Episode Transcript
[00:00:14] Speaker A: Hello, welcome to Call It Like I See it presented by Corruption Now, I'm James Keys, and in this episode of Call It Like I See it, we're going to discuss the fallout from the reports that the Justice Department is going to begin looking at the reports, reports of violent threats being made against educators and school board members and so forth around the country.
And really the fallout from that, which resulted in the Attorney General being brought in front of the Senate and being questioned about it and so forth, and the underlying letter from the National School Boards association, which appeared to prompt it.
And later on, we're also going to take a look at reports that drones are now capable of hunting down and killing humans that autonomously, like, on their own, just push the button and the drone will go. And that's it, you know, so that it doesn't require ongoing human interaction and intervention.
Joining me today is a man who must have eyes in his back because he has money to the ceiling. Tunde. Ogonlana Tunde. Are you ready to take a look at some arguments that on their face may look like they're kind of ludicrous?
[00:01:25] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I got a great lawyer as a partner, so, you know, I'm sure I'll be able to have my arguments holed up in court, sir. Let's see. Let's see if you approve.
[00:01:34] Speaker A: Hey, media podcasting, that's not the standard. You can say whatever you want, but we won't go down that direction.
[00:01:41] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, no.
[00:01:42] Speaker A: So we're recording this on November 1, 2021, and I do want to get right to this. Essentially, there was a letter written by the National School Boards association to the executive branch, to the government, Biden and so forth, expressing concern about the rhetoric and the threats and so forth that were being lodged and some contentious issues dealing with whether it be critical race theory in schools or mass mandates or issues that either are contentious or could be contentious or have been made contentious. And so Garland has directed the Justice Department to look into it. And this created quite a incident at the Senate we saw last week. And so I wanted to get into it. Tunde, how serious should law enforcement be taking these reports of threats being received by school board members and educators?
[00:02:36] Speaker B: I think they should take any threats to anybody serious, especially local elected officials, just like they would take a threat to a state or federally elected official serious.
So, yeah, I mean, I think they should take it serious. And I think kind of the way you let in here, I'll kind of expound on that, that it's sad that we are here so I'm sure we'll get into this in more detail.
[00:03:02] Speaker A: I would agree with you. I mean, what surprised me about this story was that there was pushback, it seems, in an attempt to make an issue, make an emotional issue out of the idea of the Justice Department looking into threats being made.
And if there's threats being made, then I would have assumed previously that that's something that anyone who supports law enforcement would want to be investigated.
Making threats, violent threats, is not something that people can go around and do in a civilized society. And our society is no different than that.
And so the what about this? And that's why I wanted to start there, because the what about this? What are we talking about here? Let's not immediately just jump in and. And identify. We're gonna say, I'm with this side, regardless of what they're doing. Let's see what people are actually doing and then figure out how we can kind of make sense of it. And so that. The part that just stuck out to me immediately is we're talking about whether law enforcement would be justified or should be taken seriously when they're requested, saying, hey, we have a concern here, we, as these municipal level officials, have a concern here that. That violence may be coming our way because we are getting threatened in ways that is credible, at least to us. And so, yeah, it was a surprise to me. And yes, again, it seems to be a pretty basic answer that when there are violent threats being received by officials, then that's something we would want law enforcement on some level to look at, whether it would be local law enforcement, or if it's something bigger than that, if it's something more widespread with that, then you would look at federal law enforcement.
[00:04:41] Speaker B: Yep. And I think that there's something happened in this last, you know, 24 months between the pandemic, between the stresses, and then I think the triggers, as we have talked about at length on many shows, between the politics, the tv, the social media ecosystems and the Internet, where people are just on edge. And I think it's translating to then them showing up at school board meetings and acting, you know, shacked in a fool, if we can say it that way, Because. And I think it's just. Because it involves kids. And so people get emotional if they believe their children is being indoctrinated. So, but. But, yeah, so that's where I think that this is. A lot of. This is, you know, just a culmination of all that.
[00:05:28] Speaker A: Well, yeah, but I mean, at this point, you know, we looking at just how the Response from a law enforcement standpoint and how seriously they should be taking it. We also should look at the other side of this, you know, and when Garland, when Attorney General Garland was at the Senate, part of. Or one of the things that was brought up was the issue of freedom of speech and whether or not this type of speech should be protected, that whether parents, whether the Justice Department was looking to suppress parents freedom of speech and conveying their thoughts, their feelings, their positions on. On what the curriculum was going to be or what the requirements as far as masks or so forth were gonna be. And so whether or not this was going to be an issue of intimidation, one where the Justice Department was gonna come down and try to silence speech, and maybe the threat piece was a pretext for that. So what's your reaction really, to that kind of a mindset? Like, what do you think about this as an issue of freedom of speech?
[00:06:28] Speaker B: I mean, look, I think. I think it's like the other things we've discussed. We've got opportunists here.
You know, like, you just put it at the beginning, I think. Well said, right. That threats of violence aren't freedom of speech.
So, you know.
[00:06:45] Speaker A: Yeah. In fact, in terms of speech, you sent that to me. Like, you're like, oh, I was. You went and looked. What was it? At the. One of the government websites.
[00:06:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:06:53] Speaker A: And the first. Oh, go ahead.
[00:06:55] Speaker B: The Supreme Court website. Yeah. And I got it here. I mean, it's funny, freedom of speech. So it's courts.gov for the audience, if you want to just go look at the source.
So it's the Supreme Court defining. So the ultimate authority on law in our country defining what freedom of speech is.
So, for example, I find it funny, one thing that is counted as freedom of speech is the freedom not to speak and specifically the right not to salute the flag. I found interesting. That was a case that was ruled in 1943.
Now, the freedom of speech, it is accepted to use certain offensive words and phrases to convey political message. That was a case decided in 71. However, freedom of speech does not include the right to incite actions that would harm others. And that was decided in a court case in 1919.
[00:07:45] Speaker A: So this is old. This isn't some new things that have been decided.
