Episode Transcript
[00:00:14] Speaker A: Hello.
Welcome to the call it like I see it podcast.
I'm James Keys, and in this episode of call it like I see it, we're gonna react to the trend, apparently, of comparing Donald Trump to Jesus or other biblical or, you know, religious figures, and consider whether what we're seeing here is just normal politics, or is it like, a religious or social movement or something altogether, something different, you know, than that altogether.
And later on, we're going to take a look at plasti stones, which, you know, is a newly discovered sedimentary rock, which, you know, is being seen around the world and apparently is based in part on plastics, are discarded plastic, and it's formed. Being formed into the rock, you know, rocks, you know, and so forth. So joining me today is a man who has a mind like an academic, even if he can be a little eccentric sometimes. Tunde. Ogun. Lana Tunde. Are you ready to show off those nutty professor vibes today?
[00:01:16] Speaker B: Yeah, man, I don't even know where to go with that one. So let's just keep going. Cause I'm about to get myself in trouble if I respond to whatever you just said about now.
[00:01:28] Speaker A: We're recording this on January 23, 2024, and in recent weeks, we've seen a God made Trump video get circulated, you know, by Trump and then by others, you know, who seek to, you know, who do promote Trump. And then we've also just seen people, and this has been over time, that try to portray Donald Trump as being, you know, an agent direct from God or somehow connected to messianic feed that figures or, you know, and so forth. And, you know, this. All of this commentary does seem to suggest that there are people out there that look at Donald Trump as more than just a politician or. And so forth. And so we wanted to explore that and to get us started tuning, you know, just between this video, you know, this God made Trump video, which is, you know, available, and we'll have links in the show notes and so forth to places where you can get to it through, you know, and also just these attempts we've seen over the years and, you know, seemingly increasing to. To compare Donald Trump to Jesus or biblical figures.
You know, what. What do you see we're seeing here? Is this politics, or is this something else?
[00:02:34] Speaker B: It's a very interesting question. I think it's a.
[00:02:37] Speaker A: It's.
[00:02:37] Speaker B: It's a mix of things, and I think it's something that, look, in any large population, there's gonna be tensions and people that think that things should be run one way or another. But I think in the United States, this might be the first time that our country has seen this level of this type of attitude towards a leader who's actually in a position to lead the country and at this point, lead the country again.
I can think of events like the 1939 rally in Madison Square Garden where you had American Nazis doing the Hal Hitler salute to a statue of George Washington. And there was, like I said, 20,000 people showed up for that. So these movements have happened in the United States, but this is the first time that it looks like one of the two major political parties has kind of decided that they're folding into this. And what we're seeing is kind of this messianic mix and kind of savior mentality. And that's, you know, you alluded to that God made Trump video, and I know we'll discuss more than that. But when I saw that, that was the first time I said, man, this is becoming like, you know, what we've seen in human history, right between, from the pharaohs to, let's say, the japanese emperor up until the end of World War two, the idea of kind of merging a human being, a leader of a nation or society, into somewhat of a living deity, and, I mean, to even hear myself say that, it kind of sounds not serious. So I kind of almost feel like, is this too hysterical? And are we all, people like you and I just freaking out over something that's not serious?
No, but that's what I mean. But what he reveals more, it's not about Trump. The way that people gravitate to that, I think, is very revealing.
So in a certain way, I appreciate that president or former President Trump has shown us this because I was naive to the fact that this many Americans, our fellow citizens, would kind of just run towards something like this. So that's what I'm seeing. I can't tell if it's religious or politics. And maybe that's the point. It's a little bit of both.
[00:04:48] Speaker A: Well, see, I think, actually, this is kind of, if you look from a longer time scale, this is normal politics. Like, this is the way people would claim mantles of leadership is, you know, ordained from God or, you know, put themselves above or, you know, beyond the reach of the normal person. And I think the surprise here, and it's interesting how you kind of went through your thoughts there, because I think the surprise here is that in the United States, the way the things were set up by the founding fathers was to avoid stuff like this. But stuff like this seems to be, if you look around the world. And if you look throughout history, this seems to be the norm more than anything, where there is a large segment of people that want to put the, quote, unquote, the person they want to look to as the leader, as someone who is somehow being given to them by God or, and so forth, has some kind of divine right to do what needs to be done, what they believe needs to be done and so forth. So to me, I look at this as, actually, this is more normal politics than we're used to, but this may not be normal american politics. And one of the examples of this would be like with George Washington at the beginning of the country. Remember, when we've learned a lot about this, it was very important, his personality and the way he approached both the presidency while he was the president and then the presidency after he left to set important precedents for how the country would operate, because there were many Americans that when George Washington was the president, wanted him to just become a king and wanted him to, wanted to look at him as a deity like figure as well and say, hey, this is the guy that's going to lead our country. And so in part of being able to bring the country together, you had all these brainiac founding fathers talking about rule of law and all that stuff. But that wasn't what was drawing in the common man. They said they thought they needed someone like George Washington to put at the head of the mantle, to, to really coalesce everybody together underneath and say, yeah, yeah, we're with George Washington. So they utilize that. And it just happened to be that George Washington's personality, well, you know, I mean, fortunately, if you're, if you're a fan of the constitution and that kind of rule of law government, that his, from a personality standpoint, he didn't lean into it. He was like, he still tried to stay above that fray. And, and, you know, him stepping down even early after the two terms saying, I'm not doing anymore, was a big step as well. So I think, actually, again, this is more normal from a human politics standpoint, human society standpoint. But what we're seeing here is kind of this interacting with this constitutional system that's been set up here that's supposed to put everyone under a rule of law and is supposed to say that all men are created equal and so forth.
