speaker 1: foretell the beginning of an open political crisis. So that's heavy, obviously,
Speaker 1: And yeah, I think we want to like put a
Speaker 1: pin in that one. And then I want to read
Speaker 1: this summary that was written by the writer Catherine Brodsky
Speaker 1: on her sub stack Random Minds that I think just
Speaker 1: really helps give us a bigger context of what's been
Speaker 1: going on. So what she wrote was the following President
Speaker 1: Trump's ear was grazed by a bullet as he narrowly
Speaker 1: escaped with his life at a rally. He was targeted
Speaker 1: again soon after. United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was assassinated,
Speaker 1: but Luigi Mangioni arrested for his murder. A gunman killed
Speaker 1: two Embassy of Israel's staff members who were leaving a
Speaker 1: Young Diplomat reception at the Jewish Museum in Washington, DC.
Speaker 1: Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro's mansion was broken into and set
Speaker 1: on fire. Tesla vehicles have been torched, and bullets as
Speaker 1: well as molotov cocktails were aimed at the company's showrooms.
Speaker 1: Two Minnesota state lawmakers were shot in their homes. Side note,
Speaker 1: that happened the day before I went back to Minnesota
Speaker 1: this past summer, so that was interesting. Continuing in March,
Speaker 1: a fire was set to the entryway of the New
Speaker 1: Mexico Republican Party headquarters. BD Pellots and gunshots were fired
Speaker 1: at the front door and window of the Democratic National
Speaker 1: Committee office in Arizona on three separate occasions. Last fall,
Speaker 1: Anti Pelosi's husband Paul, was bludgeoned with a hammer in
Speaker 1: his home. His attacker admitted he had planned to hold
Speaker 1: the speaker hostage to quote end government corruption unquote. Individuals,
Speaker 1: including some extremist groups, stormed the US capital protest to
Speaker 1: twenty twenty presidential election results. Eric Komer, an executive at
Speaker 1: Dominion Voting Systems, was forced into hiding after his home
Speaker 1: address was published and a million dollar bounty was put
Speaker 1: on his head. And now the successful assassination of political
Speaker 1: commentator Charlie Kirk. And then what he sort of concludes
Speaker 1: is this is not just a list of isolated incidents.
Speaker 1: And I am inclined to agree with that. And she
Speaker 1: didn't even include everything that I would have included on
Speaker 1: that list, which included the was about three months of
Speaker 1: rioting in twenty twenty, which I think was political but
Speaker 1: also had to do with COVID, so it's a little
Speaker 1: more complicated. But then you had other more explicitly political
Speaker 1: events like the attempted an aborted assassination of Supreme Court
Speaker 1: Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and a number of other things. So
Speaker 1: I think the picture is pretty clear, especially when you
Speaker 1: think about that quote from Trotsky and what Catherine said
Speaker 1: at the end there, which is these are not isolated incidents.
Speaker 1: We're living in a time of it seems to be
Speaker 1: political violence in the United States at a level that
Speaker 1: we just have not seen, at least in my lifetime.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I mean, I actually don't even think it
Speaker 1: was in you know, your lifetime, Danielle, and you're the
Speaker 1: elderly man here. So but yeah, we we have a
Speaker 1: very serious time in this country, and I think that
Speaker 1: getting your guys' perspective is really important. But I do
Speaker 1: want to let you respond to everything I just gave
Speaker 1: you there, because that was a lot.
Speaker 4: Well for me. This whole thing comes in addition to
Speaker 4: the fact that despite all the drones arriving here, which
Speaker 4: is in my mind as well. In addition to that,
Speaker 4: today we found out that it has been like a
Speaker 4: crash drone in Latvia as well, which is just what
Speaker 4: that was eating on the train. So along all this stuff, Yeah,
Speaker 4: it's kind of fun for us over here. It's kind
Speaker 4: of scary that you guys are still our biggest ally
Speaker 4: and then our times when we need the most to
Speaker 4: rely on you. You know, this is the point where,
Speaker 4: especially here in the Baltics, we feel threatened every day
Speaker 4: and then you know, you look at the United States
Speaker 4: to be sort of to take on this role of
Speaker 4: actually you know, making things in order to as a
Speaker 4: we used to look at you as a beacon of
Speaker 4: hope in a way of stability that you guys got
Speaker 4: it made and everything. And now now when I when
Speaker 4: I read my news and it's like, oh, lookie, we're
Speaker 4: living in a dangerous deditory. And then I switch over
Speaker 4: to foty news and I'm like, again, something weird happening. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it doesn't. It's really it's really lowers at least here,
Speaker 4: it lowers the the idea of it really lowers the
Speaker 4: image of the United States in a way in the
Speaker 4: sense that over here, a lot of people here, not
Speaker 4: not just here laughing, but in Europe in general since
Speaker 4: over here. And also but the person who if something
Speaker 4: happens in the United States, I'm the one that gets
Speaker 4: all the questions because I'm weirdly enough, they know, not
Speaker 4: many people have have ways to speak with American people,
Speaker 4: and they're asking me, what's what's going on? Because people
Speaker 4: are just genuinely scared. And this is because of what's
Speaker 4: happening across, you know, on the other side of the planet.
Speaker 4: And the more this happens, the less we feel like
Speaker 4: the less we feel like this this whole global system
Speaker 4: is working because you know, EU is very good at
Speaker 4: expressing deep concern and as much as you know, as
Speaker 4: much as people might might not like it, you guys
Speaker 4: are the ones who kick in the door and get
Speaker 4: stuff done right and right now it seems that you
Speaker 4: can't really get stuff done instead of your own place.
Speaker 4: So we're looking with with a lot of distress going on.
Speaker 4: We don't like people here, don't understand the intricacies of
Speaker 4: of your internal politics and why it's happening. But everyone
Speaker 4: here at least has the sense that what I want
Speaker 4: to give you this Dutipian perspective of today, the fact
Speaker 4: that something's broken in there. Like you you you, it
Speaker 4: seems it feels like you've got you've always had at
Speaker 4: least over here. Whenever the United States have had some issues,
Speaker 4: it has always been this idea that, oh, you have institutions,
Speaker 4: you have institutions, do you know what you know was
Speaker 4: going on?
Speaker 2: Yet?
Speaker 4: You know something crazy you might happen. But on the
Speaker 4: other hand, you have these institutions, you know what, you
Speaker 4: know what you're doing. You like you're going to selve
Speaker 4: this self through the power of institutions, through the power
Speaker 4: off here democracy, all this, all this stuff, and right
Speaker 4: now that that's feeling is imrolling here and it doesn't
Speaker 4: And and to be to be honest, well that's that's
Speaker 4: what that gives me personally all as well, and a
Speaker 4: lot of people around in my idea, a lot of dreads,
Speaker 4: because you know, we've used to, we've actually used to
Speaker 4: the United States being the way that you portray yourselves
Speaker 4: as in your pr segments. So that's how I want
Speaker 4: to want to put it.
Speaker 1: I spell what And I was on your show very recently.
Speaker 1: I think we spoke only a couple of days ago
Speaker 1: as of this recording, and I use the phrase that
Speaker 1: I still stand by that when talking to you and
Speaker 1: anybody else who's not living in this country, even like
Speaker 1: Canadians at this point. But it's just embarrassing, Like that's
Speaker 1: the that's the feeling I get, is just feeling embarrassed
Speaker 1: by by this dysfunction.
Speaker 4: On the on the bride on the bright side, on
Speaker 4: the bright side can tell you the at least our politicians,
Speaker 4: especially those who really work with American people, they're they're like,
Speaker 4: we still have faith that you can make that you'll
Speaker 4: fix it somehow. We don't know how, but you'll manage
Speaker 4: we hope.
Speaker 1: I think Danielle and I are both a little more
Speaker 1: pessimistic about that. But at the same time, yeah, and Danielle,
Speaker 1: I want to get your perspective, because you have a
Speaker 1: different one, which is and I kind of wanted to
Speaker 1: throw in the whole feeling of embarrassment too, because you
Speaker 1: have the perspective of somebody who did come here and
Speaker 1: became an American, you know, so, and that's you know,
Speaker 1: that's a whole other kind of aspect, and I think
Speaker 1: that requires a level of optimism that I think people
Speaker 1: who are born here are multiple generations back Americans tend
Speaker 1: to take for granted a lot of the time. Every
Speaker 1: immigrant I've ever met is always far more positive on
Speaker 1: the American project and the American future and everything I
Speaker 1: think than people who actually live here. But I'm want
Speaker 1: to let you respond to all that too.
Speaker 2: No, I've never been I always thought it was crap. Yeah. No,
Speaker 2: He's just certain things that are fantastic about you us,
Speaker 2: But there are also things that are absolutely atrocios and
Speaker 2: always wear Right now, the atrocious ones are rising in
Speaker 2: power and intensity and all of it. I think, like,
Speaker 2: for me, it's different. It's not that I come from
Speaker 2: a sht place and I came to us and go, oh,
Speaker 2: this is fantastic. Is I come from a shit place
Speaker 2: knowing that I was trading some sit for different kinds
Speaker 2: of shit. You know, that's the trade, that's part of
Speaker 2: the deal I was. You know, Italy was atrocios for
Speaker 2: a lot of reasons.
Speaker 1: You want to get into some of those too, yeahs
Speaker 1: is Atrocio was atrocious for a lot of reasons.
Speaker 2: Now is atrocious for a lot more reasons. So I think,
Speaker 2: like my general view is never particularly rosy when it
Speaker 2: comes to politics. When it comes to other things, Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 2: there are so many things about American culture that I've enjoyed,
Speaker 2: American music and cinema and creativity and certain attitudes that
Speaker 2: I really really like. So it's not an anti American
Speaker 2: thing by any stretcher imagination, but definitely not even close
Speaker 2: to a rosiview, particularly of the politics.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, Well, and you came here, if I remember,
Speaker 1: right in the early nineties, right, that's when you immigrated,
Speaker 1: So you came actually at a pretty interesting time in
Speaker 1: that respect. That kind of gives us little context about
Speaker 1: what's going on now in terms of the rise of
Speaker 1: political violence, because I do think there's something to the
Speaker 1: idea that what we're going through right now is a
Speaker 1: little bit unique, a little bit new, But it's also
Speaker 1: not because in the early nineties. I mean nineteen ninety two.
Speaker 1: You have Ruby Ridge, then you have Waco, then you
Speaker 1: have the Oklahoma City bombing, and I actually forgot the
Speaker 1: first World Trade Center bombing. I mean, these things were
Speaker 1: I'm very intense.
Speaker 4: Well I'm studying with I'm studying for not being educated. Well, sure,
Speaker 4: but what's Ruby Ridge? I have not heard of that one.
Speaker 4: I don't know what. I don't know.
Speaker 1: That's a separate podcast, I think because it's a very
Speaker 1: complicated story involving this family that was essentially a sort
Speaker 1: of they weren't a militia, that they were a separatist family.
Speaker 1: They wanted to get out of the you know, out
Speaker 1: of the purview of the federal government and up or
Speaker 1: something up there. I am not clear. Maybe Danielle knows.
Speaker 1: I didn't expect to be talking about Ruby Ridge.
Speaker 4: Talking about like I got the general idea about what
Speaker 4: that was because I remember the standoff thing where we're
Speaker 4: at yes by sniper. Yeah, I've seen a documentary on
Speaker 4: that that just didn't nize by name.
Speaker 1: Thank you, okay, okay, Well yeah, And that's what I'm
Speaker 1: saying is that the nineties had I mean, people have
Speaker 1: been especially lately talking about the nineties in a very
Speaker 1: rosy way, and you know, yeah, there was a lot
Speaker 1: of prosperity. It was the last time that we had
Speaker 1: a budget surplus, So I guess if you want to
Speaker 1: look at it that way, that was a good time.
Speaker 1: And you know, all things considered, Clinton wasn't the worst president,
Speaker 1: but yeah, it was. There was violence.
Speaker 2: Then.
Speaker 1: There was obviously violence in the two thousands. That was
Speaker 1: the you know era of you know jih hottest terror
Speaker 1: both you know that happened and that we thwarted and
Speaker 1: were terrified of. But you know, at the same time,
Speaker 1: you know, there was late sixties, early seventies, you know,
Speaker 1: terrorist violence by leftist groups like the Weather Underground and
Speaker 1: the Cymbinese Liberation Army. And then you go back even further,
Speaker 1: you have you know, the eighteen seventies to the nineteen
Speaker 1: hundred's with all the you know, bombings and assassinations that happened.
Speaker 1: Then I think we had am I getting this right?
Speaker 1: I think we fact, we had like two assassinations of
Speaker 1: presidents and multiple attempts during that time. And then if
Speaker 1: you really want to get heavy, we had the Civil
Speaker 1: War and everything led up to that. So political violence
Speaker 1: is kind of a normal thing in a US history,
Speaker 1: but in that like I said, it doesn't feel different.
