Left Face
Join Adam Gillard and Dick Wilkinson while they talk politics and community engagement in Pikes Peak region.
Left Face
No Kings Day, Columbus, and Nostalgia
What if a holiday label could teach you everything about power? We start with the fight over Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples Day as a living lesson in how culture gets replaced, co-opted, and defended—and why nostalgia is such a potent political tool. From there, we pull back the camera (literally) on protest coverage, showing how tight frames and smoky angles turn a two-block action into a “city on fire.” When fear takes the mic, escalation becomes easy.
As veterans, we talk plainly about what we’ve seen at ICE facilities: pepper rounds fired at a priest, riot lines moving to punish rather than protect, and a growing haze where impersonators mimic federal agents to harass vulnerable communities. That’s not just a policing problem—it’s a civic one. We break down how modern resistance actually works: tail-number tracking, open-source mapping of operations, and real-time alerts that keep protests visible, lawful, and effective. When platforms silence observers in the name of “safety,” the public loses a critical check on state power.
Shutdown politics threads through the hour, but not as a budget parlor game. We ask what’s worth a hard stop: premium hikes—or drawing a line against active harm? With fractures showing on the right and real economic pain hitting farmers, service members, and families, pressure won’t come from sound bites; it’ll come from consequences. We also tackle the uneasy “peace” in Israel–Gaza and the profit-churn of reconstruction without accountability—another reminder that transparency is the guardrail, at home and abroad.
If you’re planning to show up for No Kings Day, we’ve got you: clear de-escalation steps, how to document safely, and why discipline—not outrage—wins hearts and ground. Listen, share with a friend who’s on the fence, and tell us: where do you draw the line, and how will you help hold it? Subscribe, leave a review, and join us on the ground—peaceful, visible, and prepared.
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Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Left Face. This is the Pikes Peak Region podcast where we talk about politics through a veteran's point of view. I am your co-host, Dick Wilkinson, and I'm joined this morning with Adam Gillard. How's it going, Adam? How are you doing, Dick? I'm doing good. Yeah, I'm doing pretty good. I am uh I'm gonna be doing some traveling next week. Oh, yeah. So I'm getting ready for that. Um tomorrow is uh holiday, uh, which with a little bit of controversy associated with it. It is no longer Indigenous People's Day because that's not conservative, right? But we've got to go backwards in time. Did they say it's Columbus Day? Yeah, yeah. Trump, it's been, you know, Trump doesn't acknowledge Indigenous People's Day. But it's Columbus Day officially. He signed it on Saturday or something like that.
SPEAKER_00:Presidential, you know, executive order. Like I how do people like agree with that? You know, be like it like old timey.
SPEAKER_01:People like old timey stuff. That's it. It doesn't take any more value than that. Remember when this happened when you were a child? Wouldn't you like that to happen again? Like, that's it. There's no more value or depth to it than that. Yeah. Old, this is conservative, this is backwards, this is old. Would you like that? Yes. Okay, cool. Yes, that's it. Yeah, it has also has no more meaning than that, right? Oh, the one joke though that I heard that was really funny was um President Trump is hell-bent on getting rid of all the Hispanic people in the United States, but he is you know championing the hero. He calls Columbus a hero, and he's like, Columbus's job was to bring boatloads of Hispanics to America. The reason they're here is because of Columbus. And now you, you know, a couple hundred years later, are like, what are all these Hispanic people doing? Yeah, yeah. Reality has never been as strong. No, those two dots couldn't connect. It doesn't matter how you wrote them down, how you explained it, it would never connect for him. Yeah, that's that's no surprise. Because his nostalgia is based on the the 1940s uh, you know, Columbus Day concept of whatever, right? Right. It has nothing to do with actual Christopher Columbus or today. Yeah, you know, it's frozen in time on something that happened back in the day. I don't think he even has many like of his own thoughts anymore.
SPEAKER_00:I think Stephen Miller has his ear so much that that like just feeds him what he needs to know and say.
SPEAKER_01:Administration has very much been a like other people are yeah punching the puppet arms at some time. Yeah, I mean, and I yeah, I think he still um if he says no and just completely disagrees with everybody and wants to behead somebody, like he can do that, right? You know, but yeah, but for sure the Project 2025 people are seeing this as they're they're really the ones driving the train.
SPEAKER_00:Well, absolutely, you know, yeah, yeah. Well, and and it doesn't surprise me like when somebody gives you a 900-page plan, like well thought out, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And they'll say, We're gonna get you elected so we can do this plan. Yeah, you have you don't even have to read the plan.
SPEAKER_00:This is for us to execute. You just have to get elected. There's no work for you to do here.
SPEAKER_01:You just sit here and so I assume Columbus Day was on page 800 of that, not every page documents.
SPEAKER_00:Somewhere in the back. Yeah, so there you go.
SPEAKER_01:Local, that's the uh that's that's what's going on. Man, this is crazy. That's tomorrow, so get ready to celebrate. Yeah, whatever you celebrate. It'll be Indigenous people then. Yeah, I'm just working. I'm gonna celebrate anything tomorrow. I don't really care, you know, like one way or the other. America as a piece of land was here before any of the people were here, and now I live here, and that that's it.
SPEAKER_00:That's all. Well, I think it's good to take time and like recognize people because um, for so long, uh contributions to society in general just get pushed aside, and just for no reason. It's just like, why is it so wrong to recognize indigenous people? There's nothing wrong with that. Yeah, sure. They're good people, they they helped us, you know, us white folks, and you know, uh adapt to the right.
SPEAKER_01:This conversation reminded me of something. Um, there's been these historical, I thought to myself, I might not ever experience one of these. Like for real. There's these historical um examples of like, uh I'm a Christian, but Christmas happens on December 25th because of Saturnalia. Period. It was to step on the pagan holiday. Nobody knows what day Jesus was born. Yeah, right. Like nobody knows if he was born in the winter or the summer or whatever else, right? Like we really don't know, right? But we picked that day because it was already had some convenient European traditions built into it. And so we said, let's co-opt those European traditions and change it from this pagan Saturnalia to Christian Christmas, right? Keep the tree. 100% happened, right? Yeah, and so we're seeing that happen in this argument of is it Columbus Day? That would be Saturnalia, I guess, right? And is it or is it Indigenous People's Day? That's Christmas, right? Somebody wants to replace it because one thing is offensive to the senses and to the masses, and the other one is more socially acceptable. I mean, just black, don't get too far into it.