[00:07:24] Speaker B: Yeah, no, that's great. And it's kind of ironic to me that we're here and that actually, I'm alive in this moment to see this because, you know, I think we are, you know, guys like us in our mid forties are kind of, you know, I'd say maybe 1980 is the cutoff of, if you were born before that, you're kind of more steeped in growing up in the culture of the post World War two era, right? We were, you know, I remember from movies like Red dawn when we were kids and, you know, watching Rambo and the whole idea of, you know, the capitalism versus communism and all that, right? And Ronald Reagan saying, gorbachev, tear this wall down. We're old enough to remember seeing that when we were kids. And so we grew up on a doctrine of totalitarianism is bad, fascism is bad. All these kind of state run type of authoritarian systems are bad.
[00:08:16] Speaker A: Well, yeah, putting one man at the top and then everybody like that was.
[00:08:20] Speaker B: To us, very un american because we're coming off our parents and grandparents, you know, the experiences of Stalin and Hitler, with the Nazis and Mussolini and the whole second world War. The japanese emperor, like I mentioned, being a God king. And you know, what I realized is, in preparing for a day, and, you know what it was? It was the God made Trump ad. There was a portion in that ad where they said that, you know, God delivered a leader who was strong enough to deal with the snakes and vipers. I mean, a very religious type of wording. But think about this, with hands gentle enough to deliver his own grandchildren. That commercial said it.
That took me by surprise because that's when I was like, yo, that's a different. Yeah, you know, that's not normal. Like, you're saying, that's not normal politics anymore. That I like.
[00:09:09] Speaker A: That's not normal american, mid century american politics.
[00:09:13] Speaker B: That's normal.
[00:09:14] Speaker A: That's just, that's not much different than having, requiring everybody to have a picture of this dude in their living room.
[00:09:20] Speaker B: No, that's my, that's where I'm going. So that's why I said, for us, that grew up in the time of America where we were, you know, you and I maybe weren't born exactly during World War Two and all that stuff, but meaning the living memory and the culture that we were in was that we don't like that, right? We're against that. We're here. And I just saw, I tell everyone to go, look at this. The 1980 debate between Ronald Reagan and George Hw Bush. And when they're asked about immigration, it's amazing the different mindset, because those men were older, that era, and that's when the mindset of most Americans was, yeah, we're here to welcome people from those parts of the world that are totalitarian. We welcome the refugees from the remnants of Nazi occupied Europe, whether they were jewish or christian or political refugee, whatever it was, it was that we are in a global struggle between democracies and dictatorships, autocracies and all that. So that got me thinking about Kim Il sun, who is the founder of the whole north korean thing that we know now, the grandfather of Kim, the current leader, Kim Jong un. And I remember learning about a year ago that, again, one of the myths for this kind of dictatorship, I think this was on a Netflix or Amazon prime document about how to become a dictator or something. And it was one of these where just that one. Because I didn't know this, but the korean people believe that Kim Il sun invented the hamburger.
[00:10:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:10:48] Speaker B: I don't know why, because they like hamburgers there. And in order to make him more of a God God king, like human, he has to invent everything. So they invented the automobile, they invented the hamburger. And when I heard that thing about Trump delivering his grandchildren with his own hands, that's when I was like, okay, this is morphing into something like that. Because you're asking now the listener or the, or the supporter to make a giant leap, because you gotta either say, okay, that's embellishment and that's too much, or you got to say, oh, wow, maybe he is that good that he did sit there and deliver Ivanka's baby. And Eric Trump's wife, he sat there with her legs spread and said, oh, you know, bring it to me. I'm better than the doctor.
[00:11:27] Speaker A: 30 cc's of.
[00:11:30] Speaker B: Fauci and Burks. Maybe he did go in the delivery room and say that, like, hold on, you guys gotta get out of here. I know what I'm doing. So, long story short, James, without getting the jokes aside, that led me thinking about 20th century regimes like Nazism, which I know is a dangerous. I'm not accusing any of this to go into the Holocaust, but the idea that you took a Wermach republic, that was generally republic normal, and within a decade became what we know became fascism under Mussolini, communism under people like madam.
[00:12:00] Speaker A: I mean, you've made this point already. I do want to keep this moving, man.
[00:12:03] Speaker B: Well, no, that was gonna be. My point is the irony that we are seeing american, some of our fellow Americans, and enough that we gotta deal with this actually want what you and I grew up believing was not the way that we were going to ever run a system of government.
[00:12:17] Speaker A: Well, that's the point is just that this isn't necessarily, this isn't necessarily distinct from politics in a human sense, but it's distinct from politics in the, like, the mid century american sense or even in large part american sense. But this is, you know, this has kind of been the tried and true way to organize societies is get some charismatic guy, put a lot on them and say, hey, this is our guy. You know, this is, this guy did everything. He's amazing. And then go from there, you know, and get people really invested in that and embellish stories about them to the point that people don't know if those stories are true or not. And they just, like, it makes them feel good to believe it. And I think the feeling part is a big part of it, which I want to get into the why here. And that's, I mean, frankly, we, you get to the question of why do we think this, this way of looking at Trump is, you know, something that appeals to people. You know, it's something, well, I should say, actually is one that's acceptable given the context of America, as you said, pointing out that post World War two era where the idea of a guy at the top was something that Americans looked at and said, hey, with pride. That's not what we're about. And, you know, like, it goes from so acceptable to actually having the appeal of, hey, you know, like why? You know, this is what we actually, this is what makes us feel good. And I think the term feeling is a big part of that, actually. It's just that, you know, the, the what, what we're seeing here is that there is a lot that is invested into the idea that Donald Trump makes people feel good about being an american, about themselves or whatever and, and so forth. And so what's happening with that, basically is that we're building on that. This is not something where people are making rational calculations and so forth, which, again, for people who try to lean more in a rational sense, it doesn't make any sense to them. But when you end up in a situation where it's like, okay, this guy takes what's, whatever you have a problem with, whatever you're afraid of, this guy can take it on. This guy. Like, this is about a guy that can make people feel good about something. And when you have that, then, yes, they are trying to build a movement around the guy in the sense that, and it doesn't have to make sense. It's not supposed to make sense because it's feeling based. And in a world where everything you see makes you afraid or people who are more susceptible to being made afraid about. You know, you could be afraid about immigration, be afraid about this, and then they're people that are easy to make afraid then, yes, finding someone who can make you feel good in this scary world is something that has a lot of appeal, which, again, isn't new to human societies, but is something that we're seeing now incorporated into our system, which leads to some interesting results. So when you look at the why, you know, what stands out to you as far as why stuff like this you think is happening?
