The Prepper Broadcasting Network - Matter of Facts: Martial Law

Episode Date: May 25, 2026

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Welcome back to the Matterfax podcast on the Prepper Broadcasting Network. We talk prepping guns and politics every week on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify. Go check out our content at MWFpodcast.com on Facebook or Instagram. You can support us via Patreon or by checking out our affiliate partners. I'm your host, Phil Ravale, Andrew, Nick, are on the other side of the mic, and here's your show. Welcome back to Matter of Facts podcast, the least professional podcast on the internet. I am going to make sure we do the admin work this time because we, I think, buggered it up last show or the show before.

Definitely, at least one of those. I mean, we bugger it up every now and then. I find that it tends to happen when there's whiskey involved. When that happens, this show goes off the rails really quickly. Yeah, yeah. Whiskey with dinner and then whiskey with the podcast definitely does not conducive to doing admin work. That's why there's coffee in the cup and no booze, just coffee. Anyway, if you'd like to become a patron, you can help promote bad decisions by becoming a patron.

This topic was inspired, demanded, and researched by a patron who I'm going to call grandpa because it'll annoy him slightly. It's fair. I mean, he's literally old enough to be my grandfather. He can't be that mad about me calling him grandpa. True. No, no, he's not old to be my grandpa. He's only to be my dad. I'm 43.

He's not that old. Guinness Book of World Records says yes. No. I don't even want to go down the road of explaining how that's possible. So let's just leave that big. If you don't want to be a patron, you can still buy merch for the vibes from Southern Gals, supports small business and supports the podcast. And if you don't want to do either of those, you can still prevent war crimes or invent new ones with coffee from disaster coffee.

Use code MOF, or I will personally individually harass you about paying full price. You know, if you order it through the subscription, for three months in a row, Phil will finally remember not to harass you about using the discount code you can't use. Or if you do like Stewart and say, I refuse to use discount code because I want to pay for at Folk Freight and you do that often enough, I eventually just relent and allow it. That's true. But you know.

Okay. The topic is martial law, but that's going to come at the end of a couple of things that have popped up recently. The first of which is my nerdy bull crap. Nerdy Bull crap is very important. It's a cornerstone of this podcast. It is. It is.

So we were talking not too long ago. And for those you listen to this in audio, you'll just have to take my word on it. There's a spreadsheet. There's an excerpt from a spreadsheet up on the screen. But we were talking when we were talking about reloading about the fact that like, when I first started reloading precision rounds, I was like adjusting my seeding stem a lot. And I was tweaking things. I was trying to get my overall length perfect all throughout my run.

Yeah. And then it came to my attention by measuring the, bullets that there was a variance in the bullet itself and that was what I was chasing. So I set the seating stem and I just load a batch and let that be that. But recently I started having this debate with myself about how much is the dimension changing between the datum line where the dye touches the bullet and the tip and that same point and the base of the bullet because from that point where the die touches the bullet to the base, that has an influence on pressure and thereby velocity.

And the, where the datum line is usually pretty close to the OJive, where it contacts the land. So that should be at about the same height no matter what. So your lead and your jump and everything isn't changing much. And the only thing it really gets changed by that difference between the datum line and the tip is like the ballistic coefficient. And that's why really, really, really nerdy guys that do F-Class and PRC, they tip their bullets. they do lots of weird voodoo and black magic to make sure all the BCs are exactly the same. I, however, approach this from the point of I can only shoot so well. I'm shooting this out of a rat grade AR-15 gas guns, so there's no possible chance that tipping the bullets and everything else is going to have enough of a difference in this barrel with my shooting skill to be noticeable.

That's probably fair. But I still wanted to do it for the vibes and for the information. So what I did was I pulled 10 77 grains here, Match Kings out of a box. And I weighed every last one of them, which, surprise, surprise. They varied from 77.0 grains to 77.1 grains. So, you know, very nice and consistent. And then I measured from the tip to the base of the bullet. And so I have to explain this some kind of way.

I used the seeding stem of the dye like a fixture to measure from the datum headam line where it contacts the bullet back to the base. And I just subtracted the length of the seating stem. Follow me? Yep. And what I determined through all this nerdy bullcrap is that the extreme spread that you can see here was 0.008 of an inch from the longs to the shortest bullet, but measuring from the datum line back to the base. was only 0.003, so less than half of the variance. And if you think about proportionally the amount of the bullet were measuring, that means that less than half of the variance was 75% of the length of the bullet.

And most of the variance is concentrated in that little narrow area between the data line and the tip. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, given how they're formed, that's kind of where you're going to have your most error because they're formed kind of from the bottom up, wrapping around the lead core anyway. Yeah. the exact opposite of what an FMJ is where it's formed from tip down to base exactly

but this also got in my head to do the exact do the exact same thing with a bunch of 55 grain hornity FMJs because those are formed tip to base right and i came up with the same trend with much larger numbers so those bulk horny bullets had an extreme spread of point seven grains had almost double the variance in length for a much shorter bullet and had but still had about half the variance between the datum line and the base. Well, you know, that's interesting. It is interesting when you think about the fact that the tip is what's formed first and what would be the outside of that jacket forms around the bottom of the base.

And yet dimensionally, we're still seeing a much tighter tolerance in the part that impacts the pressure of that round. That makes sense from a manufacturing tolerance and safety perspective. I mean, that's the critical point. So that's where your quality checks are going to be. That's where your controls are going to be the tightest. Now, clearly you see a very big difference between the premium or semi-premium, depending on how you consider Sierra Match Kings, compared to bulk, like a rack-grade bull. it quite considerable difference in them. I mean, that's, that's really what you're paying for is that

increased quality control because every zero you add after your decimal point for quality control increases the price dramatically. Yeah. I mean, it really is one of those things where like tolerance or tolerances or tolerances for a reason. Yeah. And those reasons are not always because you have to have tolerance in order for things to, like, move together, because if the tolerance was zero, things don't like to move very much. Well, and it, but the other problem is just manufacturing costs. Like, if you hold a tolerance to, like, a thousandth of an inch, when 10 or 50,000s of an inch is plenty tight enough,

or you're doing it's raising cost at that point. I mean, you do. It entirely depends on what you're trying to do. I mean, with stamping, these are a combination of a swedge form, and then Sledge applied to a lead core most of the time anymore with modern jacketed bullets, whether it be FMJs or whether it be like Sierra Match King type bullets. So you do you do also have to account for wear in those dyes as everything is formed together and temperature difference to some extent in those dyes.

The beginning of the run is going to be ever so slightly different than the end of the run because once everything's warmed up, metal expands as it heats, you're going to tighten down those tolerances a little bit. Yeah, but all nerdy bull crap aside, the point of all this was to demonstrate for myself and for anybody that gives a damn. That really and truly, with the exception, like the only application I could see here would be

if you wanted to measure, if you want to go through this exercise with a bunch of your bullets so that you can call out the, ones that are like in the middle of your range and then you use those to set your dyes. Sure. But once you go through that exercise, you're not fooling around with the seating depth of those bullets because the variance you'd be chasing is largely irrelevant at that point. Unless.

For most shooters, I would agree with that. Unless you are literally trying to make the difference between like 0.15 MOA and 0.145. Yeah. Or if you're shooting, say, extreme long range. for that caliber where your ballistic coefficient is going to have a phenomenal impact because it'll have more time and distance to have that impact. But for the average person, no,

simply, simply upgrading from a bulk FMJ to a true match bullet. Like we demonstrated here loud and clear. The simple change from a bulk bullet to something like a Sierra Match King, you're already getting a much more consistent bullet, a much more consistent ballistic. coefficient, a much, much, much more consistent weight of the projectile. Yeah.

