The Need for Term Limits

We here at DanCarlin dot com receive lots of email from people complaining that we don't release enough content. We'd like you to understand that this is done for your own good. Too much Dan is not good for you. He's like cigarettes, booze, and jelly donuts . He is to be experienced in moderation, if at all. And if by chance you're unlucky enough to get hooked, well, you'll be a cautionary tale to everyone else. If we can save even one child, it'll be worth it, right? That's common sense . You're canary in a coal mine since 1994. It's common sense with Dan Carlin . I think I was feeling a bit nostalgic when I asked the legendary or is it mythical? I mean judge my call. The legendary producer Ben to put together, you know, one of our old school intros. And in fact, that's an old school intro he put together a uh long time ago. So that's a double old school intro . But people have been asking for us to uh release some content. I don't blame them. We haven't gotten anything out in 2026, which is relatively inexcusable, but if you watched my work process, you could understand how it happens. My wife is yelling at me saying you are a unitasker, not a multitasker, stick to one thing. And so I get nose to the grindstone about something like hardcore history . Can't even do hardcore history addendum, which was designed to be something to do in between things, because I you know, a lot of authors want to come on, but I can't read their books because I'm reading now , you know and because I can't get the common sense show out for one reason or another, because I can't do one that does what I want it to do every time I switch over to do it. It's wasted time that takes away from hardcore history. And then when I start working on hardcore history, you know, the crap hits the fan in terms of our current events, and I get sucked into trying to deal with that again. Uh and so this time I'm splitting the difference because of something one of you asked of me , and I am giving you something that is not good enough by normal standards for us to give you. How about that? We're giving you a reject from April seventh, I think this take was and uh one of your number had uh on social media basically said, you know, we don't care if you're throwing stuff away, we want what you're throwing away. Well, normally I wouldn't give into that kind of strong arming on the part of the listenership, but we haven't gotten anything out in 2026. Big things are happening. Uh and we did a I did something because you know, we just don't release if it's not right. Everything nowadays is in digital stone nowadays for the last twenty one years, is in digital stone. And once as a radio show host, a former radio show host, I realized that that's one of the key differences between radio where when you do a show, it's out in the ether five seconds later. If it's a good show, no one's ever going to hear it again, except maybe if you run a best of once upon a time. If it's a bad show, luckily no one's ever going to hear it again. But what you do on the internet, of course, as everyone who grew up with the internet knows is cast in digital stones, so we are a lot more pers nickety and nitpickety and you know, careful. I don't want my great-grandchildren to hear this stuff and go, wow. He thought that was good. So we generally have a pretty high bar, especially on I was gonna say especially on the political stuff, but really we just have a pretty high bar for better or for worse . But the show you're about to hear was recorded on April. I decided not to release it and then when Marcos Troj illo on uh Twitter I refuse to update my contact information when it comes to social media . Uh asked please just for anything. Well you're lucky I'm a sucker, Marcos I think I was feeling nostalgic because I saw something on the news the other day that was really interesting. They were talking about political independence, which is an interesting term because it makes political independence sound like they're a political party, right? Like there's a whole bunch of people called the independence and they all have an idea of what they want to do and they can leverage that po well, we know that it just means everybody who's not identified as a Democrat or Republican. It's the everything else party, but they were showing how many people or what percentage of the electorate it was. And it's huge. Equal, if not outnumbering, the other two parties , right? I think it's just equally. But you know, my lane has always been so narrow when we started in nineteen ninety three, we were trying to appeal to independence, of which there were few, as one of my consultants screamed at me once, if you would just pick a political side, Democrat or Republican, we could market that. You'd have, you know, a built-in foundational audience already there that we could then build off of . But no. Right? So so it's interesting, and I should be more happy that the number of independents out there, people who are willing to look at the two parties and say there's something wrong with both of them has grown, but it doesn't feel worth celebrating right now in any way, shape, or form, does it? And for those of you who don't understand what I mean when I say political independence, I mean we used to say on the radio show, because you have that opening line that you say that sort of markets you to people who may be tuning in for the first time, and we would always say at the beginning of the show, we are your independent alternative to the partisan voices you normally hear. That was the line. Not neutral . And that's where people get tripped up. They think I'm some sort of referee, but I have very strong beliefs. My problem is neither party values my priorities. And when they do give them lip service, they never follow through. And both parties, let's be honest, by the strict definition of the term, forget about what the Supreme Court says. Both parties are corrupt mainly . So why would I support that? Well, sometimes you have to, right? Positional v oting is the thing, especially when we're trying to avoid absolutely unprecedented things in our political system . Right? When my priorities are more threatened by one side than the other, I will support that one side to continue to bolster my priorities. My priorities, what are they? Well, a lot of them are enunci ated in the show that we pulled out of the digital rubbish heap because Marcos Trujillo said he'd be fine with something that didn't meet our expectations. Thank you, Marcos, for putting us in a situation where now this is set in digital stone. I hope you're happy Steve Bannon had that line about flooding the zone with shit as a tactic. And I can I think well, confirm that the zone is now flooded. Mission accomplished, job well done. Impossible to figure out where to untie the ends of this Gordian not to have a colo The last couple of common sense shows we managed to get out, I believe, because you know our release schedule's a little spread out, so so going back to And while that's successful in its own way , it ignores the wide-ranging nature of the problem, shall we say? Right? The entire expanse of what's going on, and there's so much of it going on, and it's interconnected like that Gordian knot. So trying to figure out how to even find any of the