Thresholds and Precedents

hi everyone this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado from time to time i do opine on particular political issues and things that occur and this today is a doozy and it's something that's quite interesting and it's a threshold and a kind of a new precedent and so i wanted to talk about it for a little bit you see when you create a society you create rules in a society and you have some rules that are very explicit and written down and some rules that are implicit and they're not really written down but they're customs and then you say well there are certain groups of people that have special privileges or authorities in our society for the ordering of society the functioning of society for example you look at gun laws and you say oh okay well you can't as a private citizen united states bring a gun into this area but a police officer can't because they're serving a public trust and then maybe a former one can or retired one can under certain circumstances because they've proven that they're capable of and there's still social benefit to these types of things certain people while performing the duties of an office it's maybe more difficult to prosecute them or stop them for political reasons because separation of powers and checks and balances so this is always the sketchiest when you look at the person at the top so in olden days when we looked at people at the top the the leader of a country like kings or popes or these types of things they basically had total immunity to everything for life then our political system an artifact of the 18th century while kings were still running around we said well no they don't but they're still an honored citizen in some way and it's it's difficult to enable a system to persecute them because we don't want future political parties coming in and deciding to punish their enemies traveling throughout africa traveling throughout the world it's not lost on me that many of the failed states that i've been to they have a reoccurring pattern of the new leaders arresting the old leaders just happens and we call them banana republics we call them failed states we call them dictatorships totalitarianism it's very difficult to legitimize for any reason proper or otherwise the arrest or persecution of the former head of state and it's impossible in a free society for that person to get a trial a fair trial because every single person in that country has an opinion one way or the other positive or negative on that figure they cannot be impartial it's too hard there's just too much water under the bridge now the united states we've taken it a step further and not only have we endowed the presidency with enormous power we've created a social expectation that the presidents must commit things that are actually crimes prominent examples would be torture which occurred with enhanced interrogation techniques under the bush administration but we swept that under the hood or assassinations of american citizens which occurred under the obama administration with anwar al-awlaki look that up just a drone to the u.s citizen and no due process and these are the public things and if you dig you will find evidence of thousands of things that technically speaking the president does not have the power to do but just decided to do involving the death of americans the seizure of assets the destruction of private property lying in situations that ought to be considered under oath but they get away with it and we even give them special things like executive privilege now we decided as a society that this is okay because it's a club it's a small club and it's a self-regulating club with norms and standards now what happened is that we elected a person who just doesn't seem to respect or care about precedent prior norms and behaviors and will not comply with the rule of law as a fact will not turn over taxes will not submit to subpoenas basically asserts that he is for all intents and purposes above the law no matter how die-hard of a trump follower you could be you have to acknowledge that this person feels that they don't have accountability to the u.s people transparency accountability document accountability and so forth and any attempt to gather any information or have him comply with norms he basically cries and says it's a political persecution on the other hand no u.s president has ever been searched like this and so this thing that happened with mar-a-lago it has the potential to create catastrophic political damage every institution that touches it is now covered in molten tar and this will now be litigated for years it's very likely that the republican party will retake the house perhaps even the senate but at least the house this year which means that with a new speaker the republican party will likely begin an inquisition looking at every institution that is involved in the search of and seizure of documents from the former president out of a matter of principle the end result will be delegitimization and damage to these institutions even if they're following their job and i don't really understand the outcome let's say that you collect evidence of wrongdoing does that then mean that you're going to arrest the former president try to put that person on trial and if that does occur how do you ensure a fair trial with an impartial jury who listening to this has a neutral opinion and can be objective about a person as polarizing as donald trump this is what gerald ford realized when he pardoned richard nixon costing him the re-election in 1976 to jeremy carter was one of the contributing factors to his loss he said over a nine minute speech that no one can be impartial in the matters of the former president it's just true so it brings up a broader conversation and the thing the reason why i'm making this this video should we really endow a single person with this much power think about it this is a prime example of the consequences of hyper-centralization by entrusting an individual and an institution with the power to wall in power arbitrarily violate u.s law murder u.

