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I am here with gram would Graham thanks for joining me.
My pleasure Sam.
So where am I reaching you? I get the sense. You're not at home.
I'm usually not at home. And right
now I'm in Oslo Norway home for me is the United States and usually I'm traveling around it's harder than it usually is but I have family over here. I got jailbroken from the US and made it out.
Have you been traveling throughout covid or have you been locked down for a period
this has been the most sedentary period of six months or so in my life. So I've been locked down with the exception of one reporting trip to Florida
and I
In on the podcast before you wrote a great book on the Islamic State which we discussed the way of the strangers. So people are encouraged to listen to that if they want to get your expertise on all things related to Jihad, but generally I can you summarize your focus as a writer. I mean you write mainly for the Atlantic and cover really interesting stuff at what sort of things. Are you focused on these
days.
These days I've been not traveling around so much. So I've been writing a lot of opinion columns. I've been writing a fair bit on covid usually with an international Focus, but my bread and butter is traveling around finding things that are interesting wherever they might be and as you mentioned for a few years the main thing that I've been writing about has been the Islamic State and the development of jihadism.
So domestically I think I want to focus on all the ways in which the United States has begun to resemble a failing State. You obviously know what it's like to be in a failed state or to focus on it, but it seems to me we're dealing with Trends in public opinion and disinformation and failures of sense making a breakdown of trust and institutions political polarization.
Failures of leadership at a level that I haven't even contemplated in my lifetime. I don't think I mean it perhaps I was just too young to understand how bad it was at various points earlier in my life. But this just seems like an unraveling that is fairly disconcerting. You know, I'm happy to go wherever you want to go, but I thought we could talk through what's been going on with social protests and police violence and the political ramifications of what?
Happened in Kenosha and Portland and it actually I didn't know I recall that the first time we met was around this topic of violence. Yeah, actually I got into Brazilian jiu-jitsu and you wrote a piece in the Atlantic on that and that's what you came out and sort of introduced you to my midlife crisis around all things Jiu-Jitsu and self-defensive. So it's kind of Full Circle for our conversation, but give me your general sense of
What we're living through at the moment in the u.s.
Yes. So like I mentioned a lot of my reporting has been going overseas to places that have had some level of social breakdown some level of political breakdown. And so yeah, there's some aspects of that you definitely see in the United States when I think of societies that have really broken down though, I think of places like Somalia like Iraq places where the government just has ceased to exist.
and we don't have that we have touches of that and we have a kind of relative breakdown that I think is we experience both as an absolute loss of standards and performance of government but also a relative loss when we look at other countries that seem to be doing much better than we are and that, you know, we thought we thought we were in their league or we were they were not quite in our league but below us and somewhere
Like say Vietnam or Thailand, it has just been cleaning our clock when it comes to dealing with with covid. So what does break down look like in another place the kind of places where I would have been sent a couple of years ago 10 years ago to report I think of places like like Zimbabwe where the government has no longer any control over its currency can't be trusted to maintain.
Law & Order because it insists on destroying any kind of any kind of Law and Order that might exist. So we see bits of that right now. I mean there are cities that are pretty much acknowledged to be no longer under control of the forces law enforcement or any other kind of discernible powers that we would want to have a monopoly on the use of legitimate Force. So there's there's touches of that. Now what I've found
In looking at other countries is that the really dangerous combination is a place like Iraq, where at one point you have total control by the government way too much control control over the life and death of its citizens say during the Saddam Hussein regime that's replaced by a total Anarchy. So in the United States, you see touches of that to you see the government arrogating do itself all sorts of kinds of
power that you shouldn't really be comfortable with and then at the same time you see the total breakdown of Law and Order and cert pockets of urban America. So I am yeah, I'm terrified to see that combination of both consolidation of power and then total chaos. It's a really ugly combination to see
Yeah, I remember I did a podcast in the beginning of April with Stanley McChrystal and Chris fossil his partner forgive me Chris. I can't recall whether you pronounce your last name Fussell or fusil or some other variant there. But anyway, I remember having this conversation with them and talking about the prospect of a breakdown in Social cohesion under covid and I remember I think I actually Telegraph this in the
But if I did know certainly thinking it that I was worried that I was being a scare Monger for even just hypothesizing that this was possibly on the menu or worth thinking through right just two things could Fray enough so that there would be violence in the streets that are political partisanship could turn violent. It really did seem, you know as recently as the beginning of April.