[00:07:50] Speaker B: Correct. Just like we had to show that in 1905, the Supreme Court decided that vaccine mandates were legal. Yeah, so that's kind of been decided too, but we still argue about that. So.
[00:08:00] Speaker A: Of course. Well, so, but. But let me jump in real quick, because I think that that was an excellent point that you said, because I now, I'm one that does think there's always a risk. Anytime a law enforcement agency is going to look more closely at what someone's doing and there's a speech component, we should be caught. We should be conscious of the fact that that can have a chilling effect on speech. But there do. There does need to be bright lines, though, once you have credible threats going on. And when I say credible, I mean, like, somebody heard it. Like, it. Not that, oh, you know, did this happen? Did this not happen? But like, actually this was set out in public or this was communicated by, you know, email or phone or whatever. Once you have that kind of stuff happening, the freedom of speech analysis has to take a backseat because like you said, that is something that is expressly not considered in your freedom of speech if you're talking about inciting violence, if you're talking about making threats and so forth. And so I do think it's fair to say, hey, don't go too far with this. Hey, I have my eye on you when you look at these threats to make sure that you're not using this in a pretextual way. But it's not fair to say that the government and the law enforcement has no role in investigating threatening, violent threats, because that's how we end up with the insurrection. People talking greasy all up in here all the. And then all of a sudden they do something and people are like, oh, who would have thought that would happen? It's like, well, they've been threatening it the whole time and you don't take it seriously. And then something violent happens. And so that's the last thing we need, is this increasing threatening language and violent talk to become something that actually becomes violence. And so, yeah, the law enforcement needs to look at it once it crosses that threshold.
[00:09:41] Speaker B: But this is where I think it becomes the slippery slope of dangerous. Because, look, there's a lot of good people in the United States that believe what they're being told, right? And that's why I don't want to beat up the people showing up at the school boards yelling at the elected officials, necessarily. Because obviously, I could say, we could all say that antisocial behavior is not good, yelling and screaming is not good, all that. But you're right, those are all kind of the freedom of speech stuff, generally. But like, you're saying that, like, my concern is that we have people that know better, like United States senators and congresspeople who have access to the FBI and the justice system or, sorry, justice Department and people within it, if they really wanted to know what's going on and what the goals of the people in those departments are. And instead of just acknowledging that, like we're saying that there are people that are taking this too far and that are threatening local elected officials, just like we found out that there was a plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan last year in 2020, who I wouldn't say is a local elected official, she obviously is someone that does have protection because she's a governor, just like the senators and congresspeople enjoy Secret service protection. So the idea that now these politicians themselves have created the anxiety within their bases, their political bases of voters, that drives them now to go to these school board meetings and become irate. And some people, right, not all of them, but even like you and I have talked about, 1 or 2% of a large population is still a lot of people.
So if you had 50 million people in, let's say, the base of a particular political party and 1% of them were a little bit out of whack, that's 500,000 people that's showing up in various municipalities around the country that could do harm. So I think that's where my concerns concern is in the long run is that we have elected officials. And we had one Texas senator from Texas who recently, I think last week was grilling the attorney general and started asking, well, is a Nazi salute freedom of speech?
You know, if someone does a Nazi salute to say that the school board members are Nazis, is that freedom of speech? And my point is, is that, yeah, of course it's freedom of speech to do a Nazi salute. And the attorney general acknowledged that.
But I'm just wondering why so many elected officials are flirting with ideas like calling their opponents Nazis and saying that brown shirts are coming and comparing whether you agree with it or not, People genuinely, just people on both sides of, let's say, the vaccine debate, generally believe in what they're talking about. And I think people on these school board debates, there's a lot of people with good faith, but then there's actors that go in there and try and manipulate emotions for political gain. And that's where I think we have the danger. Like you mentioned, the insurrection, something similar, people getting ginned up.
[00:12:45] Speaker A: Well, I mean, yeah, that's as far as whether or not that's where you cross over. As we were talking about the threshold of freedom of speech, and it's no longer a freedom of speech issue. But again, to your point, this is like what we're seeing is Like a grandstand, you know, like it's people who, a senator can write a letter to the attorney general and say, hey, I understand you guys, you have reports of threats, you're going to be looking at that. We're going to be watching you because we want to make sure that you're not trying to use this as a pretext to chill, nonviolent, non threatening stuff, that you're just not using this as a political tool to make, to shut people up who you don't agree with. A senator can write that letter, several senators can sign it. They can all do that. They can use subpoena power, they can do a lot of things which provide here, you've heard this before, congressional oversight, they can do all that stuff. The fact that they want to get on tv, have a public hearing and start saying things that are purposefully inflammatory is really just to try to convey a message to the public at large. And it's one of grandstanding. It's one to incite passions, to get people more angry, people who are already angry more angry. And so that's a concern because as you said, it's opportunism. It's like, okay, I'm going to, so I see this issue not as one where I'm going to do my function as a, as a member of this government, but I'm going to use this to further isolate or further push my supporters into this place where I want them to be, a place where they won't look at me for any accountability.
Any problem is always on the other side. And so I wanted to get there with you because the question ultimately is, as you noted, and I agree with you a lot of times the people who are making these threats, I think you can take from it that they really believe the concerns that they're raising, they're not just, they're not out there, just.
[00:14:33] Speaker B: Yeah, that's what I mean. Yeah.
[00:14:34] Speaker A: And so if they really believe the concerns that they're raising and they're, as you pointed out, in any large society, some people are going to take things too far. But if they really believe it and they're, they're in a position or they at a risk of taking it too far, how big of a role does the ecosystem, and you touched on this a little bit before, but the overall ecosystem that we're operating in play in this, like, are we basically firing everything up for this to happen? We're creating this problem with our own, with our, the way we consume information, the way that we get information and all that Stuff. And then we're looking around and our law enforcement has to go put out a fire that we just started.