[00:14:55] Speaker B: I'm ready for the answer, but you just said something that I got to address.
[00:14:59] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:15:00] Speaker B: No, it's interesting when you use the word scary, kind of the direction I was going anyway, but it made me. It's gonna help me crystallize what my feeling is, which is I was very naive to a lot of the things we're about to get into discussing, which is why I always saw this kind of attitude as very irrational.
[00:15:17] Speaker A: What is irrational?
[00:15:19] Speaker B: You know, but what I'm saying is, based on where we're gonna go in this conversation, I now find it very rational to behave this way if you believe in certain cultural, I guess, things that have manifested themselves in american thoughts. But when you said scary, that's really what stuck out to me, because what part of this process of me observing this last decade of our culture wars in the country and kind of uncovering all the stuff we're talking about today is the first time I'm kind of able to accept, and this is where it becomes rational to me. I didn't realize that there's actually enough people in our country that are really scared of people like me and you.
And I never internalized that, because I've been me my whole life, right? And I feel a proud american. I love my country. I would die for my country, all that stuff. And so I never believed in things that I've since learned in recent years, like manifest destiny.
I understood what it was. I understood there was a time in history when there were actually a lot of people in this country that believed that God gave this country to Europeans and that they had a right to expand west and overtake, quote, unquote, the savages, which were the native Americans. They had a right to harvest human beings from Africa and bring them here to be the labor, to build the foundation of the country, and that that was their God given right. And so my point is, because I don't fit into that, I never thought of it as something that today a lot of Americans would still hold, really, as a cultural fact. And a thing of importance. And I think, and again, I'll pass it back because I know we're going to have a long conversation on this, but I feel like understanding that culture. And again, I don't think it's a majority of Americans, but it's tens of millions, at least we're dealing with it, right. I think that's what former President Trump has revealed to me, that I didn't know that so many people actually have this level of anxiety just due to what appears to be the demographic changes and things like, we got 59 years of integration since the 1965 Civil Rights act, and integration generally has worked. People like me and you are normal members of the society along with many others. And so I didn't know so many Americans would be hostile to that. I thought, and I was naive in projecting how I look at our democracy and thinking that everybody was on board. So when someone like a us senator like Mike Lee would say, democracy is not a point of view, the point, a few years ago, I was kind of confused. But now that I've kind of been educated about some of these cultural realities of how some Americans see their own position in the country, now, that seems rational to me. I don't agree with it, but I no longer look at it as rational. I take them very serious.
[00:18:13] Speaker A: So, but again, you're walking a line there because there's a lot that's unsaid. And so it's rational from the standpoint. You're saying that when you understand that the parts of it that are unsaid, then you understand where they're coming from. But it's, the parts that are unsaid are still irrational. You know, it's still, it's maybe a rational response, but it's based on stuff that stuff that you're talking about is not written into the Constitution, so to speak. Stuff that is cult held culturally, like, okay, well, yeah, this is what we say on the books, but what we really believe actually is, is this stuff. And so we're going to try to almost serve two masters here. And where they conflict, actually, we're going to default to the unsaid stuff and say, okay, well, that's really what's going to govern our behavior. I mean, and I think, I mean, I think the fear piece is a big part of it because if you think about it in terms of, okay, Americans and, you know, like, I think our modern technology, modern technological environment plays a big role in this. It's been studied that Americans have an increasingly negative view of each other. And where you see, this the most is with something like what we're witnessing here with the, the God made Trump or just the, the efforts to put him in a biblical light. When you think your enemy, when you, when you start thinking worse and worse of your political adversary, your fellow American, but your political adversary, when you think worse and worse of them, when you're conditioned to think worse and worse of them, think about it. When you, when you feel like you're up against the devil, then who do you look for? God. It's like, okay, well, hey, we, these people that we're against in, in this election or in this, you know, that are our political adversary, you know, our countrymen. But if they stop becoming your countrymen, at a certain point, they just become an obstacle, you know? And, but when you think they are so bad, they, they, you know, they're into this, they're into that, then, yes, you will start looking to more. You won't look for just a political actor. You won't look for a lawyer. You'll look for somebody who's willing to break the rules and who will, you know, do things that are, you know, that may not conform to the standards of the society because you have been led to believe, and you are in an emotional state where what you're up against is Satan himself, you know? And so I think that's where, you know, where we see all this, this interact, is that we're seeing a level of desperation, basically, that is manifested and why the need to, or the, why it feels good to elevate one man and say, this guy can save us from what we've been told is, you know, demonic or, you know, like, so bad that an average politician wouldn't be enough to come and deliver us from this.
[00:20:50] Speaker B: What's interesting, as you say, that, I'm sorry to say it, I kept thinking of the golden calf, dude. And because, again, I'm thinking the irony that we're watching Americans behave in a way and responding to someone like Mao or Stalin or Mussolini or one of these type of leaders which think about in those societies, too, those men above the law, they really could, I mean, Mussolini could choose somebody on Fifth Avenue in Rome and.
[00:21:19] Speaker A: Or order steel team six to take out a political right.
