Badlands Media - Badlands Story Hour Ep. 183: Lawless

Episode Date: September 4, 2026

Chris Paul and Burning Bright dig into this 2012 Prohibition era drama with a genuinely stacked cast, and both come away pleasantly surprised by how well it holds up. The pick came from a random YouTube rabbit hole that somehow led straight to Tom Hardy, which feels about right for how these episodes usually go. Expect a solid breakdown of the film's bootlegger versus corrupt lawman setup and why that particular flavor of systems versus sovereigns storytelling keeps resurfacing depending on where the culture happens to be. There's a real conversation about trust in institutions, narrative fatigue, and a pointed detour into who actually benefits from convincing people that human nature is fundamentally bad. Expect some sharp opinions on that one. Stick around for listener boosts and next week's pick, a late 90s thriller about martial law that feels a little too familiar these days.

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And tonight we are discussing Lawless written by Nick Cave, directed by John Hillcote, starring Tom Hardy, Shilabuff, Guy Pearce, Jason Clark, Jessica Chastain, Misa Wasakowska, or sorry, Mia Wasakowska, and Dane Dahan, Gary Oldman as well. Man, what a cast. I had never seen this movie. I am very happy that I did see this movie. I enjoyed it quite a lot. This was a Burning Bright selection, so you go ahead and kick it off.

Yeah, this is one of those funny movies that I had not seen this either. I randomly thought of this. I don't know why. The other day or last week I was screwing around and looking for stuff on YouTube while I was working. And I happened, my feed, my YouTube feed just played a clip. from Peeky Blinders. And that clip had Tom Hardy in it. It was like his best clip in Peaky Blinders where he kind of goes after

Killian Murphy and tells him what for. And I just thought of the movie Lawless, which I had never seen, but I knew he was in it. And then I looked it up and like watch the trailer and everything. And I was like, this would be a good, this feels like one of those evergreen sort of stories for us where no matter what's going on in the story cycle, lawlessness, prohibition, systems versus law, all this kind of systems versus sovereigns. Like I figured it would deal with a lot of these things. It does.

You know, I have some minor quibbles with the movie that we can get into. But the weird thing about this movie is when I came away from it, I enjoyed it. I thought it was good. I'm glad I picked it. I don't have like major problems with it. it was more almost a curiosity thing whereas I was sitting with the movie afterwards I was like at on one hand it's crazy to me that this movie wasn't a bigger deal when it came out because I feel like it should have been on the other hand I kind of get it I kind of could there was something that

it just didn't do for me like there's nothing I would look at and say that was bad or it has this big flaw. But I will say, and it's no like disrespect to the creators, but this felt like one of those premises and certainly a cast that, man, if you gave this setup to somebody else, there could have been something really special here. Like you might have been dealing with an all-timer sort of premise. As it was, I thought it was well made, competently made, very well-acted by pretty much everybody. And it's just one of those archetypal storylines that I think it's very American. And, you know, I'm not saying that right now, 2026, is the most relevant this has ever been.

But I think this is one of those stories that just, in the American tradition especially, becomes, you know, more relevant and then less relevant and then more relevant, depending on the cycle we're in and where people are at. you know, from in the zeitgeist, right now, I think we are in one of those cycles as a society where this kind of a story is relevant again. Not that it's never not relevant, but I think there are times when maybe it's in the 90s and people are feeling like good and disconnected from this stuff. And then we get the sort of maga awakening cycle and all this stuff going on that led to the birth of badlands and all the rest of the stuff we talk about. And all of a sudden, many,

more Americans just across the landscape are talking about legal systems and sovereignty and freedom and rights. And maybe it's besides the MAGA movement, which is a big deal, something we talk about on many of our shows is the post-COVID era, the post-COVID crackdown era. I think there are a lot of people who haven't even directly engaged with politics, even in the last 10 years who definitely engaged with the COVID narrative. And as many people has bought into that, there were a lot of people that did not. And there were definitely a lot of people that I think we talked about last week of the week before. We often talk about trust in

systems is at an all-time low. And if you even look at John and I last night on DPH, we're talking about polls and statistics and taking these things for what they are, narrative deployments. we have never seen this many narrative deployments about the system wherein the system itself is saying nobody trusts it. So I thought it would be interesting to look at the prohibition era and most prohibition era stuff that I have seen is like in Chicago and in the cities and dealing with that sort of thing. And this one is out in the countryside, out in, is it Tennessee or Virginia?

Virginia. It's Virginia. Yeah. But, you know, it was, again, it was well done. We can get into a lot of different things here. But I think just on that the archetypal level, this is basically about the law, a system coming to town to try to disrupt a system that sovereigns have set up. And under the guise of the law. And I think the way it is portrayed is very blunt and in your face. But it's also very honest of there isn't an ounce of legitimacy in. the system that is attempting to enforce its authority over anybody in this movie. And I think

there's no argument to be made that there is. It's just that in this kind of a situation, that kind of metaphor is rendered very obvious, where in modernity, it's not, unless you're dealing with something like the COVID sciop. Usually the system is subtle. It hides behind layers of bureaucracy and in a story like this it just hits you over the head with it of like as a viewer as a as a watcher you're like do you think the law should be doing this kind of thing or not and you know it's pretty hard to watch something like this and be like I think the law is is good and the people who run it are good um yeah you covered a lot of ground there so yeah uh in terms of the movie the movie itself and its initial reception and the

making of it and the rest of it. So Nick Cave, who wrote it is a very famous musician and very talented musician. Interesting guy. I, no, no, I was going to make a mistake right there. So you hold off on that comment. So I'm just going to check myself in a minute. But yeah, John Hillcote's, I'm pretty sure directed some fairly big movies. I think that this at the time was his most successful. And I think he did the road. I remember. Oh, cool. Right. Okay. With, with Vigo Morton. Yeah. So this was seen as going for kind of the prestige movie.

It was supposed to be one of those like award bait films. And it didn't turn out to be that because it wasn't quite so well received. But it had a huge cast. I mean, Jessica Chastain is just a straight up movie star at this point coming off the help. Zero Dark 30 was the same year and it just for her just has kept going. I mean, that was kind of the early stages of her movie stardom.

Tom Hardy's a pretty big movie star at that point. Shaila Bufs, that's still in his Transformers era. Yeah. So it's a little bit after it, but it's during that, it's during that window, yeah. Okay. So still a big, big movie star when this comes out. And this is right in the middle of the Obama era.

It comes out in 2012. And so I was specifically interested in what the critical reception would have been and what the popular reception would have been in terms of the anti-government sentiment. And a lot of the commentary seem to focus on this is like a tea party fantasy, a tea party dream. Mike, Nick Cave is not a tea party guy. And, you know, some of the reviews said it was right-wing propaganda. It's like, Nick Cave's not right-wing, or at least I'm not. never thought of him that way.

Right. But at least not in terms of the, the way we think of the American right wing. But then again, the American right wing is not really a right wing. It's collectivism, uh, with, you know, branded as an oppositional force to what is overtly leftism. But this actually would be the American right wing. And this is the American right wing that used to exist. Like, I didn't invite any of you government people here to the place that I live to tell

me what I'm allowed to do. What in the world are any of you doing here? And that's like the stance that, um, that forest bodderon took in in act one when they rolled up right in front of the station. It's like, you don't, you people can't tell me how I can like spend my time using the resources of the earth to create something new and then trade with other people who want. that thing? What business do you have controlling where I'm allowed to go, which that, you know, they also have no right to do. And so, man, the backdrop, the metaphor of him as a survivor, like he can never die, I guess unless he does something stupid or that death is going to come to all of us. Well, he has a human. Maybe that's true. But the, the ethic that he embodied,

survives forever. And we see that ethic embodied now in limited form, obviously, but it never, it never goes away. You can't kill that thing. If this came out right now, it would be a huge hit, I think, because, you know, this is something I criticize a bit and, you know, I understand, well, we don't know where the creator's hearts are in these things. We always say we're inferring these things. I understand where audience hearts are at when they support production companies like Angel Studios is one that comes to mind, which is kind of doing a lot of the prop, the propaganda, Freudian slip. It's doing a lot of the, it's positioned itself as the anti-establishment sort of conservative Christian movie studio that's taking on Hollywood. That's the branding of Angel Studios.

