Dictator from Day One

Today’s episode features returning guest, Rob Tracinski, who has a new book, Dictator from Day One: How Donald Trump Is Overthrowing the Constitution and How to Fight Back. Find out what damage he’s doing on ‘Constitution Day,’ here in America. And how to counter his wanton destructiveness.

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Show notes with links to articles, blog posts, products and services:

• Dictator from Day One: How Donald Trump Is Overthrowing the Constitution and How to Fight Back
• Constitution Day and Citizenship Day on September 17
• The UnPopulist Launches Executive Watch
• The Tracinski Letter

Episode 103 (54 minutes) was recorded at 2100 Central European Time, on September, 15, 2025, with Alitu's recording feature. Martin did the editing and post-production with the podcast maker, Alitu. The transcript is generated by Alitu.

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Episode Transcript

Robert (00:00):
Foreign.

Blair (00:09):
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
This is yet another great episode of the
Secular Foxhole podcast.
Today, Martin and I have a great guest.
Robert Tracynski is back with us to discuss
his latest book,
Dictator From Day One.
Robert, how are you?

Robert (00:27):
I'm doing as well as can be expected these days.

Blair (00:31):
Yes, yes.

Robert (00:33):
It's unfair for us guys who are a little bit older that our remaining hair has
to be coming out just from reading the news.
You know,
that's why I have my.

Martin (00:43):
Cap on my finger cap.

Blair (00:46):
Yes, it is.
But nonetheless, there are ways to perhaps not
to get our hair back, but to fight.
Fight the good fight.

Martin (00:57):
Yes.

Robert (00:59):
Lose a good cause.

Blair (01:00):
That's. Well, that's true.
That's true.
And today I'd like to have Robert go into hisbook, which comes out, you said Wednesday, I
believe.

Robert (01:11):
Yes, September 17th.
I aimed it for, you know, it could have gone
one way a day, one way or the other, but Iaimed for September 17th because that's
constitution Day.
It's the anniversary of the ratification ofthe cost of the U.S. constitution.
And so that's seemed like the appropriate dayto do something that's about an attack on the
Constitution.
So the book's called Dictator From Day One.

(01:33):
It's playing off of this thing that, you know,Donald Trump said like a year or so before he
got elected again for the second time for asecond term.
He said, oh, I'll only be a dictator on dayone.
Well, you know, who's ever become a dictatorjust for one day and decided, oh, I'm, I'm
done now.
Right.
And this is about how from day one he's, youknow, and literally from day one, because I

(01:53):
talk about,
one of the main things I talk about issomething some executive orders you put out on
his first day in his second term.
And from then he's been basically expanding
the, the, the power of the presidency,expanding his power,
creating the system of one man rule.
So the, the subtitle of the book is How Donald
Trump is Overthrowing the Constitution and Howto Fight Back.

Blair (02:17):
Yes, yes, yes.
And I did,
I want to say I didn't get to finish the book,but I read the first chapter and a half and I
do like how you introduced the book.
As far as some history about the Constitution
and about the founding and America's firstnation in history founded on ideas.

Robert (02:42):
That's a really important thing that, you know, people don't, may not know the
detail.
That's sort of a cliche.
Oh, we're founded on an idea.
It's been said A lot.
But people don't need to know whatspecifically that means.
And it's something I've really gotten toappreciate in the last couple of years, is the
way the founders thought and argued abouteverything, is they would start with, okay,
you know,
the Parliament passed this bill putting astamp tax,

(03:05):
and they would think about that always interms of, well, let's go back to the deepest
issues.
And, you know, the detail I love, I've heardfrom a number of historians, is that, you
know, they're going through old newspaperdebates and they said they'll find giant
chunks of John Locke from the First SecondTreatise of Government.
You know, John Locke, this heavy politicalphilosophy, talking about, well, why do we

(03:26):
have government in the first place and whatfunction does it serve?
And there'll be these.
These chunks of excerpts from John Locke
reprinted in a colonial newspaper.
And it won't say, this is by John Locke.
There'll be no attribution.
It'll just be out there.
Because by that point, everybody knew who theywere quoting.
You know, everybody had heard this stuffbefore.
They were just reminding you.
Because everybody was up to their eyeballs in

(03:47):
political philosophy and looking at this onthat deepest philosophical level.
And it's such a contrast.
I think it's something we've lost today that,
you know, so the way I put it is, you know,when, when the Parliament, British Parliament,
put a tax on tea,
we didn't.
They didn't commission a study on the optimal
tax rate for beverages, right?They.

(04:07):
They talked about, well, what authority dothey have to put a tax on us?
What, you know, what.
What is the stat?
What is our status relative to the Parliament?What is our status relative to Great Britain?
Why does government exist in the first place?
They go back to these deep fundamental issuesand we tend to, even now, you know, with Trump
in office, tend to do things like, well,
he cut funding for this one particularprogramme over here.

(04:29):
We're really mad.
He cut funding for this programme and, you
know, not the question of, well,
who gives them the right to put.
To cut funding for this, decide what the
funding of this programme is, Shouldn'tCongress be doing that?
Or what gives him the right to put tariffs.
To put tariffs on and take them off and thendecide they're going to be higher and they're
going to be lower and it changes three times aday.

(04:49):
You know, what gave him the right to do thatjust by his own say so, as opposed to having
go through a process and go to Congress andask for permission to do this.

Blair (05:00):
Let me take that A little further.
I mean,
we should also go back to why is thisprogramme What?
Why is this programme exist?What is its purpose?
Why, you know,
is it really needed?
So on and so forth,
instead of just, okay,
let's just slash everything.
We have no plan, we have no agenda, we havenothing.
We just wanted.
We just hate government, we hate bureaucrats.

Martin (05:22):
And, you know,
isn't that a thing,
Blair, to have a plan to push the differentbuttons and see how people are reacting and
doing this back and forth, back and forth.
Right.

Blair (05:35):
Yeah, you probably got.
You probably pegged it right there.
But again,
I guess your preface is wide awake,
which is what more people need to be aboutwhat's happening, because you're not getting
any of it or very, very little bit of it onthe news.
And I think the left is so discredited and sodisoriented.

Robert (05:58):
There's something happens after every election that the vox populi has been rendered
and everybody and one side tends to bedemoralised.
But I, I think even more so because, you know,Donald Trump,
part of it.
Tom Trump's a master gaslighter, right?
So he comes in and he gets 49.
Excuse me.
Yeah, 49.8% of the vote, I think it is, you
know, which is just under.