[00:15:10] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:15:11] Speaker A: You know, like, how big of a. How big of an issue is that? Do you see as far as the ecosystem?
[00:15:14] Speaker B: Well, it's a huge issue. I mean, I think. I think the tails wagging the dog at this point. I think all the politicians are responding to the ecosystem. I think that, you know, the fact. I mean, we've heard this stuff for the last decade. Plus, I remember watching 60 Minutes 10, 10 years ago, roughly about the amount of time that people in Congress have to spend raising money.
[00:15:32] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:15:33] Speaker B: And they said that they spend 30 to 40 hours a week raising money, just fundraising to stay in power.
[00:15:37] Speaker A: And that was before they had these endless stream of texts and emails that they send out.
[00:15:41] Speaker B: So my point is, is that. So back then, we already learned that they're spending more money on the phone trying to raise money to stay in power and pay for the next election. Then they are actually doing their job in legislating for the American people. And so.
[00:15:53] Speaker A: Or doing oversight.
[00:15:55] Speaker B: Yeah, or oversight. Or whatever. Their job. Right. They're not working. It's like me and you, you're an attorney. Imagine if you had to raise money for 30 hours a week. One thing you'd be doing less of is actual legal work. So my point is, is that the system itself, this is a result of a long time coming in many ways, and that's why it's hard. You can't just point one finger at it.
But there are certain cultural triggers that we know in this country, whether they be, you know, racial anxieties, whether they be kind of economic anxieties like socialism versus capitalism, all that, all these kind of things that once you have the population a bit off on edge and disturbed, especially after something like last year, which is a pandemic, which was new, and then you had the shutdown and all this kind of changes and everyone kind of having this tension, then people can be triggered a lot easier. And, you know, and that's the sad part, is that there's elected officials who know better. And that's my concern. Like, I was watching the attorney general getting grilled last week, and they're telling him that his memo said something it didn't say. And then when he's arguing back, one of the female senator from Tennessee basically says, well, that's your opinion, that it doesn't say that.
And I read the memo and I'm like.
[00:17:09] Speaker A: And it doesn't say that.
[00:17:10] Speaker B: No, it's a fact. It doesn't say what you just said.
[00:17:12] Speaker A: Correct.
[00:17:13] Speaker B: But because she understands this is where they're very smart, unfortunately smart in a way that's hurting the country. She understands the ecosystem. So she knows that the hand in glove thing, where her sound bite will be played on cable news and it'll be circulated on Facebook groups that. Yeah, look, she's telling.
[00:17:32] Speaker A: Nobody will see that. It actually doesn't say that.
[00:17:34] Speaker B: Yeah, they won't actually read it. Right. Just like they won't read the Constitution and see what the First Amendment actually says. Says they won't read the Bible.
A lot of people claim to know a lot about a lot of things, but they don't actually pick up and read about them.
[00:17:47] Speaker A: Your point is.
[00:17:49] Speaker B: Let me finish this one, because that's my concern is that elected officials, first of all, they know better because these are senators that can read. Right.
And they can pick up the phone and call somebody in the FBI or the Justice Department. But that's where to me, it's very disingenuous because they know that nobody has tried to put anything like critical race theory into K through 12 education.
I mean, we did a whole show on it. That type of discussion doesn't belong at that level of education.
And I'm not here trying to advocate for crt. I'm just making the idea, just the point that because, like I said, because we have certain cultural triggers in our country, race being one of them, race.
[00:18:35] Speaker A: Being the defining one.
I mean, there's no bigger culture.
[00:18:39] Speaker B: I won't argue that point.
And so my point is just saying that if you can disturb enough parents that you've got these crazy kind of socialist liberals who want to indoctrinate your kids with all this quote unquote, either black power stuff, for example, as one potential, or to make them feel bad about themselves because they oppressed other people, because you're trying to tell historical facts, like when we talk about things like the Tulsa massacre or something that can be disturbing to people. And that's where to me, proper leadership, if we had it, would be able to say we're going to argue about things like liberalism and conservative left and right stuff generally. But let's all agree that these things are part of our history and it's better the more sunlight and transparency we have on them. Because then everybody.
[00:19:32] Speaker A: You're missing the point there. Because in part, the objective here is indoctrination.
It's continued indoctrination to a particular version of history. Yeah.
[00:19:44] Speaker B: And so that's why I'm missing the Point, you're right.
[00:19:47] Speaker A: Yeah. Like, so the goal isn't, I want.
[00:19:48] Speaker B: To live in the real world.
[00:19:50] Speaker A: Exactly. The goal isn't to say, this is exactly how it went down. Like, look at the arguments against this. The arguments against it is, oh, like, you shouldn't have to feel bad about what happened. So we just won't tell you what happened. We'll tell you some fairy tale about what happened. It's not much different than what we saw with the. And you pointed this out to me offline with the Daughters of the Confederacy. The Daughters of the Confederacy did the exact same thing. Like, they went and they pressured school boards and they got the curriculum changed to make sure that the presentation of that type of history, that part of history, at least in the south, was presented in a way that they felt made them look good. And so it wasn't about, let's agree on this. This is real. We got to be transparent. It was like, no, no, no. We want to indoctrinate with a particular version, with our version. And this is the thing that this reveals to me. I've always been uncomfortable or made uncomfortable by this concept that history is written by the winners, because it's not really written by the. Written by the winners as a. As a rule. Now, if the loser is wiped out, then, yeah, it'll be written by the winners. But if the winner and loser continue to continue on, basically, the history is going to be written by who wants it more. And we see that to this day in a lot of different facets where we see fights over. You'll see fights on Wikipedia right now over how Nazi history is going to be told on Wikipedia. And Nazis lost. Like, there's no. It's unequal. Unequivocally, they lost. But if the people who want positive Nazi history out there, put it in a positive light, want it more than the people who just want to tell the real history of what happened, then you know what? Their stuff is going to be preserved. And it's the same thing with the Confederacy. Like, we argue over the Confederacy and in terms of how they should be presented, like Confederacy only existed for one reason, and that was treason against the United States. Guess what? We're the United States. And we argue in this country about how. How they should be looked or how the people who were part of them should be remembered, whether they should be remembered as traitors or great Americans, and they only are known for treason. And so the fact that. The fact of the matter is here, there is a battle for history going on, and it's whether you're going to tell history the best you know it, the best you understand it, or you're going to tell history in a way that makes certain people feel good.