SPEAKER_00:Take it at abstract face value, right? I'm gonna dive in.
SPEAKER_01:There's a current cultural tone, and then there's a replacement cultural tone. That has happened in the past, yeah, right. Okay, and I didn't think I would ever witness how that goes down, right? Because historically we always think about it like there was no conflict over that change. Yeah, like people were just like, oh, that's great. We have Christmas now. And like everybody adopted it and loved it. No, there must have been a couple, you know, a hundred years there where people were like, What are you doing? Right.
SPEAKER_00:The calendar itself, yeah. You know, switching over to the Gregorian calendar, Junior calendar. Yeah, yeah, there's no like chalk line that gets snapped, and everybody's like, okay, cool, we're doing this, guys. Right, exactly.
SPEAKER_01:So I just see I yeah, I think this is one of those, it's it's a slightly smaller scale example, maybe, but but it's the same cultural replacement of one thought with another, and one is now no longer acceptable, and the other one is forcefully acceptable, right?
SPEAKER_00:Well, and and that kind of leads me to another thought. You say, you know, replacing one thought with another. Yeah. Well, we see the administration forcing thoughts, you know, about you know, Democrats being violent, sure, and protests being violent and not peaceful. Yeah, and then you know, the the the secretary of the homeland security goes to the war zone of Portland and gets faces down a frog or and a kind of clowns. That was funny.
SPEAKER_01:That that should be the transition into our first like real topic here, the ice of securities, right? Let's talk about that.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so the the what's coming out, and even President Trump at one point has said, is what I'm seeing on TV not the reality.
SPEAKER_01:It was either the governor of of Oregon or the mayor of Portland. He's like, What I'm seeing on TV, like, is that not true? Right, right, yeah. They're like, no, sir, it is not true.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, you're being fed a lot of BS. I mean, in an administration that historically uses pictures of old things and does you know a lot of like media manipulation. Yes, I can only imagine what kind of information they're feeding him. Yeah, because he's not going to take time to fact-check anything. Yeah, you know, true. Like he takes whatever Stephen Miller says as the gospel, and Stephen Miller's saying take the handcuffs off, boys, go get them.
SPEAKER_01:It's very easy if you're not on the ground to take pictures and even video. Um, you know, cinematographers understand how to do this, where it looks like there's a lot of people there, but it is not. You just you you get a depth, you get a focus of the line of the people up front and then blur in the back, and you can't tell how many people are there. Yeah, if there's anything that looks like smoke or fire in the picture and you can get the right angle, it could look like there's 50 people standing around something on fire. But there's not, you know what I'm saying? It's a camera angle, right? Right, and that's what required to make the ice facility protests look like an entire city is burning down because they're never more than a two-block radius from the building itself. Yeah, there's never been more than a couple thousand people like at the most in even in LA, like LA when it was fully packed up, right? There's like two, three thousand people at the most within two blocks from that building. And now the same thing's happening in every other city in Chicago, in Portland, in Dallas, anywhere where there's dis you know problems around the ice facilities, super local. Uh, but the people telling story make it seem like it's super out of control. Yeah, and it's not at all.
SPEAKER_00:Until Ice Escalades, did you see they shot a priest? I did see that hold the uh in the head with a pepper ball or whatever.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, they shot him in the head with a pepper ball, and then after that happened, and again, we're talking there was like less than a hundred people outside that fence. Yeah, there was more than a hundred armed troops there, right? And a hundred citizens, and they came out and marched him down the street. First, let's not call them troops.
SPEAKER_00:These are unqualified, like there.
SPEAKER_01:I don't know if there were National Guard people there or not, is what I'm saying. There were ICE people that are not separate those. Yeah, okay, fair. I thought at that facility, the National Guard was there. Okay, I think they were there. Okay, and so what I'm saying is not necessarily that it was troops on top of the building. I think that's for sure ICE people. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. No, no soldier would shoot somebody like that. Right. Like I just exactly I'm the Norman guy, and I'm telling you, we wouldn't do it, right? So, and then what happened next? I also can't attribute to soldiers acting the way soldiers should act. The probably 50 people uh in a you know, a band, like the squad uh riot control movement, right? Uh structure where they were like 10 people wide and five layers deep, start walking down the street. And then when they get to that pastor, they bear sprayed him in the face, like hard, like soaked him down, bear sprayed him, dude. And he, no, no weapon. A priest. A priest, yeah. Don't think he's carrying as a collar. Yeah, yeah. Holy cow. Yep, less than a hundred people there, nothing's on fire, nobody has a weapon. They march down the street and bear sprayed him. Like, it's just amazing, man. I mean, like amazing in a bad way, you know, like jaw-dropping. Can't believe what I'm looking at.
SPEAKER_00:You know, yeah, yeah. There's got to be photos of that and oh yeah, and they should be plastered. I saw it, I saw it.
SPEAKER_01:It was that is horrible. It was terrible, dude. It was terrible. And that's on top of that. And there was nothing going on outside of that building that was dangerous to be able to do that. They were just people yelling at them. Like nothing. They weren't climbing the fences, there was nothing on fire, there was no guns, there wasn't even that many people there. Like there weren't enough people there to make the facility be in danger. Yeah, you know what I'm saying? If they all tried to climb the fence at the same time, they could have stopped them. You know what I'm saying? It wasn't enough to feel like you needed to open fire on anybody, no matter lethal or non-lethal.
SPEAKER_00:And I'm sorry, did you what was it uh, or who was it that sprayed the bear spray or was it a it was a crew.
