With tensions and potential negotiations in the making between the United States and North Korea, this week I have former military intelligence analyst Dr. Jeff Wasel on the show to discuss the history, state of mind and capabilities of North Korea and its dictatorial dynasty. We show how an entire country is under the sway of a cult of personality and make comparisons to Scientology throughout the show.
The post Sensibly Speaking Podcast #142: North Korea, Scientology and Current Events appeared first on The Sensibly Speaking Podcast.

This week, I tackle the Red Pill documentary by Cassie Jaye, a feminist documentarian who claimed she was “deconverted” from feminism after interview Paul Elam and other men’s rights advocates. I examine the claims and ideas of this group and look at what they might be getting right and what they are definitely getting wrong.
Links
Catherine Mayer Guardian article 
Buzzfeed article
Forbes most dangerous jobs
Notes used during the show
A viewer wrote me not too long ago and asked me to look into and comment on a documentary called The Red Pill. Made by a woman named Cassie Jaye in 2016 using crowdfunded resources, the film looks at what is called the Men’s Rights Movement and the people, men and women, who identify as Men’s Rights Activists.
According to The Urban Dictionary, the top definition of this term states “Civil society associations concerned with combating accepted discrimination against men in contemporary society, especially in the areas of military service, family law, popular culture and other areas when double standards are applied. Often targets of hate speech by radical feminists.”
The most “upvoted” definition on The Urban Dictionary also says this:
“Someone who believes that the honorable cause of providing rights for women has exceeded justice in several areas, with some laws now favoring women instead of being neutral.
“They are often accused by women of being misogynistic.
“MRAs do not approve of how women get lighter sentences in court than men.
“Ultra-Feminists hate any MRA, and will do anything to destroy his credibility.”
Alright, so obviously a contentious and passionate subject and one that has no shortage of black-and-white thinking. It may be a mistake for me to stick my foot into this particular subject, but hey I was in a cult for 27 years so maybe my judgement is worthy of being questioned.
Actually, this topic is a very serious one and worth a critical discussion or two. In researching this, I read and watched a lot of people who are a lot smarter and better educated than I am make good and bad arguments for and against the Men’s Right Movement. Let’s go ahead and start this then with a statement of where I feel I stand on the overall idea of feminism.
I’ve looked into the various “waves” of femnism as they have been called historically, and fully agree that women have historically had it worse than men in many ways. Not allowing women an equal right to vote was pretty ludicrous as are most of the stereotypical roles that women have been forced to play out. As far as I’m concerned, there should be no law or rule or guideline that stops a woman from doing anything she wants to do so long as it is not destructive to herself or others and doesn’t impinge on or violate the human rights of anyone else. That includes not just the laws on the books, but I’m also referring to cultural norms and values and what we consider to be rules of “morality.” I see very few places where someone’s gender needs to play a signficant role in determining their rights or freedoms. There are certain roles women play that men simply can’t, such as giving birth and child rearing. No matter how hard we might try, men are not going to give birth or breast feed. They also won’t have to experience some of the physical suffering women’s biology puts them through, such as having periods or pregnancy or having their backs go out of whack if their breasts are too large.
What’s more, I’m a man, so no matter how hard I try, I will never be able to talk about what it’s like to live life as a woman. There are certain aspects of it that I just will never understand because I haven’t and can’t experience it. That being said, I will point out the opposite is just as true. Some women sometimes get so wrapped up in their own specific problems and issues, that I have gotten the distinct idea that they think men’s issues are gender-neutral and there are no real problems for men when compared to what women have to experience. I’d say that would be just as stupid a statement as me saying “What are women always crying about? They have it easy.” There are distinct physiological, mental and emotional differences between men and women and no amount of talking, thinking or writing is ever going to change that or make those differences go away. We have to learn to live with each other in order to allow the species of homo sapiens to continue.
And so we come to the Red Pill documentary and the MRAs. I’ll use Paul Elam, who is basically one of the founders of the Mens Rights Activists movement, as the focus of what MRAs represent, although I’m well aware that there’s a lot more to this than just what Paul Elam has written or said. As far as I can tell, Elam represents most of the more rational positions the MRAs take and I was interested in some of what he had to say. However, given my background, I can see that Elam treats feminism as a kind of cult and in some ways he is right but only in some very limited and specific ways. As with any extremist, and make no mistake, Elam is an extremist, he takes the bits of truth he preaches and he spins it out to exaggerated and ridiculous proportions.