[00:21:22] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:21:23] Speaker A: Or the equivalent.
[00:21:24] Speaker B: Yeah. And so that's where, that's where it's just to me.
[00:21:28] Speaker A: And by the way, just to be clear, the issue we're not out in here, you know, necessarily trying to throw a bunch of stones. The issue actually, that we're talking about is that it's this is not a message that we've been conditioned historically to believe that Americans would respond to or that they would seek out and want. We had been conditioned in this post world War two era to understand that Americans, while that is, this is kind of messaging, has been effective and worked throughout the history of the world. Americans, because of their political ideology, which is more, you know, they constitutional, you know, republic that is based on democratically elected officials, all of that stuff that's built into that, that they would look at this stuff as a negative. This kind of thing is a negative. And this is anti american, so to speak. So it's a surprise that many Americans are drawn to this. In one sense, again, Americans are human. So it's one sense, it's not a surprise, but in another sense, it is. When you look at all that baggage, and then, so it's like, well, why is that happening? Why has it been for so long assumed that Americans wouldn't respond to this? And then they are, is there something that's changed in the culture? Or is there something that's changed? Or was it, were we just looking for an opportunist this whole time, someone with sufficient charisma who would try to take advantage of such a thing and not downplay it? You know, like a George Washington would downplay it and say, no, no, that's not me. Don't put me like that. And in fact, I'm gonna step away after my second term and I'm not coming back to the leadership role. And so that's really the open question here, is, you know, like, and that's why we, right now, we're talking about the why, like, why is this happening in a situation in a circumstance that historically, from a cultural norm standpoint, it was believed that this wouldn't take holding.
[00:23:07] Speaker B: Yeah, well, the thing is, and I'm looking at some things that I want to say here because this is where, again, it's seeing this arc of. From the culture of manifest destiny, actually, and landing right today, it makes sense now to understand things like the great replacement theory. And actually, again, that's something that I didn't realize how effective and potent it is, because into your point, it's fear based. And so, and so, and I think this leads us into this idea, to your point about needing a savior, needing someone who is above the law that to handle your, you know, what you need to do to deal with the fear. So, and this is, this is why I definitely would ask anyone listening to this that's not steeped in it to go look up manifest destiny and all these mindsets, because it reminded me of things like the cornerstone speech that we discussed in other shows from Alexander Stevens, you know, the reason why the confederacy left, wanted to leave, secede from the union. And, you know, a couple of things stick out. So, you know, I'll quote here from the historian, the Anglo American. Sorry. The Anglo saxon race was separate and innately superior and destined to bring good government, commercial prosperity, and Christianity to the american continents and the world. And so three main tenants of manifest destiny are the virtue of the american people and their institutions, the mission to spread these institutions, and then the destiny under God to do this work. That's where the melding with the cultural idea of the country and the religion come in, which is in conflict with the First Amendment. So that now can help me understand, right? That's how I started saying, okay, now I get why this. This kind of christian nationalism has always been saying, as a christian country, then the second thing is important. This is why it's. We do ourselves a disservice as a country not discussing history, because look at the middle of the 18 hundreds, you had all these issues. You had slavery, all that. Then you had the country expanding west. So this type of attitude really did take hold, because people did believe that they were coming to this continent from Europe as religious. This is the irony of it. They were religiously persecuted by the Catholic Church for being protestant, and so they were escaping that to come here. And like humans normally do, they just decided, we're gonna just dominate other people.
[00:25:25] Speaker A: Well, no, it was. You know, and that's. It's interesting in that sense, is that some said, okay, well, let's. Let's. We'll come here and let everybody practice their religion. And they wrote that down. But then a lot of people were like, no, no, we're gonna come here and we're gonna impose our religion on everything else. They just didn't write that part down in the constitution. They just.
[00:25:42] Speaker B: That's how they wanted to live. And because they were smart, like, I mean, this is, again, speaks to the genius of the founder, founding fathers, on creating a society like this. We see it today. If you just say, this is a christian nation, the next thing that's going to happen over the next generation, they're going to be bloodbaths between which type of Christianity, which denomination is going to be the top. Remember, the English had a protestant and catholic war for 100 years. And during our lifetime, remember when we were kids who still had the irish republican army bombing great Britain? They still had this holdover in our lifetime from things hundreds of years ago.
[00:26:18] Speaker A: And so let me just real quick, because that's a really good point.
That's the, why the founding fathers attempted to keep the religion out is because they knew that it doesn't stop there. It doesn't say, okay, yeah, we're a christian nation, we're going to do all this stuff under christian principles. It doesn't stop there. That actually then leads to more conflict which they had observed in Europe over the last thousand years that, okay, well, then it's about which Christian, which christian sect will be in control. And that was specifically what they were trying to avoid and say, okay, well, we want to avoid all these wars between christian sects, then what we're going to say is the government's going to stay out of it from a Christianity or any other religion standpoint. And that that's how it's written. And, you know, like I said, that's how it's written. But we go to this thing of how many people are actually 100% on board with that, you know, versus, you know, like, it being there. It's supposed to be the law of the land, but how many people are actually on board with that?
[00:27:07] Speaker B: Yeah. And so then that takes us to, if your foundational belief about your country is intertwined with that kind of thing, that my ancestors were given this country by God and were allowed, therefore, I mean, it's a very, it's a throwback to kind of the conquistadors and the Catholic Church of Europe. I mean, that's why this history is important, because it was the same attitude when the colonists were going out from certain parts of Europe, conquering the world. The Catholic Church said, well, if it's not a christian nation, you can claim it for whoever your crown is. So the Spanish claim South America for the spanish crown.