Now, is that accurate or not? I don't know. I don't know any of these people. I will say I watched what'd you say? I said, well, it's run by Mormons. And some Mormons identify as Christians, but hey, man, that's between them and Jesus. Yeah. I'm trying to hide my true feelings on what they're doing over there. But I saw a recent movie trailer. I think it was from them, although I shouldn't ascribe this to them.

But it was in that universe. It was starring Jim Caviesel as like basically the Punisher, you know, taking on illegal migrants and who are, you know, terrorizing the local townsfolk. First of all, you can't make Jim Caviesel like a badass. That's just not playing to who he is as an actor, which is not to say that he's a bad actor. But I just noticed, I noticed something that was only just from my, like, comic book fandom that I noticed it in that trailer.

He says at the end of that trailer, only God can forgive you, but I'll arrange the meeting. like basically I can't forgive you but I'll arrange the meeting. That is a line from Frank Castle in a comic book that they just like took and put in this movie with no reference to the material. It's also a meme that you see on like MAGA Twitter. And the reason I bring that up as a strangest side

is that studio has figured out, just like many people in the truth community have figured out that there is a truth community or at least a community that calls itself the truth community. And that community rejects wholesale anything that is branded as establishment, anything that is branded as Hollywood, anything that has a celebrity that they recognize because of kind of the inversion of the last 10 years, the MAGA inversion, the Q inversion, all this kind of stuff. I'm not even saying that that's wrong.

We talk about this a lot on this show, or there's some people who will never watch any of this stuff because they've sworn off Hollywood, et cetera. But I would just say, you know, in keeping with your controlled opposition dynamic, framing, when you look at something like Angel Studios, people are very eager in the MAGA community to like watch this stuff that is poorly made trash, like just drivel, highly derivative of Hollywood movies, starring Hollywood celebrities who have been canceled by other Hollywood celebrities, being created by people who didn't make it in Hollywood but are still trying to, you know, know, ply their trade outside of it, which is all fine. But this branding that is over this

counter-Hollywood movement is a Hollywood movement. And people don't understand what they're doing, right? They're like supporting this stuff, which is all to say that a movie like this is what studios like Angel Studios pretend to be making. But this one is starring like actual good actors with a good script and good movie making and drives home all these points. And what's funny is something we kind of talk about both on shows and in private is a lot of the people in kind of the maga core of 2026 that swear off these kind of storylines because they blanket just sort of like that thing over there is bad. Like anything that came out of that thing, Hollywood is bad. If they just watched something like this, it's impossible to look at this script or this movie and think that it is anything other than a total condemnation of, government bureaucracy, the government in general.

Like, as you said, it's basically, it's one of the most based sort of American movies of the last, however many years. And yet, I've never seen anybody in Maga World reference it because it came out of Hollywood. And I think it just shows you, like, it's good to revisit movies like this or try them for the first time, because there's snapshots of a period of time, and I'm not talking about the 20s, I'm talking about period of time, the Obama era, what stories were being made at that time? And to your point, what was the reception to these things? Because there's going to be movies we're going to look back on during this era right now in kind of the MAGA era and all the propaganda against it that are going to be extremely based that nobody will check out, et cetera. And you know, it's why I think we

take the approach of like looking at the movie, looking at what the movie is saying. I even saw people in chat earlier saying like, oh, it's a true story or is it not a true story? I'm not belittling that point. I would just say like, that doesn't matter to me at all when I'm looking at a movie like this. I'm looking at what is the story being told to me and like what principles are in it? And in terms of just the through line of the Bondurant brothers in this movie, it's pretty, it's pretty difficult to refute kind of any principled stance that has taken throughout it. Well, at least from Forrest. I don't know if I would. That's fair.

Howard and Jack's back. But yes. Yes. Yeah. Forrest as the representative of the family ethic. All of that I agree is very good. One of the things that struck me when I was going through some of the reviews, and I was, to be fair, going through summaries of reviews.

I was not reading each and every one of the reviews myself because that would be, I think, a waste of time. One of the, the framing for. Charlie Rake's character was like a cartoonishly evil corrupt cop. And they focused on him or corrupt lawman or corrupt politician or however you want to describe it. But it was it was his corruption, not his representative, not his representation of the state, not the fact that he's that his role was to be a representative of public power enforcing the law of the. people by people who would violate that law. And there's not anybody out by Forrest Bondaran that supported those laws being changed in that direction. That was thrust upon them.

At least that's how it seems to me. I mean, maybe Jimmy and all his boys, you know, that character who kind of immediately submits the go along get along type. If the system is going to be corrupt and it's going to keep moving in that direction, well, we got to make money within that system. so we have to keep moving in that direction too. So maybe there are plenty of those people or enough of those people that the majority actually does support that form and they're even willing to let the state do whatever it wants because it thinks that this, they think that the state makes their life easy enough that it becomes worth it.

And I think that that was the point of when, uh, Forrest Bond around, let me just get the line. And we can probably talk about this more. at length but he says um when he's after jack gets his ass kicked by uh charlie rakes he says well what do you intend to do now and he says um he says the violence is not the point it's how far a man is the distance a man is willing to go and he said we have to control the fear because if we live without fear. Let me just make sure that I'm getting. I wrote that without the fear.

That's the one quote I wrote down. Yeah. Without the fear we are all as good as dead. And I was like, what does he mean by that? And I think he means that you basically have to stop living if you want to be taken care of to the point where you don't have to fear anything.

And so Charlie Rakes is not just, he's not just a symbol of corruption. He's not an individual corrupt actor. He is the avatar of what is ultimately a corrupt institution that does not operate with the consent of the people it operates on. And I thought that that, I thought that was like the obvious principle of this movie. And reviewers either can't recognize that sort of thing or they simply ignore it. Yeah, totally. There was, it's funny, I wrote, I only wrote one quote down, direct quote, and it was that one.

He says, we are survivors. We control the fear. And without the fear, we are all as good as dead. It's interesting, actually, because I agree with your framing of that. But I did take it a different way when he said it. This might not be correct. But the second part, the first part of that, where survivors, we control the fear, that feels very Frank Herbert-esque. I've mentioned fear as the mind killers, like my all-time favorite passage in a novel from Dune. very similar, you know, if you don't control the self, if you don't control your own fear, then you're done. You might as well be an animal. You're a dog. You've already lost. But the way he says it without the fear, we're all as good as dead. Given the context, I had taken it at the time to be more a reference to the story of the Bonderamp brothers.

And that's one, there's another quote I wrote down that's not in the movie, but it's from Nick Cave. I was reading an interview with him where they asked him about the story. the true story of the Bondurant brothers, because this is based on a novel, it's a self-described a novel, but about the Bondurant family, which was real. And there were all these legends, you know, in Roanoke Valley about the Bondurant family. It's a kind of an interesting, you know, layered sort of thing. And Nick Cave said, quote, it's not so much a true story as a true myth. And I think that's a really cool way to put that, but which we can get more into, but in the specific context of the line you brought up, I was thinking of that and thinking, I think

one of the things that Forrest is saying there is like, we're in a battle, we're in a war of stories right here. And one of the things I do think that the movie communicated, although I agree with you that I think critics are stupid. I think they're stupid people, many of them. And they're just collectivists. They don't understand principles. And when I say principles, I mean like moral principles, truth, truth as a principle. They are looking at good and bad as these kind of political dialectics or these legal dialectics. That's what these systemic critics, that's how they think. That's, it's very leftist thinking. They don't think about what is right and what is wrong from like a principled level. And I think that one of the things the movie communicates to my

satisfaction is that Forrest is very well aware that he is a story. Like, I think there, there was some critics I was reading some reviews as well that seemed to think that he was unaware and that like there was this feminist message code in here that I didn't take away from it at all with Jessica Chastain's character, the whole thing where she basically tells him she wasn't raped, etc. They were kind of trying to play this off as like, oh, he's kind of, he's not actually all that. Forest is not actually all that because she has to save his life and at the end he falls into

the lake, right? They're kind of, they're saying like Cave was deconstructing Forest. I don't think that's what Cave was doing at all. I think what Cave was doing was saying, no, Forest is an encapsulation of he is a myth. He is a living myth in the context of this movie.

And he knows this. He knows that he is a living myth. He knows that he's not literally immortal. There is no indication. you get at any point, in my opinion, in this movie, that he thinks he is immortal. When he's talking to Jack in that scene, that's what I took from that. I took from that as for us saying, Jack, we can die. Like, we have things to fear.

