Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to the Jack Hopkins Show podcast, where stories about the power of focus and resilience are revealed by the people who live those stories. And now the host of the Jack Hopkins Show podcast, Jack Hopkins, Hello and welcome to the Jack Hopkins Show podcast.

Speaker 2: 0:23

I'm your host, jack Hopkins. This episode features Dave Troy. Dave is an investigative journalist addressing threats to democracy. His background as a technologist and as a student of history gives him a unique perspective on current events not only in the United States but the world at large perspective on current events not only in the United States but the world at large. He writes a newsletter about the bigger themes behind the news, frequently speaks in public and hosts a podcast where he researches and explores the history again behind current events. Dave has a podcast. Dave has a blog and newsletter. He's the host of Toad Social on Mastodon. Dave again does a lot of speaking. He's spokencurator TEDx Mid-Atlantic, washington DC. He's a fellow North America Foundation and a research associate at Arizona State University.

Speaker 2: 1:36

I love having people on the Jack Hopkins Show podcast as guests who are a lot smarter than I am in a given area.

Speaker 2: 1:50

My whole life has been focused on human behavior and psychology and when you immerse yourself in something so completely, there's not time to pay attention to too many other areas. There's not time to pay attention to too many other areas and that's why I see people like Dave Troy, who I think you will find is very informed, can talk as long as you want to on about any historical event, and combines all of his background, experience and his skills to really deliver some insights about what's going on now and about what we can expect to happen in the future. So with that, let's get into this episode with Dave Troy. Let's get into this episode with Dave Troy and that means you dig deep on subjects and that's really, I think, what anybody watching or listening to the news wants to hear but very seldom gets to hear on mainstream media is that in-depth stuff. You know, turning over those rocks that others have walked past. What are you working on now?

Speaker 3: 3:10

Yeah, so, first off, thanks for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk with you and to your listeners. And yeah, you know, as you mentioned, I have the privilege and the opportunity to dig deep into a lot of the things that are happening in the world right now and what you know listeners might want to know that my background is that of a really a technology entrepreneur for the most of my career and in the last 10 years or so kept getting sort of pulled into the world of data analysis, which has led me into the world of doing journalism and a variety of historical inquiries which turned out to be much more relevant than I think people realize. So in my college years I studied both computer science and history really, and so that's turned out to serve me well because I'm using both of those skill sets to really do deep analysis of what's happening. So what I've been trying to do and, as you mentioned, you know a lot of what people read in the news is really just this kind of surface level, you know, horse racy kind of stuff that you know documents the movements of the day but doesn't really give people any understanding, or at least rarely gives people understanding of why things are happening or what the motivations are and that kind of thing. So what I've been doing is to try to take some of the networks of actors that we see today and trace them back to kind of their historical beginnings in a lot of cases, or at least you know, long enough back that we can understand what the longer term motivations are. So, you know, one of the journalists that I respect a lot and have received some mentorship from in this is Ann Nelson, who wrote the book Shadow Network, which really documented the emergence of the Council for National Policy and all of the impacts that it has had, and it's a significant chunk of what we see going on. But there's a lot else happening too, and so what I've been trying to do is to kind of fill in some of the space around that. So, right at the moment, what I've been working quite a lot on is the network around.

Speaker 3: 5:13

You know Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, and you know their efforts to. You know what it looks like to take control of the Republican party. They attempted a similar kind of set of moves in 2016, but it was a little bit more complicated because they were working with, like Steve Bannon as kind of their main liaison into the world of the Trump universe. And that ended up obviously kind of not working in 2017 when there was the Unite the Right rally and Bannon left and you know he sort of got sent into exile. So Peter Thiel and Musk seem to have kind of regrouped since then and really made an effort to shape things. And so just in the last several days, you know, we saw the selection of JD Vance as a you know, as the Trump's VP pick, and what that really indicated was that that faction had gained a decent amount of control within the party. Otherwise, the VP pick would have been somebody else, like a Burgum or Ivanka or something like that, but instead we get somebody from the Teal Network. So that's really what I'm looking at right now.

Speaker 3: 6:26

And you know, obviously the election is on top of everybody's minds and you know that's been a wild ride as well. And of course, we just had today the selection of Tim Waltz as Kamala Harris's VP. So you know, we'll be watching that obviously very closely as well. But what I'm really more worried about is like know, we'll be watching that obviously very closely as well, but what I'm really more worried about is like what happens even if harris wins? Are there still other things that we need to be alert to coming up towards the end of the year? And that's and that's. You know, we could spend a lot of time talking about that, but that's, that's. The main focus for me right now is what happens towards the end of this year and beginning of next year certainly, and I think that is such a huge concern for most democracy-loving Americans.

Speaker 2: 7:08

I want to ask you something, because on an episode that I did with Lev Parnas and we were discussing potential violence, in the country and Lev said to me he said the violence, any violence, that's going to happen. He said it will happen if Trump loses. That's when we are going to see the violence. Does that kind of mirror what you have looked at?

Speaker 3: 7:36

Yeah, you know, what I've been looking at is kind of the structural elements of the society. So there's a really good book that I recommend to people called Radical American Partisanship by Nathan Calmo and Liliana Mason, who are political scientists, and what they've been finding, you know, through the course of various kinds of survey work and other you know data analysis, is that the country has become much, much, much more polarized, and of course you don't need to be a political scientist to know that Out of your eyes and ears and everyday experience will tell you that. But what the data does indicate that people might not intuitively understand, is that people's political identities have become much more closely tied to their other group identities, and let me give you an example of what I mean by that. So if you are a progressive sort of person who you know lives in a city and shops at Whole Foods and you know drives a Prius, I mean there's all these identity elements, right that?

