 beacon of liberty, beacon on the hill, or civil war. You know, this is the contention. It's been that way a long time. And so here on Community Matters, we're going to talk about that today. But let's begin with Hugh Peter. We begin with Frederick Douglass. He was a black abolitionist. He was a very smart guy. David assured me that if Frederick Douglass appeared at his law firm today, he would hire Frederick Douglass immediately. And he gave a number of speeches and he did what a good speechmaker should do. He wrote it out in advance. You know, you can get all his speeches, all his major addresses, you can get them on the internet, which is a blessing for us all. And he was a great thinker before the Civil War. And he understood this country. He was a great patriot and a great, what do you want to call it, historical analyst of his time. 1852 is a day to the speech. And it was about slavery and the country. And July 4th. Why did you send that around, Peter? And what struck you about it? Well, actually, I think David sent it around. And, but it was actually the speech that I was looking at was called composite, composite nation. And that was done in 1869. And Frederick Douglass was a towering figure. He'd been a slave. He sought and created his own freedom and just became a towering speaker and a towering figure in American politics. And in the composite nation, he articulated three principles that are alive today for us, but under threat. And one of those was the absolute primacy and frequency of everybody involved, everybody there. We're all equality for all. That was one. The second one was racial diversity. He said, we need to be a nation of many people. In Chuck's terms, we're not a melting pot. We're a salad bowl, a fresh salad bowl. The third one, the third principle for him was religious liberty. So it was about absolute equality, racial diversity, and religious liberty. And those three, he said, make for a vibrant nation. David, you remind me too, because you were the guy who said it to me and I was stunned by it, stunned by the speech. Yeah, I thought it was a fabulous speech that he had come up with. And the reason why it was so brilliant, and Frederick Douglass was an absolutely brilliant guy who was a slave, freed himself by escaping and then became a speaker and a writer. But the composite nation speech talked a lot about the fact that at that time there was this anti-Chinese hysteria. This was the precursor in 1869, the precursor of the Chinese Exclusion Act that came in in 1882. And there was this giant fear of the Mongol hordes that were going to come over and take all the women, take all the jobs, take all the riches, and wipe out the white man. And to have this black man who's a former slave standing up for abolition to say, hey guys, don't be afraid of the Chinese. The Chinese are not this monolithic horde that's going to be loyal to the emperor. They're people just like us. And we should embrace them because they are hard workers. They want what we want, which is freedom, which is equality, and they are going to be hard workers, and they're going to move this country forward. And so for him to say that was a tremendous thing that I think was prescient as well as a forerunner that is important today because I see, I contrast that with the Chinese Americans who have been, in my word, hoodwinked, to take on the anti-black, anti-affirmative action, anti-Harvard affirmative action policies and say, hey, we want like the current system because under the current system we succeed and the rest of you guys don't. And so we need to do that now. And I contrast that with that. And he had an ecumenical wide open. Let's everybody get in here and let's all work together and it's going to work. It was a fabulous speech. And impactful, just one more thought to add on to what David said. He was described, this speech was described as, I wrote it down, audacious optimism coupled with fierce determination. I mean, what a tribute. What a tribute to something that's more than 100 years old, a speech. He could run for president today. And the other thing, I just want to contrast that with his speech in 1852, he gave a July 4th speech, which was a very dynamic but a darker picture, which where he was basically saying, hey, America, you're having this giant celebration of freedom, equality, liberty, truth and justice. And you're inviting all the slaves and you're saying, hey, you don't get to participate, pal. You're the worker bees. And he was saying that, the worker, the blacks got paid for their work with the lash and religion. And the white man was getting all the money. And so you contrast that picture where he's saying, this is not right. This is wrong. And making that statement about how evil slavery was. And then you go to 1869 and he's saying, you know what? You can't be discriminatory against the Chinese, just like you can't be discriminatory against the blacks because four fists of the world is not white. And these ideals of the nation are great. And if we allow immigrants to come in, they're going to be hard workers, they'll do great things and we'll have a great country. So I thought it was just a tremendous intellect who came up with this stuff and who gave these speeches. And so much of what he said is relevant today. It's extraordinary. You know, he was talking about Passover and the Jews too. I mean, he had all these issues under his belt that are still relevant. Really extraordinary. He was a great thought