(06:20):
He wins.
It's enough to win the election,
but it's not a lot more than his competitor,and not even quite 50%, it's not a majority.
But he goes out and says, I have a mandate.
I speak with the voice of the people.
And so, you know, part of it is he just, youknow, he knows, he hammers this stuff in.
He says this again and again and again, andeventually people start to just sort of go

(06:41):
along with it and.
But the other thing that happens is that Ithink because they didn't expect him to win
another time they thought, you know, afterJanuary 6, 2021, you know, we tried to stop
predecessor from being elected.
They thought, okay, he's a spent force, it'sover.
The American people had enough with this guy.

(07:01):
They didn't really expect Trump to come back.
So I think it hits this, this extra kick of
demoralisation for the Democrats that, oh, youknow, we didn't, we thought this was over, we
thought this was gone.
And the fact that he won a second time waslike extra special demoralising for them
because they didn't expect it was possible.
But, you know, they got to pick themselves upoff the floor.
I mean,

(07:23):
I, of all people, you know, I've criticisedthe Democrats forever.
You know,
I'm in this odd position of wanting them toget their act together and be effective, which
is I've, you know, I've never wanted, I neverwanted Nancy Pelosi to get her act together
and be effective.
And now suddenly, you know, I'm wishing ChuckSchumer and Hakeem Jeffries and these people
could actually do that.

Martin (07:43):
And what you're doing, Robert, is with this, find the real classical liberal and this
could really hammer it down in a positive way.
Maybe this will be the wake up call after, youknow, we're gonna have.

Robert (07:58):
To get the classical liberals the sort of, the more free market,
the more,
you know, old fashioned liberals.
But you know, a part of it too is that, and I
talk about this later, in later chapters ofthe book that you may not have gotten to yet.
I talk about how we do need a,
a kind of a united front.
So, you know, I said we're gonna have to heave
a sigh and, and sort of find some allies whoare people farther to the left than, than we

(08:22):
would like and temporarily find,
find common cause for them on this issue of weshould have a democracy.
We should have, you know, we should have arepresentative government.
We should have that.
We should maintain the rules of the
Constitution and the checks and balances inthe Constitution.
You know, I kind of give the example of goingback to the founders again that Jefferson and

(08:42):
Adams worked together very closely.
And then of course, you know, after the
revolution,
they went hammer and tongs at each other for awhile and they got to be friends again later.
But, you know, they didn't talk for like 10years after,
after Adams lost the, the 1800 election.
It took, it took a while for them to bury thehatchet over that.
But, you know, so that they work closelytogether, they were allies and they fight

(09:06):
themselves afterwards once, once they actuallyhave established the government that they're
trying to create.

Blair (09:12):
Well, yeah, that's true.
I mean,
I still, I mean,
so my,
in my mind, okay,
democracy is such a.
Because we were supposed to be, or started asa constitutionally limited republic,
a limit on the government, not on the people.
And then we've just slid into a democracy andnow we're sliding into autocracy,

(09:38):
going back to a democracy.
Let's do the, let's leap over that, back tothe constitutional limited Republic.

Martin (09:48):
Blair, wasn't it a publication back in the day with that headline, Is it Worth
Defending a Constitutional Republic?Wasn't you involved in that, Robert?

Robert (09:59):
No, I, I published one very, very long ago called the American Republic Republic.
If you can Keep it.
Well, so one of the things, one of the things
how he evolved on over the years is theterminological issue of, you know, we're not a
democracy or a republic.
One of the things that, that sort of broke medown on this is finding out that a bunch of
Jeffersonians in the 1790s were already usingthe word democratic.

(10:19):
And they, they, they were, they were theDemocratic Republican Party.
So I realised that terminologically the, the,the strong.
The sharp difference between democracy andrepublic has, has never been as, well, you
know, there hasn't been as, as stark a pieceof terminology,
a distinction as, as we might have thought.
But the other thing, and I partly do it justbecause in, in today's parlance, when people

(10:42):
talk about democracy, they are talking aboutthe parts of democracy that I like.
You know, the, the, the meaning of democracythat I like, which is, you know, that, that
the people are in control of their owngovernment.
And so the other thing I've observed is, youknow, I said, I wrote something a while back
says,
you know, I'm a big fan of Thomas Jefferson.
So I'm taking off of his,

(11:03):
when his inauguration, that he gave his firstinauguration after this bitter election
between the Federalists and the Republicansthat he said, he gave this,
this inaugurate inaugural address, we said,set out the olive branch and said we are all
Federalists, we are all Republicans.
Is it pointing that, you know, we all believe
that we should have a federal government, sowe're all Federalists and we all believe it

(11:25):
should be a limited government,
it should be in a Republican form, it shouldhave representative government to answer to
the people.
So we're all Republicans.
Such are appealing to what we all have incommon.
And I think there's something too that thecase against using the term democracy is the
democracy refers to unlimited majority rule.
The majority can vote for whatever it wants
and you know, can vote to be oppressive, canvote to take away your rights.

(11:47):
One thing I've noticed over the years is thateverybody is a Republican in the sense of
wanting, wanting government to be limited bycertain things on the issues, on certain
issues.
They all, everybody discovers, oh, we do havefundamental rights that, that,
that the government can't really touch nomatter how big a majority.
And everybody becomes like a majoritarian,
accrued majoritarian on issues where theythink they can get away with it.

(12:10):
Right.
If you're on the left and you're probably infavour of abortion rights,
then abortion rights suddenly becomes theissue in which.
Well, that's a fundamental right.
Government no matter how big a majority, the
government can't take that away from you.
And if you're a,
or conservative or, you know, Republican onabortion, you're the one saying, oh no, that

(12:33):
should be up for a majority vote at the statelevel.
You know, that's what they're going to be.
That should be up for a Democratic vote sothat, so that Missouri and Florida and places
like that can vote to ban abortion.
So again, everybody, you know, sort of, we'reall Democrats and we're all Republicans in the
sense that everybody wants an unlimiteddemocracy who are the majority can vote for

(12:53):
whatever they like on the issues where theythink they can maybe win.
And everybody thinks, oh no, government has tobe limited.
There are certain things they can't do on theissue where they're afraid that they might not
be in the majority or at least might not be inthe majority in the majority at a particular,
at a particular time.

Martin (13:10):
Isn't that the case especially have been here in Europe and now I wonder if, you
know, America is caught up in this, that theydon't,
they have forgotten the history and as yousaid about the ideas.
Yeah,
yeah.

