Matter of Facts: Civil War, the movie

[00:00:06] Welcome back to the Matter of Facts 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 Ravely, Andrew and Nick are on the other side of the mic, and here's your show.

[00:00:30] Welcome back to the Matter of Facts Podcast. Phil and Nick are here. Andrew's not dead. He hasn't been fired. He's being an adult.

[00:00:38] Yep. Unfortunately, we all have to do that now and then.

[00:00:42] Yeah. I mean, y'all can give him hell about being an adult, but like, I'm not going to because like, sometimes we just have to do adult things.

[00:00:50] It's all right. We'll make this work.

[00:00:53] Yes. So let's do just a brief little bit of admin work. There's already five psychopaths watching this, which that should give me performance anxiety. But you know, we won't talk about that. That gets really weird really fast.

[00:01:07] First things first, got to thank the patrons. Y'all support the show every month. All it takes is a buck or more if you're feeling generous and or psychotic.

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[00:01:26] And hello, Jeff. And hello, Rachel. I'm not, I'm going to be good enough to ask to not ask why you're watching. And thank you for lending us your spouse.

[00:01:37] Probably because she's bored at work.

[00:01:39] But that's valid. It is.

[00:01:42] So merch, merch is available at the Southern Gals Crafts. The link is in the show description. You get to wear really cool stuff like this.

[00:01:51] One of these days, I'm going to make a shirt that has like an outline. So you've seen like the things like where you have like a scale and it says, if you're this tall, it's this, if you're this tall, it's this. We need one that has like beard.

[00:02:04] Yes. It goes down the shirt or just like a graphic that is completely around the area of your beard.

[00:02:12] Yeah. So it only makes sense if you have a beard.

[00:02:15] Cause I'm, I'm not going to lie. The first time I put on the shirts that Chris and Tiffany made us, that was the first thing Gillian told me was you literally can't see what's on them because of your beard.

[00:02:25] Tuck it in with the shirt.

[00:02:26] And I was just like, well, but that's what, that's why when we put the post on Instagram, which if you're not subscribed to our Instagram, you should be, cause it's occasionally hilarious.

[00:02:36] But, um, when I put posts up to kind of like show everybody the merch, I had some pictures.

[00:02:41] Andrew took, I had some pictures that my wife of my wife and my sister and my brother-in-law, cause my brother-in-law is clean shaven.

[00:02:48] And thankfully my wife and sister don't have beards.

[00:02:51] Yeah.

[00:02:51] You can actually see what was on the front of the shirt.

[00:02:53] Whereas if I do it, it looks like, you know, this, but it is what it is.

[00:02:59] It'll do.

[00:03:01] Okay.

[00:03:02] Okay.

[00:03:04] So with Nick's coaching, I think we figured out a way to do this in such a way.

[00:03:09] It doesn't turn into a complete and total like internet pileup.

[00:03:14] No, no.

[00:03:15] I think this will work.

[00:03:16] So tonight we're going to talk about the movie civil war, which for anybody that hasn't seen it, spoiler alert, I'm going to spoil like most of the movie with not most.

[00:03:28] I mean some key scenes.

[00:03:30] Yes.

[00:03:31] Some key scenes, but I snipped what I did.

[00:03:36] Mostly I'm doing, I'm saying this for the people that are going to flag this for like, you know, me stealing somebody's content buzz off all these clips off of YouTube.

[00:03:43] So if you're not happy about the fact that we're commenting on them, I got them off YouTube.

[00:03:48] Be mad at somebody else.

[00:03:50] None of this is pirated nonsense.

[00:03:52] It's raggle fraggle.

[00:03:54] See, I agree and don't agree that it I don't think it I don't think Civil War was like before we start the clips.

[00:04:00] I don't think it was like, oh, my God, best movie ever.

[00:04:04] I don't think it was bad.

[00:04:06] The cinematography was good.

[00:04:08] I will give it a cinematography.

[00:04:11] I think you kind of took issue with the ambiguity of the backdrop.

[00:04:15] Well, OK, I.

[00:04:19] Having talked with you about it, my initial my initial concerns about the movie were, OK, is this going to be a partisan hack job?

[00:04:26] Which it wasn't.

[00:04:27] I was surprised.

[00:04:28] Bravo to them for avoiding that, especially at this time of year.

[00:04:31] Yes.

[00:04:33] Number two was it was going to be some kind of, I don't know, Pearl Harbor romantic wannabe with a Civil War background, which it was not.

[00:04:44] Congrats for not picking the low hanging fruit.

[00:04:46] And my final concern was, is that they were they were going to be too vague about the causes.

[00:04:56] Or far too specific in an unreal fashion, which I think they danced that fine line of a for those that don't know the president in question postponed elections, gave himself a third term.

[00:05:10] And that's kind of what kicks off the whole disagreement.

[00:05:13] Some people take issue with I did initially as well with them pairing Texas and California as the belligerents on the same side fighting D.C.

[00:05:24] But I suppose the way the way they worked it out to where it's it's a president that is clearly overstepping constitutional authority and it has bridged the political divide in this country.

[00:05:37] Perfect.

[00:05:38] Excellent.

[00:05:38] Very well made.

[00:05:40] Anyone can watch it.

[00:05:41] Jeff's correct.

[00:05:42] It is a war reporter road trip movie, and I think they pulled it off fairly well.

[00:05:48] Some of the dialogue is a little ham fisted, I think.

[00:05:53] But I do believe having watched a fair bit of real life combat footage recently following what's going on in Ukraine, having been growing up watching G Watt and all the footage coming back from that, but never being a combat veteran.

[00:06:09] It looked fairly well done to me.

[00:06:12] What do you think, Phil?

[00:06:14] So before we get into the first clip, because I want to start like picking out things the two of us saw in these clips that like we thought were well done or we thought were applicable.

[00:06:24] Like for me, I'm going to make a lot of comparisons to some of this to like the urban conflicts in the cities of Iraq and some of the.

[00:06:35] I'm going to make some very loose analogies to like Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, not that it was a civil war.

[00:06:42] It was a conflict on this scale, but just like devastation to an urban area where people are still living.

[00:06:48] You know what I'm saying?

[00:06:48] Like I was as I watched this movie, there were things that jumped out at me and then I went hunting for the clips so we could talk about them because there were things that I saw that I thought or pointing out.

[00:07:00] But like as far as like the backdrop of what's been presented here, I I appreciate the fact that it was kind of like it was given to you in tidbits as you went.

[00:07:09] Yes.

[00:07:10] Big exposition front load.

[00:07:13] Great example of show.

[00:07:14] Do not tell.

[00:07:15] Yes.

[00:07:16] The other thing is, I honestly, I think there's a lesson to be learned by California and Texas being the belligerents in this case, because first of all, it would in order for a civil war to really.

[00:07:26] Take off.

[00:07:28] You would need something you would either need a hyper polarized.

[00:07:33] A hyper polarizing issue, but you would also need like geographical polarization and you can't have that in in our modern country.

[00:07:44] You're talking about city states versus rural areas.

[00:07:47] So like the concept of of a the concept of like an 18 and 19th century civil war where it's the north for the south.

[00:07:55] That's almost impossible these days.

[00:07:56] It is.

[00:07:57] But that's not the only way a civil war can break out.

[00:07:59] I mean, look at the Spanish.

[00:08:00] True, but the other the other the other thing you could get is that you have to two states that are so large and so self-sufficient, they can kind of stand on their own.

[00:08:12] And by banding together, they pooled resources.

[00:08:14] And that's what I see.

[00:08:15] That's what I noticed in the example of like California and Texas.

[00:08:19] California and Texas are both very large, have lots of natural resources, have enormous military power.

[00:08:26] If this if the state says buzz off, we're doing our own thing.

[00:08:31] And the military that is ostensibly kind of invested in that state says I'm with them and I'm taking my hardware with me.

[00:08:38] So like you're talking about a situation where like Texas, just the Texas National Guard is bigger than the armies of most other countries.

[00:08:47] You know what I'm saying?

[00:08:47] Same with California National Guard.

[00:08:49] And that's not even like federal troops that might jump ship.

[00:08:53] That's state assets.

[00:08:54] So Texas and California being involved in this this weird little marriage where the enemy of my enemy is my friend or, you know, like I can see that.

[00:09:06] I could see that because it's California, Texas and those specific states.

[00:09:09] But I agree with you that in order for those two to ideologically like pair up and become kissing cousins, you need something that cuts across all lines like suspension of elections.

[00:09:20] Because like I said before, the minute we don't have a peaceful exchange of power, we don't have a country anymore.

[00:09:26] Agreed.

[00:09:27] That that is like the one thing that separates has always separated our nation from other nations, because like in most other nations, when you're not the president anymore, it's because you got killed.

[00:09:37] A lot of them.

[00:09:38] Yeah.

[00:09:40] So anyway, so the way we're going to run this is that I'm going to play a clip.

[00:09:44] It's going to completely wipe out the screen.

[00:09:46] You won't be able to see me and Nick until the clip is over.

[00:09:48] I can't speed it up.

[00:09:50] So these clips last anywhere from like most of the average two and a half.

[00:09:55] The longest one, and I'll front load that before we get there is seven minutes long.

[00:10:00] But stick with me.

[00:10:01] Watch and then put it in your mind, because then we're going to come back and talk about what the two of us notice from them.

[00:10:08] And for those of you who are listening to this in audio only, I mean, we'll tell you what goes on the scene and you'll be able to hear it.