There are people with guns. There are people with knives. There are people that are going to beat the shit out of you. And that that's not the point. The point is, we, the Bonderamp brothers, are a story. And in order for us to survive, the story of the Bondurant brothers must survive. And you are going to destroy the story. And I think there's a few scenes that communicate that from the perspective of,

and a lot of it is just done through just great little moments between Forrest and Howard. Almost no dialogue between them in this movie, Jason Clark and Tom Hardy, but all these looks they share usually in the context of Jack and what he's doing throughout the movie because he's the little brother and I don't I think that people don't get these critics are like oh he's this bumbling idiot brother who's like over-eager etc and I don't even think they get what Cave was doing with Jack because I think Jack's failing isn't that he's dumb or over-eager his failing in the eyes of his brothers is he doesn't get it he doesn't get that they're not immortal but that they must appear that way to everyone in this community, including the law. And to hand it back to you, the other point that I think the brothers both make in this,

one of my favorite scenes is right near the beginning. You referenced it where the cops roll up to basically intimidate the brothers and tell them like, hey, things are changing around here. And Howard immediately answers them with violence. And even that scene, I don't think gets much credit because I think people think, oh, here's Howard, he's the crazy one. So he's going to attack them. And Forrest doesn't want him to be doing this. And that's not how I read that dynamic at all.

I think there's plenty of indications you are given in this movie that Howard knows exactly what he's doing. And he knows what the story of the Bondi Ramp brothers are, which is fear. everyone in the town is afraid of the Bondurant brothers because when the Bondurat brothers say they're going to do something, they do it. And when you try to do anything to the Bonder Aunt Brothers, they are going to kill you or they are going to immediately greet you with violence immediately. There's not going to be like we're going to negotiate. You mess with the Bonder Aunt Brothers.

There are immediate consequences. And Howard immediately stops right when Forrest says to. And I think that's a little tell right there that's like, like, yeah, Howard is not actually crazy or not in control of himself, although he is a drunk. He knows, like, this is what we have to do now. These guys are getting way too familiar because my little brother's an idiot. So because my little brother just shattered the family name by getting his ass kicked by this fed, me and Forrest have to overcompensate to keep our story alive.

So that's a, I'm probably reading too much into it. That's not all communicated in that one line. it seems to me that Forrest and Howard are very concerned with how fearful of them everyone else in this environment is. And by the way, Gary Oldman is afraid of them. So, and that's a whole other thing we can get into. But I think that's what he was referencing about the fear. But maybe it was both at the same time. Yeah, yeah, I certainly didn't take it that way. I mean, I think at that point is valid, regardless of whether or not that's what they were addressing in that line. shit. There was a number of directions that I thought about going as you were talking. And then we got

sidetracked there at the end. Maybe it was you, you seem to, I said the Nick Cave quote, not so much a true story. It's a true myth, which is something we talk about. Oh, yeah. No, that, that part of it was very cool. And I totally take the point about them needing to preserve that story. And the Jessica Chastain character references it at the end, you know, in her very last scene with him. And she says, she says, it's just like you to believe your own legend. You know, he's, he was told a story about how he got back there or maybe he made it up. And, and he just believed that because he didn't know the truth. And a lot of the times that's how these things happen.

And hey, man, maybe that's just fine because maybe people need these sorts of stories. they certainly did preserve a fear of them in doing business with them. But I think to me it was if you choose to live outside the law. And by the way, we could just abolish law and then everybody would live outside the law. And we are conditioned to believe that if that were the case, everything would be chaos. People would just start robbing and assaulting and raping and murdering and society would just evolve in two days and it would all be over. I actually don't think that that's true because I don't think that people generally want to live that way. And I don't think that people are so vicious that they would be like, oh man, the grocery store has been closed for two days.

I'd better eat my neighbor. You know, people generally, businesses have an incentive to keep doing business. They don't want the whole society to break down so they can't do business anymore. And the people finally start to crawl up the walls of their big houses and the rest of that. Nobody wants that. Nobody wants society to devolve into chaos. And so for most people, they accept the existence of the state because they don't believe that people can actually be. self-governed, which is all it seems

Forrest actually wants here. So they accept some form of the state and then it just becomes a matter of how much power am I going to give to the state so that the state will protect me and I don't have to fear my neighbors and

the potential for chaos that lives right outside my door. And so what we do is we just turn that off. We pretend that the chaos no longer exists right out outside the door because the state is protecting us. It's not that people aren't looking to walk down our street and invade our homes and do terrible things to us because, you know, there are people out there.

It's the state that protects us from all those people because those people are scared of punishment. Well, would you be more scared of punishment from the police who are not going to get here in time and not protect you and the rest of it? or from the community of people around who knows what you did and none of those people except that kind of behavior and all of them are willing to take the personal responsibility to punish you. And I think that that's the, and we can talk about the divide between Jack and Forrest with Howard kind of somewhere in the middle, probably just a black pilled

Forrest honestly. But that difference is crucial for the two of them because Jack actually wants what the system provides and is willing to give away his ethic and a number of his freedoms to get that. But, you know, Forrest wants to be self-governed. And that's rare. Yeah, I like how you frame Jack too because I think I think that that kind of hits on one of the points I was making, which is that.

Jack is weak, and he is obviously portrayed as weak, but in reference to his brothers, in comparison to his brothers. But I think the reason that most of the people watching this or reviewing this at the time were portraying him as weak is this physical, you know, he's incompetent, he's making bad decisions, he is physically overpowered in virtually every situation he comes into. You know, that's obviously the physical manifestation of his weakness. But like I said in that scene with Forrest, and as you just remarked, I don't think that that is why Forrest and Howard see Jack as weak. I think they see Jack as weak because of exactly how you just ended that. They know that Jack is a systemite. Jack wants to be part of the system.

I mean, he even reveres, and I forget the character's name, but Gary Oldman comes into town as, you know, the very famous, Banner, you know, famous bootleger in the context. I don't know if that was a real guy or not, but either way, famous bootleger in the context of this movie, big time criminal comes into town with a Tommy gun. And Jack is as basically no moral qualms about what he witnesses. He doesn't seem concerned about the people that were just gunned down, whether they were guilty, whether they were innocent. He just recognizes this famous story that has just done this famous story act in front of him immediately runs over to recover his shells, the shells from his bullet casings, and wants to make

a necklace out of them. So like literal idol worship of a mass murderer right in front of him. It doesn't really get much more on the nose, which is maybe why they play it a little bit on the nose when it comes to him being physically ill when he is in a church having his feet washed a few days after that. I thought that that was pretty on the nose, but also pretty effective. Like, you know, from a literal lens, oh, he's hung over. He can't, he can't stand the heat. He's going to get sick. But I think it's pretty clear what they were going for there. That boy shouldn't be in a church. It's not really doing them any good to be in there. But I think while Forrest and Howard are not in church and they're not portrayed as particularly moral men necessarily.

uh they are absolutely men of honor and men of a code and that does not always mean you're a good man but it does mean that you're a man of code you're a man of honor they know that their little brother is not that which is what they're most concerned about i don't think they're concerned that he can't throw as good of a punch as Howard i don't think they're concerned that he's not as calm and collected as forest i think they're like this he's kind of he's kind of just a shitty kid and that's why he's going to ruin our whole kind of legacy and everything we've built here he's the wrong incentive structures. He's after all the wrong things. And that's not good. You know, they love them as their little brother. But yeah, that's, I think that was pretty well communicated.

And I was going to say something else, but I forgot, I'll pass it on. But yeah, I thought, I thought he's, he's weak, but he's weak. He's weak of character, not of a physical stature. Yeah, certainly weak of character. And I agree with you about the incentives. He is clearly in it for material rewards. He wants fancy things and he wants to be able to show those things off. And I think it that it was almost too on the nose that he was going after the preacher's daughter. She's part of a very devoutly religious community that is not going to want some lawless scumbag trying to win all the fruits of the world. stealing their, you know, stealing his daughter away from her community and the beliefs that

he's instilling in her. And we saw him come and be and like be overtly tempting to her. Trying to show off about his car. There's only a few people in the world who've ever sat in one of these things. Would you like to sit in one of these things? Here's this, this dress. I know you're not supposed to to wear a clothes like this. But here's this. dress, will you please wear it? Let's go. I'm going to show you our crime business. And he thought of all those things as things that defined his character in ways that made him look even better when those are exactly the sorts of things that his brother would understand made him look even worse because all of them are in direct violation to his, to the family's

ethic. You cannot be the way that forest is if you want all the things of the world. The things of the world are the things you give up if you want to live that other way. And, you know, there's there's no reason based on his behavior to suggest that Forrest has, you know, is a devout follower of Jesus Christ or anything. But he is, he is at least operating on a spiritual level because he has a real ethic that he is willing to sacrifice for, and he believes it's good. And, you know, I can't say that all the ways it represents itself in the world are good, but the ethic is solid.