Blair (13:27):
Again,
progressives have dominated universities inevery level of education for a century and
it's no wonder several generations have no,
no respect for America's founding or you know,
and things like that.
But getting back to the book,

(13:47):
I still like you.
You outline five main prongs, if you will.
Do you want to go into those?

Robert (13:56):
Right.
So, so one of the things I would mention
you're talking about, you know, all thedifferent causes and what the progressives
have done and what the conservatives havedone.
So one of the things that this book doesn'ttry to get into is it doesn't try to get into
all the causes and all the problems that haveled us.
Sure. And that's a huge topic because that's awhole other.
And I think there's,
you know, the conservatives also, I think, youknow, it's really emerging.

(14:17):
The conservatives,
they weren't really trying to conserve whatAmerica really was.
I think they're trying to, they're trying toconserve a version of America as they would
prefer it should have been,
which is more religious and more authoritarianand more, you know, it's more, it's really
more.
They're trying to go back to a European style
conservatism.

(14:37):
Right.

Blair (14:37):
Well, the Puritans and New England throne and alter conservatism.

Robert (14:41):
Right.
That you're trying to preserve the traditional
power of the state and the church Nationalist.
Yeah, yeah, very Nationalist. And America hasnever been based on nationalist principles.
So there's lots of things in terms of whatwent wrong with the conservatives, what went
wrong on the left that sort of got us to thispoint.
And one of them, by the way, one of the subthemes of this book is that, you know,

(15:05):
I'll give you the five prongs in a moment.
But one of the things, each of them,
in practically every one of them,
I find some area in which, well, there's lotsof precedent that's been set right, that, that
he found all sorts of places in whichgovernment already, and especially the
presidency, that, where the executive alreadyhad this excessive amount of power and certain
limits on the presidency had already beenknocked down.

(15:28):
And he found ways to say, okay, let's takethat and let's take it to 11.
Let's, let's, you know, take this, you know,where the, the presidency's been given too
much power.
Let's use it and take all the power.
Let's, let's, let's lift all the restraints
and go be what anybody's done before.
So the five prongs are.
So first one is I call the power of the purse.
And so it's the idea that, you know, the, the

(15:49):
Congress is supposed to control spending.
And this is a key part of, so each one of
these prongs, by the way, is about some aspectof our system of checks and balances.
Because the way you could, the way you keepgovernment limited, the way you keep a free
society is no one person gets to decideeverything.
Everybody has to go through.
You have multiple institutions with their ownpowers, and they're all sort of there to check

(16:12):
and block each other and keep them, keepthemselves limited.
And so in each one of these things,
Trump is knocking down some sort of checkagainst his power as chief executive.
So the first one is Congress as the power ofthe verse, Congress having power over the
money, over the spending.
And this is what I talk about with, with the
Doge thing that, that, that Elon Musk wasdoing for a while and it's outgoing without

(16:34):
him.
And this was a major aspect of that, is that,
you know, Doge was billed as, oh, we're goingto cut costs, we're going to be for government
efficiency.
They didn't actually cut anything.
And that's the amazing thing about it, is ifyou look at the details,
there are people, there are experts out therewhose job is to go through these numbers and
see what's going on with federal spending.
And you follow those people as I do, and you

(16:55):
find out had no impact whatsoever on theactual total amount of government spending.
So there's a graph somebody did of, you know,government spending last year and then
government spending this year.
And it's the same curve.
There's like a few little wiggles that aredifferent.
It's the same curve, just a little bit higher.
We're spending more than last year.
So all this budget cutting that happened,somebody called it budget cut theatre, right?

(17:16):
It was a theatre of budget cutting, but theydidn't actually cut any federal spending.
What did they actually do instead?Well, what they did instead is they said,
well,
you know, Elon Musk and a couple of 19 yearold tech guys that he brought in,
they're going to be the ones literally goinginto the back end, the tech, the technical
computer back end of the system and manuallyapproving or not approving things that are,

(17:39):
that are spending based on what their prior,based on what they think we ought to spend.
And in disregard of the fact that Congress haspassed bills saying you can spend this, you
can't spend that.
And so it's really an attempt to grab that
power of spending from the Congress and put itinto the executive.
So that's why I see as the fundamental thing.
And then this includes also things like taking

(18:03):
over the Library of Congress.
So Trump came in and said he fired the Library
into Congress.
I'm going to, I'm going to put a new libraryinto Congress and I'm going to assert control
over this.
And you know, the thing about the Library ofCongress is, you know, who controls the
Library of Congress is kind of in the name.
It's the Library of Congress, right?
It is, it is the branch of the United StatesCongress.

(18:23):
And but he's basically saying, anywhere I canassert executive power,
and if he can exert executive power overbasically the back end working of the US
Congress,
he's, he's imposing a kind of power over theCongress.
And we see that too in that during this Dogething, there was a case where there were a
bunch of Congressmen complaining, hey, you'vecut funding for this programme in my district.

(18:45):
And Elon Musk goes to Congress and he says,okay, here's my number, you can call me.
And I asked me to help reverse this.
And I pointed out how that's so opposite ofthe way it's supposed to work, that the
executive is supposed to go to Congress andbeg them for money.
And here you have Congressman having to go tothe executive and beg him for money.
In this case, it was Elon Musk as sort of copresident for a while there.

(19:05):
All right, so that's the first prong.
The second prong is on immigration.
And again, this is one where the, thefoundation was laid.
Before that there was this,
there's been this sort of background whereimmigration and, and the status of foreigners
in the US has been considered almost like anexception to the Constitution.
Right.
That they don't have the same rights against

(19:26):
search and seizure and, and you know, theright of habeas corpus and all these things
that they didn't have the same rightsconstitutionally that,
that citizens have.
And that's not found grounded in the
Constitution.
By the way, if you go to the fifth Amendment,
it says no person shall be deprived of life,liberty or property without due process of
law.
It doesn't say no citizen, it says no person.
It's very broad.

