"boors" twist presumably valid stats to fit their prejudices, while "wimps" know those facts are wildly irrelevant to the underlying problem, if any even actually exists.
Ie this typical chain of argument, usually not explicitly spelled out past step 1.
1. "Black Americans commit significantly disproportionate per capita murders."
2. "This is due to some innate flaw of black people."
3. "Therefore we should ignore all complaints from black activists."
This conclusion does not follow even if 1 and 2 were face value true, because variations within a sub-population, good or bad, obviously does not justify curtailing the entire group’s political rights.
But #2 is false, the predominant cause of black murders is prohibition.
The drug war creates incentive for people with the least other opportunities to engage in low barrier market, without protection of any civil justice institutions. Knowing that people in the drug trade cannot go to police in case of theft or murder, means they are particularly vulnerable to anyone willing to risk violence to take their job or just whatever contraband/cash they happen to be holding. In America, due to several centuries of lifetime legal theft committed against blacks, they are the ones with the least capital, and eventually ended up concentrated in urban areas with convenient access to most customers. Its not that there are so many black killers, its there’s so many easy black targets.
If for some historical reason the Atlantic slave trade never occurred, and there were say 99% fewer blacks in America, but we enacted the same drug laws, then the same murders would be committed in the same turf struggles today, but by whatever white people shook out as poorest, and most willing to risk death to fill this govt-contrived niche.
So yes, black people commit many more murders, and there’s no reason for a libertarian to deny that, but instead use this as proof of monstrous government interventions, past and present, that led to their situation.
Otoh, I’m aware of very few black activists calling for full drug legalization. Instead they fixate on secondary problems like police brutality, or counter productive solutions like doubling the minimum wage.
I’m similarly not aware of any libertarian thinkers, either side, going out of their way to actually talk directly to black community about how government is making their lives worse.
So rather than dismiss the plight of black inner city dwellers, go talk to them!
This phenomenon is even worse re: immigration where the problems that boors bang on about don’t really exist. People fleeing objectively bad governments are low hanging fruit to convert, if anyone from either of our camps made the slightest effort.
-There were indeed black criminal organizations during prohibition, though only known to exist in Harlem and Chicago, and primarily interested in gambling markets. Intoxicants were controlled by far more powerful white immigrant cartels, who killed each other at comparably aberrant rates, and blacks of the day mostly chose not to challenge.
-Official data is spotty on all black activities in general prior to 1960.
-Segregation limited interactions between black and white populations, such that black bootleggers had few customers outside their own demographic, who had minimal disposable income. Thus they could not achieve the rapidly profitable clout of a modern gang, who today collectively dominate the national supply chain for customers of all races, and readily willing to kill to protect this much higher income stream.
-Post WW2, gambling laws liberalized, drug laws intensified, white mafias were decimated by crackdowns, and next generation had easier access to legal professions than their old world elders. Black organized crime rushed to fill the drug trafficking gap, and being always considered the most expendable people, competition became particularly lethal.
Maybe because blacks were still second hand citizens during Prohibition and only were involved in their communities, so (a) with 10% of the population, and poorer to boot, they never got the press or police attentions, (b) black bootleggers got lynched without the bother of arrest and trial.
I think of wimps, leftists, boors, and rightists as *guilty*. There are some responsibilities you don't get out of by caring about people, by despising people, by gushing with respect, or ignoring or satirizing ideas that smell unfamiliar to you. You don't escape intellectual responsibility by not liking, or for that matter liking, people's personalities, tribes, bank balances, or styles. And if you want to be considered a libertarian, you don't win points by spending most of your time scheming to out-politic, or fearing you're being out-politicked by, others. The people who catch my attention think and talk about people as if they were people, and try to appeal specifically to the intellectual honesty (or its potential) in people, and want to be called on it if they fall short.
An example of someone I disagree with about half the time, yet who seems to actually care to do (his version of) *the thing*, is Freddy deBoer.
The point is that *guilt*: that preference for habits, personalities, appearances, paranoia, and tribe membership... anything *except* facts, when (as often), it's facts and the best generalizations of or conclusions from facts, that matter. I love personalities, styles, obscurities, appearances, weird cultural phenomena, etc., but if there's that crater, that managing-not-to-address, right at the center of the target of what matters, that's guilt.
The failure mode for each of boors and wimps is presumably clear, particularly to the other side. Wimps claim boors risk annoying potential allies. Boors claim wimps will gradually asphyxiate the ability to tell necessary truths.