Speaker 1: But with this particular time, with the Charlie Kirk assassination,
Speaker 1: it does feel like a lot of people believe and
Speaker 1: I can't help but feel it myself to a certain
Speaker 1: degree that a different line has been crossed. But I
Speaker 1: guess I don't want to overstate things, so I just
Speaker 1: have to ask, from your guys' perspective, to what extent
Speaker 1: do you think that or maybe even just feel that
Speaker 1: we in the United States, and maybe even in the
Speaker 1: Western world more broadly, are in a new era of
Speaker 1: political violence. Christops, you and I talked about this a
Speaker 1: fair bit, and I think for you it's obvious that
Speaker 1: you know, it's you know, things have escalated a lot,
Speaker 1: especially in your neck of the woods. But I'm trying
Speaker 1: to think about this more broadly, so I'm going to
Speaker 1: let you guys sort of ruminate on that a bit,
Speaker 1: like what to a new era?
Speaker 2: Before Christa's jump Jean just one please was in Idaho.
Speaker 1: Idaho got and.
Speaker 2: And the number of presidents assassinated was.
Speaker 1: Four four yeah in total. Yeah, well, yeah, nineteenth century
Speaker 1: was particularly bad.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Colin Garfield I was thinking of Garfield and McKinley, Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: and that and they tried with Ford to uh, at
Speaker 1: least one member of the Manson family tried to kill
Speaker 1: Ford squeaky from So yeah, a lot of assassination attempts.
Speaker 1: I mean, you really want to add that to the list.
Speaker 1: There's you know, there was people on the White House
Speaker 1: lawn during Clinton, Obama and Trump administrations. I want to say,
Speaker 1: but don't quote me on that. I might be remembering wrong.
Speaker 1: But anyway, I want to let you guys sort of
Speaker 1: get I want to get your perspective on what you
Speaker 1: think about this potentially new era of political violence or
Speaker 1: maybe an idea that it's not a new era, maybe
Speaker 1: it's just more of the same. I just want to
Speaker 1: get your guys' perspective on that.
Speaker 4: Well, I think, well, I want to just be quick
Speaker 4: about this because I want to hear Danielli's opinion more
Speaker 4: than mine, because I think he is more to say.
Speaker 4: But I feel like this isn't this isn't much so
Speaker 4: much of a new era as of people to people
Speaker 4: have just you know, remembering the good old, good old,
Speaker 4: forgotten things from the past, so to speak, in the
Speaker 4: sense that if previously, previously, we previously we had a
Speaker 4: lot of political violence all over the place in Europe,
Speaker 4: in everywhere basically, and currently what we're seeing now is
Speaker 4: just well, there there were a bunch of good times
Speaker 4: where people were not solving their problems with such political violence.
Speaker 4: But right now, you know, we've we've been through a
Speaker 4: lot of stress stressed, stressful period of events COVID and everything,
Speaker 4: and now well the memories are just coming back and
Speaker 4: people are just remembering how this is going. For example,
Speaker 4: like we also didn't have a lot of that stuff
Speaker 4: happening here but recently, because it's a diversity. If you
Speaker 4: remember the revolution of nineteen oh five that happened in Russia,
Speaker 4: well the bloodiest parts of that happened here in Latvia.
Speaker 4: And after that, for example, you got Peter the Painted
Speaker 4: in London doing shootings there, almost shot Winston Churchill. By
Speaker 4: the way. Interestingly enough, another person that was important for
Speaker 4: this fact was Edward Leitzkalnen, the guy who built Coral
Speaker 4: Castle in Florida. He was also a part of those things.
Speaker 4: He shot a baron that he emigrated there. It's just
Speaker 4: that political violence to such a scale in the United States,
Speaker 4: I feel well, it's always happened in the waves, and
Speaker 4: I think we're you know, the very cliche statement that
Speaker 4: history does not repeat itself, but it's sometimes rhymes. Well
Speaker 4: right now when in the rhymey period, I just I
Speaker 4: feel like it it's because the violence hasn't gone anywhere.
Speaker 4: It's always been there, just under the hood and just
Speaker 4: you know, brewing up and now with all the stresses happening,
Speaker 4: well the people people, you know, when people start to
Speaker 4: feel very desperate about their lives and everything, and then
Speaker 4: they see this is some sort of solution, as I presume,
Speaker 4: that's how I feel about it, certainly.
Speaker 3: Sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And Danielle, I wanted your perspective on this too well. Also,
Speaker 1: I want to highlight that another part of your perspective
Speaker 1: that's so interesting, and you fast tracked this episode you
Speaker 1: were working on on the years of Lead in Italy,
Speaker 1: which unfortunately you could not have planned. I'm saying this
Speaker 1: in big Air quotes her better time to put out
Speaker 1: that episode. But yeah, I want to let you just
Speaker 1: sort of give your thoughts on how political violence is
Speaker 1: shaping up right now, and then maybe also talk about
Speaker 1: the years of Lead affair BIX. I want people to
Speaker 1: listen to your episode, but I want to give people
Speaker 1: an idea of what we're talking about, because, as you said,
Speaker 1: a lot of people in the US know about that.
Speaker 1: But anyway, as you.
Speaker 2: Will, I'll jump in super fast on the years of Lead,
Speaker 2: and then I'll just being on today. Years of LAD
Speaker 2: basical is a period in Italy from the late nineteen
Speaker 2: sixties up to roughly the midday, is when political violence
Speaker 2: was at insane levels. There was a period between I
Speaker 2: think sixty nine and seventy four where there were like
Speaker 2: five thousand terrorist attacks in Italy. Now, most of them
Speaker 2: were very small scale operations that didn't lead to much,
Speaker 2: but many of them were the way the terrorism began.
Speaker 2: I mean in many ways, and again i'll give you
Speaker 2: the one minute version. A lot of the problem is
Speaker 2: at the end of World War two, people think that's
Speaker 2: the end of fascism. It's not. The chairman of the
Speaker 2: Italian Communist Party commits an atrocious compromise with fascism where
Speaker 2: essentially they do an amnesty for any war or any
Speaker 2: crime committed during the war, both by partisans and fascists.
Speaker 2: This will allow the fascists not only to just go
Speaker 2: back to their own lives, but also to infiltrate the state,
Speaker 2: in the police forces, in the army, in secret services,
Speaker 2: with politicians and so on. So this leads to the
Speaker 2: FED by the late sixties. They don't like the direction
Speaker 2: where society is going. They see it going progressively more
Speaker 2: toward what they consider leftist positions. So some people start
Speaker 2: this campaign of terror, planting bombs, doing all sort of
Speaker 2: in the screminate terror activities to create a climate of
Speaker 2: fear throughout Italy with the hope that then the population
Speaker 2: in a panic will turn to some fascist strong men
Speaker 2: to take over and bring fascism back. Now that's not
Speaker 2: going to work. However, the climate of tension that they
Speaker 2: are trying to push will continue for a long time,
Speaker 2: will lead to the exact opposite reaction, which will be
Speaker 2: leftist groups start harming themselves and some of them take
Speaker 2: for arm struggle type of attitude. Now the main difference
Speaker 2: between groups like the Red Brigades and the fascist terrorists
Speaker 2: now they're all terrorists. Let's be clear. Red brigades tend
Speaker 2: to be more targeted assassination. So a politician, a judge,
Speaker 2: a journalist or whatever, not that that's good. Obviously, it's not,
Speaker 2: but it is a little different from planting a bomb
Speaker 2: in the middle of a train station killing a hundred people,
Speaker 2: you know, So that was the But regardless of Io Spini,
Speaker 2: there was a ton of violence, you know, whether targeted
Speaker 2: or not, the violence was pretty insane.
Speaker 1: Well, I think sorry to interject, I's gotta ask because
Speaker 1: I'm trying to remember your episode. But did it ever
Speaker 1: get to the point that because you're making me think
Speaker 1: of the German Revolution of nineteen nineteen, where it literally
Speaker 1: turned into I mean it was a civil war basically
Speaker 1: between two extremist groups. Did it ever get to the
Speaker 1: point of pitch street battles between the communists and the
Speaker 1: fascists in Italy?
Speaker 2: But even then wasn't even that easy, like just the community,
Speaker 2: because like the left was ten zillion different groups who
Speaker 2: liked each other as little as I like the fascists.
Speaker 2: So there was and I think is also part of
Speaker 2: the problem with our language than when we are like
Speaker 2: the left to the right, it's like, what the fuck
Speaker 2: are you talking about? There's zillions of people who radical
Speaker 2: disagreements among those groups. So the left was everything and nothing.
Speaker 2: I'm sure the right was too. In many ways, there
Speaker 2: was you know, the right was somebody with some mildly
Speaker 2: socially conservative views and it was a fascist terrorist bombing
Speaker 2: train station. Not the same thing, clearly, but they were
Speaker 2: all labeled as the right, much as the left was
Speaker 2: the Red Brigades and some students or workers protesting for
Speaker 2: slightly better conditions, you know, not the same.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And as we know, the you know, left and
Speaker 1: right in Italy is very different than left and right
Speaker 1: in the United States, than in Britain, than in Australia,
Speaker 1: than in Latvia, than in Russia, I mean, swords or
Speaker 1: it's just fill in the blank with everything except maybe China,
Speaker 1: because I don't think that they have any of that.
Speaker 2: But yeah, the street violence was definitely, I mean, I
Speaker 2: think one of the things that I throw in my episode.
Speaker 2: I remember like when I was a child, finding motorcycle
Speaker 2: helmet and the giant ranch in the house and there
Speaker 2: I was like, hey, you guys, don't ride motorcycles, and
Speaker 2: my dad was like, hey, politics, you know, because it's like,
Speaker 2: because if you are active in politics, if you went
Speaker 2: to any kind of demonstration, you probably went with a
Speaker 2: motorcycle helmet, because either the police or the fascist will
Speaker 2: try to crack your skulls, and you had your own
Speaker 2: tolls to beat them up. That was just how it was.
Speaker 2: That was part of the deal. And then the violence,
Speaker 2: as I mentioned, it got so insane that I mean,
Speaker 2: in Milan, like close to where I live, like a
Speaker 2: bank blew up in nineteen sixty nine, killing seventeen people.
Speaker 2: In Bologna, the train station blew up the day, within
Speaker 2: twenty four hours from the time when my mom took
Speaker 2: a train from Bologna to Milan. The very next day
Speaker 2: the train station blew up, killing eighty eight people. I mean,
Speaker 2: it was just And then eventually the years of lead
Speaker 2: come to an end in the mid eighties, when everybody
Speaker 2: realized nobody's gonna get what they want. The fascists are
Speaker 2: not gonna get, the return to a fascist dictatorship, the
Speaker 2: Red Brigades are gonna go, are not gonna get a
Speaker 2: communist revolution is just everybody's tired. Nothing has been accomplished
Speaker 2: other than killing a zillion people. And oddly enough, what
Speaker 2: it leads to though, is the fact that really, I mean,
Speaker 2: of course is good when they stop killing each other,
Speaker 2: and not just each other but also random civilians. But
Speaker 2: also it's not in the sense that it coincided with
Speaker 2: a period of tremendous disillusionment and cynicism. So what I remember, like,
Speaker 2: whereas my childhood was spent with the years of Lead,
Speaker 2: right after was just arrowing everywhere. People just strang out
Speaker 2: on the street, laying on the Florida you would have
Speaker 2: to kind of crawl over to get to somebody's house.
Speaker 2: And that was and that was part of it too.
Speaker 2: So you know, that sounds a.
Speaker 1: Lot like the United States in the late seventies, and
Speaker 1: so in a sense, it's it's it's familiar, I think,
Speaker 1: I mean at least I mean I wasn't alive during
Speaker 1: that time, obviously, but I mean from everything I've read
Speaker 1: and seen, it's, you know, sounds very familiar. And and
Speaker 1: let's put I want to put a pin in that
Speaker 1: sort of like fizzle out of the years of lead,
Speaker 1: because you know, obviously want to talk. Yeah we can
Speaker 1: talk about it, but yeah, in the case of like
Speaker 1: what's going on now, I mean, again, we don't want
Speaker 1: to put too fine a point on it, but I
Speaker 1: mean I'll just ask bluntly, Danielle, how similar are things
Speaker 1: now to the years of lead or are we not
Speaker 1: quite there yet? In the United States? Would you say, I.
Speaker 2: Think we're well on our way. I think we're very
Speaker 2: much well on our way.
Speaker 4: I think depressing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you know, you're already listed a long string
Speaker 2: of violent incidents that have been at the meting level.
Speaker 2: I think now with the boiling level where it begins
Speaker 2: to boil. Not quite you're in pasta yet, but we're
Speaker 2: getting there. And I think I think this is very
Speaker 2: clearly where it's going. So to me, it's the fact
Speaker 2: that like after a lot of these events, you go
Speaker 2: online and like half of twee there is people cheering
Speaker 2: for civil war, not saying like actually cheering like wanting
Speaker 2: the blood of their fellow citizens. I think that's being
Speaker 2: something about where we're at a society. And I granted,
Speaker 2: most of these people are talkers, and thankfully, thankfully there
Speaker 2: are people who just cheat and don't do it. But
Speaker 2: among you know, five million people who talk that way,
Speaker 2: all you need is twenty thousand to act on it,
Speaker 2: and that.
