 Hey everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense, and things are not going well. So I am filming this on January 7th, which is the day after the capital had stormed and there was a bunch of mayhem and chaos and whatever. And I've been thinking about it a lot, as I'm sure you have, over the past 24-ish hours. And I think I've arrived at, maybe not conclusions, but a couple things that I think are worthy of note. So here is the situation as I see it, and that's all it is, it's just a situation as I see it. There's a couple competing factors, okay? So the first thing is, you gotta understand in the current situation that we have going on, we have COVID, okay? So the first thing we have going on is COVID, right? We have the coronavirus thing. And what I mean in that, excuse me, what I mean in that is the economic depression that's come out of that, right? The isolation that's come out of that, and just the general setting. You've been living in America, probably for the past nine-ish months. So you understand the basic lay of the land as things are, right? People are being told where they can go, what they can do. There's all the civil liberties issues that certain people have with that. Maybe you don't have that, maybe you think that's ridiculous, but that's still a factor that's out there in the land, right? So that's another one I'm gonna put up here. So you just take that. I mean, just that by itself, right? Whether or not it's a real disease is hotly debated, not that it doesn't exist or not, but whether or not how deadly it is, right? You have mass mandates, you have all these lockdowns, you have businesses, just, I mean, the economic devastation we're gonna reap for years out of this thing, right? So there's just a lot going on with that, just that. Okay? Now, you throw that on top of a hotly contested election, okay? I mean, people have been hating or loving Trump for the last four years. Wherever you are in that spectrum, you obviously realize that he has his extreme supporters and he has his extreme detractors, right? So it's just been a very hotly contested election leading up to this. So we have a hotly contested election, right? People feeling very do or die on both sides of the issue. And that only happens because since about World War II, the federal government has been increasing in size. It's like this bloated Amima, it's like this thing, this blob that just keeps growing, right? Prior to World War II, the federal government was not as large, really prior to the Great Depression. And so who president is or isn't, it's not necessarily gonna affect your everyday life. So prior to this massive growing of the federal government that we've been living under for the past 70 years, it may or may not matter who's president so much, right? You can pretty much still do what you want. Yeah, some policies or programs will change, some things or whatever, but by and large, you're gonna be left alone. That is no longer the case. Partly because the federal government has just massively grown in size. And now what the federal government does or does not can have a very large impact on your everyday life. So that's point number three, large federal government. The last point and what I would say the most important point is, is that I've seen a lot of people on Twitter talking about a peaceful transition of power. In America, we have a peaceful transition of power. And so these riots and these people getting upset and serving the Capitol building, this is un-American, it's thuggery. I saw one person call it insurrection. These things are just their way out of control. They're un-American. We can't allow them to happen, okay? Just totally not acceptable behavior. But here's what you need to understand. In America, we have a peaceful transition of power. And that peaceful transition of power is built on people having faith in the electoral process. The peaceful transition of power, it is a great American tradition, by the way. We've been doing it successfully for the most part for 200 and some years, right? That is a wonderful American tradition. And I couldn't find the quote, I looked forward a little bit, but I couldn't find it, but there's a quote from Rousseau. And it's basically something to the effect of Americans have peaceful transitions of power because instead of shooting it out, they can vote it out, right? So that's what our peaceful transitions of power are built on in this country. Yeah, your guy might lose, but you know what? You can regroup and in two years or four years or whatever the next election is, you can try to pull it back together and you can try again. That's how elections work, right? However, when your faith in the elections and the electoral process no longer exists, how are you gonna have a peaceful transition of power? If people don't believe that their votes count or that it's gonna matter, then you can no longer have a peaceful transition of power. Whether or not you believe the election was rigged is inconsequential. Right now, about half give or take of the country thinks that the election was rigged, that it was a stolen election. Whether or not you think Joe Biden won legitimately or not isn't relevant when half the country thinks it was stolen, okay? So that's at least half the people of the nation, give or take, that feel severely disenfranchised. So if you've removed all recourse for that, if the election isn't a fair and legitimate process, which again, whether or not you believe that isn't the point right now, if there's no recourse for that, you could say, well, they never presented any evidence of fraud or whatever, we can have that debate. But all I'm saying is, if you don't feel like there's a recourse and you've lost faith in the electoral system, how do you have a peaceful transition of power? And then the last one is the progressive agenda. And the agenda of the incoming government isn't necessarily to just shuffle a couple of things around, to move some papers, right? They have big dreams and they're coming after certain people's way of life, right? We can expect to California the whole country, right? They're gonna try the green leap forward and there's gonna be some gun registration, confiscation deals, like there's a lot of things that we expect that are going to very much impact the everyday life of normal people. So when you put all of this together, I don't see how 2021 is gonna be any better than 2020. I just, I don't understand how this ends anywhere good. If we don't have faith in elections, we have an incoming government that's contested whether or not they actually want it and their agenda is an extremely aggressive one on half of the country to change their way of life. I do not see a path forward in that that's good. These are all the major factors that I've been thinking about the last 24 hours and that I've been considering. And this is why I think it's gonna get worse before it gets better. And no one really is excited about that, but these are all the factors that are pointing to it. Now you might say, okay, well, how could you back this down? I guess I really only see maybe two or three ways out of it. One, the progressives could give up their agenda, okay? They could decide, yeah, all right, forget it. We're not gonna do the gun thing. We're not gonna do this green leap forward. We're not gonna do universal healthcare or free college or all that other stuff, but that's never gonna happen, right? Because that's what they built their agenda on. So I don't see that as a legitimate option. The other thing I guess is middle America slash the people that feel like they've lost this election and don't have faith in the process anymore, they could roll over. They could just say, you know what, all right, whatever you wanna do, you know, if you wanna pass all these laws that we think are against our constitutional rights and you wanna take care of this, okay, we'll just accept that. That's no big deal. You can do what you want. That's an option. I think that's probably about as less as unlikely as the progressives just giving up their agenda to begin with. Because again, they'd be folding on their whole thing. The other option, the only other option I can think of is if we could somehow restore faith in our elections. And what would that look like? What would that mean? I think even that is an uphill battle though, because the things that would restore faith in the elections are themselves hotly contested political issues. Things like voter ID or, you know, getting rid of same-day voter registration or getting rid of the vouch system. The vouch system being like, hey, this is Bob. I know him from down the street. Yeah, he lives there. He can vote here. Stuff like that, right? If you enacted some, even though all those policies are hotly contested and have been for some time. And those have been proposed as solutions to restore faith in elections, to fix the election system, to make sure that fraud is not happening. If people were perhaps persecuted, they'd be prosecuted for voter fraud, right? But again, that itself is a hotly contested thing. One side will say there is no voter fraud. The other side will say, of course there is. Are you blind? And on we go. So those are the only three options I see to talk our way out of this. And I think all of them is as unlikely as the next. So that is the current lay of the land as I see it on January 7th, 2021. I'm sure you've been thinking about it a lot over the past couple of hours and I would invite you to continue to do so. Do brave deeds and endure.