[00:10:15] Take my word on it.

[00:10:16] I think it's worth a watch.

[00:10:18] Yeah, I think the movie is worth a watch for sure.

[00:10:22] But let's get in the first clip before we lose any of these 22 people that are watching.

[00:10:27] Nice.

[00:10:27] What?

[00:10:28] Bunch of sociopaths.

[00:10:29] Good to have y'all.

[00:12:01] It's crazy.

[00:12:03] Take this.

[00:12:04] Oh, no, I can't take this.

[00:12:05] Take it and put it on.

[00:12:09] Thank you so much.

[00:12:24] All right.

[00:12:24] For those who are just audio, the sound of the movie completely cuts out due to a bomb explosion.

[00:12:29] That is purposeful.

[00:12:35] Yeah.

[00:12:36] So Raggle Fraggle raised an interesting point and said, are we going to get a copyright strike for playing such long clips?

[00:12:41] And to be perfectly honest, I kind of accepted that we're going to get copyright struck because there are certain people with blue hair and facial piercings that just don't like my content.

[00:12:50] And I'm emotionally at peace with that.

[00:12:52] Yeah.

[00:12:53] We'll get all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons.

[00:12:56] Yeah.

[00:12:57] So this first scene, you know, where.

[00:13:00] Well, like what what jumped out at me and thankfully I remembered at the last second, I have a list of what my thoughts were in the moment as I was watching this.

[00:13:08] But, you know, you see a bunch of people like crowded around a water truck.

[00:13:11] So obviously this is one of those things that's like a secondhand or a deleterious effect of any kind of conflict in a nation is that resources start to get very scarce very quickly.

[00:13:22] Things like food and water, the integrity of the power grid, supply chains, everything starts breaking down.

[00:13:29] And you end up in a situation very quickly where even the people that, quote unquote, want to stay out of it may not be able to stay out of it because like the war is going to bring an impact to your home one way or the other.

[00:13:39] So you have people crowded around this water truck.

[00:13:44] Tempers are flaring.

[00:13:46] Troops are troops and cops are like beating people back, using violence to try to maintain order.

[00:13:51] The people are not responding favorably to this.

[00:13:54] And then in the midst of all this, somebody runs in with a backpack and a flag and boom.

[00:13:59] And what I wrote in here was crowds are targets for both sides.

[00:14:05] Acts of violence will seem random, but in hindsight, we're almost predictable.

[00:14:09] Which is something that I want to put in y'all's heads.

[00:14:11] Like anytime you get this many people that are scared or angry or desperate in one place, like there was a point in here where one of the reporters got hit with a baton.

[00:14:21] She wasn't even part of the conflict.

[00:14:23] She just got hit because she was in.

[00:14:24] She was right there when the baton got swung.

[00:14:26] So like the lesson to me to try to get across people is that if there's a crowd of people and they're angry and unhappy, you shouldn't be in that crowd.

[00:14:36] Agreed.

[00:14:37] Holy amen.

[00:14:39] It follows the basic tenets of concealed carry.

[00:14:43] Don't go stupid places with stupid people to do stupid things.

[00:14:47] And crowds, as much as the individual people may be intelligent, crowds are not that smart.

[00:14:53] And once they get fired up, all it takes is one person to throw a punch and then the scene devolves.

[00:14:59] I think you're right, Phil.

[00:15:00] Anytime you have a conflict situation, resources do get scarce.

[00:15:04] But in a civil conflict or in civil strife, civil war, anything like that, a complex insurgency, one of the main targets is going to be resources.

[00:15:16] Power grid, water supply, roadways, bridges, anything where you get a bigger impact for your dollar.

[00:15:24] And realistically, all you have to do is hit a water distribution point.

[00:15:30] And then your water supply for a large area is down.

[00:15:33] You know, most small towns, at least in the Midwest, are supplied by a single or maybe a pair of water towers.

[00:15:40] One bomb takes out that water tower or at the very least the supply pipe to it.

[00:15:45] And who knows how long that could take to fix, especially if you can't get materials due to the ongoing conflict.

[00:15:52] Yep.

[00:15:54] And this is why, like, to tie some of this back to, like, preparedness lessons, like, this is also part of the reason why I've consistently told my wife and people that will listen to me.

[00:16:05] Like, down here, when we get, when a hurricane gets close, you start getting lines of people at gas pumps trying to tank up.

[00:16:11] What I've consistently told my wife is, is I'm like, as many days out as we have reason to believe the hurricane is going to hit us, you go tank your vehicle up every single day on the way home.

[00:16:21] The first time you drive by the gas station and there's two cars in line, one at the pump, one behind them, pass it up, go home.

[00:16:31] Because I've been in that situation where, like, I pulled into a gas station.

[00:16:34] There was no weight.

[00:16:35] And in the time I was tanking up, like, my truck plus two five-gallon cans, two people pulled in behind me.

[00:16:43] And they were doing this number where they're nose-to-nose trying to figure out who's going to hit who to try to get in line behind me.

[00:16:50] And that was the moment at which I was like, I'm sitting there, by the way, with, like, a nine-millimeter handgun on my hip, locked and loaded under my shirt.

[00:16:57] But I'm thinking to myself, I'm like, if one of these two pulls out a gun or gets into a fistfight, they are five feet away from the back of my truck.

[00:17:06] Like, it was just, it was one of those situations where, like, it's not like I broke my own rule.

[00:17:10] There was no line when I got there.

[00:17:11] There was an open pump.

[00:17:12] But in the short amount of time I was there, the situation I'd always feared my wife being caught in the middle of happened right behind me.

[00:17:20] And that's why I've consistently said, you see crowds of people, we have stuff at home.

[00:17:25] We don't need to be in the crowd.

[00:17:26] We don't need to be in the fistfight at the Walmart trying to get toilet paper.

[00:17:30] That's nonsense.

[00:17:30] Oh, exactly.

[00:17:31] It's a lose-lose situation.

[00:17:32] Even if you're the victor in that fight, you're still going to get hurt.

[00:17:35] And odds are, you're probably not going to win, especially in a crowd.

[00:17:41] Well, my problem with being involved in a conflict is that there is no winning.

[00:17:49] It's not like you win in a fight because you still run the risk of getting hurt, and that sucks.

[00:17:55] You still run the risk of having to deal with people in polyester uniforms.

[00:17:59] Like, the only way to win a fight to me is to avoid it.

[00:18:03] And that comes along with don't be in the stupid place with the stupid people when they start doing stupid things.

[00:18:09] This is very true, and I did not even notice this at the time.

[00:18:14] Jeff brings up a perfect point.

[00:18:16] The movie's a bit out of date because Flag Lady would have been a drone if not for the time of filming.

[00:18:22] Well, judging how Ukraine's gone.

[00:18:26] Well, but I would say yes and no because, like, suicide bombers are still extremely common all across the third world.

[00:18:33] Sure, but the third world doesn't have people with basements full of half-finished drones.

[00:18:39] True.

[00:18:40] I mean, think about it.

[00:18:41] How many people do you know that have at least one of those little fun camera drones?

[00:18:47] I can think of a half a dozen.

[00:18:49] No, I mean, you have a point.

[00:18:52] Jeff has a great point.

[00:18:54] Yes.

[00:18:56] But I still don't think suicide bombers are going to be out of style for a very, very long time because in most conflicts, human lives are the cheapest thing on Earth.

[00:19:06] Agreed.

[00:19:07] That sounds really harsh, but at a certain point it is.

[00:19:11] Well, yeah, especially when you're talking about, say, an insurgency-style conflict where, yeah, your materials are in short supply and drones are in short supply and everything else, but there's people around and you can indoctrinate people.

[00:19:26] You can always indoctrinate or recruit more people, unfortunately.

[00:19:31] Yep.

[00:19:32] All right.

[00:19:32] Let's go to the next one.

[00:19:35] So I might not let this one run to full completion because it does get a little bit slow, but the very beginning has the parts that I wanted to kind of like.

[00:19:43] Well, let's do the highlight of the very beginning.

[00:19:46] Help you folks?

[00:19:48] Just looking for gas.

[00:19:52] Gotta look at the fuel permit.

[00:19:55] No, we're actually just passing through.

[00:20:00] Can't help, sir.

[00:20:02] Sir, if we pay.

[00:20:04] I was never going to give it free.

[00:20:06] Over the odds.

[00:20:08] What's over the odds?

[00:20:09] $300.

[00:20:11] For half a tank and two cans?

[00:20:15] $300 buys you a sandwich.

[00:20:17] We got ham or cheese?

[00:20:20] $300 Canadian.

[00:20:26] Okay.

[00:20:28] All right.

[00:20:29] And the rest of that I think goes to like a kind of a broad look over the whole movie.

[00:20:33] But so the things that stood out to me in there was, you know, when the reporter offered $300, the guy kind of giggled.

[00:20:43] Which if you think about areas of conflict, let's say non-hard assets, fiat currency, the value goes to almost zero.

[00:20:53] Like, you're talking about a government that's literally under siege.

[00:20:57] Their paper currency that is backed up by our IOU if we survive this conflict has almost no value.

[00:21:07] But the minute he heard $300 Canadian, that's a – I'm assuming, because it's never stated in the movie, I'm assuming that's a more stable nation in this world.

[00:21:17] So the value is still there.

[00:21:19] It might be tradable in the future.

[00:21:24] But moderately organized militia maintaining order and custody on limited resources in the absence of law and order.