good stuff in the zone flooded with shit is is more of a challenge than trying to figure out what to do once you find it . And I've been maybe it's a mental self defense mechanism because you know otherwise you just get stuck in the where we are moment and that can be very doomy and gloomy . And the interesting thing to me are the people that don't feel it. Because you know, you'll see it on like Twitter and what are you talking about, Danny? You're sitting here going, Where do you live? I mean what's going you know, anyway, it doesn't matter. None of that. To each their own . But the way my mind works is you know and we used to say this in the old common sense shows in the old days that it was all about having some solutions, you know, even if they were wacky at the end of the show or whatever. Uh 'cause who wants to hear just a bunch of bitching with nothing at least to think about that might be a path? What would Gandhi w what would the Gandhi movie have said, you know, a way out of h ell . And I've been thinking about , you know, a renaissance. That's what I've termed it in my head. And I'm sure that's a stolen term at this point, so I apologize. It's just what popped into my head because it's a logical thing , this idea of revitalizing. Because otherwise, what do you have? I mean, there's there seems to be two paths you can go by, to quote Robert Plant here, and one is the path we're on. More of this and a degeneration, a de evolution, Devo would say, from here. Whatever the hell that means . The other path is um the one that got us here backwards trying to find what we have lost the the renaissance idea . And here's the thing, we lost it quite a bit of time ago, if we're going to be honest with ourselves. So going back to the place in the road, the last restore point on the computer or whatever might be a little bit revolutionary . And I used to say on the show, uh and I I still believe this, that's what's crazy, uh that I'm not for revolution . Because revolution opens up the door to all kinds of outcomes. I mean, most revolutions don't turn out nice and genteel like the American Revolution. So it's better to stay within the structures of something that protects you , but within those structures I'm for revolutionary level change, and the reason why is because it's simply a common sense answer to the scope of the problem . You ever had termites in your house? There's a couple of different things you can do, but it all depends on where you are in the process. If you've had termites for a year, you can freeze them, you can do all these other things. You have options. You don't even have to pay for a whole term. I mean, you know, they haven't done any damage. Don't have to resort to anything drastic. If however you've had them for a decade, it's a major thing, 'cause repairing the damage, the the level of work required to do that is much more intense and the our house has termites and has for a while. The restore point is pretty far back. What does that even mean? How does one update how does one have a renaissance towards the ide als that I'm asserting, and I'm gonna try to make maybe a case for this a little bit for the young folks out there, because Lord knows why would they have any reverence for the US Constitution based on what they've seen of the one we have , right? If you never saw it even functioning a little well, I don't know why you'd wonder why the old folks are so enamored with this. Some of the old folks anyway, well at least one . But there's a lot of stuff that has gotten lost in the translation of what should be the list of important things in this country for a long time. And we all feel it, and and you've seen manifestations of it across the political spectrum. I mean, this whole Trump thing is one of them, actually, but you see it you see it in in many different manifestations . They occupy Wall Street thing. I mean, all these different things are are this same sort of over over a multi-decade-long degeneration sign that the basic needs of society on the ground are fraying . And if that's not a priority for the people who are making the decisions that create the reality, the water in which we fish swim, over time that becomes a huge it's this is why revolutions happen, right? Once people can't get bread, then you know, the game is on . So the goal in a society where you don't want everybody's houses burned down and everybody's stuff looted is to not let it get to that point . But just looking at the way we are online, man, you know, there was a there was a and I'm sure I've talked about him before because he's stuck in my brain. In the middle nineties uh when I did a talk show here in the uh Pacific Northwest, when you don't have like a national show, it's it's there's a certain bunch of callers that are like the the regulars at the cheers bar, you know, from the TV show. Uh they call regularly and you kind of know them all and there was this one old guy from a little teeny town in Oregon and you know as the host I never knew who they were. I knew a first name in a town and this was Roy from Crow . And he was awesome. In retrospect, he was even more awesome than I gave him credit for at the time. He had the same opening line every time, no matter what he was going to talk about, and he sounded like he was a million years old, and I always tried to place the accent, and I figure some some And he'd start off by saying Dan , we're all a bunch of propagandized sap s . Now mind you, this is in the middle nineteen nineties. When we were compared to what we are now , you know, it was like the old school, I mean it was the it was the hinge between newspapers and network television and iPhones. And so it made sense at the time. Although let's recall the oldsters out there, you know, can point to all sorts of books and writings and theories and stuff that have started ever since. I mean, radio started some of this stuff. Again, if we're looking at this through the big long lens, hundred-year-long lens, look at where we were and look at where we've come from. We had a colonial newspaper scene going on back during the revolutionary The difference is is it's the difference between, you know, a match and a nuclear weapon in terms of amplitude . I mean, the idea that we are able to be affected on an individual capture your attention on your iPhone level by a foreign government that might be trying. I mean , to a person that grew up in an era in the Cold War where nations kind of freaked out about one radio signal getting across the iron curtain and what that might do . I mean, we're one level away sometimes on some of this stuff from you know Rwanda radio times however many outlets there are. And that's kind of a good example of part of the problem. And I've talked about it in some of the live shows we did. Sometimes I guess all of us are better I'm better at the questions than the answers, but if you think about our system, our ecosystem that, like I said , the the water in which we fish swim, and you think about adding heat to it, and heat in the form of things like division and tribalism for cliques, all this kind of stuff. If you think about what that adds to our system collectively, no one in particular, you know, the ecosystem as a whole, both sides can be I mean there is no partisanship necessarily to the whole