One of the things that strikes me about boors and wimps is the opportunities for gaming these perceptions. If I'm a hardline progressive, I'll pretend to be a wimp. If I'm a hardline HBD, I'll pretend to be a boor. In each case, I'll play on the risks one side wants to avoid, in order to silence it. Or I'll settle for wedging boors and wimps apart, when they would otherwise ally and be a threat to left or right.
In light of this, a bright libertarian must always be wary. When seeing a boor, it might be a racial supremacist masquerading as one. When seeing a wimp, it might be a progressive authoritarian in disguise. This is always a risk in a group with open borders. If a man can walk into an LP convention and streak on a dare, so can a veiled extremist who keeps his decorum and arguments sharp.
--
Ideally, rhetoric shouldn't be a threat. But arguments don't need rhetoric to mislead. I can give you ten sourced claims suggesting anything you want, as long as they don't contradict what voters know, and most voters won't know any given issue deeply enough for that to be a problem. (Especially if I can discredit the few who might, and deny them a platform.)
There are people who know this game well enough to point this out, but they often end up looking like people who "don't believe the news" or "only trust their own underinformed / doctrinaire sources". Also, peeling away rhetoric is tiring, and it's easy to stop doing it and just accept whatever's said, to forget skepticism (or forget to defend that skepticism carefully and not look knee-jerk about it).
Defending a philosophy from perfidy is hard. Even walling it up in a motte and defending it reactively is not enough - unless of course one doesn't care to share it outside oneself.
Are there prominent figures in the libertarian movement whom you interpret as infiltrators? Hoppe on the right? The BHL group on the left? How do you distinguish an infiltrator from a genuine libertarian with views closer to the left or right than yours? How from an "infiltrator" in the other direction, trying to make libertarianism more attractive to left or right by tweaking it to avoid or deemphasize features that would make it unappealing to that audience?
In the case of Hoppe and the Mises people that means constructing arguments against free immigration. In the case of the BHL constructing arguments for welfare payments. My interpretation of the recent history of the LP is that before the Mises takeover it was watering down libertarian positions to appeal to center and left, after to appeal to the right.
On the other hand, after, at least the leadership was pretty openly pro-Trump.
My impression is that in recent hears the anarchist/minarchist issue got less attention within the movement, or at least the LP. That was an internal division, not a left/right one.
Admittedly, I know less about many Libertarian personalities than I would like, and Hoppe and BHL are among them. But I understand both to have been associated with the LP for a long time, with the acceptance of the LP, so I assume they're all genuine. It will be harder for any given BHL member, though, since its membership is presumably fluid, meaning someone could infiltrate it.
The way I would try to tell an infiltrator from a genuine believer is mostly how they respond to counterevidence. If someone dismisses such evidence casually, I consider that a sign of infiltration, or that they've seen that evidence so many times that it's tested their patience - a denial of service attack on their time. (I try to rule out the former with a quick search for their response to that evidence in the past.) If someone takes such evidence seriously, it's a sign of genuineness - that their goal is to get the right answer, even if it's not the answer they currently hold.
There are other ways to get a sense, such as admissions against interest, or even being able to tell the story of each side in a way that a genuine believer in that side would agree is positive and complete.
People who tailor libertarianism to left or right are interesting in this framework; they're "reverse infiltrators". In my experience, they're easy to tell from the first kind of infiltrator in that they spend more of their time talking to the left or right than to libertarians. Do you have a different example in mind?
Based on a brief review of that argument, I read it as motivated by Hoppe's observation of people who prefer not to have immigrants in their vicinity but are otherwise open to free exchange. "[E]ven if real incomes rise due to immigration, it does not follow that immigration must be considered "good," for one might prefer lower living standards and a greater distance to other people over higher living standards and a smaller distance to others". I read this as Hoppe attempting to improve on the usual model of homo economicus, to better match what he observes. This is the language of a non-infiltrator. He spends more of that essay discussing societies where the land is not all already owned, but with a brief exploration of those where it is, in order to establish what is probably believed by the audience; in other words, an attempt to address possible evidence against his argument for immigration control. Another mark of a non-infiltrator.
I notice that one might have no sense which type of arguer Hoppe is, if they walked into a room where he'd just asserted that immigration control might be a good thing.
Politics is such a dirty game it attracts so many bad actors. Libertarians by joining into politics will inevitably attract them too.