SPEAKER_01:I I don't know if they were ice or what, but it was it was a riot squad that moved down the street with you know with with uh shields and batons and and just started like, hey, back up away from the gate that they that where the guy got shot, they decided they wanted to get everybody further away from that gate and essentially down to the end of the block. Yeah. So they're trying to move all the all 100 people about 100 yards down the block. And when those people were still standing there, they just started attacking people.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And that's why I would assume that those are ICE folks because those they're getting zero training. These are folks that are signing up to do this and getting paid really well, so they're gonna try and do it as best as they can. Yeah, you know, and they've never had an opportunity like this in in their life to just go do well.
SPEAKER_01:Genuinely, you know, authority, right? Like they've been handed genuine authority.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, not legitimate authority, but authority. Yeah, top cover, let's call it that.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. I mean, everything they're doing is unconstitutional. Yeah, and that's why they're having them cover their faces because they know it's unconstitutional, and there's no protection for like when things you know hopefully change you know with with our elections, like folks need to be held accountable. Like this, like to shoot a priest, to to rip you know families away from each other. And even if they are here illegally, it's a misdemeanor. Like, seriously, like they give trillions to our economy, farmers are are getting abandoned now, you know, like they're not there's their fields aren't getting harvest. Like we're seeing the repercussions of all this shit, and people voted for it. And it's it's like so. Hopefully, once things come back to normal, these ice folks that they find accountability. Some accountability, yeah. Yeah, like I this is they're they're not law enforcement, they're not military, uh, they're not trained well at all. They're just goons. They're the they're the brown shirts going around beating people up right now.
SPEAKER_01:That is true. Um, Christy Gnome was at uh one of the facilities, and like you said, you know, I'm on the building surveying the you know, the war zone, yeah, and there was nobody there. There was like two people and they were both in costumes, right? Like no, nothing that even could have looked dangerous. And and honestly, that was like the perfect uh exclamation point on the whole topic, right? Is that she flew out to this place, climbed up on the building, looked down at the street, and said, Oh, oh right, nobody's here.
SPEAKER_00:So I haven't turned on news anywhere really a whole lot, but you you mentioned you you watched Fox News, you know, yesterday. Yeah, to try and get that other side of it. What kind of stuff did they say on like gnome being on top of the building? Oh, and did you see the guy showing him around with the the SOG thing on his arm? No. Overweight dude with a beard. Yeah. This is a week after Heg Seth. So let's get rid of overweight dudes with beards, and then he's up on the building, like showing the secretary route. I believe that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah. So on Fox, what they're talking about is um they are saying that Portland is in fact on fire. It is in the upside-down land, and it's being run by communists, and they're eating children, basically. That's what they're saying on Fox.
SPEAKER_00:And that's not far off from what the president's saying. Okay, so because the president said in Chicago, 4,000 people have died in a short span of time. 4,000. Yeah. Like, what are you talking about? Yeah, they've had a couple hundred murders this year. This year, right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So which is still terrible. Like, that number is still a lot. Yeah. But 250, 300 or 4,000 in a couple months, like it's made up, right? It's totally fabricated. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And for local law enforcement to cede power to federal authorities over lies like that.
SPEAKER_01:Well, and that's really why Fox is bashing on, like, that's why they're willing to feed the narrative that Portland is on fire, is because it's a sanctuary city. Oh, period. And Fox is like all fully loaded on deck against sanctuary city. So they'll tell non-truths if it's associated with a sanctuary city. Can you believe those radical liberals are housing criminals in their city? And this is what you get. And then they'll show like once, once or twice a week. So here's the one thing about Portland, a detail that we should draw out a little bit. Portland is in fact a sanctuary city. Portland is in fact weird, as their stickers say, right? Portland has people are protesting there. It wouldn't matter if bubblegum was green instead of pink. They go protest it, right? Like that's the kind of place that Portland is, right? So Portland leadership got wise to that and said, let's make a little cordoned off area that basically, if you want to occupy Portland, come on down here. It's open for business. You can come down here and complain about whatever you want. It's kind of like a protest zone, right? It's the protest zone, right? Yeah. And so that is an authorized protest zone. You could come down here and do anything you want, camp out, yell, scream, banners, Chinese dragon heads. We don't care, right? And there, there you get a place where you can go with a camera almost any day of the week and find people doing crazy stuff, right? Yeah. Being what looks like violent, being what looks like offensive towards the police, because the Portland police are there and they do get in skirmishes all the time, right? And again, back up the Portland police aren't there to just let people burn things. Right. They're stopping them from burning things, right? Because it's there's an apartment building right next to it. It's a park, right? Yeah. And so that's what Trump is hearing people that live on the east facing side of that apartment building call the White House every day and say Portland's on fire.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:All 100 of the people that chose to live on the east side of that building, and they should sue the mayor for letting people protest outside their window every day. That's really what needs to happen. It's a local issue with a local ordinance where there is a fish bowl full of protesters at all times. So you need to move that to where it's not in the middle of a residential area, right? Like that's the mayor's problem, not the president's problem, right?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. It's kind of funny. I was we were talking with somebody yesterday about uh social media and like why I don't care about it and that I just don't follow it. Because if I start caring about what other people you know think about me from like across the world, then you're not listening to the folks that are local to you. For sure. You know what I mean? Yeah, like huge distractions. So many things going on. Huge distraction. So many things going on here locally that we can be a part of it and to affect real change here.