Speaker 3: 8:36

make up somebody's, you know sort of who they think they are, and what is happening in our very polarized society is that people are, of course, wanting their side to win Like who doesn't want their side to win. But what they're also extremely motivated by is the very, very bad feeling that comes with their side losing and the other side winning, because what that ends up doing is it invalidates all of their social identities at the same time and makes them feel like they're personally under attack. So you know what? The reason why you know Parnas might say that violence might happen if Trump loses is because you have a bunch of people who you know are very closely associated in their own identity with Trump and the Republican Party and all of the things that they attach to that, whether it's, you know, pro-life or guns, or you know rural living or gas or trucks, or you know whatever it might be. And so you know, if you know the Kamala Harris Tim Walz ticket wins, they're going to go. Oh my God, this whole country's going to hell and they're coming to get my guns, you know. And of course, we see now that, like Tim Walz, is an avid hunter and sportsman, so maybe that story doesn't really hold that much water. But point being that, you know that's the sort of thing where people feel socially invalidated, kind of canceled, if you will, and then wanting to fight back, fight back.

Speaker 3: 10:00

Now, the thing that I think can keep violence from happening, hopefully is, you know, obviously, conducting a very clear and fair and transparent election process without a lot of craziness, and also to have overwhelming numbers, you know like, if it comes down to 11,000 votes, that's not great, you know, and we saw how that was played last time. So if it's 100,000 votes or 200,000, those are the kinds of margins where, even if there's games being played, there isn't a lot of moral authority that can be attached to it and that you can't really build conspiracy theories around numbers that are that wide. So that's kind of how I see it is. You know that as long as the election result is clear and there isn't too much day of chaos and people have a relatively high confidence in the process, then I think it might be OK. But again, there's a lot of people that are predicting that the process itself will be compromised and if that happens, that could be, you know, a source of concern as well.

Speaker 2: 11:04

Right, let me ask you. Something happened recently. It was a SCOTUS decision and I wondered about whether it might have been a message from the United States Supreme Court to kind of lower the temperature, not for our benefit but for theirs, the temperature not for our benefit but for theirs. When the immunity decision got kicked back to lower court, did they just throw America a bone on that? It just kind of say, hey, you know, no, no, no, we're not in for Trump.

Speaker 3: 11:38

Yeah, I mean, I think they were trying to kind of send a signal that you know they didn't want to be the ones to sort of fix this and to send it back to the lower court and we'll see you know how that plays out. It looks like that the sentencing for his other case is going to happen on September. What was it? 18th, I think? Yeah, I think so. 18th I think.

Speaker 2: 12:03

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 12:04

I think so, I think so, yes, so you know, I think that there's at least a possibility that some kind of justice may be done there. But again, I mean, this business with the immunity and whatnot is really disturbing, as well as the other Supreme Court cases, the Chevron situation, as well as this one. This one goes a little bit underreported by most folks, but the SEC versus Darcacy case lays more groundwork for sort of deconstructing the administrative state because it basically further questions the delegation principle that gives federal agencies the right to kind of do their own stuff. So you know, and we're already seeing, you know, citations of the Chevron doctrine at like the state level to start to undermine the Department of Education and things like that.

Speaker 3: 12:53

So you know it's. We have a. Even if Harris wins, there's going to be a whole mess to clean up in aisle six come 2025.

Speaker 2: 13:03

Right, there was an article and I didn't read the article. I saved it. I think it was late last night and the headline was something to the effect of how the Supreme Court will try to undermine Harris and what she can do about it. So just the idea, as you kind of alluded to, that here we will have this very energized new president If if that's pressed it Harris is elected and yet we still run head on into this issue with the Supreme court uh, being as lopsided as it is and also having known how they've ruled on some very key issues. In terms of Peter Thiel, what is his connection to the Supreme Court? Is there a go-between or is he just kind of a periphery guy doing his own thing and they happen to align with some of his ideas?

Speaker 3: 14:10

no, he's, you know, tied in with folks like leonard leo, um, and you know he and kevin roberts of project 2025, jd vance. There's another group, uh, the Rockbridge Network that Teal has funded. That includes people like Joe Lonsdale and JD Vance, and you know what's sort of difficult to convey to people about some of this is that, you know, on the one hand it seems like religious extremism and it kind of is in a way. You know, people like Leonard Leo are, you know, part of Opus Dei and so there's this kind of Opus Dei cult involved. But what a lot of people don't understand and I was spending some time online the last several days trying to kind of convey this to folks is that, yes, you know, opus Dei is a Catholic faction. It's really a cultish little faction, but it's actually.

Speaker 3: 15:00

I have a book about it right here. This is a book called Saints and Schemers and it's about the origins of Opus Dei. It basically was a little Catholic cult that was set up in Spain in the 1920s, kind of as a reactionary movement against the Jesuits, and it really became focused on just the accumulation of power and the placement of people into different roles and stuff for the purpose of gaining power. Now, of course, looking back at history, which is again so important, what was happening in Spain in the 1920s and 1930s? Well, this was the rise of the Franco regime, which was a right-wing fascist regime in the same kind of mold as Mussolini's in Italy or Hitler's in Germany, then very right wing and very aligned with the right wing of the Catholic Church and also totally opposed to the Jesuits. So you know, it's it. You can't really just say that this is like Catholic religious extremism. No, it's a cult within the Catholic Church. It was a fascist cult about 100 years old. And so you know Leo and you know several of the other folks I think Roberts is part of that as well are in that.

Speaker 3: 16:27

You know Teal, you know I don'to Yiannopoulos in the mix, you know, who was a convert to Catholicism also. So I think it's important for people to understand. I happen to be, you know, I was raised Catholic. I'm not really a practicing Catholic, but I understand the church well enough to defend it against these people who are basically, in my opinion, apostate fascists, who are representing a bizarre, you know, little chunk of the church that isn't really representative of the broader whole. So you know they are trying to kind of activate this.