Speaker 1: You don't even need that you need. I mean, I'll
Speaker 1: just throw in my sort of historical analog that I've
Speaker 1: been looking at for years now, which is, you know, Yugoslavia.
Speaker 1: I mean, all the Ustasia needed to assassinate King Alexander
Speaker 1: and as well as like it was allies. But also
Speaker 1: they only had about six hundred active members. You don't
Speaker 1: need that many people to cause extreme I mean Timothy McVeigh,
Speaker 1: he technically had one accomplice with I think was Terry Nichols,
Speaker 1: but he killed how many hundred people including a day
Speaker 1: care full of children? Just one guy?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: I mean, or the nine to eleven hijackers what was that?
Speaker 1: Like twenty people? I don't even remember the numbers, so
Speaker 1: I maybe don't quote me on that. But there was
Speaker 1: something that I noticed in your Years of Led episode
Speaker 1: that I want to bring Christops in to talk about
Speaker 1: a little bit with First of all, I just want
Speaker 1: to point out that I was struck by how there
Speaker 1: seems to be a shared love between corrupt Italian police
Speaker 1: and Russian government thugs with tossing people out of windows.
Speaker 4: It's on a defenestration is a probably noble tradition of.
Speaker 2: But I want to.
Speaker 4: Add to this because this is no please please. This
Speaker 4: is a book that probably I asked my friend but
Speaker 4: to bring it here. This is a rush political philosopher
Speaker 4: who was who was working during in the nineties, but
Speaker 4: he wrote about He wrote a bunch of lectures, and
Speaker 4: his lecture cycle was mostly about both the nineteen eighteen
Speaker 4: and how it was formed up, about the how it
Speaker 4: how we formed up in the nineties. And this is
Speaker 4: Alexander Pittegotsky. I've quoted him many times. He's not well known.
Speaker 4: And this lecture cycle is what is political philosophy. And
Speaker 4: here he writes about how the teal Titians happens, how
Speaker 4: everything becomes politicized and then it turns political violence. From
Speaker 4: that comes to some sort of revolution or a lauious leader.
Speaker 4: He literally really describes this process. And right now this
Speaker 4: is the first time. You know, when I was reading
Speaker 4: this back then, back when I was in college, I thought,
Speaker 4: oh wow, this this reminds me. This sort of reminds
Speaker 4: me how things are going in the United States. Well,
Speaker 4: now I'm one and more convinced that death this, this
Speaker 4: this person was very right. If you if you can
Speaker 4: find some of his works in English, I would highly
Speaker 4: recommend he must be translated. He's he used to read
Speaker 4: lectures in Saint Petersburg, and he writes, he writes about
Speaker 4: the you know, he writes to the very specific tone,
Speaker 4: but post history and everything as well. He sort of
Speaker 4: mocks this idea, but he basically in this book here
Speaker 4: describes this whole process on how everything starts when as
Speaker 4: in his example, which is one of my favorites, is
Speaker 4: when even buying the correct brand of sausage becomes politics.
Speaker 4: Then even while then that is the first step on
Speaker 4: all of the when everything is politics, then of course
Speaker 4: even the most extreme things also become politics. In this
Speaker 4: case violence, This is how you normalize it. It's is
Speaker 4: the in the in this theory, which I personally agree with,
Speaker 4: you sort of you get to this violence by basically
Speaker 4: making everything political, because then if everything is political, then
Speaker 4: of course people have more radical, radical opinions. And if
Speaker 4: this radicalization goes reaches its its natural point there, then
Speaker 4: of course why then of course it just gets into
Speaker 4: violence datatudy, because what else are you going to do
Speaker 4: if if if you can get yelled at and and
Speaker 4: like like he says here buying a sausage, well here
Speaker 4: in the start he wrote in the nineties, and so
Speaker 4: it posts of it. If even that becomes political, if
Speaker 4: where you go and eat becomes political, then you feel
Speaker 4: like you're you're struggling to with even the most basic ideas.
Speaker 4: Then then violence also becomes a political norm because politics
Speaker 4: seeps into your everyday life and in your everyday struggles,
Speaker 4: especially if you're a young adult in your twenties. Well,
Speaker 4: how do you solve most of your problems, do you? Well?
Speaker 4: Young male Young males are prone to well not not.
Speaker 4: They're not very very much known for being the most
Speaker 4: most people who solve most of their issues by just
Speaker 4: talking it out, you know, and so so in a way,
Speaker 4: it's in a way I see what's happening there, and
Speaker 4: especially with what Danielli said here, which is why I
Speaker 4: asked my friend just to bring this book from from
Speaker 4: my bookshelf. The fact that yes, it's it's tragic, and
Speaker 4: it's it's you shouldn't see it as something abnormal. In fact,
Speaker 4: this is a very normal, very rational result of what's
Speaker 4: been going on in the United States politics. It's not
Speaker 4: it's it didn't PLoP out of nowhere. It is there
Speaker 4: for a reason. It was something that seems to me
Speaker 4: like you've been marching towards too, like you this this
Speaker 4: is this is just the natural end product of things.
Speaker 4: If that's because this is this is how like I'm
Speaker 4: sorry for maybe being sort of a rush here. But
Speaker 4: what else did you guys expect? I mean, this is
Speaker 4: another example that he uses here, by the way, which
Speaker 4: is which is gonna which Danielle is gonna like he
Speaker 4: compares this to the video, like to the vide early
Speaker 4: times when when Roman Republic became empire like Gragai brothers
Speaker 4: and all that stuff. That's also their violence becomes normalized.
Speaker 1: So that almost suggests that this is definitely a human thing,
Speaker 1: because that's like, you know, we're talking like, you know,
Speaker 1: over a thousand years ago this way.
Speaker 4: Yes, but also the sign, the sign the signs were,
Speaker 4: the signs are clearly there. It's just the fact that
Speaker 4: you know, people just thend to people maybe choose to
Speaker 4: ignore them and not see them for what for what
Speaker 4: these things are? You know?
Speaker 1: Well, I mean just you made me think of this.
Speaker 4: I mean that's good.
Speaker 1: Then, like, how else do you explain people getting literally
Speaker 1: filled with rage when they cast a new several snape
Speaker 1: as a black man, I mean, or how else do
Speaker 1: you explain this is my personal.
Speaker 4: Favorite I was buying as sausage becomes political.
Speaker 1: Well that's what I mean, my personal favorite moment. I
Speaker 1: jokingly call it my radicalizing moment. But what I was
Speaker 1: picking up on was what you're talking about, Christops. And
Speaker 1: it was in twenty fourteen, and I don't know if
Speaker 1: you guys remember this, because we're going on twelve years
Speaker 1: ago now, but they landed a probe on a comet.
Speaker 1: Do you remember that? And it was incredible. It was
Speaker 1: probably the biggest achievement in astronomy probably ever. And then
Speaker 1: the story was about the guy who headed the team
Speaker 1: wearing a shirt that had cartoon babes on it, like
Speaker 1: hot babes on his shirt, and that became the story.
Speaker 1: And I was thinking, and it was that people are
Speaker 1: getting mad at him for having a sexist shirt or something. Well,
Speaker 1: and what I'm saying is that, like it was one
Speaker 1: of those moments where I was like, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: what are we doing here? We just did something incredible,
Speaker 1: Like this team of people did something incredible, and all
Speaker 1: people want to talk about is the shirt the guy
Speaker 1: wore to announce the accomplishment. It just anyway, My point
Speaker 1: being is that, as you said, Chris Stops, this has
Speaker 1: been going on for a while and it's kind of
Speaker 1: the natural culmination of all that of making everything political
Speaker 1: and whatnot, there is a missing ingredient that I wanted
Speaker 1: to bring up though that I think you both can
Speaker 1: comment on, which is the role of the state in
Speaker 1: all of this, Because I talked about the corrupt Italian
Speaker 1: police throwing people out of windows. I mean, that's a
Speaker 1: part of the story of the years of lead that
Speaker 1: Danielle talks about in this show. We don't have to
Speaker 1: necessarily get into the details of that because people should
Speaker 1: go listen to the episode and it has a lot
Speaker 1: of really it has weirdness in it, but it's pretty
Speaker 1: obvious what happened. But my point is is that the
Speaker 1: role of the state plays and their efforts to put
Speaker 1: down politically violent individuals and groups especially there can be
Speaker 1: problems when targeting individuals, obviously, like getting the wrong person,
Speaker 1: but the real problems, at least as I'm seeing it,
Speaker 1: and I think we're already seeing this with this classification
Speaker 1: of Antifa as a terrorist group when they're not even
Speaker 1: a group. They're a decentralized network I guess, of people
Speaker 1: with sympathies that might not even do anything except share memes.
Speaker 1: I mean, it just it. I don't know how you
Speaker 1: would define Antifa as a group, just that.
Speaker 4: The this is this is a lot of people will
Speaker 4: anger to be. But this is one of those arguments
Speaker 4: why you we don't have the death penalty, because if
Speaker 4: the state normalizes killing, even in these cases, then killing
Speaker 4: becomes more normalized. The sort of if you have death
Speaker 4: penalty in your country, then it's more likely that you're
Speaker 4: going to have a higher number of more murders because
Speaker 4: what the state does sort of makes it more legitimate
Speaker 4: and valid. Is a sort of problem solution there. I think,
Speaker 4: I think that would be a point because this is
Speaker 4: literally one of these arguments which we recently had with
Speaker 4: with students about pro forward and against death penalty. And
Speaker 4: this is the EU's point that statistics data shows that
Speaker 4: if the government says that it's okay to kill someone,
Speaker 4: then if the government doesn't, then you know, you are
Speaker 4: more likely to have that normalized. As a little tiny
Speaker 4: thing here from.
Speaker 1: That that ties into actually I didn't even think about
Speaker 1: that angle. I mean, I you know, I will not
Speaker 1: get into the death penalty conversation because that that is
Speaker 1: a rabbit hole, especially for me because I have complicated
Speaker 1: thoughts on it. But but I think what you say
Speaker 1: is very important there because when you start targeting groups,
Speaker 1: especially groups that are poorly defined. What you're inviting is
Speaker 1: a game of guilt by association and potentially a lethal one,
Speaker 1: as you're saying, Chris stops. And then if you start
Speaker 1: doing that where people are getting killed or hurt or
Speaker 1: arrested unjustly simply because they have an association, however tangential
Speaker 1: to a group or to a person or whatever, that's
Speaker 1: just going to incentivize people to become more violent as
Speaker 1: an active self defense, especially in a country like the
Speaker 1: United States that really prides itself on self defense. Uh So,
Speaker 1: I guess I just wanted to get your guys' thoughts
Speaker 1: on that, like the role of the state basically in
Speaker 1: all this, and to what extent can the state do
Speaker 1: anything to put a lid on the violence without allowing
Speaker 1: authoritarian concept creep to kick in, which is already kicking
Speaker 1: in the United States. I'm not disputing that, but I'm
Speaker 1: just saying, I guess possible.
Speaker 4: This one's not for me, because again I don't feel
Speaker 4: like but not this. This is something that you guys
Speaker 4: helar the United States. You you do that, I'll just
Speaker 4: I'll just wait and listen because I can give you
Speaker 4: just the arguments so that I only go for it
Speaker 4: because I I won't have much time here.
Speaker 2: One thing I forgot in my rather big thing that
Speaker 2: I forgot when I was trying to summarize the years
Speaker 2: of let in one minute was the role of the state.
Speaker 2: Was the fact that the state was directly complicit with
Speaker 2: fascist terrorism. Not all of the state, of course, not
Speaker 2: every politician. But the problem is a bunch of secret
Speaker 2: services have been infiltrated by neo fascist stativist and so,
Speaker 2: and they were politicians tied to them. So there was
Speaker 2: one segment of the state more or less actively participating
Speaker 2: in the terrors in order to take over the rest
Speaker 2: of the state. So it wasn't like the state was
Speaker 2: this neutral arbiter of what was going on. And honestly,
Speaker 2: I think, and again you know, I grew up with
Speaker 2: that stuff. So for me, I've always tried to stay
Speaker 2: as clear as humanly possible from conspiracy theory thinking, because
Speaker 2: of often it becomes like a lazy excuse not to
Speaker 2: look at evidence correctly. However, especially now as I'm looking
Speaker 2: at the way things I'm developing, my conspiracy brain is
Speaker 2: kicking into high gear. And there's more or less nothing
Speaker 2: that I'm seeing in the news that I'm not going, Wait,
Speaker 2: that doesn't make sense. Who's benefiting from this, Whether we're
Speaker 2: talking about the Kirk assassination, whether we talk about the
Speaker 2: Trump shooting, whether we talk about a lot of things now,
Speaker 2: I don't know, of course I'm not I don't know
Speaker 2: that those are but there's a lot of things that
Speaker 2: don't seem to adapt. And I think think is because
Speaker 2: I grew up with this, with the fact that it
Speaker 2: was normal for the state set up false flag all
Speaker 2: the time, for the state to be involved in like
Speaker 2: the dirtiest possible things. And by the way, the state,
Speaker 2: not just the Italian state, because the CIA was very
Speaker 2: much behind a lot of what was going on in
Speaker 2: Italy at the time. So to me, I'm like, it's
Speaker 2: almost a given that what we are seeing on TV
Speaker 2: is not real, that there's something that's going on underneath
Speaker 2: the surface. Now what that is, I don't know. And
Speaker 2: also the ear is the part that gets tricky people
Speaker 2: who fall into the conspiracy theory rabbit all they start
Speaker 2: thinking everything is conspiracy. It's like, no, that's the part
Speaker 2: that's messy about it, that it's a mix of things,
Speaker 2: because you're gonna get the crazy, stupid guy who does
Speaker 2: something that's perfect for one segment of the political spectrum,
Speaker 2: and he was not planted at all, and he acted independently.