And that'll largely be down to the thickness of the, of the copper. Yeah. Now, truthfully, you're paying probably twice as much per bullet. Sure. But if your goal is to have the most accurate ammunition possible, that seems like a reasonable trade. I mean, if you're talking about half the tolerance or less, twice the price is really not out of the line for manufacturing.

I can all day throw a part in my machine barely check anything, and I can hit a fractional tolerance for weeks. As long as the cutter still exists, it's intolerance. Because a fractional tolerance is something like 60,000s on any dimension. That's a lot. By the time you get down to 5thau, now you've got to check most dimensions. Time you get down to 1,000,

you are checking every single dimension. every single time. Unless you're grinding. Questions, questions. Stewart's saying I have some kind of a data stream issue. I did notice things stumbled on my side just for a split second. I didn't. But maybe it'll maybe it'll be okay.

I'm going to politely agree and disagree with Stewart. So. Depends on the projectile. Match bullets or, okay, a Sierra Match King, an open-tip match bullet. The jacket is form. from the base to the tip. Yeah. For an FMJ,

typically, definitely for the Hornities, it's formed from tip to base. Yeah. And you can very clearly see that when you have the bullets in your hand because on the Match King, the bottom is like a continuous sheet of that brass

or of that copper. And then on the, on the Hornady, you can see lead in the, in the base. So like, it's, Stuart's not wrong.

he's he's rarely wrong i just don't like committing it because it's annoying um dr scary guy blah blah the good thing is i can download and listen at my leisure that is the good thing about this stream which i love doing is i get to talk to you all while we're talking but we also still honor the original format which is that audio podcast which is still available just about anywhere you can listen to an audio podcast because quite frankly i still listen to podcast and a lot of people still listen to podcasts. It's easier at work, but with YouTube

not allowing you to play with the screen black. I am forced to admit, though, and like this is not shade on anybody, but like the audio podcast market has shrunk a lot

over the years. Well, I think the, I think the competition has grown more than the market is shrunk. Yes and no. So, total sidebar.

But part of the problem is, it's not, yes, there's more competition, and there's a lot more really high production value podcasts in the mix, which are kind of siphoning away a lot of listeners. Oh, yeah. And rightly so, they put a lot of effort in.

Yeah. But the other problem is just that, like, there are just, I feel like the audio podcast have really taken a large backseat to, like, video streaming like this. It could be. I mean, it is more interactive for sure. 10th anniversary episode. It will be sometime in August.

I would have to go and look up exactly what the day is. Yes. I will say this much. I told Nick, we are also closing in on 500 episodes. Oops. Like, we're,

we're going to hit that this year. That's going to happen. Yes. The math maths. Jeff Jags got the million-dard question. Does the mass difference of the length variability counter the pressure differential caused by the seating depth. So here's the thing.

What the math is alluding to to me is that the, if we define, if we temporarily define seating depth, not by the, not by the tip where we're measuring, when we can measure car, carter overall length, but we measure from the base of the bullet. Because that's really what we're concerned about when we're talking about pressure. It's how big is the, how big is the pressure vessel, that is the cartridge from the bottom of the web to the bottom of the bullet.

That cylinder shape is how much volume we have to burn this powder and to make pressure. And the base of the bullet is not changing near as much based on the measurements and everything I did as the difference in overall length would allude to. Well, here's the trouble. we don't necessarily know that the heavier projectile has a longer overall length and is seated deeper. It looked like it was from your chart. And if that is the case that the heavier bullet has a longer overall length in these instances. I'm just saying, wait, wait, when you say overall length, are we talking about the bullet or the cartridge? The overall length of the bullet.

Okay. which would then cause a deeper theoretical seating into the pressure vessel. So that middle column and both of those charts is the length of the bullet itself from tip to base. Right. So what I'm getting at is in this sampling, that seems to be the trend we're seeing that you're going to have slightly higher pressure. You're also going to have slightly higher pressure because of a slightly heavier bullet because it's more inertia to overcome. whether or not that compensates for the difference in the bullet weight, giving you a similar velocity,

we can't tell just from this chart. What you would have to do is you would have to very deliberately load 10 rounds, the exact same length with the exact same powder charge, with as close to identical bullet weights and overall lengths and seating depths as possible, comparing that to then bullets seated in the same dye with the same powder charge of a slightly heavier and longer overall bullet giving you a smaller pressure vessel and then comparing the velocities and impact data on a very and also chronograph also with the understanding that like the margin of error we're introducing with just the nature of burning powder the chronograph our own ability to measure your ambient temperature is going to have a bigger difference in my opinion than what we're seeing in these bullets here yeah and that that was really the end goal was hmm Stewart saying I'm still dropping packets might be on Stewart's end because I'm not seeing

that at all in our stream but uh one more Stewart question then we're going to move to into the next topic 500th anniversary 500th episode before 10th anniversary so it's the end of April. Yes. No, the end of it. It's the end of May. We're about to be in a June, July, August. So that's 12 episodes.

Two and a half months. Two and a half months would be 10 episodes. 10, 12 episodes. We're going to hit the 10th anniversary. And then later in the year, we'll hit 500 episodes. Ah. Because like I said, I think we're at like 477 right now. Correct, Stuart.

But I'm not seeing the dropping audio issues through my headset or the video of Phil's coverage. That's odd. I don't know because it should be visible to me if it's visible to the audience from your end. I don't know. I mean, theoretically. So on to a fun topic. Nick, where are we going to name our col? It's not a cult.

It is going to be a cult. It is going to be a cult until the federal government acknowledges it, which they probably won't. So it'll be a cult for a while. Look, Phil had a great idea partially, I assume, inspired by the Sikh religion that has gotten around the UK knife laws by making carrying knives part of their religion. Actually, I got the idea from the Mandalorian because I'm a gigantic Star Wars. I thought you got the idea from the Sikhs because there's a whole deal going on.

with the Sikhs in the UK right now. I guess a Sikh guy stabbed another guy, and it's turning into a whole kerfuffle, a la Black Lives Matter riots and all that jazz. Fun. That's the UK. They'll be fiery, but mostly non-shooty. Yeah, well, you know, 10 out of 10,

it's more fun to get stabbed than shot. I am being as sarcastic as I possibly can be. You know, having met somebody, that's had both occur to them, their claim was being stabbed was more was much worse than being shot. Um, I've never been stabbed or shot, but I have seen extensive,

extensive evidence of what happens to the human body in both instances. And I think I would rather roll the dice on being, being shot. Well, as long as it's not in my dome or my testicles. Like any, like any, any, any other general,

like anywhere in the body. shoulder extremity give me a bullet twice on Sunday and every day and twice on Sunday please do not stab me that does not look fun yeah that's fair also have you see I mean have you ever compared the scarring from gunshots versus stabs not really it looks like it does a lot more damage to get stabbed a lot lot I think it's a caliber dependent I think I don't want to be the test dummy agreed it looks like a zero zero stars type of situation. But we,

I had the idea. I was like, Nick, we need to start a religion in which one of the sacraments is that I get to carry a firearm everywhere I go. Right. And then as soon as we get jammed up by law, because let's face it,

that's going to happen, it's religious infringement. And I want a court to tell me that my religious liberties shall be infringed, because apparently the Constitution is not a good enough reason. Yeah. You know, I'm fairly certain. Oh, yeah, Jeff, that is the exact story I'm referencing. A man was stabbed in the UK and he was arrested because the Sikh claimed the guy was being racist and the cops let him bleed out on the ground.