Speaker 3: 16:55

And you know, the thing about Thiel is that he, his worldview and I know this from talking to a bunch of people that have known him and I actually have, you know, been friends over the years with other people that have worked from, because, you know, my background is in the tech industry and he was a, you know, has been a giant in that field, and so it's impossible not to know people that, like, know him indirectly. So I'm one degree away from him on all kinds of levels. And, um, you know, what seems to be the big motivators for him are this kind of anti-wokeness crusade. And if you, you know, you and I are probably around the same age. If you recall what was going on on college campuses in the 90s, there was a whole backlash against multiculturalism which is really the same as what we're seeing now with the woke stuff.

Speaker 3: 17:42

So Thiel and David Sachs wrote a book around 1994, I think it was called the Diversity Myth. That really articulated a lot of these anti-diversity, anti-affirmative action kind of policies and helped to crystallize some of that debate. Now that wasn't going on in a vacuum. There were, you know, other people that were writing stuff along those lines. There was like closing of the American mind. Camille Pavia was kind of acting in the same role as, like a Jordan Peterson is today kind of calling for like traditionalism and, you know, traditionalist female roles and stuff like that. So, you know, a little bit more complicated than that, but point being like this stuff's been going on for a long time.

Speaker 3: 18:26

So Thiel's pet issue is that and his other pet issue is that he thinks that the New Deal was bad actually and instead the New Deal should have gone another way.

Speaker 3: 18:37

So there's a book that he likes called Three New Deals by a writer named Wolfgang Schibelbusch that describes how Roosevelt and Hitler and Mussolini each handled the New Deal.

Speaker 3: 18:49

And Thiel thought that the Mussolini and Hitler versions were better because they were more, you know, sort of business oriented and capitalistic oriented. Roosevelt administration handled it by bringing America further off the gold standard and having big make-work programs and all the different New Deal alphabet soup of agencies. His opinion is that that slowed the recovery and made things worse for a lot of people, which really brings you directly to JD Vance. So JD Vance's book Hillbilly Elegy is in a lot of ways in the same exact vein as another book that Thiel likes called the Forgotten man, which was really talking about the people in Appalachia who were not aided by the New Deal and who, you know, ended up being left behind. And so this Forgotten man book was written by a woman named Amity Schlaes who was a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and what she was doing was basically recapitulating a whole bunch of American Enterprise Institute pamphlets from 1934 to make the same arguments they were making then against the New Deal.

Speaker 3: 20:03

So that's why you have to know this history, otherwise this current moment doesn't make a ton of sense. And so if you look at JD Vance's book as really kind of a way to turn that more into a story and to sort of popularize that line of thought I'm not going to say that Vance's book was based on American Enterprise Institute pamphlets, but it comes from that same ideological place, this idea that there's people that have been left behind by, you know, the West and East Coast liberals and we need to pay attention to them and their voices are unheard, yada, yada, with or without any mention of couches. So you know, that's kind of the deal with Thiel. And so, as a result of his anti-New Deal orientation, he thinks that the departure from the gold standard over the course of the last hundred years has been a huge mistake and that we need to basically get back onto hard money. More about that.

Speaker 3: 21:06

But the idea is that you know, the fiat dollar, the federal reserve, all of that stuff is evil because it's controlled by the government and scary people and bankers and etc. So he wants that to be brought into the private sector. Privatization of money is what that's about. So those are his issues and that's why he's doing this stuff.

Speaker 2: 21:20

Let me ask you something, because my my entire adult life has been immersed in basically one area human behavior, psychology and sociology, so I love to have people on the show that know so much more than I in other areas of history, for example. Let me get your historical take on this idea that I have. Let me get your historical take on this idea that I have. When they attack diversity, we talk about the racial discrimination we talk about oh, that's racist and it is. But is it as much about racism as it is just about power? In other words, is the racist aspect of it just something that's a tag along for this quest for power? But the real focus is not so much on I hate this ethnicity, it's just whoever you are, whatever color you are, you represent a threat to us having power. What are your thoughts on that?

Speaker 3: 22:32

I think it's kind of a dual situation. There are definitely people and there is a strain of intellectual thought and history that surrounds the idea of eugenicism and the idea of breeding and optimizing for intelligence and all of that. And you see that echoed in some of the rhetoric surrounding some of the people connected to like Thiel and Musk and like Charles Johnson is absolutely obsessed with that stuff. And so if you believe truly that you know genes and intelligence and race and all these things like matter in terms of, like, the development of the human species, then yeah, you're that's pretty racist. You know, it's hard to get around that that's pretty pretty up there Now.

Speaker 3: 23:16

That said, I think that you're right that that's a relatively minority position. In fact, I don't think most people are obsessed with, you know, genetics, the way some of those guys are. But you know, the thing about the United States is that we are it's a very large country. You may have noticed that it's very large and we have a lot of people concentrated in a few places. We have a ton of people concentrated in cities on the east and west coasts and then in a few cities scattered across, have a ton of people concentrated in cities on the east and west coast and then in a few cities scattered across the middle, and then the rest of it is mostly empty. And so what has happened, you know, just as a byproduct of the design of the country and the geography of it, is that over the last couple hundred years we've basically become bifurcated into two separate worldviews, and there's, I think, more than two, but if you want to just keep it simple, it's two worldviews. You have kind of this like rural worldview, that is, you know, sort of more focused on, you know, gasoline and guns, and you know sort of rural living and Christianity and whatnot is often associated with it, and then you have kind of a more urban experience, which is more you know about apartment living and diversity in cities and restaurants and light rail and all that kind of stuff, and in general those two groups kind of hate each other because they don't understand each other and they also don't have to interface with each other that much you know. So what ends up happening is that a lot of the people in rural areas not all, but a lot are white and Christian and drive pickup trucks and have Trump flags and, you know, live on farms or whatever, and they end up becoming annoyed with the folks in the cities who are, you know, of a lot of different races. You know immigrants and some of them, you know, with more legal status than others, and so that becomes this division between them, and so the natural contention for resources, for attention, for federal money what have you that would exist between those two groups becomes racialized, because it's de facto racialized, right, like you know, the people in the rural areas are white and the cities are, you know, less white. So I think that a lot of that is going on.