Before getting into all this, there are a few points of critical thinking I want to talk about.
Freedom of speech means freedom for everyone to speak. No one has a right to a venue, as that is a private matter of those offering the platform or venue. But if you are trying to silence your opposition, it would be a very good idea to make absolutely sure you are justified in doing so. Controversial topics create polarization and the emotions generated by that often become extreme, which then skews one’s views on the topic. If you are not willing for an opposing view to even be heard, my opinion is that you have a very weak, fragile argument that could probably easily be taken apart or challenged and you are afraid that’s what the outcome will be of a debate or forum. We should be better at the exchange of ideas in public forums, rather than trying to shut them down.
What is the difference between a woman’s group, a men’s group, the KKK or the government shutting down a public platform of idea engagement? The only difference is the viewpoint of those involved. The action of censorship is the same no matter who is doing it.
Shouting down opposition, making noise to interfere with an event, pulling fire alarms, rioting and otherwise sabotaging these events are the actions of a 6 year old, akin to putting your hands over your ears and saying “nah nah nah.” It’s childish and frankly uncivilized.
Another logical fallacy that occurs frequently in discussion of controversial groups or issues is to make the most extreme examples or lunatic fringe of a movement represent the entire movement. Everyone has done this, including me. In any large group of individuals united around a common purpose or cause, you are going to get many differing views, opinions and interpretations of what that common purpose actually means. When you then look at those who oppose that group, you find not only the same spectrum of differing understanding and ideas, but also a vested interest in twisting or distorting anything sensible in that group because the whole effort of the opposing group is to demean, discredit or destroy that group. The opportunities for irrational thought increase exponentially as a result, because those distortions or outright lies end up becoming a strawman for the opposing group. Its members end up misrepresenting the original group to be this strawman and ignore anything sensible or reasonable about the original group. Again, we all do this or contribute to it but it seems few of us take the time to recognize when we are doing so because of our own biases and because often we’ve only been given the strawman rather than the real arguments.
Another aspect of this is when all men (or women) are individaully made responsible for all the wrongdoings, errors and crimes of their peers and forefathers. I as a male do not represent all males. Any individual woman listening or watching this podcast does not typify all women. We have to group men and women together into classes for the purpose of statistics and overall tendencies when it comes to sociological or psychological or physical studies, but the truth is that every one of us are individuals who have our own unique experiences, upbringing, education and way of looking at the world. When this is ignored, not only are potential allies cast aside because they have a penis, but enemies are actually created against feminism because individuals are wrongly called out, ostracized or persecuted for nothing they themselves ever did. In researching this podcast, I found plenty of examples of men who support the ideas of equal rights, who want to resist being misogynistic or sexist and who want to do their part to combat abuse and violence against women. Yet it’s the women who push them away because “all men are the enemy” and similar thinking.
Then there is the zero-sum fallacy which says that if you get something, others must be denied that thing. It’s been used in economics or production, but also applies when people of either gender assert “I don’t have this right. You have to lose this right in order for me to have it.” It’s as though there’s a bag of rights or a bag of discriminations and there aren’t enough to go around, so if you as a woman are being discriminated against because of X, then there’s no way a man could ever be discriminated against for the exact same thing. Yet it’s fairly easy to see if you aren’t so emotionally invested in being a victim that there are plenty of rights to go around, and plenty of reasons to also discriminate against one another. The more rational voices in the feminist movement see this fallacy amongst their own members and amongst males and have tried to make the case that when equal rights exist for both genders, then everyone benefits. As Catherine Mayer wrote in the Guardian in an April 2017 article, “[he] represents and magnifies a strain of confused thought that misunderstands equality as a zero-sum game: if women get a slice of the cake, there will be less for men. All the evidence shows the opposite is true: more gender equality means more cake.”
Alright, all that being said, let’s talk about the Red Pill documentary. Why is it called the Red Pill? From the movie, The Matrix, of course.
“You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe,” Morpheus tells Neo. “You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
“The blue pill is the paradigm that most people live by,” Elam tells the documentary-maker, “that men have all the power, that they’ve always had all the power, that domestic violence is a problem that’s only committed by men against women that sexual assaults are only committed by men against women [and] that women don’t make the same money for the same work as men.
“[Feminists say] we need to stop violence against women, instead of just stopping violence. That is feminist training.”