So, UK cops suck. Pretty much all the time they're arresting people for social media posts. Getting stabbed and bleeding out, that sucks. the riots that they're going to have because of it also going to suck pretty much sucks all the way around but will they have riots because i mean it's looking that way they've already got like large assemblies of people and the seek the seek community is kind of okay holding around this guy the seeks will probably riot i meant for the western europeans because i don't know man all the western all the western europeans are really rioty they shipped over here 500 years ago yeah but

still you can only you can only push your average peaceful person so far and and i'm going to be honest the immigrants in europe have been really pushing hard for a long goddamn time refusing to assimilate and trying to take over europe when um i mean i don't think that's debatable anymore when my long long house ancestors the french start pulling the guillotine's out of mothball i'll be impressed sure definitely i mean i I get that, but it doesn't go from zero to guillotine. We're starting to see protests and pushback in Europe. Protests of weak sauce.

But it's a start. They weren't doing that at all five or six years ago about this. Why does Stewart always have to pee on my Cheerios? I know I'll lose. It was supposed to be a half joke. Stuart, I wouldn't really... It's about the non-taxable donations we can use to fight the inevitable. legal battle with the county.

Yeah. I mean, and let's call what it is. I am so mistrusting of organized religion. I am hardly going to go start one. It could be a disorganized religion. Given our track record, it would be very disorganized. Leave it to Stewart to take

my flippant joke too far and be able to and start quoting frigging legally used to me. I know I would lose. This country is not prepared to have this country won't even abide by the Constitution. It's founding documents for God's sakes. It's not going to let religious liberty flies and

excuse to carry guns wherever I want. Well, I think it definitely depends on your state that you try it in. I mean, Illinois, that wouldn't fly at all. I don't think that would fly. Unless you can somehow get the Democrats to agree that you're a religious minority, in which case, you're good. Yeah, I don't think that's going to happen. happen.

I don't know. Rag was saying the left would have pulled it already if it worked. I mean, they kind of already did. They kind of already did. No. All right. One more little one. Then we have to talk about martial law.

Nick, what in the fuck happen in Kentucky? Their major metro areas gained enough voting power to override the rest of the state. Explain. Extrapolate. Well, major metro areas. areas tend to be left-leaning. Once the major metro areas gain enough political capital or political or political

influence through voting or whatever else, they will vote for left-leaning policies a la disarmament and various other things and fuck the entire rest of the state. Illinois is a perfect example of this. Ever look at like the voting maps by county. for Illinois, Phil. There's like six counties in Illinois that technically control our elections because they have like 60% of the population of the state. So Chicago and its collar counties and then Springfield. They control Illinois state politics regardless of how the rest of us vote.

It's not physically possible for us to outvote those counties. So the major metro area's policies are carte blanche ruling the state. And that's what's beginning to happen in Kentucky as well. So I guess here's the thing. Regardless of anybody feels about Thomas Massey, he was one of the few politicians. Oh, you're talking about that part? Oh, I thought you were talking about the changes to some of the regulatory structure. Now, Thomas Massey was thrown under the bus by Trump.

Yeah. That was directly funded by Trump and his super PACs to get rid of him. Yes, he did. Yes, Stuart, he did. And Trump put $38 million into making sure he would not get elected in the primary. But here's the thing. For every one thing Massey voted that pissed off conservative, he also did things that I kind of approve of. Like, he was the only one during the stupidity of COVID.

who was screaming bloody murder and tying up the house floor saying, you idiots have to come back here and vote in person because the law says so. He was the only one who was throwing shade, left, right, and center at the slush fund that was being created by COVID, going into hospitals and insurance companies. He's been one of the loudest, most strident voices screaming, release all the Epstein files, stop screwing around, let the public see all of it. He's been, if I recall correctly, he was one of the few that was also. screaming about, hey, we should let all the voters know who in Congress had a sexual assault

allegation. It had to be paid out by this mystery slush fund. Yep. So it's one of those situations where, yeah, and Stewart just said it. He agrees with him 80% of time. Here's my issue. I have never in my adult voting life agreed with any politician 100% of time. I don't know that it's possible to agree 100% of the time with any other adult. And I don't, I can't think of a politician that I would, I've disagreed with 100% of the time. Even Nancy Pelosi. Hmm. That's a hard one, isn't it?

She has great taste in ice cream, though. She's, she's got a really badass stock portfolio, but that's not a voting issue. Nope. Well, it is if you consider insider trading a voting issue, which I do. Yeah. I would have to dig hard into her voting history and see if there's anything I agree with. In Feinstein. You bastards pulling out the big guns.

Okay, but to be fair, she did say that getting shot sucked. I agree. Getting shot probably does suck. There is that. So, you know, there's one thing we agree on. But I guess my issue is at the end of the day, it's like, I feel as though, okay, now ragel, now you're just being ugly. AOC is a very heartwarming story about how you can come from, you know, being a bar fly to being a senator.

That's like rags to riches. A bartender. Okay. She had a job. That's more jobs than Biden has ever held. Now, Nick, embezzling money and screwing your constituents is a full-time job in this country. I really don't think it is because Pritzker sure has a hell of a lot of time to do everything else as well. well anyway i might dig by that with a response with a response steward but um i don't know

like i i feel like kentucky really i feel like kentucky lost a little bit on this and i feel like the country lost i don't know i don't know enough about his i don't know enough about the guy that did win the primary to make an educated statement on that because no offense i'm not in kentucky i'm not from kentucky I technically have no horse in this race, derby or otherwise. No, but the horse I have in this race is that two things. A, I don't like the idea that you can buy an election. And when you throw this much money behind it and the primary tips that direction, it kind of feels that way.

But my other issue. Did Joe Soros try to try to buy a presidential election recently by outspending all of the major competitors by at least 2x and he still failed? Guaranteed it wasn't just the money. But here's my other issue. And this might be the bigger one. Nick, you remember 2020? The election went a certain way. There was all of a sudden, for no explicable reason, an enormous uptick in Democrat voters, more than had ever been long before.

Numbers that were, numbers that were so lopsided, some people allege there might have been some, you did some. Tom Fuller going on at the voting booth. Well, we also had, we also had unprecedented numbers of mail-in votes. But here's the thing. The exact same thing just happened in Kentucky. The number of people that voted for Massey is damn there the same number that voted for him previously. And the number that voted for him against him was three and a half times what it was previously. Now that does, someone, especially in a primary that does raise some suspicions because primaries don't tend to be well attended by voters.

in a primary in an off year. Exactly. So here's where I get frustrated. You know that my pet peeve is hypocrisy, right? All the voices, all the talking heads in a conservative movement, all the talking heads on social media have been fucking radio silent about this interesting little voting habit in Kentucky because they're kissing the ass of the Orange Republican.

Probably. I mean, I honestly didn't look at any of the market. turtles for it. I didn't look that hard into it, but when I noticed that, I was like, hmm, you know,

that's interesting. And maybe, perhaps it's the case that people in Kentucky are that fed up with Thomas Massey. It is possible. And that's possible.

But again, my issue is, it doesn't fit the train. The same voices that scream bloody murder when it benefited Biden or being radio silent when it torpedoes Massey. All I'm asking for is some

intellectual consistency where if we if if the issue is when the vote looks cooked cooked we look into it and we make sure everything was done above board but if we're just radio silent because the big team man didn't like massie to me that just that that that that that just doesn't sit well with me i would argue that because of how influential elections are in our system of government we should be looking into every single election. It literally determines the path of the country into the future. As evidence, as evidenced by Virginia right now. Wow.

That would be an entire hour long episode to unpack all that freaking bull crap. And we really need someone from Virginia to come on if they want to talk about that. If anybody knows anyone from Virginia that's politically involved in all that, send them our way. Yeah, even if they have to wear like a balaclava and we disguise their voice. Even if they disagree with us. I'm okay with that. I love being disagree with. That's why I talk to Stewart so often.