The Germans and the Portuguese and the Belgium all, and the French all cut up Africa and the Middle east. So the bottom line is that it's understandable that people hold these views. So now, if you're being told that you should be scared because people are coming and they're taking over your nation who are not part of that plan, then that leads us to kind of where we're going with this. The leader needs to be is a savior, he's a messiah. And I think, again, there's a second piece to that.
[00:28:15] Speaker A: This is happening, and the rules and laws in place necessarily aren't going to stop it from happening.
[00:28:22] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:28:22] Speaker A: And so therefore, you need somebody to go beyond the rules and the laws that are in place in order to stop it from happening.
[00:28:28] Speaker B: Yeah. And that even explains how in some of the extreme things that we hear that people are even saying that the teachings of Jesus right now need to maybe be put on pause because, you know, in this moment, it's special. And right now, we can't be, you know, love our neighbor or, or give forgiveness and all this stuff. So it's, it's a very interesting thing. And one of the things I did is I went, I was watching a speech from President Trump from just this past Saturday, so not long ago, and it was about immunity. And he said, quote, you have to give the president immunity so that a president can do what he feels and what his advisors think is the absolute right thing.
The first thing I wrote after that, which you'll laugh at, I said, man, only Sith speaks in absolute.
Which then got me thinking, yeah, the Sith was the one with the empire.
The Jedi were the one with the republic. But no, on a serious note, because, I mean, think about what that says. A president can do what he feels and what his advisors think is the absolute right thing. What he's saying in a more messianic tone is basically saying, you should allow me and whoever I pick to kind of advise me to bypass the entire process of delaying legal structure and the entire infrastructure of the government.
And that's why we keep hearing all of these things. Like I'm hearing now that some people are comparing him to Jesus against the Romans. This is why, again, for people like us outside this culture, it's counterintuitive that a guy is more popular after he's indicted for crimes. But again, when I started looking into this, I thought, no, it makes sense. That's why in the last, just couple of years, he wasn't talking like this while he was present. He's become very messianic, like he's the savior. Remember this retribution talk, the idea that I'm the only one standing in the way from them coming for you because they're coming for me. So that when you think about Jesus dying for our sins, that's a very, that's not a hard thing for the mind to make, to say, wow, Donald Trump is like a human version of Jesus. He's our savior. He's being crucified by this big, bad government and the deep state and all that stuff for me. And if we don't support him, you.
[00:30:53] Speaker A: Know, that's a message.
[00:30:54] Speaker B: We're going to be in trouble.
[00:30:55] Speaker A: But I do want to keep us moving. Um, yeah. The only thing, the other thing I wanted to deal with here and just kind of get your thoughts on is, well, where does this go? Like, like we. We talked about how, you know, care was taken. It wasn't a unintentional thing to try to keep the religious overtones out of the governing structure of the United States because they saw how this led to conflict, perpetual conflict, essentially, in most places in the world, or at minimum, oppression. You know, it's either the conflict or it's the conflict comes from when the oppressed stop wanting to be oppressed, and then there's conflict, you know, like, that's your war between the Protestants and the Catholics, you know, so to speak, in Europe. So the founding fathers are like, all right, well, we gotta. We gotta prevent that. You know, so let's figure out. Let's set up a structure that tries to get to keep that set up from occurring so that we can happen. So where do you think this goes from here? Because if Trump sent from God, literally, or if that's what you're looking at, then you typically don't just say, okay, well, if we lose the election, we go, we'll look for four more the next four years, and we'll figure out what we got to do, or the next two years in the house and so forth. So it seemingly raises the stakes for everything, which goes back to the question of, is what we're doing politics here or what we're doing something else.
[00:32:15] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I really don't know where it goes, but I don't think it gets much better in the short run. I think, you know, things that we've identified in other shows and conversations, like the technology, the media, ecosystems, the ability to trigger people and disturb them with fear based on, you know, what's, what they're looking at in their phone, their iPad, the cable news. So, and again, I'm a.
[00:32:36] Speaker A: And also the ability to shield people's information bubbles to create information and all that, that's where nothing, nothing unflattering could ever get in.
[00:32:45] Speaker B: Yeah. And that's what I'm saying is, again, in a country where I do revere the First Amendment's freedom of speech clause, that the government shouldn't be able to stop people from communicating in certain ways, I don't know how we deal with that, with the ability of people to just lie and just say things that disrupt kind of our social norms. So that's number one. Number two is like, I've used this term earlier in our discussion, Trump is not the guy that started this. What he's more of is a revealer.
He revealed to us that there has been this pocket of Americans that have been wanting someone like this. So to me, okay, so that's another interesting thing, is at some point, because he's 78 years old, he'll be gone either politically, he'll destroy himself.
[00:33:29] Speaker A: Just let me say this. Have been running it in the sense that have been primed for it, have been primed to believe that it's necessary. And then, like you said, he, I think, astutely stepped in and presented himself as the solution to the problem, that he recognized that many people were struggling with this, the problem of, you know, America, the demographic changes or, you know, whatever, that became really acute, you know, after the 44th president, so to speak.
[00:33:57] Speaker B: Yeah, and that's what I'm saying is that, like, so we know that there's already an economic ecosystem now of grifting and people, you know, from politicians to pundits and YouTube and cable news and all that, that whenever Trump is off the scene, whether, you know, through natural causes or just not politically accepted anymore, someone else is going to try and do this. So I don't think this goes away easily. And I think that's where just, you know, coming back to, you know, everything we've been discussing today, the one thing I'll finish with is, which really is sobering to me, I found a study that was done two years ago in 2022, which tracked it actually really did, a breakdown of the people, arrested 800 people at the time for the January 6 insurrection. And the reason I'm just gonna cite a few stats and not sit on it too much is because, again, I think most of the public in us that don't like this stuff and want to get back to more of a normal, just debate, you know, and not violence, still misread this. I still see a lot of people in the non right wing media, let's call it, saying, oh, the working class white people and all this stuff. And I found, you know, this study found that the majority of people that were arrested were in their early to mid forties and who had families and all that. So these weren't people that were young guys with nothing to lose. 45% were lawyers, doctors, accountants, or CEO's of businesses.