Speaker 2: And then there's the one who's actually tied. And so
Speaker 2: sometimes you can, you know, because where stupid and devil meets,
Speaker 2: it's not always easy to say what is planned evil
Speaker 2: and what is just random guy stupid.
Speaker 1: Well, it speaks a lot to something that I know
Speaker 1: you and I have at least talked about, like just privately,
Speaker 1: but in general. Something I've thought about, written about, talked
Speaker 1: about is the what we're and Kristap's actually kind of
Speaker 1: hinted at it earlier when he mentioned COVID we're living
Speaker 1: in a time of collapsing or collapse. That actually actually
Speaker 1: goes so far as to say institutional trust and and
Speaker 1: and the media has been doing itself no favors for
Speaker 1: far longer than COVID. I mean, it goes back way
Speaker 1: further than that, and that has that's a whole other conversation.
Speaker 1: The point being is that the incentive to trust institutional
Speaker 1: claims is at an all time low, clearly, and I
Speaker 1: think that when that happens, it invites conspiratorial thinking and
Speaker 1: makes conspiracy seem a little more reasonable for a lot
Speaker 1: of people. So I don't blame people for going down
Speaker 1: that path. I I do always think that there is
Speaker 1: while it's important to always ask who benefits, there is
Speaker 1: something called the qui bono fallacy. I mean, it's sometimes
Speaker 1: like when some as you said, Danielle, somebody benefits, well,
Speaker 1: benefiting is opportunistic in a lot of cases. But yeah,
Speaker 1: to that, to that point, yeah, I think that the
Speaker 1: the role of the state in cracking down or the
Speaker 1: role of the state in collaborating, that's another I didn't
Speaker 1: make that clear because as you said, Danielly, that that
Speaker 1: was a bit a major thing, and you just introduced
Speaker 1: the other aspect of foreign medaling. I didn't even want
Speaker 1: that's a whole other.
Speaker 4: Today today we also have time besides the state, because
Speaker 4: back then and sure in the early nineties, we didn't
Speaker 4: have another player here. And I'm of course all can
Speaker 4: mega corporations, which in my eyes have broken capitalism measures
Speaker 4: was intended, but I said, but I think it's completely
Speaker 4: from the state. But that's a whole different other political matter.
Speaker 4: But right now we have to look at these huge interests,
Speaker 4: the non state energies. You always think about these, you
Speaker 4: knows groups and everything which also are there, but I
Speaker 4: mean Google and what they show around also play a
Speaker 4: big role, which is how I explain a lot of
Speaker 4: things here to a bunch of people. You know, Well,
Speaker 4: recently I have I've had to explain why, you know
Speaker 4: what a lot of media we people from the Baltics
Speaker 4: in general and Eastern we get to call racists a lot.
Speaker 4: But then I have to explain, well, look, I have
Speaker 4: a grandma, like random grandma who lives in the countryside
Speaker 4: and whose only information about black people comes from comes
Speaker 4: from gangs, thrip videos in Hollywood movies. What what? What
Speaker 4: do you think her her view on life is and
Speaker 4: that that is a thing that really impacts people thinking,
Speaker 4: because you know, if they don't see this in everyday life.
Speaker 4: So how we've I I dread to sound like an
Speaker 4: old man, but yeah, you know, it's sort of sort
Speaker 4: of sort of makes sense. And I recently watched that
Speaker 4: recently spoke with with Robert you know, the man that
Speaker 4: that was on my episode with you History Impossible, and
Speaker 4: he said that he pulled he pulled out of phrase.
Speaker 4: I think he saw it online somewhere. But basically Fox
Speaker 4: News has done with the older generation, what they were,
Speaker 4: what they what they had thought the video games would
Speaker 4: do to us. Basically, yeah, it's.
Speaker 1: Weird, weird attitude there, But I need to I need
Speaker 1: to throw out there I am so far. But then again,
Speaker 1: maybe I just haven't seen it, because that's part of
Speaker 1: the problem. Algorithms have now perfected what you see and
Speaker 1: don't see be based on your interests and whatnot, so
Speaker 1: I would think that this would show up. But anyway,
Speaker 1: I haven't seen any fear mongering about video games with
Speaker 1: this killer whose bullets were or casings rather were inscribed
Speaker 1: as memes related to video games.
Speaker 2: So I.
Speaker 1: Guess it's good that we're not blaming video games for
Speaker 1: violence anymore. But it seems like we're blaming things that
Speaker 1: are maybe a little bit more important.
Speaker 4: You know, you're well, you're not. But as I'm following
Speaker 4: all the Russian media sites, then they're obviously again to
Speaker 4: our subject of Russian religion. Part of the hardcore, the hardcore, hardcore, weird,
Speaker 4: ultra violent teogo Yevitch. I hope you watched that thing
Speaker 4: until the end. That's the sketty one.
Speaker 1: I'm working on it. It is a slog.
Speaker 4: It's a very difficult thing. To watch how that I
Speaker 4: come on, everyone does have the thing on my stream there.
Speaker 4: But they also of course instantly, they instantly blame that
Speaker 4: the genderacy of the West, but for everything, and it's
Speaker 4: not just video games. I mean they will currently you're
Speaker 4: in Russian propaganda channels. All of this is blamed to
Speaker 4: the to the foul decadents of the West. But instead
Speaker 4: of instead of actual fascism and to tell Tanism, they
Speaker 4: of course blame guess who, the lgbt Q World Organization.
Speaker 1: Blaming the Jews.
Speaker 4: That's a classics right right right now, right now kind
Speaker 4: of Jews, Jews are not polite and polite decide you
Speaker 4: can't do that anymore. So now it's sort of over there.
Speaker 4: It's just that people will blame anyone and everyone to know,
Speaker 4: with zero actual with zero actual idea what's going on.
Speaker 4: It's just the fact is that this is the point
Speaker 4: where I believe people need to stop figuring out, you know,
Speaker 4: you stop you need to stop worrying about whom to
Speaker 4: blame and start worrying about how to solve the problem
Speaker 4: instead of blaming. You know, there is no one simple
Speaker 4: This is not a simple problem. But not there is
Speaker 4: no simple solutions. Simple solutions is what brings kind of
Speaker 4: amatic leaders to power, and then you know this stuff happens.
Speaker 1: The authoritarian concept creep.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's where I think we are not in
Speaker 2: a good place when it comes to solutions, because I
Speaker 2: think there are a couple of things that you guys
Speaker 2: have brought up that and then I'll get to the
Speaker 2: why we are in a bad place when it comes
Speaker 2: to solutions. Now, one thing earlier, when we're talking about
Speaker 2: anything from the Gray Brothers forward, Yeah, there is a
Speaker 2: human universal aspect which is when as society is consistently
Speaker 2: they're refusing to find solutions because they go against the
Speaker 2: power structure and people who hold the reins of power,
Speaker 2: or because the solutions are massy. I mean, right now,
Speaker 2: it's no wonder that people are desperate. We're facing so
Speaker 2: many different crises and no one has a foggust idea
Speaker 2: of how to deal with it, from environmental issues to
Speaker 2: ais going to change radically our entire life and economy,
Speaker 2: to you know, you can go down the lead and
Speaker 2: there are probably thirty issues that are insedly difficult. So
Speaker 2: it's so much easier to just find escapegoat and rather
Speaker 2: than thinking the life sucks because we can figure out
Speaker 2: how to deal with major challenges. It's all because of
Speaker 2: the dirty communist or the gay or the Conservatives or something.
Speaker 2: If only those guys were in tears, we could have
Speaker 2: a great life. And it's like, yeah, that's just scapegoating
Speaker 2: one oh one because you are feel powerless, you don't
Speaker 2: know what the hell to do about it. Your life
Speaker 2: is falling into pieces. So I mean the fact that,
Speaker 2: like right now, the rate of Americans who don't have
Speaker 2: a single friend has grown fivefold in the span of
Speaker 2: like not even twenty years. Wait what, yeah, this is
Speaker 2: a yeah twenty years. There was a statistic that said
Speaker 2: about three percent of American men reported having zero friends
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty one, so it's already a few years back,
Speaker 2: and the percentages hi are now. In twenty twenty one,
Speaker 2: it was fifteen percent having zero friends. Now those are
Speaker 2: the people who say they have zero friends, not even
Speaker 2: the ones who say, oh, I have one or two friends,
Speaker 2: but we hardly ever see each other, which is a
Speaker 2: Loneliness is an epidemic right now in the Western world,
Speaker 2: especially US, and it's just so of course, half of
Speaker 2: the country's one product and of people have issues because
Speaker 2: we deal with a society that's falling two pieces at
Speaker 2: the most basic level, at the people being alone with
Speaker 2: a screen all day kind of level, and those are
Speaker 2: things that there are no easy quick just do this
Speaker 2: type of solution, because it's our whole society has been
Speaker 2: built to lead into this place.
Speaker 4: Is this is this is really scary because again I've
Speaker 4: seen so I've seen on social media so many posts
Speaker 4: about oh, look he voted for Trump or something. Now
Speaker 4: now now I'm getting divorced or something. In such a situation,
Speaker 4: maybe throw Throwing people out of your lives because you
Speaker 4: differ on some aspect is not the wisest thing to do,
Speaker 4: at least in my love opinion.
Speaker 1: I wanted to put that out there too because of
Speaker 1: what you guys were saying, because there was a big
Speaker 1: epidemic of that starting well before COVID. COVID accelerated what
Speaker 1: Danielle was describing, we already I think the loneliest epidemic
Speaker 1: was being talked about a good six, seven, eight years ago.
Speaker 1: People were starting to talk about it then, but a
Speaker 1: lot of that sort of like artificial ejection of friends
Speaker 1: and family. I always thought that, like, well, if it's
Speaker 1: family there's probably other dynamics going on, and that's why
Speaker 1: you're cutting family off, and that you just found an excuse.
Speaker 1: That's usually what happens. But when it comes to friends
Speaker 1: splitting apart because of political differences, I just don't I
Speaker 1: don't buy that as like a reasonable reason to not
Speaker 1: talk to people, obviously up until a point, because if
Speaker 1: you have a friend who's a Holocaust denier, that's really
Speaker 1: all they're going to be talking about, and that's not
Speaker 1: fun to be around. If you have a friend who's
Speaker 1: a flat earther, that's I mean, that's really what it is.
Speaker 1: Is that if if the friend becomes a conspiracy theorist,
Speaker 1: that usually is the reason why you don't want to
Speaker 1: hang out with them, is because they don't have much
Speaker 1: else to talk about. But but yeah, like that, that
Speaker 1: that element of self isolation, I think is that is
Speaker 1: a major contributor to this loneliness as well as obviously,
Speaker 1: uh you know, technological aspects of it. I mean, I
Speaker 1: don't know if numbers have changed over the years, but
Speaker 1: online dating always struck me as a very strange thing.
Speaker 1: And now granted I'm biased because I you know, my
Speaker 1: partner of almost sixteen years and I met in real life.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't mean I wouldn't have used online dating
Speaker 1: had I been single a couple of years later when
Speaker 1: it really started to take off. But it just it
Speaker 1: strikes me as like very odd when you put like,
Speaker 1: what when you digitize romance or digitize friendship?
Speaker 2: Well, but that's that's a seem not a cause, right
Speaker 2: right right, it's francially because nobody meets one another. You know,
Speaker 2: he's like, you don't. There are no group of friends
Speaker 2: that you meet their friends and you get to meet
Speaker 2: some people. It's like you wake up, you go to work,
Speaker 2: there are twenty q because half of them are all
Speaker 2: half of there's probably one person your age. You don't
Speaker 2: click with them. You don't meet anyone else. You come back,
Speaker 2: you go to you watch TV. You know people don't meet.
Speaker 4: One Okay, there's another thing. There's a thing I'd like
Speaker 4: to add there because I would like to respect because
Speaker 4: I something just clicked into my head here a lot
Speaker 4: in a lot of cases, I've seeing people from the
Speaker 4: United States blaming us in Europe for the fact that
Speaker 4: we're too lazy, that we don't work hard enough. Yeah
Speaker 4: we have vacations, Yeah we take that stuff that people
Speaker 4: make people have memes about, you know, Oh no, those
Speaker 4: French people, they're just you know, as an example that
Speaker 4: are used often that they just won't work in August
Speaker 4: and they won't pick up your calls after six pm.