(19:46):
But they've taken this and, and so DonaldTrump has been in this mass deportation push.
He did what I expected he was going to dobecause,
you know, when you start saying we're going todeport a million people, we're going to
appoint 10 million people,
you are in, you know, the only way that'sgoing to be implemented is you basically
creating,
you know, jackbooted secret police going doorto door, you know, rounding people up and

(20:10):
doing it without due process, without properprocedure, without any legal process and
tramp, you know, really trampling on therights of all Americans doing this,
you know,
and, and so what he's done is he's built upwhat I sort of call a, literally a secret
police because you have these,
these guys from ice, the Immigration andCustom Enforcement, going around with masks

(20:31):
and wintest of time we've ever had masked lawenforcement in this country.
I mean, that is just like, that's, that's thething that should really creep you out more
than anything else is law enforcement.
People go around with no badges,
no regular uniforms, masks over their faces.
It is literally, literally a secret police.
And then he has his case where, like, forexample, he took 238 guys that they rounded

(20:52):
up.
They claimed, oh, these are terrible, horrible
gangsters.
They had no evidence for this.
And they sent them with, with no process atall,
avoiding the courts.
They sent them to this prison in El Salvador,
to this very brutal prison where they weremistreated and, and beaten and,
and, and treated very badly in, in ElSalvador.
And again, there's no process at all.

(21:15):
Anybody could be grabbed.
And as some people point out, you know,they've got a great,
there's a scholar of Soviet economic History,who had a great line.
He brought an old Russian joke to describe whyyou need due process.
And the joke is that there's a bunch of foxesare running away and leaving the Soviet Union.
And somebody asked them, why.
Why are you leaving?They say, well,

(21:35):
there's a new law that, that the Soviet Unionhas outlawed.
Camels says, but why are you running yourfoxes, not camels?
He says, look, you try proving to the NKVDyou're not a camel.
Yeah.
So,
you know, if you can't, if you can't, if youdon't have a process of law, if you don't have
people being able to go into courts and havethe regular operation of the courts, you know,

(21:56):
try proving you're not a camel.
Try proving you're not.
Try proving that you're a citizen, try proving
that you're not a criminal, that you're not agang member,
if there's no process at all.
And you could just be sent off to a brutal
foreign prison based on the.
Just the whim of somebody who works for,
for ICE or for Border patrol.
All right, so that's.
The second prong, is creating this sort of,

(22:16):
this police force that has,
is not bound by due process.
The third prong is various attacks he's made
on the courts trying to limit the power of thecourts and lie to the courts, deceive the
courts,
the courts.
Unfortunately, I think the Supreme Court's
been cooperating in this, in, in oftentimesoverruling lower courts in order to give more

(22:36):
power to the executive.
And the most ominous part of that prong,though, is that he's gone after.
Trump has gone after big law firms,
and he's had these retaliatory executiveorders where he's like, denying them security
clearances that they used to have lawyers forthese firms,
denying them federal contracts, sometimesdenying them the ability even to step foot on

(22:59):
government property to be able to, you know,so if you're a big law firm and you have,
you're, you're representing corporate clientsand you have to go work with regulators, if
you can't set foot on government property,
you, you can't represent your clients.
And it's something he's been doing and
basically in order to, to beat down the biglaw firms and make them basically tell them,
don't take places we don't want you to take.

(23:21):
And so, you know, because Donald Trump wins100 of the lawsuits that, that people won't
dare file against him.
Right.
So it's his attempt to sort of rig the courtsby depriving people of the right to, to
representation against him.
Now the fourth one particular talk about moreis, is the power he has over the economy and
he's done, you know, it's his tariffs, butit's also a lot of other stuff.

(23:43):
You know, taking a 10 stake in intel, that'sone I think is really interesting we can go
into.
And then the fifth one is civil society
society.
So he's done various things to try to sort ofco opt the press,
the political press and also just inserthimself in every aspect of,
of our public life.
You know there's, I found some wonderful
quotes from Tocqueville who's sort of the manon this Tocqueville talking about how, you

(24:06):
know, he says in, in, in any big thing you seegoing on in Europe,
behind it you'll find, in France you'll findit, you'll find the government.
If there's a big thing that's going on,
the government will be behind it.
It'll be leading the charge.
In England, if you go look at it, there'll bea great lord who is behind it, who is the sort
of aristocratic sponsor this is in America yougo, you find some big activity and you find

(24:27):
that there's a private association of privateindividuals who just all decided to get
together to do this.
And these associations are what's behindeverything.
And I think it's really important that, youknow, if you don't want government or a great
lord to be in charge of everything,
you need to have this, this term we use now iscivil society.
You need to have these private organisations.
And Trump is sort of like inserting himself

(24:47):
out there in every aspect of that.
Like what he's done with, with the Kennedy
Centre in D.C.
where he's,
you know, he's, it's supposed to be this sortof cultural centre that's nonpartisan and he's
basically taken it over and made it partisanand now he's saying, oh, maybe I should be
getting an award from the Kennedy Centrebecause I've, you know, I've waited for years
for one.
They never called me.
Maybe I should give it a word to myself.

(25:09):
That assess sort of way of putting himself inthe centre of everything, even things that
aren't even politics.

Blair (25:15):
Let me.
You just made me think of something, didn't.
Isn't he like PO'd at the.
Is it India or Brazil?Yeah, Brazilian Premier.
Because he didn't vote for, you know, Trump toget a Nobel Peace Prize or something.

Robert (25:30):
That, that's India.
So.
Yeah, so There was this, like, there was thislittle conflict between India and Pakistan a
couple months back.
And this has happened before many times.
And you know, they're, they're sort of
constantly like at the brink of war, but neverquite over.
And, and so Trump came in and maybe playedsome kind of role in tamping this down, though
not as big a role as he thinks he did.

(25:51):
And then the Prime Minister, Pakistan said,I'm gonna nominate you.
You know, sucking up to Trump says, I'm gonnanominate you for a Nobel Peace Prize.
And so he apparently got really mad atNarendra Modi, the, the Prime Minister of,
of India,
because Modi was like,
you know, this, you have this pro.
First of all, this problem isn't even solved.
We're still in high state of tensions withPakistan and, and probably will be for many

(26:15):
decades to come.
And you know, for second of all, you didn'treally do all that much.
But, you know, here Trump is basically pushinghim, you should nominate me.
Because he really, you know, I think it's, Ithink it said, it said Obama got a Nobel Peace
Prize.
So where's mine?
Where's my Peace Prize?

Blair (26:31):
Yeah, he even, this was, even in his first term, he was campaigning for one for
some nefarious reason.
But anyway.

Robert (26:40):
He reminds me a little bit that the old standing example of this was Idi Amin.
He was the dictator in Uganda in the 70s, Ithink it was where he like had all sorts of,
he was like,
you know, if you look at his official title,had all these ridiculous superlatives piled on
top of.
And he was like the nation's top soccer star.
And yeah, because nobody, he would, you know,he would play these games where he could score

(27:04):
every goal because nobody dared to stop himbecause they get killed.
Right.
Yes.
There was something similar to that recentlywhere this is when I knew we were in trouble
in Ukraine because this is right before Trumpinvaded, not Trump, right before Putin invaded
Ukraine.
And people were saying, oh no, he wouldn't dothat.
He's, you know, that would be crazy.
It would be a disaster.
He wouldn't do that.