From a Buzzfeed article of Feb 5, 2015 by Adam Serwere and Katie Baker:
“Elam’s takes on gender are often attractive to men dealing with the painful aftermath of divorces, custody battles, and rejection. He preaches the gospel that men’s failures and disappointments are not due to personal shortcomings or lapsed responsibility, but rather institutionalized feminism and a family court system rigged against dutiful fathers, as well as a world gripped by “misandry,” or the hatred of men.”
Valid points of the MRA which should be open for discussion:
– male suicide rates. The claim made by the MRAs is one of the indications that men experience more stress, anxiety and grief than women is gender differences in suicide. There’s even a Wikipedia page on this topic which shows statistically that there is a paradox that women more often have suicidal thoughts but men die by suicide more frequently. In the western world, males die by suicide 3-4X more often than females, yet women try 2-4X more frequently. It’s a little hard to nail down how often people are having suicidal thoughts, though, but the hard numbers of male vs female suicides are clear and easy to find from the World Health Organization and numerous other university and hospital studies. The bottom line is that men die by suicide 3.5x more often than women but women attempt suicide 2x more often than men.
What I could not find in the time I had to research this or in the information available to me (since I can’t get to most academic papers on this stuff since I’m not an academic) is what factor age played in male suicide. I’m referring here to the idea that older men may be killing themselves because their life-long spouse dies or they have reached a point where their quality of life has been impacted to the point they no longer want to carry on. Certainly there’s a percentage of such suicides but what it is I can’t say. I’ll quote here from factors cited on the wikipedia page. These come from studies done by the Australia Institute for Suicide Research, the Scandanavian Journal of Psychology, the Journal of Men’s Health and the European Archives of Psychiatry and Neuroscience.
“A common explanation relies on the social constructions of hegemonic masculinity and femininity. According to literature on gender and suicide, male suicide rates are explained in terms of traditional gender roles. Male gender roles tend to emphasize greater levels of strength, independence, risk-taking behavior, economic status, individualism. Reinforcement of this gender role often prevents males from seeking help for suicidal feelings and depression.
“Numerous other factors have been put forward as the cause of the gender paradox. Part of the gap may be explained by heightened levels of stress that result from traditional gender roles. For example, the death of a spouse and divorce are risk factors for suicide in both genders, but the effect is somewhat mitigated for females. In the Western world, females are more likely to maintain social and familial connections that they can turn to for support after losing their spouse. Another factor closely tied to gender roles is employment status. Males’ vulnerability may be heightened during times of unemployment because of societal expectations that males should provide for themselves and their families.”
– workplace fatalities/high-risk jobs
Another point MRAs make is that men suffer higher workplace fatalities and work in higher-risk professions than women and this is simply ignored because to feminists, men dying at their jobs doesn’t mean anything. It’s not hard to see why there would be some anger over this. While many feminists talk about the pay gap, which is based on very controversial studies and statistics, no one really discusses this workplace death gap. Yet I did not see anyone in my research refuting the pretty common sense validity of the fact that men work in higher-risk professions than women and therefore die more often on the job. Because of the higher physical risk and exertion such jobs require, they tend to be dominated by men. Bureau of Labor statistics show that from 2011 – 2015, men accounted for 92.5% of all workplace deaths.
According to a Forbes article which cited on-the-job fatalities from 2010, the most dangerous professions in America, worst first are:
(1) Fishers and Related Fishing Workers because of extreme weather, heavy equipment and drowning
(2) Logging Workers because of falling trees, cutting equipment and difficult terrain
(3) Aircraft Pilots and Flight Engineers because of testing equipment, emergency response and crashes
(4) Refuse and Recyclable Material Collectors because of heavy equipment, traffic and hazardous materials
(5) Roofers because of heights and summer heat
(6) Structural Iron and Steel Workers because of heights, heavy materials and welding
(7) Farmers, Ranchers and other agricultural managers because of heavy machinery
(8) Drivers/Sales Workers and Truck Drivers because of traffic and fatigue
(9) Electrical Power-Line Installers and Repairers because of heights and electricity
(10) Taxi Drivers and Chauffeurs because of violence, fatigue and roadway dangers
Now in my lifetime, I’ve personally met women who work in every one of these professions. Hell, we did a lot of this kind of work on the RPF and no one ever stopped a project or changed personnel because of gender differences. Women are fully capable of getting trained for and doing any of these jobs.