Fetch to me and I just felt like it was worth talking about because it was possible. But you know, if you would ask me then I certainly didn't feel it was likely and so now I'm interested to consider how many of us have now kind of reset our expectations and this seems like the new normal and we're not actually entertaining how much worse things could get and it would seem like scaremongering to sincerely entertain that but there is a
Kind of slide towards something unrecognizable at least in our lifetimes here, obviously their comparisons with the 60s and there was a, you know, a fair amount of social unrest then I don't know if you know, I'm sure there are many dis analogies there as well. But, you know with Trump in the White House and the prospect of either him being re-elected or they're being, you know, real real unwillingness to accept.
Kept the results of an election that goes against him. It seems like a very risky time we're in and the thing that is so disconcerting for me just on an hourly basis is to see how things are distorted in what used to be the most reliable sources of news for us right now. I feel like now I can count on the New York Times to get crucial things wrong with respect to what's happening with protests and political.
Violence say and wrong in a way that just amplifies political partisanship and hysteria on the part of people who actually decide to go in the streets, you know, and certainly hysteria on social media. And so I feel like this there's a kind of a moral Panic component to a lot of what's going on and there are very few level-headed people in the media whose inclination is to turn down the temperature on things.
The business model of media is to be a shrill and Sensational as possible so that the partisans amplify your message. So yeah, I just there's a way in which this is a runaway train or at least feels like one that worries me and I for which I really don't have any it just seems deeply unfamiliar to be living through. Yeah. I think
there's a definite recalibration that's taking place within media and a recalibration that as Citizens. We've got to kind of work through in our own minds.
we notice things that we didn't notice before about stories getting covered or not getting covered that should be and you know, I would still take the New York Times / my Facebook feed say as a way to understand what's happening in the United States that said, you know, it's it's been tough at the Atlantic which is where I wrote most of the time the magazine has endorsed a candidate in the last
Election it is endorsed Hillary Clinton very odd thing for the Atlantic to do just because we don't endorse candidates most of the time but to have announced ourselves as as having been on one side now readers have to have to take that into account and it's just are being honest. I mean there were basically nobody at the magazine who was in favor of Donald Trump and so it was important that we come right out and say that and so when readers read us they
Know that that's where are our origin point is going to be in our opinions that said we still in I've been told by more than one editor that if Donald Trump does something right then it's our duty to say so so there is still a standard of truth that we're working toward. It's just that we're in a different media environment. I would also hasten to add that. It's not just media. I mean, there are so many other sources of
truth that we would have taken for granted in the past that we no longer. Can you may have seen Harold varmus Co wrote an op-ed in the New York Times? Yeah, just in the last couple days this the former head of the NIH most Noble Prize winner basically said don't trust the CDC CDC has been politicized. So if you've got Harold varmus telling you not to trust the CDC, then you really have a breakdown in the sources of medical information. Yeah when you need
To have that information coming through loud and clear with the consensus of the best. Medical Minds.
Yeah. Don't trust the CDC in the middle of a pandemic when you have to decide whether to send your kids back to school. It really is unbelievable. We're in this situation. Well, let's talk a little bit about the violence we've seen because this is a place where I see everyone left of center seeming to get virtually every specific.
Vic claim wrong and you know, I'm someone who as I think you know is more concerned that we not reelect Donald Trump, then most people I'm going to certainly I would put my anti-trump Bona fides up against anybody on the left or the center or among the never Trump Republicans, but it is crazy making and deeply concerning that the left seems too.