[00:21:30] And this is something that, like – this is something I feel definitely harkens back to, like, some of the conflicts that the global war on terror vets might be familiar with.

[00:21:38] Because in the absence of government or in the absence of law and order, you will see local militia activity spring up to try to maintain some semblance of order because there's nothing else to hold it together.

[00:21:52] Like, sooner or later, you're going to get into these little tribal coalitions where it's like, well, me and my cousin and my brother, we're making sure things are okay right here because we're protecting what's ours.

[00:22:02] We're protecting our community.

[00:22:03] And you get into these weird little situations where, like, you have a local fuel permit because they know they only have so much gas.

[00:22:10] They ain't giving it away to strangers.

[00:22:12] And from the sound of it, they're certainly not selling it for currency that may not have value.

[00:22:18] Absolutely.

[00:22:19] You know, I know we didn't run the whole scene, and I think there's – it's like a three-minute scene, and there's a couple minutes afterwards where they've got some guys hanging from the car wash out back.

[00:22:28] Mm-hmm.

[00:22:29] All right?

[00:22:29] That's another thing that you're going to see a lot of.

[00:22:32] I wouldn't say a lot of, but in situations like this where there is no formal law enforcement, one of the guys makes a comment of, we've been arguing for days over what to do with them, the looters, that they have, I suppose you could say arrested because they're the only force of authority in that area.

[00:22:52] Yeah.

[00:22:52] And the guy who's making these comments, by the way, knew one of the looters, went to high school with them.

[00:22:56] Yeah.

[00:22:57] So you're going to – like, there were stories that came out of the U.S. Civil War where you had, like, brother fighting brother or cousin fighting cousin.

[00:23:03] And you're going to see situations like that in any situation that gets desperate enough where people know the people who are wronging them because they're in your community.

[00:23:14] You've probably grown up with them, but they're so desperate.

[00:23:17] Their morality goes to zero, and they just need to get what they feel like they need, which puts people in this weird position of, like, stringing up guys you went to high school with in the car wash behind the gas station because you can't let them loose.

[00:23:33] You can't allow them to loot.

[00:23:35] You can't let them commit property crimes against their neighbors, but there's no law to call.

[00:23:40] So what do you do with them?

[00:23:42] Yeah.

[00:23:43] The debate, if I recall correctly from that scene, is whether or not to shoot them or beat them for a few more days and then let them loose.

[00:23:51] Yeah.

[00:23:52] So if you were to pull some shenanigans in a situation like this and loot or steal or assault someone, you're at the mercy of the person who's arrested you, seized you.

[00:24:07] So you're at the mercy of their morality and how wrong they feel personally.

[00:24:13] Yeah, but I will also say that at a certain level, you are at the mercy of very practical decision making because if you're in a situation that is desperate enough, you don't have the resources to operate a jail and house and feed these guys.

[00:24:33] So your only two options that are left are either take them out of the gene pool so they stop being a problem or let them loose and hope that they learn their lesson.

[00:24:42] And if you let them loose after you beat the fire at them for a couple of days, they very well might come back with a bunch of buddies and just want to tune you up for it.

[00:24:50] So it really becomes one of those situations where, yeah, you could totally get into this very serious, heated morality argument of what's the right way to deal with this.

[00:25:02] But sometimes the right way might have to give way to the way you can deal with it.

[00:25:07] And in this kind of a situation with this wide range of a conflict, there will be no judge.

[00:25:13] There will be no jury.

[00:25:14] There will be no jail.

[00:25:15] There will be no prison.

[00:25:16] There will be no prison.

[00:25:17] It's going to you're going to have to make a decision on the spot and just live with it.

[00:25:21] And I don't know.

[00:25:23] I'm not saying that to be like flippant or say it's an easy decision to make, but you're not going to you're not going to have the luxury of.

[00:25:31] You won't be able to outsource your decision making.

[00:25:34] That was the word I was looking for.

[00:25:36] You're not going to have the luxury of outsourcing dealing with societal problems.

[00:25:41] Yeah, you're not going to have a luxury.

[00:25:43] There are no guys in polyester uniforms with badges on their show on their their chest coming to take the bad people away.

[00:25:50] They're not coming.

[00:25:51] You know, and realistically, it doesn't have to be a scenario this severe.

[00:25:54] You know, say the earthquake that everybody's been fearing on the West Coast cracks off.

[00:26:00] Cascadia subduction zone, I believe it's called.

[00:26:02] It could be I think they were saying on the best case scenario, three to six months before restoring restoring normal functionality in the area.

[00:26:13] Hey, it took a few days after just a hurricane wiped out some roads for people to start getting any kind of government assistance.

[00:26:23] What happens if every single highway for an entire coastline is is destroyed?

[00:26:30] All right.

[00:26:31] You might have a couple of weeks where you either have to hold the person who is looted, who's trying to loot your house or deal with them.

[00:26:38] Yeah.

[00:26:39] And the police are going to be busy doing with every single thing else and their family.

[00:26:46] Mm hmm.

[00:26:48] All right.

[00:26:49] So on to clip number three.

[00:26:51] Yeah, sure.

[00:26:52] So I saw this.

[00:26:54] I saw this clip labeled very different things.

[00:26:56] But the one I grabbed is called Boog Boys Shootout, which the whole.

[00:27:01] Yeah.

[00:27:03] OK, so.

[00:27:05] Admittedly, I was multitasking when I watched this and I wasn't like watching super, super close.

[00:27:09] I had to go back and rewatch it to notice that they were wearing Hawaiian shirts.

[00:27:13] Yeah, they were.

[00:27:14] I mean, maybe maybe that maybe that's my own personal blinders.

[00:27:18] I was more focused on like, you know, the weapons and the tactics and what they were doing.

[00:27:22] And, you know, like I was looking at this from my perspective of dissecting the scene and the fact there where Hawaiian shirts went right over the top of a noggin.

[00:27:30] Well, usually when people are shooting at each other, the last thing you're worried about is his fashion choices.

[00:27:36] Yes.

[00:27:36] But in this case, kudos to the director for this little.

[00:27:40] Yeah, it was a nice little Internet drop in there.

[00:27:42] Yeah.

[00:27:43] All right.

[00:27:43] Here we go.

[00:27:44] So I'm going to stop it right there just in case we have somebody who's a little bit sensitive in the audience.

[00:29:20] Yeah.

[00:29:20] But the rest of that scene gets a little bit gory.

[00:29:23] Yeah.

[00:29:24] I mean, rightly so.

[00:29:26] So let's let's let's first talk about.

[00:29:30] What happened immediately following that scene?

[00:29:32] The gentleman who was shot had what appeared to be a through and through lower abdominal wound.

[00:29:38] He's not going to make it.

[00:29:39] No, no.

[00:29:40] 0% chance of that.

[00:29:42] Kudos to his battle buddy who is like, you know, unrolling a thing of gauze and trying to shove it in there and wound pack like that's probably the right thing to do in that case.

[00:29:50] But he ain't going to make it.

[00:29:52] That's that's not that's not happening.

[00:29:54] So what stood out to me was.

[00:29:59] I said broken chain of command, which doesn't necessarily apply to like this specific situation, but I feel like you're going to that's going to be a theme in any kind of a conflict like this where the the objectives.

[00:30:10] Are almost centralized around that group, which this was obviously not.

[00:30:14] This was a paramilitary group, but it was obviously like kind of a local group of like Boogaloo boys and they have assigned their own objective and decided on their own how they're going to achieve it.

[00:30:27] But so broken chain of command, no inner unit tactics.

[00:30:31] I wouldn't.

[00:30:32] I mean, they might be operating within their own unit, but it didn't appear.

[00:30:35] I wouldn't expect there to be a lot of coordination between this group and another similar group.

[00:30:42] Small groups choosing individual objectives towards a perceived group goal, not necessarily a cohesive one.

[00:30:49] Um, what else?

[00:30:53] No quarter likely to be given for press.

[00:30:55] Nope.

[00:30:56] Never mind.

[00:30:57] I am on the entirely the wrong freaking bullet point.

[00:30:59] Jesus Christ.

[00:31:00] I told you I was going to screw all this.

[00:31:01] That's all right.

[00:31:02] We're so sure.

[00:31:03] Very varied weapons, very tactics and experience levels.

[00:31:07] It was very obvious that there was one guy who seemed to have his stuff together and everybody else was kind of playing off of his lead.

[00:31:13] Did you notice that there was an AK in that group?

[00:31:16] So I noticed in addition to like several very different ARs that were all outfitted very differently, but even different weapons, possibly different ammunition, different armor packages as well.

[00:31:28] Yes.

[00:31:28] So again, this tends to be something you see with unorganized militia activity is that everyone kind of brings whatever they have and you're not going to have that cohesive.

[00:31:39] Everybody runs the same gear.

[00:31:40] Everybody has the same magazines.

[00:31:42] Everybody has the same ammo.

[00:31:43] So you're going to see a lot of rum with your brung, which can be a blessing and a curse, especially if you start trying to like swap mags.

[00:31:50] Hey, I'm out.

[00:31:50] Throw me one.

[00:31:51] That magazine may not fit in that weapon and that weapon may not like that ammunition.

[00:31:56] Who freaking knows?

[00:31:58] Questionable resupply strategy.

[00:32:01] So I noticed they were throwing some smoke grenades and I think to myself, where did those?

[00:32:05] It's not like smoke grenades are illegal currently, but I wonder about where they were getting them from unless they were just looting them off of scavenging.