leader. Chuck, your thoughts? All of those are important insights. Other things that are really important lessons for us now. Douglas, perhaps more than anyone in his time, recognized, elevated and prioritized the value of diversity in all aspects of life, in relationships, in work, in decision making, and studies have borne that out for several decades now. And another thing that he did that was really striking was that he emphasized the scientific basis for equality that races don't qualitatively differ genetically. And all of those things are still part of the struggle on the table now, even though it's been 150 years that we've had evidence verifying that he was right on the mark. But what's troubling about it is just exactly how totally relevant that all these speeches were, his whole position. And I get concerned about the fact that we may not have moved off where we were in 1852 or 1869. And I guess that's the fundamental point of this discussion here today. We're still fighting those fights. Yeah. Yeah. We're still fighting the Civil War. And yes, we're not finished fighting the Civil War. It's not as if we can turn around and say, oh, yeah, well, we handled that. We haven't handled it. And there are people who are into this kind of racist nationalism and bizarre religion. He talks about that in his speeches. And we still have that. If he were here today, sorry, he could make the same speech. Terrible. You know, the other thing that's interesting to me is that racism is not just limited to whites against people of color. We have the recent example in Los Angeles, where the Hispanic leaders and the woman who was the chair of the Board of Supervisors of the City Council was caught on a hot mic or some kind of recording making disparaging remarks, calling this black child who was adopted of a gay supervisor, a monkey. I mean, just terrible stuff. And you had Kevin De Leon and these other Hispanic leaders not saying anything, and they were all plotting how they were going to hold on to power for Hispanics and denigrate the power for the gays and the blacks. So it was all about power, wealth, money, and the story of power corrupting and absolute power corrupting, absolutely, is absolutely true. So that to me, it's all about power. And that's what we have today. You've got elements of the Republican Party who will, like Lester Maddox, say or do anything to cater to the far right. I mean, Donald Trump, this is the biggest dog whistler of them all, talking about, you know, how fine people there are who are in the, you know, the KKK and having a dinner with Nick Fuentes, who he still has not about. Andy Borowitz had a great thing, because Trump, I didn't recognize the man because he was wearing a white hood. Barowitz is too funny. So why did you send the speech that you sent around, David? What motivated you to do that? You know, because I found it one intellectually interesting, fascinating. It speaks so much to what we are facing today. And there is a dearth to me of communication of these intellectually interesting commentaries and broader themes that are so important. And so that's why I sent it around. I thought, oh, my God, this is so exciting to me to read this. And I'm thinking, my God, that guy was brilliant. It was a hundred years, no, 150 years ago, you know, when he did this stuff. And, you know, we're still fighting that stuff. But we're always going to fight it, I think. And it's too bad. I mean, because at the same point in time, that Frederick Douglass was writing abolitionist speeches and giving abolitionist talks around the country, Europe was terminating slavery. So, you know, with all our American exceptionalism, we were way behind Europe at the time. Peter, why did you send your speech around, which is the one I mentioned in 1852, and when David was talking about what to the slave is the fourth of July? Why did you send that one? I'm not sure if I did send it. Maybe I did. I don't remember. But I tell you, the thing is what hits me is that we are in a particularly dangerous and malevolent moment in the country. We're somewhat immune to it here. I'm not totally immune. I can tell you about that. But I think part of what's resonating is that we're in a time and a moment where civil disturbance, civil wars, civil disobedience, civil confrontations are right on the edge. And January 6th was one version of that. I'm glad that, you know, Siddish's conspiracy has found a name and they found a place and it's been established at least as a credible fear, credible, what, you know, penalty or potential penalty. So, it's in contrast with Frederick Douglass, what he was saying then and what we are facing right now. That's the poignant thing for me. So, Chuck, the other piece that went around was, I can't remember who's sending what anymore, was called an atmosphere of violence. Stochastic, S-T-O-C-H-A-S-T-I-C, terror in American politics. The definition, this is a very simplistic definition, of stochastic is randomly determined having a random probability distribution or pattern that may be analyzed specifically but may not be predicted precisely. So, Chuck, can you connect these things up? We have that article and we have the speeches by Frederick Douglass and we're trying to make some connection between the middle of the 19th century and right now looking at no stochastic. Well, one of the things that we see graphically and tragically is that the mass killings, which were hangings, lynchings and mass murders that