The bar is nowhere near what where you put it at the Atlantic Not only would they not acknowledge that he gets anything? Right? But just everything is upside down in how they describe what's happening with police violence and social protest many NPR just published a wonderful interview, which I think you noticed informing all of humanity that looting was essentially a moral imperative and a great form of social protest because small business owners are really
You know better than big business owners and they all deserve to have their stuff stolen and this was presented on the NPR website without any that wasn't a single critical question. If I recall correctly was just like this is practically NPR is position on looting.
Yeah. It was that was shocking to read. I've actually subjected myself to the book. I've read it cover to cover by now and have reviewed it for the Atlantic how nice it is if anything it's more radical than
The NPR interview would have you believe the NPR interview really took the title of the book as the the jumping off point in defense of looting by Vicki austere while the book is actually mostly about in is a defense of violence. So looting is an afterthought. I think they're all chapters where looting isn't mentioned explicitly what it's really trying to argue is that America is conceived in sin racial sin capitalists in
you name it that the system that we've inherited in the present is bad screwed up and that it must be destroyed. So, you know, if if it sounds like the kind of thing that would destroy our society to just have people smash open shops take everything in them and burn them down. Then that is very much the point there's a desire on the part of the author to recreate Society in what I can only assume is some kind of she doesn't say explicitly but a marks
Anarchist Revolution that is born out of violence wiping away the old order and yes, the NPR interview that introduced this book to I think most of the people who have heard about it was totally uncritical and I will say this for it. I think that NPR did the right thing by interviewing this writer because there are a lot of people who have if not explicitly positive things to say about looting think that looting is a reasonable
A response to the injustices of American History or the present in the American system and I think that those people need to articulate what they really think they can't just get away with saying I don't want to criticize the looters. No, I want them to to say I'm on the side of Vicky Oscar while or say that they have a different view of looting but being able to be kind of mealy-mouthed about these things.
Has not worked out very well. And it's allowed for example, Donald Trump to conflate the position of say Joe Biden with the position of say someone who throws a brick through a window and steals an iPad which is completely unfair making sure that these differences are as sharp as possible. I think is one of the things that journalists should do. So NPR they started to do that Unfortunately. They weren't as critical of as they could have been of the author when when they
Had her in their
clutches. Yeah. So Biden as of yesterday, I think will release this a few days, hence, but we're recording the day after he gave his speech in Pittsburgh and the purpose of which was to put some daylight between him and the caricature of him that Donald Trump tried to paint a line in him with the left and the pro chaos Pro looting anti-capitalist, you know far left which exists and
His you know clearly worth disavowing. I assume you saw that speech. I was pleasantly surprised that he took the line that he did and I thought it was pretty effective but he does still get enough wrong as part of his talking points that given enough time. He doesn't do himself to many favors here. So I like when he talks about police violence virtually everything. He says seems to me to be pandering to Black lives.
Are in a way that's just inaccurate. Why should you know explain why I think that but you know, and I think he also said that Kyle Rittenhouse was a white supremacist at one point not in his speech, but I think I on Twitter. I think the in his campaign released something about white supremacist in a way that was clearly referencing The Rittenhouse shooting. I don't think there's any evidence that Rittenhouse is a white supremacist is there are obviously things can change by the day. But by the time we're having this conversation, do you know of any evidence that suggests
that
no, unless you think that a white supremacist is someone who believes that there is such thing as private property and it should be defended by the state and you know, there are such people who are so radical that they would say that that alone will make you a white supremacist or but as far as I know all the reporting about Kyle written houses social media suggests that he was a big cop Enthusiast a big gun enthusiast and if that makes you a white supremacist, then I guess he's a white supremacist, but I'm I tend to be more restrictive in my
Mission
yeah, well, I think our sanity depends on our being that way. So let's just wind this all the way back to the Jacob Blake shooting which was the proximate cause of all of this chaos. What happened there to my eye again, we're talking at one point in time and you know, who knows what facts will come out in subsequent days or weeks. We might learn a lot about the cops there. We might learn that they're all members of the local chapter of the KKK and therefore
Racism could have been a conscious motive on their parts. But when I see a shooting like that within the frame of that video the color of everyone's skin is totally irrelevant. I've seen videos like that where white people are getting shot. I've seen videos like that where black people are getting shot by black cops. And you know, I have talked at sufficient length about the statistics of all of these encounters with cops and applications of violence lethal and not and
Justified and not to say that the story is not is certainly not a clean black lives matter story of us having an epidemic of racist police violence against young black men. That is just the statistics. Don't bear that out. You know, I would just say to our listeners. You have to listen to my two hour walk through this morass titled. Can we step back from the brink or can we pull back from the brink one of those but what?