[00:21:59] Speaker B: You know, there's always like you're saying after a big historic kind of period or event, there's going to be a battle for the narrative. And I think you bring up a very good point about the post Civil war era. About 100 years ago, remember we did this show about Reconstruction and the kind of culmination of the unfortunate kind of backwards, I guess, direction that it went after it was tried.
I think the culmination was the 1915 film of birth of a Nation.
That's when it was like, you know, the lid was finally put on any idea that, you know, you are going to have some sort of kind of genuine equality. And that's when we saw the high Jim Crow kick into gear for the next 50 years or so in the South. And so what's happening in the school board fights is people don't want to bring up things like the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, the things that you and I kind of grew up just after and heard all the stories of the dinner table from family and friends.
[00:23:00] Speaker A: So it was a matter of living memory in our age growing up, whereas we're moving out of the time where that is a matter of living memory. So there is an opportunity to kind of change the way that's taught.
If you wanted enough, basically. Now I want to say as far as the ecosystem, I think it's the defining issue of this, this kind of thing reveals it, how this critical race theory was a non issue at all. You know, you go back three, four years, it just wasn't discussed at all. And then it, all of a sudden it sparked in the media and then it became the most important thing to some people. And so we're seeing how the ecosystem can actually set the mental priorities, the things that people can feel emotional about, the things that people connect to their emotion and so forth and so forth. And if they're doing that, then the ecosystem can drive people to this thing basically. And what it really shows is that you were saying good leadership would be able to stand up to this to some, to some degree. I don't know that that's the case yet. Because right now the way the ecosystem is tilted is that it is tilted towards the disingenuous. You can accomplish a lot more right now with propaganda, with not waiting for the facts, with being able to change the what you're saying going to the whole firehood of falsehood propaganda model, which is designed for the Internet and for social media.
If waiting for facts, having to stick to the same position and not actually, you know, like sticking to the truth, so to speak, not being able to adapt what your truth is depending on what actually people see or whatever, all of those things are hindrances from a persuasion standpoint in the current ecosystem. The current ecosystem rewards those who are first, meaning it doesn't matter if you get it right, who are repetitive, meaning anybody can be on the same, you know, the same wavelength for that. And people who are able to connect either tangentially or directly, issues with emotion, and that is, those are things that all lean in the same direction in terms of if you're disingenuous, if you're trying to be opportunistic, this is.
These are areas where the current ecosystem can give you a leg up. Now eventually I would think it'll catch up, you know, like it'll become either people will become more sophisticated as far as being able to see when somebody's trying to take them for a ride, or the, you know, the people who are trying to be truthful will figure out other ways to combat it. But right now the advantage is to the person who, you know, is not bound to the truth.
[00:25:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm not too confident on the former. Let's hope for the latter. Because, you know, I just watched a documentary on the Salem witch trials. So what I'm saying is 10,000 people got burned in the stake over a 10 year period in Massachusetts. And I think it was the late 1600s because they were thought to be witches. So human rationality.
[00:25:51] Speaker A: Let me add something to that because one other thing that you can look at that in the past and say, okay, it could have been worse. And right now we're in the situation where it could be worse is remember, the ecosystem is national. It makes issues that ordinarily would not be of particularly national import.
Everyone is caring so much about them. And so with the Salem witch trials, that could have been much worse if you had, you know, Facebook and all these other things out here. Because the witch trials wouldn't have been just in the Northeast.
[00:26:22] Speaker B: Could have been a million people killed. Exactly.
[00:26:24] Speaker A: Because they would, they would have caught on like wildfire. People like, hey, just can just accuse somebody. Yeah. You know, and just go with it. And again, that's not bound to fact, that's not bound to logic or reason. You can just say that stuff and if you argue it and are passionate about it or whatever, Then you can get people on board. And so the nationalization of issues due to the ecosystem and the way we. Again, the way we receive information and spread information is another piece about this that makes it really difficult for. To. To control issues like this.
[00:26:56] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think, you know, one of the things that is very interesting about this whole thing is as not only we've done shows about social media and all that, but more stuff has come out about Facebook, kind of what they know, how they create more conflict through their algorithms. And you're absolutely right. Then that's what I was thinking about.
[00:27:17] Speaker A: They do so because they've learned that if they don't, then engagement will go down. Their level of engagement, as told by Facebook, depends on their ability to create conflict and to make people angry.
[00:27:29] Speaker B: Yep. And I think that's what we're recognizing when we're saying the tail's wagging the dog. That and this thing about, like, the amount of time politicians have to spend raising money and doing all this stuff, which is. You're right, unfortunately, there's no room for leaders who want to kind of break through this kind of noise because they're going to lose. And so one of the things I wanted to bring up, going back to ecosystem, was a story I found, which I found fascinating because it shows about how ecosystems are nothing new. I think you rightfully pointed out that the Facebook and the Internet creates a new dynamic because it spreads like wildfire across the world.
[00:28:07] Speaker A: That being another national news.
[00:28:08] Speaker B: But there was a story I read in preparing for this, somehow I went down a rabbit hole on clicking links, and it was the nativist riot of Philadelphia in 1844.
And this is when it says the riots were a result of rising anti Catholic sentiment at the growing population of Irish Catholic immigrants. The government brought in over a thousand militia. Basically, these were before we had, like a national Guard.
And they confronted nativist mobs and killed and wounded hundreds. So imagine that like a battle.