It’s hard to get accurate numbers on how many women are in each of these professions, at least when I looked. The breakdowns are different. For example, when I was trying to find women doing fishery and related work, I found it combined with forestry occuptions. But with the second most dangerous profession, logging, for example, out of 68,000 workers, 99.1% of them are men. For aircraft pilots and flight engineers, out of 141,000 of them, 94.8% are men. And for garbage workers, out of 101,000 of them, 91.4% are men.
A lot of assumptions could be made about this, but let me just say this. Each of these high-risk and high-paying professions require skill and training and physical stamina. When I heard back in my days in Santa Barbara how much garbage collectors make, I immediately called up to apply. I found out there was a waiting list over a year long! It’s not a matter of sexual discrimination so much as it is numerous other factors that keep women out of these professions at the same rate as men: physical hardship and risk being the main one, and the amount of time an effort required to do the job being another. I don’t mean women can’t do the work or that they can’t invest the time, but how many of them want to? Imagine the consequences on our air travel, food and garbage situations if we tried to enforce a 50/50 quota system in these professions. Do any of you honestly believe there are just as many women lining up to be roofers, iron workers or ranchers as there are men? When you drill down into the details of this, it becomes clear that the more dangerous and physically challenging jobs are dominated by men for a reason. Women don’t want to do them in the same numbers.
Now the pay gap issue is controversial and I know I’m going to upset some people just bringing it up, but hear me out. You can find studies and statistics to back up almost any position on the spectrum from there being no wage gap to there being a gigantic one. Various figures have been thrown out there over the years, depending on who you ask and when. In looking into this, I found claims that the same job being done by people of the same skill set and work experience have discrepancies from 5.4 – 41% difference. Of course, if it were true that women were specifically being discriminated against only because they have a vagina, then why would any business paying attention to its bottom line ever hire a man? If any woman of equal skill, education and ability could be paid substantially less then any man, it would not make sense for any business to ever hire a man. When this question is asked seriously, you get the real factors behind pay gaps between the genders. I’ll quote one self-proclaimed “intersectional feminist” who laid it out pretty clearly, at least in terms of the corporate world:
“…the gender pay gay doesn’t, for the most part, come from corporations making different salary offers to men or to women (although that does happen).
– It comes from men being more likely to apply for the job, even if they don’t have all of the qualifications.
– It comes from women being much more likely to accept the first offer instead of negotiating.
– It comes from the women who do choose to negotiate often caring more about benefits than pay.
– It comes from women not being promoted or offered raises at the same levels as men.
– It comes from women working fewer hours over the course of their careers than men, because they are expected to do so when taking care of their families and raising children.
– It comes from fields that are dominated by women being, on average paid, much less than fields dominated by men.
“The firm I work for has, for the most part, great policies and a good work environment for women. Almost half our office is women, which is very unusual for the field we’re in. But our bonus and promotion systems are still based on how “billable” employees are — i.e., how many hours they put in per week that can be billed to clients, with no weekly cap on hours — which means that employees who choose to make time for their families by only working 40 hours are a week are essentially “choosing” to make less money and advance more slowly than those who are able and willing to work 50-60 hours a week. Since women face much more pressure — both from our society/culture and from their families — to reserve time and energy for “emotional labor” for their families, this means that, over the long run, men will tend to make more money at my firm than women.”
This of course is just one anecdotal example and other anecdotes can be found to support any view you care to have. I believe that the above, though, is a fairly average and good example of the broader corporate picture. The jobs are out there, women can get them if they are willing to do the same volume of work and make the same sacrifices as men do. And for any of you who are saying to yourselves right now “But our culture puts unfair demands on women to raise children and take care of the home and that sort of thing,” let’s just reverse that viewpoint for a second. Look at it from a man’s point of view. Do you automatically assign to all men a callous disregard for their wives and children? Do you think men enjoy working 60-70 hours a week climbing the corporate ladder so they can provide for their families? If so, I think you might have some gender bias of your own interferring with your common sense. Men don’t enjoy making the sacrifices they have to make to survive and succeed in the corporate world any more than women do. And it’s not just the MRAs who think that those sacrifices are more expected of men than women and that for many, men are doing so out of a sense of duty and loyalty to their families. Just think about that a bit before coming to any unwarranted conclusisons that men have it easier than women in the corporate world.