Yeah, absolutely. I also remembered in that context what I was going to say in response to how you were talking about, you know, society devolving into chaos. without law, right, without the rule of law. And I firmly agree with everything you said there. And I've like, I've argued this till I'm blue in the face with a lot of people, including a lot of Christians who, again, like it's not, it's not everybody, but I definitely seem to have a fundamentally different view of human beings than a lot of people do, even otherwise good people, which is not to say that I don't think that we're sinners and that I don't think that humans are flawed or capable of

great evil. But I absolutely do not believe that the natural state of the human is chaos or evil. Now, sin, maybe that's a different conversation, right? But I think there are a lot of people who conflate those two things together. And I think that they are wildly different in terms of intention. And, you know, it's kind of funny. Like, I've got an almost two-year-old son at this point. And it's just observing him. On the one hand, you think a toddler is chaos, right? It's like, when people think of the personification of chaos in human beings, they say a toddler, basically, because they're like in control of their physical bodies, kind of, but then they do really dumb stuff with their physical bodies. They're not really thinking clearly, but they're making decisions.

kind of communicate with you, but they kind of can't. They don't really know what's right or wrong yet. So on the one hand, you're like chaos, chaos, chaos. But on the other hand, something I've noticed with him lately. I just watch the stuff he does. And there is, I think we misread what toddlers are doing. I think that they don't know how to do stuff, but there is an inherent drive in them to order chaos. And now I have a son who is probably wired like me, and obviously I have certain tendencies, such as tonight when I went up and opened my hamper

to put some clothes in there, there was a bunch of boxes stacked up in the hamper, and then the hamper was closed, which is something he's doing. He's just organizing things. Like, I'm not saying every 20-month-old kid does that. That's probably a touch of the tism of whatever I do. But in general, when you watch a toddler play, like you give them a bunch of stuff, they pick it up and they put it somewhere.

And then they pick it up and they put it somewhere. They pick this thing up and they put it inside of a box. They take the things out of the box. What are they doing? They're not trying to cause chaos. They're trying to figure stuff out. They're literally trying to do the opposite of chaos. They just appear to be chaotic because they have no idea what they're doing.

And yet their desire is like, there's a bunch of stuff on the ground. I'm going to go pick it up. There's a bunch of stuff in this box. to take it out of the box and look at it and then put it back and you know that's really it's a backwards way of making a god point because i think once when you observe children it's like it's just god god code doing stuff that they're called they're just called to do and i think it's order i think the natural state the godly state of human beings is literally order i literally think that we are the only creatures basically that are made comprised

of order that our natural state is to order the chaos around us. Organize ourself into groups. Organize ourselves into families. Organize our land and protect our boundaries. Organize our thoughts and organize our language. That everything about human history, everything about observing human beings is order, order, order, order. Which is all to say, to your point, we do not need an authority from on high

other than maybe God to order us. We are fully capable of ordering ourselves, and it is the natural state for human beings to order themselves. And I think that not only just logistically and in society, but to your other point, morally, it is also the natural behavior of human beings to order themselves morally. And whether you're talking about this from a survivalist lens or a moral lens, like a godly lens, the result is the same. Whether for practical reasons or for moral reasons, esoteric reasons, human societies will order themselves morally because it makes the most sense to do.

And it's such a fallacy that to your point about like the psycho in town, the psycho in the village, that's going to get to. taken care of and it doesn't mean there's not going to be any damages done there's always going to be bad people and and bad choices that are made but you're absolutely right to point out I remember my my friend a good friend of mine who went into corrections and he he almost became a cock but then cop but then he went into corrections and he once said uh police don't police do not stop crime they respond to crime and like that's how you should think of the system The best the best encapsulation of the system, a system that is not trying to inherently destroy you, which much of it is, the best thing it can do is respond to problems in your life after they have occurred, which it can do nothing about. And once you think of that, like I've told my wife that when it comes to home defense and just situations like that.

Like remember, police do not protect. They respond after something bad has happened. And that's not even a failing of them. That's because they're not omnipotent. They're not omniscient. They respond after the bad things happen. And then they write little reports about the bad things that happened and decide who to punish about the bad things that happened. But yeah, firmly agree with that.

And I just think I feel really passionately about the order versus chaos in human nature debate because I, it annoys me. It is specifically like liberals obviously think that that's not human nature because they want everybody controlled. Conservatives do not think that that's human nature. because they think that humans are just a bunch of like flea-bit and savages that are going to like run around and kill each other if they don't have like a specific framework that they're following. I don't think either of those things is true. It really is amazing how they how they think that everyone would just want to tear everyone else limb from limb as soon as you ever met anybody. There's no laws anymore. Yeah.

Like first off, if the fact. federal government vanished tomorrow, there would still be laws and there would still be ways that we go about doing things. Now, if the federal government's laws and all the regulations and the rest of it went away, obviously that would create enormous gaps in a number of areas of how society is organized and how businesses are organized and how trade is organized. But all of those things will be, I don't know if reconciles the right word, but they will be figured out in some manner just by the free and normal operations of humanity. People will be going about their business and the things that are still worth doing and still sensible to do will continue to be done. It's not like we are only doing the things that we need to do because there are laws restricting us from doing other things.

So, yeah, of course I agree. There's going to be some way that these things are self-organizing. And one of the interesting parallels to this right now. And I think Nick Land does as good a job as anyone, probably a better job than anyone of describing these things. He believes in AI acceleration. And he thinks that AI is kind of this force outside of humanity. It is the function of the motion of capital, I guess. It's always advancing and growing and consuming.

This is what it's going to do. And it's going to select for things that help it advance and grow and consume. And that's really how things work. The fact that we need to do things, that actually perfects and refines the way that the things are being done. The control system from the top orders things in a way that benefits the control system. That's not the same as like the free market and freedom of operation. That's not the way that things would organize despite that control system. So it's already a distortion.

And you're talking about the godly nature of order. I think that that's certainly true. And sin is a deviation from that order. And we do all sorts of things in the course of sin and even outside sin, I suppose, that, well, maybe not. That's not true. I guess it would be a sin in some regard if it was a deviation from order. But yes, of course that exists.

And if we comport with order, the way we go about things will actually be better and more refined than a system of rules could ever produce from the top. Yeah. Yeah, it's funny. Even in my, and part of the part of why this movie kind of speaks to me, obviously, these are three brothers. But, um, but I grew up in a very tight knit, expansive Irish family, like 15 first cousins, all within five years of each other or seven years of each other from top to bottom, oldest to youngest, all grew up within 20 minutes of each other.

So it was like, I was one of those kids growing up going to school. thinking like, you know, what do you do this weekend? And people would be talking about this friend and that friend. And it was like my cousins, every single weekend. My cousins, cousins, cousins and cousins. And, you know, you have obviously, if you're hanging out with your cousins all the time or your brothers, it's a much different dynamic than if you're hanging out with your buddies on the street. There's much more of a familiarity there. Boundaries can be crossed much easier when it comes to cousins and brothers and stuff. And I even just think, you know, one of the things I say in my writing all the time on a first principles basis is the micro is the macro, the macro is the micro.

And I often think about that in the context of this family. I think about like my brothers, my cousins. We had, you know, there was like seven of us that were boys. And there was very clearly a hierarchy. Like somebody could have come in by the time I was 12 and my brother was the oldest and was 17. And then there was a couple that were below me at, you know, 10 and 11. They could have come in and watched the seven boys in the yard for 20 minutes. And somebody probably could have ranked one through seven.

Not who would win in a fight, not like that who's biggest and strongest. They probably could have just gone, who's in charge here? Like how would you, when you watch these boys playing in the street, how would you rank them one through seven? And I think it was so clear because we hung out so much together every week that a stranger could have done that. And they probably would have gone seven for seven, like 10 out of 10 times. And it's funny because in hindsight, I'm like, well, my brother was literally the oldest and the biggest and the strongest, but was not in charge.

