Showdown
Showdown Episode 99 7-9-24
(upbeat music) - Welcome to Showdown, I'm Mark Casein, and it's Tuesday, July the 9th. But actually, if you're here in St. Louis and you're out walking around, you might think that it's January the 9th because it's raining and it's cold and it's ugly. But yeah, there's a hurricane somewhere that hit Houston, I guess, and is coming through St. Louis and much of Missouri, and it's creating some really horrible weather. So, it's not the end of the world. It'll be 100 degrees in another day or two, I'm sure it'll all be fine. I love it 100, I know other people don't, but hey, this time is it global warming, is it climate change, only indirectly, because this hurricane that came flying through Houston certainly is tied in to some of these bad weather results. All of that aside, this will be gone in a minute. We have bigger problems than what's going on outside with the weather. So, one of the things that's happening today is the start of a NATO summit here in the United States, and this of course is led by us, by Joe Biden, by the president of the United States, and he's hoping to show the world, and of course, the domestic audience as well, how excellent he is when it comes to foreign policy. For his sake, but I'm not sure if it's for our sake, but for his sake, I hope that he doesn't melt down in the middle of all of this. And the reason I say it the way I did is because if Joe Biden does a really great job showing people how well he's handling NATO in the rest of the world, it might help him to stay in the race. But the problem is is that helping him to stay in the race may not be the best thing that could possibly happen to any of us. And the reason I say that, and I love Joe Biden, he's a good man, and so many people are saying that now. Everywhere you go, people say, yeah, well, he's a good man, but he's got to go. And the reason that he would have to go is because he's having a problem. He's having an obvious problem, speaking, and this communication problem that he's got, which has become worse over time. Originally, everybody talked about the stutter, and now it's obviously much more than something related to his original stutter. And he's got a problem. And that doesn't mean he can't be president. I mean, he could be a great president. He's been a great president right now. He is running the country very well. He just, everything he does, he's just tapping in to his background, his expertise that he's accumulated for so many years. And it makes him a great leader. But he can't tell the story. And if you can't tell the story, you've got trouble because if you can't tell it, then no one knows what it is. And believe me, the other side is telling a story. And let's back up on this story part of it. You know, I've got two brothers who both watched a handmaid's tale. And they're constantly trying to get me to watch it, which I have not, I haven't watched any of it. And then we talked about the fact that it was originally written and that I could read it because I read so many things and I could do that. But I still haven't even done that. And I'll tell you why. And I'm not saying no one else should. I'm just gonna tell you why I haven't. You know, utopia is this idea of a fantasy world where everything is absolute perfection. Everything is wonderful. Everything that normally is maybe two-sided and sometimes works out and sometimes doesn't. In utopia, everything's perfect. Paradise, the problem is there's another side to this utopian business and that's called dystopia. So a dystopian story as compared to a utopian story is a fantasy world where every imaginable thing goes wrong. All kinds of terrible things happen. And that's what a handmaid's tale is. It's a dystopian novel that was turned into a program that people watched on TV. And I believe it's excellent. I haven't seen it, but I believe it. I've been told many times the things that are in there and everybody that watches it on the left, they say, wow, this is Trump. And I understand that and I believe that. I'm sure it is. The only reason I haven't watched it or read it is because this is not the first dystopian story that's ever been told. In fact, these dystopian novels have been written all throughout literature. And long before a handmaid's tale, I was reading these as a high school student. They were assigned to us and I read them. Obviously, 1984, George Orwell, that's a pretty good example, animal farm, likewise. These are dystopian stories that really give you chills. It's terrible. What could happen under the worst of circumstances? And many people pointed to the communists in talking about what could become right alongside these dystopian stories and fit in and this would be the world. And there were many people, I was one, who read these things and said, forget the commies. No one's gonna do this. No one's gonna follow the communists. The communists are gonna blow themselves up. And in fact, in the Soviet Union, they did. And I wasn't certainly the first person to believe that I was a teenager, but I read other people and they said it and they were absolutely right. And of course, George Kennan is the big name in all of this. I assume most people haven't ever heard of him, but he was an ambassador to the Soviet Union, a Russian expert. And he said that, yes, Russia's an example of a dystopian story, but on the other hand, it's never gonna happen because the Russians are totally incompetent and they can't get anything done and they'll always be rejected and guess what? He was right. The Russians weren't