– male disposability
The MRAs make a broad and interesting point about the disposability of males as a whole. The idea is that in any dangerous situation, whether it be combat or a natural disaster or accident, it is always the “women and children” who go first. While some more radical feminists may decry this tradition, for the most part it’s built into the very foundations of our western society. You can imagine what would happen to any man who tried to elbow his way to the front of the line ahead of women and/or their children in a sinking boat or getting out of a burning building. This tendency in our society has actually been tested for by MIT with their “Moral Machine” survey which presents different scenarios of a driverless car killing one group or another and the person taking the test has to decide. According to the results, more people would choose to have the car run over a man rather than a woman and run over older people versus children.
This speaks to an implicit bias, not a conscious one, that adult males are more disposable and less valued than females. We see this all the time in media stories, choosing which kidnapping or missing persons reports to highlight and which victims should gain our sympathy. I think most people would admit that given a choice and all things being equal, a missing female would garner more sympathy and support than a missing male. Most people I know would assume the guy is out gallavanting about or laid up somewhere or just took off for no special reason, while they wouldn’t make such assumptions about the missing female.
When it comes to miltary conscription, or the draft, MRAs point out that men are the ones who have to sign up for selective service and will be the ones who go to prison, not be eligible for student loans or federal job training and get fined out of existence if they don’t. Under current law, no woman would be forced to sign up or go into the miltary for any reason.
Is this disposability of the males in society a gender bias? I think, as with all things, it depends on who you are talking to. But it certainly can be looked at that way, in the same way some feminists feel that there are systemic female biases which disadvantage their survival. It’s more than just a matter of one person’s perspective, though, when you have agreed upon societal norms that way men die first and in western culture, it’s inarguable that such norms exist.
– domestic abuse/rape
Domestic violence happens every day and it’s always ugly. Whether men are beating up on women, women are beating up on men or either of them are beating up on their kids, there is no question we human beings have tempers and they flare up and sometimes people not only get hurt, but they die. The controversy isn’t whether this is a real problem or whether spouses sometimes physically take out their frustrations on each other. It’s how much of a problem this is for women versus men.
The position of the MRAs is that yes, women are beaten and abused and sometimes killed by their partners and this is unacceptable behavior, but that what is wholly ignored in every discussion, legislation and social justice program to address this issue is the men who are assaulted.
Statistics provided by the National Domestic Violence Hotline show that 1 in 4 women and 1 in 7 men aged 18 and older in the US have been the victim of severe physical violence by an intimate partner. That doesn’t mean getting slapped or pushed around, that means severe physical violence. 1 in 3 women and 1 in 10 men have experienced rape, physical violence and/or stalking by a partner to the point that it impacted their ability to function in life. Nearly half of all women and men in the US have experienced psychological aggression by an intimate partner in their lifetime, with the percentages of this being nearly equal between men and women.
So it’s not a matter of men not being abused, physically and psychologically, by their intimate partners. While percentages are greater for women, they are not so significantly different as to justify ignoring the experience of men or just chalking it up to the fact that they should shut up and take it, yet if you look at this subject from the point of view of media attention and legislation, you find that women receive the bulk of sympathy, support and treatment. In the US, there are 2,000 domestic violence shelters, but only one of them offers support and treatment for men. I don’t think I really have to belabor this point. If you are a battered male, you will look in vain for sympathy, understanding or government-sponsored treatment in the US. That is just a fact and yet whenever this topic is brought up, radical feminists start shouting about how this is just a backlash against the domestic violence faced by women. It’s the zero-sum fallacy all over again, where there’s this idea that if you support battered men and care for their concerns, you are somehow lessening the issue against women. This is irrational thinking at an extreme and denies not only battered and abused men the treatment and support they need, but also opens the door to more violence against children in such a situation. I don’t think anyone could honestly assert that women who beat on their husbands will universally not touch their own children too.
– social tolerance of misandry, now being built into the language itself. I’ve discussed the effect of language on our thinking many times. It’s a very important topic. If you control the language of a culture, you control how it thinks and acts. Fortunately, no one entity has such powerful control, but the feminist movement has introduced words specific to men, some of them bordering on misandry. such as “mansplaining” “manspreading” etc
As Liz Cookman wrote for The Guardian in Feb 2015:
“Men. If they’re not ‘mansplaining’ things to women they’re ‘manslamming’ us in the street, ‘manspreading’ on the tube or ‘manterrupting’ us during work meetings. Even as a hairy, sensible-shoe-wearing man-hater – otherwise known as a feminist – the rise and rise of the man-shaming portmanteau has left me feeling a little uncomfortable.