Speaker 3: 25:26

I think things like the Southern strategy from back, you know, in the 60s Gosh, who was it that came up with Lee Atwater came up with the Southern strategy. In the 60s, all of the old southern states that had been left over from, you know, the Confederacy were ripe for the picking from Republicans if they would just kind of tune their message just so. And of course, reagan launched his campaign in 1980 in Philadelphia, mississippi, you know, which is where they had, you know, various racial unrest during the 60s. So you know, sending these dog whistle kind of signals has racialized a lot of what's going on. And so I think, and that's why it's funny, you know, when you get people you know like Ali Alexander or Tim Scott or whoever you know, black and Muslim or whatever, and they end up mixed up with these people that you sort of assume are like totally racist, well, you know, most of them are not that racist.

Speaker 3: 26:23

They just want people that are on their side and to the extent that you know, sometimes black faces or brown faces can help bring people into their circles of power, then they're just useful and they become part of the in group, you know. So, again, I do think there's some really racist people who are motivated by a very explicit kind of eugenic racism, but I think most people are just playing this power game, and the way it's played out in America is that it's racialized Fantastic answer and thank you for that because again you offer a historical perspective that I couldn't.

Speaker 2: 26:56

I'll give you a couple of examples of something that you talked about. I grew up in a town of about 6,000 people. I grew up in a town of about 6,000 people and we had one black family in town mine K through 12. And there were three boys and a girl, and the girl was in my class. So I just about every year in school we were in the same classroom and as I think back on that they had assimilated so much to an entirely white community that I never really got the experience of living with and interacting with African Americans because I'm guessing maybe some out of fear, just adopted the mannerisms and the way of living and talking as the other 5,999 people. So I grew up almost entirely just around white people.

Speaker 2: 28:00

When we would go to Kansas City again, I grew up in a town of 6,000 people it was always a big deal. We'd say, yeah, we're going to run down to the city, you know, because we didn't think of our town as a city. It was just a. It was a town, it was kind of a Mayberry type place. So it was a big deal if you go to a real city and you're right, because I remember it was. You know, coming home, my parents would be talking about, boy, the city people. The way they drive, it's just crazy, right. So there was this segregation of rural people. Although I'd never heard my parents talk about or think about us as being rural people, I think they just kind of thought we were like the people and the city people they were this odd commodity.

Speaker 2: 28:50

You're the regular people, and then there's these city people, sure and like you said, though, it flip-flops as well, because I'm sure, when people have spent their entire life in the city, when they come into contact with deep rural people, I'm sure I have an aunt who is ethnically Chinese.

Speaker 3: 29:13

She's first generation American, born in this country but to Chinese immigrant parents, and she grew up in New York City and was traveling on a road trip through Lake Tennessee, you know, several years ago and encountered all kinds of, you know, random out of the blue racism, you know, and of course it was astounding to her.

Speaker 3: 29:31

She was like what the?

Speaker 3: 29:32

What are you people doing?

Speaker 3: 29:34

And you know, and I and I don't say that to put down, you know, rural people, because I don't think that that's all that common necessarily, but at the same time, like there is just this kind of built in tension between people in cities and people in rural areas in this country and it's not really going to go away until, like, we fill in a lot more of the country and, to be frank, I think you see less of the kind of craziness that America produces in continental Europe, in particular because of just the density, like you know, there's, just people are just packed together.

Speaker 3: 30:07

So in general they are more of the same worldviews. Now you do see it a little bit different, and this has been fascinating to watch and the divide between East and West Germany. The AFD party Alternative for Deutschland party in the East has been extremely resilient in the areas where you know that have been under communist control and you wouldn't necessarily think that an authoritarian right-wing party would do well in a place that had been a stronghold of communism. But the key is the authoritarian party. You know it's kind of like yeah.

Speaker 3: 30:42

I don't know, this whole democracy thing has been kind of a pain in the ass. It's not really producing great results. This other sounds fine. Why don't we just check that out for a while, you know? And so it's just bizarre that, like, afd is so strong in the rural areas in East Germany but not in the Brandenburg area where Berlin is, because Berlin is so freaking cosmopolitan and dense also, so it has a very different kind of psychography than the rural areas do. So anyway, interesting stuff.

Speaker 2: 31:11

Well, I think that one of the things that a lot of Republicans don't get is that authoritarianism is not one of those things you test drive. It's not one of those things where you say, well it's. It's not one of those things where you say, well, you know, democracy's not working out to our liking. Let's try authoritarianism, not realizing that once the nation tries that, it's very seldom or it's a long time before they stop trying it's. They're locked in for a good while. Yeah, how does that play out in terms of when there is talk about getting rid of the electoral college and just going with the popular vote? How does that interface with this division that we have between city thinking and rural thinking?

Speaker 3: 32:05

Yeah well, I think you know first you make a really good point about. You know you can't just kind of try this out and then go back, because one of the features of these kinds of authoritarian setups is that they end up blowing out the walls that otherwise would protect you against further. You know autocracy. So you know Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Anne Applebaum. She just has a new book out called Autocracy Inc. I have not read it yet, but you know it touches on these themes and you know the issue is and we're starting to see this now like with these Supreme Court rulings. You know we're going to have a hard time fixing some of these things and we really probably need to expand the court because you know the people that are on the court are really there kind of on an illegitimate mean some of them. Certainly somebody like Terrence Thomas is just not a credible person at this point. So you know we have a lot of work to do on that front.