Well, yeah. Speaking of Stewart, he caused the next bit. Yes. So, Stewart asked us to talk about martial law from our perspective. And in a characteristic, how do I pronounce this word? characteristically charitable moment. He prepped all the show notes for us, too. He did.

And we've ignored a considerable portion of them so far. Yes, there is that. But I did put into the notes. So I'm going to try not to read all this because we were supposed to do some research on this ahead of time. But I am in a crib from a lot of Stewart's notes because quite frankly, I did. Well, thanks for calling me out because I didn't study as much as I probably should have. I wouldn't call what I did studying.

I verified separately his notes because the man is brilliant. He is. He's a very smart guy, but trust but verify. Yeah. So martial law is the temporary substitution of military authority for civilian government in response to a profound breakdown of public order, natural disaster, or military invasion. Key words. Substitution of military authority for civilian government.

So that was, I think, one of the key things here. And it was one of the things that I'm really glad, like, we started off with the definition for that because I feel like a lot of people don't think about martial law as what it really is. Like when people see like National Guardsmen in the street, they think martial law, but it's not really the point. It's not the National Guard in the street. It's who has final authority over the civilian populace. Is it the civilian courts, and then by extension, law enforcement, or in the absence of those things, is it now military and military tribunals? Which is a very different. Yeah.

For any of us that have been subject to UCMJ in the past, Uniform Code of Military Justice, like, I can tell you that military tribunals are very, very, very different from a civilian court hearing. It's not so much beyond reasonable doubt as preponderance of evidence. Yeah. All right. When declared civilian courts, laws, and civil liberties are suspended, and the military commander wields supreme executive, legislative, and judicial power over the domestic civilian population. So in other words, with the exception of like, you know, really weird times from about 2020 to about 2022, if, if any, if a, if a, you have certain rights that are inalienable that can not be stripped away from you except by due process and yada, yada, yada. But if military law... Behold the due process. But if martial law has been declared and is actually in effect, whoever that military commander is can say, to hell with your rights, you're going to do what I tell you to,

or I'm going to throw you in the stockade. And that literally is how that's going to work. Yeah. Unfortunately or fortunately, however you want to look at it, there are situations where because of the nature of the events, say, during the Civil War. Big one. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus for a lot of the areas of the country and seized control of a lot of infrastructure in order to prosecute the war. I would argue the way he did it was very tyrannical and would make him a bad president, but he also did the whole fring of the slaves thing, which gets all of his arresting of journalists that published bad press against him, kind of whitewashes that.

way that was exactly the phrase i was going to use was whitewashing it's you know there's roosevelt and lincoln get a lot of passes on some pretty goddamn tyrannical things that they did under martial law or in the name of national security which is why whenever i hear that phrase i hear oh no it's just a little bit of tyranny it's tyranny light yeah it's like the low it's the low calorie less filling version of tyranny yeah and it oh i really don't think they should get the past they get i mean i don't think a lot of things yet here we are yeah there's that all right and there are three definitions we need to unpack real quick before we go too much further and that was state of emergency insurrection act and martial law now i'm going to lump a couple of these things

together because in both the state of emergency and the insurrection act being declared, the civilian courts and civilian law enforcement are still in charge. You might have National Guard. You might have military. They might be supporting law enforcement, but you do not have martial law until the civilian courts and civilian law enforcement are no longer able to provide basic governmental functions, which was something like we were talking about this a while ago. like I was I actually had I had to look it up just to like sanity check myself because I had always remembered there's this big kerfuffle during Katrina where martial law got declared but was never made official I declare bankruptcy yeah but but but that that is they in legal terms that's what happened martial like the threshold for martial law was never met despite the fact that there were no courts I'm sorry by the fact that

You got to see this one from Jeff. Low count less feeling tyranny like communism. No, no. Communism is the full three-course meal of tyranny. No, it's not. Everyone starves in communism. Yes, but you get force-fed extra tyranny. That's fair. You starve because it's empty calories, but you get force-fed the tyranny.

That's good, Jeff. Yeah. But like I said, like that's the thing of it is, in spite of the fact that during Katrina and know, like, you know, probably 60 to 70% of law enforcement, abandoned their post and left the state. Despite the fact that the civilian courts were not operating because large sections of the city were uninhabitable, despite the fact that local government was like operating from, in some cases, outside of the city limits. It was.

There was still government. There was still government chain of command. And the threshold from martial law was not met. Therefore, we did not have. martial law in in New Orleans post Katrina, which kind of beg the question of like, okay, if if that, which is one of the worst disasters in this area in my lifetime, if that didn't meet the threshold for martial law, what the hell does? You want to talk about a disaster that that did call for that? Sure. Stewart gave us a lot.

He did. The 1871 Great Fire of Chicago. Marshall Law was instituted for a few days. in order to maintain order and prevent looting. Now, I don't know, I know a lot of you guys are not from my area. The Great Fire of Chicago destroyed like 70% of the city. Let me actually look up with the exact percentage was. If memory serves, it even burned the river.

17,000 buildings were burned. One third of Chicago's population was left homeless and 300 people abouts were killed. Due to a cow knocking over a lantern. Hmm. Mrs. O'Leary's cow specifically. But it's interesting that they know that. Well, it's pretty easy to know because the O'Leary's survived. And they reported their barn being on fire before anybody else reported anything being on fire.

But due to drought conditions, high winds, the Chicago River didn't stop the fire because it was full of trash at the time that the fire went across the river. Nice. In fact, it's the reason for the Chicago skyline looking like it does now and the Chicago roadway is being laid out how they are now because it was purpose built after the fire into a grid system. Yeah. So looking through the list of the rest of these disasters and what I will probably do

with Stewart's permission is I will try to clean this up, put it into like a Google doc, and, um, I'll, um, I'll, um, I'll, um, um, I'll, um, um, um, um, I'll, um, um, um, um, um, I'll try to remember to post that on my Google Drive, and I'll just drop a link someplace so that everybody can get to it if they really wanted. 1814, Battle of New Orleans. Marshall law has declared because the British were coming. 1842, Rhode Island, declared by the state authorities during the door rebellion, which I think that might be closer to the point of, like, what does it take to trigger martial law? and that would be massive civil uprising that overwhelms the police and therefore the government's ability to do business. Here's the thing, though.

We're going to notice a pattern here. The earlier you go back in history of this country, the more often martial law was declared. And I think that a little bit of that, a little bit of that is technologically driven. Explain. Okay. So, Phil, when a hurricane hits the New Orleans area, what? do you do um well nick if it's below a certain threshold you buy beer and you sit at home until it stops blowing outside i'm talking about for your job you work for the government oh uh for my job

if it is and deploy somewhere else we we deployed to an alternate work site right you telecommute well no we literally we literally oh no i commute 300 miles away but you are signing in remote to do your job that you would normally do in the New Orleans area, right? So the ability for us and the government employees to work from a variety of locations and all the infrastructure we've built up gives them a better ability to maintain civil law and order during these events than they could in, say, the 1850s, 1870s. Okay. I see where you were going with that when you meant technology. I honestly kind of wonder

if part of what might be driving this is actually just sheer numbers in terms of police and the prevalence. I mean, post the militia act of 19, whatever was, the last time it was revised, you get the National Guard formalized, and budgets continue to expand for that. So now you can, now you have this whole force of soldiers who can be called up to bolster

a much larger law enforcement presence than what was around in the mid-19th century. That's fair. You do have a not a standing army, but a pseudo-standing force you can deploy to do that low-level policing and recovery efforts faster than having to get a militia together. Yeah. 1857 Utah territory imposed during the Utah War ahead of advancing federal troops 1861 declared by Lincoln but declared by

Brigham Young in Utah The Mormons declared martial law 1871 fire We already talked about 1892 enacted by the governor To crush violent riots

1900 galsin That's recovery efforts Against the hurricane Yeah Which again I mean like I would have to look at that instance in particular, but like for those of you not from the Gulf Coast or from

southeast Texas, like Galveston is basically a coastal town. And when they eat a cat four, cat five hurricane in the teeth, it is like nuclear bomb going off levels of catastrophic. It's, it's bad. I would argue it's almost worse than like Katrina sides wiping New Orleans because at least then you've got X amount of like swamped everything to try to take the steam out of it. But Galveston is literally right there on the beach. Yeah, you've got what, 60 yards of beach, 70 yards of beach, and then you've got major high rises now. Yeah. It's far like like, think of it like a cat-five hurricane hitting Biloxi or Gulfport, Mississippi, or Mobile, Alabama.