It's what I think a lot of people thought they would have saw, you know, if the Capitol was ever stormed, that actually. That the law enforcement would stand up to it. And there was five months leading up to the riots. There was a lot. There was an ecosystem. You know, you had pamphlets, local newspapers.
You had. Back then, you didn't have tv, so people would actually just get on a soapbox and literally start speaking.
[00:29:07] Speaker A: In the town square.
[00:29:08] Speaker B: Yeah, in the town square. So you had the same thing. You had this ecosystem of information, which was false. And so what it says is they were spreading false a False rumor that Catholics were trying to remove the Bible from public schools. Because remember back there was a time when it wasn't, you know, socialists and capitalists or liberals and conservatives, it was Catholics and Protestants. Those were the big fault lines of who you kind of what side of the fence you were on. And so what's interesting is the result was the Catholic church sued the city and won some money for repairs. I found that's cool. Like the courts again in the United States always coming to the rescue. And it says civic leaders deplored the nativist attacks. Nationally, the riots helped fuel criticism of the nativist movement. Despite denials of responsibility from nativist groups, the riots exposed efficiency in law enforcement in Philadelphia and the surrounding districts. Dude, I thought so much of January 6th. Like, hold on, most people frowned on that. On average then the people that caused it all are acting like they're denying it, like, oh, I didn't do this, I didn't do it, I didn't incite all these people. And then what do we find? Deficiencies in law enforcement and the response. So it's just funny how history kind of rhymes.
[00:30:25] Speaker A: Well, I mean, as you said, one of the big issues there was the school board issue and what was going to be taught in the schools.
[00:30:31] Speaker B: Correct. That's why I thought of it and it came up as I was doing my reading because it was about, there was the Dewey's Bible, which was the quote unquote Catholic Bible. I mean, I didn't know there was two different Bibles back in the day for Catholics and Protestants and then there was the Protestant Bible. And that was the whole thing. Just like the lies about CRT and all this stuff today about you're going to indoctrinate my kids. It was lies about that. And it's funny, that's why the Catholic Church was able to win through the courts because they were able to prove that it was false and then they got harmed for it. So it's just interesting. And that's why also there's, there's so much precedent in our country and written precedent, like we talked about with Supreme Court rulings of these various things.
And, and well, let me, let me tie that into.
[00:31:14] Speaker A: Because here's the, the piece. As far as the nationalization is, what we're, what we're living in right now is that these types of things have happened, you know, around, spontaneously around the country or here or there or whatever, all types of eruptions of small scale violence and so forth. But where the direction we're going right now is One where it's a nationalized problem, where the scale could be much larger and much more difficult to deal with. And so, again, if you looked at that, if they had the ability to spread their word nationally, the issue would have most likely been much larger. It would have been a much more difficult issue to deal with, and more harm could have come to people. And so to deal with that, it makes sense why you would have the Justice Department right now when you're saying, oh, we have violent threats coming, when we have people saying things that aren't necessarily true, that are going to rile people up, it makes sense why you have the Justice Department look into it. Again, not to say that the branch of government that's charged with oversight of the executive branch should not do some oversight duties. Yeah. Check. Make sure they're not just suppressing speech just because. But at the same time, to turn it into an issue, one of grandstanding, one of fundraising. Oh, we're just going to make some sound bites that we can fundraise on is really disingenuous in terms of using the position and undermining really, the function of rule of law. And, you know, that's ultimately where we get to at a point where it's really becoming a concern as to whether or not we all are in it for rule of law, like, by people's own words. Like, I was reminded actually, with the defense that was being made of making violent threats of when Ron Johnson, the senator from Wisconsin after the insurrection, was talking about how he wasn't that worried about it because it was his people, it was people, that those people are fine. If it was Antifa or Black Lives Matter, he would have been worried. But since it wasn't them, it wasn't that big of a deal. And it's like, again, you're judging the actor and not the action. You know, you're saying, okay, I don't think this is a big deal because of who did it without regard for what they actually did. And so we can't. What. We can't fall. All I'm gonna say is we can't fall into that when we're looking at people making threats to school board members, educators, and all that we need to protect these people. You know, like, these people are just trying to do a job, and it's a job for the state on behalf of us, the state, the county.
[00:33:39] Speaker B: Well, here's the sad part, is that this is a beautiful system the United States has created.
And part of the reason why it's beautiful is you have these Especially at the local level, like this. These are regular folks like us. These. All these people got jobs. They're not getting paid for this stuff.
[00:33:54] Speaker A: Right.
[00:33:54] Speaker B: And so we really have representatives from the community.
And what I was gonna say is deeper than even what you're saying in terms of, like, the Ron Johnson comments, because I just saw, I think it was two weeks ago, Mike Pence, who was being targeted to be hung that day because he wasn't loyal enough to usurp the Constitution and go against actually the will of the American voters nationally through the Electoral college in each state and certify the electoral votes.
He said that, well, January 6th was just another day in January because I guess he's so scared of the base and about the media ecosystem and not being scared he's gonna get hung.
[00:34:37] Speaker A: He's scared he's gonna get hung.
[00:34:39] Speaker B: Yeah, he's scared to get hung. So my point is that. That's the difference is that you've got on one side of this emotions high. Let's say the BLM side, right? There's emotions high and all that.
And you know, hey, certain bad actors do, do, do do things in crowds when they get hyped up, but then usually they're condemned by all serious people. Even on the side that wants to see things like justice reform and all that, they, they, they will go out there and say, this isn't the way that we should do it.
Then you've got another side that is being fed red meat, and it's almost like the dog chasing a car.
There's no real reasoning behind it. So it's just anger. And then the people who could be leaders for people who feel that way don't say, this isn't the way we should do it and all that. They just pretend like it wasn't that bad. So it inevitably is probably gonna happen again.
[00:35:38] Speaker A: Well, but this is what you were saying, though, with the tail wagging, the do pay to when Liz Cheney stands up or when Adam Kinzinger stands up.
[00:35:46] Speaker B: Or the guy Ohio from.