SPEAKER_01:But you'll get some, you know, just somebody with a bone to pick from like South Carolina, right? That'll start stalking you around on social media. It's like they don't even know what you're talking about. They don't live where you live, you don't live where they live. You have no idea, but they're like, You're dumb, you're dumb, you're this. Yeah, I had that. I had that. It's ridiculous. I got off of Facebook. Like, I'm so glad I got rid of all that stuff. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. We get, you know, uh some hate mail here here and there. Yeah, and it's it's not you know terrible, but it's still like what drives people to listen to something that you hate, yeah. Take the time to respond to it and think it's gonna change my mind.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, right, exactly. Yep. The uh well, the ice stuff continues. Oh, we've talked about this, and we should spend a little moment on this there in this episode. We have said, hey, we're concerned, me and Adam are concerned about fake ice arrests, people pretending to be ice, because ice has set the stage where if you're in a suburban and you have a gun on your hip, you're an ice agent. Ta-da! Yeah, right. We all have gators. Yeah, right. Like the there's nothing required to prove that you're an ice agent other than tackling somebody, right? Like that's how you prove you're an ice agent is you tackle somebody, right? And so um it's happened, right? I watched a news article and I read something else about the increase in not just like police impersonations, but specifically ice impersonations. That there are people that are gearing up, driving around in their own pickup truck, or you know, like I got a white suburban or my buddy's got a white Tahoe. Yeah, that looks official, and they'll drive around and harass people. And there's videos of it happening now. It's not imaginary anymore. That's just these crazy people that go out and start racially harassing people and they put on fake gear, fake badges, carry real weapons. It's happening. I mean, like a lot in the last few months has happened like there's like a dozen evidenced, documented times where somebody has either harassed or tried to hurt somebody under the fake guise of being an ice officer. Yeah. Again, it gives these people who are crazy a license to play pretend, and it's easy to do now, right? Like it was hard to look, maybe it's hard to look like an FBI agent. I don't know, maybe, maybe not, right? But like if they were gonna go that route, right? It's like a whole different concept, right? Versus fake badge, pickup truck, I'm an ice agent, right? That's all it takes. And then the starter kit is like available at Walmart. Exactly.
SPEAKER_00:And what's frustrating is you sound the alarms, and like you said, we talked about it before, and we're lunatics for it. Yeah, right. You know, like, oh, we're all calling for violence. No, we're saying you guys are setting us up, you're setting everybody up for this. And uh, you know, I mean, their their standard right now that they have to, you know, behave to is ice agents chasing down 15-year-olds on bikes and harassing them for paperwork. Like I've seen videos of that. ICE agents crashing into cars, is and then saying, Oh, we they swarmed us with 10 vehicles, and there's a guy with a car with the camera behind them. Did you see that? The lady, yeah. The lady gets shot, go to the has to go to the hospital by an ice agent because she's sort of had 10 cars swarm around them, but the guy had a video behind her and there was nothing like that, and they just chased her and ran her down shot. Yeah, um, that that's the standard that like we're encouraging for people, and we're not there's no way to track and enforce anybody who's trying to even carry that out.
SPEAKER_01:And yeah, like I said, everybody needs to uh and we have the weird cultural situation too of here, let's let's you know what? If we were being a little bit rabble rousing or scaring people with the idea that somebody's gonna be a fake police officer or a fake ICE officer, right? Um now let's take it a step further. Some people could people are disappearing with with the real ice officers and their family cannot find them. Right. What is the how is it not possible for someone to basically just kidnap a Hispanic woman, murder her, hide her body, and then people will just assume that she got picked up by ice? Right, right? Yeah, you know what I'm saying? Oh, yeah. They would go, oh, my my my sister disappeared. Yep. Shit, you know, she lives in San Diego, right? So there's a lot of ice people down there. Uh they wouldn't, you know, like plausible reason to think that people just disappear right now. Yeah, you know, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:That's scary, dude. Even 20, 30 years ago, a brown woman disappearing wouldn't get much attention. Sure. So yeah, culturally, yeah. Right. So so now they're like it it's not even a blip on the map, it's happening. Right. You know what it happens. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:They're yeah, there's a flood of statistics to go, well, which one? Right. They all disappeared. Well, I mean, even when terrible as that is, you know, we kidnapped a hundred people last week.
SPEAKER_00:What are you talking about? When uh because when we had those people kidnapped from the nightclub uh earlier this year, yeah, that was the government's response was like, you know, well, give us, you know, their names, identify in marks on them, and stuff like that, so we can go find them. It's like, I you don't even know where they like I can't just say, hey, find my friend, you know, XYZ, whatever.
SPEAKER_01:So I've always wondered. Now we're now we're transitioning to topics again. I want to be very, very, very careful with this topic. And I feel like we're gonna talk about it again. I don't know, we need to set some boundaries around how we talk about this. But I'm serious. The revolution, right? The resistance, yeah, the the alternative to fascism, yeah, whatever that is. I've wondered it's going to rise out of the population. It has to, it will. Every situation, no one just stands around and watches fascism happen. Like even in Nazi Germany, there was a resistance, right? Even in Russia and in Italy, when these you know dictators took over, there was some resistance, right? Um, so there can't be an execution of a regime change, if you will, of a of a social change like what we're witnessing right now without some dedicated resistance, right? And so I said, okay, how will that come to life in our setting, right? Yeah, and how does the the different the trappings of modern life lead to a very different resistance than maybe what we've seen in the past? Oh yeah, yeah. Tracking tail numbers that are moving those people around. There are people out there doing that, tail spotters that are tracking ice planes. Yeah, so that's part of that's part of the resistance, right? And then somebody realized, oh, that's a good idea. Now let's figure out a better way. We're gonna kind of like on Google Maps when it tells you there's police up ahead. People started making websites to watch ice as they leave the facility every day and say they're heading north, they're probably going to this place, they're heading east, they're probably going to this place. That's the resistance, man. You know what I'm saying? And so what happened? Christy Nome went and got those social media platforms to take those accounts down, right? Distrangled free speech. Yeah, yeah. They said, you can't do that. You can't, because that puts our ice agents in danger, right? They're they're armed, they're rolling 10 deep, they're they've got troops following them around, right? Right? Like they look, they stick out like a sore thumb on their own. You see what I'm saying? If it's a legitimate ice operation, you're gonna see it coming, right? There's no way to hide that. There's five black trucks and troops and everything else. Like, that's not a secret operation, right? And so the idea that citizens are simply going to observe the the very visible operations that are going on around them and write about it online, that is dangerous, is what they say.
SPEAKER_00:Right.
SPEAKER_01:I have a problem with that, you know. Yeah, that's it is I don't care what the activity of the government is, it is absolutely okay for the citizens, whether it's private citizens or journalists, to observe and report on whatever they see. Period, right? Like it's not a secret operation, it's not classified.
