My Fellow Americans…We Have Lost Our Way

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If I was president of the United States and I was giving a speech from the Oval Office to the nation, I’d start it a little bit differently than what happened yesterday. It’d be, my fellow Americans, we’ve lost our way. A new poll found that American voters have a neutral mistrust of the other side.

and are actually open to exploring alternatives to democracy. Not democracy, we don’t have a, it’s, again, we don’t run a pure democracy. Democracy doesn’t present, the word doesn’t present itself once in the United States Constitution. We’re a republic, okay? We have democratic ideals will get us to that point in time. But both Democrat and Republican voters believe it is acceptable.

to use violence to stop the opposing party from achieving its goals. Majority of voters that support President Biden or former President Trump believe that electing officials from the opposing party in 2024 would create lasting harm in the United States. 52% of Biden supporters say individuals who support the Republican Party are a threat to American life.

and 47% of Trump supporters say the same about Democrats. 41% of Biden supporters say they believe people who support the Republican Party and its ideologies have become so extreme in what they want that it is acceptable to use violence to stop them from achieving their goals. 38% of Trump supporters say it’s okay to use violence to stop Democrats.

from achieving their goals. The poll also found that both Biden and Trump supporters are open to using undemocratic means to achieve the party’s ideals. They say that democracy is no longer a viable system of governance. We should explore alternative forms of government to ensure stability and progress. That was 31% of Trump voters, 24%…

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of Biden supporters. We’ve lost our way. I mean, this type of polling could have been done in Nazi Germany, pre-Nazi Germany before the rise of Hitler. It’s been used throughout history. This is gonna be one of the more frightening, in my opinion, podcasts that you’re gonna ever hear me do here on the program, but it is a reality check. It is. I mean, I’ve been…

reading all morning long here trying to figure out how I’m going to, you know, put this together and present this to everyone. And I grabbed a column by a professor from Northwestern, he’s a professor from actually Slavic languages. His name is Gary Saul Morrison. And he wrote a piece about, again, look at like he’s a professor of Slavic languages.

name of the column is Dostoevsky knew it can happen here. Now Dostoevsky I’ve talked about him in prior podcasts in late 1800s very famous writer crime and punishment possessed and one of my favorite parts of one of his books the grand inquisitor but I want to read to his column we

It’s spot on and it’s frightening in so many ways. I mean, again, I saw this poll that I just told you about and I’m like, why aren’t the major news networks talking about it? Why isn’t anybody in Washington DC, any of our political leadership talking about this saying, listen, we’re going in the wrong direction. We’ve lost our way. We’re on the wrong path. But no, we don’t get any of that.

Anyway, from Dr. Morrison’s column, as I read about Harvard students demonstrating in favor of Hamas and educated people proclaiming that decolonization should be pursued by any means necessary, I thought of Dostovsky’s reaction a century and a half ago to atrocities committed by the Ottomans as they suppressed uprisings among their Slavic subjects. This was a case apparently unknown.

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to today’s decolonizers in which a Muslim empire persecuted colonized Christians. The European press was then filled with reports that now seem familiar. Whole families were wiped out. Women raped and tortured. Living people humiliated, corpses abused, children slowly murdered before their parents’ eyes. And in one case that particularly shocked Dostovsky, a young child forced to watch her father being flayed alive.

completely. The child, Dostovsky reported, was being cared for in Russia, where she repeatedly fainted as she recalled what she witnessed. If it seems that only uncivilized people could be such sadists, Dostovsky cautions. Know that the same thing could happen among civilized Europeans as well. And boy was he spot on.

For the moment, it is still against the law, he writes, but were it to depend on us, perhaps nothing would stop us despite all of our civilization. For the time being, people are simply intimidated by some sort of habit. But if some progressive expert, sound familiar? This is written, okay, a century and a half ago. If some progressive expert were to come up with a theory,

showing that sometimes flame skins can benefit the right cause because the end justifies any means and if that expert were to express his view using the appropriate style, then, believe me, there would be respectable people among us willing to carry out the idea, despite our sophistication.

and professions of compassion. All that’s needed is for some new fad to appear and people would be instantly transformed. Not everyone, of course, but the number of adherents to the new fad would grow while others would be afraid or embarrassed to cling to old ideas. And then, where will we find ourselves? Among the flayed or among the flayers? After 9-11,