[00:32:16] I mean, possible.

[00:32:17] Look, if you're a disorganized militia, say guerrilla style insurgency or whatever, and you're going up against a state actor, you're going to be robbing the bodies of the state actors that you take out.

[00:32:30] You're going to be stealing from their supply depots when you can.

[00:32:34] You're going to be interrupting their supply shipments when you can.

[00:32:37] You're going to be harvesting every single thing you come across because whether or not you need it now, you damn sure can't get it from the armory because there is no armory.

[00:32:48] Yep.

[00:32:49] And then the only other thing I had in here was through and through gunshot wound arterial spray unsurvivable.

[00:32:55] Probably unless you have a serious Kazivac ability or higher level of care.

[00:33:02] Don't beat me to the later punchline.

[00:33:04] Yeah.

[00:33:06] But yeah, I mean, this is something that's just very worth pointing out.

[00:33:08] And this is why, like, just in the last scene, I was talking about, like, the only way, the best way to win a fight is not to get in the fight.

[00:33:14] Right. Because in these kinds of situations, if you get hurt, you are probably not going to make it because this this lack.

[00:33:23] I don't I don't think a lot of people fully respect the fact that, like, the reason why mortality rates in war have gone down so much over the last 80 years is largely because.

[00:33:37] First of all, we're feeling believe it or not, we're feeling much smaller groups of people than we used to.

[00:33:41] Like, we don't there are no more World War One trenches.

[00:33:45] And even like the big battles of World War Two, we don't have anything approximating those anymore.

[00:33:50] But the other the other reason, once you get past just the raw numbers, is the fact that a lot of people get wounded and they survive because we immediately Kazivac them to the rear.

[00:33:59] And we have life saving technology that was like science fiction 80 years ago.

[00:34:04] So there's there's a ton, the ton, the number of purple hearts handed out has gone done nothing but gone up because a lot of people get wounded, sometimes critically, and they survive.

[00:34:15] But in this situation, without Kazivac, without field hospitals, without really ironclad supply lines, if you get hurt, you're going to see Jesus.

[00:34:26] More than likely.

[00:34:29] Yeah.

[00:34:31] But that was those were all the things that like, really jumped out at me as I was I was really looking hard at, like the weapons, the tactics, how this was being prosecuted.

[00:34:41] The one thing that really frustrated me and it's not a criticism of how this was shot or how this was done.

[00:34:46] It's a criticism of what I saw.

[00:34:48] But at the moment they were calling for their buddy who was kind of like, you know, stranded on an island.

[00:34:54] They were calling for him.

[00:34:55] Hey, you got to move.

[00:34:55] You got to move.

[00:34:56] They stopped shooting at the opposing force.

[00:35:00] That's the wrong freaking way to evacuate a buddy from an island.

[00:35:04] Like at the moment you tell him run, you should have everybody on your side pouring fire at the enemy to keep their heads down.

[00:35:12] Or better yet, you sent two guys around the other side of the building to flank the freaking building.

[00:35:18] Wait until they flank the building.

[00:35:19] And then the guy the opt for has to take fire from two different sides at the same time.

[00:35:25] And they will put their freaking heads down and you'll be able to get your buddy out.

[00:35:28] So like that's just a that is a total 20 years ago.

[00:35:33] I was trained like this and it came back to me real fast.

[00:35:36] But I just looked at that and I was just like going back to my original point of like.

[00:35:41] Like the there's an out there's an element here to me of I don't want to say a lack of training, but maybe a disparate amount of training where like you've obviously gone through some kind of training, but maybe not enough to execute these types of attacks without casualties.

[00:35:58] Well, in actually executing any kind of attack without casualties, even among a very well trained force is extraordinarily rare.

[00:36:07] I mean.

[00:36:09] Anytime you're going into a firefight, chances are probably are pretty good that at least one of your team, unless you're hitting a soup, a really numerically inferior foe or technologically inferior foe.

[00:36:23] Chances are somebody is going to catch a round or a piece of shrapnel at some point.

[00:36:29] I mean, yeah, but I guess what I'm saying is and like to raggle fraggle's point, yes, he did send someone to flank.

[00:36:36] But why didn't he wait until that flanking element was laying down fire and then he was laying down fire?

[00:36:42] So you have fire from two different directions, because like what I see is if you tell your buddy to get off the X and the other side can pick their can lift their head up off the wall without getting immediately perforated or can dude.

[00:36:54] You've done something horribly wrong.

[00:36:55] Yeah, you should have a volume of fire going up, you know, and especially when you're talking about shooting in an elevated position, you need four times the fire going uphill to keep their heads down.

[00:37:07] So the fact that they were able to pick their head up without getting can dude when you told your buddy get off the X, you did it wrong like that.

[00:37:15] That was what I saw, which given we're talking about, like, I don't want to say marginally, let's say less than professionally trained paramilitary activities.

[00:37:24] I didn't feel it was inappropriate, but it did jump out at me.

[00:37:28] I think it was completely appropriate.

[00:37:30] I think it was completely appropriate.

[00:37:32] Especially if there's only one person that's actually trained in that in that squad.

[00:37:36] Let's call it.

[00:37:36] Yeah.

[00:37:38] Yeah.

[00:37:39] It falls under the heading of like, I think I think it was scripted well.

[00:37:44] But if this was like a professional soldier, someone would be smacking him on the back of the helmet and telling him that's not the way you're supposed to do.

[00:37:50] Oh, for sure.

[00:37:52] Oh, for sure.

[00:37:52] But I don't know that any of them were intended to be professional soldiers.

[00:37:58] I think you had one guy that had at least a cursory knowledge of tactics, techniques and procedures, but maybe no training and probably no experience.

[00:38:10] Which I think is very much representative of what you would see in the surprise spring up little militia groups.

[00:38:20] Very much so.

[00:38:21] Like I said, I thought it was well scripted.

[00:38:23] I just when I saw it, it kind of jumped out at me.

[00:38:27] And yes.

[00:38:27] And Jesse.

[00:38:28] So this isn't so much a movie critique.

[00:38:30] It is more of a as I saw these things.

[00:38:34] These were things I thought were pointing out that like had parallels back to like modern urban conflicts, the preparedness community, just, you know, different things.

[00:38:43] It's kind of like I saw this and it made me remember this other thing that comes from somewhere in my brain box.

[00:38:49] And it's just kind of an interesting film.

[00:38:52] It is.

[00:38:53] It's a different it's a different take on the genre, which I really appreciated.

[00:38:59] All right.

[00:39:00] Let's go to what I have named the sniper scene, which if anybody's seen like previews from this, this should all look familiar because these were kind of the highlights of the movie.

[00:39:10] But, you know, for the reason that they're the highlights, they're the parts that jumped out at me.

[00:39:15] So let's fire this one off.

[00:39:18] You keep going.

[00:39:21] Shit.

[00:39:23] Where are you going?

[00:39:44] Sam.

[00:39:45] Don't be such a hot shot.

[00:39:47] Just keep your head down.

[00:39:51] No shit.

[00:40:04] Don't try driving on.

[00:40:06] This guy's a good shot.

[00:40:30] So I'm going to cut this short.

[00:40:31] Apparently, we're not streaming on Facebook because somebody got their feelings hurt.

[00:40:36] Oh, well.

[00:40:37] That happens sooner or later.

[00:40:38] Yeah, they can deal.

[00:40:40] Anyway, you know, free fair use is a thing, even though.

[00:40:45] I don't know.

[00:40:46] Media companies get their panties all knotted up if they can't get you into a theater for 50 or 60 bucks.

[00:40:52] Well, you know, Facebook's got the whole violence, whatever.

[00:40:56] But they've got Ukraine war footage all over everything.

[00:40:59] So, yeah.

[00:41:00] Yeah.

[00:41:00] Well, they also had like Taliban beheading videos back in the day.

[00:41:03] So let's just assume for a moment that all of big tech and big media can buzz off as far as I'm concerned.

[00:41:13] Yep.

[00:41:14] You guys are useful, but not welcome.

[00:41:16] Yeah.

[00:41:16] Like my wife just said, we are still streaming on Facebook, but it's blocking some of the video you were showing.

[00:41:22] Oh, that's okay.

[00:41:22] Well, we can discuss what it was.

[00:41:24] So essentially what's going on here.

[00:41:27] Let me pull out the world's smallest violin for Lionsgate.

[00:41:29] I know.

[00:41:30] Play my song.

[00:41:31] My heart bleeds for you cold hearted, you know, capitalist bastards.

[00:41:35] You poor bastards.

[00:41:36] You only made 50 million dollars.

[00:41:38] People can't talk about your videos, which is free freaking advertising, you freaking morons.

[00:41:43] I know, right?

[00:41:44] Because, yeah.

[00:41:45] The only reason I watched this movie is because we were going to talk about it.

[00:41:48] Damn it.

[00:41:49] I was going to avoid it.

[00:41:52] Well, in honor of Lionsgate, I'm not going to promote someone violating federal laws, but let's just say hypothetically that if you are smart with the internet and know what a VPN is, you don't really have to pay to see a movie.

[00:42:05] Let's just leave that right there.

[00:42:06] There's that.

[00:42:08] Anyway, so.

[00:42:10] So the sniper scene.

[00:42:12] Opens up with them in a car.

[00:42:14] Sitting in a car discussing what they're going to do, and a round comes through the window.

[00:42:18] Driver does.

[00:42:19] Perfect.

[00:42:20] Perfect.