[00:35:48] Speaker A: Gonzalez. Gonzalez. The guy from Ohio, Anthony Gonzalez. When they stand up, the ecosystem casts them out, you know, and so they're no longer basically welcome to the table. And so that's what your point is as far as the tail wagging the dog. Here, there is no space for leadership to level with people. The space is you have to do what works for the media and which works for the media is to rile people up. If you're not in the business of Riley, people up. Hold on. So. So you can if you're not in the business of riling people up so the media can turn a larger and larger profit, whether that's traditional media or cable media or, excuse me, or social media, then they will cast you out, they will turn you into the enemy and it becomes something that's self reinforcing. And so that's what I'm saying. Like ultimately they'll have to be a change on how these things operate. Because right now the incentive system, as you pointed out, doesn't support honesty. Doesn't support, in fact, makes honesty, makes having principles a liability. And as long as that's the case, then this is the direction things are going to go. And we just hope that it doesn't take over the entire system because it's already taken hold pretty hard in part of our system.
[00:36:56] Speaker B: Well, let me just say this to finish your point because you made a great point a long time ago and I think we joked about on the show that this is the participation trophies of media, right? People getting told what they want to hear instead of what they should be.
[00:37:07] Speaker A: Hearing, like facts, because that's profitable.
[00:37:10] Speaker B: Yeah, I know. And what I want to say right now, like just to segue off, I mean, piggyback, what you said was it is taking hold. You know, I saw a poll today, it's funny in timeliness for our show that 75% of Republicans polled believe that there was basically shenanigans that were illegal in the 2020 presidential election.
Now, we've had shows about this, right? The 60 plus lawsuits that all went nowhere. The fact that Fox News and other conservative quote unquote outlets took anchors off the air that were pushing the big lie once they were being threatened with lawsuits. So clearly they didn't want to go to court over this.
On and on and on. Even all the audits that have shown that the election was right, basically.
So my point is the damage is done. That's my point. Like, so now we've got a majority of a whole party, which is only.
[00:38:07] Speaker A: Two major super majority. Yeah, substantial.
[00:38:09] Speaker B: There's only two parties in this country, really, I mean, that matter. So now we've got the majority of half this country that believes that a fair election in their own country wasn't fair.
And that's my point. Just like all these parents now believe that their kids are getting indoctrinated with something different than they were getting taught two or three years ago.
I mean, the curriculum's the same and.
[00:38:29] Speaker A: They believe that because it's profitable for media companies to make them think that.
[00:38:33] Speaker B: Or Just keep watching. Americans in North Dakota and Idaho and Iowa get ginned up thinking that a caravan of 400 people coming up through the southern border of Mexico is gonna somehow stop the United States cold in its tracks. And so my point is that all these issues are important. We've talked about it before. I don't want open borders, but I'm not gonna stop my whole day. Cause somebody told me 400 frigging poor moms from Guatemala showing up at the border. I figured a border patrol can deal with that. And I'm going back to sleep.
[00:39:01] Speaker A: So it's just again, that goes to the tail wagging the dog piece. Basically there are ways that media has identified that they can get more attention, they can keep your attention or many people's attention. And basically our politics now have become reactions to these issues that the media is using for attention. You know, and so it's all, it's lost all connection to, or at least if it doesn't need to maintain a connection to reality in order to be prevalent or dominant in our political discussions or what's discussed at our school board, all that matters is does it have salience and can it keep attention in a news cycle? And if so, we're going to have to deal with it regardless if it's true or not.
So I mean, I think we can move on from there.
It's a very interesting topic just from the standpoint, like I said, I think you put it best. It's just that the tail's wagging the dog.
Can we make a story out of this? Is the first question.
And the analysis on whether it's something that we need to talk about in society.
And so that leads to some pretty crazy results.
But moving on, the second topic that we wanted to discuss today was something that's kind of just jarring on its face to hear said or direct read the headline and read the article, but just that you have companies now. Now we read a piece, at least initially, about a contractor, a military contractor from Turkey that has, that's selling drones that carry payload, carry their own, you know, decision making engine and can be programmed and then set off to go hunt and kill people. And that's it. Like once you set them off, that's it, they're gone. And you don't, you know, you're not, you're not controlling them with a joystick. You know, you're not using the camera to see, you know, like, oh, I got to bring in here, bring them there. You're not pushing the trigger to make sure that they fire or tell them when to fire and so forth. And so beyond going to like a Terminator 2 or Terminator and Terminator 2 type discussion, it like, are you as freaked out about this as I am?
[00:41:06] Speaker B: I was gonna say, why do we need to go beyond that discussion? That sounds like the discussion we're about to have. That's all I was thinking about when I was reading this stuff. I was like, damn, this is Terminator.
Yeah. I mean, it's interesting, dude, because you're right. Like, I'm not freaked out about it, but I probably should be. It's so funny. Like, yeah, this is the stuff we should be worrying about, not what's going on at the damn school board. Right, yeah. And. And you mean.
[00:41:29] Speaker A: Hold up, hold up. You mean that these corporations won't just do what's best for society when they're selling these things? That we should have to worry about them doing something that might put profits over what's best for society?
No. Say it ain't so.
[00:41:43] Speaker B: Cigarettes are healthy. Right.
[00:41:45] Speaker A: And social media doesn't make your kids.
[00:41:48] Speaker B: They told me the filter in a cigarette scrubs the air. Yeah, yeah. So, but anyway, so I was thinking this article was kind of cool because I learned a few things. One, I learned that there's a civil war in Libya. I had no idea what's going on around the world.
And then, because that's I guess, where this was first used last year in 2020, successfully used as a weapon. And then the second thing is Turkey's got a pretty strong defense contracting sector in their economy. I was impressed that this came from a Turkish company.
