OK, let's get into our first audience questions for twenty twenty one very good ones, ones
I'm looking forward to answering.
First is, David, do you think we really could be approaching a secessions civil war scenario
after January 20th?
I think that the answer is no.
Now, if you step back and say, well, I'm going to just focus on are there secessionist movements
and is there a group that would love to use militia organization and militia power to
separate or to go against what is going to be a Biden run federal government?
Yeah, there's no shortage of that.
But the country has changed dramatically from the times of the civil war.
In the Civil War, you had two very clearly defined factions.
They were geographically much more homogenous than what we have now, where you have even
in red states, the cities are often blue, even in blue states, the rural areas are often
red.
Right.
And now it's a very urban rural situation within states in the civil war, it was different.
Each side had a military to back it up in a more sort of equal way.
And so right now, a lot of different things have changed.
First, there's this sort of geographical complexity.
It's not clear like which states would be part of which side.
Urban, rural within states is the sort of circumstance no two financial red states are
not viable without blue states.
And we've talked a lot about when you look at whether states pay in more or get more
back from the federal government, the blue states overwhelmingly pay and more, whereas
the red states are more likely to be lechers and receive more from the federal government.
And absent that, a lot of those red states would not even be financially viable.
And my my guess would be, is if you see some of these groups, militias, et cetera, escalate
into bombings, shootings, etc., you would see the tide turn with police and National
Guard forces likely putting them down without even getting to some kind of a more federal
response.
However, I mean, like let's think ahead.
If you imagine these red states somehow come together and they say we're going to use our
combine our state National Guards, I'm speaking.
So hypothetically, the reddest states all together have National Guard forces of about
200000 troops and the federal government is about a million and a half troops and they
have all the real firepower.
And so from a purely logistical perspective, I'm not saying that right wing militias can't
cause chaos.
Oh, they absolutely can.
They can cause chaos.
They can cause death.
They can do horrible, horrible things.
But the circumstances are simply not ones that would lend themselves to a true civil
war.
And if the federal army, if the army were to be used by the federal level to suppress
this, you know, homegrown militias are not going to be a match for the U.S. military.
For better or worse, we can talk about military industrial complex.
We can talk about all of these other things.
But I actually think the more interesting topic is.
Are there enough just people willing and interested in that, I know that, you know, half the country
or a third for 35 percent of the country didn't vote.
Of the people that voted for Trump, half believe that Trump is ultimately going to be sworn
in.
Some of those, when Trump is not sworn in, might be really, really angry.
And some subset of those might want to secede and some subset of those might be willing
to actually go and fight for that in some way.
The point is, I don't think there's enough people actually interested in that, that that
you're really going to see any significant movement along those lines.
And I've talked before, we have an economic situation that is designed to prevent people
from organizing in that way.
And this is for better or worse.
I've talked about how cheap stuff from China combined with easy access to credit.
Credit cards and personal credit keeps people relatively comfortable enough, doesn't mean
that there's no poverty, doesn't mean that there's no hunger.
But even people who otherwise might not like without credit and cheap stuff from China,
there would be lots of people who on a day to day live far worse, far less comfortably
than they do.
So a lot of people are just going to say, you know, I kind of would rather just hang
out and watch sports, not do whatever it is the secessionists want me to do, combined
with the fact that due to stagnant wages and the precarious financial situation of many
people, a lot of people, you know, oh, let's go let's go wage a civil war and try to secede,
I'll be gone for two weeks.
Wait a second.
Then I lose health care and lose my income.
And then if we don't succeed when I get back, what do I have?
I lose my house, my car gets repossessed or whatever.
So that is to some degree by design in the system that we have.
And I've spoken about that before.
So I do not expect that that is going to lead to anything even approximating the real threat
of what we might recognize as a civil war.
David