The Dangers of Protests

Do you carry it? No, I don't have a concealed carry. We're gonna fix that. Okay. Like super fast. Alright, excellent. Good to hear. Yeah, you can't be here. I gave you a concealed whole- Open carry state, right? Open carry stone. Please don't do that. Yeah, it's like very antagonistic almost. Yeah, but like, that's, while I believe you have the right to do that, it's also one of those things that's like, it's also dumb to do it. From a tactical perspective, why would you be sitting here with the thing that you want to protect you, exposed to the whole entire world, and telegraphing? Like if I walk into a room, that's like the first guy I'm like, one, you're probably useless. Two is, I'm concerned about you not as an asset, but rather as a threat. Right. Like there's, I don't, there's not, if you went out to any of the guys out here or any of my friends, and you're like, do you open carry? They'll be like, ha ha ha! No, that's dumb. I'm not going to do that. Well, that's that thing that like I was getting into about the protests when people were showing up at these Black Lives Matter protests with AKs around their neck. What are you doing? Do you know how many times they have accidentally discharged their weapon into the crowd? Oh, I'm sure. It's happened like a dozen times. I'm sure. It's heartbreaking because like, I respect that they're trying to, like I fully believe in protesting, love peaceful protests. I even like that, that kind of bravado of open carry in that sense where they're like really, I think a freedom not exercised is a freedom that's going to atrophy and die. One of the reasons why I love comedy is because you are pushing the limit of what people are comfortable with, especially with the First Amendment. So you're kind of torn on open carry in that sense. I think it's super dumb, but I like people exercising their freedoms. Interesting. Yeah. I see what you're saying though. The right person, like I won, I would never be at a protest of while I support it. I would, it's dangerous to be there right now. So I wouldn't, the cost versus gain of what happens at those peaceful protests. And then the thought of even open carrying is, is idiotic. I agree with that. I feel like showing up at one of those protests with a gun, like unless they're coming to you and trying to take your house or break down your door, why do you have it? Why are you walking around with a gun? Just you're supposed to, if it's supposed to be a peaceful protest and the idea is like, what if someone comes to try to disrupt that peaceful protest? Like you're inviting them almost with that gun. Yeah. I remember we had a poor kid killed here in Austin. He had an AK and a poor Uber driver got in the middle of a protest and he's like, holy crap. His, his, you know, when he dropped, he had a drop off and he went to go do another pickup and Uber like automatically routes the way to go. So he's following his little Uber route and he turns and he's like, oh man, I'm in the middle of a protest. He's a soldier from Fort Hood right here. He's concealed carrying in, in, in his Uber vehicle and he gets stuck in the protest and the protesters just swarm his car. And this, this, this kid that died, he's actually a really neat kid because, you know, his, his girlfriend was black. He's there to support her. She had a bunch of physical, physical impairments and he's in a wheelchair. Yeah. So he's like a neat kid. He like, not smart. He's open carrying at a protest, you know, and he was saying kind of some inflammatory things beforehand, but like, I think his point in his purpose was really good and pure and like trying to do the right thing. Right. But then he runs up to the side of a car and points a gun at an Uber driver that is scared and confused and he gets shot. Yeah. Like that's the recipe for disaster. I saw so many different versions of that story too, where people had twisted the facts. People had said he was unarmed. The guy who got shot. Yeah. People were saying that the guy who did it was a white supremacist who drove into the protest on purpose. There was so many. And the video was edited where it looked like the guy was making a right hand turn and he like sped up because he was trying to get around a person and they cut right there because it looks like the guy speeding up to go into the crowd. But super when you watch the whole video, it's really obvious what that poor kid was trying to do with the driver. I saw a fascinating this PhD on communication broke down from the initial release of the information of the story, how immediately started being distorted. Yeah. For two different sides. Like I'm gonna leave out this detail. I'm gonna include this detail. And by the time you got the game telephone, we're like, hey, here's this catchphrase. And by the time it gets all the way around the room, it doesn't sound like any semblance of what it did when it started. When you got to the final version, I'm super enraged at one version and I'm super enraged at another version, but neither of them are true. And that's what every single issue is happening from defunding the police to Black Lives Matter to Antifa. It's like, can we just be reasonable and talk about what's really happening? And we have some real good examples of what the worst case scenarios are in this country right now. And one of them is Portland. Portland is one of the best case scenarios of completely unreasonable, ridiculous shit that's going on every single day. 101 days approach. That fucking mayor up there is the most progressive mayor in the country. And they're like, fuck you, resign. We're gonna burn your house down. He had to move out because they're gonna burn his place down. Well, they tried to burn down his lobby. They were throwing fiery things into his lobby. They were lighting fires in front of the street, in front of his house, having dance parties in front of his apartment building. So I was just coming back from Africa on an SFA mission, a security forces assistance. Like we, the military go to places that have insurgents and we try to legitimize the process of government. So in counterinsurgency, there's like all of these different missions from joint combined exercises for training to foreign internal defense to SFA, security forces, assistance. And I'm over there doing a counterinsurgency mission and I'm coming back and I'm seeing the same kind of horrible, dangerous recipe in Portland, the same types of organization structure. And it's an insurgency is a charged idea that, you know, an insurgency as the DOD defines it is an organized group trying to delegitimize or overthrow a constitutional government. Like that's how the DOD defines it. And I think if you went to almost anyone in Portland, they're like, what are you trying to do right now? Like that's what they're trying to do. Yeah. Right? Yeah, which is all right. And that creates a really hard. How do you combat that? Because you have to combat the grievances and the ideas you have to in as dangerous as it