When I look at a video like this and I'd be interested to know if you see this differently. We clearly see a person who has been resisting arrest. I don't know to what degree he fought with the cops before the video starts movie see him just essentially moving away from the cops, you know, their guns are already drawn at this point, but I think it's from other video. I think it's pretty clear that there was a kind of a wrestling match happening and then he broke away and then you have fully three
If memory serves pursuing him around his car and he's you know now opening his door to either get into his car to drive away or reaching into the driver's side of the car for something. It's not clear from the video and then he gets shot seven times in the back. And now he is I believe still in some terrible State and very likely paralyzed though. I think it seems likely he'll survive at this point and this encounter gets summarized.
Virtually everywhere in mainstream media as this is not a Verbatim quote. But this is a paraphrase of virtually every summary. I've seen yet another black man shot by white cops or a black man shot in the back seven times in front of his kids by white cops, right, you know and it is just is an article of faith that the skin color of all involved is absolutely relevant.
here and worth emphasizing and it's also an article of faith that all of these details have some moral opprobrium attached to them like it is assumed that if the cop could never be justified in shooting someone in the back in an encounter like this, whereas if you understand how violence evolves and you understand that we're living in a society in the US where every
police officer has to assume that everyone they are dealing with is either potentially armed and if they're reaching for something in their car, they are very likely reaching for a gun. And this is not the default assumption perhaps in Western Europe, but in the u.s. It absolutely has to be our failures of you know, gun control are relevant here, but the idea that cops are performing some kind of lynching by shooting someone in the back because he has fought them off.
Ran around his car and opened the door and reached in that's just it's just completely untrue given a cop's eye view of the world. I think that the only thing I want to say here and turn it over to you that really does put the onus on the cops is clearly, they lacked the training or capacity to control him physically and take him down so that they wouldn't have to use lethal Force right at me like cops who actually could
could restrain somebody could have easily restrained him if he was outnumbered he was walking away from them in a way that allowed for any cop with a modicum of training to take him down and hold him down and the fact that they couldn't do that suggests that there's a serious recruitment problem and training problem, you know, and we know this is true, you know Nationwide and so that's something to be worried about and and rectified but I mean even their people's intuitions about what
Should be doing should be allowed to do all of this is run off the rails in mainstream media. Maybe it's a point of seemingly absolute consensus that cops should never use, you know, a rear neck restraint otherwise known as a rear naked choke because some number of people have died under those conditions or seem to have died under those conditions. I think in many cases that that was not in fact there cause of death whereas a rear naked choke is in fact, if done appropriately
remarkably safe procedure. I'm is done in every Jiu-Jitsu school in the country every day of the year. And if it had any High rate of lethality what you would just be seen people die all over the country all the time in Jiu-Jitsu training and this is now I think it's illegal in New York now and maybe illegal in other states for cops to even attempt this what you have done when you remove that tool you have made it far more likely that cops are going to have to resort to lethal Force.
Because they can't is really one of the only ways to incapacitate someone so that you can cuff them if you're going to rely on your grappling skills. And so it's just everything is upside down here. But again, I would love to know if you disagree with anything I said about what we can glean from that video.
Yeah, there's a few things that I see when I watch that video in addition to just being horrified at at seeing it seeing violence of any type that first of all Sam. I think you're kind of like
like me and they probably spent a fair bit of time watching encounters like this on YouTube or wherever videos of police soup doing failing to subdue someone please Doling out violence and being the victims of it and I think many people who see that scene, they start off being rightfully horrified at having witnessed and act of violence and then they don't have some of the context that you might have if you've gone down,
As YouTube rapid walls and watched lots of violence like this and seeing how this kind of thing could turn out in other scenarios how that does turn out another scenarios, like, you know, the fact that he's lunging into his car who knows what he's lunging for. Apparently there's a knife there. There's it's not it's not it's not a crime to have a knife in your car as far as I know. However, if you're a cop and someone grabs a knife and you're right behind him and that person wants to stab you.