The one who was in charge was the second oldest, my cousin Chris, who was also pretty strong. But he was just, he was in charge because he cared to be in charge. He took charge. It was just kind of like, hey, we show up to the party. what are we do? What are all the boys doing? They would all gather around. And then it's like, we're playing baseball, we're going down to the park. This is what we're doing. Why? Because Chris is going to the park with the baseball bats. He's already got everything. And everybody just follows him. And then it's like, all right, who's going to cause chaos in the game? Well, it's going to be

John. It's always John because John gets mad the easiest, right? And it's just, it's like this silly example, but it's kind of, that's like a little microcosm. But when the neighborhood kids would mess with us, the kids from South Boston, it was, like we would beat the hell out of each other in that family. And yet, if anybody messed with one of us, the older, my brother, who was like the silent giant and my older cousin, who were the ones beating me up the most every day, they would turn into Howard and be like, you are not allowed to touch him. Because that's my little brother or that's my little cousin. And it's like, nobody taught us that. didn't pull us aside and say, listen, if anybody messes with you like you see in the movies,

if anybody messes with your brother, this is how you deal with them. It was just like the law of the jungle. It's just what these boys were doing. It's like, hey, hey, that guy like beat me up over there and you're my older brother. Like, you're not supposed to let that happen. You're supposed to beat me up, but like only within reason. And I kind of like that that's baked into this where these are adult men who are doing like involved in extremely serious situations. But like some of those looks between Forrest and Howard are just kind of communicating that of like that shorthand of there is a law that exists that is in nature, in the nature of men. And there is also a law that exists within brothers, within cousins, within blood. And it's real. And like anybody who's

grown up in that environment, whether you have a couple of brothers or you have cousins or whatever it is. And some people have friends that are truly close enough where they've had these dynamics with them growing up. But like that's another just proof that a lot of people have just anecdotally in their lives of like there is an order. If you have a group of, you know, maybe especially boys and girls don't quite as much do this in the same way, you're going to get order. You're going to have a hierarchy.

And another thing that this movie communicates very well, and I've been talking about this for years in my personal life and on Badlands, power is ultimately what decides who's in charge. And like I said, my brother might have been literally the biggest. and strongest of all of us, but my brother didn't care about being in charge, which is why he wasn't in charge. Whoever cares about being in charge and has the power to be in charge is in charge. That has always been the way it will be. That is always the way it will be. And no matter how much we try to disguise that and dress it up in laws and systems or in moral codes, it is just the way

things are going to be. And instead of thinking that's inherently bad, maybe we should just allow good men to exert power and things would be in a much better place. Yeah, maybe. The idea of the older brother enforcing the law, that's kind of how it goes. And that's what he was doing with you. And now, I can't say that he was defending any sort of good ethic or anything. but in general, a family as like a self-contained enforcement structure that regulates the behavior of its own members, the proliferation of those sorts of organizations is what makes it so that the larger centralized organizations that control people's behavior aren't necessary.

Like if we look after ourselves and we look after our own and we expect certain behaviors to be embodied by that group, well, then we are policing ourselves so that we don't have to be policed by others. And I think maybe this is the time to mention this. You know, at the beginning of the film, Jack's first exercise was whether or not he could kill the pig. and it struck me immediately, I was like, big, huh? Like, are they talking about cops? And it turns out, of course, that at the end of the film, Jack finally gets the credit he believes he's always deserved from his brothers to be included as part of the family for ultimately being the guy that kills Charlie Rakes.

So you got that in it both ends. And so there's an element to which this, I guess, was anti-police. but it was only anti-police as the enforcement mechanism of the state. And then the police were able to kind of come around on that thing when they saw that the state had gone beyond its delegated authority. It had usurped power. And it had amassed undue power that it turned on the people. And so finally the police, the sheriffs stood up to the state. Now, will we see that model in real life?

We haven't really seen it yet. But I suppose that we can hope for that. Respond if you want. Otherwise, we have a couple quick Badlands ads to get to. And then we can get back to it. Okay. So let's pause for a second. For sub-disclosure.

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ambushed last week on on Badlands Daily and they were like hey what colors charitruces yeah I don't know what that's a bright green and apparently there's like some internet controversy about it being pink and it's pink in this commercial and i don't understand where that came from maybe it was an a i hallucination but apparently there are other people around

the internet who think that this is like a mandala effect thing and that shartreuse has always been pink there's a color that colors in the commercial well shartreuse is written on the top of the paint can oh i didn't even notice that paint is pink yes but I remember Chartreuse from like fishing lures as a child. I can't see any of that stuff. Oh, yeah. Wow. See, this is why I'm above you, people. I don't even, I could never be pulled into such a debate because it doesn't mean anything to me.

Never even heard that word before. But, uh, yeah. The, uh, Randy in that commercial seemed like kind of a modern day Bonderon. I mean, maybe his, uh, his hands were messed up from his brass knuckles or something. Yeah. All right. So guys, we also have to tell you about the next great American restoration tour, Gart number 13. We are back at the Ahern in Las Vegas just two weeks from tonight.

Uh, what are we doing? Thursday night, Friday and Saturday, Gart sessions. closing it out with the big live DPH, which is always a lot of fun. We got, we did the Ahern, I guess about 18 months ago now. I think it's exactly that, right? March of 2025. So yeah, it's been a year and a half. We're back in Vegas.

And I know that there are still some, some tickets for the weekend, some single day passes. And of course, virtual passes are still available. you can find all of that by going to badlandsmedia. Dot TV slash GART. So go check that out. And wait a second. I didn't even realize that we had a GART video. And so I apologize to you great people out there.

But I want to see this this here Gart video because I'm hoping that it's funny. Truth doesn't stop at the screen. It's hitting the road again. Badlands Media is coming to Las Vegas, September 17th through 19th, for the next stop on the Great American Restoration Tour. Join your favorite Badlands hosts and like-minded Americans for three powerful days of unfiltered conversations with deep dive panels. I understand this is an emotional talent.

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then all of a sudden, ghost from the character stage pops up and it's all worth it again. Yeah. Okay, so let's get back into the movie. There was, uh,

there were, there were two other major themes that were kind of relayed multiple times in dialogue, the first right at the beginning of the film in the scene where Jack's getting mugged while his brothers are inside selling their moonshunds,

moonshine and when forest bonderant finally comes out and he sees that his little brothers being accosted by a knife wielding man he has kind of you know his badass little speech but he also says your whole world is about to change and you don't even see it because of course he knows what's coming and you could apply that to forest because the world is changing you know that that jimmy character even says you can't do it the old way no more And then you have another example of the same kind of thing later on when Jack is trying to pick Bertha up in his new car. And he says to her, if you get in that car, your whole life's going to change. Now, in the two examples in particular, in the example where Forrest hits this guy with his brass knuckles, kind of just, who knows how injured this guy is.

maybe he's never going to be the same again. He's in the city. He thinks he's indestructible. He's got his knife. Most people are just going to back down at that point because they don't want any trouble. But Forrest Bond-Dorant does want trouble because he's from an entirely different way of seeing and going about the world. He's happy to embrace that trouble. And so he's bringing his world to bear on this man who doesn't live in that world.

And the same thing in a different way is true. We have Bertha, who's been raised in this upstanding religious culture. And then we have Jack Bondaran who's been raised in not obviously an in upstanding culture, but one with a very rigid and strict ethic that he is violating. And he's suggesting that this girl violated too. I'm going to show you what the world can give you. And once I show you that, you're not going to want this stuff anymore. And it proves true in both cases.

And I think that we have the two directions you can travel going from the ethic to the world or the world to the ethic. And I thought that this movie was a really interesting take on that dynamic. Yeah, going back to it, I'm of a very broken record about this, and the power, power is power refrain. I've been writing about that since my Righteous Russia series. But it's always been, I think I've probably mentioned it on shows, but it's not to say I'm a badass. But the thing I used to talk about a lot that I learned after not just training in martial arts, but then taking full contact fights is very eye-opening.

It's like these levels that you're out. You're like, oh, I've been training and I'm badass now. I know how to throw a punch and I know how to take a punch. in the gym and then you get into a ring where it's like oh well this feels a little bit different and then you know people obviously at war experiencing a whole other kind of thing um but one of the things that you kind of opens your eyes after those experiences is not that you all of a sudden think you're badass it's that you kind of recognize how fragile and just how dangerous physical combat is just like physical situations you get hit the wrong way you're

You could be having a fight that's like going well, all things considered and you're feeling good, whether this is in training or in a real fight. And then all of a sudden you get hit with something that you just didn't see. And it's like, oh, man, I can't, I can't breathe. I can't walk anymore. I can't see. Whatever it is. And you just enter animal mode. We used to call it lizard brain.