thing. It's just heat. That's what they used to call it when I was in talk radio. Heat. I got in trouble about that. I've told told the story many times. You have to generate artificial heat. Why? It keeps people engaged . Right? Makes them care. So it's great for all kinds of businesses that rely on engagement. Well, extra, extra read all about it. I mean, how long has media relied on engagement? But as I said, it's the difference between a match and a nuclear weapon . At what point does the heat that there is a profit motive, not just on the giant corporate level, but they're the ones who obviously discovered it, but down to the individual influencer level to divide us artificially for money . Right? To increase the heat in our system that has, as far as I can tell, and this is what used to come up in the live shows, as far as I can tell, has no way to release that heat. There's no counterbalancing sort of venting going on anywhere else. Now I'm going from memory here because it's been a long time, but um somewhere around the year 2000, there was that famous Project for a New American Century uh document. Uh it was talking about defense priorities that were coming up, and it's famous because, you know, a lot of people see a connection to 9-11 in it. But one of the things that it had talked about that stuck with me was what it was like the assumptions area or something, and they talked about the normal trend in American society. And they said the normal trend on any given time that's normal in American society is for us to be sort of pulled apart . And they made it sound, if I'm remembering correctly, they made it sound like an almost natural thing. They weren't bringing into into play the you know division for money kind of aspect of it, but just in general. And that's why they were sort of saying, and I think the example they used was like a Pearl Harbor or something, that those sorts of events from time to time uh had the opposite effect and sort of made up for a lot of the damage the pulling apart had done, things that, you know, unite us . But without those things, what plays that role in the system that counterbalances both what that project for a new American Century assumption was that we're naturally pulling apart at all times, and the fact that we have all sorts of incentivization in our system to create division, not because it's what we really feel and care about and think is important, but because it's, it makes money. Division and hate are a form of engagement, and the intensity of it just increases the amount of engagement and clicks and money, and I don't begrudge anybody any of it, and nobody's at fault of it individually. It is a phenomenon. It is a piece of the fabric of our reality. But it's doing things to our system that we need to understand because it doesn't matter what you do as a solution to what you think is going on in the country, you know, with things like how divided we are, for example, it's not going to get you away from these things because these aren't a part of like the American version of what's going on right now. This is a part of what it is to be alive in this moment right now, the water in which we fish swim for, example. A lot of people would like to see the United States just divide into a couple of different countries. Think that would solve all of our problems . You can go live in your place and you can have uh all the things that matter to you and then the okay, and how long do you think it's gonna last before the division starts in each place? Between the new extremes, right? The left wing conservatives and the right wing conservatives. The communists have infested our right wing country with these I mean, do you see what I'm saying? Because you're gonna have these same things. You're gonna have the same influencers and the same media and the same Fox News, this country or MSNBC . They're gonna be doing the same thing because it's the same playbook because the heat is what they're after, and they're gonna divide these new places, and it's not even their fault, it's just the phenomenon . Right? So we are now incentivizing and see and see here's here's where here's where it gets to me. This is where I have my problem because if I was a dictator, this is no problem at all. We just, you know, we turn this all into uh what what I think you should have, right? It's all gonna be all freedom radio all the time for you people . But you can be indoctrinated into liberty whether you like it or not, right? No, it's it's more how do you protect things that are vital to our free society and that are part of my renaissance , by the way, uh like like freedom of speech and the and the right to write what you want, think what you want, do all these sorts of things, and at the same time allow this to be out there in a way that you know if you just follow current trends, if you what do they always say at the financial meetings? Uh, if current trends continue, uh, you don't have to be a genius to say, see where those lines run into brick wall down the road . Create your own country, see how long you have , right? You bought yourself another thirty-five years before the division tears you apart, because it wasn't the other side, it wasn't your countrymen that were the problem. This is all a function of where we are. It's gonna be a chapter in some future history book if we have future history books. Right? They'll have a hopefully it's not a terrible chapter title. You don't want one of those the age of division. Well that would be actually better than some of them . World War III, who who knows? The problem with getting into the kind of times we're getting into right now is that once you pass a certain line, and in and I remember reading a historian, I wish I could remember it, there was talking about how times like we had, and I'm speaking of Americans because you know, your results may vary depending on where you live, but I mean there are periods in the nineteen nineties where you can forget how it can get . And there's a sort of a safety bar where, barring, you know, waking up one morning and finding out that the nuclear weapons are on the way, um, there's a sort of a safety that that allows you a false sense of security, this historian was kind of saying. It is destabilizing, especially for people. That was the water in which I swam. It's destabilizing to feel so unmoored because you know that once you get past a certain point. Now all of a sudden the range of possible things that can happen is much, much more wide than you would have thought when I was younger. All sorts of things, I mean, just going online and reading what people write, you go, who are some of these people?' Thats that's the other thing. The younger generation I both feel sorry for and I'm afraid of. That's old man talk right there, Ben, little old man. Ben starting to understand old man-ish uh pretty well yourself, Ben. Not not really even a foreign language to you anymore. Um But the but this is traditional, just so you young people know, you'll do this too, if you're around. This is how it works . But you can completely be forgiven if you want that attracted to the US Constitution because you never even got to see it have a fair shot. Heck, I barely got to see it. We never even got to its more perfect union point. Maybe that's a better