were overtly and predominantly racial for a large part of the 19th and early first half of the 20th century, those are still continuing. They've just gravitated to a higher level of weaponry. But we're still seeing in synagogues, in mosques, in schools, mass killings that are very racially oriented, that are still throwbacks to exactly the kinds of prejudices, the kinds of divisions that Douglass was trying so hard to bring into the light and move forward. Are you saying we haven't made any progress, Chuck? Not much. I heard that. You know, there was a moment when President Obama got elected where we were all patting ourselves on the back and saying we've turned the corner and it's a new era. And then after Donald Trump got elected, I sat down and I said, geez, how could I have been so wrong? How could I have misread this country so badly? And what are we going to do now? Okay, because hopefully two steps forward, maybe one step back as opposed to one step forward, two steps back. So I mean, I am hopeful. But it is a continuing saga. I mean, look at this latest mass murder in a gay nightclub where that guy was luckily stopped by a U.S. service man. You know, just there's a lot of hate out there. And there's all the anti-Asian violence that has occurred. It has terrorized the Asian communities, the Chinese communities, the Japanese communities, the elderly who are just in fear of random violence that is going to come out. Well, we have it and we can explore just how bad it is. But I want to explore with you, David, as a lawyer and a litigator, this whole notion of stochastic. Because as a lawyer, you see this happen. You see somebody like Lindsey Graham get up and say, if you indict him, there will be violence. And the question is whether he's reporting that as a fact, as a prediction, or whether he's calling for it. And the whole Trump dog whistle thing seems to be calling for it. Now, you have a lot of trouble, and they are in the insurrection investigation in Congress, and maybe in the Department of Justice too, connecting all the dots. And say, just because he said, let's fight like hell, was he really calling for a violent attack on the Capitol? And I think stochastic comes to mind here. Because if you say, all these people are good people, including the bad people are good people, you're really encouraging them, giving them license. And they take it that way. There's a communication. And I think, you don't have to go too far to convince me that the fellow who made that communication is giving license to somebody who uses that communication to be violent. So does American law, David, it's a hard question, does American law connect it up? Is this within circumstantial evidence? Is this is this whole notion of dog whistle and stochastic violence, something you can prove in court? Well, I think it is. And I mean, yes, the Republican Party, which is enthralled to Donald Trump and the far right, has adopted the mantra that January 6th was just another form of civil discourse that was perhaps a little more extreme than debate, but not much and certainly accepted. And so there's a bunch of people who think that. Now, I think the courts and the lawyers are saying no. And that's why we're convicting a bunch of those people and sending them to jail. Whether Donald Trump will get indicted for his statements and his encouragement of the January 6th thing is yet to be seen. I mean, Merrick Garland appointed a special prosecutor to take a look at that stuff. And so I actually hope it happens. I don't know. The political wheels move slowly. But I think that the the important thing is, is that this is happening. There are these calls for violence. They're thinly veiled. This is just another way. It's like when Mao unleashed the Cultural Revolution by giving the signal to the Red Guards that we had to discipline the old people and we had to discipline ways of thought and just unleashing this reign of terror as a political move. That is what Trump has done. That's what the Republican Party has done. That's what people are trying to do. And because the terror is not going to be visited upon them or the far right, the terror is going to be visited upon the people of color, the Asians, the blacks, you know, and people who don't agree with the white supremacists. You know, Peter, we've had in this in this year, 2022, hundreds, you know, different sources tell you how many hundreds, but there are hundreds of mass murders that is more than four people killed, usually by assault weapons or high capacity weapons. And it's getting worse every year. It's getting worse. And, you know, Trump hasn't condemned it. The Republicans haven't condemned it. The condemnation by the Biden administration may or may not be strong enough. But my question to you is we have this, may I call it a civil war of violence all over the place where there's more violence now than ever in our collective lifetimes. Okay. And there are people who not only don't condemn it, they call for it. They remark about it. They do lots of things that foment and encourage and give license to this kind of violence. Is there a clear, my same question, is there a clear connection there so that we can get, you know, some legal relief on this? Because I suggest to you that if there wasn't the dog whistle, the violence would not be at the same level. I'm skeptical that, I mean, I've been involved in and around the courts for a long time. And I'm very skeptical that the evidence will be produced