Speaker 4: You know what, that's that's actually a good thing. That's
Speaker 4: a very that is how you should be get. That's
Speaker 4: the time which you literally dedicate to spell with your
Speaker 4: friends and family, which is well, as we can all see,
Speaker 4: extremely actually important because oh well I actually didn't know
Speaker 4: about this slowliness, but I thought it was like something
Speaker 4: happening related to Q one on and insults of that stuff.
Speaker 4: But I mean, it is, it is, but it's just
Speaker 4: like it It made me feel very kind of kind
Speaker 4: of scared in this sense. But you know, it sounds
Speaker 4: it sounds silly. But but again, another number that is
Speaker 4: often thrown is about the level of life in general.
Speaker 4: And you again, I can't speak about all of it,
Speaker 4: but yeah, we make less and salary, but then again
Speaker 4: we have like reasonable health care. We we spend we also
Speaker 4: have to spend less and then we you know, we
Speaker 4: really really value the time that we spend with our
Speaker 4: families and having hobbies important and people you know, all
Speaker 4: over like my my area, there's a hunting club, there's
Speaker 4: a there's a fishing club. People like in my little village.
Speaker 4: There's even the line dancing club opening up soon. I
Speaker 4: don't know why, but people really seem to enjoy this stuff.
Speaker 4: And I was gonna say it doesn't.
Speaker 1: Matter why it brings people together.
Speaker 4: I mean, you have something you can't work all the time. Yeah,
Speaker 4: you're sure, you make all You make way more money
Speaker 4: than we do over here, a lot more money. And
Speaker 4: I'm not even denying that. But but but but but
Speaker 4: but but but for what reason?
Speaker 1: What the And I was gonna say this this really
Speaker 1: like make something like click in my mind because I'm
Speaker 1: thinking about the countries that seem to be suffering the
Speaker 1: most from this kind of epidemic. United States obviously, but
Speaker 1: other countries that are known at least or believed to
Speaker 1: be very hard working and don't really take vacations. Japan
Speaker 1: comes to mind almost immediately. I've heard South Korea as
Speaker 1: having problems, but I don't really know anything about their culture.
Speaker 4: This is this is this is this is also this
Speaker 4: is also taking a good thing to round extreme again.
Speaker 4: Look at Rashia, which is my expertise there. They have
Speaker 4: an interpretation for toughness but enduring things. Well, put in
Speaker 4: this playing all that I mean you you will just
Speaker 4: endure through you and we will adore everything. You don't
Speaker 4: have a plumbing in your house.
Speaker 5: Endure.
Speaker 4: That's what threeal Russians do. This is to them, that's
Speaker 4: this toughness. Take into this extreme is what it becomes unhealthy. Well,
Speaker 4: maybe work ethic can take can be also taken to
Speaker 4: an unhealthy degree. Just seems this steadiotype exaggerated in the sense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there there's I'm sorry, Danielle, you had some other
Speaker 1: stuff you wanted to touch on, but we just are
Speaker 1: transitioning so perfectly into something I wanted to talk about
Speaker 1: related to loneliness, because what that is in concert with
Speaker 1: is a crisis of meaning. I think I'm not here
Speaker 1: to say people should be going to church. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm an atheist, but at the same time, people should
Speaker 1: probably be going to church in a lot of cases.
Speaker 1: But and I mean that more proverbially in the sense
Speaker 1: that I think people need to find more things to
Speaker 1: connect with to to really give them meaning. Because I
Speaker 1: think the deepest problem with political violence in the United States,
Speaker 1: at least lately actually has more to do with nihilism
Speaker 1: than with any political valence. Like, yes, this guy who,
Speaker 1: Tyler Robinson, I shouldn't I don't want to say his name,
Speaker 1: but I don't want to be vague. Tyler Robinson. He
Speaker 1: is from all the pieces of evidence out there, codes left,
Speaker 1: quote unquote as far as political valence goes, but I
Speaker 1: don't think that really matters. We as far as I know,
Speaker 1: we don't even know political valence with the guy who
Speaker 1: tried to take a shot at Trump. And there's obviously
Speaker 1: left and right motivations that go on with some of
Speaker 1: these acts of violence that have been going on over
Speaker 1: the years, but that doesn't really matter as much as
Speaker 1: I think a lack of meaning. And there's a quote
Speaker 1: that I want to read to you guys, and then
Speaker 1: it's the last quote I'll read, I swear. And I
Speaker 1: actually shared this on Facebook, so you guys might have
Speaker 1: seen it, but it's from who I like to jokingly
Speaker 1: call my favorite Marxist. Freddy Debor wrote about this in
Speaker 1: a really really powerful essay talking about political violence right now,
Speaker 1: But it just really struck me, and I want to
Speaker 1: get your guys' thoughts on this more broadly, but here's
Speaker 1: what he wrote. This is in fact my overarching argument
Speaker 1: that where we are trained to see public violence as
Speaker 1: the outcome of ideology, those anarchist assassinations nine to eleven
Speaker 1: Oklahoma City andras Brevik Yukio Mishima in the twenty first century,
Speaker 1: a certain potent strain of political violence is not the
Speaker 1: put of ideology, but rather an attempt to will ideology
Speaker 1: into being through violence itself, to create meaning in a
Speaker 1: culture steeped and digital meaninglessness by the most destructive means available.
Speaker 1: The twenty first century school shooter, for example, does not
Speaker 1: murder children in an effort to pursue some teleological purpose.
Speaker 1: The twenty first century school shooter exists in a state
Speaker 1: of deep purposelessness, and at some level and to some degree,
Speaker 1: seeks to will meaning into being through their actions. This
Speaker 1: is part of why so many of them engage in
Speaker 1: acts of abstruse symbolism to wrap their politically incoherent violence
Speaker 1: in layers of iconography. They are engaged in cargo cult
Speaker 1: meaning making, the pursuit of a pseudo religion. The tail
Speaker 1: wags the dog. Acts we have grown to see as
Speaker 1: expressions of meaning are in fact childish attempts to will
Speaker 1: meaning into being through violence. So yeah, I think that
Speaker 1: that says it all, and I am inclined to agree
Speaker 1: with that being really the core motivation for what does
Speaker 1: I think we seem to agree that there is a
Speaker 1: rise in political violence right now. It's kind of hard
Speaker 1: to disagree about it. But I think that that is
Speaker 1: like the core motive that we're dealing with here, and
Speaker 1: maybe that's always been the core motive of political violence,
Speaker 1: but I don't get that sense necessarily. I think that
Speaker 1: a lot of the time there's an objective, it usually
Speaker 1: does have like ideological valence that's very deliberate, especially when
Speaker 1: it's something you know that leads to a revolution. But
Speaker 1: in this particular case, it doesn't feel like revolutionary violence
Speaker 1: is taking place right now. It feels like nihilistic violence,
Speaker 1: destructive violence. So I'll let you guys respond to all that.
Speaker 1: It ties into what we've been talking about, so I'll
Speaker 1: just let us go here.
Speaker 4: Oh, this reminds me. I'm reading a book series now
Speaker 4: by at Albert Backer, and there's there's a big, big
Speaker 4: sense of logos that he speaks about, meaning a lot
Speaker 4: of there, and one of the taglines is what comes
Speaker 4: after it determines what comes before sort of plugged into
Speaker 4: my head. And the problem is the book theater is
Speaker 4: just called The Second Apocalypse, so you know where that
Speaker 4: is going. Highly that I commended that that is basically
Speaker 4: a fantasy book series about what would happen if Catholic
Speaker 4: Church would be objectively true, like objectively true in every
Speaker 4: aspect except you know, in case Catholicism is a very
Speaker 4: much polly like a polytheistic thing. But if you do
Speaker 4: magic once you are determined to go. It's a long study,
Speaker 4: very good book, but very depressing. The stuff that I
Speaker 4: like here, but in general all this is well the
Speaker 4: meaning stuff. Yeah, I mean, do you guys know I
Speaker 4: was very lucky and I got like for super super cheap,
Speaker 4: me and my wife. We just got a house next
Speaker 4: to the Russian border, twenty twenty kilometers from Russian border
Speaker 4: twenty two kilometers. It's a very good deal like then,
Speaker 4: And a lot of people here like they don't they
Speaker 4: don't really understand why do I want to move to
Speaker 4: this middle of nowhere extreme Deeplathyan countryside right but there,
Speaker 4: you know, I start every morning by just taking a
Speaker 4: round the walking around my house and checking on all
Speaker 4: the animals. I have a bunch of a bunch of
Speaker 4: like I have wizards and deer and and all sorts
Speaker 4: of these little creatures. They leave their things and there
Speaker 4: over there. It doesn't feel like civilization has pushed out
Speaker 4: all the animals over there. It feels like my house
Speaker 4: like has wooden walls, and right now the sap is
Speaker 4: coming out of them because they're like very fresh, So
Speaker 4: it feels like the house is alive. And those little
Speaker 4: things give me, give me the meaning thing. And I thought,
Speaker 4: you know, people were looking at me as if, as
Speaker 4: if as I was a weirdo. But I understand that,
Speaker 4: you know, that gives me peace, and that gives me
Speaker 4: some meaning. I have to have a house to take
Speaker 4: care of. And when you look at this house, well
Speaker 4: for me it's a physical house now, but for everyone
Speaker 4: we have to have this mental house in order as well.
Speaker 4: That's what philosophy does. It's it's an introspection little thing.
Speaker 4: It's not about you being angry at someone. It's about
Speaker 4: getting your own headspace and order. And in a lot
Speaker 4: of cases, for example, I hear I would have to
Speaker 4: blame people like Andrew Tage and other people who claim
Speaker 4: that they're giving this meaning to new people, and they
Speaker 4: dare to use the philosophy that I like a lot
Speaker 4: of Stoicism and the proper Sooicism of Seneca and Marcus
Speaker 4: Aurelius and Epictetus and the real one. And then they
Speaker 4: sort of give these easy answers and they give this
Speaker 4: stuff like this search for a meeting has been corrupted
Speaker 4: in a way. They are a lot of people are
Speaker 4: being told to search for a meeting in the wrong ways.
Speaker 4: And when someone like me, for example, when I did
Speaker 4: this thing with the house in the middle of nowhere,
Speaker 4: but this was a really good price though, but it's
Speaker 4: fought away. You know, people were confused about why would
Speaker 4: I do this. I'm far away from all the civilization everything.
Speaker 4: But that is this is this is this societal what's
Speaker 4: become the norm. Here is the fact that you must
Speaker 4: round this rat race. You must like that really said,
Speaker 4: sit in this cubicle. You must have no friends, you
Speaker 4: will owe nothing and love it right. That is stupid,
Speaker 4: and and again give away your friends stuff. This search
Speaker 4: for meeting is very mentioned, a very deep thing, and
Speaker 4: I feel like people in their flanning is like my
Speaker 4: friend Robert here he also spoke about this, that the
Speaker 4: younger generation have much larger issues with this than we do,
Speaker 4: and that we should. I don't know. This is why
Speaker 4: we're again, we're doing a YouTube channel with Robert to
Speaker 4: maybe inject some actual meaning into these into twenty year
Speaker 4: old to twenty year olds because I don't feel as
Speaker 4: I don't feel as old to be completely separate from this.
Speaker 4: But the search for meaning, you know, when when you
Speaker 4: leave I understood, I understood with this. How is the
Speaker 4: fact that you won't be able to find any meaning
Speaker 4: in the things that you can buy from what the
Speaker 4: corporations can give you. You have to find meaning yourself.
Speaker 4: And that's a lot of work that's not fast food,
Speaker 4: that's cooking your meal on your own, that takes effort,
Speaker 4: and we don't like effort these days. This is this
Speaker 4: is it's really it really means, you know, it's doing
Speaker 4: hard work, but when no one pays you and you
Speaker 4: can't take a vacation either. It's a process, not something
Speaker 4: that you're given And I feel like all these and
Speaker 4: I mentioned mega corporations, the whole impact that mega corporations
Speaker 4: and this, this this over the top consumers culture has
Speaker 4: given us is the fact that right now we see this,
Speaker 4: we have learned to see this as some sort of
Speaker 4: a failure in life if you don't do this rat race.
Speaker 4: But I think I think we would have to admit
Speaker 4: that maybe we've gone wrong somewhere and maybe, you know,
Speaker 4: maybe taking a longer vacation, spending your time and you know,
Speaker 4: touching the grass is something that really needs to be done.
Speaker 4: And this it was very cliche. This sounds very stupid,
Speaker 4: except if I wouldn't be going through my own stress
Speaker 4: with this exact method, that wouldn't help. Hey, I wouldn't
Speaker 4: be here talking to you guys because I was really
Speaker 4: stressed out from all of my work and that's related
Speaker 4: to the war that had gotten into my own headspace.
Speaker 4: And now I'm being organized and I have other problems
Speaker 4: to think about, very real, actual problems. What was this, hi?
