 Obviously, a huge amount of huge number of stories coming out of both media on the left and on the right about the response to the raid on Donald Trump. It has raised the temperatures. It has raised anxiety. We saw this guy, you know, supposed to attack the FBI building get shot and somebody else tried to ram his car into the Capitol. You know, we're not even sure they're related, but it just seems like people are on edge. People are freaking out. And there was a lot of talk, a lot of talk of civil war. I mean, Stephen Crowder, right after the FBI search of Trump's Mar-a-Lago property. Tomorrow is war. He announced, I think it was on Twitter. And then the next day, you know, he said, today is war. That is all you will get on today's show and he did a whole show on today is war. And the question, and then of course, the New York Times has covered just a rise in the violent language coming out of the right. In this case, this means war, we're at war, country on the verge of civil war. All of these are titles and tweets and people, you know, people sounding off on what is going on in the world. And it seems like the raid, the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago has just intensified these emotions, intensified these feelings and caused everybody kind of significantly to get excited about this. So let's talk about it. So first, two stories, two opinion pieces, really, that I'm going to be drawing on that I think have given me some food for thought on this. And I found interesting. One was in The Daily Beast by Bonnie Christian Friday. And it was published, I don't know, published just yesterday or the day before, something like that. And then that's really from kind of she's probably on the left perspective, given the list of The Daily Beast. And then the other one is from the right, John Hawkins. John Hawkins is like a pro-Trump rightist, but one of the more articulate ones. And he writes a sub-stack that I subscribe to, and I get a sub-stacks. And so she wrote, Bonnie wrote, Americans are too pampered and erotic to fight a civil war. And John Hawkins says, are Americans really too pampered and erotic to fight a civil war? So they kind of went, you know, went at each other. And I found the exchange interesting. And that's kind of what inspired my discussion today. Let me just see where are we. I want to make sure I'm keeping up with the chat. Let's move that over there. Move this over here and open that. All right. Again, I need to travel with a big screen so I can track everything that's going on. So there's a lot of talk of war. There's a lot of talk of civil war. But you know, what does, what does a crowded mean by war? What's he really talking about? And this comes from, from the peace and the Daily Beast. You know, what does war mean to crowd? It primarily means means means it primarily means lots of Twitter posts. It primarily means yelling and shouting and pounding on the table. I think at the, you know, on his, on his war show, you know, he said it's time to fight for every square inch. He said, fight like hell. And what should you do? Well, you should do is go, you know, what's the action? What's the, what's the call to action when he's talking about, let's go fight a war. This is, this is serious where, you know, what's the call to action? The call to action is go to crowded shop.com use code fight and you get 15% off of your, I don't know, let's fight the war t-shirts or something like this. Right. So there's a lot of chest beating. But chest beating is primarily something that people like crowded and others on the right. And we'll talk about the left in a minute have used in order to wild people up and get people excited and really to get people to watch the show. I mean, it's why there are more people right now watching this show than maybe usual at this time of day live because the title is Civil War. And how can you not? It's, it's, how can you not come and watch a title of civil war? There's a lot of chest beating. There are a lot of excitement. There's a lot of the use of the term war to indicate a real, a real conflict of ideas, a real conflict of ideas, a real conflict of rhetoric, a real, you know, trying to get people active and excited. And the terminology of war often applies to this. Yes, I know some of you watch the show, watch every show they can. I'm not, but at the margin, you got admitted at the margin. My show on, on beautiful romantic art is going to score fewer people than civil war. Are we going to civil war? It's just, that's the way it is, right? You know, we've got, we've got a lot of people who are making the case that this is serious, that there is going to be a civil war, particularly over the last three years, particularly since the last election. There's been a lot of discussion on this on the left, on the right. We'll talk again, we'll get to the left. Don't worry. You know, the, the, the, the, the, the storming of, I mean, think about the acts of violence over the last three years, we got Antifa and Black Lives Matter burning down city centers, burning down stores, rioting, breaking windows. I mean, you saw the pictures out of Portland. It was, it was almost civil war like just in Portland for a few months. It was, it was unbelievable destruction. And what was interesting in Portland was that most of the focus of the demonstrators was the focus of the destruction was on, most of it, not all of it, was on government buildings and federal government buildings. And it was like an uprising against the federal government, you know, in this little locality of Portland. You notice that all of that has gone and kind of dissipated. You know, you saw the destruction of police department in Minnesota and in other places around the world, the tax of police department, we saw the January 6th attack on the, on the, on Congress. And, and, you know, again, and so we've seen an increase in violence. You're also seeing, I think, more kind of people taking up, taking guns. Usually it's crazy individuals and going out and using a political manifest or political agenda, typically from the right and just going shooting people, whether it's minorities or whether it's immigrants, whether it's in, you know, we've seen that in a number of different locations after the first, after the last few years. So there's no question there is a rise over the last few years of political violence, a violence that is motivated by politics. And that is just part of the world in which we live and part of the reality in which we live right now. And you can see, and many people are warning that this escalation, that this increase, this escalation and this increase is aiming towards civil