They said 93% were employed.
And so it's like this, the remedies of what we normally at least would think of to deal with populism, like, hey, we need to get these guys jobs and all that. That doesn't seem to be what this crowd is upset about. And what's interesting is 50% of the people, when really asked what is their real fear and their concern, it came down to blacks and non white Hispanics rights are rising at a faster pace than the rights of whites. And that is a direct nod to the great replacement theory. And my point is that once I started learning all this, that's when I was like, okay, if you believe that, then the breaking of the democracy, the needing of a leader who is going to be above all the laws, makes sense. Because what they're basically saying is, I mean, it is sad that people see this kind of zero sum within our country. You and I, James, don't have more rights than a white person. The reality is we just have equal rights and what we've done, meaning non white Americans have performed in the last 60 years.
And there must be a cognitive dissonance, because if you're told that black people and brown people and women and all that can't achieve certain things because of, you know, we're stupid or inferior, and now you're watching those people achieve those things in your neighborhood, in your society, and you maybe feel like you haven't gone anywhere, that's gonna cause you, as a human being, to say, you know what, my country is actually not what I thought it was. And I'll go pick that dude who's telling me all the stuff I want to hear. Right? And so that's why to me, this is, this is really about what direction is our country going. And the people like you and I aren't going to give it up easily as well. And they don't seem to want to give it up.
[00:37:14] Speaker A: That's why I don't think this is.
[00:37:15] Speaker B: Going to get better anytime soon.
[00:37:17] Speaker A: Well, yeah, I mean, I think what we have to understand is this is an attempt to overthrow or, you know, just depose the existing order.
This is existing order, which is a rule of law based type of system. I mean, and that's when we see it. Like, you read the quote from Trump in terms of, you know, and he's talked about this in recent weeks as far as that presidents need full immunity, which is crazy to me about this, because I'm sure that he doesn't endorse full immunity for Biden. You know, it's just like he doesn't think that all presidents should have. He just thinks that he should have, you know, as a. For when he's president, he should have.
[00:37:53] Speaker B: You don't think that he believes Biden can send Seals team six?
His fans would be okay with that if that.
[00:38:03] Speaker A: I don't think it's a principal thing that should apply to everyone. But, I mean, if you're looking at this as an attempt to overthrow the existing order, it claimed, they claim they want to go back to something, but really they're trying to create something new. You know, like, it may have pieces from the past that they like, but it's going to have pieces that they're. They're creating as they go. Like, the whole president should be a king thing, for example.
But we've seen attempts to overthrow the existing order or fights over what the prevailing order will be. I mean, the civil war embodied that. And you read some of the quotes from Stevens, who was a prominent member of the confederacy, and saying what they were trying to do. Slavery was a big part of that. But it was bigger than that, actually. It was like, hey, no, there's this whole idea of the white christian nation, and they should dominate everything and everyone here versus this rule of law thing. And, you know, that happened that when it happened there, that the attempt to kind of overthrow or the fight over what the existing order would be, it ended up being a hot war. But this was not this. We also saw an attempt to overthrow the existing order with the civil rights movement. And the civil rights movement didn't devolve into a hot war. You know, it was, there was, you know, now, granted, you had one of the great leaders, you know, in history, Doctor Martin Luther King, who, you know, was able to do this through a nonviolent movement, but nonetheless, that was an attempt to overthrow an existing order. And it was successful, by and large, but it didn't devolve into a hot war. So what we're going to see here is when we have, this is an honest to goodness attempt. What is happening now isn't just a fight over just how we're going to, you know, who's going to be, don't have their hands on the existing controls right now. It is an attempt to change the nature of the existing controls and also have your hands on the existing controls. And so what we're going to end up seeing is whether this becomes something that devolves into something that's more violent or if depending on the statement from. Because basically the rest of the people, the people who aren't fully immersed in this idea of Trump as a deity or being sent directly from the deity, or that things are so scary now that we have to take extraordinary measures to, you know, we can't live by the constitution anymore or, you know, we've seen this in some of the shows we've talked about in terms of how religion is evolving right now, in terms of, oh, well, you know, you have evangelicals saying, well, the Jesus way isn't good enough anymore. You know, so we see Americans saying the constitutional way isn't good enough anymore. And so it's the rest of the people, the people who don't necessarily feel that if they do, they tolerate it. Do they go along with it or they say, no, no, we do want to maintain the existing order and they stand up to it. And so that I think the other shoe has to drop. You know, every action, there's a reaction. We're watching the action. We're talking about the action now. And so we'll see what the reaction is from the rest of the people who form a majority and who, you know, are there is the status quo. You know, like, to me, the interesting thing is what we're seeing a lot of times, you know, we talk about these battles as liberals and conservatives or progressives and conservatives. Well, the conservatives, now the conservative, remember, is those who are looking to maintain a status quo, you know, looking who, who caution about varying too much from the status quo. An attempt to overthrow an existing order is not conservative, you know, and so it's the opposite of conservative. And so, you know, it's a radical, radical. Liberals, they're the radical, well, I wouldn't say liberal, you know, because it's an illiberal approach, but they are definitely the radicals, you know, and so the conservatives are the ones saying, you know, hey, let's, let's, let's move slow. Let's not do too much to upset, you know, where we are right now. So it's kind of inverted in that sense. But I find it interesting, though, that framing it as liberals and conservatives or progressives conservatives, the people who look at Trump as, you know, who want to put, put Trump above, draw strength from that because, you know, actually that's the wolf and sheep's closing, so to speak. That can pretty, hey, I'm just a conservative. I'm just trying to maintain the status quo while actually you're trying to overthrow it. So I find that interesting. But again, what's going to happen? We don't know. You're predicting to make that prediction, you're out of prediction. What the other shoe was going to be, what the reaction is going to be from the rest of the people? Are they going to tolerate it? Are they going to emphatically put it down via the existing mechanisms, which is voting and elections or something else, you know, and so that I think, you know, we live through. That's what we get to see, which, you know, should be. It's exciting times, a time to be.