Speaker 3: 32:57

As far as the Electoral College is concerned, this is a really interesting topic because I know that a lot of progressive folks feel very strongly that it's not representative and we should just abolish it and then we move on. And I get your point. You know, I hear you. I think that there's some validity to that because I think it does create problems for the country when, let's say, the popular vote it goes one way but the electoral college goes the other way. It creates a crisis of legitimacy, for confidence in the election and I think you know you can have that split result, maybe a little bit of the time, but when it becomes to be like all the time, people feel like something is just inherently wrong and they have an argument.

Speaker 3: 33:36

Now the issue is is that if we just were to eliminate the Electoral College and for the folks that haven't thought through, kind of like, what the structure of the Electoral College is, let's just review it real quickly. The number of electors in the Electoral College is the same as the number of seats as there are in the Congress. So there's, you know, 435, you know House seats, there's 100 Senate seats plus like the VP Senate seats plus like the VP. So you know you end up with a situation where you know to win you have to have greater than 269, so 270 plus you could do 269, 269 with like a VP tiebreaker I think. But anyway, you know it's a goofy kind of setup and people are like, well, why? Well, the reason why is because it helps to balance the power between the small states and large states. And you know people might think well, that's not fair, because it gives people in Wyoming and, you know, north Dakota or whatever way, more representative power than they deserve relative to the piece.

Speaker 3: 34:44

So it kind of amplifies the votes of rural people and denigrates the votes of the more urban people. And the valid point that's a valid point. But if we just kill it and don't tune it, what you end up with is a situation where the places with maybe a few other high population places determining the outcome. So whereas now you have a lot of attention on the swing states, you know, pennsylvania and Michigan and Wisconsin and Florida and Georgia and whatever else then you're going to have a situation where the only states to get any attention are the big ones and the little ones no one cares about because not enough people live there. So we're a little bit stuck on how to actually fix that. Now, you know, what you could do is come up with some kind of, you know, tuning of the electoral college that algorithmically assigns kind of like the exact right amount of power to each state, based on population and size and whatever other factors you want to consider, and maybe that would produce a more legitimate seeming outcome.

Speaker 3: 35:48

But you know, of course the other problem with some of these changes is that they're, you know, ultimately would require, like constitutional amendments and whatnot, which are a huge pain and very unlikely to pass anytime soon.

Speaker 3: 36:00

Unless you know, something crazy happens where, like, one party gets control of everything for a while and then you can, you know, make a bunch of changes, but you know, that's not kind of in the near term card.

Speaker 3: 36:10

So I think we just kind of have to live with the broken, like not. It's not broken so much as not perfect, I guess, in my opinion. But you know, it is designed to solve certain kinds of problems, and I think the issue is is, if you ultimately did just dissolve it and just replace it with a popular vote, you would end up dissolving the union after a while because people in rural areas would feel like it's not legitimate and so they would secede, and then you'd have problems there. So you know how do you and this was the problem that the founders were grappling with in, you know, 1788, you know how do you glue this thing together in a way that it's not going to fall apart too easily. And they did it all without computers or simulations or algorithms, they just kind of thought about it. They came up with something that worked for almost 250 years. So not bad, but we will need to update it.

Speaker 2: 37:01

I think that was my next question. Actually. I think that was my next question. Actually. What struggles other than the obvious are we facing with kind of guiding the country in whatever direction it goes on decisions that were made 250 years ago yeah, 250 years ago when, as you mentioned, a lot of the tools to make better decisions were not available and where many of the developments, well lots of the developments that have come along since then couldn't even have been a thought. You know, nobody would have ever even imagined something like the Internet, where we would have to make legislative decisions about that. What's the answer to?

Speaker 2: 37:53

catching up to modern life, or do we need to?

Speaker 3: 37:58

Well, I think we do, within our system, have the capacity to amend it really in any way we want. So that's cool. We have that kind of plasticity where we can change it to, you know, improve things and bring things more up to date. And I think the big challenge you know at the moment is that, you know, do we really have that capacity? Because at the end of the day, on paper we do, and occasionally we manage to pull that off of the day.

Speaker 3: 38:26

On paper we do, and occasionally we manage to pull that off, but uh, you know we're so and you know deadlocked on everything and and are on the brink of freaking civil war every five minutes, that it's very difficult to get anything of substance done. So you know, what I've been thinking a lot about is like, you know, if you think of the constitution and the rest of the government as software and you think about our society and our culture as the platform on which the software runs, then there's sort of like minimum platform requirements, right, and you remember, you know, if you buy like windows seven, you had to have so much Ram and you had to have, you know, to drive this big like, these are the minimum requirements to run the software.

Speaker 3: 39:08

What I worry about right now is that have we gotten to the point where we screwed up our society and our culture in such a way that we can't run the software properly anymore? And if that's true, then the problem isn't with the software, the problem is with our culture and our society, and we need to fix the problems in our culture and society. If you look at the kinds of things that like Steve Bannon was trying to do, you know a lot of it. What he was after was cultural engineering, and he was sort of quoting Antonio Gramsci, the Italian political scientist, in saying, you know that culture is upstream from politics. But what he kind of didn't really also put on there was that if you screw up culture enough, you can really screw up politics. And I think that's kind of where we're at is that we've had what amounts to cultural hand grenades thrown into the works of our generation, and what made the greatest generation the greatest generation? Well, you know, it's pretty obviously World War.

Speaker 3: 40:11

II and the reaction that they had to it and the responsibilities that they dealt with in managing that huge conflict. Were they responding to a situation that demanded a great deal of sacrifice and patriotism? But they also did something extremely pragmatic, which was they went into a conflict situation and they mixed up their relationships with each other quite a bit and built quite a lot of trust, and then they went back home and built the remainder of the 20th century. So all of the post-war institutions you know the UNs, the NATO, all of our modern, you know kind of defense infrastructure and the things that have, you know, for better or worse, brought about peace, relative peace, for the last 75 years. Those things were built by that generation of people and they remember what war was like and they also remember what it's like to have loyalty and honor and you know connection to others and respect for people that are different from themselves. So you had in that situation people from cities serving with people from rural areas and people from rural areas serving with cities, and you know people of different cultural backgrounds and you know it wasn't perfect but it definitely, you know, created an opportunity for a lot of social mixing.