Or New York. Yeah. Where it's not just on the coast. but it's heavily populated. Like, it's one thing if, like, the Louisiana coastline gets hit by a major hurricane because it sucks for the people that are down there that are in harm's way, but it's not major metropolitan area levels of population. So the number of people you have to evacuate or care for is much less.

The resources are less, but that's the thing about a hurricane is usually you can flood resources into an area within a few days. As widespread as they are, it is a fairly localized event. Yeah, I mean, I half jokingly tell everybody that, you know, like a cat five hurricane is like an F3 tornado that wipes out seven zip codes. That's accurate. That's not an inaccurate way to state it for those of you who don't deal with hurricanes and deal with tornadoes instead. The damage comparison is similar. Well, I mean, just in terms of wind speed.

The wind speed of an F3 tornado is just shy of a cat five hurricane. gain. An F4 tornado puts its shame, but still. And don't even look at the damage profiles of a five. No, but here's the thing. An F5? How much territory does it really wipe out? Sometimes.

Several miles. So be like, well, let's see, the Joplin tornado had a one and a half mile wide path of devastation. And I want to say it was 150 miles wide, something like that. Mostly in farmland, but. Yeah, but the thing of it is that like, it did hit was gone. Yeah.

And as opposed to a cat five hurricane, which is zip code. Like, yeah, it, I'm not, I'm not exaggerating when I say it will wipe out seven zip codes. Like it will,

if you look at satellite imagery of major hurricanes and compared to the size of your state, except for Texas, because Texas is a weird situation when you start talking about how big a state is, but for any of the rest of y'all, when you realize that a cat-bip hurricane can swallow a third to a half of your state, you start to understand why down here we get a little nervous about a hurricane sometimes, because it is a factor of like, if it goes here instead of here,

your life's going to suck. It's just not going to suck as bad. Anyway. 1903, disarmed striking mine workers, 1906, another natural disaster. San Francisco fire. Yeah A couple more striking miners. Did striking miners do seem to raise some serious now?

1920 striking miners and armed conflict between unionizing miners and coal mine operators. Yeah, this one weird little thing here about 1931, East Texas and Oklahoma oil fields, declared by the governors to forcefully shut down overproducing oil wells. Yeah, it was cratering. It was cratering oil prices. And it was causing economic problems in other areas. Yeah, it seems like a perfect use of martial law to force economic policy through, you know, in spite of the free market. Yeah.

Well, you know, they, they had very high producing oil wells. And if you shut oil wells down, sometimes they can't be reopened at the same capacity. And so, yeah, they produced and they sold. And they were willing to sell as cheap as they could because they produced so much. And that was causing economic problems in other places. So 1934, more strikes. 1941, three years falling Pearl Harbor. That kind of heard.

Well, I mean, okay, okay. That one was ruled unconstitutional, though, because of how long it was, it lasted compared to the actual crisis. Yeah. I kind of want to, I want to rush through the rest of these because I don't want to make this. into any more of a slog that already is. 63 declared by the governor during civil rights movement. All right. So based on all.

I would argue that the one in Cambridge was also unconstitutional, but that's my opinion. I don't think you should be declaring martial law to deal with protesters. So here's here's my issue. Yes, but they still got away with it. They weren't. Yes. Well, you want to talk about getting away with things. 1941. What happened to all the Japanese people in the U.S., Phil?

1941 to 1945? They were sent to summer camp, Nick. I believe it was a camp where they learned how to concentrate. Yes. They learned how to concentrate. Very hard concentration. Yeah. Oddly enough, the same thing didn't happen to the Germans, or to a German immigrants. No, it's almost like it was racially based and not based on the conflict.

Oddly enough, it does kind of seem that way. What's that? FDR? Hmm. I wasn't, I wasn't alive back then. Uh, ragel. Should they have declared martial law during the Kenosha riots? Again, if the threshold is civilian law enforcement and courts are not operating, then by that standard, a lot of these other instances when martial law was declared, shouldn't

have been declared either. Well, okay. So, Bill, I don't know how much you know about the coal mine strikes and the coal mine riots and the quite literal battalions of men having gun fights at coal mines. If you're interested, if you'll watch it or listen to it. I actually listened to there was a podcast on the Martyr Made podcast, did a whole thing about this instance you're talking about. Very, very interesting. Something like the Battle of Blair Mountain, if I recall correctly, was 250 or 300 men in a shootout involving heavy machine gun emplacements. I'm sorry, but your local police force probably can't deal with a company's PMC group because it was a private military contractor.

It was the Pinkertons. Don't let anybody tell you it wasn't. And the Pinkertons are still around. The Pinkertons bought machines. guns and decided to machine gun a bunch of women and children that instigated the battle of Blair Mountain. Yeah.

Wasn't a nice time. Oh, God, now. I wonder if the Pinkertons are any better now. I don't know. What incentive do they have to be better? Cell phone cameras? No, Nick. What incentive do they have to be better? None. Thank you.

I'm just saying they could get caught easier with cell phone cameras. And just saying it, you're caught. Some people don't like bad press. The justice system can be bought. That's obvious at this point. Yeah, that's very accurate. I mean, you and I have had conversations about how you fix extra legal problems. It involves extra legal things.

Yeah. And I can't say anything else because I've been advised by my lawyer not to. And, you know, fortunately or unfortunately, the legal system is pay to play. 110% if anyone is considering getting a patent you better have a deep six figure legal fund so i will so i will say this much i had a criminal justice professor in college who i thought was the biggest douche canoe on earth he was this grumpy old man his career law enforcement officer who had basically you know screwed off to college to teach in his semi retirement and he said something one time that pissed me off so bad because at the time i was young and idealistic and I still believed that things work the way they're supposed to because it's the law. It's supposed to work that way. Fair and impartial and all that bull crap. He literally told me with a straight face that the rich get justice and the poor get prison.

And at the time, at the time. He's not wrong. But hold up. Don't beat me to the punchline. Damn it, Nick. 24-year-old Phil was still so firmly, like wanted so badly to believe that he, was just full of crap or he was just like a grouchy old fart and he didn't know what he was talking about or he was a crazy lefty lunatic or something but that wasn't really how things worked.

Sir, if ever you, if you are still out there and not in a hole in the ground, I owe you a fucking apology. You do. Because 24 year old Phil still wanted desperately to believe that what you were saying was just talking out of your frigging rectum. Oh my God. It took a while, but I caught on. it just I was just too young hadn't seen enough life yet oh absolutely thank you thank you for being

as gracious as you were in telling me that he wasn't that gracious he pretty much called me an idiot an idiot child well to be fair 21 idiot child fits I mean 24 I was 24 at the time I thought though like 24 24 years old engaged to be married combat veteran I was like I have lived more of life at this young age than most people have i just didn't know how much left how much was left to live you just hadn't run into the fun parts of nasty grams no anyway so getting to the point of what provoked all this so the whole point of this little trip down historical lane was that the root question steward wanted us to tackle was what do we think a modern martial law declaration would look like.