is. Those ideas are like a cancer because when the truth and information is being adjusted, just like we talked about with the shooting here in Austin, where you have two different versions and some people are in the echo chamber of only hearing one side of it. It just keeps radicalizing more and more and catching more momentum. And then the reason that they're there is, is so convoluted with, you know, if you're, are you there for Black Lives Matter or are you there to, you know, to, to fight systemic racism? Are you here to like, what are you protesting about? Like, I think you'd get a lot of different answers. Yeah. That's dangerous. Like now, now, now you're just there to do damage. Like you're not really trying to do anything that's good. It's also exciting. This is the other thing about it. When, when you're allowed to throw fire into the lobby of the apartment building where the mayor lives and no one stops you and you're out in front and people are playing music and dancing and everyone's going Black Lives Matter. There's excitement to that, right? Something's happening. And then when you're talking about people that are out of work, the economy is fucked. No one knows what to do. Everyone's scared. COVID's killing a certain percentage of people. You can't do anything about it. There's no vaccines. There's all this tension in the air. And then you have this movement. Yeah. And then this is the most exciting thing that's happening. And then for people that don't have jobs and can't go anywhere, what the fuck do you want them to do? They're going to get sucked up into that, especially if it aligns with their political ideologies, if they're a left leaning person. And they're like, look, we have a real chance for a real revolution here. And this is it. But what they don't understand, I was talking about Seattle. You're doing the same thing that you would hate for people to do. You're taking over businesses with force. You're occupying land that you don't deserve. You're stealing buildings. You're literally occupying buildings that other people built. And then once you get there, you're establishing boundaries. You're putting up barriers. You have a police force that will attack and brutally beat people up for just filming what they perceive as injustices or what they're going to put on the Internet. And then people get shot and you're calling the fucking cops. You call the police and ambulances when people get shot there. You know how goddamn crazy this is? It's so poorly thought out across the board. And if you do that, if you take over an area, what's to stop people from doing that to you? You've already set a precedent. You've already said we could do this with force. We're going to move in with no law behind us, with no court ruling, with no reasonable discourse. We're going to move in with force. And we're going to take over an area with numbers and threats. And then what's going to stop someone from doing that to you? Nothing, you fuck. You've already set a precedent. You've already said this is how it's done. And then it's just chaos and anarchy. It just gets worse. Exactly. And the more violent and larger group will win. So from the mission of counterinsurgency, how do you fight those ideas? Is stability and security, right? If we want to see positive change and destitute poverty-stricken areas of the country, urban areas where, really, you want to talk about systemic racism, you start looking at Detroit and Baltimore and Chicago. How do you fix that? It's not fewer police officers. It's more police officers. The way that you fix it is providing stability and security in an area so that then businesses can flourish, capitalism arrives, more job opportunities, more wealth, more education, more, like, immediately in 10 years, you'll see the transformation of a block when a good business comes in and good things start happening. That business can't go there if it's dangerous, if it's rioting and it's looting. So if you look at every one of the cities that had serious riots from Rodney King, how bad those areas still are, it takes like 50, 60 years, if they ever bounce back, to come back from that. So if you're like, yo, go Black Lives Matter, but then you're going in rioting, you are absolutely condemning yourself to more poverty. And then you go and defund the police and you remove the one thing that's going to provide stability and security out in that area that will bring in commerce, that will bring in business and jobs. Like, you're screwing yourself. It's just so hard for people to see that because it's a long game. Yeah. In the short term, they want justice and they're like, no justice, no peace, and they just want to light shit on fire. And I understand that they're angry and I understand that sentiment, but no one's explaining that this is how this plays out. You're literally going to fuck that area. Yeah. For a long time. Yeah. Yeah. It takes a lot and a lot of money is going to be, have to be spent in order to bring it back. So the money is a hard thing. Insurgencies are really cheap. You know, if I wanted to ruin something, you know, it doesn't take a lot of effort for me to destroy it. For me to build and protect something that takes a lot of manpower and hours. Insurgencies are also way more successful than a conventional type war. Even if it's just war of ideas that were in a civil war, thank God, we don't have like geographic lines that these radical groups could align themselves with because then it would be in a different problem. It takes not just manpower funding. You know, like if you're going to flood, say, Baltimore with police officers, that's a lot of money. And it would take a long time for a business to feel like it's safe and secure for them to go in there and start affecting positive change, opening more stores, more jobs, more jobs, more wealth, more wealth, more education, more education, better schools. And then boom, we have a flourishing community where people can prosper. But it takes, you know, one idiot with a Molotov cocktail to bring that all crumbling down again. Yeah, and you start from scratch or below scratch. Yeah. Yeah. And that's where we are. Yep. I mean, this is a trying time for us in the weirdest of ways because I don't think anybody anticipated everything going this far south so quickly. It's not done. Oh, this is yours. Was it? Oh, my constitution. Back up, fuckers. Yeah. I got the papers. Just how it is. It's not for interpretation. It's just as it is. Just read the words. It's amazing that these guys saw human nature and how it could be fucked up and how they could ruin everything so far in advance. Episodes of the Joe Rogan experience are now free on Spotify. That's right. They're free from September 1st to December 1st. They're going to be available everywhere. But after December 1st, they will only be available on Spotify, but they will be free. That includes the video. The video will also be there. It'll also be free. That's all we're asking. Just go download Spotify. Much love. Bye bye.