way to phrase it. It was a work in progress when it started to be sabotaged. That's pretty early on, actually. Get into a long conversation about that if you'd like, but I mean the point being that if you think about it and if you read it and if you prioritize us at the highest level, you realize how much stuff has been co-opted, and we've allowed see, see , for example, when Ronald Reagan came into power, I remember they were really getting down on the government. That was a big thing. And government had kind of gotten to a point where it deserved to be gotten down on on some points. But it it was this general sort of hammering into you that government is bad. Well, bad government is bad. And the larger the government is, the more likely it's gonna be bad, but this idea that there shouldn't be protection of the sort that only government can provide for us is part of why we, we, the people, um, have been so exposed and undefended. I mean, I'll give you an example of what I mean. And and you have to say stuff like this because everyone, well, you know, what are you? I'm a free market capitalist. I have a couple of companies. I I've been and I exploit no one, Ben, shh . Right? So it's just me and I I always describe myself to friends as a global street performer. I'm like a guy who has a violin on a street corner and he opens it up and he asks you to throw change in it and I work a busy street corner, clearly. I mean, you know . Come many times Ben's been run over . But I'm a capitalist, right? I'm a free I I I'm an entrepreneur and I'd like you to be too. That's kind of how I feel about things. Find your interest, find something you love to do, try to do it. Hope we can still do that in the age of AI, but that that would be what I would want for anybody . But there's not enough protection for us from big powerful entities out there that the only thing powerful enough to protect us from is the government. So you may say government is not the solution, government is the problem, which I totally get, but at the same time , what are you gonna do when major corporations are doing things that if you want the Constitution to actually mean anything, they can't do? I mean and this is where we got a long time ago, I think, derailed, and maybe when the Renaissance happens, this is something that can be addressed. This idea that the Constitution only applies to the government, because this may be something worth an amendment. I'm sure everybody'll jump on board with that . But where we point out that anything that would have the same effect on our rights as if the government did it is via connection to Something that we should be protected from. Let me give you an example of what I mean there. And I should, you know, none of this is planned clearly. But there was a court case or something just the other day where the judge ruled that the government should be able to just sort of throw their hands up about the fourth amendment when it comes to uh your data information that anybody could buy anywhere from a data broker. And the decision said something to the effect, again, going from memory, but it made sense. It was this idea that well, why should the government be the only group of people out there that has no access to this one? Anybody else can? Okay, that makes sense. The question that should come into play if we really care about the right intrinsically would be, well, wait a minute, somewhere down the line we screwed up if the if we're saying that the government should be able to spy on you like this because, well, private entities have been spying on you, and why can't they spy on you? Because well,, the Constitution doesn't apply to them. But maybe it should if the government can then use it as a loophole to get to your fourth amendment rights? I mean, do you see what I'm saying? It's somewhere down the line, the wonderful language and this is traditional, isn't it, the farther away you get from the revolutionary times, hence the need for a renaissance. But I mean when you get farther away from those times, all of a sudden, you know, these seem like rather strict things, the way that they're written, and clearly there was a sort of fanaticism going on during the revolutionary period for things like you know, high minded flutin words like liberty, and we all know, don't we, that very quickly some of the men who led the revolution got a little freaked out by, you know, some of the populism side of it, and listen, I can relate to that more than I used to be able to as a Jeffersonian . As somebody said to me, I think on Twitter, uh, you know, feeling a little John Adams-ish lately, Dan ? No comment . But if you're a young person looking at this constitution, why wouldn't you say, why are you so protective? of it What the hell's it do what have you done for me lately, Constitution? And so I think part of getting young people on board that this is something worth saving is turning it back into something worth saving. And that was a huge thing. You know, we used to say that there were four or five pillars of the common sense show, and several of them play into what we're talking about now, I guess, but one of them was the Swiss cheesing of our rights, these e being exceptioned to death, for example. And what's so funny about the now in which we live is that you're watching a president with no respect for protocol who feels like he should just push presidential power to the boundaries and ignore guardrails? He's proving what we always said that everybody said we were always crazy for saying . One of my listeners out there, and you know who you are, Scotty, he called and basically said, You were right. I was the voice of reason on the discussion forum all the time and uh well, you know, here we are . But you could see it. You could see it coming and that's why when people say, well, Dan, what about Biden? What about this? What about well first of all we'd kind of stopped doing the show with Biden, you know why? Because Biden was the same. Biden was the he was the swamp, Trump would say. He was the same kind of guy we'd had forever that we talked about in every common sense show, basically. Anything we said about Clinton or Bush or Obama or anything it they equally applied, right? Variations, grade them on a curve, you can go up. But in terms of the overall group of them, anything that I had said previously applied to Joe Biden. Trump is the outlier. Trump is the guy I've never said things about before because no one's ever done this. You know, even when uh people say to me, you know, Dan Obama did this and and Bush did that. Yes, but they didn't do it all. But you you pick the most um expansive constitutional move that any of the past presidents made and it's their one move, and Trump does them all. Clearly that and the amplitude question trips a lot of people up. You know, the amplitude question being they'll point out something Biden did, which is completely right, but it's a four on the amplitude scale, and Trump did the same basic thing, but it's a nine or ten on the amplitude scale. Those are not the same things. But making such a fine distinction is tough for some people. I mean, listen, I haven't been to school in a long time. Those sorts of things may be a something we don't do anymore. There's a lot of things I wonder about, by the