Speaker 3: 41:27

Now look what happened in America in the 20th century following that, in terms of how we did cultural mixing.

Speaker 3: 41:33

Well, first off, you know we ended up with an all-volunteer army, which has its you know benefits. You know we obviously had the situation in, you know the situations in both Korea and Vietnam that you know there were drafts and stuff and people did become socially mixed there, but there was also a lot of kind of radicalization that happened and you know a lot of Cold War kind of information warfare games around Vietnam that we're still dealing with and a lot of internal domestic dysfunction as well. So, point being that you know, colleges didn't really end up performing that function of doing social mixing, and I don't know what we're going to end up doing to provide the kind of social mixing that we need in order to provide the cultural, societal stuff, to build this like next hundred years, say you know, and then to have the software operate on top of that society. But at this point I'm of the mind that we have a societal problem more than a governmental problem, because if the society wasn't so screwed up, I think we could still make the software work reasonably well.

Speaker 2: 42:39

Right, and you bring up I like the software metaphor. I like the software metaphor, no-transcript bonding experience. You and I grew up in an era where even though, like you said, you grew up Catholic, my parents went to the first Christian church, right, so there were differences among our families, and yet you and I probably grew up watching the same TV shows. Yeah, I mean, there was the same TV shows.

Speaker 3: 43:19

Yeah, I mean, there was only like four on.

Speaker 2: 43:21

Sure, sure, and by the time you and I reach uh, time to go to college or enter the workforce, you and I have had a shared experience, even if we live 1500 miles from each other, right, whereas now two different graduates from high school can show up the freshman year of college and really never having watched and shared the experience and the culture of the same shows which is a big deal, because the shows we watch shape us in so many ways, and so the expanded choices that we all now have, I think, play a big role in kind of ripping us apart and not allowing us to come together and say, oh yeah, you watch, yeah, I watch that too, I love it. I think there's a lot less of them, and television is just one example of that. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 44:26

You know? No, I think you're really. I think that's absolutely right. I mean, people just are having very different experiences and you know, I mean, even though there's a bunch of shows that you know some people still watch and they can kind of use those cultural reference points, if you just look at how people there's only 168 hours in a week and how are people using those hours, you know, there's YouTube, there's podcasts, there's Netflix, there's tech talk, there's Twitter, you know, I mean there's all these things that people can, can be spending their time in and increasingly they're spending them in very different, separate universes from one another. So we just don't have those kinds of cultural reference points.

Speaker 3: 45:03

So I think, you know, one of the things we need to consider is how do we build real world relationships between people at scale, hopefully without going to war, because going to war is obviously a big pain, a big pain.

Speaker 3: 45:18

But if we could figure out, I think personally, like national service programs not necessarily military, although that's certainly an option for those that want to pursue it I think any kind of service programs where you're getting people mixed up across different kinds of societal dividing lines is probably where we need to go, and I think as much as people kind of. I don't know, everybody reacts against everything these days because that's just what people do you say something and people, people lash out. But I think if you stop and think for a minute about what is needed in order to get our society to a point where the software runs again, I think that's what's needed and I think we need to build awareness around that. And how you do it I don't care necessarily, but you got to figure out some way to get our society back in shape to function again.

Speaker 2: 46:06

Right, the issues that you've been you and I've been discussing. Let me ask you something Within any given administration and clearly I understand that it can depend a lot on who's president at the time, but overall, how many times do they take an issue like the one we've been discussing and put together some of the top minds in the nation and create a think tank not out of politicians, not out of people who are deeply entrenched in Washington, but the best people in that area and say here's the problem, we need to find solutions? How often does that actually happen?

Speaker 3: 46:55

Well, you know it's so frustrating. I spend a lot of time listening to C-SPAN because, while it is not perfect and has a lot of strange features, it does not have a lot of what I would call media packaging. It's just sort of whatever's going on. So you get to listen to congressional hearings, you get to listen to people calling in and griping about whatever they think and you know. So you get a little bit of a view into just kind of like how stuff works. And what I find is that you know, when you talk about trying to put together panels of people that are sort of, you know, experts on whatever, a lot of times what you end up with is you know, everything is sort of politicized. So if it's being done, you know, by the Heritage Foundation, well then you have to watch out for the Heritage Foundation funders and their bias. If it's done being, you know, done by Brookings, you know they might have a different point of view.

Speaker 3: 47:48

And, of course, I actually have come to believe that a lot of the think tanks in DC are actually pretty fair players, in that they sort of take money from everybody and they sort of are a mixing bowl of a lot of different points of view and so they have to answer to a lot of different. You know funders and other people. You know platforming them, so I think it could be worse. But I think that you know like you look at what happened, like with the AI stuff just as an example like they ended up putting together this platform or this uh advisory board uh, you know that included.

Speaker 3: 48:24

You know people like sam altman and you know like sam is certainly a powerful figure in that world I think elon might have been on that as well and like so these are powerful people and certainly they shape the landscape. But, like I've known sam altman for like 15 years, 16 years, and the first time I met him I was like dude, that guy's a con man, you know. So, like do you really want to put the con man? And so it ends up being these kinds of figurehead type people rather than people that might be more useful and thoughtful about some of these things. So I think you know it. It depends and and of course, there's political value to bringing powerful people into your proximity if you're a politician or you know what have you. So it's a lot of games. I do think we can get better at that. I have hope that you know we can start to be a little bit more serious about how we do these things, but I think it's a challenge for now.