Winning the zeitgeist might be the best thing to do. Perhaps the boors should infiltrate the current Republican movement and the wimps the current Democrats. Together they could win regardless of which big party wins the vote.
I was sometimes happy to call myself a socialist because I thought libertarianism the best thing for society.
It is unfortunate that a movement where everyone at least agrees on constraining government has become so bogged down by these niche ideological differences that are more academic than practical. If Libertarians want to capture even a fraction of the vote from the two major parties, they need to accept what those parties did long ago, which is that electoral success hinges on prioritizing winning elections over maintaining ideological purity in their coalitions. The irony is that the differences between the various factions of conservatives/right-wing populists and leftists in the United States are much more significant than the differences between libertarians in practice.
Minarchists, ancaps, bleeding hearts, objectivists, paleolibertarians, and libertarian conservatives all have the same public policy priorities and overriding vision of limited government. Unfortunately, I don't see the LP matching its 2016 performance anytime soon, if ever. Having two competent and experienced former governors on the Libertarian ticket less than a decade later seems impossible. It is hard to imagine what America might be like now if Johnson and Weld had just left the White House this January.
I think it is a mistake to see the objective as the LP electing a president. Better to use the electoral process as an opportunity to spread ideas, hopefully to supporters of both major parties.
There are at least two areas where differences among libertarians over public policy are as large as differences between the parties: immigration and foreign policy.
While I found a lot of the content of Ron Paul's newsletters to be terrible and even evil, my main problem with him was that he lied about them at least once. He claimed to have authored particular pieces. Later, he defended those pieces while still claiming to have authored them. Then when he decided the content required an apology, he blamed them on an unnamed ghost writer. He couldn't have been telling the truth all three times.
My problem with the Mises Caucus was that they were a GOP "infiltrate and neuter" dirty tricks gang who weren't ever able to convincingly pretend to be libertarians for more than a few minutes at a time.
The Mises Caucus did not infiltrate the Libertarian Party for the purpose of ensuring it didn't hurt Republican candidates. The Mises Caucus did.
To the extent that the Mises Caucus had any inspiration related to the Mises Institute, that inspiration seems to have come from Frankfurt-trained, self-declared Marxist Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
Where and in what context did Hoppe describe himself as a Marxist?
I regard him as a bad influence on the libertarian movement — because he is an intelligent man constructing arguments for conservative positions, not Marxist ones, designed to appeal to libertarians.
"I will do the following in this chapter: First, I will present a series of theses that constitute the hard-core of the Marxist theory of history. I claim that all of them are essentially correct. Then I will show how these true theses are derived in Marxism from a false starting point. Finally, I want to demonstrate how Austrianism in the Mises-Rothbard tradition can give a correct but categorically different explanation of their validity." -- The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, chapter 4.
This brings to mind your conversation with Tom Palmer at the weekend.
Perhaps his interjection makes him a boorish wimp?
I wasn't familiar with him before Prague and he's left a rather poor taste in my mouth, his hatred for Trump seemed to make him lose all objectivity. On every other topic he seemed calm and collected.
The interaction may have been on the Saturday panel which Tom moderated. His is basically the "this was the last election" interpretation. He thinks Trump is successfully putting enough of his people in positions of power so he will be able to establish a dictatorship. I disagreed.
I give my view of Trump starting about 1:35:34. Tom states his view starting at 1:35:51. I don't think there is a more detailed exchange in anything recorded, although we have had some brief arguments on it.
Thanks, David. Great discussion. I do think that Trump will not get a 3rd term no matter what, although the 22nd Amendment isn't as foolproof as I had thought. If he persuaded someone to run for president, with him running for Veep, and if they got elected, and if he then persuaded that person to resign, then he could legally and constitutionally become president. Those are a lot of ifs. Moreover, I think he'll be too unpopular by then.
"boors" twist presumably valid stats to fit their prejudices, while "wimps" know those facts are wildly irrelevant to the underlying problem, if any even actually exists.
Ie this typical chain of argument, usually not explicitly spelled out past step 1.
1. "Black Americans commit significantly disproportionate per capita murders."
2. "This is due to some innate flaw of black people."
3. "Therefore we should ignore all complaints from black activists."
This conclusion does not follow even if 1 and 2 were face value true, because variations within a sub-population, good or bad, obviously does not justify curtailing the entire group’s political rights.
But #2 is false, the predominant cause of black murders is prohibition.