coming. You know, there was a book and then a movie. The Russians are coming, but they weren't. And they didn't because they were basically incompetent. Now, anybody that read Karl Marx understood what it was that they were trying to do. And there were some people who read Karl Marx and said, you know, it's a great idea. We're gonna create equality. The problem is it doesn't work. You can't do it. It'll never work. And anybody that tells you the commies are coming to get us, whether it's the Russians or somehow our own people that they imagine might be communists, forget it. There's no such thing. I mean, there may be some people around who envision themselves in that way. But it's a very small group and they're very incompetent. They get nothing done. They've never been successful. And let me give you a perfect example. So yeah, maybe it'll help somebody it probably won't because we've got people out here who are so afraid of everything that they think still that the commies are coming. I mean, I get stuff on Facebook all the time from these people. Right-wing crazies who think that, yeah, somebody's coming to get 'em. Well, here's the thing. Nobody who works hard is willing to give up what they've earned to somebody else just because somebody else didn't wanna do the work. It doesn't happen. Now that's separate from as an example, let's say you're a mother and you've got five kids. And let's say your husband dies and you've got no way to earn any money and you certainly can't go out and earn any money because you've got all these kids and you've got a mess. So the government helps those people. That's not giving away everybody's wealth to people who don't wanna work. That's not communism. This is basically social democracy and it's a way of helping people who can't take care of themselves. And I give you another example. Everybody's got this in their family and of course, think about Joe Biden, but anybody's got grandparents. Eventually they become old enough that they really can't go out and do what everybody else does. They just can't. There's a limit. Everybody's got an expiration date. And so what happens is that we set up social security and we set it up so that everybody pays for it when they work. And then when they get old, they get their money back. Now, there's some people who don't like the way it was set up and we can always argue over that and we can try to find better ways to implement this and unfortunately, some of the people who don't like it, what they would like to do is they would like to get rid of all of it. Problem is that they don't even think about is that they have grandparents. And so their grandparents could be out in the street eating dog food, you know, all that kind of stuff. We don't want that. So for the benefit of our country, we provide these services that you pay for in taxes in the early days of your work and it's gone great. I mean, social security has been very successful and everybody loves it. Well, I guess not everybody, because certainly Donald Trump hates it. He's talked about getting rid of social security for years. George Bush, George W. Bush wanted to get rid of it and it got him into a whole lot of trouble. And there are other people who have come up with this brilliant idea too. They want to go back and they want to install a system like what we had, it's say in the 1920s, 1900 through 1925, 30 and the reason is because they would have lower taxes. Well, I'm not going to teach this whole section that I do, but I will remind anybody that catches this, that there's a book by a lady named Monica Prasad and that book is called "The Land of Too Much." And you really need to read that book because it'll help you understand in very profound ways how we help people in our society for the betterment of all of us, for everybody. This is not communism. This is, like I said, social democracy, but call it what you want. It's not giving things away. It's not taking away the wealth of people who have worked hard and now they're going to end up in poverty with nothing because somebody took away everything and gave it to somebody that didn't want to work. See, yeah, we don't do that. That's not our system and we don't do it. In our system, we compete and when we compete, we try to become really wealthy and very successful. Some people have one goal, other people have different goals, but you are able to attempt to achieve whatever it is that you want. And that's a good thing. And I've always told the story and I tell the kids this all the time when I've taught young kids who, and they work. And I ask them, they say they work at McDonald's. And I say, do you ever go to McDonald's and want to kill the guy that's running the place? And of course, they say, no, why would I do that? Well, no, of course they won't do that because they go to McDonald's, they get some food, they get enough money to buy a few things. And in the case of McDonald's, they also pay money for their workers to go on to college and become very well educated people. And speaking of that, by the way, there was a great story out just two days ago. And it pointed out that in the United States, that only 30% of the people in the United States believe that college is worthwhile. 