Speaker 2: 49:17

What are your thoughts on this? You know there are a lot of things that are phrases that are thrown around in politics that sound on the surface I mean, yeah, that's right. Damn damn right Sounds like that. It's one of those things that just when it hits you it sounds right, but upon deeper examination sometimes you go well, it doesn't really make sense. So when we hear you need to get the money out of politics, that's one of those things that sounds right. It sounds like, yeah, that's the source of so much corruption. If you were to argue the other side, what happens if we take all the money out of politics? Is it better, or what are some of the pros and cons of doing so?

Speaker 3: 50:05

Yeah, I mean, I think this is a deep topic and one that a lot of other people besides me have studied in much more detail, but you know from where I sit. I think that you know one of the most just practically damaging things that we've seen emerge over the last 15 years or so was Citizens United, which really made it possible for corporations untold millions from who knows where towards whatever agenda they want, which may include Donald Trump as well as other things too, and they've been running some kind of campaign where they're doing data harvesting from people who haven't registered to vote and claiming that it's going to help them register to vote, but it hasn't, and so now they're under criminal investigation in the state of Michigan, I think it was, maybe Minnesota, I can't remember, but at any rate, you know, I think and arizona, god knows where and I generally don't do that unless I have some personal connection to um. You know one of these candidates, because I think it's like what do I know about freaking pennsylvania congress? You know I shouldn't, so like there's some simple things like that. Like you probably shouldn't take individual contributions from dudes in maryland for races in north North Dakota or something like that's probably not a great idea. Just intuitively you would think, especially if I'm throwing in a lot of money and just like some pack or something like. So I think there's a lot of kind of these common sense questions.

Speaker 3: 51:53

But of course, again, you know the counter argument is First Amendment right. You know you've got a right to speak and if money is speech, then you can't shut anybody up. So you know that's where we're at and I guess we'll have to wait for some of these things to you know some other, like suppose you expand the court in a way that maybe is a little bit more centered than it is now and you have some case that challenges the Citizen United thing. Maybe that gets turned the other way and there's some new doctrine that gets applied from then forward. But you know that's going to take a long time. You and I are not going to be around to see some of these things get fixed. Unfortunately.

Speaker 2: 52:31

One of the things that makes somebody like Steve Bannon, for example, as dangerous as he is, is the fact that he's not a stupid guy.

Speaker 3: 52:41

Oh, he's really smart yeah.

Speaker 2: 52:42

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 52:44

Intelligent guy.

Speaker 2: 52:48

Does that make someone more dangerous when they have that for lack of better words that evil thread through them, for example? I think you could argue both sides of this, but I've always said that one of the things that kept Trump's evil thread woven through his body from going clear off the tracks is that he's not smart enough himself to you know, he's not an evil genius.

Speaker 3: 53:19

He's an evil genius. He's an evil dummy.

Speaker 2: 53:22

We see this. So if you had to pick one or the other, which one, in your opinion, is more dangerous? Somebody like Trump, who knows nothing but he's evil, or somebody like Bannon?

Speaker 3: 53:36

Well, you know, we have an opportunity right at this moment to do a little compare and contrast between you know, evil and charismatic, and and dumb and smart people here. So you've got, you know, uh, trump, who you know, I mean he, he is. He does not understand concepts deeply, but he isn't. He is a media genius Like. He just has the ability to get on stage and say whatever the hell he wants, whether it's about Hannibal Lecter or sharks and batteries, and it's just kind of people are like, yeah, that sounds good, you know. So you know, he's got a sixth sense for connecting with audiences, and I credit his decades of experience in media for that. You know, he just knows what's going to play and what isn't, yes, and he just has a good instinct for that. So, so he is a certain kind of genius in that way, yes, but very dumb when it comes to, like, facts and policies and stuff like that. Um bannon, on the other hand, is, you know, super smart about understanding I think, some of the deeper currents that you know lie underneath this stuff, and also understanding the power players that are behind it and knowing how to play those people off of each other to get the outcomes that he wants. He's also extremely persistent, like you know. If you follow bannon long enough, what you see is that you know he's and knowing how to play those people off of each other to get the outcomes that he wants. He's also extremely persistent, like you know. If you follow Bannon long enough, what you see is that you know he's not afraid of losing. Right, like sometimes they lose and he's like okay, well, we lost, I see why we lost. Now we're going to come back and we're going to do this again and next time we're not going to lose, or maybe it'll take three, three times or four times. He's just very persistent.

Speaker 3: 55:06

And then you have somebody like Musk, who is in the mix now, and of course Thiel as well, who have they're very smart about certain things. Like they understand sort of the stuff that they think they know well, like the monetary stuff and sort of the wokeness, all that kind of stuff they understand within the logic of their own arguments. Right, they sort of grasp what they think they're trying to do, but they have like zero emotional capacity to connect with a crowd and they're the opposite of Trump in that regard. So, like you know, elon connects you know, I hate to say it with you know, sort of socially maladjusted young men, because he's a socially maladjusted middle-aged man, you know, and just doesn't have. He can't read a room, he can't understand why people would be against him, and so what's this is and this is why this whole JD Vance thing is actually the Achilles heel of the entire Trump operation at this point is because JD Vance is kind of like them.

Speaker 3: 55:58

He's not as socially maladapted as they are, as Thiel and Musk are, but he carries a lot of their same affect and carries a lot of their same logic and he doesn't understand why it's not connecting with like everybody, right? And I think that what Musk and Thiel believe is that if they just make it possible for people to express their deep, dark, inner desires, it'll all be for Trump and that two-thirds of everybody's going to vote for Trump. And you saw this when David Sachs addressed the Republican convention a few weeks ago where, you know, he caught up in front of all these people and he's talking about Ukraine and how NATO aggression caused Putin's invasion of Ukraine. And he's waiting for, like, the laugh lines that he feels like he's built in, or the cheer lines, you know, and he's waiting for, like the last lines that he feels like he's built in, or the cheer lines you know, and nobody's like getting him because he hasn't talked to like a real actual.

Speaker 1: 56:49

you know regular Republican, you know car dealer from Des Moines, you know ever Right.