[00:42:20] Textbook reaction.

[00:42:22] Into gear.

[00:42:22] Get floor it.

[00:42:24] Yeah.

[00:42:24] Get off the X.

[00:42:26] Get out of the kill zone.

[00:42:28] The only freaking thing you're supposed to do when somebody's shooting at you in a video.

[00:42:32] Yeah.

[00:42:33] The only thing you should really do when someone's shooting at you at all.

[00:42:36] Start moving as fast as you can.

[00:42:38] Pick a direction.

[00:42:39] It's probably better than standing still.

[00:42:41] I mean.

[00:42:42] Yes.

[00:42:43] You know.

[00:42:45] What I found was really interesting about this whole situation.

[00:42:49] And we didn't really show this part of the clip.

[00:42:52] One of the reporters is kind of doing a back and forth with the counter sniper pair that are laying on the ground in their ghillie suits.

[00:43:00] Interesting choice of hide for them.

[00:43:01] But all right.

[00:43:02] I'll allow it.

[00:43:03] They had to have a convenient place for them.

[00:43:07] The reporter asked them, you know, who the people were that they were, you know, that they were getting shot at by.

[00:43:13] And the guy said, it doesn't basically it doesn't matter.

[00:43:17] They shot one of our people.

[00:43:20] There's a sniper in the building who's shooting at us.

[00:43:23] Doesn't matter who he is.

[00:43:24] Doesn't matter what our orders are.

[00:43:26] Doesn't matter what we were doing.

[00:43:27] That is now the problem of the day.

[00:43:30] Yeah.

[00:43:33] Yeah.

[00:43:34] When you get to the point of somebody's trying to send you a lead cord high velocity F off.

[00:43:41] Whatever was going on five seconds before that, and especially if they whack one of your buddies, that's all off the table.

[00:43:47] Now there's only one mission and one objective.

[00:43:49] And it is to absolutely end whoever is messing your day up.

[00:43:54] Yeah.

[00:43:55] So what I was thinking about this was exactly what I said on the last video.

[00:43:58] Because I got my stuff out of order.

[00:44:00] Broken chain of command.

[00:44:02] No inner unit tactics.

[00:44:03] Small groups choosing individual objectives towards perceived group goal.

[00:44:06] And the reason I went down this road is that I don't think these two snipers.

[00:44:11] I think these were part of the Western forces.

[00:44:14] Possibly.

[00:44:14] And I say that.

[00:44:15] Well, I say that because you got one guy with his hair dye 14 different colors.

[00:44:20] That doesn't strike me as like big army federal.

[00:44:23] Oh, no, dude, that was that was improvised camo to hide him among the Christmas decorations.

[00:44:29] It was the same colors as the Christmas lights laid out in front of him on the grass.

[00:44:33] If you look if you after this, go back, slow it down, pause it on that scene.

[00:44:39] They are one to one matches of the Christmas lights.

[00:44:44] I'm still going to go with the idea that I just I don't know that these two because in any OK in any kind of a.

[00:44:53] Because both of them.

[00:44:56] OK, but what what has me wondering and the reason I think that these might have been Western forces, even though I couldn't see like patches to indicate that was.

[00:45:05] Is the fact that they're in the middle of BFE on farmland.

[00:45:11] And I can imagine that at this stage of a conflict where by the end of this to spoil the to spoil the movie, we see the Western forces kicking in the door wash in D.C.

[00:45:21] So at this at this stage of a conflict, I would imagine that the majority of the federal troops would be either in D.C.

[00:45:28] or protecting high value targets, not playing peekaboo with farmers in the middle of BFE.

[00:45:34] So what I'm imagining this probably was was Western forces that were either reconning, which would make sense for a sniper unit.

[00:45:41] They were gathering intel. They were looking for for but whatever they were doing, someone has taken issue with them traipsing on their land.

[00:45:49] And now they have a problem to deal with. And the thing that kind of jumped out at me was, you know, like the reporters were trying to get trying to get at like, well, you know, what side are you on?

[00:45:59] What side is that guy on? And you really can't tell at this point.

[00:46:04] And it really doesn't matter.

[00:46:05] Well, I think that's how the scene was designed to be. You know, it's it's supposed to be ambiguous on both sides.

[00:46:14] You know, it doesn't matter who the who the soldiers on the ground are.

[00:46:18] No, not really. Does it matter whose side the snipers on?

[00:46:21] No, not really. Friendly fire is not contrary to popular belief friendly.

[00:46:26] And that's the wild part is that this you could have a farmer in that building who is sympathetic to the Western forces who is currently trying to murk a couple of them.

[00:46:36] But you get you get those kinds of situations in in in civil war or in urban or in civil strife situations because the lines get really blurry really fast.

[00:46:48] Yeah. It begins to devolve into.

[00:46:54] Whether you perceive that person to be on your side or not, and perception is not always accurate.

[00:47:01] And even and even if it's not necessarily you perceive that they're on your side or not is.

[00:47:07] Well, there are some grumpy old farmers that, well, you don't belong on my property.

[00:47:13] Period. Don't care who Gran Torino energy.

[00:47:17] Yeah, exactly. It's like, what are you doing?

[00:47:19] My lawn. Exactly. Get off my lawn immediately.

[00:47:23] This is not a discussion.

[00:47:25] Yeah.

[00:47:28] All right. So now is I just named it the scene because this is the one that everybody has seen and we're not going to play all seven minutes of it.

[00:47:38] No, it's way too long.

[00:47:39] We really I don't think we really have to. Everyone has seen the scene that's coming up.

[00:47:44] It's been discussed to death. And there was only like one thing that really jumped out at me, which I found.

[00:47:49] There's a couple of things there that I thought I saw.

[00:47:53] All right. Well, let's get into it. This is the infamous scene of what kind of American are you?

[00:47:58] Yeah.

[00:48:05] Hey. Hey, guys.

[00:48:12] What's happening?

[00:48:18] I guess there's some kind of misunderstanding here.

[00:48:21] Yeah.

[00:48:21] Yeah, sir.

[00:48:23] Those two guys over there, they're my colleagues.

[00:48:34] What kind of colleagues?

[00:48:36] Journalists, sir.

[00:48:38] We're actually just, we're passing through.

[00:48:41] Passing through to where?

[00:48:43] Charlottesville.

[00:48:44] Charlottesville.

[00:48:49] What's in Charlottesville?

[00:48:52] Good hiking.

[00:48:53] I hear.

[00:48:59] Actually, we are.

[00:49:01] No, we are covering the university campus there.

[00:49:05] They started a new program.

[00:49:06] They are reopening the school, which is a surreal feel good story.

[00:49:11] Uh-huh.

[00:49:12] I guess we all need that, right?

[00:49:29] This guy is your colleague?

[00:49:31] This guy here?

[00:49:32] Yes, sir.

[00:49:33] He's my...

[00:49:35] Yeah.

[00:49:36] I think I snatched that just in the nick of time.

[00:49:38] Yep.

[00:49:39] No pun intended to my post.

[00:49:41] Perfect.

[00:49:43] Yeah, so basically what we've got here is we've got either Western forces or a militia group.

[00:49:49] It's very not clear.

[00:49:50] There's no badging on any of these guys.

[00:49:53] I have a theory.

[00:49:54] Yeah, and essentially what we have is we've got a mass grave full of apparently civilian bodies.

[00:50:02] And the guy just taps one of the journalists.

[00:50:08] Probably for, I'm guessing, racist reasons based on his next line of questioning.

[00:50:16] Yeah, and that was kind of where I was going.

[00:50:18] So I don't think these guys are Western forces, and they're certainly not federal forces.

[00:50:23] I think this is probably like local militia.

[00:50:27] And if not even like organized local militia, this is a pair of rednecks who are taking the law into their own hands because there's nobody to stop them.

[00:50:36] And the reason I go down that road is the...

[00:50:42] Really, I'm looking at things like mannerisms.

[00:50:45] Certainly not military.

[00:50:46] Not trained.

[00:50:51] I'm telling you, there is no one that has spent any mad time in uniform who's going to be approached by a group of people who could possibly be concealing weapons on their person who's going to be sitting there that non-freaking-chalant with a firearm in their hands.

[00:51:04] Yeah, I would agree with that.

[00:51:06] 10 out of 10.

[00:51:07] That is some cousin banging redneck who has shot a whole bunch and never had a professional bit of firearms training in his life.

[00:51:16] I mean, the fact that the group was able to come up on him theoretically in surprise is not a great sign, especially in broad daylight walking across an open field.

[00:51:28] There's no sentries.

[00:51:29] That does tell me this is probably not professional military at all, even semi-professional military.

[00:51:35] Yeah.

[00:51:36] So to go down that road a little bit more, what I wrote down was tribalism.

[00:51:41] In-group versus out-group.

[00:51:43] Breakdown of society gives way to people dividing along ideological, racial, or tribal lines.

[00:51:48] And we saw a lot of this in Iraq where when...

[00:51:52] Because you have to bear in mind that as much of a son of a bitch as Saddam Hussein was, he actually did kind of force the country together.

[00:52:01] But when he was deposed from power, all of a sudden the country fractured along family lines, tribal lines, religious lines.

[00:52:10] I mean, I'm sure you've heard there's like Sunni and Shiite Muslims.

[00:52:13] And they don't like each other very much because they both think each other are like halfway infidels because they don't do the religion the right way.

[00:52:19] Well, the country fractured in all these different little subgroups because if you ask...