SPEAKER_00:You know, for again, a president that always campaigned on transparency, yeah, being so honest and things like that, but you can't hear different opinions or you can't hear what you're doing. Like you can't even look at the company.
SPEAKER_01:Or you can't tolerate that pro, even though these people aren't necessarily coming down to shoot these ice agents, that has happened. But really, it's so that protesters can show up and interfere with the operation. Not to be dangerous necessarily, but just to say, stop kidnapping people out of the park. Stop it.
SPEAKER_00:You know, because there's been some successful stops. Yeah, there has.
SPEAKER_01:There's been some stand downs, right? Where the where ice just left, they showed up in a park and then they left, right? That's happened a few in a bunch, probably a bunch more places than we understand, right? Because that story is one that for sure is gonna get shut down at the national level, yeah, local level, you might hear about it. So that you know, I have a big problem with that, and I see that as the beginnings, the the little uh drops in the bucket that will lead to some form of resistance against this activity. But I don't know, you know, what's I don't want to hyperbolize onto what's the next step. That's why I say I want to be real careful with this topic.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, well, well, I mean uh whenever I talk about things like this, I always say that folks on the right need to step up and they need to be a part of it. Because, you know, with this, this is obviously the whole gets and flag all over, you know. Yeah, uh that they're taking away people's individual rights, uh that they're they're trying to take away states' rights by you know, uh to keep money away from states that that have already been appropriated for them. You know, Colorado's lost a ton of money. Um, where are those folks at when they hear that there's a gun registry being made now? Have you have you read that headline? That that was one I got I got today was that uh Pam Bondi uh requested information uh to start creating a gun registry. So the the thing that they they they freaked out. I can't believe it. The thing that they've been scaring people out that the Democrats are coming for your guns, they're gonna make a registry. Yeah, they're getting everybody's name that has a gun. I gotta I gotta learn more about that. Yeah. Yeah. That is um, you know, but where are the where are the folks at that cried and screamed about 1984 all the time? Well and yeah, I mean we know that every huh. Let's see.
SPEAKER_01:The reason we believe. I'm gonna I'm gonna share an opinion. The reason that we believe we have not fallen to kingdom or dictatorship earlier is because we have an armed population, right? Like that's what a lot of people in America believe. Yeah, is that we hold tyranny at bay by simply having guns in our homes, right? That's that's one of the inspirations of the Second Amendment, right? Is that right? And so there are people that believe that the reason we've made it 250 years without that is because we could have shot somebody that tried to do that, right? And the historical context is over the last 250 years, every other place where that did happen, disarming the population was a required step before the goons could fully execute the mission, right? Because there's not enough, there's more people than there are goons in America, right? So you have to disarm the people and arm the goons, right? That's happened in every other dictator regime that and and coup type situation in of the world over the past hundred years, right? As long as citizens have had weapons, someone has shown up, summarily taking them away, and then a whole lot more police show up out of nowhere, right? You know, like they're all armed, right? Yeah, and so um the idea that somehow that part of the playbook would not need to be repeated in America, regardless of who's executing the plan, even if it's 50 years from now and it's some somebody else, that step's required. Yeah, disarming the population is required for the full uh tide to turn, right? To really shift from, well, we were a democracy, but we're not anymore. The disarmament is required, right? And the idea that they think that only one political side would execute that disarmament to cement power. No, you're you're ignoring the idea that a dictator doesn't care about the party, the country, the anything. They care about them, right? They care about their power, right? Yeah, and so the idea that they're gonna betray your conservative mindset is is you know almost sounds implausible to the person who believes that this regime is their hero, right? But the truth is you have to see the the the sheep and wolves or the wolf in sheep's clothing, right? And you have to go, oh, right. Yeah, a bad person's just a bad person. And there's no way to cement power and get whatever you want in the future unless you disarm us, right? There's just no way. There's no way to do it, right? And you're right. Everybody said Obama's doing that. Obama is gonna turn us into a socialist country, he's gonna put taxes on bullets, he's gonna put registration numbers on individual rounds, right? Like people were saying all that stuff. Yeah, I even went, I was here in Colorado when Obama was president uh for a tour, and I went, there was some weekend, some news story had happened, and I was at like a poker tournament and it was in a strip mall with a gun shop, right? That gun shop had a run on the shop like a run on the bank. They were they were literally, they sold every bullet in the store because some headline had come out the day before, like Obama's coming to get you guns. Right.
SPEAKER_00:And they cleared the shells day because uh 22 ammo. Yeah, no, nothing happened. Nothing, yeah, 22 ammo.
SPEAKER_01:We got impossible to find for like since then we've gotten rid of the assault rifle ban. Like weapons control has gotten looser since then, right?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, but the the fear is still there.
SPEAKER_01:The fear was real, and it moved some ammunition that day, man. They made they paid their annual bills off of that, you know.
SPEAKER_00:But but the entire time, the boogeyman that's whispering in their ears, the one that's gonna be the one that ends up taking their guns. Yeah. And that's uh the sad reality that's the beautiful irony of what this situation is. And for me, and again, people voted for it and everything that they were afraid of, and it was written down, and they voted for it. And like it's just so hard to wrap my head around it. And like, I'm glad that I'm not complicit with this. Although, like, I'm glad that you know, in 80 years my kids are gonna be able to easily see that no dad wasn't cool with that.
SPEAKER_01:No, no question of where where our family stood at that time.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, because I mean it's just absolutely disgusting the attacks on people, the constitution, just the the foundational of like who we are as Americans. It's just it's shameful right now. It's just so shameful that so many people are on board with this. You know, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Well, let's uh maybe we'll shift to the last uh last topic here, which uh no No King's Day is coming up in October. Yeah. And I don't just want to talk, usually we just give that as an announcement, but I'd like to talk about it more as far as uh what's going on in the media and how the administration basically is starting to pay attention to some of this stuff.