And he gave us some notes here that kind of was like his idea. And I think he's probably pretty spot on. But also, how could it be abused? And that is, I think, probably the more interesting part of this conversation. So, like, I don't disagree with what Stewart said here that, like, with a modern sprawling metropolis, you cannot have 100% full lockdown of the city. You got too much area, too much in and out. What you're going to have is, like, rolling patrols. You're going to have checkpoints in and out of the city throughout the city.

You're going to have high traffic areas that are courting off by the military. Baghdad green zones is basically what you're going to have. Exactly. And for those who weren't, aren't super familiar with that example, because you didn't serve or didn't study it. Like there's going to be movement. There's going to be people moving around. There's probably going to be black market activity. There's going to be goods trading hands.

People are going to be going to work. But you're going to have a level of involvement by the. the military in your daily life that you have never experienced before, your wildest fantasies of a police state will fail in comparison to what you're going to deal with in martial law from the military. It will not be, it will not be a situation of like, oh, there's a soldier. Hi, how are you doing? He's going to point a rifle in your face and want to see your papers and want to know where

the hell you're going and do your permission to go to work. And you might or might not get jammed up just because. he doesn't like the way you look. Yeah. And there will be no consequences for it because the military has full authority at that point. And I can tell you from having been involved in a natural disaster, in a military detainting command, even when martial law was not declared, the prevailing opinion coming from the military chain and command will be you do what you got to do, you protect yourself. And if it might give you away shit, you gag them bag, bag them, zip, tie their hands and feet behind their back and throw

in the back of the humpings. Yeah, sorted out on the back end. Yes. And like that is, that is not meant to be like we were given carte blanche to just abuse citizens. No. But it was,

but it was the expectation that you are to, and you are to conduct yourself as if you are in a foreign land in a hostile area, which might sound a little alarming for y'all who were not in uniform, but that is the personality you have to develop, especially post-Katrina when we were literally having pot shots taken at us just for fun. Like, we develop the personality very quickly of, if someone points a weapon to me, I'm smoking them in the middle of the street and I'm walking away.

Well, it only takes one crazy to kill half a squad. I mean, realistically, if they get the drop on you. And unfortunately, it also takes- At that point, you are to protect government property. Yes, Jeff, drone overwatch as well. That was like the one thing that we didn't have in play during Katrina that would definitely be in play now is there would be a lot. of drone activity in the scots.

I do think, though, we are far less likely to see martial law declared now with how easily abused and easily manipulated states of emergency have become. I do not disagree with that at all. I don't think that the negative press is far, far less for declaring a state of emergency than there is declaring even a limited section of martial law. And I don't think that matters, honestly. I think it does. I think optically it does.

Okay. Two politicians. It might not matter to you and I because the effect is not that terribly dissimilar, depending on some of the declarations of emergency that we've had. Look at COVID. I'm not speaking from our perspective as concerned citizens. I'm speaking from the government's perspective. And my reasoning is, admittedly, I am so frigging jaded at this point.

I don't think the government gives you shit. I think I don't. I don't think the government as the large entity does. I think individual politicians care very greatly about it. I don't even know if I agree with that at this point. For one reason and one reason only. COVID. COVID proved, COVID proved loud and clear that when a large segment of the population cries foul and screams bloody murder because their rights are being taken from them at gunpoint by police officers, that the other.

half the population will shout them down and there will be no consequences for the police, for the politicians, or for anybody else. You really saw no, you really saw no blowback from that in your area, did you? No. Now, admittedly, admittedly, the level of, in my area in Louisiana, there was a whole lot more jaw flapping about what was going to happen if people didn't comply than what actually did happen because a whole lot of people said, F you come and come and get it. if you want. And we realized, I'll give you a perfect example. A little bit of example,

microcosm, right down the street from my local government building, parish, the, the parish seat, is a playground. Public Park, open all hours. It's, it is literally right down the street from the parish, okay? And I used to take my daughter there, parents take their kids there. It is it was right down the road from the local children's museum. It was right there by the trailhead from the Tammany Trace, which is like a big biking and hiking and walking path. It was a really popular place. And there was always police presence through there, so it was a really safe area. Well, a couple of idiot politicians got it in their tiny little brains that like close contact outdoors for an upper restory infection is a freaking problem. So these people decided, as they did in many parts, many places around the country, that they were going to lock the gates because people were not safe enough to bring their children to play outside during COVID. A handful of parents said, I pay tax dollars for this effing park and literally push their kids over the fence, jump the fence, and they were letting their kids go in there and play. And I am told, I have it in good authority, that a local sheriff's deputy stopped, threatened to arrest parents and made a big old stink about it.

Well, of course, as soon as I hit social media land, the entire area erupted. And the next day, there were 10 times as many people with their kids in that park. And the parish immediately backed off, opened the frigging gates, and dropped it and stopped making it. It did work. But when I say consequences, I mean that the asshole local politicians faced no consequences. the cop who's trying to enforce stupid shit face no consequences. We saw a 60% turnover rate of our county board for their COVID policies. Not enough. Should have been 100.

Well, considering 40% voted against those policies, it was the correct amount. The ones that voted for it all got booted. But you had to wait for an election cycle for that to happen. We did. But you can't remove county. Okay, look, aside from violently. Oh, Nick, you were about to say something. I was about to disagree with.

Aside from violently removing county board members, which I thought was an inappropriate response at the time, I still do. The proper lawful procedure was followed by the citizens to correct the behavior. Do you really want any time somebody disagrees with a county board member to go out there and whack them and stack them? No.

I'm sorry, I was having an interim conversation. Oh, I understand. Now, Raggle is saying the governor got voted out next election. I don't count that because we still had to tolerate years of that stupid fat, pompous bas. Sure, but again, does your state have a procedure to remove a sitting governor? Not when he's a Democrat, and you have New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Shreveport in play. Okay, so functionally, the state did, through the proper or through the only procedure available, get rid of him at the next immediate opportunity. I think my issue

So my issue with the instance we're talking about and to a large degree my issue with Stewart's original question of how will martial law be Instead of talking about how martial law might be abused Let's take let's broaden this out just a tiny bit Because you brought it up You don't need martial law when you can just abuse the hell out of a state emergency

Exactly The issue is not martial law The issue is the abrogation of people's rights It is. And the installation of tyranny, no matter what you call it, and no matter what the point is. Because is there a justification for a short term? Listen, guys, y'all have rights, but I need all you to go to your houses and stay there for a minute while we forget and get control of the situation. Is there a point at which we can justify that and say, you know what, there are some situations where the military or the police, someone's got to say, I know you have rights, but not right this minute.

just go sit over there and chill and let us deal with this. For the audio listeners, Nick is unpacking. I don't know that my moral framework allows for that. I could understand other people's moral framework allowing for that. But if the rights are inalienable as spelled out in the bill of the rights, no, which they're not. In my opinion, no. Now, here's my issue.

you've heard and I'm sure you will agree with me but if you can suspend the citizens rights because there's an emergency then they'll just invent more emergencies they will I'm fairly certain my state has been under a state of emergency since about

2010 in one bit or another oh I thought you made like one continuous state No, no, no, like they rotate through the different emergencies, but I'm fairly certain that Illinois has had a state of emergency enacted. Not the same one, but a rolling series of states of emergencies since 2010 to today. But are they emergencies or in air quotes, emergencies. State of inconvenience a lot of the time.