70% believe that college is a complete waste of time. Don't spend your money, don't go, don't waste your time. Just go out and get a job. And if you have to learn a skill, learn your skill, it could be computer skills, which might make you $100,000 a year, that's all nice. But that's not why you go to college anyway. So we're not gonna do that one right now, but I know there are people who think that's why you go to colleges to make money, but it's not a technical institute. It's a place where you learn to be a different kind of person, but we could argue that a thousand times. And I think I can win that argument every time with everybody, but there are people who just think that college is a waste of time and they don't wanna do it. I don't know what they do instead. I guess they watch sitcoms or I don't even wanna say this. Reality shows, that's how you end up watching Donald Trump for 10 years and you think that he's some kind of a genius when actually he's nobody. He's nobody and he can't do anything. But he convinced people after 10 years on television that he's somebody, of course he always goes bankrupt and everything he touches dies and there's a book by that name. I mean, yes, that's the problem with television without education. Television is not bad, but if you don't have any education, well, sure, it could lead you to believe all kinds of things. Just like students, teenagers who get their news from TikTok, that's not the way to do it. Gotta read a newspaper. You gotta watch the news. You gotta listen to people who know what they're talking about. You gotta read articles that come from universities that are peer reviewed, which are considered to be scholarly and are considered to be reliable. Well, okay, and all of this though is important to talk about today because we are clearly entering into a dystopian environment. That is a fantasy world where some very dangerous and crazy people are trying to do things that will ultimately take away your freedom, your rights, everything. You don't like what the dystopian leaders say, you go to jail or they kill you. Now we do that in other parts of the world. Human beings do. I mean, that exists today. I mean, you go to Viktor Orban in Hungary, you can go to Vladimir Putin in Russia and Xi Jinping in China and Kim Jong-un in North Korea. So yeah, these things exist. Also, Iran, although you probably know, you should know that a man in Iran just won an election who is a very exceptional reformer. He's trying to change the whole Iranian system to get away from the Ayatollahs and to give Iran a democracy. So, you know, it's out there. The battle continues. We already talked yesterday about what happened in France. The first section of the election was going towards these neo-Nazis, the right-wing people like Donald Trump. And then lo and behold, they had a second round. And in the second round, all these left-wing groups got together and the people in these countries voted for these leftist leaders who have now taken the control away from the neo-Nazis. So it didn't happen, but it was feared. But, you know, people generally like freedom. Unfortunately, in the United States today, there's a group, probably 35% might be 38, that thinks they want freedom, but actually they're willing to turn their lives, their livelihoods, their decisions about life, everything. They're ready to turn it over to the unified Reich. Unbelievable, but that's what's happening. So that's why my brothers say, "Yeah, read a handmaid's tale so you know what's going on." Well, I don't have to because, like I say, they've written these stories for generations. I know how they end up and it's not good. But I also know that people fight back and I know that people who love freedom, in the long run they do win, they do. Or at least they have. They've won all the way through history. So my guess is that that's headed in a good direction. But in the meantime, there's some horrible things happening. And among the worst of the things, so forget how handmaid's tale, that you can put aside for a minute, there's a 970 page document. And I don't know how much of it you're gonna read and how much of it you're not. Maybe you'll read none of it. But this is a dystopian view of the United States of America that is about to fall down on our heads if the right-wing unified Reich group gets control. So if you're, listen, if you're supporting Donald Hitler, then this is where it's going and believe me. And if you don't believe me, go back and check, although you'd have to go to school probably and you're not gonna do it. But anyway, how about this? The rise and fall of the third Reich by William Shirer, one of the great history books of all time. Only problem is a thousand pages. And in 2024, no one wants to read it. I mean, when I was a kid, 50 years ago, people read it. Today, uh-uh, they don't. But it certainly is the story of Nazi Germany. And it's a story that's actually been replicated in the United States today. And I would have said, you know, 10, 15 years ago, I would have said, impossible. This is Germans who do this, not Americans. But on this one, I was wrong. Because we have people, various levels of people in this country, about right-wing Christian supremacist, white supremacist. It's a small group, but it's powerfully ugly. And they're out here creating unbelievable problems. And they turned all their so-called power over to Donald Trump. And Donald, you know, he's got his own Bible now. So he'll sell you that Bible for $60. I mean, you need a Donald Trump Bible, like you need a whatever. I mean, it's pretty pathetic, but that's where we are. So anyway, we've got this, this problem and project 2025 is the problem. And I talked about it yesterday and I showed the Velshi example of how you know that Donald's lying. Cause Donald says he's never heard of it. And he doesn't have anything to do with it. And he doesn't know anybody