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It turned out that the terrorists were often well-off and well-educated. Cruelty often thrives among the sophisticated. I say that time, how many times has that been used? It’s, and it’s so true. Cruelty often thrives among the sophisticated. Dostofsky recalls the French terror when people were humiliated and murdered in the name of the highest principles.

and this after Rousseau and Voltaire. We know, as Dostoevsky could only suppose, that during the Stalinist terrors, millions were routinely tortured in the most degrading way possible, and that during the collectivization of agriculture, millions more were deliberately starved to death with young Bolshevik activists, idealists, brought in to enforce the famine and take food away from children.

In the West, New York Times, intellectuals justified such behavior because it was done in the name of socialism and anti-imperialism. Dostofsky adds that there is no need to resort to examples from the past because the same dynamic can occur in any place at any time that allows the dark side of human nature to show itself. Again.

we not showing the dark side of human nature on a regular basis here in this country, the way that people speak to each other in Washington, DC, the way that our leaders act, we are. Basically, dark side of human nature to show itself clad in the language of whatever passes for progressive and enlightened.

Believe me, Dostofsky addresses his readers, the most complete aberration of human hearts and minds is always possible. It’s a terrible mistake to imagine that thuggish deeds are performed only by thugs. And he talked about his early years as a revolutionist. He says that his group could have readily performed terrible acts.

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and they were composed of sophisticated people that went to the equivalent of Russian, you know, Ivy League schools in Russia at the time. It was the equivalent. But despite regarding themselves as a cultured elite, or perhaps because they did, few of us could resist that well-known circle of ideas and concepts that had taken such a firm hold on young society. Then it was called theoretical socialism, but it could have been anything. And there is no good reason to think that even murder.

would have stopped us, not all of us, of course, but at least some of us surrounded by doctrines that had captured our souls. Dostofsky recalls that in his novel, The Possessed, he showed that even the most innocent hearts can be drawn into committing monstrous deeds and feeling proud to have committed them. And therein lies the real horror, that one could commit the foulest and most

Villainous act without at least being a villain. And this happens all over the world since time began. The possibility of considering oneself and sometimes even being in fact an honorable person while committing obvious and undeniable villainy is a possibility that we overlook at our own peril. Century later, Alexander Schulz and Eason

contemplating the idealist Russians who joined in torture and the enlightened Western intellectuals who whitewashed it asked why? How come in Shakespeare’s villains they only murdered a few people while the Bolsheviks killed millions? And he answered this question, he says that no one thinks of himself as evil. To perform evil deeds a person must discover a justification for his actions.

so you can regard stealing and humiliating and killing, it’s okay. Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble, and so conscience restrained him. He had no ideology. Nothing like we have today. Anti-imperialism, decolonization to allay any pangs of guilt whatsoever.

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and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination so that he won’t hear the reproaches and curses but receives praise and honors.

The doctor, Dr. Morrison continues. He says, I’ve heard commentators worried that cancel culture and suppression of diverse opinions might lead to a soft totalitarianism. He says, if only. We need to recognize, now pay close attention here. Okay, this is, it’s frightening. Okay, I read this.

I’ve read this column several times. Every single time to this point in time, it shakes me. We need to recognize that some of those who justify Hamas’ atrocities would be ready to perform them against their designated enemies.

We all know that to be true. We don’t talk about it in polite society, but we know this to be true, that it’s a distinct possibility. And unlike Dostoevsky’s Turks or today’s Hamas, they would have high tech means at their disposal to extend their reach. I fear that the horrors of the 20th century may prove only a foretaste of much worse

in the near future. Again, this is a warning, but we are well on our way. We’re well on our way down this path. And the polls, read the polls, you see these types of things and they, these polls scared the crap out of me. It’s, this is, like I said, the horror movies are showing on Halloween. This poll that we talked to, I mean, it’s.

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How does it not scare you? We need leadership in this country that is gonna work to try to actually bring people together and get us off this path. Because again, you read from this and what people are thinking and alternatives to our current constitution and the willingness to use violence.

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We need a sharp change in direction. Watchdog on wallstreet.com.