war, ultimately. Is it? Is that what we're having? Is it possible? Now, again, this is from the Daily Beast. I mean, this is what she writes. And I'm going to, I'm going to quote it. I don't think that most, I don't. So it's talking about the violence. She says, I don't, I don't even, I don't think that this is most people, the violence. I don't think it's most people who like law extremist politics on the internet. There is a madness of crowds. Yes. And mobs will do things their individual members will not. But there's a yawning gap between rage booking while you watch Fox News or getting hyped about make America great again on Twitter and bludgeoning a real life human being because he voted the wrong way. It's a gap. I don't believe most Americans are prepared to cross. Now, for the most part, I think she's right, but we'll see for the most part. We are as a people, I'm reading from her, really, where there's no way conditioning in the forest without refrigerators. Do we hate each other enough to eat hard track to undergo battle surgeries? Who knows about foraging anymore? Can you start a fire with nothing but sticks? And there's no YouTube tutorials. They'd knocked down the cell towers during a civil war. In the last two years, large swaths of the country declared their lungs too weak to breathe through cotton cloth while others insisted it was deadly dangerous to take on open air to take an open air walk on the beach without the same cloth. Are these people actually going to go fight? I mean, are we really Americans really going to go out into the woods and start killing each other? I mean, put aside the hatred, there's a lot of hatred out there. There really is hatred out there. The hatred is legit. But most Americans who hate, most of the people I see, most of the people even complaining on this chat about the state of the world and how ugly it is and how horrible it is, are complainers who sit on the sofa and complain. They sit on Twitter or they sit on whatever the medium of their preference on the Iran book show and they bitch and complain. They get riled up and they might join a protest here and there but you really understand what a civil war really means, what it means to fight, what life is like when fighting like a civil war occurs. How many people actually believe enough in their ideas? Any ideas to be willing to go out there and literally start killing people but not just killing people but you know, be shot at, live on the run, have to do all the things that you as a survivalist have to do. How many people would know how to do it? Very few. I mean, most Americans, I think even with guns, yeah, they can go out and they can shoot at targets and it's fun and it's exciting and they think that when the time comes they will use those guns to defend themselves against whom? Is it American military that is unbelievably equipped and unbelievably trained and could wipe you out in an instant and has big weapons with incredible accuracy and can hunt you down anywhere using drones and high-tech? How many Americans are really willing to do that? Hundreds? Thousands? To be a civil war, it would have to be thousands, they'd have to be well trained and they'd have to be able to survive for a while and if they're going up against the US military, would they? How many? War has always been a young person's game. Young people go to war. Old people, older people, over 30 year olds, rarely go to war. Too much to lose, life too comfortable, yeah, and physically maybe not in that good shape. I mean, look at Americans. Look at Americans. They're obese, they're out of shape. I mean, how many American young people, how many American young people today qualify? Never mind one, but qualify to go into the military. Actually, had the numbers here, let me see if I can find the numbers. It's some pathetic number who qualify from purely physical perspective. Let me find this for you. Yeah, the pool of those eligible to join the military continues to shrink with more young men and women than ever disqualified for obesity, drug use or criminal records. Last month, Army General Chief of Staff John McConville testified before Congress that only 23 percent of Americans 17 to 24 are qualified to serve without a waiver to join, down from 29 percent just a few years ago. An internal Defense Department survey obtained by NBC News found that only 9 percent of those young Americans eligible to serve in the military had any inclination to do so. The lowest number since 2007. So the Army is having a problem recruiting anybody primarily to a logical extent because there aren't that many young people who can run and jump and shoot and do all this stuff physically. We are today a country of whips, of unfit, emotionalistic. We're good at yelling, we're good at shouting, we're good at target practice, we're good at taking our guns out to the woods and shooting stuff. But what would we be fighting for? What are we willing to reduce our stand-up, living in quality of life dramatically for? What are we willing to live in the wilderness and be hunted down for? Very few people, very, very few people would be willing to do that. What about BLM and ANTIFA? BLM and ANTIFA? BLM and ANTIFA wouldn't last five minutes. BLM and ANTIFA, the only reason, the only reason they got as violent as they did, the only reason they succeeded in the kind of looting and destruction that they succeeded in, is because they were treated with kick gloves. It's only because the police didn't go after them. I mean, how long would it actually take to shut down a BLM riot on ANTIFA gathering? And ANTIFA, cowards, if they don't have 15 to one odds, they don't fight 15 to one odds in their favor. If it actually got into a real battle, they would run like the cowards that they are. No, we definitely need stronger law enforcement. There's a question about that. But I'm talking about who among the American people, who among these young punks, is actually willing, actually able, actually wants to go out there and actually engage in a fight. My argument is almost nobody is competent. Almost nobody would do it. They're just, and you know, was people have to believe in something deeply. And yes, there are people who believe stuff in deeply. Many of the ANTIFA people believe their stuff deeply. But they're incompetent and useless. Think about the January 6th insurgents. And I think what happened in January 6th is horrific and awful. But think about how incompetent and pathetic where they were. A bunch of yahoo's walking into Capitol Hill. No plan, no leadership. Some of them had weapons. They were willing to beat up cops, but now use the weapons. Why? Because they knew what the response