But on a serious note, this is definitely game changing. One of the articles, I think rightfully so, pointed to this as being potentially as game changing as the first nuclear bomb that was. That detonated. Meaning that from a historical perspective, we could look at the nuclear age and the nuclear bomb being detonated as a change that. That's when society, warfare, all that basically changed to kind of compensate for this new weapon. Yeah. And you know, and just say, okay, maybe let's not go there anymore.
[00:42:56] Speaker A: And interestingly enough though, it kind of, you could argue that it put a chill on, on large scale conflicts because prior to that, in the last 30 years, they had two world wars, and then after that you still had conflicts, but they were, a lot of them were proxy conflicts.
They weren't large scale.
[00:43:14] Speaker B: Yeah, they kept them. I think you're right. Let's say you're right. In the 20th century. The two good examples are chemical warfare from World War I, which was devastating. And unless you look at the very rare instances, like Saddam in, I think, 1998, and a few little instances, chemical war, like bombs that drop chemicals, like chlorine gas and all that were not used in warfare anymore. And I think you're right. The nuclear bomb kind of did the same thing. Like, hold on, if we use this, it's going to kill everybody.
Let's not do this.
[00:43:45] Speaker A: It's just an interesting. Like, you don't think about that, but just the interesting backside of it creates something so devastating that people actually are like, oh, well, maybe we need to think a little about this a little bit more. But go ahead. Yeah.
[00:43:56] Speaker B: And I think this has the potential to get there, unfortunately.
Let me think.
As I even said, The World War I and World War II examples, part of the reason is nature. I mean, just like with the COVID virus, I remember watching a documentary about World War I and the French were using artillery shells to do these big rounds of the chemical gas onto the Germans. And then what happened is the wind shifted within, like, 10 minutes and blew all the gas on the French troops and killed them all.
[00:44:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:44:27] Speaker B: And that's when they figured out they're hacked. Yeah. They're figuring out, like, all right, maybe we just shouldn't do this. And I remember reading a similar thing about after we dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they had radioactive meters off the coast of California that were going crazy. And that's when the US Realized, hold on, if we start dropping this stuff around the world, the wind will blow it back into our country.
[00:44:48] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:44:48] Speaker B: And I think you're right that unfortunately, it'll probably take some sort of, you know, tragedy like that, like someone hacking one of these things that was maybe going to be used for a legit military thing and then went and hit the school and killed a bunch of kids or so. You know, like, just something tragic will happen or it'll go too far, where maybe society will say, okay, let's not do this anymore. But it is fascinating because it. Like, we're talking about, and I don't think we've articulated this yet for the audience, it was the first time that an autonomous machine killed a human.
[00:45:21] Speaker A: And what they call it hunted and killed, like, didn't. Not, just, you know, like, you push the button and it fires. But like.
[00:45:28] Speaker B: And like you said.
Yeah, we're used to seeing, I think, the drones, like the ones in Afghanistan, Iraq, where there's a guy sitting in a trailer in Nevada with a joystick, still controlling it, still getting a Good, you know, view from high HD cameras of who's there and all that. And still having a chain of command, like calling it up to a superior, saying, hey, I see this person, this looks like the person in the photograph here that we identified. And boom, let's put the missile. And there's layers. This one, they said that's foolproof, but.
[00:45:57] Speaker A: That'S still has a lot of.
[00:45:59] Speaker B: There's accountability at a certain level. And. And I think this one, the way they said it was, it was programmed at whatever, you know, the, the base that they programmed it at.
And then. And it was the Libyans who flew it against the, I guess the faction that's fighting them.
And there was a caravan of, like, fuel and all that to go, I guess, restock the enemy, you know, and munitions and all that. And what they did is they programmed the drones to go to the location of the caravans, but the drone had already been programmed to identify humans.
And what happened is they just figured every human at that place is going to be an enemy because that was a caravan of the enemy. And you're right. So the drone indiscriminately went and just killed people. And they said it was basically 60 drones that are basically kamikaze drones. They don't have guns and missiles on them themselves. They're designed to go right to the target and blow up. So they're designed to see a human figure and literally fly up right to your face and just explode. And you're right. So there's a lot that could go wrong with that.
Once someone hits a button for those things to take off and just. And go.
You're right. They could get hacked. Someone could have the wrong target.
[00:47:13] Speaker A: Well, just doing it the way it's supposed to be is terrifying. And then. Yeah, and then all the other terrifying things of if something goes wrong or if it gets hacked or whatever. Like. So to me, this is like, this is a. And the article we read talked about, you know, like, you said that the threshold moments. And I think this is actually a threshold moment here because you have a axe, you have a sword, you have a gun, you have a cannon, whatever. That thing can't just go off on its own and kill somebody. And now that we're doing that, that'll change warfare, you know, that'll change warfare fundamentally.
But again, it's still one of those things. Like. And this is where I guess it's good that we don't have, you know. No, I'm not guessing it is good that we don't have These large scale conflicts right now, in this, in the computer age that span nations and nations and nations and continents and continents. You know, like there's always going to be some level of conflict. But these are the type of things though, like you hope that it wouldn't embolden people to be more belligerent because it conceivably can remove some of the risk from people who are making decisions on, you know, on, on whether to go in or something like that, or people, the people they care about. You know, like you're not necessarily sending in your troops, you're putting your troops in harm's way. But, you know, I don't know, you hope that it works out like you said, in the way that maybe the chemical warfare thing worked out or the atomic, the bomb worked out. And in those, as you've pointed out many a times, the kinetic strikes oftentimes spur people to action. Much more so than theoretical or things that are subtle. And so you would hate this, but you hope that it's not going to take something really bad happening for us to wake up and say, hey, we may want to keep an eye on this. This is something that is, that could go really poorly in a lot of different ways, you know, because it's not like it's going to be one of those things where one person has it and nobody else does.