Speaker 3: 56:51

You know, he just doesn't have that capacity to connect with the average person. So they're off in their own little bubble in tech land, thinking that they're the God's savior, and of course they're getting like love letters from Putin and Xi and all their friends going like, oh my God, this is great what you guys are doing, keep it up. And so they're very convinced they're on the side of righteousness, and so that's kind of the dynamic that you have at this point. Of course, steve's in jail right now, I guess, so he's not able to do anything until he gets out like in november or whatever.

Speaker 3: 57:19

Yes, so you know, the now the, the inmates are kind of running the asylum. Now you've got teal and musk and trump and vance trying to like make this go, and it's a shit show. I mean this, this campaign is just completely falling apart. And I just somebody just texted me a minute ago that apparently trump is going to do a quote, a, a major interview with Elon Musk on Monday, and of course, I mean who's interviewing whom and how stupid is this going to be? You know. So you know. But yeah, I think that's what's going on and I think you know none of them are in possession of a complete deck of cards. Is the other way to look at this. Like Trump doesn't, you know, is good with media, but doesn't know what's going on. Bannon knows what's going on but is in jail. Thiel is socially maladapted and so is Musk, and they also are trying to do something that nobody wants.

Speaker 2: 58:16

So yeah, you know, I think, all things being equal right now, you know, the Harris campaign has definitely got the advantage to these clouds Right and to kind of wrap things up here, and I guess this will be kind of one of the last things we touch on.

Speaker 2: 58:28

Three years ago I started making a lot of posts saying this election, the 2024 election, was going to come down to emotions, emotional intensity, that in the end, the party who was able to and not necessarily emotions of excitement, although that certainly could be part of it but it was going to be the party that was able to keep their shit together and not go cuckoo and stay focused on the task at hand, and then, if you can throw a lot of excitement in on top of that, great. And as I see it and again I want your perspective on this but as I see it, and I was not expecting this effect, kamala Harris injected, I think, an amount of energy that not too many people thought she would bring. Now, there were a lot of Kamala Harris fans and people who wanted her, but I haven't talked to many of them. Even that thought it would be on this level.

Speaker 2: 59:39

Talk to many of them even that thought it would be on this level. So what are your thoughts on that whole idea that the election is coming down to? It's an emotional game, and has been throughout the last few years.

Speaker 3: 59:57

Yeah, well, I think there's two factors to consider here. One is that you know, if you really think about it, in many ways this election was, you know, a few months ago and still is now, a referendum on MAGA right. Do we want a MAGA future or a not MAGA future? So to the extent that that's kind of a built-in baseline, like that's steady right, like people aren't going to change their opinions about being pro-MAGA or anti-MAGA based on a few details around who's the candidate right?

Speaker 3: 1:00:22

So that was one reason why, even given Biden's relatively bad performance in that debate, he still managed to hold a pretty decent foothold because at the end of the day that MAGA floor, anti-maga floor for him wasn't going away, anti-maga floor for him wasn't going away.

Speaker 3: 1:00:41

Now, as you said, you know, being able to bring excitement and to really turn people out, I think is something that this campaign has unlocked, and I think it has been kind of an unlock where you know now that there's really nobody in a position to come up with any really negative reasons to not vote for these people on this. But you see this also with the Waltz election today, like you know, I think people were coming up with reasons why Shapiro was bad, and maybe those were valid, maybe they weren't, but point being, like nobody has room to complain right now, like this is a solid freaking ticket and so, as a result, that has unlocked a lot of excitement. And you also see, you know all these affinity groups that have formed.

Speaker 3: 1:01:17

You know the white dudes and the black women and the Latinas, and the Catholics and the Jews and everybody's come together in this kind of factional stew to kind of stand up and say, yes, we want this.

Speaker 3: 1:01:45

And so I think you know that is going to do is they need to scare their base into actually voting at the prospect that the other side's going to win. So this would be a two-pronged strategy. One is drive that excitement, like you said, but also make sure people understand what the stakes are, and the way to do that is to send messaging into suburban and to urban areas for Democrats, making sure that people understand stuff like Project 2025, that they understand that Musk and Thiel and Putin and Xi are in the driver's seat of the Republican Party and that the stakes could not be higher for civil rights, for women, for the Constitution. All of that is on the ballot, quite literally. So if you follow that two-pronged approach of really highlighting what's at stake and getting people a little bit scared while also inspiring them, I think the Democrats have got a lot than I am, because I love to learn.

Speaker 2: 1:02:37

You know what I mean. I love to learn and I know my area pretty well, but I've been focused on this one area my entire life, so you kind of have blinders on to everything else when you do that. And so to get somebody like you who can answer deeply historical aspect of something or data driven you know, happy to do what I can.

Speaker 3: 1:03:04

We all have our specialties and you know that's what makes this work is we're all bringing our best selves to the table.

Speaker 2: 1:03:09

Absolutely. How can people find you if they want to get in contact with you?

Speaker 3: 1:03:12

Yeah, sure, so you can find a link to a lot of my work at DaveTroycom and also I'm on X at DaveTroy, on Mastodon at DaveTroy, at Toadsocial, and I write a monthly column called the Wide Angle at Washington Spectator, which is at WashingtonSpectatororg.

Speaker 2: 1:03:32

Fantastic Again. A real pleasure to have you on, and maybe somewhere down the road either closer to the election or maybe just after the election, maybe we can do this again and discuss some new issues here.

Speaker 3: 1:03:46

Yeah, hopefully we'll have some fresh new issues to discuss and the election will be in the rearview mirror and positively ended.

Speaker 2: 1:03:55

So that'll be good, right. All right, dave. I can't thank you you enough, and I look forward to speaking to you again.

Speaker 3: 1:04:02

All right, thanks, jack, really enjoyed the conversation.

Speaker 2: 1:04:05

Thanks, bye-bye, we'll see you next time.