would be. Who exactly is going to lead these people? Well, maybe General Flynn, I guess. So there was a real case to be made that the likelihood of a civil war is zero now because we don't hate each other, not because there's no real strife, not because there's real, not real disagreement, but because there's just nobody to fight. Nobody willing to actually pick up arms because the Dominican people are too lazy, pampered, overweight, unfit to actually engage in a war. And this would be a war. And depending on how the civil war would land up, there's a good chance you would be fighting against the best trained military in the world. How long would you survive? So that is an argument, I think a fairly strong argument. And let me add one more element to this. Other than a few crazies on the Antifa side, BLM, and on the, I don't know who represents the kind of crazy right, but the kind of shooters that have gone in and shot up places. On the right, right. How many are there on both extremes, on both sides of this? How many are there that are really willing to actually go out and kill people? I mean, there might be, there might be hundreds on each side, but are there thousands? Are there tens of thousands? Are there hundreds of thousands? I mean, that civil war, we have a population of 350 million people. Is it, are there several million on each side that are willing to actually go to battle, actually willing to kill fellow Americans because they disagree politically? Is that something that is, the realistic thing, realistically think, is going to happen? I mean, I think you can make a case that right now know that while there might be some hundreds of people here, hundreds of people there who are willing to go out and kill fellow Americans because they disagree about the outcome of the 2020 election, it's a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny minority at this point, as bad as our political culture is. It's still a tiny minority. So is a civil war therefore impossible? Well, no, it's certainly still possible. Things can get bad and they can get bad quickly. While, you know, civil wars don't necessarily involve 100% of the population fighting, the civil war, for example, the US civil war, about 10% of Americans fought in World War II, about 11%, the number of Americans serving in the military today is less than 1%. But you can imagine a civil war breaking out represented by those people who can take up arms, in particular those people in the military who not only can take up arms but are trained and qualified to take up arms. You can imagine a world in which the military is split and where different units within the military are fighting each other, some representing quote, one elected government and the other representing an insurgency or representing something else, hard to tell. But you could imagine the US military splitting and fighting within. You could imagine states succeeding and the federal government attempting to stop them from succeeding and force being used in those kind of interchanges that could be pretty brutal and pretty big and pretty significant and where soldiers leave the federal, you know, military enjoying their state militias in order to fight against the federal government. And, you know, you could imagine things like that get pretty, pretty ugly. You could also imagine a world in which small groups of people, hundreds, maybe thousands, who are well equipped, well trained, create havoc within society, terrorize, kill, destroy. And where civilization crumbles, not because it's millions of people fighting each other, but just because a few very well trained people create real, I mean, imagine if dams are bombed, electricity is taken out for the same reason. I talked about the fact that Americans are pampered. And therefore, those Americans will not fight for the same reason. Those kind of Americans, how would they survive if there's fighting around them? It's this fighting that's taking out the infrastructure with which they live. So there's, they could be domestic terrorism, significant domestic terrorism and domestic terrorism. We saw some domestic terrorism in the 60s and 70s, but it wasn't very well organized. It wasn't very sophisticated. It wasn't didn't use weapons very cleverly. Imagine if you had the money, imagine some, I don't know, billionaire or rich guy who wants to fund a civil war, wants to fund a terrorist group or wants to fund purchase of military equipment. And there's so much military equipment to date, all over the place. Police departments have military equipment. Federal agencies have military equipment. Individuals have military equipment in some states. I mean, just imagine what they could do. They have what they can create. Now, we know that loners can create a lot of havoc, but usually loners die quickly and they're gone. What's really dangerous is organizations who can sustain hundreds of people or thousands of people. Now, again, I'm not, I'm not as wide because partially I think that these organizations are monitored. I think it's hard to do this kind of stuff. Stealth, I think that all these militias and all these groups, the Timothy McRae's of the world, as soon as they try to organize beyond one to five people, the FBI and other entities discover them and shut them down. But there are real possibilities and you can see it right now with the kind of angst and the kind of hatred. I mean, what's going on today in America, I think is unprecedented, certainly since the actual civil war in terms of the hatred. I mean, people in red and blue states, some people in red and blue states hate each other's gods. They really, really, really think that their fellow Americans are the enemy and they are willing to cheat. They are willing to lie. And maybe the scariest to me is they're willing to follow. They're willing to accept tribalism. They're willing to accept the verdict of the tribe and do what the tribe tells them to do. And that's how you get into real civil wars. That's how you get into bloodshed. Thank you for listening or watching The Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening. You get value from watching. Show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbookshow.com slash support by going to Patreon, subscribe star locals and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see the Iran Book Show grow, please consider sharing our content and of course, subscribe. Press that little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get an announcement when we go live. And for those of you who are already subscribers and those of you who are already supporters of the show, thank you. I very much appreciate it.