“First there was mansplaining, which has just been declared 2014’s Aussie word of the year by Macquarie Dictionary of Australian English. It refers to the very real tendency of some men to explain things to women, whether they need them explaining or not, because of an ingrained assumption that they’re too ignorant – their pretty little heads too full of boys and makeup, no doubt – to understand.
“The term is thought to have been first coined by feminist commentators in 2008 following the publication of Rebecca Solnit’s scathing essay, Men Explain Things to Me. The piece recounted the painful tale of the time an over-confident and clueless man at a party explained her own book to her – an experience that many women can sympathise with to some degree.
“One of the problems with simplistic terms like this, however, is that their ease of use and humour risk diluting any message. They become an easy-to-mouth solution for a more complicated problem, and this one quickly took on more pejorative meanings. It became a go-to phrase for mumbled or garbled explanations and the trump card in arguments, but this sort of overuse just desensitises us to the real issue which is that, yes, some men really do talk down to women.”
There’s no stopping people from coining new words and no stopping societies from making them go viral, so to speak. But I think we should recognize that language shapes attitudes and attitudes shape action. There’s been no shortage of misogynistic language too. This river flows in both directions and I don’t think two wrongs make a right.
There are other issues they bring up which I won’t go into as much detail about but which I believe are just as valid points of discussion.
– child custody/unfair family court biases
– criminal sentencing
– educational inequality
– men’s lack of reproductive rights
There are valid points and hype and nonsense in the MRAs. Our problem is these lunatics get involved and no one can talk rationally about any of it. And that includes the MRA too. Elam’s daughter said: “He does a lot of stuff just to get a rise out of the public. He said there’s no such thing as bad press. He knew in order to get something out in the spotlight, especially something as niche as men’s rights, you have to overblow it.”
Comment from Byenia on YouTube in response to a video posted in 2009 gives an even-handed look at the problem of using exaggerated hyperbole to make a point:
“…I do think you over-inflate men’s innocence, similar to how feminists like to over-inflate women’s innocence. While people like to think exaggerations are useful to even the score, it really just makes it look like both ends of the scale tip too far off-base. Would be nice if we could assess the situation without so many distortions and biases, but I suppose that’s impossible since we each live behind our own eyes. Subjective, emotional, irrational beings striving to be reasonable (or at least create the semblance of such).
“Lots and lots of people are unhappy, both men and women, and material gain doesn’t alleviate that despite some hoping it will. So it seems obvious that we’re living lives out of balance and that something seriously needs to give.
“Feminism has gone too far and is creating more problems than it remedies these days, that’s a given. But it really disturbs me when I read some of what you’ve put out there, like you’re just trying to scare the shit out of women. Acquit all men in rape cases involving women, never mind all the other crimes men are falsely accused of and convicted for, like drug possession and homicides. When you zone in on what will scare and psychically hurt women most, you not only offend feminists and draw attention to your movement and organization, you detract from its value in many of our eyes.”
It’s main spokesman and founder of the A Voice for Men website, Paul Elam, has a rocky and dark past which does not paint him in a flattering light, according to a 2015 Buzzfeed investigation where they spoke directly with his ex-wife and estranged daughter. Not interested in ad hominem. A man of low character, a complete criminal, can still make a valid point or tell the truth about something. However, there certainly is cause to be concerned if someone is outed as having a motivation to lie and hypocrisy does say something about a person’s character and honesty.
Elam quotes:
“Should I be called to sit on a jury for a rape trial, I vow publicly to vote not guilty, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the charges are true,” he once wrote in a blog post explaining the way the criminal justice system is stacked against male defendants. Elam has since defended the post against claims of “rape apologia”, saying he was being deliberately provocative.
In one post, Elam wrote that “all the PC demands to get huffy and point out how nothing justifies or excuses rape won’t change the fact that there are a lot of women who get pummeled and pumped because they are stupid (and often arrogant) enough to walk [through] life with the equivalent of a I’M A STUPID, CONNIVING BITCH – PLEASE RAPE ME neon sign glowing above their empty little narcissistic heads.”
The hypocrisy comes in the way he has acted with his own estranged daughter and how, if he is representing and leading a movement about men fighting for their custodial rights and wanting to be part of their own children’s lives, that you would imagine he himself would jump at the chance to have a relationship with his daughter and grandkids. He had that when she reached out to him on her own and then blew it within a few years and is now completely out of touch with them.