SPEAKER_00:So yeah, Mike Johnson's even mentioned you know the protests and you know, saying that we're uh Antifa and things like that. And and again, Antifa they're saying it's gonna be a terrorist rally, right? Exactly.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And you know we we learned during the war on terror that like when you have a nebulous foe, you can do whatever the hell you want. Yes. And so when they start throwing out Antifa and things like that, it's a nebulous foe. So if there's justifies you right, yeah, and like and we've had agitators in our crowd. We had a guy with a 45 Trump jersey on throwing rocks at cars one time, like like uh we had a guy you know put uh a fake bomb threat in, and then you know, as we're trying to get information, he assaulted one of our marshals. There's agitators in the crowd already, and so those agitators in front of the right people can really set things off.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Um, and it gives them that spark that they're looking for. Uh when we come out on the 18th, we are gonna be peaceful. We you know, we have you know a lot of planners that are already planning their costumes, and then you know it's gonna be a fun time with with uh different community organizations. Um we'll have some workshops on you know how to uh do the rapid response for corn and things like that. And then uh some folks want to do a march afterwards. So we'll be at 12 to 3 at the park, and then folks are talking marching afterwards, and we'll you know we'll we'll try to keep people you know on the sidewalks and and you know where they're supposed to be to keep everything peaceful and you know up in inside the boundaries of the law. Yeah, um, because we don't want to be the ones that cross the city. Don't be the example of what they're talking about. Exactly. We want to go out there and show them that you know we're here, we're gonna keep using our First Amendment, right? We're not afraid of you. Um, you know, that there's gonna be but like you said, they're they're gonna look for that one agitator, and it's gonna like somewhere in the country, you know. I think the last the last big protest day started off with uh the political assassinations in uh Minnesota.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So so I mean, the the these things are getting dicier and dicier everyone.
SPEAKER_01:Well, the condition of the of the of what's going on in America right now, especially for this one, like okay, so one of the news kind of sound bites that I heard, uh, and this came from the right, but it does make it does sound believable or it makes sense. It makes sense from a political perspective. They said the government's gonna stay shut down until after the No Kings riot, because the Democrats have to go out and put on a performance because they have no power to do anything within the government. Like they're they're they're not going to get what they're asking for, period, right? If anything, Trump's just gonna keep making it worse and worse and firing more people and he's gonna pressure them into collapsing. So they can collapse 20 days from now, or they could have collapsed last week. I prefer that they would have collapsed last week because the Democrats have nothing. They have nothing, no dog in, like, they have no way to gain anything out of any of this. But if they wait until the 18th, go out to all these marches and grab the bullhorn, show their face, say, I'm fighting for you, then they can go back and lose the argument with a little bit of face to get them into the whatever re-election cycle or whatever, you know, the midterm situation that they're about to face, right? And that the government won't, there's no way they're gonna even consider voting on any of this until after that protest happens because they all have to go out and basically apologize before they go back and vote and and reopen the government. They need to go to their constituents and say, I'm sorry, I can't win this argument. Now I'm gonna go back and go ahead and open the government back up, right? That was what they're that's what the right is saying. Okay. And there's some veins of truth in it, right?
SPEAKER_00:And except except it's all built on bullshit because the house speaker isn't even calling them in for a vote.
SPEAKER_01:They are, but they already passed the house, it's through the house, and the Senate is voting on what the house already passed, right? Like there's no thing open for negotiation right now. Nobody's negotiating anything. And it's as you know, the house house votes first and gives it to the Senate, or depending on the legislation, sometimes it goes the other way around, right? But in these funding bills, it goes house passed, then Senate. The House is our that's why they're in recess because they passed it, right? Right. They don't have anything else to do, right? They have to wait for the Senate to send it back to them. Yeah, that's I thought they just happened, it happened in the last day. Okay, right. Like it what that wasn't that the case on it was not the case on Friday. Nothing that got sent back to the House. So the House's step is done. The Senate is the the linchpin here, yeah, right. And the it requires 60 votes in the Senate, right, to pass this funding bill. And that's the breakdown, right? Is that it would require like eight or nine Democratic senators, right?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, but but I still see this as just uh another uh noise distraction away from Epstein vials. You know, that that makes it such a big deal. This is a very effective them making such a big deal out of peaceful protests where people are just showing up and using their First Amendment, like you know, it's always uh peaceful until ICE gets involved.
SPEAKER_01:Do you think the government shutdown is going to lead to more people being more vote motivated to come out on at this next protest?
SPEAKER_00:I think so. Yeah, like I do too.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, because uh I think people that would normally wouldn't care or don't even pay any attention to the government are about to miss out on something and then they're gonna be like, wait a minute, right? What's happening? Right? Like when people, so many people that have been able to ignore the politics so far, yeah, are now running out of options to ignore the politics, right? Like it's coming for them, right? Services that benefits the whatever, even just legal stuff they need to do, they can't do, right? Like, even if it's not I'm missing out on food support, is like I need to file my you know federal taxes or something like that for my business, and I can't, you know.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. The uh the lines at the food banks are already a lot longer with folks in uniform standing in those lines. Yeah. Um, yeah, I I I think it's coming to to roost right now. You know, like and we kind of said it all year long that you know, this harvest season when you know things aren't you know as well as well as they should be or what they were, people are gonna realize it. You know, like things are getting bad for a lot of folks and there's no end in sight. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think there'll be more people this time. I think there'll be more people that are more, I guess, motivated for writing. I guess most protests, you often only get more extreme people, right? You get people that are closer to the edges from either side of the spectrum, right? I feel like when the government shutdown's going on and when this economic impact is starting to impact more people, the amount of reasons, the types of reasons that would get somebody to come out and protest, the idea of like no king, I feel like there's a lot more of them, right, in what exists in people's daily lives right now. So I do think there'll be more people out this time around. I do think that um Trump's arguments of like if you spit, we hit, you know, that kind of stuff, that's gonna happen. Right. Yeah, there's gonna be some violence that that kind of gets coming from both sides, right? Like there's the the people are ready, you know. There's gonna be some violence in some places on there, they're yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:There's definitely folks out there that think it's time to you know start start doing stuff. And it's like well, once you cross that line though, you don't come back. Yeah, like me personally, like I won't cross that line. Like I like even if uh I get you know involved in something and you'll get arrested, like I'm just dropping. Like, like you guys can carry dead weight. I'm not I'm not fighting you. Like if I'm arrested, rest is on you. Yeah, you know, keep me safe. Keep me out of here and keep me safe. Yeah, yeah. I'm not fighting you.