You just enter lizard brain where it's just like, protect myself, protect my liver. I don't know what's going on. Get me out of here. And you could be the most seasoned, you know, competitor there is. that can happen to you. But you kind of, when you come out of those things, you recognize, like, looking around in our normal society, like people who subject themselves to being weirdos who fight in cages or rings is such a small percentage of society that I think then when those guys, like a lot of those guys I used to train at, they look at other normal guys in modern society

who have never been in a physical confrontation. And it's a very strange thing where it's kind of like nothing, huh? Like you don't even know what, you've never been hitting the nose really hard or something like that. And there's an element of that with Forrest and Howard, but Forrest is kind of like the one who communicates these things where what I really like about him and that that kind of through line, that power through line is there's a recognition in an honesty in the power is power refrain. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have, it, it can't be moral. It doesn't mean there can't be a code layer to top that. In other words, this kind of goes back to our conversation about order and chaos. But, you know, the reason I bring up fighting is

that sort of thing. It could, I guess some people would take that as like the rule might makes right, the laws of the jungle, the rule of the jungle, et cetera. If you don't know how to fight, then, you know, you don't have any power. I think it's okay to kind of recognize that on a literal level while also recognizing if you have no code, if you have no rules, if you have no morality, then that is pure chaos. Power without any rules or code is pure chaos and exactly what other people think it is. But code and rules without power is nothing. It's less than chaos. It's just nothing. And again, the reason I bring up fighting is because like it always used to, I guess, it surprised me when I was a little older, recognizing how many guys, like I used to say,

my wife will repeat me many times where she now says, if we meet a guy that she can tell I don't like, she usually will say, oh, that guy's never been punched in the mouth. And, you know, I have always said that in my personal life, and part of it's how I grew up, part of it is fighting. It's not because I want to hit somebody in the mouth. It's more like, oh, you're behaving in a way that suggests, somebody like me has never just hit you because you've just walked around your whole life saying stuff and nothing has happened to you. And like there's scenes in this movie where the scene you mentioned with the brass knuckles

is a more extreme version where this guy's already threatening somebody physically. But the scene I think better encapsulates that dialectic is, as I said at the beginning of the show, when the cops show up, not even threatening violence, they just show up to basically intimidate and threaten and or harass the Bondaran brothers and Howard immediately responds with a physical escalation. And it's like, I think they look at that as like, you're being an animal. You're being crazy. And I look at that as being like, no, no, no. Howard is reminding you and Forrest is letting him remind you like, you guys pulled up here in a car and said words out of your mouth or you were going to say words out of your mouth none of that matters where you are

where you are right now is you're at my house and my brother's inside and he's bigger and stronger than you and like i don't want people to be getting into fights and public and stuff like that's how people die but i do often lament that so many especially men uh so many just carry themselves in this way and the internet has made this a lot worse, admittedly, they carry themselves in this way where it's like they're not checking themselves at all with how they speak, with how they communicate, with who they could be insulting, with who they can't be insulting. It doesn't mean I want people doing drive-by shootings and all this kind of stuff, but it's like even that is actually like this pusification of culture. It's kind of funny. It's like there's two pusifications of culture.

Part of it is like nobody knows how to fight or defend themselves anymore and people don't get slapped in the mouth when they say something that's untoward. The other side of the pusification is people just kill each other as soon as something like that happens. And like the best middle ground is like, you might get hit in the mouth. You said something, you shouldn't have said that, you know? And now you're probably not going to say that again. But you're not dead. We're not going to kill you. Like it's just, you got slapped around a little bit. And it's just that like kind of biblical morality that forest really embodies where he kind of gives you a chance. He's like, listen, you can't just be doing stuff like this just because you

think that you're in this position of authority or power, or because even if you're just talking shit at a bar, you think like, well, this other guy is not going to hit me because that's against the law for him to do that kind of thing. And, you know, we would probably have less assholes and we'd have less murders if people were allowed to, within reason, enforce. And, you know, even social boundaries with physical power. And that is a controversial statement. I'm not saying that that works in every scenario. But I am saying that generally, in this old-fashioned way of doing things,

the asshole in town is probably going to be checked at some point and stopping as much of a dick. And the person who is using too much physical violence is also probably going to be checked at some point, just like we were talking about earlier with this whole case. chaos, order and chaos example. The line I mentioned earlier about you can't do it the old way no more. So that's in the conversation between Forrest and Jimmy when, you know, they're told by

rakes and the rest of them that basically their cost of doing business is going to go up because a new regime is in town and they essentially have just decided that they want more more of the money that these people are making outside of the law. And so Forrest says, I'm a bonderant. We don't lay down for people. And when Jimmy goes through and kind of tells him, you just can't do it this way anymore.

This is just, you know, this is the cost of doing business. We have to do it the way we're told to do it. Forrest goes, I guess we'll see what happens then. And that whole thing kind of paralleled, I thought a lot of the conversation people are having with themselves over things like,

for instance, choosing not to pay taxes any long. It's like, well, you know, I don't actually owe these people this money. So I'm just not going to pay it. And somebody's like, well, you have to pay it or otherwise they're going to put a lien on your bank account or they're going to take your house. They're going to do this or they're going to do that. Maybe they would. but you just have to say, well, I guess we'll see what happens.

I guess we're going to wait to see if they're going to escalate. If they're going to escalate, then I'm going to have to escalate. I'll take it more serious than if they escalate again. I'll escalate again. And let's just see what happens because there's probably a point at which it's not worth their trouble either. And so Forrest actually believes that he has to enforce that all the time so that nobody is kind of taking more than their share. You know, he needs to continue saying, no, the boundary is actually right here.

And if they try to press up on him, well, now you're going to have to be punished by me so that my boundary remains established and you don't cross that. Because if you begin to cross that, if you just tell me you're going to cross that and you expect me to sit down and I do, well, then you can just push the boundary as far as you want. And to a man like Forrest, Bond to rent, that can just never happen. Well, and that again, that's part of the same theme that I, that I love so much about that character, which is it's both moral or you don't have to say it's moral, it's principled and it's, what's the word, practical.

It is both principled and practical. From a principal perspective, it's his code, right? It's what he's known by. It's what he believes in. So that's one side of it. But it's also practical because if somebody can push him, then any power or authority he was exerting before that point in time, de facto goes away because people have then seen this. Another personal anecdote that I've probably brought up before, but I have a very big dog and he's a working line dog. He's like a police dog, bloodline.

And I learned this with him when he was six months old where they told me like, there's going to be a day. You don't know what it's going to be. But probably in that first year where he's going to test you and you're going to realize that, oh, he's testing me in a little bit of a different way today. We're not just kind of like wrestling around. And that happened. There was literally a day where I was like, oh, man, we're like going at it.

And if you don't establish with an example like that, if you've got a dog like that and you do not establish yourself as cliched as it is as more powerful than that dog. And it's really even, it's kind of less about being more powerful. It's even sometimes about the illusion of power. Maybe your dog could beat you up. But if you show the dog, like, listen, it doesn't matter what you do. I'm going to fight you on this and physically oppose you and I'm going to stop you from doing this. They'll never do it again. It's like it's hardwired into them. And I feel, think there's a there's a human aspect of that that forest is understanding like once you have earned actually earned and displayed this reputation in front of people it will perpetuate itself and then i mean

that's where this whole saying comes from your reputation precedes you right sometimes that's bad sometimes it's good it's often a good thing of like you get the impression forest doesn't actually have to do much fighting his kind of posture in this movie because he did that he did that when he was younger or him and howard did it and now everybody just knows like Howard and forest are in the bar they're in town like the rules are different now because these two dogs are in town jack is running around with the bonderant name but he's a chihuahua and everybody knows that right so there's even there's clearly speaking of there's a small dog syndrome with Jack where I think there's a knowledge to him, there's an innate knowing that his brother's

reputation precedes him. So he goes into town and it's his brother's reputation that is protecting him. He actually is not the one who holds the power. So that's where you get into some of the limitations of that kind of code that comes down to power again. And Forrest and Howard, I think, recognize this and their brother where they're like, man, you know, our power is really not enough when it comes to him because he doesn't have it. He obviously doesn't have it. All he has is the story. And the one thing that Guy Pearce is, we haven't talked about him much, but Charlie Rake, the one thing that he's obviously a sadist and a psychopath, etc. But the one thing he does recognize that makes him a threat to these guys is he's playing the same game as them. You know, he's dressed up in the law, literally,

But Charlie Rake does understand the game that the Bondarans are playing, and he knows that Jack is not a part of that game. So he's like the only character we see in the movie where when the cops, when Jimmy and when the cops back off from Jack, they're not backing off from Jack. They're backing off from Forrest and Howard. And Charlie sees that immediately. When Jack is barking at him, he's like, you're a little duck.

that's what you are. And I know that there are two bigger dogs back at your house, but they're not here right now. And that's a really big problem for you. So it doesn't ultimately end well for Charlie, but there is an honesty to him that I think is why he is such a threat to them because he's like, I'm also a big dog and I know how these things work. So now we're going to see, as you just said, we're going to see what happens. The reason that's a compelling and kind of nerve-wracking experience to watch as a viewer for this movie is, you know, that Charlie understands this and is not concerned about it. And I don't think it's because he's a badass and he doesn't think that the brothers are dangerous.