You could have a gun but I don't think the average person knows whether you should expect to get stabbed. If someone is 4 feet away from you, you have a gun and they have a knife and the answer is almost certainly you're going to get stabbed. That's what you are are are dealing with if you have someone who wants to stab you and you're that close, it's not unless you get one really good shot right in the head. It's very likely that the person is going to get to you and be on top of you with with a knife even if you've even if you
Round and him already. So yeah, I think there's there's not a great intuition on the part of the general public about the kind of threat that's being faced about the type of mindset that you might be in if you're aware of those threats to and I think too that that's that's a problem that not just with with police training not just with the the poor intuitions of the general public, but also with Kyle Rittenhouse, you know,
If you are spending a lot of time thinking about guns thinking about law enforcement you were going to be aware of these things and maybe primed to overreact a bit too if your your politics suggested the other thing in that in that video and what you're describing is the the the failure to describe it properly properly, you know, as a journalist, what I tend to do is I look for incidents that turn out to be more complicated than they originally appear and what you're describing is the exact opposite.
This and people seem to like doing that. Both sides liberals conservatives left far, right you find a situation of moral complexity of deep ambiguity like this and people are not as interested in what I do is as in turning it into a black-and-white morality play. It takes takes a lot of Investigation to find out what's actually happening. Just watching a few.
Seconds of video is not going to tell you why the cops are there in the first place what the interaction is being like up until the point where we see them shoot a guy seven times in the back here and I'm not sure we'll ever know that I mean half the people I talk to about that shooting think that the guy died on the scene. They're not aware that he's still alive right now. So if they're not aware of that detail and they're unaware of pretty much every aspect of the context of that shooting and it can be used for
One of these binary political purposes either to suggest that he's a demon or to suggest that the people who shot them are.
Yeah. Well I want to talk about the Kyle Rittenhouse episode because it does strike me as more complex and interesting in the end. It has pretty wide implications. But yeah, just to reiterate something you said there about the Jacob Lake shooting and what it's like to have seen a lot of these videos you have to
No, is that every permutation of this kind of encounter has happened. So you can find video again with the race of everyone swapped in and out, right you can find video where the guy reaches into his car pulls out a gun and shoots the cop in the face and kills him. Right and every cop knows about those kinds of encounters, right? So it's just you have to game this out more fully than your your knee-jerk reaction may
Of which is it is just awful that we're living in a society where cops shoot a guy in the back in front of his kids right with an apparent intent of killing him right as a way to pacify him. And how did we get here? This is completely insane and unacceptable. But once the wheels begin to come off in an encounter like this, there are very few options open to people who don't have you know, all the tools that
Might be possible there. I met again cops of sufficient strength and training could have easily taken this guy down and held him down. He wouldn't have been injured in the end. Right? So there's an absolute deficit of training and recruitment there that is visible to the eye of anyone. Who knows what is going on. And then there's the fact that I think a taser was used before the video picks up and failed but you know people think that tasers are magic. Well, you know, why not always use them.
Well, they're not magic and they often fail and they're more dangerous than a neck restraint, which is now been ruled illegal, right because it's if you tase someone and it works and they fall to the concrete and hit their head, you know, that is virtually always worse than actually being choked out, you know in a Jiu-Jitsu class. So people have to become better students of this kind of violence before they have the these reactions that seem to justify burning down half a city or writing headlines.
Add lines which a test yet again in the loud as possible way that we have a real problem of lethal racist Violence perpetuated by cops because again, you know, unless we find out more about the precursors to that event. There's no reason to even talk about race at this point. That's what's so sickening. My hypothesis is that virtually every mention of race is counterproductive now in our
It's virtually only going to push Society in One Direction, which is greater polarization greater derangement greater pissed area less contact with actual facts and it's also going to increase the likelihood that we're going to get four more years of Donald Trump.