way. These are the many strands of the Gordian knot that are hard for me to unravel because the zone is flooded with shit, but my goodness . Civics, the humanities, I mean, we were people like yours truly were just destroyed by the what do we need any of this for, crowd? Not to gloat. And look, I can't draw a direct connection. I can't say the reason nobody cares for any of those things that should matter anymore is because nobody ever taught 'em to care. Because then we get back to that point about the young people looking at the Constitution and go, should I really care about this? I can certainly do better than this . And that's always been my opinion, that you can't. You can do better than the way we actually live under it. That's the Renaissance need. But I doubt if you started from scratch today you'd be able to get a better deal, as it's meant to sort of unfold if you read it straight up. What was it? It was d who was it who said it was uh it was Flee Bailey, I think, said like in the late seventies, something to the effect of, you know, with a sarcastic tone, the Constitution, it wouldn't even get out of committee the most liberal politically extreme people of their day, and they foisted an overly liberal constitution on a bunch of the country that was a little you know unnerved by how revolutionary and liberal it was. Well, who knows? Maybe it's still that kind of document, especially if you undo the Swiss cheesing. Maybe that's the best shorthand elevator pitch version of this Renaissance idea, right? We start to sew up some of the holes. Can you imagine this is what I mean about wanting revolutionary change, because this would be big . And to me, you know, you if you were to sort of take the constitutional ideas even a little farther , because there's a lot of practical things, obviously, that we deal with now that would be difficult for us to you know, if you're an originalist, it's difficult to, you know, fit your uh digital assistant in your pocket to uh constitutional thinking , which is why I'm not necessarily an original ist. I'm for whatever best protects our rights is . But listen, something like this is expensive. Let's not kid ourselves. Look, I mean, because you know how you know how you know it's expensive? Because so much of the reasoning behind why the Swiss cheesing and everything like that happened to begin with was to make more money. So if you closed off those you know you sewed up those loopholes in our constitutional protections, it's gonna cost us . The other thing you'd have to maybe get a handle on, and you know, the funny thing about this is is I feel like this is a little like when I just use the example for uh the MAGA people or the Occupy Wall Street people. This is something I feel like has been brewing for a long time too across political lines. But this idea of the military side of our econom ic system . And this is a huge thing because the amount of money and it the interconnectivity between it and our form it's it's what was it Eisenhower said way back in nineteen sixty farewell speech, have to be careful . Basically, he was saying uh it's already at a point that's bad enough for me to have this speech. You know, that's within like ten years of growth by that point . And here we are now, and you can just see he said it would persist. It's persisted. Is that fixable ? And I realize there are going to be some people out there that wouldn't want it fixed, and Lord knows that's why we have it. The amount of money in procurement, how we make deals with foreign countries, where we essentially give them loan guarante es that they can turn around and use it to buy our stuff. I mean, let's just put it this way. I'm sure it's good for business. I'm not sure it's good for a free republic. And I don't know when the line should be drawn between what's good for business and what's good for a free republic. And you might think something like that sounds communistic or something along those lines, but all I would suggest is we're just trying to protect a republic where the people in the republic are the focus of the republic . And we can still have all the same disagreements we have, but maybe things that drag our foreign policy in the direction that other nations have an interest in, right? Because it's their foreign policy. If you're dropping our bombs on some third party country, there's no way for us to have completely clean hands. And there's a part of me that just goes, what is the value of that to your average American citizen? And is it worth well, take a look at history. You get dragged into things you wouldn't otherwise get dragged into. And if Eisenhower was warning about the continu ed and persistent influence of the military industrial complex in nineteen sixty, I would suggest I wouldn't mind rolling it back to nineteen sixty levels, right when he started getting worried about Institutional ide as is going to be painful because we're a long way from some of those. We're a long way from the American people's rights being the number one priority. And getting back to that would suck in a lot of respects. Isn't that we aird thing to say ? I mean, think about just the spying. Right? The Fourth Amendment. One guy called it the Criminal Protection uh Amendment, right? The one that doesn't allow searching and seizuring without probable cause and all this. Well, that's one of the most Swiss cheese, clearly. I mean, there's not even it was a fig leaf ten years ago, it's gone now, right? That's that was the violation that I mentioned earlier where the judge basically said, why does the US government have to be the only people that can't have your data ? But see, what's going to be so painful is you can't just go back and restrict the government, because as that judge said, the government can just buy that info from private parties. To protect yourself from the government knowing everything about you, you have to inhibit the private party from collecting the data in the first place, and they're not gonna like that. That's their entire business model . I don't blame them at all. No I this isn't a point fingers kind of deal. This is organ ic. This is the water in which we swim . But you have to recognize it if you're gonna do any sort of significant reforms, right? And the termites have been gnawing on us for a long time now. Right, there's some major structural reform that needs to take place if we're going to get back to a place where young people would look at our Constitution and say, holy cow, that's a hell of a birthright. I want my children to inherit that . And see the value of all those rights and protections. And not as these courts over the years have interpreted them, because remember some of the things the court has said over the years . Slavery was legal, folks. The court made that decision. The point is that if you look at the document, if you were going to revitalize it, write a renaissance , uh, you would look at it in the spirit at which it was intended, which is your rig hts, your freedoms, your protections . We are and have allowed ourselves to become vic tims of everyone around us who, for their own reasons, totally legal and understandable, chipped away at those protections. To get them back is going to be quite a change . But for me , I look at the roads that we have in front of us, as I