that will connect generic statements to specific moments and incidents. And that's certainly true with Trump and the January 60s. There's a stronger case on the documents at Mar-a-Lago than there is on the January 60. But we'll see. It'll play out soon. But this stochastic business is all about what David said, thinly veiled statements that are kind of aiding and abetting people's worst intuitions and impulses and almost encouraging them towards violence. And that's certainly not doing anything to discourage it or condemn it afterwards. So you know, the way it looks out, right, looks to me is, you know, what you have are people who are angry and leaders who are angry, and leaders are speaking in generalities, and people take very specific precipitous actions. Hard to prove, I think, hard to prove. I'll leave it to David and Chuck to be the proof positive on that. Well, let me drop that one on Chuck then. I'm skeptical. So what we have is hundreds of people who are at the insurrection have been charged, dited, convicted, and to varying degrees punished. But these are the recipients of the stochastic messages, the dog whizzes. They're the dogs. They're not the guy who initiated the message in the first place. And the guy who initiated the message, and there are a number of them, not just one, who initiated the message in the first place, he walks. So we need to deal with this kind of violence. I'm sure Frederick Douglas would have some ideas about it. But can we solve this problem simply by looking at one side of the equation and not looking at the other? Because it's rising. And despite all our efforts to prosecute these thousands of people who are at the Capitol, it hasn't changed the level of violence in the country. That's been going on higher. So don't you think we have to nail the people who send the message in the first place? How can we do that? Well, that's a great insight and a great question, Jay. And a couple of things that it brings out that Douglas highlighted years ago. One was that the more the need for the rule of law to be effective gets politicized in particular situations, the less effective it is. That's been a weapon that Trump, the Maga Republicans and the GOP generally have used to their very great advantage. The more they can politicize things, the more people push them away, the less weight they have in society, the less strength and motivation there is to actually enforce accountability. And if you look back to Douglas's time, that's exactly what was happening then. The pervasive violence with virtually no accountability, obvious to many, people knew who was involved, they knew who did stuff. And the second element of it is that Douglas exemplified by the model he set, one of the elements that can actually help influence and change directions in areas like that. And that is the three C's, conscience, courage and charisma in leadership to galvanize people that this needs to happen. The arguments have been made, but we haven't had people who have exemplified those three elements in ways that can bring people together, the MLK's, the Gandhi's, the Mandela's. We could definitely use a few of those. We could use Frederick Douglas, actually. I love to put him up against Mitch McConnell. Well, Mitch McConnell is of no help. He's a zero. He's not a hero. I had a very influential biology teacher. I started out thinking I was going to be a biologist, an aquatic biologist. And I had a very good anatomy, comparative anatomy teacher. And one of the things he said was we don't know a lot about a lot of things. We know the temperature at which water boils, but we don't know which molecule boils first. So here you have these dog whistles. Here you have these big innuendo-laden comments made by leaders who really are kind of using the anger that's out there. They're using it. They're deploying it. And they couldn't tell you what will happen as a result. And when it happens, they deny it. So we don't know the molecules that will boil first. We know the temperature at which things boil, but we don't know what will boil. What we do know is that there's huge anger out there. There's so much anger. And I encountered some of that the other day. I mean, I walked to the public library here in my neighborhood and somebody was pissed off and said, what are you doing here? You fucking holly? And I went, whoa, what's that? What did I do to you, bro? Yeah. So there's just anger. And people now have so many means of expressing that anger on all the media channels and all the social media, whether it's Twitter or whether it's Instagram or Spotify, whatever it is. And so people haven't learned the art of shutting up yet. You know, Tito ran Yugoslavia for a long time. And his thing was, you want to act out, I'm going to get you. You can't act out. And it worked. I mean, he's a strong leader. He was a conservative leader. He was an autograph, for sure. But with that approach, people did not act out. Right. But once he left, they really acted out. That's what I mean. So, you know, you have to have somebody that says, I hold you accountable. We don't have that really. I mean, we have from that, but nobody holds him accountable. And he would never hold anybody accountable on a moral basis. So I guess, you know, I come back to the question of, we're in a civil war, where people are acting out, but somehow they take license. And nobody seems to be accountable for this sort of thing. I personally, as Chuck knows, I personally doubt