There's one aspect of what you say that I am not so sure about and we should come back and race in a second, but the idea that we should familiarize ourselves with this kind of interaction used to be very appealing to me, you know.
I started watching these videos and I actually wrote a profile couple years ago of a kind of John Korea. Very nice guy who does kind of color commentary and videos exactly like this. So it will be badge cam it'll be CCTV but it's always violence that either happens or is averted and then he will minutely dissect what
happened. He's our former preacher right he be he went from minister to full-time yet here to Camp self-defense videos.
Video
analysis. Yeah, and he's still a man of God in the sense that he will remind you of the importance of having a good relationship with Jesus and remind you why you know, Jesus would want you to put in the right amount of time at the range and so forth, right? So he's a great guy and he's extremely responsible. You know, he's very I think evidence-based when he's doing these analyses and I've learned a great deal. I think that people should watch
Him and he'd his his his words of caution as well. I'm also the not really certain whether I want people to be thinking about this all the time for one thing rarely. Do you do you see people, you know student studying encounters that go. Well, you know, they end up seeing huge numbers of a counter if encounters that go very badly, even if these are extremely rare in the in the life of a cop or
a citizen and I found it by watching them that you have to be extremely scrupulous and making sure that you have kind of kept your head on your shoulders when it when it comes to understanding what the actual likelihood that this is going to happen to you is and here if you if you don't do that your mind will be even more warped than when you when you went in you might have a better sense of yes this person with this weapon is a danger at this distance when I'm carrying.
Weapon when I'm ready for him when I'm not but the fact of the matter is most of us don't get attacked very very few of us are law enforcement. So many of these things are just not relevant to our lives and when we get to use to them then I think it can have a really warping effect on our psychology. I know use them spent a long time thinking about self-defense personal security and so forth as of I and I'm not sure I would take back any of that time in my case, but
But I do worry that people are becoming over familiar with these types of interactions and what they get out of it is not necessarily healthy for us collectively as a society.
Yeah. I know I would totally agree with that and this is a nice segue into the Kyle Rittenhouse phenomenon because if you become a student of this kind of violence, yes, you can get an outsized sense of how common it is.
So really what I would just to make clear what I was recommending is like if you're not someone who really knows a lot about violence and if you haven't studied it you haven't trained in anything right? If you just don't know how hard it is to to shoot what you're aiming at, you know, especially when that thing is moving if you're just not informed don't have a strong opinion about these things right don't go in like the now's a good time to burn down the local sporting goods store over this or support others doing likewise.
When you just don't know what's going on it basically it also attracts. It is a kind of bug Light it attracts a certain kind of mind and a certain kind of person to spend a lot of time doing this and it's going to select for people who have that in a fondness for firearms and self-defense training and joining militias. And any that's sort of the Kyle Rittenhouse kind of person and then we wind up in this other terrible.
Place on the landscape which is once you get any kind of breakdown in social order once cops get pushed far enough on there on the back foot such that they're not doing the kind of policing we would expect them to do right once they have essentially announced Nationwide that they won't protect property which they de facto have just by example. We saw this in the first wave of protests and
Is that even in the most affluent parts of the most affluent cities cops would not protect property. I mean, you know, potentially there's an argument for that but it's probably not a great one and in response to the protest we had the worst of all possibilities. We had cops essentially saying they would not protect property and they wouldn't even be diligent in protecting the people who tried to protect their own property from being.
Being you know, violently attacked by mobs. We all saw footage of store owners being beaten by mobs. But what they would do is they would kick the shit out of peaceful protesters, right? That's what the cops were up for. So it was like if you wanted to create a machine to amplify cynicism and a commitment to a kind of vigilante, you know, take matters into your own hands ethic you could not have done better than these last few months with the spectacle of American.