that's in it. And it's just, you know, nothing, forget it. Although he was big on it originally. And you can find it on the internet where he was proclaiming the greatness of this. But now he says no. Because he found out that the people who look into it scares the heck out of them. So he's again trying to avoid losing an election. And of course he got a lot of help here from Joe Biden's, you know, mental problems or geriatric problems. I think it's fair to say geriatric problems. It's, it's an age issue, but it's, it's an issue. And, and, and Joe Biden's got the problem. We know he does. And we've all seen it. So, you know, you can't unring the bell as they say. And, you know, you got a lot of people today who have come out in big numbers in the Democratic party saying we're riding with Biden. Riding with Biden. Well, you know, I keep bringing up this historical example that's very fearful for me and should be for everybody. And that's of course Paul von Hindenburg, who was the chancellor of Germany in 1933 and attempted to run against Adolf Hitler. Not Hitler only got 35%, but remember in Germany you could win with that because it was not a two-party system. There are other parties that get all these diverse groups. Anyway, Germany went with this. It was clearly Germany's dystopian view, which came from Hitler and was written very clearly, very specifically everything that he was going to do in mind comf. Well, guess what? Today we don't have to worry about mind comf in America. It's called Project 2025 and it's mind comf. And if you read it, you'll know it. And if you don't look at it and you put your hands over your ears and go la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, I don't hear anything. Well, okay, until they come for you. But, you know, don't get too far ahead of ourselves here because I'm going to say that none of this is ever going to happen because I also believe that we're probably not going to run the 80-year-old man for president. I know we're all saying we are and it could happen. For example, if Joe Biden isn't in as bad shape as we think he is, as what we saw the other day, if it never happens again and he stands up and turns into John Kennedy, then I guess he'll run for president and win. But, I wouldn't count on that. Instead, I think what I said the day after the debate is exactly where we're headed, which is Kamala Harris. And let's talk about Kamala Harris and let's talk about some polls. I saw a whole list of polls today. And Donald Trump is ahead of Joe Biden. These are all brand new July polls and Trump's ahead. Some by three points, some by five points. One of them is tied, but there's an ifsos poll that actually has Biden ahead by one point. And that doesn't mean anything. That's not the reason I bring it up. It's not because Biden's ahead by a point. Here's why I bring it up. Because suddenly Kamala Harris has surged in the polls and in the same poll where Joe Biden's ahead of Trump by one point Kamala Harris is ahead of Trump by two points. So there was some fear, I wasn't really afraid of it. I thought this would happen right away. There was some fear that people would not warm up to Kamala Harris and that if she ran instead of Joe Biden, that she would be destroyed. As it turns out, it looks like that's not the case at all. According to the polls, she's probably a little stronger in the polls than Joe Biden is. And Joe Biden is still strong. The worst he is is probably down by three. That's the worst. And that's after an abysmal performance that should lead everybody to be horrified. And I'm horrified, but not for the country. I'm horrified for Joe Biden. I hate that he's going through this. I know people who have gone through dementia. It doesn't end well, but I think he's headed there. And it's not a thing to laugh at or joke about. And Donald's calling him a dumb dog and all this other stuff. No, that's not right. It's not right. It's unnecessary. I mean, this guy has got a medical issue. The doctors are all saying it's not anything severe at this point and maybe it isn't. I mean, this has been argued out at the White House press conferences with Karen John Pierre leading the way in this conversation and trying to tell everybody what's actually happened. That Joe Biden's had three visits from doctors in three years that it was a regular scheduled doctor's visit. He went through the examination and they said he's okay for a man who's 83 years old or 82. Yeah, he'll be 82. So anyway, look, the United States would like a young person in this race to replace Joe Biden and also to replace Trump and 59 year old Kamala Harris is that person. She is a former prosecutor. She was an attorney general in California. She was a senator in California. She's no dummy. She's very accomplished, well spoken and we saw her in hearings back in the last part of her time in the Senate right before she became vice president and she was incredibly good, really strong and here's the thing. She's going to destroy Donald Trump if she ends up being the candidate. I mean, Trump won't even be close and this is what I've said all along. You know, anybody prosecutes the case against Trump. This country will vote against him. He might get 30% the neo-Nazis that stick with him. Yes, I get it. But it's a small group. You know, white supremacist, yeah. No, they're not going anywhere. This is not the United States of America. It is a fringe group, not only in the United States, but around the world. They just lost in Great Britain. They lost in France. They lost in Poland. There's no inevitability