s citizens torture people do whatever they really desire and be able to sweep it under the rug through clever politics and be in charge of the very people who are supposed to investigate them and have political parties keep them in power even when their conduct is reprehensible you have now created a citizen that has been so warped that it is nearly impossible to put the cat back in the bag even when leaving office the residual power of the office knowledge of the office is so great that you cannot treat them normally i am treated or a normal citizen is treated you can't it's not possible what are you going to do put somebody who knows all of our nuclear secrets our military capabilities how our intelligence agencies work almost everything that we've been strategizing about in foreign policy in a jail cell in a prison and create perpetual disgruntlement to the point where they are now a national security liability you might as well just execute them if this is the end result so why do we have an institution that does this why do we need one man one person one office to be this powerful this really should be the national conversation how do we decentralize decision making and power at the top so that we can truly detangify the united states we did our best in the 18th century and i'd argue that we did a pretty good job we created separation of power and we created a precedent of term limits which eventually had to be constitutionally enforced because it was violated and we created a situation where for the most part people knew when their time was over and there was a peaceful transfer of power now that that public trust has been violated we're in a situation where we have to re-examine my view of the presidency as a whole and we can see how bad it can get there is literally no outcome here with what's just happened that ends well for anyone in the united states if convicted trump will be a political prisoner and become more powerful than he is today and if the republicans retake the presidency will be pardoned of all of his crimes that can be convicted of and return to not just public life but have an unusually high amount of political power perhaps even reassent to the presidency if not convicted the anger over the injustice of him being above the law will create civil unrest so again why create a scenario where these are your options space and why create a scenario where every person involved from the judge who signed the warrant to the fbi agents who searched the place to the people gathered evidence to the informants who provided the case to the attorney general every single person is now under so much scrutiny that if political wins change their careers have effectively ended for the rest of their lives why create this situation honestly it doesn't make any sense to me and i'd like to point out it is a case study why centralization is so bad and why we do what we do every day in the cryptocurrency space we wake up and we say how do we take an institution something that is centralized something that has middlemen something that has a need for disintermediation something that has the potential of corruption and we convert that thing into something that is pushing power to the edges and doesn't elevate people up to be so great and so grand and so untouchable so i think that's the proper lesson is to apply that logic to the presidency as a whole and as moving forward how do we solve the problem obviously the constitution has to be changed but we really do need to ask that question because the time has come to make a change i am getting seriously tired of this and this precedent if it's allowed to stand means that moving forward every single u.s president will likely be searched and arrested on some technicality moving forward there's ample evidence of some potential conspiracy with hunter biden and joe biden you could argue it's just a political trump charge but if the republicans are in charge of the department of justice and now have a political mandate why couldn't they just go and search all of joe biden's records and documents why couldn't they go and look at all of his things and go after him why not there's 40 plus years of public service there's bound to be an issue where maybe a form wasn't filed correctly there's bound to be an issue where maybe somebody said something a slightly inaccurate while under oath and then suddenly it's a crime it's impossible to conduct the affairs of a nation-state and be constrained by the normal rules of law it's just not because you kill people for a living you deceive people for a living that's what intelligence agencies and state department does you do all kinds of things that are outside the bounds of normal laws we accept that as a society because the world is a dangerous place and statecraft is a dirty affair every single person involved the prosecution of that would know that so if we create precedence now that you're just allowed to take the people who are from opposing political parties and arrest them that's a problem which is why you have to remove the whole concept of former president and replace it with a different institution that deconsolidates the centralization of power and prevents an individual from having the ability to decide of life and death an individual from having the ability to decide things that are so significant to our daily lives and then we as a society have to decide what our limits are and our boundaries are so this makes me uncomfortable and it's just the beginning of a deeper fallout it's likely going to continue it's likely going to escalate it may even be possible that trump decides to run for president from a jail cell and technically i think he could lawfully do so and could potentially win which is the scary messed up part in any event it's going to have massive political fallout consequences and sadly a lot of people seem to be cheering it on for partisan reasons i'm not a trump supporter i thoroughly loathe the man and dislike the man i always have i feel he's a pathological liar i think he's been sued more than 1600 times he trades in deceit and malice and he has never once exhibited leadership skills that would make him qualified to be the president much less a taco stand manager he's a petulant man child who inherited from a greater father a dynasty that he was able to leverage as a carnival barker into power it's a symptom of a greater disenchantment with the entire political process because at the time we as a nation were left with a choice between jeb bush and hillary clinton and a lot of anger that was unaddressed he recognized that was able to tap into it and obtain temporarily the highest institution the highest power he had an opportunity to rise to the occasion says demons of his nature aside and maybe do something unique and new and different instead he chose to squander it and become a national embarrassment for four years i'm a fairly conservative guy a libertarian guy in many things by no means do i i wake up and say let's go embrace the woke left but it was pretty shameful watching this office tweet the things that were tweeted and say and do the things that were done and how everything was just a game of optics and it was pretty shameful for an institution that has so much raw potential and knowledge behind it at any given moment can take the greatest experts on the planet and consult them to not tap into those people and ignore them it was a mistake but remember we've made a lot of mistakes before as a nation we elected presidents who were sympathetic to the ku klux klan we've elected presidents who are responsible for things the trail of tears you just have to google president johnson the successor to abraham lincoln and see how horrific damaging and hurtful his presidency was which nearly undid the results of the civil war we recovered from that as a nation we healed from that as a nation and usually after these people left office we swept them under the rug we socially exiled them and moved on and trump is just a man his legacy will be tarnished forever there's no way that in the annals of history is going to be viewed favorably and we move on but to continue to do this to continue to attack this in and and burn this man to the ground it serves no public interest it really doesn't the party was ready to move on and embrace other people like desantis the donor class certainly had in the media is unified against him now he's actually a viable candidate again for 2024. if re-elected i firmly believe his entire purpose in office will be to punish the people who didn't back him in 2020. is that really healthy for a nation now so why create an outcome like this why create the potential for this i don't understand it i really don't and now now we're flirting with it yet again so what can we do well moving forward it's become very clear that our voices as citizens don't really matter very much no matter who you vote for the system is raped i'm firmly convinced that the only way the united states is going to get political change is through amending the constitution through a constitutional convention it has to happen and we have to fundament fundamentally change the way we vote how our voting systems work and how the federal government works furthermore we have to actually for the first time ever acknowledge and address in the u.s constitution the fourth branch of the government which is the bureaucracy the u.