said, and there are two that I see . More of this , or some attempt to recapture our former glory. And not the former glory as it was, or you're going back to like segregation. Former glory of the ever-increasingly more perfect union . The one that's getting better all the time, my stepfather said building the better mouse trap, creating a system that is the envy of the world. And I have news for you. The envy of the world is not because they look at our military and see the the amazing might of that. The envy of the world is when they look at what has always made this one of the places people wanted to come and live . Because it's awesome. Well, it is on paper. You can swiss cheese that to a certain point where you have to all go, well, it was awesome until we allowed bad stuff to happen to it. What happens if that happens? Well you go back and you get some paint and you fix up the neighborhood and you try to recapture a little of that former glory, and that's what I'm for . And so when I have these thoughts about how bad stuff is right now, I keep thinking to myself, well what's the goal? You know, what would we do if we got out of this? How how does it ever get better? It gets better by us making it better, the same way you would reclaim your neighborho od . And the great thing about young people is that they have a ton of energy and they see a lot of the world in front of them, right? A world that they have to live in. They gotta live in this neighborhood a long time. It's in their interest and they know it to turn it into something that they want to live in, that they're proud to live in, and that they would give to their children as an inheritance worth valuing. And I realize we're going to have a lot of differences, folks. This isn't a kumbaya kind of thing, but understand something. That's built into the system. This is another problem with the way the ecosystem has turned us against one another. It's supposed to be that way. That's okay . Everybody takes it way too seriously. We're all having a disagreement about the goal. See, this is that there now let me make a little asterisk disclaimer here. There are some on the extremes that are not, and they have way too powerful voices. People who want to make you live the way they want you to live . People who would repress your thoughts, your creativity , your freedom of expression , your freedom to live your life and pursue your happiness as you see fit. What's the old Oliver Wendell Holmes line, right? You have the right to swing your fist until it hits the other person's nose. Well , I'm in favor of a wide swing circumference . And maybe in the same way that when the captain of the ship decides he wants to close off the avenue of e asy escape, you know, when he lands his crew on some island somewhere and decides to burn the boats behind them, right? Forward or die kind of thing. If you're holding out for having your own country someday where you can all just live the way you want to live and it'll be great. You won't have those other people from that other place. Just know, as I said, the very phenomenon in which we live here will still be working its magic in the new territories, and we're only human, right? We're going to fall for these same things the way we do now. And no one's going to be at fault again, but if you don't think conservative land or liberalville are going to split into camps very quickly. We'll think about it. And if you think you can enforce, you know, beliefs and thoughts, I mean, one generation ahead of time, they're all going to be reading each other's writings, gonna have all those college kids in Liberalville getting conservative, and vice vers a. Tends to happen, freedom of thought . Pen is mightier than the sword, all that kind of stuff. The point is that does the functional equivalent of burning the boats when you realize that. We have to live together . And we have an interest in doing it. If people didn't keep artificially tearing us apart, but how in a free world were you're allowed to say and do all those kinds of things? Do you deal with that ? I was having a discussion with somebody the other day and we were talking about the financial corruption side of everything now, and how you deal with that when you have a Supreme Court that's essentially legalized it. And I'll I'll see this sometimes I'll I'll be reading a fundraiser thing. Uh usually comes from Democrats because they're the ones that go after the the corruption from the citizens united uh decisions and whatnot. But but it'll say something like, you know, we can't because of the courts, we can't do okay, okay, but And here's part of the what bothers everybody, I think, about the corruption problem is that every side is blind to their own supporters who play into this whole idea, right? It's the corporations and it's the unions, it's the foreign interests and the chambers of commerce, and I mean it's it's all of it , but the the one group that is not really represented well is us , we, the people collectively . Because the argument always is that we're all represented in some way, shape, or form by one of these, you know, we're all in a union or we're all, you know, working for the corporation that's being represented. Okay, so again, sort of second rate representation as opposed to top-tier representation where the number one thing we're concerned about is you and your rights. I mentioned the Fourth Amendment earlier. This is the kind of thing that's going to be tough though, because you know what the Fourth Amendment stands in the way of? Catching criminals easily. Like I said, that the old guy of the radio show would say to me that that's the criminal protection measure . You think James Madison was after that? You think those guys were like, you know, we do need a little loophole here in case we want to burglarize somebody . They did it for a reason, and it's partly because they understand how bad things can get when a kid in the nineteen nineties has these artificial lines in his head because of the time and place where he lives, well, it will never get any worse than this, and now those lines are gone, and you go, hmm, James Madison and those guys might have had a point. Although I've been a fan of the Fourth Amendment forever, but you just have to know. The reason that the Fourth Amendment was Swiss cheese to begin with was to go catch people. The problem that societies have and that they don't pay enough attention to is the definition of the kind of people you should be catching changes. You protect those bad people because those same rules protect you if they decide that what you do makes you a bad person . We discussed this all the time when it came to terrorism. God, the nineteen nineties so often cut the Clinton terror laws. We talked about this endlessly about how and that's a you know, I hate to always bring up the Nazis, but that's a Nazi thing, right? Where you just changed the definition of who falls into this special category of terrorists, and that's what we did too. You have another loophole in your constitution where you say, Well, listen, because of terrorism, we'll have a special exception for this, that, and the other thing. And listen, it's probably saved some lives. We have to be honest about this kind of thing. But once you create a special supra constitutional