[00:52:28] If you take an American and you put them in any other country and somebody says, where are you from?

[00:52:33] They're probably going to identify themselves as an American, right?

[00:52:37] In Iraq, if you ask them, are you an Iraqi?

[00:52:42] Most of the time the answer you would get is, no, I'm part of so-and-so family or so-and-so tribe.

[00:52:47] Like these people had no cohesive concept of being countrymen.

[00:52:53] They did not see each other that way.

[00:52:55] These were...

[00:52:55] This was based...

[00:52:56] Like it was as if you had four different countries all bordering each other.

[00:53:02] And then somebody drew a line around the nexus point between the four and said, y'all are a country now.

[00:53:08] Because the...

[00:53:08] Well, that's exactly what the British did, though.

[00:53:10] I know.

[00:53:11] But that's the road I'm going.

[00:53:12] We can blame the British for the Middle Eastern problems.

[00:53:15] You can blame the British for a lot of stuff, if we're being really honest.

[00:53:19] They show a whole lot of people for those spices they refuse to use in their cooking.

[00:53:24] Jeff Jag, if you have comments, stick it in the chat and I'll send it, man.

[00:53:29] But like I said, like, so that was what I noticed.

[00:53:31] Like the whole point of this scene is he winds up shooting the journalist.

[00:53:36] He winds up shooting several people.

[00:53:38] Well, he starts by shooting that journalist and then he starts asking the rest of them, like, where are you from?

[00:53:43] What kind of American are you?

[00:53:44] And what he's looking for is, are you from places I consider to be America?

[00:53:50] And the answer to that was like Missouri, Colorado, Florida.

[00:53:52] I'm sure if he would have said, oh, and I'm from Maryland or I'm from the D.C. Beltway, he'd have probably got shot too.

[00:53:59] But...

[00:53:59] More than likely.

[00:54:00] But then this other guy says, I'm from Hong Kong.

[00:54:02] He's like, oh, China.

[00:54:03] He shoots him on the spot.

[00:54:04] So what we see here is we see that when the national identity is no longer cohesive, people find new lines to draw between them, the in-group and the out-group.

[00:54:16] And that you, I'm just saying that usually, historically winds up being religious, racial, national origin.

[00:54:24] You know, like the beauty of...

[00:54:26] Family and clan structure.

[00:54:27] The beauty of the United States for most of our history has been that, like, we have this shared national identity that kind of, like, cuts across where did your great-grandparents come from?

[00:54:39] Like, I feel like most Americans, like, we remember our national, our former national heritage.

[00:54:45] We remember our culture.

[00:54:46] But we've also melted them all together into this new national identity in the fact that we're all Americans.

[00:54:52] But when we're all Americans goes away because the country has fractured, you resort back to the only thing that's left.

[00:55:01] And you find new lines to draw.

[00:55:03] And people will enforce those new lines in a very bloody manner.

[00:55:09] Well, unfortunately for us, you know, none of us have ever really had to experience that in this country.

[00:55:18] Thankfully.

[00:55:19] You definitely saw it overseas.

[00:55:21] Yes, there is racism in this country and it is a serious problem.

[00:55:25] Fair enough.

[00:55:27] It's bullshit.

[00:55:28] It's stupid.

[00:55:30] But that doesn't change the fact that this country has, from everyone I know who has traveled outside of it, done away with it to a very great degree.

[00:55:44] At least compared to Europe, China, Asia.

[00:55:48] I mean, a friend of mine, he was overseas stationed on, I think, an Air Force base.

[00:55:55] I forget which island, which of the Japanese islands he was on, but he was on a Japanese island and they would refuse service to anyone that was not ethnically Japanese.

[00:56:08] Completely legal to restrict service to you for not being ethnically Asian enough.

[00:56:14] Yeah.

[00:56:15] That's insane to me.

[00:56:18] But again, grew up in the Midwest.

[00:56:20] There's everybody here.

[00:56:23] So before we go to the next clip, there was something I couldn't find this clip, but it happened right after this.

[00:56:29] In the process of making the escape, one of the journalists winds up getting shot.

[00:56:34] And, you know, they do their best to rush him to want to be in the Western Forces field hospital to try to save him.

[00:56:40] He didn't make it.

[00:56:41] And, you know, this is a very similar note to what I said earlier, which was breakdown society will render insignificant injury serious and want survival injuries immediately fatal.

[00:56:54] So like this guy, he he was obviously hit.

[00:56:57] And given his rotundness, he was probably going to have a rough time.

[00:57:01] But he survived long enough to like drive apparently several miles down the road before he started to have issues with consciousness.

[00:57:10] So I'm thinking to myself, like if this had been current situation and there had been operating hospitals around like there.

[00:57:17] There's an argument to be made.

[00:57:19] You might have been able to roll the dice and get him into an emergency room.

[00:57:23] Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe shot.

[00:57:25] But in this kind of situation with breakdown society, like a a gunshot wound from the top of your head to your pelvic girdle is immediately that that's a no go zone.

[00:57:37] You are not going to survive any of that gunshot wound to an extremity.

[00:57:41] 50 50 if you have a turn again.

[00:57:44] But maybe.

[00:57:45] But like if you get hit from Eddie's going to love this.

[00:57:49] If you get hit anywhere from the top of your melon to your taint, you're done.

[00:57:52] There is no there's no saving you without access to immediate access to a very, very good trauma center.

[00:57:59] Yeah, you cannot tourniquet the tank.

[00:58:02] You can't.

[00:58:04] And and, you know, I think that the reaction of the journalists to this whole experience where there's this great shot of.

[00:58:15] I don't know who the who the actor's name is, the guy with the mustache that's in the backseat.

[00:58:20] I know where you're going.

[00:58:20] Young girl.

[00:58:21] That's.

[00:58:22] Them looking at each other and they cannot even breathe and process the situation that they're in because of how overwhelming this whole thing has been.

[00:58:32] That is probably some of the best acting I have seen in a movie in a very long time.

[00:58:38] I mean, that's that's that's exactly the kind of response I would expect from anyone.

[00:58:46] Realistically.

[00:58:47] A hundred percent.

[00:58:48] And I'm going to tell you honestly that, like, in these kinds of life or death situations.

[00:58:55] There is absolutely less than zero shame in a person getting overwhelmed because, like, these are overwhelming situations.

[00:59:02] It happens.

[00:59:03] Oh, yeah.

[00:59:04] There there is no prior life experience that can prepare you for seeing two of your friends shot.

[00:59:13] For not being American.

[00:59:16] Yeah.

[00:59:17] Air quotes.

[00:59:18] Probably means white.

[00:59:19] He probably meant white.

[00:59:21] I think that was the writing that they were leading to.

[00:59:24] American enough for for someone.

[00:59:27] Yeah.

[00:59:28] OK, we're at an hour.

[00:59:30] I'm going to skip the six scene and go straight to the seventh.

[00:59:35] Sure.

[00:59:35] If you're this one's a I don't think anybody's still watching on Facebook.

[00:59:39] We might have people watching on Rumble and we have five on YouTube.

[00:59:44] But this will be the last one.

[00:59:46] Stick with us to the end.

[00:59:47] And there was something I meant to announce at the very top of the show.

[00:59:50] So shameless self-promotion.

[00:59:52] And I forgot how we can do it.

[00:59:53] So I might do it at the end.

[00:59:56] All right.

[00:59:56] Last but not least, this is the Western forces knocking on D.C.'s front door to say hi.

[01:00:03] That run for the whole four and a half minutes.

[01:02:09] I'm trying to leave some meat on the bones in case somebody actually wants to like go and watch this because I think it's worth a watch.

[01:02:15] The end of the movie is pretty good.

[01:02:17] It's it's intense.

[01:02:19] It is.

[01:02:21] But I think this is a there's one problem I have with this scene.

[01:02:25] And Phil, maybe your experience will will correct me on this.

[01:02:29] Why in the hell is D.C. not blacked out right now?

[01:02:34] Two reasons.

[01:02:37] First of all, I am allowing for the possibility that perhaps they were caught flat footed.

[01:02:44] OK.

[01:02:45] In other words, like, you know, the the total surprise.

[01:02:49] Not in an OK.

[01:02:50] Total surprise when you're talking about a military force this large might sound kind of laughable.

[01:02:55] That's that's that's what I'm getting.

[01:02:56] But consider the fact that if you have defectors, if you have divided loyalties, if you have subterfuge, if you have sabotage, it's not inconceivable that somebody didn't tell, you know, POTUS and crew, hey, the redcoats are coming.

[01:03:14] And also consider like think about the amount of forces you see coming in versus what is in opposition.

[01:03:21] There's not a lot of opposition.

[01:03:24] So true.

[01:03:25] I'm going I'm going down this road of like very obviously this is like the last stand and most of the opposing forces given up or they jump ship or they or whatever.

[01:03:36] I mean, they're not there.

[01:03:37] And the other thing, I mean, it's just it it's it's kind of like modern tactics.

[01:03:42] One on one ever since World War Two.

[01:03:45] If you've got an opposing attack attack coming in, you cut the power, you cut the lights, you make it as hard as possible for them.

[01:03:52] But the other reason is because it really screws with the photography unit.

[01:03:56] Well, that's fair.

[01:03:58] I mean, I mean, you could I mean, you know, you could have got some cool night vision scenes in there.

[01:04:04] I'm just saying last eight minutes of this movie with a green tent on and done it.

[01:04:08] And it looked like a exact ad.

[01:04:09] But no, that really.