It's that he knows he's dangerous too. And he's entirely willing to just be like, we're having a dog fight. And one of us is going to die and one of us is going to live and we'll see what happens. Yeah, I mean, that's the craziest part because he seems so effeminate in many ways. Right. you know, about his dress, the shaved part in his hair, the shaving off of his sideburns and maybe even his eyebrows too, just a really strange man. Was he dyeing his hair at one point?

It looked very dark. Yeah, yeah. I think that was just part of his thing. I mean, he's, I suppose, an aging man. I mean, Guy Pearce, I guess would have been probably in his late 40s at that point. I don't know. I don't know exactly how old. is. But I thought all those representations of that character were really interesting,

partly because it was unusual and it gave Guy Pearce to the opportunity to have an interesting performance, a little bit of it maybe probably over the top. I thought there were certainly some interesting scenes there. I've never seen sliced off testicles in a jar. So that was a new experience that I will obviously never forget. But the representation of Charlie Rakes as the avatar of the state, I think is the thing you'd come back to. He's, you know, as you said, obviously a sadist, maybe a bit gay. He thinks he's much, much smarter than everybody based on, I guess, credentials or the things

he thinks about or the ways he talks about those things. but yeah i don't know i i'm i guess i'm not going to say that he's he's not smart like he never knows what he's talking about he clearly overestimates the ability of the system to be the ultimate authority and i think that that's the mistake that all statists make is that you actually can do the best by just serving the system and the truth is that maybe that's true in this material domain but it's doesn't go possibly any higher than that. That just reminded me, speaking of smarts, et cetera,

I said at the beginning of the show, there's nothing I would look at in this movie and say that was bad. But in hindsight, there was one scene I had a major problem with. It wasn't the performances. It wasn't whatever. It was the writing.

There was one scene where I went, this happened because the movie needed to continue. When Charlie Rake follows Jack and Bertha down into the still, you know, in the woods. And you get the dramatic scene where Howard sees this happen. Howard intervenes and saves his brother. They have, they have Charlie Rake on the ground with Howard over him with a shotgun. And with everything we have seen up to that point in the film and with everything we see after that point, there is no defensible reason in my view that Howard did not blow Charlie Rake's head off. And I'm not saying

that because I'm a viewer and I want him to have his head blown off. I'm saying it is not logically consistent with anything we've seen in this movie. There's no, like, they're already at the point where they're in a shootout. The brothers are in a shootout with the police and they don't kill them because they're going to get in trouble? Like, what's going on there? It doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. And they end up in the shootout after that anyways. So that was the one scene where I was just like,

you guys shouldn't have written it this way. In fact, the way that it should have been written, which I actually thought would have been cliche, but fitting, is everything in movie lore or an archetypal story structure would tell you how it is going to die in the scene, which is absolutely what I thought was going to happen. So I guess it was a little bit of a surprise that he didn't, but I thought it actually made the writing a lot worse in that whole exchange.

Because it felt like they put Jack and Howard and Charlie into this powder keg of a situation and wrote all of them out of it. And you're like, sorry guys, but this is one thing that George Martin, for all his other faults as a writer with Game of Thrones, really kind of called out across writing, which is like, nope, if you're put these two guys in this situation and you've written them this way, something has to happen in that situation, no matter what the viewer wants to happen and no matter what the script wants to happen, it just doesn't make any sense. And anyway, that's just a nitpick. But I thought less because it was like illogical and more, even the morals we've been shown in this whole situation. None of this makes any sense. Howard isn't worried about the law. He's not worried about the cops that are shooting at him, like, and they knew that letting Rake live is going to

get them killed, like, very obviously. So that is the one major problem I had with it. And I think it was one of those like, oh, there's 40 more minutes in the movie. That's why this happened this way. Yeah, I guess I take your point there. I didn't, I thought it was a weird moment. And I just kind of let it go because that's like what movies do. You kind of have to. Yeah, yeah, like everybody else is kind of running in. Like, oh, man, we don't have time. I don't have time to pull this trigger and then run away. Yeah.

Yeah. And you kind of just like look the other way because it's kind of such a movie convention to do that. Right. But yes, that's a good point. The only other thing that I really had that I thought would be worth a bit of discussion is just the question of whether or not you eventually just do have to reconcile. with this thing. This is the direction the world is moving. And we talk a lot about consent.

We talk a lot about mandate and the rest of it. If there is such thing as passive consent, certainly the people are giving their passive consent to the system. They are not withdrawing their consent from the system in any active way whatsoever. And if you wanted to track involvement, versus, you know, the withholding of consent from various parts of the system, at least in any

expressed manner, you can only find the first category for most people, just people going along and accessing the system and they can complain about it till the end of days, but they're still involved in major ways of it and not even so much as critiquing it or understanding their involvement with it in the first place. So if there is passive consent, maybe it's that people give that passive consent to this government, corrupt as it is. And if we want something else, we're pretty much just going to have to abstain from, we're going to have to be much more active about when we are giving and withholding that consent and make it clear to other people so that they might be inclined to do that too. But the thing is, if they're not inclined to,

going to do that, then you can really just enforce it only on yourself and maybe it convinced the people around you to enforce those same ethics, but winning the entire society over or changing society over to your preferred form is probably pretty unlikely. And so then do you just have to reconcile? Or is it just like we surrender with any sort of compromise? And I don't know the answer. Maybe next time you're on the narrative, maybe we should have like a longer discussion of this. Because I think this is a very interesting discussion. I'll give a brief because this is something I struggle with. You used an example earlier in the show that I like discussing taxes.

So I think morally it is abhorrent to be taxed. I think morally it is abhorrent to pay taxes. But what some. people, and I'm not saying you do this because of what you just said, I think you do understand this dynamic. One dynamic within the no tax people, the people who choose not to pay taxes that I find a little annoying at times is I think that those people, I think that there are people who abide by aspects of the system, which is apporant and bad and wrong, but that are doing it.

it with a different decision structure than other people think. You know, there's a lot of people who pay taxes because they think it's morally right, which is retarded. There are many more people who pay taxes because it's the law, which is also retarded. Paying taxes in general is retarded, but I'll tell you just for my personal state. I pay them because I think about the system that we are in, and I think about the system that as a very powerful criminal enterprise. And I think about it very literally, because I think about power.

I used my fighting analogy earlier, but usually people think that's me saying, I have all this power because I'm a badass, et cetera. It gave me a very clear recognition of when I do not have power in a situation. I live in an area where there are great white sharks. I would like to swim out into the bay. I enjoy swimming. I very much like swimming.

There are men who swim out into the bay every day and do not get eaten by monsters. and some could call them braver than me. Maybe they are. I choose not to do that anymore. The reason I choose not to do that anymore is because there is something very powerful in that bay that I cannot defeat.