And and you know, what you have there to is exactly that kind of twin evil force going on where it's the force is a of total chaos. That is the cops saying we are not going to enforce laws concerning property go out light fires whatever but at the same time claiming for themselves immense power. So Chaos and Order both being weaponized to just make
Life hell if you combine those two you get what what I was describing earlier is as these characteristics of hellish failed states that I've reported on overseas, you know, it's in micro. It's not Beyond recovery, but it's a taste of what life is like in places where where everything falls apart and you know, what I worry about most to is that these effects are not exactly
You know that the police they step back from from enforcement of property crimes and sometimes in in other places where I've reported. It's been pretty clear that they'll say. Yes, we stand between you and violence and Chaos if we're not here then that's what's going to happen. But kind of silently uttered after that after that promise that threat is we're going to make sure that that's what's happened. What happens if we're not there that is
If if we're not there to protect you then things will go badly because we insist that they'll go badly so that you you know, give us the proper respect and you know sign over your security to us along with everything else.
So what is your actual allegation or concern there that the cops have put the Riders on a sufficiently Long Leash for reasons of sort of justifying their own office.
Like what the your you sure you want to defund us? We'll take a look at what's going to happen tonight when we just you know, sit on our hands what I make us happened.
Yeah. Well what I think is happening is that that incentives exist. So the incentive is to say first of all, there are some perfectly reasonable incentives if you don't enforce laws concerning property because you're spending your resources making sure that people don't get killed you try to make sure violence isn't happening. So that's a good reason to do this but there
Is an incentive to to say look we're not going to enforce this because we want to show you what happens when you don't have us and the incentive is for what happens when you don't have us to be very very bad to be as bad as possible. So that your appreciation for us. The police is is sufficient. So I'm not alleging that there's some conspiracy where the cops are handing people guns or Molotov cocktails what I'm saying, is that at all
There are really really negative vicious incentives that are at work and it wouldn't be shocking if there was a downward spiral that's driven by.
Yeah, and all of this is coupled to what is now known as the Ferguson effect where cops because they don't want to wind up on YouTube on what seems to be the wrong end of yet another lethal encounter which in their world may in fact have been a Justified shooting. They're just going to stop policing proactively and crime rates are probably soaring as a result of that. So the Rittenhouse thing is interesting because so you have someone who draws the
the obvious lesson especially right-of-center here politically that you know, we have the Second Amendment for a reason it only makes sense to get really into guns and personal protection because you really can't delegate the protection of yourself and your family to the cops at a minimum there just usually not there when you need them and they're going to show up too late to do anything other than hopefully solve the crime that you were the victim of so if you care about self-defense, well, then it really has to have to put the
Health back in self-defense and they're there for you need guns and you need to train with them and you need to take selfies of yourself walking around in the woods with your AR-15 and become one of those guys and then you hear about this breakdown in social order a few miles away from where you live and you decide you're going to be this high testosterone Good Samaritan and get out there and put yourself between the forces of chaos and
the social order that still needs to be maintained and you're going to protect people's businesses as I think Kyle Rittenhouse was intending to do at least that's been reported and there's you know, there's footage of him cleaning up graffiti earlier in the day, I think and then he's he's interviewed by somebody and in the various points. Yeah,
and in those interviews you seems like a perfectly nice kid, right? It does no indication that he's intending to shoot somebody. There's every
Occasion that we night during some portions of it. I think he's offering medical assistance may be medical assistance that he has no business offering and I don't think people many people take them up on on it. But there's no as far as I can tell no recorded in evidence in the videos or interviews with him that he's there looking for a fight. That's it. You know, he went from Illinois to Wisconsin and picked up an AR-15 and went into a really really really dangerous place where anything
It could happen. So maybe that is you know all by itself looking for a fight. Yeah, I wonder whether he had the right level of I mean he obviously did not have the right level of situation situational awareness awareness of what he was getting into. I mean if you're walking around open carrying with any weapon, even if it's a tiny pistol and someone Taps you on the shoulder in that scenario in Kenosha and
Buildings are burning around you and people are screaming in crowds around you. You have to consider it with that within the next few seconds. Someone is going to try to kill you. Yeah with the weapon that you have brought that could be the weapon that puts a bullet in your brain. So I didn't see any awareness and his face. I don't imagine that that any awareness could possibly be had if you're say a recent high school graduate who shows up with
AR-15 in the middle of a riot in a previously unexampled horrible situation in this country. This is this is a situation that he clearly had never been in that you'd be terrible at assessing the danger to him. You know, when when younger reporters go into war zones and I talk to them. Sometimes they'll ask. What do you suggest? What should I know? And the first thing that I say is that Danger?