category, uh that doesn't specifically tell you who's in it. That is a flexible and changing group. And we've gotten to the point again where we used to talk about this and old Scotty on the board would say you're getting a little too crazy, Dan, a little tinfoil hatish. But we would talk about how the president's just gonna say certain groups of people that don't like him are domestic terrorists at some point and then bingo bango we've used the magic word, it's superconstitutional, and a whole bunch of extra constitutional laws that would otherwise not be available to us are here now and usable. And at you know the discretion of the very person uh who's in a position to misuse them and benefit from them. This is what happens when the separation of powers and the various branches of government either do not do their job or do not do their job well . And I don't, you know , I don't love going after um other than the president because he's singular, but I I don't love going after one side or the other necessarily because I keep feeling like the job here is to live together again . To disagree to to if you want to see if you can get some level of federalism, maybe this is part of the Renaissance too. Uh we talked about not having a safety valve earlier to counteract all the heat that's being created in our little political ecosystem here. Well, maybe something like more federalism helps. That's what one of the benefits of it was supposed to be, right? People in Alabama can live like the people in Alabama want people in California can live like the people in California, you know, want to live, and the only people that get mad about that are the people that want to dictate how the people in Alabama should live from California or the people in Alabama who want to tell Californians how they should do their lifestyle . Now I do realize that all sounds rather simplistic when you just try to incorporate it into a little discussion we're having now . Many of the subjects we've just sort of flitted over are whole books for people, right? To dive into . And none of this stuff would be easy. But you know what makes it you know, in the same way that kid, you know, looking at the what he thought were the worst case scenarios in a nineteen ninety sense, in the same way that there were bad possibilities that seemed impossible to envision. There's a pendulum effect, and you can see it in U.S. history because you can see it if you remember your high school U.S. history book that was always divided into sections, wasn't it? Those ar tificial chapters that historians are forced to create because otherwise it's just all one big long thing. But then you have to sort of label them. You kind of think, well, what's the big theme of this era in US history? And you could watch the pendulum era sometimes. Remember the the famous one that always comes to mind right away is you have the Gilded Age, and that's a chapter in your US history book. And what's the Gilded Age followed by the Progressive Era? Because you have to sort of do the pendulum swing to compensate for the pendulum swing from the era before. So U.S. history's done this a lot. The the last time the president really I'm up in the air about when when I would say the last time the president really got hammered down was in terms of their power. Now I'm not talking about a Clinton or Trump impeachment thing. I'm talking about a rollback of presidential power. And part of me wants to say it was Iran Contra, but the real part of me wants to say it was that era after the Nixon administration fell. And for this brief moment, it's when the War Powers Act error happened and the church and the Pike Committee hearings and all that stuff, when all of a sudden the government opened up in a way that it should almost always be open all the time. The secrecy is what protects everything, folks. That's part of the Renaissance, by the way, secrecy reform. But the government opened up and it opened up because the pendulum had swung so far in the other direction with the secret tapings and all these kinds of, you know, the clandestine activ ities and all of this, that there needed to be a sunlight cleansing of everything that was going on. And that's what it was. They rolled out all the CIA secret stuff and on camera, showed the news media, it was like public hearings , was crazy . In fact, so much of what we found out, you know, in the 80s and the 90s and stuff when I was growing up, learning about the CIA, that it came out in those church and pike committee hearings and things like that. It was a giant sunlight exposure. moment And if you want to argue, well, we shouldn't know that kind of stuff, that's just secret government stuff. Understand something. The reason you should know about it is because when you find out about it, a lot of it is stuff you never would have approved of, but you never got a say because you were never told about it. And well, if you're good with that, then you're good with never being told about things that are being done in your name that you wouldn't agree with. See how that works? When you're in a republic and you're a citizen and you should be the highest priority of the land . That's the kind of stuff you should know about, because we're expecting you to vote on that . And I don't know what to do about some of the growth in what I see. You know, we the the words are so it's tough to go after . As I record this , we're in the middle of a conflict. We, the United States, the conf lict with Iran . And it is the final throwing off of the mask of even seeking the fig leaf of protocol for anybody else's opinion in the government. And we know that this has been people act like it's always been going on. No, this has been something that we've been uh slouching towards Gomorrah on for a long time, right? This is the slippery slope finally hitting bottom. How about that? Trump's the guy who pointed out that the guardrails that we had been pretending were there for some time aren't really there. And so what the hell? And I would argue that even though it's a fiction that they were there, this is still a huge step down. Because once you throw the mask off, well you throw it off for everybody. You throw it off for the next guy and the next guy and the next guy, if there is a next guy and the next you see what I'm saying? You you change the standards for everyone and who the hell thinks this is a good idea? I have yet to find someone who sits there and go, Well, actually, listen, um one man should be able to make that decision all by themselves. Doesn't matter if it's uh stupid or they're crazy or they're just mad at the country 'cause they weren't nice and didn't give him an award or something. Doesn't matter. Uh he should be able to do it. I just think that's the right thing. And I think that's the right thing w,hether they're a Democrat or a Republican or it defies and and listen, the the founders were so clear on this, it defies common sense . You should have a bunch of people on board to decide to go to war. And when people say, well, this is Barbary pirates, first of all, just I the problem again, there was a this great line from the Lord of the Rings where Gandalf is silent and Aragorn says, you know, you're up to your old ways, you're being silent again, and Gandalf says something like it's a habit