[00:42:16] Speaker B: What I think what we'll see is a continued attempt at minority rule. I mean, this last couple years is interesting. You know, they, the Rovers weight overturning by the Supreme Court was what showed me a lot. Not that it's about that issue, but when states like your home state of Ohio, Kansas, Wisconsin, people are coming out in droves to kind of push back against that. What I realize is this is like you're saying a democracy and a constitutional republic that has a representative government. Because I know a lot of people like the mike Lee's of the world, democracy's not the president. Point the idea. And you brought this up to me in a private conversation about the 15th amendment. No, our country does guarantee the right to vote for every citizen. So again, when I see that, you know, certain people on the right are very hostile to a performer like, like Taylor Swift, because she said, for 4 million young ladies go, she got them registered to vote by saying how important it is to participate. Before, I would have been like, well, what's wrong with these guys and all that? Now I kind of get it, like, yeah, you just don't want that many people in there that might go against how you feel about things, but because of our laws, you can't stop them formally. So.
[00:43:34] Speaker A: Well, no, you got, this is what.
[00:43:35] Speaker B: We'Re going to continue to see tie up.
[00:43:37] Speaker A: It's. You don't want that many people out there exercising the franchise because you want to establish and maintain a minority rule system. You want to be able to establish rules and laws without the majority of the people agreeing. And now, granted, the majority. In a constitutional system, the majority doesn't get to say whatever they want because it has to be within the restraints of the constitutional law. But that's not what's at play here. They're not saying, oh, you, the majority want to do unconstitutional things. They're saying, we just don't like what the majority wants to do. And so therefore, we got to figure out ways to undermine the majority or suppress the majority so that we can still prevail with minority, which is not unlike what we've seen in other times. And that's Jim, you know, that's that Jim was a system for minority.
[00:44:21] Speaker B: And you. It's coming from the crowd that always revered the constitution and the people's rights.
[00:44:27] Speaker A: And all that's the thing that was the throw. I was naive to.
[00:44:30] Speaker B: I was. They had me fool.
[00:44:32] Speaker A: They didn't really revere that stuff. That was just. I know that was the throw off, so to speak. That was. Okay, well, if this can deliver to for me what I want, then I'm going to fight for it. But as soon as it can't deliver for me what I want, then I'm going to throw it out, you know, and so that's what we saw.
[00:44:48] Speaker B: I was the naive guy that thought we were all in it.
[00:44:51] Speaker A: You thought we were all operating on principle, you know, but that speaks good to you because that was, it was your projection of your own belief, of your own feeling that everybody's operating on principle like you are.
[00:45:03] Speaker B: Yeah, that's why I was refreshed by Thomas Jefferson's quote about, you know, I don't care if my neighbor believes in 20 gods or not. He's not picking my pocket. Like, I don't care. So, like, I'm fine with.
[00:45:12] Speaker A: But I do want to move us on, man.
So the second topic we wanted to discuss today was something you. You shot it over to me. I think it was a couple weeks ago at this point, but. And it's these. The discovery. I mean, you have to call it a discovery because it's something that, to our knowledge, did not exist before, but of rock that is in part, in significant part based on plastic, that it has incorporated plastic into its mineral structure. And, you know, they even came up with a name for it. Plastic stones, which, you know, is in contrast to limestone and, you know, things like that, sandstone. And so, I mean, our use of plastic. We talk about the use of plastic, plastics in all of us, and the nanoplastics. And, you know, we. Plastic is ubiquitous in our society, so now it's in the rocks, too. So, you know, what was your reaction.
[00:45:59] Speaker B: To seeing this man? Kind of like my reaction is to the last conversation about our democracy, which is, I think this trains left the station with the whole climate thing. And we're just gonna see these changes happen slowly and we're gonna societal wake up a generation or two from now and look back and say, oh, this looks a lot different.
No, and I mean serious. I mean, this is very interesting. You're right. I guess we can't call it a species of stone because stone is not alive. But you're right in comparing it to limestone or some other granite or marble.
We as humans have manipulated our earth enough that we now have a new form of geology, which is fascinating. So we now have the definition of plastone. And just for it's been found, I'll just read real quick, in five continents in eleven countries. And just what does it mean? How does it happen? These rocks form when molten plastic cools within a minerals matrix, forming the plastic rock fusion. And so what's happening is a lot of this is actually happening in the ocean because remember, you have, you know, lava coming out of certain parts of just the ocean and those big tubes that were, you know, life lives where there's no light and all that for any nerds who watch undersea documentaries.
And so what happens is in those temperatures, you know, you have molten rock. But we have, to your point, James, just to explain for the audience that hasn't watched all of our shows, because we've done discussions about how much plastic is really out there in the earth and that all of us breathe in nanoplastic society on our clothes, they found it from the top of the Mount Everest all the way to the Mariana trench. So the idea is that the plastics that are in the ocean, when molten rock is just out there coming out of the earth and then cooling and forming into just new rocks, there's actually a new molecular, like, we've invented something on the earth as humans through our pollution, which is a whole new molecular structure which is the molecules of plastic fusing with the molten molecules of stone. So that's why this is fascinating, because like, you're saying limestone is stone with lime in it. And now we have pushed enough plastic onto the planet over the last hundred years that now the earth is starting to, like, regenerate and reform with you bringing in plastic into its own, like, makeup.