Make it clear the incendiary language and trash talk from MRAs is not something to be condoned or agreed with, in the same way that man hating language isn’t good for the arguments made for women.
The bottom line with MRAs is this: individuals have been harmed by various systems in our society which don’t care about them as individuals and operate arbitrarily on rules or guidelines which create injustice. Whether in divorce court or a custody battle, a false legal allegation that destroys a man’s reputation and bank account, or literally being physically beaten and then being arrested for no other reason than you are a man and your assaulter was a women; these instances of injustice create a deep and lasting anger and feeling of victimization. What is someone to do in such a situation? Lie down and take it? Maybe they are supposed to “man up” and just silently deal with those injustices because they are part of a patriarchy which systemically victimizes women, so they have no rights of their own? In certain circles, that is exactly what these men are told and they justifiably react very negatively to that. So they find other men who have experienced similar injustices and they then talk amongst themselves and try to find a causative agent, a reason why their life took a major turn for the worse. These men weren’t victimizing their partners and some of them even considered themselves feminists before their unfortunate circumstances proved to them that men could be victimized just as much as women. Like my experience in Scientology, when you find out the darker and more abusive side of any group, you have a natural desire to fight back against it, to let other people know the dangers that exist in these systems so that they won’t be victims too. Is that such a bad thing to do? No, of course it’s not.
Victims of any gender, color, race or creed don’t deserve what they get. That’s the reason we use the word victim. For men, it’s harder to own up to having been a victim. All the cultural norms in modern society say that the ideal man is a hardened warrior, tough and adversarial, able to take a beating and fight right back and never give up, never surrender. Real life is quite a bit different from that stereotype, in the same way that the old school stereotype of the ideal wife, loving and doting and who always had dinner ready on time and the children under control, was itself a ridiculous stereotype that no woman could ever live up to.
At least within my own lifetime, I feel confident in saying that all the subconscious biases installed in us from before we could even speak make us resist the idea that men are victims. It’s uncomfortable. It rubs us the wrong way. But the truth is that abusers and abuses are equal opportunity and exist in every system and every group people have ever invented. If we are going to listen to women and children when they are victimized, we need to listen to men too. That is what true equal rights are all about.
What we seem to lack at both ends of the radical sexism spectrum is empathy and understanding for the very real problems that both genders face in their day to day life. If I were going to try to offer a solution to all this, I would propose some kind of educational immersive experience for males and females. A virtual reality world, perhaps, where men would be made to experience the everyday world of a woman and women would likewise be made to walk in a man’s shoes for a period of time. I think repeated trips offering a variety of experiences in everyday life would be quite eye-opening for each, from just driving somewhere and going shopping at a mall, to answering questions in a job interview, to going out to the beach or a park, to going online on social media, to working at various kinds of jobs.
And of course, as soon as I thought of it, I googled this idea only to find it’s already being done. I think if you search for “virtual reality gender simulator” yourself you’ll see what I’m talking about yourself. I think this is a good idea and could be exactly the kind of compassion machine we’ve been looking for. There’s still a long way to go before we get fully immersive scenarios like the ones I imagined earlier, but the good news is we are on our way to using this VR technology for more than just gaming. To me, this is much more important to our future, especially as the issues of sex, gender and identity are only going to continue to become more complicated.
Thanks for listening.
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In this week’s podcast, financial analyst and former investment manager John P. Capitalist and I discuss in detail Scientology’s failing “Ideal Org” strategy and how it had some short-term benefits but has now failed epically to help Scientology achieve its goals of world conquest.
John P. Capitalist blog is here.
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This week, I am joined by Dr. Jeff Wasel and John P Capitalist to take a deep look into L. Ron Hubbard’s disastrous brainchild, the Snow White Program, an effort on the part of Scientology to get false reports removed from government files but which ended up leading to eleven Scientologists going to jail, including Hubbard’s wife, Mary Sue.
Link to the full Snow White Program is here. It’s a bit hard to read but is the only complete issue of the program I’ve been able to find on the net.
Dr. Jeff Wasel Ph.D holds Masters and Doctorate degrees from the London School of Economics. He is an expert in anti-money laundering, terrorism finance and trans-national criminal organizations. His current work involves the investigation of finance irregularities in New Religious Movements. His interest in terrorist financing and financial crimes stems from his service as an intelligence analyst in the Marine Corps, where he specialized in order of battle, technical intelligence and threat analysis.