of the old, they choose the wisest person in the room to talk to. He said the long winded explanations required by the young are tiring. And that's the problem. it And's no fault of anybody's. We're all at a different speed here. Right? We're all, you know, so if you're just coming up and you're 20 years old now, how much memory do you have of this? This is normal to you. Right? So so we accustom ourselves like the frog in the hot water thing. Uh, even though the water is scalding right now, there's some young people who go, well, maybe it is. I've never had anything but scalding water. That's part of the Renaissance, too. See, and and by the way, I was as I was talking to my friend earlier and he was saying, uh, you know, what do we even do about some of this stuff, like the court decisions that say you can't do anything about the money in politics? And we decided, you know, maybe the answer is cultural. And this gets to that progress ive era sort of pendulum swing rebound also, because at a certain point w you can almost enforce things, and isn't this what the political correctness was, but you can almost enforce things by making certain things that could be perfectly legal, but just things that would give anybody sort of the ick to quote my daughter ten years ago. How about that ? Or some level of openness where all of a sudden we we used to fantasize about any time you saw a politician, uh they had to be covered in stickers like a race car, uh, with all the advertisements based on, you know, sticker size could determine based on who you know where they took the most money from, but everything should be listed right on the every time they went out. And it's just you know, there's nothing wrong with that. That's just sunlight being the best disinfectant, right? But that's the kind of thing you get in a renaissance, if all of a sudden the people are the number one reason that we should care. And I'll tell you something else. I've changed my mind, although you know I was never a hard no term limits person, although I was always a term limit limit person for president. But I've shifted entirely. The cowardice. The cowardice. You know, Profiles and Courage was that ghostwritten book that John F. Kennedy was supposed to have written about these lions, you know, in the Senate. My God . That's all you could say. It is like reading those, you know, when you would read the old time histories of like Rome and they would talk about this, these sort of flabby uh yes men senators who I mean it's I you throw your hands up. I mean, folks, I'm gonna just say something again. How would you even know this if you were twenty? The Speaker of the House used to be an exalted, powerful position . You try going to war without Tip O'Neill if you're Ronald Reagan and he will make your life hell . Now, if Tip was on board for it, he may have had the same people contributing to his campaign. He might make a deal with you, right? They could go have a drink together like two Irish men, like the propaganda always said, come out with some sort of deal where you're not gonna get a declaration of war, you're gonna get an authorization for military activity, and uh everybody's cool with it. That's how we slouched toward Gomorrah here, that's how we had a slippery slope leading to where Trump just says, I don't have to ask anybody, and if I have to, this flabby senatorial Congress of mine will just do it. And I don't know who to get more angry with , right? I wasn't I wasn't gonna go here, Ben. But I mean the GOP legislators who are you throw up your hands. I mean it doesn't even a fiction writer couldn't come up with these guys, or the Democrats who are you know, you don't like to blame the other side who aren't necessarily part of the problem because they're not in the government at all, but clearly it's like you go up against the worst team you could ever see ever and you're leading one nothing. You know what I mean? You should be crushing these people. And the fact that you're not is indicative of something, and I'm not inside your party, and I'm not a Democrat, so I'm not gonna presume to tell you how to fix this, but here's my problem as an independent. I'm stuck with you. I've said this before. I don't want two parties that are the only two viable parties, but I don't have a say in that. So I get two of you. Generally, I'm voting to protect the rights of Americans, but that's not always the same group of people . Usually, for the last 30 years, it has meant me voting for people that are neither one of the duopoly people. And I've jumped around, right? I'll do libertarians and Green Party and independents, and just so long as it's not the two people who are hamstringing me. But because of the way it is, it's a two party system because the two parties made it one. That's not in the Constitution. But because of both of you, I'm stuck with you, and when one of you goes crazy, I depend on the other one to protect me from crazy. And I need you to be better than you are because crazy 's doing better than they should be doing. One to nothing is the wrong score, Democrats. Chuck Schumer's the wrong guy to be the face of your party, and if Trump decides to go all crazy on us, he's gonna write an angry letter I would pretend that was some sort of an insight, but it's so I mean it's a trope now to say something like that about Chuck Schumer. How much of a trope does something have to be for the guy to not be in that position anymore, to realize that even if he deserves this from a political party standpoint, even if he's earned it, he's put in the dog ears, the contributors love him, Dan, whatever it is, the times are too important to have people of that caliber in positions that important at a time period where you're only leading one to nothing and a relief pitcher isn't just called for any You have won . Republicans, I don't know what to tell you. You are the reason I've changed my mind on term limits because I've how can your jobs be worth this? How can this job be worth that? This Lindsey Graham, how can that job be worth ? I mean, maybe we're just all built differently, but I'm looking at these people thinking to myself, is the restaurant you're eating at so good? Is the health care or the pension so wonder what is the ego stroking the self event what is it that makes you willing to get down on your knees and turn the co equal branch of government into a bunch of subservient little toadies The People's House, the August Senate, and this is what we get from you ? Yeah, you damn right better only have maybe one term because you care too much about the term after this term . And maybe if you only had one I used to like some of the argument something about institutional memory, Dan, and the fact that actually it'd be more corrupt if they only had one term. Yeah, well you know what, these people are way too afraid of losing their jobs. It's better we just lose their jobs preemptively, maybe. And like I said, willing to change my mind, wisdom requires a flexible mind, as we always say, and I'm trying to think in terms of revolutionary renaissance for our country, a revitalization two hundred and fifty years after the fact, 'cause every now and then, to take the religious line you need a great awakening, and we could use one constitutionally speak ing . Stay safe, everyone