The drug war creates incentive for people with the least other opportunities to engage in low barrier market, without protection of any civil justice institutions. Knowing that people in the drug trade cannot go to police in case of theft or murder, means they are particularly vulnerable to anyone willing to risk violence to take their job or just whatever contraband/cash they happen to be holding. In America, due to several centuries of lifetime legal theft committed against blacks, they are the ones with the least capital, and eventually ended up concentrated in urban areas with convenient access to most customers. Its not that there are so many black killers, its there’s so many easy black targets.
If for some historical reason the Atlantic slave trade never occurred, and there were say 99% fewer blacks in America, but we enacted the same drug laws, then the same murders would be committed in the same turf struggles today, but by whatever white people shook out as poorest, and most willing to risk death to fill this govt-contrived niche.
So yes, black people commit many more murders, and there’s no reason for a libertarian to deny that, but instead use this as proof of monstrous government interventions, past and present, that led to their situation.
Otoh, I’m aware of very few black activists calling for full drug legalization. Instead they fixate on secondary problems like police brutality, or counter productive solutions like doubling the minimum wage.
I’m similarly not aware of any libertarian thinkers, either side, going out of their way to actually talk directly to black community about how government is making their lives worse.
So rather than dismiss the plight of black inner city dwellers, go talk to them!
This phenomenon is even worse re: immigration where the problems that boors bang on about don’t really exist. People fleeing objectively bad governments are low hanging fruit to convert, if anyone from either of our camps made the slightest effort.
Your analysis raises a puzzle: Why were black people not similarly involved during alcohol prohibition?
Good question. Cursory research suggests:
-There were indeed black criminal organizations during prohibition, though only known to exist in Harlem and Chicago, and primarily interested in gambling markets. Intoxicants were controlled by far more powerful white immigrant cartels, who killed each other at comparably aberrant rates, and blacks of the day mostly chose not to challenge.
-Official data is spotty on all black activities in general prior to 1960.
-Segregation limited interactions between black and white populations, such that black bootleggers had few customers outside their own demographic, who had minimal disposable income. Thus they could not achieve the rapidly profitable clout of a modern gang, who today collectively dominate the national supply chain for customers of all races, and readily willing to kill to protect this much higher income stream.
-Post WW2, gambling laws liberalized, drug laws intensified, white mafias were decimated by crackdowns, and next generation had easier access to legal professions than their old world elders. Black organized crime rushed to fill the drug trafficking gap, and being always considered the most expendable people, competition became particularly lethal.
Maybe because blacks were still second hand citizens during Prohibition and only were involved in their communities, so (a) with 10% of the population, and poorer to boot, they never got the press or police attentions, (b) black bootleggers got lynched without the bother of arrest and trial.
I think of wimps, leftists, boors, and rightists as *guilty*. There are some responsibilities you don't get out of by caring about people, by despising people, by gushing with respect, or ignoring or satirizing ideas that smell unfamiliar to you. You don't escape intellectual responsibility by not liking, or for that matter liking, people's personalities, tribes, bank balances, or styles. And if you want to be considered a libertarian, you don't win points by spending most of your time scheming to out-politic, or fearing you're being out-politicked by, others. The people who catch my attention think and talk about people as if they were people, and try to appeal specifically to the intellectual honesty (or its potential) in people, and want to be called on it if they fall short.
An example of someone I disagree with about half the time, yet who seems to actually care to do (his version of) *the thing*, is Freddy deBoer.
The point is that *guilt*: that preference for habits, personalities, appearances, paranoia, and tribe membership... anything *except* facts, when (as often), it's facts and the best generalizations of or conclusions from facts, that matter. I love personalities, styles, obscurities, appearances, weird cultural phenomena, etc., but if there's that crater, that managing-not-to-address, right at the center of the target of what matters, that's guilt.
The failure mode for each of boors and wimps is presumably clear, particularly to the other side. Wimps claim boors risk annoying potential allies. Boors claim wimps will gradually asphyxiate the ability to tell necessary truths.
One of the things that strikes me about boors and wimps is the opportunities for gaming these perceptions. If I'm a hardline progressive, I'll pretend to be a wimp. If I'm a hardline HBD, I'll pretend to be a boor. In each case, I'll play on the risks one side wants to avoid, in order to silence it. Or I'll settle for wedging boors and wimps apart, when they would otherwise ally and be a threat to left or right.