And if I am to swim around in that area, I could be putting my life in harm's way. Then there's other situations where I choose to do that, right? So these things are relative. The reason I bring it up in the context of taxes or the system, and compliance and you know is this inevitable to your question it's the thing i struggle with the most and there are just times though where i look at it and i say these are decisions that are being made and i think maybe a middle ground direction to go in or maybe a direction i'd like to see

people go in when it comes to just society at large if we're not going to get this like mass tax revolt um that we'd love to see including because of people like me it would be nice if people were having this kind of discussion about it and saying like at least be honest about what you're doing and what is being done to you if charlie rake rolls into town in the context of bring a full circle into this movie if charlie rake rolls into town and you've got a moonshine operation running out of your house and you are not the bond ramp brothers you are just forest and you just to have your wife and you have two daughters. You have a choice to make. Your choice is to abide by your moral principles and exert power in defense of those principles or to recognize that you

are swimming in a bay with a very dangerous and very powerful creature that can decide to kill you and to ruin your family's life or kill them. That's obviously very literal. The biggest question with this whole tax thing is, do they have that power? Are they going to exercise it? I highly respect people who make the decisions they do. I do not respect myself for making the decisions I have up to this point in time. But, you know, it's all just to say, I think there's a reductionist conversation that happens in that dialectic that is kind of like, if we watch this movie and we see another scene where Charlie Rake goes up to this other moonshiner and the moonshiner immediately relents, like the viewer is is liable to be like that guy's not as badass as forest whatever his name is uh but then

look at the guy's situation does he have any power to project is he likely to win if he tries to project that power who is likely to suffer in his surroundings if he does make these decisions and you could even argue it with the um with the brothers the bonderan brothers in this movie does it go well for them you know maybe i mean i think they're the moral heart of the movie, I firmly agree with their stances. And obviously, they don't, you know, they don't care that they could lose their lives in these pursuits. I just think these things are a little more nuanced, and that's ultimately what is so subversive of the system is it puts people in these positions of saying like, yep, the system is extremely powerful, it is vast, it may or may not ever turn its

ire on me. And, you know, again, we should have a longer discussion on this, but maybe that's actually one of the more sneaky and subversive ways that the system influences its power or projects its power is it maybe it's one of its powerful uh one of its strengths is having that uncertainty you know where like if charlie rake is in town you know where he is you know he's in town maybe you know how to avoid him we live in a society now where the system it's kind of not in our daily lives but it's always kind of there and it's There's a feeling that it's all around you, but it's not in the room with you. And it's like, does that make it less powerful or more powerful?

And that's a bit of a strange thing that everybody has to kind of decide for themselves. Yeah, I guess it depends on how much you fear the system and how much you perceive the system as the authority over your life that can tell you what to do. And when you owe it money because you didn't follow its rules and the rest of it. If you just ignore that stuff, people are like if I, if I were to say, if you just ignore that stuff, it actually goes away, people would be like, that's not true. Well, some of it is kind of true. And I would only say to those people, go ahead and try it sometime and see what happens. And that's the way Forrest Bondurant went about it as well. All right.

I don't actually have great lights though. Yes, that's real. That's true. Oh, yes. And also, I wanted to just clarify something with you. Is it true that sharks decide to ruin your life? Is that a truism? Yeah, I think that you said earlier, a shark could just decide to ruin.

I guess I did decide that. You and your family's lives. I like to think that's like that Charlie Rake of sharks. Yeah, yeah. Obviously, that's a stretched analogy. It was more just to imply that I know when something is more powerful than me, but that's why I always go bicameral with the tax or the system argument against myself, because I try to be honest about that, that it is not a Great White. And it is, ultimately, I'm making an inference and essentially lending power to the system that it may not have. A Great White doesn't need me to do that. It just is as powerful as it is.

and it's going to make the decisions it makes. But everybody who chooses to comply with the system is ultimately lending power to it, which is absolutely true. Well said. Okay. So we have a boost that just came in from the final demand for $100. Damn. Quote, a family as a self-contained enforcement structure that regulates the behavior of its own members,

et cetera, et cetera. Brilliant. Well, thank you. Sounds a lot like the way. this country was intended to run we the people in all yes i agree with that 100% obviously uh there it could be better than this yeah this this system it seems to me and the founding mythology of this nation however true it is and you know regardless of whether it's true in reality a founding mythology affects people and becomes you know true regardless um it was supposed to

to give us the opportunity to be self-goverting. And that is not what we are. And we pretend that we are that because we vote. That is not self-governance. So we need to get some clarity on what that term actually means and try to live up to that. A rocky top apologist sent one through earlier for $10. I married into the adjacent county to Franklin, Virginia. My 90-year-old father-in-law has shared some.

interesting stories from what he's heard and experience. And that is very cool, Rocky Toppa. I would love to hear those at some point. I did want to respond. First of all, thank you both. Thank you to final demand. I think you also sent me one on the narrative. So I very much appreciate that.

Maybe it was DPH, but very generous. We don't take it for granted. But I did want to respond to that a little bit, just to revisit an earlier point I made about, you know, we were talking about order and chaos and human nature. And I like these kind of discussions. But, you know, my, I guess my appeal is, like was the country intended to run this way?

Was this the intent? And like you said, Chris, things could be a lot better. I genuinely, I really believe that a big problem that even earnest leftists and earnest conservatives, earnest people have. One of the most subversive things the system is programmed into us is that we are inherently bad. And it like I'm not just saying that from this moral stop calling me bad. it hurts my feelings or people are all good. I'm saying if you buy into that, you are lending mandate to the need to be governed.

Like it is a structural problem to believe that humans are immoral. If you buy into the humans are immoral sciop, you should be delegating your authority to other two systems. Right? Like, the logical end point of an argument or a foundation that humans are bad is government and systems and, you know, people, groups of people regulating the behavior of other people, which is why it's not just a moral argument that I'm making. It is a structural argument that I'm making. Societies that believe that human beings are not good will leverage power over groups of people. societies that believe human beings are good will not in the same way.

They will organize, I think, in a more moral framework like we're talking about. So, you know, and I've said this before, but it's kind of relevant because there was a baptism, a family baptism this past weekend. It happened to be Catholic. And I didn't attend it because I had my toddler, but I heard about it from all my cousins, speaking of my Irish cousins. And the guy droned on and on for two hours because he was trying to make a point all of you are here just for a baptism and you don't believe in the true faith and literally said to my cousin,

I kept everybody here longer even with all their toddlers to prove a point. And that guy's a piece of shit in my view. And what that guy is doing, this is just my opinion, what that priest did in that moment was drive a bunch of people away from the church because he as an egomaniacal human being man decided. to lever power over other people because he deemed them to be inferior to him and that they're evil and this and that and they need him. And again, it's a whole ramp. But I just, it comes up in so many different ways. And I think in this community, we often focus on like the mainstream media and the left thinks that humans are bad. Why don't you watch Ben Shapiro? Why don't you watch

Tim Poole? Why don't you watch any of these conservative influences who are God-fearing men? They're not God-fearing men. They think that humans are bad. And at the heart of all of their commentary is human beings are bad and you need somebody powerful to save you from them. And we got to reject that or else we've got no hope of building anything resembling the vision that we would like to see. All right. So we can we can leave it there. Guys, please go ahead and hit that thumbs up if you are watching and listening on Rumble. theoretically that helps us or so we are told and with that i believe that we can get to the movie for next week

and uh i know that some people have requested this one over the last couple of years and i have somehow i don't think ever seen it but for next week we are going to do nineteen ninety eight the siege directed by edwards wick and starring Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis, Annette Benning, Tony Shalub, and, uh, I have to have seen this. This seems like one of, this is probably one of those, uh, walked through rooms it was on movies. The secret U.S. abduction of a suspected terrorist leads to a wave of terrorist attacks in New York city, which leads to the declaration of martial law. Don't tell.

bio clandestine or he will he will start tweeting about this happening in reality over and over and over and over and over again saying it's finally happening holy shit yes it's finally happen it's really happening it's actually happening oh it's happening it's happening makes you wonder what was happening all those other times i i mean i guess you can go back and research yeah yeah you might as well go back and research them just go to his uh ex-formedly twitter timeline go to that little magnifying glass and i bet you could find all sorts of things happening he didn't mean it's in all those other times he just you know it was happening it's happening but now it's happening yeah yeah you'll know that the storm has arrived by the black helicopters

but until then you should also know that it's happening exactly all right is it in the room with us right now it's happening i can't see it's happening all right and with that guys uh thank you all very much for watching we really appreciate uh all the activity in the chat and uh thank you for helping us research guy pierce's age bay theater dave 44 young younger than i thought 44 at the time yeah okay cool All right, then. Okay, so I guess that's it. We will see you all next week for the Siege starring Denzel Washington. Good night.

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