SPEAKER_01:I'm in a liability on your behalf now. Just fine. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like, you know, I'm not gonna cross into any kind of violence. Um, but there's folks out there that, you know, they're they're scared and they're gonna react.
SPEAKER_01:The shutdown. What's your take on the Democrats are painting this as a single topic issue, right? Over health care, is usually what I only think I hear people on the left side talk about it is health care, period. Right? One issue. I have not heard any other issue as a point of contention. It's the only thing they want to negotiate about. Yes, and and that's it. Yes, it's just that one issue. Now, whatever. Healthcare, important, not important, rack and stack it. Um, it doesn't matter where it falls on priorities. Congress, I think it's safe to say, let's say they have about 20 topics that are up for debate or used as political weight or tools or leverage against each other at any given time, right? They're responsible for a hundred different things in American society, but there's probably about a fifth of those, maybe twenty topics that are used as political gamesmanship or weight in an argument, right? So we've got one out of 20 that we're shutting the government down for. Is that appropriate?
SPEAKER_00:What do you think? Uh so I wouldn't make the argument just for healthcare. I would make the argument to stop the rise of fascism. Like, if you're willing to fund a fascist government, then you're complicit in it. Like, I don't agree. I don't agree with what they're doing on so many other levels.
SPEAKER_01:Pick one issue, but make it a much more important or a more drastic issue. Exactly.
SPEAKER_00:And like, you know, they need to, you know, walk their lines and say things like, you know, it's this, this. Yeah. But me, like, good, shut it down. Like, I do not want to see more people getting kidnapped, priests getting shot in the face. Um, and and I mean, months ago, they triggered the anti-deficiency act at Homeland Security. They've already blown past budgets. Oh, so this is not about funding health care. If you, if we can go, if we can blow the deficiency act uh and fund all these operations, if we can gold plate the White House, build a$200 million ball room, we can provide this health care. Yeah. This is about stopping fascism. This is about actually standing up in the resistance that we've been asking for. This is they have an opportunity to resist right now. This is what they need to do in the key to it. And if it's if they if that needs to be the flag that they carry, the$1.5 trillion, because even that's working, because uh Marjorie uh Taylor Green there's defect a little bit. Right, she's saying, like, yeah, my kids, yeah, their their things are gonna are gonna double and triple. You know, that they're actually starting to do it. So she's caring, not because it's gonna affect her, which again frustrates me. Like, oh, we only care when it affects you, but whatever. Welcome aboard.
SPEAKER_01:That's what I was just like, there's so many more people that are getting getting affected now. Even MTG is uh getting pushed on by the Trump Mr. You know, you know, so if she's getting rubbed out, like that's that says something right there because she was cheerleader number one, rah, rah, big T on her chest throat up until this year, pretty much, right?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah, and she's another one that's on the list of uh to sign for the Epstein files, too. She's one of the four defectors that they have to give rid of the or to release the Epstein uh lists.
SPEAKER_01:So I I I don't see the senators that are Democrats that are holding up the show right now, well, however you want to say it, standing for their morals, whatever. Yeah, all I hear them talking about is healthcare. All I hear them talking about is specifically the premium rate change, right? That's like all I hear. And even if I was directly impacted by that and I was like, damn, I'm gonna like I'm gonna have to pay so much money next year, I still wouldn't want the government to be shut down over that. You know what I'm saying? Like if that was directly impacting me, like, hey, your$2,000 is not gonna be$4,000 next year, I'd be like, that's terrible. I need to vote for somebody that's gonna fix this in the future, right? And so what I my wish for Democrats would be recognize that you are, you have no, you don't have the House, the Senate, or the White House. You are in the loser's position right now and have not jacked shit you can do about it until November of next year. Yeah, right. And so closing the government down between here and there serves no purpose because you are in the loser seat, right? You you you cannot, you don't have that. That's not the way our government's built. There's no lever to pull.
SPEAKER_00:It's the whole problem with the two party system. Yeah, like the minority party is just opposition party.
SPEAKER_01:If the minority party, but we get to balance things out if one of those three things is tilted in the other direction, right? But this has happened on both sides. There's been Obama had a uh a sweep, he had a three-peat of all of them, right? And that's how we got the ACA, right? So this happens on both sides of the aisle, where you get the three-peat and the losers shut up and complain, complain, complain, complain, and then do nothing because they can't, they don't have the votes, right? And I'm I'm okay with the Democrats were understanding you have to focus on the midterms next year. You have to take notes, and every time that they win, just just write it down. Hey, your premiums went up last year because of them. Yeah, you holding the government closed to prove that point does not serve the purpose. All right, to me, it doesn't serve the purpose. Focusing on winning midterms and being able to reverse decisions or bring legislation that that equalizes the problem that's being created right now. I understand that's a year or two away. I understand that's a couple thousand dollars away per year for a few people. Yeah, like I get that impact, but I don't believe that shutting the government down right now is going to change that at all, right? I just don't think the Democrats are gonna pull any rabbits out of any hats at all. Nothing is gonna happen beneficial in their direction. I don't think at all. Zero win, nothing but holding the government closed for a while until enough people are upset enough about it. Trump has fired 50,000 more federal employees, and then we open back up, that'll be it. There's gonna be scars and damage and nothing to show for it about December 1st, something like that.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, if they I don't think they'll keep it down. I don't think we'll miss paychecks on the first. Uh so I don't think I don't think they have the balls to keep it to let it be. I don't think they have the balls to let it be as effective as it could be. Yeah. You know, I I think they will, I think though, I think they'll cave. But uh, I think if they if they wanted to, they could make it hurt so that we could actually have uh a change in regimes. I don't think they can't I don't know. There's no lever.
SPEAKER_01:What lever are they gonna pull on, man?
SPEAKER_00:Uh the well the 25th amendment.