(27:24):
Right before that, he and Lukashenko, who'sthe dictator of Belarus,
had this thing where they played a hockey gameand they were playing hockey against like
these top level professional hockey playersand they score and, and Putin scored like
seven goals.
Right.
Which is an enormously high amount for any
sock, any, any, any, any hockey game.
But especially, you know, this 58 year old guy

(27:45):
against a bunch of young pro players.
There's no, he's going to Get a single goalif, if they're playing and it's clear that,
you know, they're letting him win because he'sthe big guy.
And that's when I realised, you know,
it may be totally irrational for Putin toevade Ukraine, but this is the guy who,
everywhere he goes, everybody's telling him,yes, you are the greatest, you are a genius,
you are the best.

(28:06):
You are the best hockey player in Russia.
8 year old guy, you're the best hockey player.
Or he may be older than that, you're the best
hockey player in Russia.
This is the, the sort of thing where he's,
he's got,
again, it's the, it's classic dictator kind ofstuff that, that and this is very much Trump's
mindset as well.
I'm the big guy.

(28:27):
Everybody should be flattering me and suckingup to me at all times.

Blair (28:30):
All these dictators all have the same.

Martin (28:32):
Type of mental personality traits.

Blair (28:35):
Yeah, Familiarities or whatever.

Robert (28:38):
Well, I think you have to, to want to be a strong man, to want to gain power, to
want to, like, make that the focus of yourlife.
You have to have this obsessive psychologicalneed for attention and validation from
everybody else.
You have to cut, you have to have this thing
like I,
you know, in, in some of these cases, it'slike if people stop paying attention to me, I

(28:58):
will literally cease to exist.
I will die.
Right?And so if, if you feel like you need to be the
centre of attention at all times,
you need to be the centre of everything thatwill give you that obsessive energy to gather
to, to gather the power, to pull the power,pull it together and focus on that to the
exclusion of literally everything else in yourlife.
And so that's how you get to be the sort ofperson who's able to get that power.

(29:21):
But it's also why you want the power.
It's like it's, and what you want to do with
it.
You want to, you know, you may tell people,
oh, I'm doing this to make America greatagain, or to rebuild the Russian empire or,
you know,
restore traditional morality, whatever excuseyou give for it.
Right.
Or maybe the work.
So, so I can do this for the praise sake of
the workers of the world,
the older version of it.

(29:42):
So they always have an excuse, but always the
motivation is I want to be at the centre ofeverything.
I want everybody else paying attention, to beconstantly hanging on my every word, always
telling me how great I am and that you have tohave that deep sort of pathological
psychological need for that to have that.
That's why they all have the same very.
They all fall into the same kind of

(30:02):
psychological profile.
Yeah.

Martin (30:04):
We will see the TV show, the reality show, when later on, you know, he has been
that a small detail.
What's up with changing from defence to war?

Robert (30:18):
Well, that's.

Martin (30:19):
And doing it so it.
On the sign is not.
It doesn't centre.
How do you see?
It looks very sketchy.
So when they cut it off and then put W a R and
it.
It doesn't look right.

Robert (30:34):
Right now, by the way, that.
That's one thing where he's been.
That's one where.
So he doesn't actually have the authority to
change the name of the department.
Right. Because that.
The. Just as the various departments of
government are funded by Congress, they'recreated by Congress and they are named by
Congress, so there's a piece of legislationcreating the Department of Defence.
So what Trump did is because he likes topretend to have more power than he has, so he

(30:57):
put out this executive order saying, well, I'mrenaming it to the Department of War,
but he hasn't actually renamed it.
What he said is, I created a secondary name,
the Department of War, and we can use that asa secondary name.
So the official name of the Department ofDefence is still the Department of Defence,
because he can't change that.
But what he's done is saying, but I've by

(31:18):
executive order said we could use this as asecondary name for it.
And then that's what we're going to put on thesigns and we're going to make play, act that
we've changed the name,
but it also has to do with this sort of.
This is again, strongman 101.
They want to appear tough, they want to appearactive, they want to appear like they're doing
stuff.
And so constantly changing things.
Constantly.

(31:38):
And also changing things in a way that creates
this more sort of belligerent and bombasticand aggressive appearance.
You know,
Trump is a guy.
He came out of professional.
You know, if you look at his history, it'slike we came out of real estate, which is
oftentimes there's a high element of flimflamin the real estate business.
You're always hyping up your latest propertyand tabloid gossip columns and professional

(32:05):
wrestling.
He did a bunch of stuff from professional
wrestling and reality tv.
Right.
So this is a guy who is.
His whole thing is showmanship.
His whole thing is.
Is the image.
I mean, from the very beginning, when he was
starting out in real estate in New York City,he was never the biggest real estate guy in
New York City.
He's, it's actually relatively small scalereal estate player in New York City.
But he always had this big print blitz.

(32:28):
You know, the biggest guys in real estate in
New York City are guys say whose names youdon't know because they don't care whether you
know their name.
Right.
People in, the people in the industry, peoplein New York City, the people who are in the
building industry, they know those people'snames.
The general public, they don't care.
I don't need the publicity.
But Donald Trump was the guy who always hadthis, from the very beginning, had this
massive PR thing because he didn't just wantto build buildings, he wanted to be famous.

(32:51):
He wanted to have the PR and wanted to befamous as a great deal maker.
And so this was what he's been doing from thebeginning.
The theatricality of everything was hugelyimportant.
But this is another thing.
You look back, I mean, Mussolini,
all of these people, they had that, thepageantry of it.
It was always part of,
it's always part of any authoritarian regime.

Martin (33:13):
Okay, okay, okay.

Blair (33:15):
Did we cover the five prongs or are we still one?
Number four, what did we get to?

Robert (33:20):
So, but the five prongs were taking power from Congress.
Second one is using immigration to create apolice state.
The third one was lawyers in the courtattacking lawyers in the courts.
The fourth was power over the economy.
And the fifth was civil society.
It was branching out into all these other
areas.
Like universities and the press.
Yeah, the universities, the press.

(33:40):
One of the examples I leave with is.
Now, you may have missed this, Martin, butbecause it's kind of a us thing.
But there's a, there's a chain here calledCracker Barrel.