for these right wing neo-Nazi, Christian white supremacists. There is no inevitability for these people, none. Okay, so that's the story there. Now I have more to go, but we're going to get something to eat first. So let's go to Wendy's. Wendy's is at 18,000 Chesterfield Airport Road and believe me, they have got fabulous food. We've talked over and over about the wings. And I mean, just, you know, I say the wings and then you're sitting at home somewhere and you're watching something like this and you might say to yourself, you know what? I think I'll go get some wings and you should because they're great at Wendy's. They also have hamburgers and cheeseburgers and patty melts and smoked meats. And they've got pizza, really good pizza. And then my favorite, the baby back ribs. So, you know, I was sitting up here the other day with Ray Hartman. And I started talking about the baby back ribs. By the time we walked out of here and Hartman had said, I think I'm going to go get the ribs. By the time we walked out of here, he had himself convinced. He said, yeah, let's go get the ribs, which we did and we sat down with Ben for a while. But I'm just saying, it's a great place. Go check it out, 18,000 Chesterfield Airport Road. They also have those onion rings that I love too. So you'll want to check that. And at the same time, if you're not here, if you're somewhere else in Missouri and you're close to defiance Missouri, then you ought to just go in there because there's another Wendy's there. It's Wendy's Roadhouse. Indefiance is the same great food. That's Wendy's and they are excellent. Now, if you're looking for jewelry, Jewels on Hampton is at 4506 Hampton and it's a great jewelry store. Al and AJ are there and always ready to show you all the different things that they have in their cases of jewelry, which again, I've said before, they have rooms on top of rooms and cases in all the rooms and all this jewelry. So lots of choices. So just go to 4506 Hampton and check out the jewelry. If you've got jewelry that you want to sell to them, you can do that. If you got coins, they'll buy the coins from you, all of great prices. Al and his son AJ will sit down and explain to you everything they do and all the jewelry possibilities and they'll talk to you about designing jewelry, which they do. You can come up with your own designs or you can go along with theirs. And then after you spend all this time checking out what's happening and then it gets late and you're on your way out and you look to your watch to see what time it is and your watch is broken. Well, that's okay because they'll fix your watch. That's Jules on Hampton, 4506 Hampton and they're great. Now when it comes to men's clothing, everybody knows and has known for years that I go to the St. Louis suit company in Clayton. They're on the corner of Forsyth and Central and their clothes are excellent. The suits, I love them, they're great suits, all different kinds. There's something for everybody there. You know, I have my kind that I like, I wear the grays and the the the charcoals and you know, those kinds of things, some dark blue suits. Well, be careful on that, that's Trump. But anyway, they got all kinds of great suits there and you'll enjoy it, just even looking at them. And then of course, the next thing is they got the best ties on the planet for $5 a piece. It's ridiculous. That's J and Nick, the owner and the dad and is J and the son is Nick and they'll help you through everything in the store, the overcoats, the shoes, the shirts. You name it, they've got it all. They've got hats, straw hats, you know, summer, summertime. Anyway, that's St. Louis Suit Company. They're in Clayton, been there for 29 years and if you're getting married or you know somebody who's getting married, that's the place to go for wedding attire. The St. Louis Suit Company in Clayton. Like I said, 29 years, you can't go wrong. Check them out, okay. So today I'm talking about this dystopian world that we don't live in but which is scarin' the heck out of everybody that takes the time to read even parts of Project 2025. And actually you can go online and you can put in Project 2025 summaries and you go look at those. But you know, I sort of encourage people to go to the original primary documents. I know everybody doesn't do it, but you know, I am and I'm reading through it. It's not like something you can read in a day but I'm digging through it and it's bad. Oh, it's horrible, what they wanna do. And I've made this point over and over and this goes back months. They want to eliminate the civil service in the United States. They wanna take away a part of our government that is based on meritocracy. In other words, if you merit getting the job, you'll get it because you pass an exam and then you get pulled into the job through civil service and you've got all these protections from civil service and people can't throw you out just because they don't like how you look. They can't throw you out because you have bad thoughts about somebody that's a leader in office. You can't do any of those things. You just, you get into the government and you do a job and you're effective. You care about the United States. You're not part of the deep state. That's all nonsense. There is no, there is no deep state. Listen to me, none, it doesn't exist. If there is no deep state. So when I tell you, listen to me now, peanut galleries and these will stop laughing back there. Anyway, here's the deal. There is no deep state. There's none. There's none. It's made up. Doesn't exist. It's in Donald Trump's demented psychopathology that's somewhere in that head of his. You know, with a bunch of screws loose? There is no such thing. This was created generations ago in this country in order to be sure that we have a meritocracy. People are hired to do jobs because they've done a good job. They show that they merit getting those jobs. Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't people that get hired who are, you know, bad guys who break the law and so forth, you know, like Donald. They're people who commit fraud in our country we catch them and then we put them on trial and we put them in jail unless you're Donald Trump and you've had a reality TV show and somebody thinks you actually know what you're doing and then well, there's all kinds of trouble but we're capable of fighting against that. And let me tell you why we are. Let me show you how we're capable. You know, the Supreme Court did this. The Supreme Court has issued rulings that are insane. They're totally counter to American law and actually there's a story out today where a bunch of the right-wing crazies are now saying that Amy Coney Barrett is actually, you know, some kind of a surreptitious spy. She's really not right-wing and she's, you know, a lefty and she's really gonna end up like some others in the past, David Souter was one, John Paul Stevens was another, I mean, there's some of these people who started off, they were conservative and they ended up being very liberal on the courts. It's happened, hasn't gone the other way but it does go from right to left because they're people who believe in freedom. Yes, they believe in freedom. It's America, it's the idea of America is freedom. Yes, it turns out that Americans are susceptible to Nazism as the Germans were. Turns out, I used to say, then Germany, there must have been something in the water. Turns out, no, apparently it's human nature and it's possible anywhere because it's here and it's scary but it's not something that we can't defeat because we can and here's my point. You know, the Supreme Court originally, way back, supported slavery. I mean, we had slavery and it was tested at the court and the court said, yeah, it's okay. We've done this. This is not brand new. Judge Taney. Was a crazed right wing supporter of slavery. He was the chief justice on the Supreme Court. You can go to Washington, DC. You can see his bust in that big room where they have all the famous past leaders from the United States in that room and Taney's in there. Yeah, he was an important guy. He was there for a long time and he was really bad. Really bad, but we got rid of him and we overcame that, that slavery nonsense and we actually came up with something which they called in history, radical reconstruction which was an attempt to bring black people into our society in a way which would be fair. However, once again, the Supreme Court got loaded down with a bunch of really bad people and they fought against and actually issued rulings against this radical reconstruction which led to a lot of black people being elected to political office. Well, once the Supreme Court got sort of switched in direction, we ended up with Jim Crow and in the Jim Crow era, the courts validated all of that business. All that returned to hurting black people, it came straight out of the courts and in the United States, we supported it in the law. We did. That was the second example of, I don't know if you could call it dystopian, but anyway, there's a third one now and this was in the 1930s because you know, we went through a depression that followed the stock market crash in 1929 and the result of all of that was not good, banks were failing, people were out on the streets, prices of everything collapsed, not inflation, deflation. We were in trouble, big trouble in the Supreme Court, started to take a look at what Franklin Roosevelt was doing to try to get us out of trouble and immediately the Supreme Court said no, you can't do that and they shut it all down. They slammed the new deal down. So how did we ever get here where we are today? Well, pretty simple. At the time, a Franklin Roosevelt wanted to expand the court, they called it the Roosevelt's court packing scheme and it was shut down, it didn't get anywhere. But instead, what happened, lo and behold, a bunch of Supreme Court justices started dying. They were old, that's all. They just got old and they died. And when they died, Franklin Roosevelt replaced them and then came the second new deal and here we are protecting people, protecting old people, protecting mothers who can't take care of their children and need to feed them. I mean, all kinds of things that we do. We're not as good as Europe, go read the book, The Land of Too Much by Monica Prasad and you'll learn a whole lot about social democracy. You'll like it, you really will. There's a whole way of taxing that is proposed under this idea and I think you'll like a lot of it. It's something that a lot of conservatives have looked at actually, but we've never done anything about it. For a lot of different reasons, but like I say, go read the book. Really excellent book, The Land of Too Much, Monica Prasad. In any case, the Supreme Court has been responsible in our history for doing some very, very bad things. But in every one of those three instances, freedom won because eventually people get tired of having their butts kicked and we've been the same way, we got tired of it and we put people in charge at the courts that fixed it. Now, I have to say that I agree with AOC who I like anyway. We're