Speaker 4: They goes? Does right? Do you have to touch into
Speaker 4: the reality?
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 1: The one thing that I think is really interesting too
Speaker 1: when you bring up the people like Andrew Tape, and
Speaker 1: I would expand that to maybe I'm being unfair, but
Speaker 1: most self help gurus on the internet is that they're
Speaker 1: not offering you anything. They're parasites. I think people need
Speaker 1: to realize that that self help a lot of the
Speaker 1: time is parasitic, especially when it's people who are like
Speaker 1: offering you courses in that respect of finding meaning. Whether
Speaker 1: it's through and Andrew Tates case pimping, I guess, I
Speaker 1: don't know, but even people who might have taken what
Speaker 1: started out as a good idea and then kind of
Speaker 1: turned it into something else, like Jordan Peterson. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm not trying to cast shade on him necessarily, because
Speaker 1: I do know that his books, at least his first book,
Speaker 1: has helped a lot of people. But I'm just making
Speaker 1: the point that I think when you run a business,
Speaker 1: especially via the Internet, which is all about capturing attention,
Speaker 1: what you're actually doing is acting as a parasite. Oh
Speaker 1: one thing though, when that sucks a way that that
Speaker 1: doesn't provide meaning, it just makes things worse.
Speaker 4: It is a thing that I would like to say
Speaker 4: that really helped me out when my father died and
Speaker 4: when this whole war started. It might sound silly, It
Speaker 4: might sound silly what I have to say, thanks to Danielli,
Speaker 4: because Drunken Talist podcast is actually good stuff that you
Speaker 4: should be listening to.
Speaker 1: Yes it is.
Speaker 4: I'm not even joking about the stuff pick and this
Speaker 4: is this was something that really helped my headspace. So
Speaker 4: I'm not I'm advertising to nearly show. But if you
Speaker 4: if you look for truth, truth through sense, Drunken Tais
Speaker 4: gives you the headspace that you really need. Not joking here,
Speaker 4: and he doesn't sell you courses. That's important.
Speaker 2: And I think beside the you know you, guys point
Speaker 2: out to the scammers in the self help board, and
Speaker 2: there's plenty of those, and I think related to our discussion,
Speaker 2: possibly even worse are the scammers in the political world.
Speaker 2: And I think that's the difference from the past, And
Speaker 2: this is the difference why it's harder to get out
Speaker 2: of this right now, because the thing that there have
Speaker 2: been tremendously difficult problems to solve when people decided to
Speaker 2: solve them by scapegoating instead of addressing these impossible problems
Speaker 2: has always been around whether there is one side or
Speaker 2: the other, or the witchess or whatever, there was always
Speaker 2: something that you could blame it on to avoid looking
Speaker 2: at the actual issues. I think the problem that we
Speaker 2: have right now is the fact that before as much
Speaker 2: as traditional media was terrible for a variety of reasons.
Speaker 2: At least there were some minimum standards that you are
Speaker 2: supposed to keep. And yeah you are shady, and yeah
Speaker 2: you push propagan and yeah or whatever, but you have
Speaker 2: to at least keep up appearances. Now where anybody can
Speaker 2: build a following online by just becoming a political pundit,
Speaker 2: and if you play the algorithms correctly, you can get
Speaker 2: a humongous following. Now the problem is that where is
Speaker 2: the audience sculpture? Audience sculpture Unfortunately, as we understand, the
Speaker 2: way the algorithms are set up are built or anger, outrage,
Speaker 2: and just in general like fanning the flames of the
Speaker 2: political So the idea that people now hate each other
Speaker 2: online and they are there cheering for civil war is
Speaker 2: not strange. Is as crystal to put it, what did
Speaker 2: you expect? It's like a direct consequence of what it
Speaker 2: was very clearly where it was going to go. Now
Speaker 2: it is where the problems come. See, And that's, by
Speaker 2: the way, where I think the cur assassination is a
Speaker 2: tricky one in the sense that what happens now is
Speaker 2: that so far that process has largely been all benefit
Speaker 2: and no problem for the people engaging in it. You know,
Speaker 2: be as controversial as you could possibly be, because you'll
Speaker 2: get a ton of audience, you will make a ton
Speaker 2: of money. Great, now we realize that there are bad
Speaker 2: consequences in the sense that there are people who will
Speaker 2: flip out because they don't like some controversial message they
Speaker 2: are pushing and will because society is collapsing around them.
Speaker 2: Mental health is in the toilet, and every single decide
Speaker 2: to blow your brains out. So that's gonna you know,
Speaker 2: there's still a high incentive to push controversy and outrage
Speaker 2: and fan in the flames. But now I think it's
Speaker 2: the first time that we go like, oh damn, there
Speaker 2: may be a price to pay that in the hands
Speaker 2: of some insane person there. People will not just talk
Speaker 2: sheet online. People will actually act on it, which is
Speaker 2: the same thing why people now are cheating for civil
Speaker 2: war and all of that.
Speaker 1: And that that brings up a difficulty for me too,
Speaker 1: because it reminds me of exactly what happened after Salmon
Speaker 1: Rushdi released the Satanic Verses in nineteen eighty eight, because
Speaker 1: that was what a lot of people who I think
Speaker 1: were very afraid in publishing, and I understand why his
Speaker 1: translators were killed, you know, and attacked, So I get it,
Speaker 1: though at the same time there were there were people
Speaker 1: who were very insincerely or maybe sincerely saying, well, what
Speaker 1: did you expect? You offended Islam, which is kind of
Speaker 1: its offensive in its own way too, because that pretends
Speaker 1: that everybody who's a Muslim feels the same way about
Speaker 1: the Satanic verses, and that allowed uh, you know, Iyotota
Speaker 1: Kamane to dictate terms in that sense, which included putting
Speaker 1: out an international hit on salmon Rushdi and and I
Speaker 1: think that that sort of gets into something you and
Speaker 1: I have talked about, Danielle, where it's like we're kind
Speaker 1: of trapped because like, we don't want to tell people
Speaker 1: not to say what they want to say, however controversial, publicly,
Speaker 1: because that's their right and they should exercise it in
Speaker 1: any seating of ground on that especially right now given
Speaker 1: how there is a crackdown being pushed by the state.
Speaker 1: Is essentially giving into that. But at the same time,
Speaker 1: you're not wrong that it is clear that you're then
Speaker 1: incentivizing or adding to the incentive for someone crazy who
Speaker 1: has no meaning in their life and as we know,
Speaker 1: and who's lonely, and as we know that's a very
Speaker 1: big problem, as we've said, to take action. So it's
Speaker 1: a sort of paradox that we're stuck in, at least
Speaker 1: in the United States, because of how much value we
Speaker 1: place on free expression. So do you see that the
Speaker 1: challenge we thought we talked about a little bit. I
Speaker 1: want to let you.
Speaker 2: It's worse now because Rashley was a guy who published
Speaker 2: a book making fun of like some here is that
Speaker 2: twenty four to seven news cycle where it's five zillion
Speaker 2: tweets a day, five zillion YouTube video, five zillion where
Speaker 2: it never ends. So the problem is that whereas before,
Speaker 2: you know, maybe you are mad when you read the newspaper,
Speaker 2: but then you put it away and you have the
Speaker 2: rest of your life. Now, as people are online constantly,
Speaker 2: they are like, I'll start after the cirk saying I
Speaker 2: would start a day totally fine, and I open social
Speaker 2: media and I'm in a shitty mood an hour later.
Speaker 2: And this is because we are bombarded with people who
Speaker 2: are merchants or outrage, who are merchants of hate, who
Speaker 2: make their money spreading hate and fan in the flames.
Speaker 2: And we do that, not an article here and there.
Speaker 2: They do that twenty four to seven. It's a constant thing.
Speaker 4: Is this is why, by the way, I take my
Speaker 4: journalism very seriously and I get very angry when someone
Speaker 4: calls me an influencer. I despise being called an influencer.
Speaker 4: It's just it's something that I feel disgusted about because
Speaker 4: I take my fashion very seriously. I respected and I
Speaker 4: tried to and I have to agree with DANIELI about this,
Speaker 4: about the fact that I'm a member of a Livian
Speaker 4: journalists association and a lot of people, you know, I
Speaker 4: spoke about this with some people who comment on this
Speaker 4: ongoing Ukraine war online and I thought they also were
Speaker 4: into this whole journalism stuff, and I started talking about
Speaker 4: them about sources and everything, and I'm like, okay, we
Speaker 4: have an ethics code and we have like this and
Speaker 4: this and this which you have to do. And then
Speaker 4: they were just uninformed about like the basic standards of
Speaker 4: what you have to do and everything, and a lot
Speaker 4: of these cases there. Of course they are bad journalists
Speaker 4: and not saying like a lot of bad people out there. However,
Speaker 4: when when I understood that, these guys stopped communicating with
Speaker 4: me after I just said that, Okay, so you want
Speaker 4: to interview me with this stuff. Okay, I have no magratitation.
Speaker 4: I need to check you through this. The heat is
Speaker 4: op sex stuff. And they had no idea that this
Speaker 4: even existed, and they are just like super popular out there.
Speaker 4: This there's a reason why this thing, when they can
Speaker 4: seriously done properly, is important, which is why you know,
Speaker 4: I became journalist because I read Hunter S. Thompson and
Speaker 4: that's that's that's how I do this. And you know
Speaker 4: I lately I've I've taken to to the fact that, yeah,
Speaker 4: I call him, that's only called my I deserve. I've
Speaker 4: earned to call myself Gonzo, to be honest, and I
Speaker 4: take pride in this, which is why the nearly these
Speaker 4: point is very accurate. We you, we might not like this,
Speaker 4: but the fact that the fact that you have an
Speaker 4: editor out there that balances out your thoughts and that
Speaker 4: you're not just you know what, first thing that pops
Speaker 4: into your head. You just can't publish it instantly, that
Speaker 4: you have to go that it has to go through
Speaker 4: some some sort of some aspect of being like, okay,
Speaker 4: we can't publish this for this and this reason. This
Speaker 4: also moderates the discussion levels because social media really blew
Speaker 4: this all up. Social media made this whole thing more.
Speaker 4: You know, everyone can. This is how fake news were born.
Speaker 4: And social media really allowed everyone with their craziest that is,
Speaker 4: to be plopped out, gain audience, and and no one
Speaker 4: fact checks them, like no one, No one does. Fact
Speaker 4: checking does not matter because you know it's out there
Speaker 4: and even if if, even if something gets blocked or
Speaker 4: or or something GE's you know, pushed out as oh,
Speaker 4: oh this was fake news. Yeah, it's gone already. It's
Speaker 4: already gone. It's out there, and no one cares.
Speaker 1: The problem that you are highlighting that both of you
Speaker 1: were highlighting. I actually really liked how you put it, Danielle,
Speaker 1: where you said, back in the day, you pick up
Speaker 1: a newspaper, you read an op ed and you're just like,
Speaker 1: what the hell is this? If you wanted to express
Speaker 1: that outrage that you're feeling, you had to sit down
Speaker 1: and write a letter by hand, maybe with a typewriter
Speaker 1: or a computer. You had to print it out, you
Speaker 1: had to fold it up, put it in an envelope,
Speaker 1: send it to the you like, find out what the
Speaker 1: address is the paper, send it there. I mean, so
Speaker 1: many little things like that, essentially got in the way
Speaker 1: of people sort of fanning the flames. As you said,
Speaker 1: Now all they have to do is just they're reading
Speaker 1: it on their phone anyway, and then just click the
Speaker 1: share button and then say what they want to say
Speaker 1: or whatever. And in that sense, these merchants of outrage,
Speaker 1: as you put at Danielle, they are like they're essentially
Speaker 1: outsourcing that part of their work to the reading public.
Speaker 1: And we're seeing that. We were seeing that right after
Speaker 1: the Charlie Kirk assassination of both people being gleeful about
Speaker 1: it and then sharing some terrible article in the Nation
Speaker 1: saying that he had it coming. And then you had
Speaker 1: people saying this is the worst thing ever. If you're
Speaker 1: gleeful about it, I hope you get canceled, and sharing
Speaker 1: all the statements made by members of the Trump administration
Speaker 1: essentially threatening the same thing, or Republicans threatening the same thing,
Speaker 1: like Clay Higgins. So it just these people, but by
Speaker 1: essentially outsourcing that to the public using social media, they're
Speaker 1: able to abdicate responsibility for turning up the temperature. And
Speaker 1: that's the problem.
Speaker 2: And that's what I find disgusting about these people, is
Speaker 2: that there's very much a case of throwing the rock
Speaker 2: and hiding the hand. Because they make their money, they
Speaker 2: build fortunes, They build empires on hatred, on the demon
Speaker 2: izing either another side of politically or or a group
Speaker 2: whatever that may be, whatever their group of choice may be.