Oh, so it's inconvenient when people have rights and you want them to be respected. It's inconvenient when the state has to follow its own policies and procedures. Yeah. Wea. We're so like I said, I guess for the next 10 or 15 minutes, like how, what are all the ways we think my, okay, Stewart is correcting me. My question was not how it would be abused. It's what do you think would happen for martial law to be declared? So, a couple of, mm-hmm.

state or nationally. Do we want, well, either or, but do we want to stick to Stewart's definition of martial law, or do we want to broaden out? Because you and I just got through saying that they will abuse state of emergency to basically grant them whatever power they wish. Well, do we honor the word or the spirit of what Stewart's asking? I like honoring the spirit of the idea, because let's be honest, the government doesn't honor the laws as written. so why should we because we'll go to prison or be killed for not honoring the spirit of the question that seems a bit extreme no for not honoring the the word of the law that's probably fair i mean

just just just just saying although you know i think in my state it's fairly simple things that would cause it um say the new madrid fault having a major clack off and causing the Mississippi River to run backwards again. That, I think, if that affected one of the major metro areas in the state, I think you could see a martial law type situation be enacted, because right now the areas in Illinois that were heavily damaged from the last major, major, new Madrid quake are very heavily built up with non-earthquake rated skyscrapers and structures.

because we really don't get a whole lot of them, but when we do, they're really, really minor or really, really horrible. Just so happens that it doesn't happen for hundreds of years at a time. That or Chicago going the way of L.A. in the 80s with the Rodney King riots. Would that be with or without rooftop Koreans? Who would be the roof Koreans if Chicago pulled that? Because of PICA, there could not be rooftop Koreans unless they were using Ruger Mini 14 ranch rifles. I'll allow it. But who would the roof Koreans be in Chicago?

Probably some of the Southside gangs, honestly, more likely than not. Then who would be the rioters? Probably some of the Southside gangs. Interesting. Look, aside from like, say, a major series of gang wars, massive rioting would probably be the only thing that would cause it in Illinois. Like we don't get hurricanes. Blizzards don't really call for martial law because you just kind of got to wait until the snow melts. Yes, it's inconvenient for traffic and transit, but martial law wouldn't really help get the snow off the roads any faster.

So really major fire, major early. earthquake or massive political unrest are really the only causes for it aside from say an external attack like a terrorist attack a very large large scale terrorist attack yeah and i mean honestly like given given given given katrina couldn't trigger a martial an instance of martial law the the only instances i can think of kind of specific to my area would be like wide scale wide scale riots that just completely overwhelm the local police and get to the point where they're just burning down city hall and government buildings

I think you get to that situation like I think before you get to that they declare a state of emergency and mobilize the National Guard that's likely what would happen but here's here's the trick though I think what would make that more plausible in New Orleans

is the fact that like you know you I've talked about the fact that like to get from where I am on the North Shore down to New Orleans, you have to go over one of three bridges, four bridges. Sure. There is no land bridge to get down there. Okay. Unless you are willing to drive from here all the way to Baton Rouge and then go south and come like down and around to get like the long way to New Orleans. So I think that if you ever had a situation that was bad enough and extensive enough and if there was enough coordination,

that they locked down the bridges. I think then you might be in a situation where martial law would get declared because at that point, there's not even a quick way to bring the National Guard in. You would have to literally military airlift and the only place in New Orleans

you could land like large groups of soldiers in military transports would be Lakefront Airport, which is not in a great area and could very easily be encapsulated in riots. and Louis Armstrong International, which has a runway plenty big enough to drop like a C-17 or some C-130s on,

but if that airfield gets overrun, because it's also not in a great area. Most airports are not built in great areas. Yeah, I guess I'm saying it's like, because those people can't afford to fight them. But if you had a wide no spread riot, if there was coordination, you wouldn't even need to like break the bridges.

You would really just need to pile up a bunch of junk cars on them, and that by itself would create, enough of a hazard because at that point now it's a recovery effort on a narrow bridge to get get the thing unwound so you can get military trucks through you can't just ram through them ragel saying don't forget boats and airboats um there is actually a seal there's a seal fastbo unit out of um stennis in mississippi that makes sense it's a good area to train for swamp stuff yeah well, plenty of that around here.

So yeah, I mean, I think massive civil unrest or something like a dirty bomb NBC attack in the city, New Orleans. Yeah, I could see something like that. But even then, look, 9-11, they just declared a state of emergency. Japan, when they had the, what was it? Oh, nerve gas attacks on the subways in Japan. It might have been Sarin. I think it was. Seren attacks.

They did their version of state of emergency. Didn't do anything like martial law. So I don't know. I just, I don't. Are we literally saying that the only thing that we can think of that would trigger martial law is just like a riot by half the population of a metro area? It wouldn't even have to be half. I mean, it would have. I don't even know if that would trigger martial law, though, just because of the fact.

Look, they will just use a state of emergency because they can get most of what they would get from martial law from a state of emergency without having the nasty PR. And I do think regardless of how you or I think about it, I do think politicians care about looking like that much of a shit heel because 99% of the time, their first priority is getting reelected. And being the guy that declared martial law and arrested a whole ton of people through it is not going to look great. Yeah, we might just have to agree to disagree about that. Because you have to understand that my point of view is so horribly warped by the fact that like... It could be. Our politicians have done so much fucked up stuff at this point and been caught. And there's been no consequences for them.

And they are still in power. And they are still, they are still multi-millionaires. and they're not in prison, and the evidence against them on an individual and a group basis is so extraordinary. I think they're quickly reaching a tipping point where they don't care. They might, but I don't think they're at that point yet. I think they're close.

You know how you can tell, Phil? They still pay to hide their sex scandals. They do. They still pay those fat checks to keep the hookers silent, Phil. Not because they still pay to keep the sex scandals quiet, but because they fought tooth and nail against releasing those records. Okay, I'll give you that. They're not quite there yet, but they're definitely heading there.

They could be getting there. Morgan agrees with me. Two-tier justice system. Although, I don't think sometime soon, I think we're already there. We've had a two-tier justice system for an extremely long time in this country, probably going back to prior to World War I. Yeah. I mean, now, I am not prepared to get into a discussion about two-tier just system right now.

I am going to put that down as a potential topic because this is a habit I got into a while ago when Nick and I wrapped up once many times and said, what was that thing we were supposed to make a topic out of? Because both of us have brain farts as soon as we're done. No, not Justin's system. Well, just in the system. I'm right. correct and two here just we will not be issuing sarin there are far better tools for the job red beans and rice and an enclosed space correct do 90% the same thing i was going to go corned beef and cabbage night at the local bar but that's also good i don't even want to gas myself with that

that's just violent beef and cabbage i got a co-worker that hits every one of those and everyone gets to pay for that the next day that's just mean spirited yeah Yes, he is. But he's an excellent machinist. I guess you have to forgive his eccentricities then. You do. So, yeah, I mean, Raggle, I guess, is going to have the wrap up for the night. But in the end, it takes a serious level of violence and chaos that overwhelms local law enforcement.

Yeah. But I said it's where it would have to be. But I don't think it's just that. I think not only do you have to overwhelm local law enforcement, because if you overwhelm local law enforcement, you've broken the government. the local government's ability to enforce their will. But I think you also need a situation that prevents other law enforcement agencies from coming into the area to assist. Because bear in mind, like, if a local constipulatory has an issue, they can bring it here. We call them parishes.

The rest of you call them counties. But you can bring in county assets. You can bring in state assets. You can bring a National Guard. But if there was something that shattered local law enforcement and government and prevented other resources from coming into the area to stabilize, then you might have a situation where the state has to say, hey, this is way beyond our ability to deal with this.