we're going to have indictments here. And if we do have indictments, they're not going to be, they're not going to result in prosecutions and convictions and the like and before 2024. And section three of the 14th Amendment, for that matter, section two of the 14th Amendment is not going to come into play. So the result is that we may have a leader who is bent on destroying the country for whatever reasons. And you know, the problem I have is that what goes along with that is the violence, the very violence that Frederick Douglass was talking about. And I don't know if he had a solution in any of his speeches, but we really do need a solution. And you know what? Let me say that maybe we need to look at our system of laws differently. Maybe the stochastic thing has to be somehow respected in the rule of law, or at least given credence. You know, from a psychological point of view, I think all of us would agree that if Donald Trump gets up on day one and says, you know, kill all the howlies, and then people go out and kill all the howlies, he's responsible for what happened on January 6. But the law doesn't really reach him for that, as you said there. So maybe the law has to be changed. Anybody want to take a whack at that issue? I think the former attorney general here should address that. Well, you know, I move two minds of that, which is one that you should prosecute bad guys and put them away and punish the hell out of them, especially Donald Trump for doing and the things that he's done and for opening the doors. On the other hand, as having done some criminal defense in my time, you know, if you don't have really rigorous standards standing between the state and the punishment of the populace, you can go off the rails pretty darn easily, where the power of the state, which may be directed at white supremacists today, could go off the rails and be directed at people of color and normal citizens tomorrow. And so that's the question. That's that's the tension of having provable guidelines and measurable standards to convict people and hold the state to that, because the power of the state is pretty darn awesome. Yeah, we knew you'd say that. We knew you'd say that. What did you want to add, Peter? Well, I wanted to ask David, I mean, isn't that part of the reason why prosecutorial strategies would say go for the lesser charges that you can prove, as opposed to the big one that, you know, is politically challenging and legally evidentiary challenged? So I mean, I think that's, you know, that when the Al Capone went to jail on tax evasion, they didn't go there for murder. And Trump is under fire really probably from our logo documents more than he is on on the January 6th and being a precipitator of that. So I mean, I think the legal system has some flex and they'll go after him after people. And that's, you know, I think the bigger question for me is, what is everybody so volatile and so angered about that they become weaponized so easily by the leaders? It blows my mind, you know, as sociologists, that's my field, that's what I... But it's the reality. It's the reality. It's not something we can get under. But let me ask you this. So we have, as someone said, there's 600 events of mass shooting per annum in this country. All right, it's bad. And we have, you know, lots, obviously lots of attacks on our democracy, our Republican representative government. We have that. It's bad. But let me assume for a minute, let me ask you to assume for a minute, then instead of 600 events, we have 6,000 events. And it's on every street corner. And we have guys like Trump doing his dog whistle and people reacting out of white supremacy or whatever, the racism bigotry, and they're killing a lot more people. And we have a dysfunctional or non-functional congress and various state legislators, legislatures, and what we have is a complete lack of democracy. If he gets elected again, I think we're headed in that very direction. So at some point, it becomes intolerable. At some point, this notion of the rule of law as we have known it may be under such arrest that in order to save ourselves, our public safety, in order to save our society, our democracy, we have to do draconian things, not things we would like to do, not things we would want, not things we ever had to do, but in order to save ourselves. You see that point? I see little creeping tendrils of that. I see things that are inching that way. And I'll tell you a personal story. I have a very close buddy of mine who lives up in Washington State up in a place called Anacortes out in the ocean. And he's an artist. He's an oddball artist and a guy I was in the Peace Corps with. He was in our group. And he's been a shooter. He's been a gun guy, but he's not a fanatic. And he likes to go target shooting. He's got some old guns. And he keeps urging me. He says, Peter, things are getting worse. You want me to send you one of my 38s. And I said, no, I got too many grandkids running around the house. No, but I think that's what we're moving towards is a lot of self-help and self-protection. And armament. And I do believe that we will reach something like a civil war. We're already creeping towards it. I've been writing about that. I have a novel about that, that's sitting with a literary agent. I think we're on the cusp of that. It won't be blue and gray as it was in 1860 and 65. It won't be like that. It'll be a very different kind of a more chaotic and a more anomic fight. But I do believe we're