Just doesn't always feel like danger you're going into a situation that is unlike anything you've experienced before. If you've seen movies, then you they edit out all the boring parts that happen in the movies, right? So you're going to have a very poor sense of what the actual rhythms of a day in Baghdad will be and you'll be surprised at how quickly things go bad how quickly the danger arrives how quickly it passes and
These things are extremely difficult to train. They're the kind of thing that you learn by accidentally surviving long enough. And you know, he had one day one day in Kenosha and they turned bad really really fast. I'm still very curious about what happened in the actual run up to the to the first shooting because you know, the guy who he shot Joseph Rosenbaum doesn't seem to have been the most stable individual and you know that
there's suggestions that he was Furious. He may have attacked Rittenhouse and then there's all these moral questions and legal questions that I don't think either of us is really competent to to adjudicate about whether Rittenhouse under the laws of the state of Wisconsin would have been justified in shooting him if Rosenbaum say grabbed for his gun as is I think alleged in the criminal complaint against Rittenhouse that he shot Rosenbaum after
After that happened that is after Rosenberg went for his gun. But you know
It just has to be said again and again that if you open carry in a situation like that where there is Mayhem all around you and crazy people who've literally, you know flocked there from from from other states because they're looking for craziness. Then you've committed a an error that is really sealing your fate. I can't see how how to say it. Any other way if Rittenhouse had been from Kenosha and
Just woken up and rolled out of bed and seen Mayhem in his front yard and thought he had to defend himself. That would be one thing but he made such a terrible decision than almost everything that happened that flowed from that is going to have to be seen in that light.
Well, it's a decision that so many people are making everyone who shows up to one of these protests or shows up anywhere, you know, whether it's in counter-protest to the protest they don't like or is their own protest.
You know as we saw against lockdown earlier in the pandemic anyone who shows up armed, you know, carrying an AR-15 or you know, any firearm some of these people have thought it through and they're just happy to run the risk, but the reality is that the presence of a gun completely changes the dynamic of any interpersonal violence.
When you know, you have a gun with concealed carry, that's its own burden, ethically, and tactically right. I mean just you can have a gun on you and no one can see it and still there many doors close to you. You cannot afford to get into a wrestling match with someone or a shoving match or a boxing match, you know in that kind of ordinary range of interpersonal violence when you have a gun on your belt which at any moment, you know, you might decide to draw or you might fall out.
In a scuffle or it might be seen by the other person. I mean just everything is potentially lethal and you know, you have to think through what you're going to do. If you start losing a fight and you are armed is a different situation now, obviously anyone who's a true Firearms person will have recourse to you know, several aphorisms this point, you know better to be judged by 12 then you know,
Read by 6 or you know, he in certain cases. Obviously, I would agree with that. But the real here istic here is if you are going to be someone who who assumes the responsibility, you know, the real responsibility of real self-defense, right? If you're going to have firearms training with Firearms think of the scenarios under which you would use Firearms, right? You're going to be the sheriff of your own life in the end and you understand the calling 911 is not actually a self-defense.
and you have to avoid violence at virtually every cost right avoidance has to be your master strategy because it's only if you've practiced that impeccably do you know that you will be justified if you find yourself having to resort to lethal force and if you've decided to just go out to a random car dealership with your AR-15 because you don't think the cops are going to
Offend those precious cars, you're someone who's not avoiding violence at all, right, you're putting yourself in a very tenuous circumstance in front of a mob and it's totally irresponsible in the end so that when that part can't be defended and yet everything is absolutely that if you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe at Sam Harris dot-org you'll get access to all full length.
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