Martin (33:48):
Yeah, I've seen, I've seen that thing changing the logotype.

Robert (33:52):
And so like a couple months ago, they didn't improve the service.
What's that?

Martin (33:56):
They didn't improve the service, but they changed the logotype.

Robert (33:59):
Right? They changed the logo.
You know, and it's,
it's kind of a,
it wasn't a great logo change.
It's kind of, they call it bland.
Blanding, you know, is it branding?But meeting it bland.
It was a blander version of the existing one.
But Donald Trump has to weigh in on this andhe has to be the guy who comes in.
I got them to, I convinced them to change thelogo back to the traditional old fashioned

(34:20):
logo.
And you know the funny thing about CrackerBarrel, I did some research on this,
confirming my suspicions.
And you Know, it's all total false nostalgia.
You know, there's a lot of things when you
talk about, when you find people who areconservatives who are very much into
tradition,
like 80% of the time you'll find this greatlong ancient tradition that goes back a
thousand years that they're trying to defendis like from 1940.

(34:42):
Right.
It's actually like really recent in this case.
The cracker barrel chain was started in 19.
It's supposed to, it's supposed to look likean old timey country store, but it was started
in 1969.
All the, it's a corporate chain.
They were all built along the interstates
because this is at a time in which 1969, atime which the old country stores in all the

(35:04):
little towns, they had all gone out ofbusiness.
They had, you know, the traffic had gone away.
All the traffic had gone to the interstates.
So this is like saying, well, we're going to
build a fake old timey country store.
We're going to put it on the interstate.
It's going to be a corporate chain and it's,
you know, it's going to be this totallycomplete fake thing.
It's this, you know, it's kind of like, youknow, if you go to, if you go to Disney World,
you can go to a fake version of Paris inDisney World,

(35:26):
but it's not Paris.
It's this, it's this little replica of Paris.
Right?

Blair (35:31):
Okay.

Robert (35:32):
Yeah, yeah.
So it's very much like that.
Yeah.
But again, this is Trump putting himself into
everything.

Blair (35:38):
That's sad.
I'm telling you, I'm sad.
Well, rounding up that,
those horrible, the five prongs, as you say,
you, you end the book with what, what we cando about it.
And yeah,
let's, let's start, let's start talking aboutthat,
please.

Robert (35:58):
Well, a lot, a lot of my, my conclusion on what to do about it is simply
sort of shaking people, grabbing people likelapels and them to try to wake them up to
this.
That's my wide awake thing too, at thebeginning,
aside from being a reference to an obscure USHistorical political movement is also there
to, you know,
the idea of waking people up to make themrealist.

(36:20):
I guess.
I think people are you especially if you don't
follow politics closely or even a lot ofpeople do follow politics closely, but they've
been in politics for so long.
I think it's a lot of the Democraticleadership,
this is their problem.
They've been into politics so long, they've
got all their habits are built up they have acertain habitual way of doing things and
they're thinking, well, that'll just continue.
So, like, I think a lot of the Democrats inCongress are saying, well,

(36:43):
look, you know,
another party gets into office, they do abunch of stuff, but they do a bunch of stuff
that some of it becomes unpopular.
And if we could find one issue, an issue here
and there that, that people don't like andhammer them on, that they'll be unpopular and
then,
you know, the next election things will goback our way.
And so it's, you know, no reason to panic.
It's take things calmly and steadily and, and,

(37:04):
and don't get too worked up over anything.
And that, I think that's why they have.
Having this sort of very muted reaction is if,you know, if you've been around in politics
for, like, probably 50 years, like, likesomeone like Chuck Schumer has been.

Blair (37:18):
Schumer.

Robert (37:18):
Yeah. This is, this is what you have programmed into you, right, as, as your way of
doing things.
And I'm sort of trying to wake people up to
say, no, we need to.
You don't wait to the next election.
You don't wait to 2028, you don't even wait to
2026, the next congressional election.
You need to start resisting on this now andyou need to sort of d. You know, and you need
to fight.
The other big piece of advice I have is youneed to fight a lot of losing battles, because

(37:40):
right now Democrats don't.
They don't have a lot of battles they can win.
And, you know, even if, if you're a regularcitizen and you're opposing this, you don't
have a lot of battles you can win because,
you know, the Republicans do have a majorityin Congress and the,
and over the last eight to 10 years, DonaldTrump has basically purged anyone from the
Republican Party who would actually be willingto oppose him in any substantive way.

(38:03):
You know, they're, they're like Lynchaneypeople like that.
They're, they're all out.
The people who were able to say,
look, you know, because there's always been a.
You know,
very few presidents have had this much controlover their own party.
Even in Congress, you know, George W. Bushcame up with a plan for partial privatisation
of Social Security and the whole thing diedimmediately because his own party looked, took

(38:25):
one look at it and said, no, we're nottouching this.
You know, they did.
He. I think he actually had a pretty decent
plan, but his own party said, no, we're.
We have no courage on this issue,
you know,
this is 20 years.
Social Security is going to go bankrupt 20years from now.
That doesn't affect us now.
We have no courage on this issue.
We're not going to touch it.
They let the thing die.

(38:46):
So there's been always been cases where youhave a president who has certain things he
wants to do, do, and his own party just says,nope, we're out, we're not going to do this.
And Donald Trump, to an unusual extent, hasthis dominant, such dominant power over his
own party because.
Yeah, I think it's because there are millions
of voters who know who Donald Trump is.
They don't necessarily even know who their ownrepresentative is in Congress.

(39:09):
So if Donald Trump comes out and endorsestheir guy, then they'll vote for him.
If Donald Trump goes against their guy, he'sout.
We actually had this happen in my district,
the fifth district in Virginia.
They did a redistricting a couple of years agothat put two Republicans up against each
other.
So John McGuire versus a guy named Bob Good.
And Bob Good was the sitting congressman, buthe had been sceptical or critical of Trump.

(39:32):
I think he endorsed the DeSantis in Florida.
And so he was on Trump's bad side.
And John McGuire got the, got the endorsement.
And so they went head to head in a, in a
primary, and the guy who had Trump'sendorsement won.
And the guy, even though he was a sittingcongressman, even though he's extremely
conservative, extreme, you know, ideologicallyaligned,

(39:54):
he didn't bend the knee enough.
He was, didn't sufficiently suck up to Donald
Trump and he didn't.
So this is the way he's, he's consolidatedthis kind of control over the party.

Martin (40:03):
So didn't he do that even in the mayor election in New York?

Robert (40:08):
Isn't that, oh, he's been trying to do that in the mayor's election for the
Republican.