Speaker 2: That is the bad guys. They spend twenty four to
Speaker 2: seven arguing now they are the ultimate evil, and then
Speaker 2: when one of the deranged follower will plant a bomb
Speaker 2: or shoot somebody or something, they'll go like me, I
Speaker 2: never advocated violence. It's like, you piece of shit. You
Speaker 2: did everything other than saying go shooting. You know, this
Speaker 2: is what people do constantly. And in that sense, there's yeah,
Speaker 2: look at the people doing that, look at the people
Speaker 2: like the and they are perfect because like the response
Speaker 2: right now to the correct thing has been exactly that
Speaker 2: has been, like, we need to destroy anyone who's not
Speaker 2: a full blown fascist and doesn't believe that we should
Speaker 2: hand the homeless for sport. It's clearly an evil gay
Speaker 2: communists to need to be murdered. And I'm just like,
Speaker 2: this is obviously the result of these merch and of outrage,
Speaker 2: having planted, having been rewarded for years with tons of
Speaker 2: money and attention by planting seeds of hatred so that
Speaker 2: you can't have a fucking conversation anymore with somebody without
Speaker 2: it evolving immediately and we need to shoot you. And
Speaker 2: that's the reason why Dan Carlyn is not doing common sense,
Speaker 2: whereas there's every other asshole with a political platform is
Speaker 2: pushing the most extreme scapegoat impossible because that's what the
Speaker 2: algorithms reward. The problem is, Okay, let's talk solution. What
Speaker 2: is the solution that? Never mind that you would actually
Speaker 2: need a good government to do that, and that's clearly
Speaker 2: not the case. But if you add a good government,
Speaker 2: what do you do. You have a government that mandates
Speaker 2: that social media platform have to change their algorithms to
Speaker 2: encourage puppies and flowers and touching the grass and stuff.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's clearly not good in a sense in
Speaker 2: the government. But the current state that we have now
Speaker 2: where the where the default answer is pushing hatred and
Speaker 2: what's going to lead to increasing level of violence, Well
Speaker 2: that's not a solution neither, clearly. So I'm not saying
Speaker 2: the government need to mandate the way algorithms work, but
Speaker 2: I'm also saying the current system is not bad. It's
Speaker 2: so beyond the bed that I'm willing to listen to
Speaker 2: pretty much any alternative At this point.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure how much of it help, but I'm
Speaker 1: just spitballing here if I mean, because I don't, I don't.
Speaker 1: It clearly doesn't seem to matter. Anonymity is, specifically, is
Speaker 1: what I'm thinking of. It doesn't seem to matter. People
Speaker 1: are openly saying things with their names attached to what
Speaker 1: they're saying. But I'm wondering if maybe like requiring users
Speaker 1: to not have user names, maybe making it or like
Speaker 1: you have a username, but then underneath it it says
Speaker 1: what your actual name is, maybe we should just maybe
Speaker 1: everybody should be if like you, if you want to
Speaker 1: use X, or if you want to use Facebook, or
Speaker 1: if you want to use whatever, you have to doc
Speaker 1: yourself essentially, so you have to take responsibility for what
Speaker 1: you say. I don't think that's a good solution for.
Speaker 4: Multiple That's that's what they're do in Britain where they
Speaker 4: now they've taken the age of edification to an absurd level,
Speaker 4: where like and they've taken for Spotify even and.
Speaker 1: They've been taking censorship to we're not even censorship but
Speaker 1: just punishing speech to an extreme level. So I don't
Speaker 1: think we want to go down that road if we
Speaker 1: want to remain American. I mean, that's that's how I
Speaker 1: look at it. Yeah, I don't know, I I you know,
Speaker 1: like I said, it's spitballing. I can't think of a
Speaker 1: disincentive for that kind of thing. And again, it's also
Speaker 1: really complicated because if we try to rely on the
Speaker 1: state to do that, it does kind of fly in
Speaker 1: the face of our laws that we have. We'd have
Speaker 1: to do a major rethinking of our our essentially our
Speaker 1: our First Amendment, which I don't think is a good idea.
Speaker 1: It just I mean, and I'm biased, obviously, but I
Speaker 1: just I also think it's a bad idea because it
Speaker 1: also doesn't really match up with the reality of people
Speaker 1: making decisions to commit violent acts. The people who commit
Speaker 1: violence are never pushed to I mean that the research
Speaker 1: is pretty clear that people decide to be violent and
Speaker 1: then find justifications for that violence after the fact or
Speaker 1: in the in the act of doing it. But they
Speaker 1: were going to commit violence no matter what.
Speaker 2: I don't think somebody is just born like I want
Speaker 2: to go shoot somebody today. I think, sure, But there's
Speaker 2: a context in which they leave, right, they talk to
Speaker 2: the set, they read. It all goes to influence people
Speaker 2: one way.
Speaker 4: I mean, I mean, Danielle, don't you like have a
Speaker 4: list of like what do I need to do today?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 4: I need to buy milk? Can you to fix my car?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 4: That massive shooting? Yeah, I forgot almost forgot about that one.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 1: The biggest predictor of violent behavior, I mean, and I
Speaker 1: don't think that this data has changed in the fifteen
Speaker 1: years since I first looked at it, But the biggest
Speaker 1: predictor of violent behavior is exposure to violence, like actual violence,
Speaker 1: not video game violence or media violence or rhetoric. It's
Speaker 1: it's it's real world violence. And that's the thing that's
Speaker 1: actually kind of interesting.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: I just thought of that as I was saying it
Speaker 1: is that the footage of Charlie Kirk being killed, or
Speaker 1: of George Floyd being killed, or that Ukrainian woman being killed. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's not that's not media.
Speaker 4: That's actually he is what I would like to say
Speaker 4: to you, because I would like to agree to you
Speaker 4: because out of all of you guys' studying, but I
Speaker 4: have been exposed to the most amounts of ship, brutal
Speaker 4: violence here, no no, no, and this is and I can
Speaker 4: I can tell you that this is this people really
Speaker 4: need I go to therapist. I like when we spoke there,
Speaker 4: I had I had my own my own trauma things
Speaker 4: and they pop up randomly and in the ways that
Speaker 4: you don't even understand. Because when you speak to the
Speaker 4: soldiers with even motivation in Ukraine, and when they start
Speaker 4: talking about their horrific events, and when they start talking
Speaker 4: about random deaths as if it was Tuesday with complete detachment, Yeah,
Speaker 4: I can, I can see how if you're not like
Speaker 4: this is this is why they're really pushing, pushing out
Speaker 4: there for for these people in Ukraine, ternsically go and
Speaker 4: get some help because it is necessary. Otherwise it is
Speaker 4: going to be horrible. Simply horrible. Violence leaves a arc
Speaker 4: on you, and especially real life violence, because a lot
Speaker 4: of people don't even understand what does it even mean?
Speaker 4: It is something horrible that you see and that at
Speaker 4: the moment in time it seems like something normal. But
Speaker 4: you know, I'm sad to say, but I will never
Speaker 4: forget how a burnt body smells like it is always
Speaker 4: stuck in my head and I'm just it's just something
Speaker 4: I have to deal with, and and those things are
Speaker 4: those things that people again, which is why I do
Speaker 4: my own episodes so sometimes in a very raw matter,
Speaker 4: very brutally, because when people go into this very violent
Speaker 4: aspect people, when people treat violence like it's something that
Speaker 4: can be joked about, right, when they treat its threats
Speaker 4: like it's something just just normal, that sort of normalization. Really,
Speaker 4: if you're not prepared for what you're about to see,
Speaker 4: which you are about to experience, then this really opens
Speaker 4: up the floodgate because in a lot of cases, I've
Speaker 4: also seen a bunch of bunch of media people who
Speaker 4: then you know, who have thought that, oh, well, I'm
Speaker 4: just going to go into this and do war journalism
Speaker 4: is going to be fun, you know, excitement and adventure,
Speaker 4: and then they see through hotro and then then then
Speaker 4: it's it stops being funny and entertaining really really quickly.
Speaker 4: Real violence is not entertaining. Real violence is not fun.
Speaker 4: Real violence is something that that I don't wish anyone
Speaker 4: to experience. Real love close it is it is, it is,
Speaker 4: this is this is the point where a lot of people,
Speaker 4: you know, only people who haven't seen real war and stuff.
Speaker 4: They only they can glorify it. It is impossible to
Speaker 4: justify it anywhere or form, And and it is just
Speaker 4: something that once you, once you if once you get
Speaker 4: stuck into this, understand how disgusting that that stuff is
Speaker 4: and and that that is a really I'm sunny that
Speaker 4: I'm speaking about this, but once you say about this
Speaker 4: exposure to violence, it's not just it's not just exposure.
Speaker 4: It just the fact that they think it's cool. And
Speaker 4: then they see the sanitized parts of this, when when
Speaker 4: war gets turned into lines on maps instead of the
Speaker 4: greedy parts. When you when you think it's cool, then
Speaker 4: then yeah, it's credible. Okay, I'm sorry for yapping gone.
Speaker 1: About no no, no, no, no, no it's okay, No, that
Speaker 1: was valuable. No no, it's valuable. It's don't don't apologize it.
Speaker 1: It's just it made me think though, like because I
Speaker 1: was trying to say, like I I was trying to
Speaker 1: piece out, like uh a piece together this like sort
Speaker 1: of difference between real footage, unfiltered footage of extreme real
Speaker 1: violence versus people consuming violent media or violent rhetoric. And
Speaker 1: you know, just based on what I have learned about
Speaker 1: exposure to violence, uh. Through research out there is that
Speaker 1: I think maybe watching unfiltered footage of violence is it's
Speaker 1: probably not it's it's definitely not the same as being
Speaker 1: next to it, but it's definitely much more extreme than
Speaker 1: you know, watching uh, you know, like a discussion about it,
Speaker 1: or people talking about it, or or or even a
Speaker 1: censored version of it. And dare I say it. I
Speaker 1: don't want to put too fine a point on and Danielle,
Speaker 1: your point is still very well taken about people ratcheting
Speaker 1: up the temperature. But I think the footage of Charlie
Speaker 1: Kirk and his throat blown out from twelve different angles,
Speaker 1: and not to mention the thousands of people who were
Speaker 1: actually there seeing it.
Speaker 4: I am not watching that footage. I haven't seen it
Speaker 4: because because because I hate when that shits. Real violencehould
Speaker 4: be deported on and shown even but not made a
Speaker 4: spectacle out of right.
Speaker 1: And that's what I'm saying is and that becomes more
Speaker 1: of a risk when everybody has a camera in their pockets.
Speaker 1: So what I'm saying is the exposure to that action,
Speaker 1: the actual killing of him, was far more damaging than
Speaker 1: anything he ever said, and far more damaging than anyone
Speaker 1: gleefully celebrating it, never said, and far more damaging than
Speaker 1: even people cheering on Civil War ever said. That's I
Speaker 1: think the real damage.
Speaker 4: The real people cheating on civil war disgusted me utterly
Speaker 4: because they don't know what war.
Speaker 1: Actually And that's actually sort of what I wanted to
Speaker 1: also let Danielle go off on that, because we've talked
Speaker 1: about that so many times and it's just gotten worse
Speaker 1: over the years. But I'm gonna let you both go
Speaker 1: off on that because that's sort of the thing that
Speaker 1: I think is really frustrating to me too. And it's
Speaker 1: only because I've been fortunate enough to get to know
Speaker 1: you guys, but also read history. But so whenever I
Speaker 1: hear somebody with a non American accent say Americans just
Speaker 1: don't get it, it's gotten me feeling really warm inside,
Speaker 1: you know, like people just don't get it when it
Speaker 1: comes to cheering on Civil War. They don't know what
Speaker 1: they're asking to happen. They're not they don't know what
Speaker 1: they're begging to happen, it seems, so I guess that's
Speaker 1: what I want to let you guys, you know, get into,
Speaker 1: is like, like, what would you tell Americans cheering this
Speaker 1: stuff on, Like what do they not understand?
Speaker 4: I'll just really quick. My wife is just busting me.
Speaker 4: My licee is really really simple. Like I have an
Speaker 4: episode which is a material from Russia, from a Russian opposition,
Speaker 4: like actual media sides. Who guys who just went to
Speaker 4: all the hospitals where Russian people who came home from
Speaker 4: the war are being you know, is a kind of
Speaker 4: word that are waiting line for their prosthetics for six
Speaker 4: months and yeah, that sort of stuff. I have an
Speaker 4: episode on that. That's one of my hardest ones. If
Speaker 4: you go listen to that, it's very rough and brutal.
Speaker 4: But sorry for self promotion, but that's check their attitudes.
Speaker 4: Just a bunch of direct quotes. That's all. I'm sorry
Speaker 4: for just interrupting here. Just I have to really answer
Speaker 4: to my wife here. But it's a heavy subject and
Speaker 4: I have episodes on this. Give them a listen, and
Speaker 4: then if you want to civil war, well then then
Speaker 4: then you probably go go get some help.