SPEAKER_01:Where's the pressure come from? Well, the the pressure, uh like how do the democrats create pressure to create the outcome you're talking about?
SPEAKER_00:Well, it starts with their their radicals changing, like uh Taylor Green there, Bobart's change, sure, you know, change European. If they start fracturing on the inside like that, yeah, and we get those.
SPEAKER_01:That's them losing their themselves, right? That's not the Democrats pulling a lever. No, that's what I'm saying. The Democrats don't have a lever to pull.
SPEAKER_00:No, they they have resolve. If they have if they have it, if they have enough resolve, that they could wait for this to happen because they're good, like the the longer it stays, the more people are gonna come out. The more people are gonna be calling their the representatives. And the the elections right now are still on. Uh we see you know Trump you know trying to start things with Venezuela, and you mentioned you know Russia being a big a big thing in the future where if that goes off, he could suspend elections. Yeah, and that's a real possibility. So, like right now is the time where if you stand up and have resolve, you could end all of this by either invoking the 25th amendment. And and I'm I would not be excited about JD Vance by any means, but I think you would at least set the precedent where, like, okay, here's some guardrails. Yeah, right. Yeah, here's the guardrails back on. Yeah. But again, we need people on the right to feel that pressure and actually know that there's gonna be repercussions for the garbage that's going on now.
SPEAKER_01:I will say that I would have never believed that Marjorie Taylor Green would ever raise her hand in defiance to this administration. Yeah. And and so for all the things what I would have said, nah, like, no way, like hell would freeze over first. So that's encouraging, I guess, for what you're talking about, right? Like, because to me, the idea of what you're talking about almost couldn't exist, right? Under the uh masterful watch of Trump and he how he keeps everybody a crony. It wouldn't matter how many people call one of those representatives. It wouldn't matter if every Republican that works for, you know, that lives in that representative's district called them tomorrow and said, I hate this, they would have said Trump knows what he's doing. Yeah, right. They go to those town halls and say that anyway. Right, yeah, right. So there's no most of those Republican representatives wouldn't won't defect, right? They will not defect because it's a guaranteed you get fired, right? He will fire you through primary, right? So, yes, of course, if you're gonna get fired by getting a primary, then it it changes the balance on how you think you're doing your job moving forward and how long you've been in Congress, if you're running for some other office, like all that stuff weighs in. And it unfortunately it takes away correct protecting the career, takes away from doing a good job for some people. So I didn't think this regime could have any kind of defection. And I guess if we're seeing it, that's encouraging.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it is because I mean these are real effects on real people. You know, the farmers in Kansas can't hide from not being able to sell their soybeans. Sure. And the fact that we bailed out Venezuela for them to go, you know, sell their stuff to China behind you, you know, like what a like what a slap in the face to all of our farmers. To American creations. And now they and now they want to ask for a handout or a bailout, whatever you want to call it, socialism. Yeah, but but yeah, it it's uh it's affecting real people and it needs to be broadcast everywhere. And the more people like her that has uh a totally different you know, fan base and following, and um she needs to say those things, and it's like it's still gross that it took this long.
SPEAKER_01:But thank you. It's proof that there is a line, right? That even the most diehard fans, you know, supporter, cheerleader, whatever, has a line, right? They have a line. And I didn't think she would be the person that would show us where that line was. But you know, uh, just like people were clapping for Donald Trump for President Trump this week because of the peace in the uh in Israel and Gaza, I will clap for Marjorie Taylor Green for saying, hey, enough is enough, right? I didn't think she would ever be the person that did. Right. So I will applaud her for finally saying enough is enough.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that is credit where it's due. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Well, that's and that's how everybody was about trying to clap for Donald Trump. The same is like, is this really the end of the war? And is this really what it looks like? Is this something we should be clapping about, or is there so much more sinister stuff afoot that we're a real estate developer?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, he's gonna just sweep up land, his folks are gonna sweep up land, he's gonna get kickbacks. It's just more oligarchs getting more land and money. For sure. That's what's gonna happen. I mean, that is that's also a true person.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. Yeah, and uh the idea that he's the president of the peace board, right? Of the of the reconstruction effort, right? What does that mean? Of the reconstruction effort, that's what that means, right? Yeah, is that he's just gonna, you know, hook up people that you know contractors or contractors, yeah. He's just gonna hook up contracts throughout that whole region. Um yeah with impunity, right? There's no government in the Palestinian region to even push back again, you know, they can do whatever they want, right? Yeah, they there will be no resistance to that. If Israel says if Israel gives a thumbs up, then it'll happen, right? And anything that any Palestinian, whatever looks like a government there, they'll have no vote in the process at all. Yeah, yeah, I agree. Anyways, I'm not looking forward to how that all goes down. I'm glad about the peace arrangement, but you know, what's really gonna happen over the next few weeks, who knows?
SPEAKER_00:Right. Yeah, yeah, we got to see what actually uh humanitarian aid gets into those people because there's people that are starving there and need assistance. Uh what kind of humanitarian aid gets gets brought in? Uh yeah, you know, we'll see what happens.
SPEAKER_01:But and how long, how long will the clock tick? I'm gonna say days, not months, before a bus blows up in Tel Aviv. Days, not months, right? Right. Hamas ain't gone. Hamas is not gone. And they're gonna release several thousand Hamas prisoners back to Gaza. Yeah, those dudes are totally happy to go get on a bus and blow themselves up. Like it's not, it's just a matter of time. So there's no end in that part, right? The ugliest part of this particular conflict may be over, but the the bloodline hatred is not gone. No, so we'll see. Yeah, we'll see. Maybe there'll be something about that in the next episode. Maybe next week we'll have some more to talk about that. And I guess maybe next week, we didn't really touch it this week, but next week maybe we'll talk about Qatar having air based on the city. Oh my god, I totally forgot about that. Next week, we'll do it next week. Right. Hopefully, there's more news. Either it's completely disappeared from the news cycle, maybe the pressure to make it not happen will happen. I don't know.
SPEAKER_00:Hopefully.
SPEAKER_01:All right, so yeah, tune in next week. Next week. Thanks, everybody. Bye.