[01:04:11] Oh, yeah.

[01:04:11] It's been fantastic.

[01:04:12] Dudes in panels running around.

[01:04:14] I mean, come on.

[01:04:15] We could have been really tactical about this.

[01:04:17] I know.

[01:04:18] I know.

[01:04:18] But I guess what I'm looking at is, is like, you know, like I look at the amount I look at the volume of forces coming in on the Western forces side versus what's in opposition.

[01:04:28] And I see an enormous disparity, which seems very this seems very late stage conflict, which we didn't show the scene.

[01:04:36] But if you look at the very beginning of this movie, you have the president basically saying, like, we're on the verge of victory.

[01:04:42] And then an hour and a half into the movie, it's like him and the one the one lady from Secret Service and a couple of a couple of people that stuck around to the end.

[01:04:52] And the entire military has disappeared.

[01:04:56] So that was obviously BS.

[01:05:00] Well, you're not going to go on national television and say, hey, guys, I know we're really close to losing.

[01:05:07] No, no, no.

[01:05:08] What's that going to do for you?

[01:05:10] But the things that stood out to me about this was that a civil war will divide loyalties.

[01:05:16] You will have federal troops who are going to say, I'm from Texas or I agree with the Texans or I'm from California.

[01:05:24] And when they jump ship, they're going to take their hardware with them.

[01:05:28] Hence, you get why would you not?

[01:05:29] Hence, you get Apaches and Chinooks and tanks and Humvees.

[01:05:33] And this begins to look like a, quote unquote, legit army as opposed to a lot of the other scenes, which were like local militias or the Boogaloo Boys or a small element.

[01:05:45] But this is like traditional big stand up army.

[01:05:49] This is like the difference between George Washington and his boys versus the guys hiding out in the swamps, you know, sniping redcoats off the off the backs of horses.

[01:05:58] Like that's the level of disparity I'm seeing here in terms of equipment and tactics.

[01:06:04] But that happens.

[01:06:06] There's a chain of command, obviously.

[01:06:08] There's cohesion in the unit.

[01:06:11] There are multi-unit tactics.

[01:06:13] There are obviously significant supply lines.

[01:06:15] Like the scene that we jumped over to get to this so this doesn't turn into too long of an episode is like was showing the Western forces base and it looks like a freaking bob.

[01:06:24] I mean, it's there are obviously very, very stable supply lines pushing this, which is something that's very, very important as you get to any kind of a large scale military buildup.

[01:06:36] You have to have supply lines.

[01:06:38] What a lot of people don't realize that I guess is beating us come from the military background.

[01:06:42] But when you look back through military history, the big jump didn't come about necessarily because of mechanization.

[01:06:51] Like we look at World War II and it's mechanization.

[01:06:53] It's the era of like the jeeps and the radios and radar and technology infiltrating the military.

[01:07:00] But the most significant change in military tactics was not mechanization.

[01:07:05] It was supply chain.

[01:07:07] That happened in World War I.

[01:07:09] Because if you look at the battles 20 years before World War I, they couldn't last for more than a couple of months because once you get once the supply lines get too long and too fragile and you can't supply food and bullets to the front line, the conflict cannot go any further.

[01:07:25] And it can't last for much, you know, for too long because the nation supplying that supply chain just runs out of freaking steam.

[01:07:32] What one saw was the ability to apply industrialization to a war effort so that a nation could increase their output enough to perpetuate a war almost indefinitely and the ability to stretch the supply lines so much further than they could previously because of the beginnings of mechanization.

[01:07:52] So in such a way that like you could prosecute a war very far from your borders much, much longer than you could previously.

[01:07:59] And that is why the supply chain is the bedrock that wars are built on.

[01:08:06] And that's what I saw in this scene that I didn't see in any of the others.

[01:08:10] I see a supply chain that's pushing this.

[01:08:12] I see the ability to perpetuate this war all the way to the steps of Washington, D.C. in a way I didn't see in the previous scenes.

[01:08:24] Absolutely.

[01:08:24] I mean, you can't say it any better than General Omar Bradley.

[01:08:28] Amateurs discuss tactics.

[01:08:30] Professionals discuss logistics.

[01:08:32] Yep.

[01:08:32] I mean, realistically, the big reason why our military right now, the U.S. military, is the danger that it is on the global stage is because within 24 hours we can deploy a fighting force anywhere on the globe with a Burger King.

[01:08:50] Yep.

[01:08:51] I mean, there are literally army units that are designed to be able to like next day ship you hell on earth in a box.

[01:08:59] Right.

[01:08:59] Exactly.

[01:09:00] You know, and the big thing that you're going to see in any kind of civil conflict or any kind of civil unrest is a breakdown in logistics.

[01:09:10] So whoever can win the logistics game first, fastest and best is going to be the victor long term.

[01:09:17] I mean, that was that was realistically one of the Romans big advantages over anyone else that they were dealing with.

[01:09:23] Their army was their logistics train.

[01:09:26] They didn't have a separate logistics train.

[01:09:30] Yeah.

[01:09:31] And the only other thing that was in here was like this this one little footnote that kind of like wraps up the whole movie to me.

[01:09:37] And that is that the only people that wish for war are the ones who have never experienced it.

[01:09:43] Open warfare will scar a nation physically and emotionally for multiple generations.

[01:09:47] And I'm drawing parallels to Iraq, Afghanistan, conflicts around the world where like there were entire generations of fighting age men that were that were disappeared over the course of years.

[01:10:01] And then as a result, there's an entire generation of young men, children growing up without fathers, which leads to further instability and conflict down the road.

[01:10:12] Like I it does this and this.

[01:10:15] Yeah, this is might be kind of a soapbox moment for me, but like I I'll be the first to admit I've had those moments of frustration where I've said, OK, just burn it all down.

[01:10:23] Let's start over again.

[01:10:24] To hell with it.

[01:10:25] We all have them.

[01:10:27] But, you know, rational right brain fill really doesn't want a major conflict on my soil ever for the rest of my life, because like I've seen what that does to the nation and to the people of that nation up close and personal.

[01:10:41] And it's not something I want my countrymen to have to experience.

[01:10:45] It's it is emotionally debilitating to watch to what I mean, imagine and Nick, I'm going to put you on the spot.

[01:10:55] Is there a local place where did you and your wife go on your first date?

[01:11:00] Was it a restaurant or movie theater, movie theater?

[01:11:04] Actually, yeah, movie theater.

[01:11:05] Can you imagine the emotional shock if you went if you just happened to drive by there tomorrow and it was a smoking hole in the ground like a bomb?

[01:11:12] Oh, I'm sure it would be trauma.

[01:11:14] I'm sure it would be traumatizing.

[01:11:16] So I'm sure it would.

[01:11:17] We mean, I we that were that we that were in Louisiana National Guard that were deployed to Katrina.

[01:11:24] We witnessed that because we were going we were driving past neighborhoods that we knew people that lived there.

[01:11:30] I was driving by coffee shops and restaurants that I'd gone to with friends at University of New Orleans that I remembered and they're gone.

[01:11:38] It looks like a war zone.

[01:11:39] So like we had that experience over and over and over through that city.

[01:11:44] And then you get the experience of being with buddies of yours when they go to check on their homes and they're gone.

[01:11:51] And it's gone.

[01:11:52] And you live through that pain with them.

[01:11:54] So, I mean, it's it's one of those situations where it's like I don't want an entire country to have that experience of watching your home, you know, like picked up, shaken up really good and put back down haphazardly because that's what happens.

[01:12:11] This is my biggest gripe with politics right now in this country.

[01:12:14] We have had it so good for so long and it has been so stable that our politicians feel like they can risk the kind of vitriol that they are now without worrying about the consequences.

[01:12:32] I mean, how long ago was it that we had the Chaz Chop zone in Seattle and a group of Antifa members fired several hundred rounds into an SUV containing children on a joyride?

[01:12:47] Do you want that in your town?

[01:12:54] You know, we all can do our part to tone this back.

[01:13:01] But we can only do so much when the media continues to push these stories.

[01:13:07] And fortunately, a lot more and more people I see are completely ignoring these mainstream media stories that are trying to push the vitriol and the hatred.

[01:13:17] And that's fantastic.

[01:13:19] And we all need to ignore those people and shame those people because it's not doing anyone any good.

[01:13:26] Yeah, I will say that the more you ignore them, all mainstream media, the happier your life gets.

[01:13:32] I see some.

[01:13:33] Oh, my gosh.

[01:13:33] I see some chatter in the comments.

[01:13:35] I think perhaps our stream got pulled off of YouTube as well, because why wouldn't it?

[01:13:41] So if anyone's if anyone's still watching this and there's five of y'all, you should be able to go check out our Rumble channel.

[01:13:49] And I don't think Rumble does all this censorship shenanigans.

[01:13:53] So, you know, that's well, as long as it's transformative, as long as we're commenting on it, Rumble doesn't care.

[01:13:58] We just can't play the movie in full, which fair, fair.

[01:14:04] Come on.

[01:14:05] OK, well, they're live now.

[01:14:07] Yeah, we're live now.

[01:14:08] So two piece of a piece of administrative work I meant to do on the front end of the show and then we'll wrap up.

[01:14:16] First of all, for the patrons, the annual Secret Santa exchange is going on.

[01:14:21] If you need information, you should have gotten that from the patron group that's on Signal or you should be able to log into Patreon and get your information there.

[01:14:31] Or I did go on the patron only RSS audio feed and let y'all know.