Speaker 2: There's one thing that I want to touch on right
Speaker 2: before we jump into the civil war cheating part, which
Speaker 2: is regarding what you were saying, you know, when you
Speaker 2: said I don't think the data is different from when
Speaker 2: I look fifteen years ago. I think it is. It
Speaker 2: is why because when you looking and I understand where
Speaker 2: you're coming from, and diagree, because you are coming from
Speaker 2: the idea of when they wear the campaigns against the
Speaker 2: video games, because where censorship was the answer to some
Speaker 2: social changes that some stuck up person didn't like, and
Speaker 2: so they were yelling at video games, they were yelling
Speaker 2: at music or yelling at and it's like Jesus man,
Speaker 2: it's like that was censorship against the basic artistic expression
Speaker 2: and things like that terrible. So I understand why you
Speaker 2: would have a very sensitive spot to it. I think
Speaker 2: the difference now, though, is that fifteen years ago social
Speaker 2: media was in infancy. It was barely a thing. What
Speaker 2: I'm talking about is not just the video game or
Speaker 2: the music or the thing. I'm talking primarily about the
Speaker 2: impact of social media and the social media influencers in politics.
Speaker 2: And when it's not the song you put on, it's
Speaker 2: not even a game you play around there. But when
Speaker 2: you are talking about something that's twenty four to seven
Speaker 2: is what people spend most of their days looking at,
Speaker 2: I think the impact is very different. And so I
Speaker 2: see whereas saying, you know, words don't cause violence in
Speaker 2: the abstract, I could agree when we're talking about yeah,
Speaker 2: maybe you know odds it makes me do it kind
Speaker 2: of thing. Was sort of ridiculous. But when you start
Speaker 2: looking at you listen to somebody for four hours a
Speaker 2: day and this person tells you that this group of
Speaker 2: people are the devil, and every problem you've ever read
Speaker 2: is because of those people. Of course it's gonna lead
Speaker 2: to violence. It's like, it's not even if it's like
Speaker 2: it's a guarantee.
Speaker 1: So there is the probability I suppose you could. You
Speaker 1: could make that argument.
Speaker 2: Yeah, not that everybody's gonna engage in it, but if
Speaker 2: you have an audience of a million people, yeah, there
Speaker 2: is gonna be the guy who's for as you put it,
Speaker 2: it's already inclined for a variety of reason. But there
Speaker 2: will seize that message and run with it. It's it's pretty
Speaker 2: much a given. So I think that's the only way
Speaker 2: I would tweak. And I don't have a solution for it,
Speaker 2: because as we said, it's not that I say oh thanks,
Speaker 2: or social media. I don't know what the solution is.
Speaker 2: But the problem that there is a connection between violent rhetoric.
Speaker 2: I mean, you don't end up, you don't create the
Speaker 2: Holocaust without years of anti Jewish propaganda before, it just
Speaker 2: doesn't happen.
Speaker 4: There's a saying like that. So the only there's the
Speaker 4: saying here that you know, people blame Stalin for purges
Speaker 4: and for massive crimes, but who wrote the fifty three
Speaker 4: thousand donos to those reports?
Speaker 2: Exactly exactly, And that's where me there's a connection there
Speaker 2: between propaganda and violence.
Speaker 1: And that's true too, especially with like how people perhaps respond.
Speaker 1: And this actually would be really interesting to study. I
Speaker 1: would love to see some more data on it, on
Speaker 1: existential language, because that's what you're talking about, the idea
Speaker 1: of you know, like, well, it's funny, we were kind
Speaker 1: of joking about this, but like people were starting to
Speaker 1: use increasingly existential language to talk about cultural things, whether
Speaker 1: it was you know, casting a black man as Snape
Speaker 1: in the Harry Potter series or getting worked up about
Speaker 1: a shirt having hot babes on it. At the end
Speaker 1: of the day, what is going on with that with
Speaker 1: making everything political, as people say colloquially, is you're really
Speaker 1: creating existential suggestions in people's mind that something is deeply wrong.
Speaker 1: Not just maybe kind of annoying or offensive to very
Speaker 1: particular people. There's something much more serious about that, and
Speaker 1: that has to do with like grabbing attention and so
Speaker 1: on and so forth. They don't have to get into
Speaker 1: like why existential language was getting used. It's I think
Speaker 1: it's almost certainly about attention grabbing. But yeah, maybe the
Speaker 1: use of existential language and framing, framing, that's the word
Speaker 1: I was looking for. Maybe that has a cost to
Speaker 1: the human psyche that we just don't really appreciate that
Speaker 1: I don't appreciate I could be off on that if
Speaker 1: if I was to criticize my own position on things,
Speaker 1: it's that I don't know if there is a cost
Speaker 1: to using existential language and framing on things in speech
Speaker 1: sincerely and in a way that is compelling to other people.
Speaker 1: I don't know how one could possibly legislate their way
Speaker 1: out of that. I don't think. I mean, as you said, Danielle,
Speaker 1: we're and you know, as I was saying, we're kind
Speaker 1: of trapped in that respect. But I think that that
Speaker 1: is an interesting angle that I I that I want
Speaker 1: to think about more so, I do wanna I'm gonna
Speaker 1: I'm gonna put a pin in that in my own head. Uh,
Speaker 1: and then consider that down the line, please do.
Speaker 4: But just that, Uh, Well, my wife's listening to all
Speaker 4: this stuff and about the lowliness because everything, and she
Speaker 4: just messages me, you know what, I think it's she
Speaker 4: just messages me that maybe it's time to have kids.
Speaker 4: Maybe that would help, because you know, how how do
Speaker 4: you survive the whole low and this stuff? Well, well
Speaker 4: just just have kids. Kids will bring some meaning in
Speaker 4: you if you don't have it already, I think, so
Speaker 4: find some way how to how to get this meaning,
Speaker 4: I suppose.
Speaker 1: Right, and that and that seems to be sort of
Speaker 1: the core of what people don't understand when they're calling
Speaker 1: for more violence, for civil war, for retribution and all
Speaker 1: that is, they're they're encouraging increased meaninglessness.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think there steps. We will have a lot
Speaker 2: to say because of direct experience, and I think that's
Speaker 2: where it comes in for reality. But like to throw
Speaker 2: my two sense before I jump in, I think it's
Speaker 2: it's just insane because these people think that somehow they
Speaker 2: have this image, like they watch The Patriot with Mel
Speaker 2: Gibson one too many times and they think that they
Speaker 2: are gonna grab their masket and kill the evildoers and
Speaker 2: restore the greatness of American society. The reality is nobody
Speaker 2: wins these games. Nobody wins low engagement civil war like that.
Speaker 2: You're gonna have a bunch of murders tick for that
Speaker 2: where you kill their guy, they kill their guy, you
Speaker 2: kill and absolutely nobody comes out on top. In that way.
Speaker 2: You just have a giant blood bat for a really
Speaker 2: long time. And this is not a I'm not even
Speaker 2: taking about like it's not a regular war where sure
Speaker 2: an army may eventually end up winning regardless of what
Speaker 2: the coast may be. I'm talking about this low level
Speaker 2: murder back and forth at the neighborhood level, like militia.
Speaker 2: Nobody wins those games.
Speaker 1: And years of lead the troubles, Yeah, all that stuff
Speaker 1: wean you just don't know shit, you know.
Speaker 2: And that's the problem that I'm seeing, like a tone
Speaker 2: of the mess suges I saw online or like, well,
Speaker 2: I'm not exactly cheating for it, but it's necessary and
Speaker 2: that's what we'll need to be done to bring back
Speaker 2: the United States.
Speaker 4: And two things here, Two things here. Number one in
Speaker 4: Trump election, Putin's official Putin's official idea was to cause
Speaker 4: the Civil War in the United States. That's that's that's
Speaker 4: put ins and goal for starters. If someone wants to
Speaker 4: talk about winning. Secondly, what does even winning mean in
Speaker 4: this case? They don't even know what winning is. You
Speaker 4: can't even conceptualize what is a win in civil war?
Speaker 4: What you killed fifty percent of your country? Good luck
Speaker 4: with the economy then.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think with all that said, I think it's
Speaker 1: clear that things are not in a good place right
Speaker 1: now in the United States, and I think it's pretty
Speaker 1: clear that you guys recognize it for various personal reasons,
Speaker 1: but also just I think being you know, mature and
Speaker 1: well acquainted with history and how human beings work. And
Speaker 1: there's not really many things in the way of solutions.
Speaker 1: But I do appreciate both of you being here to
Speaker 1: help us go through all this, help me work through
Speaker 1: my own feelings on it a bit too. I guess
Speaker 1: I just want to let you guys, have you know
Speaker 1: the last word in what do you think needs to
Speaker 1: be understood by the people who are cheering this stuff on?
Speaker 1: Like what do they need to understand? And maybe that
Speaker 1: that they don't understand now, like what what do you
Speaker 1: how do you want to close that close that circle there.
Speaker 4: I was almost afraid that you were going to say
Speaker 4: what needs to be done? And then I have a
Speaker 4: leton look for you. But no, no, no, here here is
Speaker 4: well what can I say? You know, come visit me
Speaker 4: at the time? What that I have pelling machine? But seriously,
Speaker 4: then that's that's only partially a joke. I like visiting.
Speaker 4: They're only a part of that a joke. And and
Speaker 4: and the fact is that what I would say is
Speaker 4: the practical advice is which is from one of my
Speaker 4: books on journalism that I studied upon, but Russian journalists
Speaker 4: luxilitives on of and he wrote a very important thing
Speaker 4: that a true professional journalist never never offends anyone unintentionally.
Speaker 4: If you want to offense someone, make it precise and
Speaker 4: exact right, then you know why you're doing this. But
Speaker 4: if you're callous and just casual about this, then of
Speaker 4: course people will get angry because don't be that just
Speaker 4: you know, be a person that only only offends people intentionally.
Speaker 4: Be that kind of person. Think about this. It's actually
Speaker 4: it's deeper than you think. That's a practical advice.
Speaker 1: Here, Danielle. I'll let you have the last word on this.
Speaker 1: Then what do people not understand? Like, what do they
Speaker 1: need to understand?
Speaker 2: I think is regardless of how well justified you think
Speaker 2: you are, because of course, every single person think that
Speaker 2: their position is the correct one, and they have reasons
Speaker 2: because the other guys are the assholes and stuff. And
Speaker 2: in some cases you may be right, but it doesn't
Speaker 2: matter because once you start playing the as versus them game,
Speaker 2: nobody wins. Once you start the dehumanization of either the
Speaker 2: other guys politics, or religion or whatever.
Speaker 1: The hell.
Speaker 2: When it gets to that level, even if you are right,
Speaker 2: it doesn't help because it leads to just full on
Speaker 2: conflict and then we're back to shooting at each other
Speaker 2: with no decent outcome. As painful as it may be
Speaker 2: to have the discussion with the person that you think
Speaker 2: is embracing ideas that are beyond horrific, I think it's
Speaker 2: extremely important to remind people A man, I think your
Speaker 2: point of view may suck, you think mind sucks, but
Speaker 2: you know you want your kids to grow up healthy.
Speaker 2: I do too. I want you know, hear some Tomatoes
Speaker 2: series like bring it back to a level where humans
Speaker 2: are not reduced just to one idea, and unfortunately we
Speaker 2: do that all. I mean, even if we do that
Speaker 2: all the time, look a like COVID. In COVID, there
Speaker 2: were people who were either full on like we need
Speaker 2: to nuke the unvaccinated, or there were people that if
Speaker 2: you took a COVID vaccine, you are the enemy because
Speaker 2: you allied yourself with the evil powers of the world.
Speaker 2: It's like Jesus Christ Man, these are your neighbors who
Speaker 2: are trying to figure out what to do in a massive,
Speaker 2: stressful situation with very limited information. They may make a
Speaker 2: damn choice according to you, but who cares. That doesn't
Speaker 2: make them the enemy, you know what I mean? That
Speaker 2: may make them. Oh, I disagree with your choice.
Speaker 4: To hit an oue with me. I now understand why
Speaker 4: the Diccletian went back to these cabbages. I mean it
Speaker 4: makes sense.
Speaker 2: Actually, yeah, no, I think it's important because otherwise we
Speaker 2: don't get out of it. Otherwise it's just a blood
Speaker 2: bath and there's nothing good that will come from it.
Speaker 2: So I think it's important to and doesn't mean you
Speaker 2: need to compromise your ideas if you think that somebody
Speaker 2: absolutely hateful ideas, figure out if there's a way that
Speaker 2: maybe by relating on a human level, you can bring
Speaker 2: down the temperature. There's this famous story that I absolutely
Speaker 2: love of this one African American bluesman befriended a bunch
Speaker 2: of KKK guys and somehow, through his ability to befriend
Speaker 2: these people who hate him, he was able to have
Speaker 2: a bunch of them turning their KKK membership and be
Speaker 2: done with it. So to me, that's easier said than done.
Speaker 2: But that's the game. Going on Twitter saying we need
Speaker 2: to massacre all the people who believe this. Yeah, not
Speaker 2: a good idea.
Speaker 5: Not your kind of.
Speaker 3: You've seen kind of fun everything, not kind of peep book,
Speaker 3: something in your makeup, don't see to U.
Speaker 2: Wait, not chuck.
Speaker 5: Peep to big, not check a bee by fine news,
Speaker 5: do't talk And that's not but STI