In light of this, a bright libertarian must always be wary. When seeing a boor, it might be a racial supremacist masquerading as one. When seeing a wimp, it might be a progressive authoritarian in disguise. This is always a risk in a group with open borders. If a man can walk into an LP convention and streak on a dare, so can a veiled extremist who keeps his decorum and arguments sharp.
--
Ideally, rhetoric shouldn't be a threat. But arguments don't need rhetoric to mislead. I can give you ten sourced claims suggesting anything you want, as long as they don't contradict what voters know, and most voters won't know any given issue deeply enough for that to be a problem. (Especially if I can discredit the few who might, and deny them a platform.)
There are people who know this game well enough to point this out, but they often end up looking like people who "don't believe the news" or "only trust their own underinformed / doctrinaire sources". Also, peeling away rhetoric is tiring, and it's easy to stop doing it and just accept whatever's said, to forget skepticism (or forget to defend that skepticism carefully and not look knee-jerk about it).
Defending a philosophy from perfidy is hard. Even walling it up in a motte and defending it reactively is not enough - unless of course one doesn't care to share it outside oneself.
Are there prominent figures in the libertarian movement whom you interpret as infiltrators? Hoppe on the right? The BHL group on the left? How do you distinguish an infiltrator from a genuine libertarian with views closer to the left or right than yours? How from an "infiltrator" in the other direction, trying to make libertarianism more attractive to left or right by tweaking it to avoid or deemphasize features that would make it unappealing to that audience?
In the case of Hoppe and the Mises people that means constructing arguments against free immigration. In the case of the BHL constructing arguments for welfare payments. My interpretation of the recent history of the LP is that before the Mises takeover it was watering down libertarian positions to appeal to center and left, after to appeal to the right.
On the other hand, after, at least the leadership was pretty openly pro-Trump.
My impression is that in recent hears the anarchist/minarchist issue got less attention within the movement, or at least the LP. That was an internal division, not a left/right one.
Admittedly, I know less about many Libertarian personalities than I would like, and Hoppe and BHL are among them. But I understand both to have been associated with the LP for a long time, with the acceptance of the LP, so I assume they're all genuine. It will be harder for any given BHL member, though, since its membership is presumably fluid, meaning someone could infiltrate it.
The way I would try to tell an infiltrator from a genuine believer is mostly how they respond to counterevidence. If someone dismisses such evidence casually, I consider that a sign of infiltration, or that they've seen that evidence so many times that it's tested their patience - a denial of service attack on their time. (I try to rule out the former with a quick search for their response to that evidence in the past.) If someone takes such evidence seriously, it's a sign of genuineness - that their goal is to get the right answer, even if it's not the answer they currently hold.
There are other ways to get a sense, such as admissions against interest, or even being able to tell the story of each side in a way that a genuine believer in that side would agree is positive and complete.
People who tailor libertarianism to left or right are interesting in this framework; they're "reverse infiltrators". In my experience, they're easy to tell from the first kind of infiltrator in that they spend more of their time talking to the left or right than to libertarians. Do you have a different example in mind?
Refreshing my memory of Hoppe's arguments on immigration by reading that section of Wikipedia, and the linked argument, written in 1999: https://archive.lewrockwell.com/orig/hermann-hoppe1.html
Based on a brief review of that argument, I read it as motivated by Hoppe's observation of people who prefer not to have immigrants in their vicinity but are otherwise open to free exchange. "[E]ven if real incomes rise due to immigration, it does not follow that immigration must be considered "good," for one might prefer lower living standards and a greater distance to other people over higher living standards and a smaller distance to others". I read this as Hoppe attempting to improve on the usual model of homo economicus, to better match what he observes. This is the language of a non-infiltrator. He spends more of that essay discussing societies where the land is not all already owned, but with a brief exploration of those where it is, in order to establish what is probably believed by the audience; in other words, an attempt to address possible evidence against his argument for immigration control. Another mark of a non-infiltrator.
I notice that one might have no sense which type of arguer Hoppe is, if they walked into a room where he'd just asserted that immigration control might be a good thing.
Politics is such a dirty game it attracts so many bad actors. Libertarians by joining into politics will inevitably attract them too.
Winning the zeitgeist might be the best thing to do. Perhaps the boors should infiltrate the current Republican movement and the wimps the current Democrats. Together they could win regardless of which big party wins the vote.
I was sometimes happy to call myself a socialist because I thought libertarianism the best thing for society.