[01:14:35] So if you missed us in all three of those spots, I don't know what y'all are doing.

[01:14:39] Like, come on, guys.

[01:14:42] I mean, I just forgot to email Stuart that I was.

[01:14:45] Well, but that can be amended quickly and easily.

[01:14:49] Oh, no, I already hit him up.

[01:14:50] He sent me an email text and he's like, hey, man, are you going to do that?

[01:14:54] Oh, I I neglected to hit the send button.

[01:14:58] See, this is why as much as Stuart makes me pull out what tiny little bit of hair I'm holding on to.

[01:15:04] I do love him to death because like he is fantastic.

[01:15:07] He is really good at keeping my my little my little herd of, you know, autistic squirrels somewhat contained in one area.

[01:15:17] I don't know how good of a job he's doing, but they're all accounted for.

[01:15:21] They're all we know where they are.

[01:15:23] They're all just a little nuts.

[01:15:24] No pun intended.

[01:15:26] And the other thing was, you know, shameless self-promotion time.

[01:15:29] So recently and we my wife and I talked about this on Raising Values a couple of weekends ago about the big thing that I was being encouraged to pursue by my wife and some family to start up our own nonprofit with the intention of starting to do like local prepared community readiness and preparedness classes.

[01:15:52] With the potential of expanding those like into regional area.

[01:15:58] It's something that like I've been torn with the idea for a couple of years.

[01:16:03] I honestly I held off on it for a lot of time because like, you know, like some of y'all know that I really am very shy.

[01:16:09] I'm an introvert and the idea of running an organization like this scares the hell out of me.

[01:16:13] And the idea of being in front of people scares me, but I am one of I'm of the mind that like the one thing that preparedness community has not been good about for the last handful of years is we've we've held our cards too close to the vest and we're not trying to reach new people.

[01:16:31] So like me talking to y'all on the internet is cool and I get we get the message of preparedness out.

[01:16:38] But what I don't do is I don't spread it to the five or 10 people in this area that I might be able to who need to hear it because they may not be listening to podcasts.

[01:16:48] They may not be on YouTube, but if I tell them, hey, there's a local event, you can meet me face to face and hang out with us for a morning and an afternoon and we'll teach some cool stuff.

[01:16:56] They might show up.

[01:16:58] So the name of you.

[01:16:59] So what you're saying is they can all show up and make you extremely uncomfortable by their presence.

[01:17:05] They I will tell you right now that I will be terrified and surprised and honored if a whole bunch of people in like, you know, southeast Louisiana, St.

[01:17:16] Tammany Parish area show up to this event where we're almost at the point of being able to announce a date.

[01:17:22] I will just say that, you know, look for it like first quarter of 2025.

[01:17:27] And the name of the organization is Cypress Survivalist, C-Y-P-R-E-S-S, because in my brain, Cypress is always spelled U-S.

[01:17:36] And I don't know why, but that's not right.

[01:17:40] But it's on YouTube.

[01:17:41] I'll have to ask my wife if we've put together a Facebook page.

[01:17:45] My wife spent most of her career working in nonprofits, so she's much smarter at this stuff than I am.

[01:17:50] And she's been the driving force behind like actually organizing this little herd of cats to go in one.

[01:17:58] That's the reason we all get married.

[01:18:00] Our wives are smarter than us.

[01:18:01] Come on now.

[01:18:02] Well, they did marry us.

[01:18:05] So that is that somebody kind of makes me question their intelligence sometimes.

[01:18:09] Even the smartest people can be fooled.

[01:18:14] Yeah.

[01:18:15] Yeah.

[01:18:15] So I'm sure we'll talk about it more.

[01:18:18] Yep.

[01:18:18] Gillian's in the chat.

[01:18:20] Facebook and Instagram.

[01:18:21] Cypress Survivalist.

[01:18:23] I don't know.

[01:18:24] Like we're going to start with like this one local event and we're going to see if we can grow it and make it in something incredible.

[01:18:30] Like my big thing is that I really want to use this platform to try to teach practical preparedness and survival skills to people who desperately need them.

[01:18:44] Like I'm not averse to bringing in a person that knows bushcraft stuff to teach people how to make feather sticks and bow drills and all that stuff.

[01:18:51] But like it's not my focus.

[01:18:53] My focus is you are brand new.

[01:18:56] You live in the suburbs or an apartment.

[01:18:58] What can I do to get you self-sufficient?

[01:19:02] And that's my focus because that is meeting the broadest segment of the population where they're at today and getting them to a point where if there's a major natural disaster, they're okay for a few weeks and they're not immediately screwed.

[01:19:16] Hey man, I'll take a few days.

[01:19:19] If I can get it so that you can make it through a long weekend without any external input, that solves, what would you say, Phil?

[01:19:29] Three quarters of the natural disasters we have?

[01:19:32] I mean, realistically.

[01:19:33] I mean, honestly, if you get three or four days, that's a good start.

[01:19:38] If you can last three days without your utilities being hooked up and powered up, you just solve probably 75% of your problems.

[01:19:48] Yeah.

[01:19:48] I would say so.

[01:19:49] You're easily going to make it through a Cat 1, Cat 2 hurricane down here on the Gulf as long as your house is in a flood zone.

[01:19:56] Oh, yeah, for sure.

[01:19:58] It's like one of our guests brought up in a recent video of ours.

[01:20:02] There are some emergencies you cannot prepare for because your preps get taken by the emergency.

[01:20:10] Yep.

[01:20:10] Shit happens.

[01:20:12] Sometimes you just got to eat that suck sandwich.

[01:20:14] Yeah.

[01:20:14] But if everyone around you is capable of handling themselves, then emergency service can handle the exceptions.

[01:20:23] Yep.

[01:20:23] And that's also part of the reason why we've started talking about doing this specifically is because it's not just enough to build up the individuals anymore.

[01:20:31] Now it's about trying to build up communities.

[01:20:34] Like, if you are a prepared individual and your neighbor is also a prepared individual, then the two of you can back each other up and y'all can solve a lot more problems than you can by yourselves.

[01:20:46] And I think that's why.

[01:20:47] Absolutely.

[01:20:47] I think that's why, like, to me, this is kind of an extension of something I used to say in the pro-gun community years ago, which was we're at a point where you don't have the option to not be an advocate.

[01:20:58] Everybody has to get off the bench and get in the game and start preaching what you believe.

[01:21:02] And I believe that for the preparedness community, that if you truly believe this lifestyle is worth living, it's time for more of us to be comfortable.

[01:21:11] Being the brunt of some bearing the brunt of some of the jokes, some of the derision and, oh, you're getting ready for the zombies and all that nonsense and going out in communities and showing people like I'm going to always quote Holly.

[01:21:24] Kyle's wife, the first time she met me and my wife, she said, wow, y'all are really normal.

[01:21:28] And that was, like, the best compliment I could have gotten because I was like, yes, we are.

[01:21:34] Like, you know, we don't live in a bunker and eat MREs and dried beans all the time.

[01:21:38] Like, we're a normal family.

[01:21:40] We just do some things differently than most other people do.

[01:21:43] But I want people to see the preparedness community as normal people.

[01:21:49] I want us to spread the lessons we've learned.

[01:21:52] And I'm willing to take that first step with my wife and my sister and my brother-in-law in this local area, Southeast Louisiana.

[01:22:01] And we're going to give it a go.

[01:22:03] You might as well, man.

[01:22:05] I mean, what have you got?

[01:22:06] The only thing you have to lose is a little bit of mockery from your fellows.

[01:22:10] And honestly, to quote one of my favorite TV shows, your boos mean nothing.

[01:22:16] I've seen what makes you cheer.

[01:22:18] Come on.

[01:22:19] Yeah.

[01:22:20] From my perspective, I'm going to repeat something I've told Gillian many, many times before.

[01:22:25] Mockery has never stopped me from doing something I think is right.

[01:22:28] And in order for someone's criticism to matter to me, I'd have to give a damn about your opinion.

[01:22:36] But let's go ahead and punt this one out the door.

[01:22:38] Cypress Survivalist.

[01:22:39] If you're a patron and you'd like to be part of the Secret Santa Exchange, you should look into that.

[01:22:45] You should get in touch with me or Nick or get into the Signal Chat or some kind of way of getting in touch with us.

[01:22:50] I mean, we're not that hard to find.

[01:22:53] Yeah, find one of us.

[01:22:54] Who knows?

[01:22:55] Maybe I'll make another canon for Christmas.

[01:22:59] Don't play with my emotions.

[01:23:00] Stewart, pair me and him up.

[01:23:03] I mean, I don't need a canon, but I need a canon.

[01:23:07] I mean, no one says no to a surprise canon.

[01:23:12] I could put it on my desk right here and just, you know, I can't be trusted with a canon.

[01:23:17] But anyway, Matter of Facts Podcast.

[01:23:20] I think my brother took this to work.

[01:23:21] Oh, Jesus.

[01:23:24] Matter of Facts Podcast is going to go out the door.

[01:23:26] Thank you to the four of you who are still hanging around.

[01:23:29] To the 22 that were with us when we first started, I guess either we were too long-winded or YouTube and Facebook shut that party down.

[01:23:37] So I apologize.

[01:23:37] But check us out on Rumble.

[01:23:40] I blame Zuckerberg.

[01:23:41] Check us out on Rumble if all else fails.

[01:23:43] And talk to you all next time.

[01:23:44] Bye, everybody.

[01:23:45] Later.