moving there and that we're losing certain of those qualities that Frederick Douglass was trying to champion about tolerance, about diversity, about equality, about, I mean, they're just eroding. Those things are eroded. And in that environment, people will start to do dangerous things. Whether that will happen, why or not, who knows. What about you, Chuck? We've talked about what does civil war, as it exacerbates, would look like? It's not going to look like 1861 or 1865. It's not going to look like that. I think we know that. And it may be this kind of lone wolf thing that we see, but lots and lots of events. And we realize that that's all sort of a political motivation. And boy, the word political can reach out in every direction. You can politicize your breakfast if you want. So what about that? Where is the breaking point? Are we simply going to ignore that until it comes in front of our house? Are we going to ignore that until we lose our civil liberties? Right now, Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong is being tried. He made very well. And he has been a beacon of democracy there. He is a great hero in Hong Kong. He did, what was it, the Apple Daily Apple for a lifetime. And now they got him in handcuffs. This is a very genteel guy, an intellectual for sure. And they got him in handcuffs, and they're talking about putting him away in a slammer on the mainland forever. So it's very troublesome that the First Amendment is in jeopardy. If we start losing our civil rights, it's not only who's on the sidewalk yelling at you. It's not only that your legislature is completely out of its mind and knocking off social security. It's your very life. Where do you find the point that you begin questioning whether you should have a gun in the house? That's right. It's the right way to frame it. It's the right question. What's the point at which you take self-help? Yeah, well, it's tough. Well, I think one of the things that we really need to pay attention to from the lessons from Douglas is he did connect the dots. We can, the four of us do, and many people do, but many don't. The one is that Trump not only incites and motivates political violence to its ultimate point, up to and including physical harm and doubt. He also advocates and promises no accountability. He promises, okay, on you, January 6th, folks, reelect me. I'll pardon you all. He is an advocate of no accountability for political violence no matter how extreme, no matter the consequences. Five people died on January 6th. That's on his head. He motivated that. The second thing is the counter-example that Douglas provides is he did his very best to humanize the values and the conversation to remind people that's the context in which we need to understand the people, their relationships, and the conduct involved here. And the farther we get away from that to allow politicized violence to be unaccountable, the farther we'll get from the rule of law. I have to pick on David for a minute. David, do you mind if I pick on you for a minute? No, you go right ahead, Jake. You've had it all your life. Okay. Let's keep going. There is a question about whether the lawyers are doing their job at dealing with the kind of Michigás from Trump. And the American Bar Association went along. They didn't really complain about what he was doing. They didn't take a position against some of his machinations. And in general, who in the country knows the law? Who in the country is trained in the rule of law? It's the lawyers. You remember Shakespeare, the first thing we do. But my concern is if you looked around at the bar nationally, you would wonder whether the lawyers are willing to lay down their careers, lay down their fortunes, their sacred honor, their lives to protect the rule of law. And my answer to you is, I don't think so. That's an interesting question. First, lawyers do a lot of good, but I'm not here to defend the profession because they're the profession that people love to hate. Everybody loves their lawyer, but they think all the rest of those guys are charlatans. But the lawyers can only operate within the law. I think that the answer to political violence, unfortunately, is communication and having leaders who stand up. Leaders who stand up and speak out against it like Frederick Douglass. Leaders who, like Chuck is mentioning, have charisma, have courage, have communication. Who can do all of those things because it is only by serving as positive role models and having those people out there to do that, that we can bring along the better angels in the populace. I go back and forth from depression about the American populace to hopefulness. When they throw out the election deniers and we retain Democratic control of the Senate for now and the Republican red wave does not come in and Donald Trump is getting this, I remain hopeful. But other times, I think, oh my god, the country is going to hell in a handbasket. But when you start thinking about the country going to hell in a handbasket, that's where the authoritarians like Donald Trump come along and say, fear, fear, fear, Jay, you're going to lose your civil rights. I got to get these people. I'm going to lock them all up, but I'm not going to lock up you, but I'm going to lock up all those other bad people and I am the only one who can save us. And that has been Trump's message before. It's the authoritarian message of Xi Jinping. It's the authoritarian message of the Hungary president or the guys over