gonna probably have to expand the court probably when Kamala Harris, assuming that she's the candidate and wins, she could expand the court by four people and that would offset the cheating that was done by Mitch McConnell and eventually Donald Trump, which put people on the court after the Democrats were not allowed to have their picks. Okay, things happen, but we're gonna expand the court. We've done this in the past, this is not brand new. We'll expand the court by four people and then you'll be six, I'm sorry, let's see, if you have 13 people on the court, it'd be seven to six, the liberals will be in charge and they won't make every decision liberal but they'll lean in that direction and we'll be in good shape for a good long time after that. This is Donald Trump's last stand. Honestly, it is. After he loses this election, all of this nonsense is going to go away. Project 2025, no, we're not gonna do that. We're not gonna allow the government to take people off the air because they don't like what they say and put them in jail like Vladimir Putin would. We're not gonna support Vladimir Putin in Europe where Putin's trying to take over Europe and there was a great lady this morning, the prime minister of Denmark who was interviewed on Morning Joe and she talked about the war in Ukraine and she said, you know, we really shouldn't call it the war in Ukraine because it's not. She says, really the war in Europe and she says, it's a European war that we need to stop right here where it is or we're gonna be looking at the 1930s and 40s all over again and it won't be pretty and I agree and so do a lot of people in this country and NATO has been so effective in stopping this mess. Very importantly they have done a great job and this is the bottom line. This is where we can protect our society and go forward being a free country or we could dive into Nazi Germany led by Donald Trump and that's a possibility too but I think it's a tiny possibility. I don't think it'll happen. I don't think we're close. I think you're gonna see 'cause remember, all of this is gonna be over in 120 days and I'm gonna tell you right now, Trump's gonna lose big. I think you'll lose by double digits. Other people say that's impossible in America today because there are just too many people on the Trump side but I think this is the end. This is not the beginning of the handmaid's tale. This is not a dystopian view of America. This is actually going to be America. There's no deep state, nobody's coming to get us. Everything's gonna be fine. What we need to do is reestablish the rule of law and move forward in an attempt to establish fairness in as many cases as we can. You know, one of the things that the crazed people wanna do is they wanna give it a Miranda. They say there was never any intention for us to read people their rights and as a result, criminals are being told, first what their rights are and they're being told exactly how to protect themselves against the police if the police break the law. But see, that was part of the 1960s under Earl Warren and we said, no, we're not gonna allow the police to do this. You can't beat people up and put them under hot lamps in order to get answers. You can investigate if you want but you have to tell people their rights and you have to give them an attorney and if they can't afford one, then the government pays for it. They wanna get rid of all that. I've talked in the past recently about Amy Coney Barrett's article where she said, you know, if you don't like all these cases, it doesn't matter because our country is built on the idea of stability in the law and so we don't overturn these precedents just because we wake up one day and decide we don't like it. Not to mention the fact that here we are, let's not forget, three quarters of people in this country believe that crime is at an all time high. But of course, that's not true. Crime is at a 50 year low. Crime is going down year after year everywhere. And those people who are committing the crimes are American citizens. Not these people who are crossing the border. Boy, there's a great article today. You need to get your hands on it. It's the New York Times today and inside, they discuss a family that came 5,000 miles from Central America and they're great. Wow, what a great group of people and they came here and they're finding their way in America and they're just the kind of people that we want here. Motivated beyond imagination to be great and to achieve in a country where you can achieve based on your merit, based on your ability. That's America. Go read the Statue of Liberty. Go check out the history of this country and how we have done this. We haven't always done it right. But then again, the courts have come along and sort of fix things even after somebody else mucked them up. So there's a lot going on here that is very good. Could Joe Biden win? Yeah, he could win. It's possible, but it does scare me because of Paul von Hindenburg. That scares me. I don't wanna repeat that story from Nazi Germany. But on the other hand, poor Joe, he's got problems. He's got geriatric problems and he probably needs to get out of the way and let Kamala Harris step up and let women and young people and black people vote her into office and they will. Okay. I'll remind you now that you can go to Wenties for dinner. You can go to Jules on Hampton for great jewelry and you can go to the St. Louis Soup Company and get great clothes, men's clothing. And on top of that, they're just, it's a great place. In the meantime, I'm Mark Kason. This is Showdown.