Martin (40:12):
Do, do you have any scoop on that? The Republican candidates there, what he's
been.

Robert (40:17):
Trying to do is he's been actually going for the Democrat, but the Democrat who's
just as corrupt as he is,
which actually, unfortunately, though, thereare two people who fit that description.
So there's,
there's the, the former governor Andrew Cuomo,and then there's the sitting mayor who's,
what's his name?Eric Adams.

(40:38):
Adams, yeah, yeah, Eric Adams.
And Eric Adams was actually in a caught and
FBI was investigating for bribery.
And Donald Trump said, oh, we're going to drop
the charges,
basically because he wants Eric Adams to owehim one.
He wants Eric Adams, to be beholden to him.
And I see that I, I could put the charges back
on and you go to jail for bribery or I takethem off.
I'm your buddy.

(40:58):
I'm your sponsor.
You will.
This is very typical strongman politics,
right?Machine politics.
And Andrew Cuomo was also a really corruptguy.
So those are the two, two of the candidates.
But I was talking about how, you know, becauseDonald Trump has such, even with a, not a very
big majority and for his party, he has such adeath grip on Congress, there's not many
battles that Democrats or other people in theopposition to Trump can win.

(41:21):
But I talk, I have a whole section about thebenefits of fighting losing battles that, you
know,
but this really gets into the brains ofpoliticians because they don't like to lose,
fight losing battles.
They want to say, let's find a battle we can
win.
And I say, no. There's a whole lot of point tofighting a lot of different battles, including
ones that you lose.
And one of them is, you know, you, you atleast flag that issue as important to the

(41:45):
voters, right?You may not win, but you draw attention to it.
And, you know, if you don't fight it at all,
people get the impression, well, you must notcare.
It must not be that important.
So if Donald Trump is, you know, defying thepower of Congress,
we have coming up right now, a, a,
a thing where they need the votes of Democratsin order to extend government spending beyond

(42:06):
a certain period.
And if they don't approve to it government
spending, there's no approval for furthergovernment spending.
There could be a government shutdown.
And I think they should do it because, look,
you know, if, if the power of the purse, thepower, control spending is the only power you
have,
you have to use it as the opposition.
You have to use it.
You have to use this to draw attention to thefact that he's been trying to take that power

(42:27):
away from you.
But, you know, so there's a case where youmight lose that battle, but you will draw the
public's attention to it.
And if you don't fight,
then the public gets the intention.
Oh, this is no big deal.
It must not be a problem.
You know, the more normal you are, the moreyou convince everybody else this is just
normal and it's nothing to worry about.
So sometimes you fight just to draw attentionto the issue, just so people know what's

(42:48):
happening.
And the other reason you other, one of theother reasons you fight is that you,
well, for one thing, sometimes you win, right?
Sometimes you actually Start a fight thatyou're not sure you can win, and you actually
find a way to,
to,
to get your, to, to, to push your pointacross.
For example, great example of that that'sstill working its way through is.

(43:13):
Well, actually, one example of this is, like Isaid, Trump round up these people, sent them
out with no due process to this prison in ElSalvador.
Well, he since have released them.
He released them to Venezuela, of all places,
but he released them.
But he did that because he was getting so much
pressure on that, and he was losing so manycases in the courts over this.
So it's another case where you challenge himin the courts, even though it seems like you

(43:35):
can't win,
if you challenge him enough, he will actuallyeventually, at some point, be forced to back
down on it.
And by the way, in the process, there's
another reason you do fight on these things,is in the process of backing down on that
issue.
He,
he burned through a bunch of lawyers at theJustice Department.
They're including one guy who was like thelead lawyer on a bunch of these cases who, who

(43:57):
they fired.
And then he became a whistleblower against theadministration,
saying, look, you know, I was in thesemeetings and they talked about lying to
judges.
You know, they planned out how they're goingto lie to judges and withhold information from
judges.
Well, a bunch of these guys who were in theJustice Department, this guy was in the
justice department for like, 14 years.
A lot of these guys who were there pre Trump,
they don't like what's going on here.

(44:17):
This isn't the standards of professionalismthey've been, were expected to live up to.
And so you're going to basically burn througha bunch of those guys and you end up with
your, you know, your D team of whoever's leftwho's just, you know, whose only qualification
is super loyal to Trump.
You end up with a smaller number of thoseguys, and you have fewer lawyers that you can
use to fight any other legal battle thatyou're fighting.

(44:40):
And so that's another way or another reasonwhy you fight a lot of these things that you
don't think you're necessarily going to win,
because sometimes you do win them.
And even if you lose them, you're using up
time, using up resources, you're, you're,you're using up energy until the point where,
you know, he becomes less capable of imposinghis will.
The last thing this isn't really in my book,but it's one thing I'm planning to write about

(45:01):
is I am Also telling people consider runningfor office even if just on the local level.
Because one of the things that happens is whensomebody's trying to impose this sort of one
man rule on the federal level in America.
The great thing about the American system is,
you know, the division of power, the checksand balances isn't just Congress versus the
courts versus the presidency.

(45:22):
It's also federal versus state and stateversus local.
Right.
Because the power is very diffused in America.
It's very spread out down to the, down to the,down to the very lowest level of, you know,
running for dog catcher,
that maybe dog catcher won't make as muchdifference but run for the local school board.

(45:43):
Run for.
So you know, if the, if the, if, if or edict
comes down about how, oh, we, we mandatepatriotic education, you can't teach certain
things that you can't have certain books.
If you're on the school board, you can say,you know what,
as a school board,
we're not, you know, we're going to fight thatand we're going to, we're gonna, you know,
we're not going to comply.

(46:03):
We're going to make you sue us, we're going to
sue you.
Or you can simply say, look, the mandate hascome down, but we're going to be really slow.
And there's all sorts of passive resistanceyou can do where it's like we're not in a
hurry to implement this because, you know, wedon't, we don't think this should be done.

Martin (46:21):
Yes, minister.
TV series and the book.

Robert (46:24):
Yes. Oh,
well, it's, but it's also, you know, there,it's the bureaucracy that it has to go
through.
But here it's also the local level.
There's so much power at the local level inAmerican politics.
And it's also a great thing where you as theaverage person have much more ability to
actually accomplish something because youknow, if you want to run for president, you
know, you can't.