We have to declare martial law because then we can bring in military assets and they can inject, they can project power in a way law enforcement cannot. Yeah, I think that's part of the technology angle that I was bringing up earlier. we have the ability to redeploy and reassess and bring in outside help that was not really available in the 1800s, early 1900s, not nearly as much as it is now. So that begs the question is like what type of emergency do we think would rise to that level where you break local law enforcement, you exceed their ability to quell violence, you break the chain of command so that local government. can no longer function and you remove the ability to bring in outside resources

because I think that's, I think you have to in modern times you have to fill that whole Venn diagram before you get to the point of martial law. Mass civil unrest during a large scale war. Ooh, that actually might work because then you have the military

largely tied up with foreign engagement. And you have a recipe for massive civil unrest. because wars tend to not be super popular for very long. And especially when commodity prices start going through the ceiling, because you know, you're yeeding all of your industrial capacity into the war. If we got to into, involved in a war that required actual rationing, so like a war on the scale of World War I, World War II, something like that,

I could see it potentially occurring in localized areas. What if? And this is actually something you know, I told. talked about before. I can't believe you didn't remind me about it. But you remember the example I gave you last show about, um, we were talking about whether or not you were your own first responder and I said, well, what if you're like, what if you're the rancher on the southern border and the narco society that they like your ranch? That's fair. If you had a situation, now we are talking about like narco terrorists, but if we're talking about a foreign power, whether it's the maple,

the maple syrup, you hurt mafia, or we're talking about Mexicans, but if they suddenly cross the border and try to project power into our country, I think that might reach a point where local law enforcement is just completely out of their death to try to stem that. If you are in an active combat zone, de facto martial law, if not martial law per se, you know what I mean?

Like, it may not have been declared, but if you have front line combat going on through the middle of your county, it's martial law, whether or not it was declared, kind of situation. Because if you go play fuck around, find out next to frontline troops,

somebody's going to send you to Jesus. It's kind of like you are the first spawner, whether you intended to be or not. Exactly. Yeah, Stewart's saying, I ended that scenario that it would not happen without foreign invasion type situation.

That really is, that really is about the only way I can see it happening and I think the only thing that's preventing that for being an issue is we only have two immediate neighbors and neither one of them can force project like that not in the scale necessary even if okay but let's say hypothetically they tried okay you're dealing with trying to force project into a country that culturally views such as situations poorly and is reasonably comfortable

using violence to protect their homes and a fair proportion of them have arsenals that would scare most foreign nations in their homes given what was it the last I saw what was it two out of every three firearms on the planet are owned by American civilians

or something like that yeah what was it that the all the hunters in the state of montana washington oh all the hunters in the state of wisconsin is like what the during opening day is like the third largest third largest military in the world that if they were in a military yeah well look it that that's part of the reason why i don't know that martial law is super useful in the u.s at this point in time not because everybody's armed, but because of the scale of the country. You know, you no longer have three sheriffs in the county. You have 35 sheriffs in the county and all the municipal police with them and a couple

thousand state troopers and then the National Guard. You know, the scale at which government operates now is so much larger than it was in the 1900s, especially in the 1800s. Especially in the 1800s, that they can get away with not using martial law, which does not look good on them politically. They can just call it a state of emergency and bring it outside law enforcement and stabilize the situation that way. They have more tools. They have a less blowback potential option. And they have an easier time of using those other options. So basically, because because they're the local government's ability to project force, and by extension, the state government's ability to project force,

is so much greater than it was before. The likelihood that we would have a scenario that reaches the legal threshold of martial law is substantially less, even though the populations that would be either participating in or affected by said event are much larger. The state and the local governments still have dramatically more. more resources than they did before. So there's incentive. I'll go with that. I think that's reasonable.

I mean, if you look at it happening historically, between 1814 and 1892, one, two, three, four, five, six, six times. From 1900 to today, we've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine times in twice as much time. So the incidents per year of it aggregate are going down. The gaps are getting larger and larger. And the things that are triggering are getting more extreme. So unless we get red dawned, probably not going to see another instance of martial law. Yeah. Ooh.

Oh, no, no, no. I just figured it out. And we're going to end with this. I know what we trigger martial law. The economic collapse of a state. or of a city. But Detroit already did that. But of a state.

Detroit damn near collapsed Michigan's economy completely. But it hasn't. No, but it got really close to collapsing the state. What I'm suggesting... What I'm suggesting is if we were ever in a situation where like... Okay, so bear in mind that inflation is still a thing, and it's not two and a half percent or whatever the hell the Republicans trying to to tell everybody, it's substantially

worse than that. All you have to do is look at commodity prices from like 2020 to now and see there's this huge upswing in the graph, but that's another discussion. But if inflation continues to get worse and worse and worse, and if the economy has a major self-correction,

which I think it's going to, in about the next four or five years, y'all can write this down. It should. It should. It's going to happen sooner or later. But what I'm saying is if that happens. Economic corrections are inevitable. But if that happens and it precipitates mass unemployment, mass civil unrest on a national scale, I think we get in a situation where someone pulls trigger and says martial law because we have to to get control of the country when the entire populace comes unglued at the same time.

Or really simple, really simple, if we ever get to a situation where welfare checks stop across the country, you will have martial law in the air. by the afternoon. You would probably have it in some localized major metros. Yeah, that's possible. I'm not saying nation-wide, but I'm saying that somewhere we would have, Nate, we would have martial law because major metro areas

from one coast to the other would just erupt. If snap cards and food stamps stopped. Depends on the time of year they did it. Okay. Expand on them because I'm curious. Do it in December. You'll never see riots in Chicago or New York. I always forget

you'll have this thing where in the winter it gets like unseasonably irrationally cold outside and also hard to riot when it's minus 30. Yeah. See, it does that down. Let's freeze off. It does that down here for like,

I don't know, like four hours a decade. You've had minus 30? No. I didn't know that was possible down there. No. The coldest I have personally ever witnessed was 12 degrees above Fahrenheit. and it was like that for a few hours.

Dude, I've had, I've had a month where it never got above 12. That's because you live in hell. Yes, I do politically and environmentally. And I live in, I would call it God's Country, but this is the land that only the mosquitoes and the crazy Cajuns want. Accurate. All right. I don't know what else we can throw into this,

but I'm sure as soon as we wrap, Stewart's going to be like, you morons, you didn't talk about this and the other. You know what we can. add. If you're in the patron group, you can probably watch me do some terribly questionable things in the lathe. I sent a video to the group earlier today that has me questioning my safety.

Oh, Christ, Nick. Did you see that video I said to the patron show? I didn't. I was working like a Hebrew slave today at work. I've got two C clamps, a couple of bar clamps, a couple of improvised bar clamps, too, an angle plate and a cast iron a cast iron assemblage bolted to a flange plate

that is threaded onto my spindle is Rachel can yell at you finger grabbing goodness she told me to be safe I'll raggle it probably won't kill me I figured out how to rig up a dead man switch to a foot pedal so that if something goes catastrophically wrong I just got to not step on it

anymore okay there's that we're going to have fun. All right. Let's go ahead and punt this one out the door. This has been an hour and a half of us goofing off, talking about various things, including martial law.

I really don't expect that I'm going to live to see an instance where it is enacted again, but I've been wrong before, and I might be wrong again. But I am still of the opinion that government is going to misuse and abuse any power we give them. Oh, absolutely. So we should tread. very lightly on the idea that the government has the ability to just suspend our rights because they say so.

Yeah. But just remember, when they have more guns than you do, they get to make those decisions. But they don't have more guns than we do. That's the point, Nick. That's the point. Matter of fact, podcast is going to go out the door. My legal representation does not want me to go any further down that discussion. I'm pretty sure Nick's lawyer doesn't want him to either.

My lawyer says that there is nothing in the Illinois statutes that prevents me from manufacturing a gatling gun in my basement. And they're willing to defend you criminally if it comes to that. They are my criminal defense attorney, yes. Excellent. We will encourage your further bad behavior privately. All right. Talk to you all another week. Bye, everybody.

Thanks.