there and Viktor Orban over there. Yeah, in some of the Eastern European countries. And unfortunately, I mean, I still believe in liberal democracy. I still believe that it will win out and that people will respond to that. But sometimes I have my doubts and the lawyers can come along and help that they are constrained by the laws. Now, how immune are we in Hawaii to these national trends that we're worrying about? Well, just wait until we start getting some gun shooting because of the concealed carry that our esteemed or not so esteemed Supreme Court has fomented here. Now we're going to have a whole bunch of guns. We're going to have the DD shooting incident become commonplace. And it will be very unfortunate. There's a bill in the Honolulu City Council that would create done free zones. And there is some pretty strong opposition to that bill. I'm saying, who is doing this? There's a Republican group that's growing in our state and taking these positions consistent with the GOP. So the answer, Peter, is I think it's changing. It's dynamic. And we are subject to the same infection. It hasn't gotten as far with us as on the mainland, but we're subject to the same risk right here in Hawaii, even though we're a wonderful blue state still, hopefully. I'm worried about that too. I worry about the erosion of the social compact here in Hawaii. Let me just make one short comment. The good thing so far is we don't have armed black people or armed Chinese people running around shooting a bunch of whites because I guarantee you, if that happened, there would be lockups very seriously. So far, we've got a bunch of white guys with guns out there. And you got Trump and everybody going, oh, boys will be boys. Don't worry, they're OK. But remember when the Black Panthers came along and started holding guns and said political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, that was instantly threatening to the entire populace. You know, every day we post an article in our daily email advisory. I was telling you about this, Chuck. And we posted an article about, it was the New York Times, about how the Proud Boys, or what do you call it, the other one? Yeah, the oath keepers appear at these nonviolent protests around the country. They actually crossed the country to go there. And they always appear in favor of the right wing extremist group who's at the protest. And they always have guns. They have assault rifles, they have pistols, they carry all kinds of weapons, and they're dressed in camouflage outfits. And the Times wrote this up and said, you know, we should be somewhat concerned that, you know, if you carry a gun and you feel strongly or you think you feel strongly about something, the next thing that happens is you use the gun. And so I really worry about that because nobody, here's the point, is stopping them. Nobody is saying, you know, you can't have the assault weapon in front of the courthouse. You can't do that. And so they do it. They do it all over the country. This is of great concern because these are institutions, you know, that they're standing in front of. Your thoughts? The system is clearly broken. I think that's what David is talking about. You can be the most knowledgeable skill for prosecutor out there. You can be Jack Smith, you can be Mary Garland, you can be Lawrence Schreib, whoever you want. But if the system's not going to perform effectively for you, you're not going to be able to bring Trump and his people to justice. And that's what we're facing right now. It's been out there since Frederick Douglass talked about it. It's still out there. If anything, it's worse than it was within recent times. You know, Frederick Douglass, I think one of the points he made was an Ann Applebaum makes the same point in the Atlantic, you know, and the Washington Post is you have to speak up. And everybody, sorry, including the lawyers, have to speak up. If they see something unfair, unjust, if they see something unlike, they have to speak up. That's one of the reasons that I'm here and that all of you guys are here. We're speaking up. We're doing what we can. Okay. But my question to Peter is, is that enough? Is that enough to respond to Ann Applebaum or Frederick Douglass? How do we stop this madness? I don't have an answer. I wish I had an answer, Jay. I wish I knew that. It's the million dollar question about how, what do we do in the face of the obstacles and the potholes and the barriers that we're describing here? I don't know how to tame the anger that's running wild in the country. I think there are programs that can do that, social programs that can get people jobs and get people education, get people healthcare and ameliorate some of the anger. But it won't, it seems to have reached a pitch. And I think it's partly the social media that is flaming this stuff along. I was in a, I had an opportunity not too long ago to meet Eugene Robinson from Washington Post. Really an interesting man. And he said, basically what we have going on in Russia and China and the US is the loss of truth, that we can't embrace truth. And he was very critical of social media and the loose standards that surround anybody who wants to say anything, as opposed to what can be done on the traditional media, where they get sued regularly, if they step over the line. So I think it was on to something about truth is under fire. And we're seeing that over and over again. And I think we have to tame the media, the social media's channels