(46:45):
There's no realistic way you, Joe Averagecould run for president.
It'd be very difficult to run for Congress.
But I mean, I know some people who haveactually done this.
Just talked to Denver Riggleman, who was ourformer congressman in the fifth district,
who was just a businessman, he was running abusiness and he got mad at the way things were
working and he ran for Congress and he got inafter failing a couple other, at a couple

(47:07):
other, you know, he had to fail at a coupleelections and then got,
got in for a term.
But he maybe, you know, so, but it's It's.
It might be a bit of a stretch to say, okay,
I'm going to run for Congress,
but it's much easier to say I'm going to runfor mayor, or I'm going to run for the Board
of Supervisors in my county, or I'm going torun for school board, where these are much

(47:29):
smaller local things.
And I know people.
One of the teachers at my.
At my son's school just got.
Won the nomination for the elections thisNovember, won the nomination for the City
Council in Charlottesville.
So,
you know, these are just.
Ordinary people can go out and do this where
the numbers and the geographic area you'retaking in, if you have a presence in your

(47:51):
community,
you have a chance of getting elected to thesethings.
And that can make a difference because you canthen be somebody setting an example and
providing resistance when something that'sillegitimate is being done.
And, you know, providing that base at the lowlevel, the local level,

(48:12):
where there's still a lot of power, just.
It comes from the fact that you are elected by
the people.

Blair (48:17):
That's brilliant.
Yeah, that's very.
That's very.

Robert (48:21):
Now, you know, not everybody had time to do this, but you could also find somebody.
I think one of the things that's happened inthis country that is a problem in the US that
is a problem is that the media industry is.
What's happened to the media industry with theage of the Internet is it basically killed off
all the local newspapers and all the local.
And a lot of the local media.
And so a lot of people.

(48:43):
The example I always use with this is I got aflyer in the mail a couple of years ago and on
the flyers picked it as the opponents we needto defeat are Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and
Alexandria Acacia Cortez.
And I'm looking at, well, what.
What race is this for?
And I look and it says Virginia House ofDelegates.
Well, none of these people are in the VirginiaHouse of Delegates.

(49:05):
None of these people are.

Blair (49:06):
That's right.

Robert (49:07):
You know, is within a thousand miles of the Virginia House of Deleg.
That's, it's, you know, but it's thenationalisation of everything, right?
That, that if you know that, you know, thatpeople know who these people are and they
hate, they don't like them.
So I could say I am running against NancyPelosi.
You're running against, you know, somebodylocally that people don't know and they don't

(49:27):
know who you are.
And it's what happens when people aren't
paying attention to the local politics andeverything become.
Everything gets swallowed by nationalpolitics.
I'm highly in favour of reviving that interestin local politics and I have.

Martin (49:39):
An idea here now when we're talking about on a podcast, a hyperlocal podcast,
because you can still do the freedom ofexpression, you can't be censored,
de platformed.
If you have your own RSS feed and could
control that,
you could go very.

Robert (49:56):
A lot of national issues do eventually filter down.
Like we.
We have a whole thing.
In my county,
we have a whole thing of like there's somepeople protesting because they don't.
People who are angry because they don't wantsolar farms here.
And. And there's a lot of.
We've.
Suddenly I'm in a rural county where I'venever had to deal with this before, but now we
have NIMBYs who don't want anybody to be ableto build a house and all that, you know,

(50:17):
because they're.
People are building too much.
The current honey won't be rural anymore.
So a lot of these national issues that youthink of as happening, you know, NIMBYism,
that's happening out in San Francisco.
No, it's happening in Louisa County, Virginia,in the middle of nowhere, you know, this rural
county.
So a lot of that stuff comes down to the locallevel.
And you know, there is somebody actually who'sdoing something here.

(50:37):
I wouldn't know anything about what's going onin my local politics if not for the.
For a lady who runs a newsletter who.
And she basically just goes to all the county
board meetings and reports on what's going on.
And she's got a subsec newsletter and it'sfree and you sign up.
And that's how I know what's going on in thelocal town here in the county and what the
debates are that are happening.

(50:59):
And it's because somebody just decided I need.
Somebody needs to do this, so I'm going to do
it.
And I think we need more of that.

Blair (51:04):
Yes, exactly, exactly.
Well, Robert,
sadly my battery is almost drained and I.
So tell us,
tell us where the people can find you on theInternet.
And please mention again the publication dateof your book.

Robert (51:22):
So the main thing is to go to traczynskiletter.com that's my last name,
Tracynski.
T R A C-I N S K-I letter dot com.
That's my main newsletter.
You can sign up there, be on my free list.
And that's where everything I do, I do a lotof write a lot of other things elsewhere, but
it's always announced there.
And direct.
I direct you out to that.

(51:43):
And then the book,
Dictator from day one, how Donald Trump isoverthrowing the Constitution, how to fight
back.
Got the image here, if you guys can use it.
Right.
This is the proof.
The proof that I've got here,
and that's coming out on Amazon,
available on September 17th.
So a couple days from the time we're recording
this, probably maybe about the same time thatpeople are listening to it.

(52:05):
What about.

Blair (52:06):
What about the book on cognition? Are you still working on that?

Robert (52:08):
Is that so? You know, this is.
This is my emergency book.
I wrote this in like five weeks.
I've been tracking.
I've been tracking abuses of pres.
So I've been doing this thing called theExecutive Watch for the Unpopulist,
where I'm.
And doing that since February, where I'm
tracking abuses of executive power as theycome along.

(52:28):
And it keeps me very busy.
And that was like.
Gave me this base of.
Of research.
And then I decided we.
I need to do a book.
I need to pull together the big picture,really, so people know what's going on,
because people aren't aware of what's goingon.
They don't.
They don't.
Aren't seeing the big picture.
They're reacting to things here and there.
They aren't seeing how it all comes together.
People need to be much more alarmed about this

(52:49):
than they are.
So I wrote the book in about five weeks now.
In doing so, I interrupted, of course, myprevious book projects.
I have one called the Prophet of Causation,which is like a representation of Ayn Rand's
philosophy from the perspective of the centralrole of the idea of cause and effect as it
goes through there.
That's still in process.
Right.
That I have draughts of.

(53:10):
I've got about half the chapters written.
I've got draughts to work from for the otherhalf that got put on hold because of this sort
of temporary emergency.
I will get back to it.
Philosophical issues operate on a timescale ofcenturies and millennia.
This operates, you know, the news operates ona timescale of days and weeks and months.

Blair (53:29):
Days, days and weeks.
Right, yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, Robert, thanks for manning the
foxhole with us today.

Robert (53:37):
Always a pleasure.

Martin (53:38):
Thank you very much.