[00:49:05] Speaker B: Yeah, no, it's obviously, you know, countries all over the place are developing this technology now. The interesting thing is I was reading that in 2017, our military, through DARPA, the big research arm of the, of the military is, had created a defense for this. Yeah. That almost looks like Silly String. You know, it's, it's this, it's this. But it's, it's not that soft, apparently. It's a very thick metallic string type of substance that sprayed out and it can, and it somehow it disrupts the drones themselves and it can, it can go against the drones that we think of like the little ones with the propellers as well as the, you know, there's now drones that are almost the size of a fighter jet that just unpiloted, but they're, you know, supersonic. And these can apparently stop those as well.
So, you know, I think that's going to be the interesting thing. It's an arms race like any other. Now that there's this new technology, there'll be defenses against it, there will be.
[00:50:02] Speaker A: Measures and there will be countermeasures.
[00:50:03] Speaker B: Yeah. But I do think that unfortunately like there are with all these things, there's going to Be some conflict, some countries going to use it in a real large scale conflict. And maybe not in a place as remote as Libya that doesn't have, you know, TV cameras everywhere, but it'll be maybe in a, in a larger metropolitan kind of setting. And it's going to go wrong and it's not going to be pretty. But Sunday, that's what I say.
[00:50:26] Speaker A: Even if it goes right, it's not going to be pretty. Yeah, like it's, it's, it's a really, really, really, it's a slip. Like we talked about slippery slope before. That's a really slippery slope.
[00:50:35] Speaker B: Yeah. You know, one of the things that makes it a slippery slope back to kind of how we're talking about like will someone use it or not, is that we may not know when it's been used. Because what they're saying is because it's basically set to self destruct, you know, the way that it works is by exploding at its target. They were saying that, you know, you can't tell what hard, what software, sorry, was in there when it's already in pieces because all you're going to have, you might have some hardware, you might have a processor or chip, but you're not going to know if it had the AI within it. Because also that.
[00:51:07] Speaker A: Or if it was just operating from.
[00:51:09] Speaker B: Yeah, like maybe a human being was operating it or was it being, was it connected to a cloud that had AI software in the cloud that was feeding it the longitude, latitude, type of coordinates?
[00:51:22] Speaker A: Well, yeah, I'll say this because it's not like, and this also stood out to me and then we can get ready to wrap it up. But it's not like this Turkish company was the first people to come up with this idea.
It's that they were the ones that actually did it. And obviously more people are going to do it.
And it's likely that other people already have, but they just have decided, like the US has purposefully said that we, hey, we want chain of command on these things. We don't want these things just flying around autonomously taking things, taking people out. You know, so the fact that it's there now, you know, you can't put toothpaste back in the tube. And so as you, as you had pointed out before, it's going to be an issue of countermeasures, but then it's just going to be an issue of if someone deploys this, is that going to be looked at as somebody deploying mustard gas? And they're going to be then reviled internationally or, you know, what is it going to be? Because it's new, it's very dangerous and it's something that we should pay attention to.
[00:52:19] Speaker B: I got a fun little thought here which is not, I say that in jest, it's not fun. But who might be the first to use it where it gets pretty ugly? Might not be a government. Because you make a great point. I didn't think of it. You say that the US wants to have a chain of command, yet a lot of governments may want the accountability of knowing that they're, you know, that they're, that they don't accidentally start a war because some drone did the wrong.
[00:52:43] Speaker A: You know, just particularly governments that answer to the people in some respect.
[00:52:46] Speaker B: Yeah. And you know, I could see, you know, clandestine operations using these things because then you don't have to, you know, you don't have accountability for something secret. But you know, who I could see using this first is maybe like drug dealers. You know, I'm talking at the high level because think about it, we know that they bought submarines and all that to, you know, ship cocaine, you know, from Columbia to Miami and all that.
What we saw recently in Haiti, I mean, that's a pretty big deal.
[00:53:10] Speaker A: So. But your point though being those non state actors basically who, because that could.
[00:53:15] Speaker B: Be like, think about it, you upset the Colombian or Mexican drug lord who's making a billion dollars a week in pure profit.
What's to say they can't buy something like this on the black market and instead of sending a bunch of mercenaries to knock a president off next time they just got three drones flying in, you know, his house and boom, hit him in the head.
[00:53:36] Speaker A: It's a good point because the thing that would prevent that person from buying a fighter jet or from buying a, you know, other types of high level equipment is mainly because they would, they'd have to also have the personnel to operate it. But the whole point here is that it's autonomous, that you don't need highly skilled personnel to operate it. And so it opens up the playing field, so to speak, for more actors as long as you have the funds to get into it. But. Exactly that's, I mean, now we're going even in a more crazy place. I think we should, we should probably get out of here.
You know, why we can't or not why we can, but just, well, you know, scared too much more.
[00:54:12] Speaker B: Yeah, but what's interesting is because these drones are still pretty big, like, you know, the size of a lot. You know, the larger drones that we were all used to seeing that's probably, you know, about three or four feet in diameter.
They now, you know, there's high level stuff where there's drones that are the size of mosquitoes and, and flies and all that. Imagine the, the capability. If you get into real high level, like we talk about the spy stuff. Imagine like the CIA, one of these things, having a small drone like that, the size of an insect that could be armed with like a poison or something.
[00:54:46] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:54:46] Speaker B: And that flies into a room and just kind of sits on your shoulder and I'd rather not imagine that. You rather not imagine.
[00:54:52] Speaker A: Okay, I would rather not. I would have been better off if we would have ended the show a second ago.
[00:54:55] Speaker B: Hold on. Okay, then I'll get on the nanotubes with the COVID vaccine. How about that?
[00:55:00] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.
[00:55:02] Speaker B: The 5G technology.
[00:55:03] Speaker A: They wouldn't tell you in advance that, hey, why don't you guys do this? So. But now we can wrap it up from there. We appreciate everybody for joining us on this episode of Call It Like I See It. And until next time, I'm James Keys.
[00:55:13] Speaker B: I'm Toondevin Lineup.
[00:55:15] Speaker A: All right, subscribe Rate review. Tell us what you think of the podcast and we'll talk to you next time.