that are out there, not think tech, of course, not think tech. But let me just pick up the phone and call Elon Musk. I know I can make some progress with him. What do you think, David? I think communication is important. I think social media is wild and untamed and unaccountable. It's the great democratization of the communications industry, which I think has actually led us to a darker place. And it's sad. There have been great benefits from it, but it is sad. And there have been great detriments occasioned by that, so that people are now free to speak their minds. I mean, I saw this one cartoon where people were encouraged to speak their minds, be who they want to be. So you're talking to people of color, gays, people who are outliers, people who are marginalized, speak up, be yourself. And then there was another panel where he had all these white supremacists going, yeah, I want to stand up. I want to speak my truth. I want to go shoot some people. And so that's an unfortunate consequence of the democratization of communications. And I think that the answer is, unfortunately, better role models, communication by people who, you know, hopefully we will speak to an educated populace. But I'm not so sure, you know, education is kind of going down. So, you know, will reason triumph? Will intelligence triumph? I certainly hope so, but the jury is still out. And it is a close question. Speaking of which, I think we ought to go round the table here and make final, you know, integrated comments on where all this leads and where it goes, you know, to see what you're still out of it, and what you would tell people for posterity. Posterity now, Chuck, this is posterity we're talking about. We're talking about your children's children's children that they would look at this, you know, decades from now and say, gee, that Chuck Crumpton, he was really thoughtful and precious. He knew what was going to happen. Let's have it, Chuck. Well, I think one of the things, and David has hit on it, we need to make the information that offers the richest learning potential available, attractive, and motivating to children and youth as early and pervasively as we can. Douglas and others, Tubman, many Booker T, all should be not just available, but standard for people's awareness growing up through elementary, middle, high school, and beyond. If we can get those voices heard and listened to and appreciated, there may be an opportunity for better and more critical thinking and more demand for truth. Okay, David, your thoughts and while we're saying this and talking about education, there are thousands, if not millions of people in the South who are burning books, who are, you know, trying to control school board meetings, who are taking every step they can to undermine a liberal education, and do we have the time to fix that? Do we have the opportunity to fix that? Anyway, your last thoughts on this, David? Well, my last thoughts are, past is prologue. Frederick Douglass was fighting the fight back then against the evils that existed in the mid-1800s, and he did a tremendous job. He was a tremendous advocate, a tremendous intellect, and he had it right, which is tolerance, equality, ecumenicalism, and lifting everybody up results in a better thing. However, his message is not always heard, and there's that old saying, those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it. And, you know, I think people just have to learn and apply the lessons of history. And the final thing I say is, I agree with what you said, Jay. Everybody has to speak up. They have to speak up. I mean, that's that old story by Franz Niebuhr, who said, you know, when they came for the blacks, I didn't speak up. When they came for the Catholics, I didn't speak up. When they came for the, you know, this guy and that guy didn't speak up. And then they came for me, and there was nobody left to speak up. And that's the problem. And as much as I, you know, as much as I find that there are feelings of liberal democracy, I haven't found a better way that we can all work together. And so I'm still hopeful, although I have my doubts and my depressive moments, I'm still hopeful that we will muddle through. Yes, madam. Now that you ask, this is from Benjamin Franklin, right? Yes, madam. Now that you ask, we are going to have a Democratic Republic if you can keep it. It does require some effort. Peter, your last thoughts. Well, I'm in the same place as Chuck and David and you, I think. And I just go back to those same three principles that Frederick Douglass talked about in 1869. Absolute equality for all, not partial equality, absolute, complete racial diversity, the composite nation, and religious tolerance and religious liberty for everybody. We need a new Frederick Douglass, we need new people to put life into those statements. And I don't think we have to embellish them. I just think that they're grand and they just need to be reinvigorated by new leaders and a new generation. Now we have to take the video of this show and make people listen. I'm like, fry their eyes open. What was the name of that movie? Fry their eyes open so they have to listen. And that's the problem. And to expose them to this kind of discussion, these kinds of thoughts. Well, thank you very much. Peter Adler, David Louis, Mark Crumpton, great conversation. Thank you. And let me answer one essential question. Yes, it went further than I thought it would go. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.