[00:48:17] Speaker A: It's, it's like, which is the way, that's the way the earth does stuff. You know, like, so you know, what's really interesting is, you know, like, they talk about how the plastics that they don't, they're not biodegradable, so they're going to be here for so long. And actually what we're seeing is how a lot of times what they end up doing, if they're left in, you know, so to speak, free, then they keep getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And that's why it's in the air, that's why it's in everywhere, is because eventually they end up as, like, we're not chopping them up to where they become nanoplastics. They get broken up just in the environment, whether it be the uv or, you know, just getting agitated around. They get broken up and broken up and broken up into these super small pieces. What's interesting to me that I was actually a little encouraged by this in the sense that one good way to prevent them from ending up in the air and in the water and everything.
[00:49:05] Speaker B: May be turn them into mountains, put.
[00:49:07] Speaker A: Them in a rock. Yeah. Like, well, hey, maybe we should take advantage of this. If we. If they can get bonded into the mineral matrix of rock, then, yeah, we need to figure out, go take, go find a place, go dump it into a volcano or something like that. I don't really mean that because I'm sure, but other and otherwise set up situations where the plastic can. Well, this can happen to plastic in a way, probably not immediately, you know, but just in a way, if you can set it up to where this will happen to plastic over the 20 years or 100 year period, because it hasn't been that long. This is already starting to happen naturally. Yeah, maybe we can kind of incentivize nature or set up nature to be able to use this process with more plastic and. Yeah, lock up that plastic and rock and then, you know, it'll get buried and then a million years or something, some other society, you know, will be like, oh, yeah, what? We just found fossil fuels that are used to be plastic a million years ago and now it's coal, or now it's something.
[00:50:05] Speaker B: So, or it's arsenic and we're all dead.
That knows what that stuff will turn into in a million years. But that's what I was thinking, too, which is.
This is fascinating, right? Cause I thought about the same thing, like, let's say longer, right? Like 5100 million years from now. Let's say the species of humans don't exist and whatever. Cause I was thinking like, what if we produce by, you know, however long it takes humans to exhaust ourselves before we extinct, we've produced so much plastic that. Yeah, if you had a time machine to show up 100 million years from now, let's say a third or half of the world's actual geology and topography is somehow has this plastic in it.
It made me realize if the earth's 4 billion years old and the whole idea of like a billion years ago, maybe there was some advanced civilization. Part of the reason why I never believed that was because I used to think about that, like, well, we, you know, we've never found anything like plastic or something inorganic that from like more than like 10,000, 20,000 years ago for us to say. But now this is interesting because, yeah, maybe in just a shorter period of time, like a few million years or something anything that's inorganic would just kind of be sucked into the earth again. So maybe certain even elements that we thought came from some supernova and all that might have been some advanced civilization half a billion years ago that already figured out how to get to Mars and all that. And what we're thinking is actual molecules of stuff that they actually inorganically produce. Yeah. So it's. It's. It's interesting.
[00:51:38] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I mean, well, yeah, the possibilities are endless. I mean, what we see, like when we see. And really the significant thing here is how quickly it's happening. It's happening, yeah. Within this short years or so you.
[00:51:50] Speaker B: Imagine maybe after 20 years. I mean, it's not that old.
[00:51:53] Speaker A: Yeah. You imagine that a lot of stuff will happen when you talk. Start on a million years or 10 million years or a hundred million years. I mean, that's the fascinating thing about the dinosaurs is just that they're placed at a time over a couple hundred million years, and it's like, well, they were alive that long. Like, where it's like, okay, yeah. If you go to the oldest dinosaur versus the newest dinosaur, that time period is longer than it is from the newest dinosaur to humans to now. And so if you go back to where the dinosaurs, then, like you said, anything could have happened and we would have no idea, you know, that stuff would have just recycled into the earth by then. And so. And that's what we're seeing now is this is happening quickly. But again, to me, I'm looking at this and the possibilities are like, okay, well, this may create another opportunity or another avenue for us to try to be a little bit more sustainable or at minimum, to minimize our footprint in a way. Again, not just. Just cuz. But in a way that will allow us to. To live on the earth for longer. You know, before the earth. Before what you say we exhaust the earth for our purposes, so to speak. And, you know, we use it all up. So ideally we can continue to use discoveries like this or anything else to improve upon, you know, how we are living and how we're living within the ecosystems of the earth.
[00:53:02] Speaker B: So I was going to just say, what a smile. That in fairness to the dinosaurs, based on our last conversation, they did not have a representative democracy. Apparently they were able to last 300 million years because they were just authoritarian.
[00:53:14] Speaker A: So that's.
[00:53:14] Speaker B: That's another secret.
[00:53:16] Speaker A: Yeah, no, they were tribal. They were. They were tribal by definition.
[00:53:21] Speaker B: So remember if. Yeah, I guess T Rex was like the biggest guy on the block. So, you know, he ran the show for a long time. No one really challenged him. There was no representative of smaller ones, you know.
[00:53:32] Speaker A: Well, no, they would just have to team up if they were going to be a bunch of small wins against him. So.
[00:53:38] Speaker B: He made the triceratops go against the brontosaurus to keep them all divided.
[00:53:41] Speaker A: You see the dividing as old as it gets.
[00:53:45] Speaker B: I'm glad we finished here. I might rethink how I felt about the whole first half of the show.
I might even run for office. Be careful.
[00:53:57] Speaker A: But, yeah. We appreciate everybody for joining us on this episode of call like I see it. Subscribe to the podcast, rate it, review us. Tell us what you think. Send it to a friend. Till next time. I'm James Keys.
[00:54:05] Speaker B: I'm Tundra Romano.
[00:54:06] Speaker A: All right, we'll talk to you next time.