It is unfortunate that a movement where everyone at least agrees on constraining government has become so bogged down by these niche ideological differences that are more academic than practical. If Libertarians want to capture even a fraction of the vote from the two major parties, they need to accept what those parties did long ago, which is that electoral success hinges on prioritizing winning elections over maintaining ideological purity in their coalitions. The irony is that the differences between the various factions of conservatives/right-wing populists and leftists in the United States are much more significant than the differences between libertarians in practice.
Minarchists, ancaps, bleeding hearts, objectivists, paleolibertarians, and libertarian conservatives all have the same public policy priorities and overriding vision of limited government. Unfortunately, I don't see the LP matching its 2016 performance anytime soon, if ever. Having two competent and experienced former governors on the Libertarian ticket less than a decade later seems impossible. It is hard to imagine what America might be like now if Johnson and Weld had just left the White House this January.
I think it is a mistake to see the objective as the LP electing a president. Better to use the electoral process as an opportunity to spread ideas, hopefully to supporters of both major parties.
There are at least two areas where differences among libertarians over public policy are as large as differences between the parties: immigration and foreign policy.
I don't vote libertarian in order to win. I vote that way to remind the main parties that they don't get a free ride from everybody.
If the Libertarian Party ever did change its messaging to try to win, it would be its end.
I don't care much about "sensibilities."
While I found a lot of the content of Ron Paul's newsletters to be terrible and even evil, my main problem with him was that he lied about them at least once. He claimed to have authored particular pieces. Later, he defended those pieces while still claiming to have authored them. Then when he decided the content required an apology, he blamed them on an unnamed ghost writer. He couldn't have been telling the truth all three times.
My problem with the Mises Caucus was that they were a GOP "infiltrate and neuter" dirty tricks gang who weren't ever able to convincingly pretend to be libertarians for more than a few minutes at a time.
Would you say the same thing about the Mises Institute, which is pretty clearly the inspiration for the caucus?
The Mises Caucus did not infiltrate the Libertarian Party for the purpose of ensuring it didn't hurt Republican candidates. The Mises Caucus did.
To the extent that the Mises Caucus had any inspiration related to the Mises Institute, that inspiration seems to have come from Frankfurt-trained, self-declared Marxist Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
Where and in what context did Hoppe describe himself as a Marxist?
I regard him as a bad influence on the libertarian movement — because he is an intelligent man constructing arguments for conservative positions, not Marxist ones, designed to appeal to libertarians.
"I will do the following in this chapter: First, I will present a series of theses that constitute the hard-core of the Marxist theory of history. I claim that all of them are essentially correct. Then I will show how these true theses are derived in Marxism from a false starting point. Finally, I want to demonstrate how Austrianism in the Mises-Rothbard tradition can give a correct but categorically different explanation of their validity." -- The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, chapter 4.
Or in other words he believes that Marxists get some things right. That doesn't make him a Marxist.
No "other words" needed. He claims that all the Marxist theses are essentially correct. If that's not Marxism, what is?
Big $$$ in preaching freedom, Lew pays himself (and the State) very well:
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/521263436
This brings to mind your conversation with Tom Palmer at the weekend.
Perhaps his interjection makes him a boorish wimp?
I wasn't familiar with him before Prague and he's left a rather poor taste in my mouth, his hatred for Trump seemed to make him lose all objectivity. On every other topic he seemed calm and collected.
Can you provide a link?
The interaction may have been on the Saturday panel which Tom moderated. His is basically the "this was the last election" interpretation. He thinks Trump is successfully putting enough of his people in positions of power so he will be able to establish a dictatorship. I disagreed.
Thanks, David. Was this the SFL event in D.C. a couple of months ago?
The ESFL event in Prague last weekend.
I watched it in person but I was able to find the link for you:
https://www.youtube.com/live/-pdJ9tmCrzg
I didn't search for the exact timestamp when the comment happened but the discussion I'm referring to in which it happened is taking place at 1:07:56
I give my view of Trump starting about 1:35:34. Tom states his view starting at 1:35:51. I don't think there is a more detailed exchange in anything recorded, although we have had some brief arguments on it.
Thanks, David. Great discussion. I do think that Trump will not get a 3rd term no matter what, although the 22nd Amendment isn't as foolproof as I had thought. If he persuaded someone to run for president, with him running for Veep, and if they got elected, and if he then persuaded that person to resign, then he could legally and constitutionally become president. Those are a lot of ifs. Moreover, I think he'll be too unpopular by then.
Thanks.