John P Capitalist (pseudonym) spent most of the last twenty years managing money on Wall Street.  He says “That’s been great training in research and analysis, trying to figure out why things are happening and to figure out what might happen next.  When you understand the past and present, you can sometimes predict the future in a way that delivers the results you want. On Wall Street, that’s about making more money for your customers than the competition; in Scientology, it’s about figuring out the best course of action to excise the cancer of this cult on society.”
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This week, I describe my Friday 13th ghost hunting adventure in Arizona, where I got the chance to work alongside Ross Blocher and Carrie Poppy of the Oh No! Ross and Carrie Podcast, to debunk the supernatural claims being made by a man who had become afraid of his own home.
Ross and Carrie’s podcast is here.
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This week, I take a step back from the hyperbole of gun control and gun advocacy, to try to have a sensible and non-inflammatory discussion about guns in America. To help me out, I am joined by Brandon Estrella, a gun advocate with military and law enforcement training and experience. Enjoy!
The post Sensibly Speaking Podcast #137: An Impossibly Sensible Discussion about Guns appeared first on The Sensibly Speaking Podcast.

This week, I am joined by military intelligence analyst Jeff Wasel and former Wall Street investor John P. Capitalist to take a good hard look at the early days of Scientology management and the formation of the Sea Organization. We discuss L. Ron Hubbard’s activities in Rhodesia and England and how he broke away to form a paramilitary enforcement arm for his church, called the Sea Organization, as well as his evolution of a system of logic and investigation called the Data Series. This is a deeper than usual look at the timeline and events which changed Scientology from an oddball, fringe pseudoscience to an international enterprise which seeks to control every aspect of its members’ lives.
Link to my earlier video on the Data Series is here.
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This podcast is actually a re-do of an earlier podcast which I had to pull because of some factual inaccuracies in my initial research and now we’ve got this put together properly so here we go. This podcast is not the only one I’ll be doing on this topic, but it’s the first and probably most important one because what I’m working to do here is lay out the factual history of how we got to where we are now on the subject of guns in the United States.
This show I’m calling “The Real History of the Second Amendment.” Hopefully a provocative enough title to get some attention but for any of you gun advocates out there, don’t worry because I’ve not filled this with any anti-Trump or anti-Second Amendment rhetoric. I have put this podcast together as objectively and honestly as I know how and I hope that any of you watching will hear me out to the end because I think there’s stuff here that you don’t know and will benefit from learning. What I’m doing in this show is tracing the history of guns going all the way back to before they even existed and then incorporate that into how the Second Amendment came into being, why our Founding Fathers wrote it in to the Bill of Rights in the first place and how it has fit into American history and our love of guns. So here we go.
The Second Amendment was written in a vastly different time from our current culture and concerns. None of the issues which are so heatedly discussed on social media and at town halls were even in the headspace of the colonials who founded America, so when looking at how we got to where we are now, we have to examine not just the context and intent of the Second Amendment at the time it was written, but the various interpretations of its words by the Supreme Court over the last 2.5 centuries. There have been some pretty radical changes, especially in recent times. First though, let’s go back to the beginning.
Killing people efficiently and effectively over a distance has been a problem for millenia. Throwing rocks may have been the first effort and somewhere along the way, the bow and arrow was invented. Our best data now indicates these were invented about 64,000 years ago in Africa and when men left their native country for India, Australia, Asia and Europe, they took their bows and arrows with them. This technology remained relatively unchanged until about 2500 BC when someone in Asia invented the composite bow using multiple layers of wood glued together which could bend a lot farther without breaking and were significantly shorter, so could be fired while riding a horse. This spread throughout the known world from Egypt to China and beyond.
However, as anyone knows who has actually tried it, hitting something with an arrow requires a great deal of practice and skill. Archers could be devastating as cavalry units but took a lot of time and resources to train. So around 450 BC, Chinese blacksmiths invented the crossbow. It was the first weapon meant for a relatively untrained individual to replace the bow and it was very effective.
Now fast forward 1300 years and we have a discovery that changed the world. The Chinese were quite good at mixing various compounds to medicines and other useful mixtures but they didn’t expect to invent gunpowder. This was discovered in 850 AD by Chinese alchemists who mixed sulphur and charcoal with saltpeter – a common name for potassium nitrate. Not yet knowing what they had done, they used this powder to treat skin infections but it had the unfortunate side effect of creating smoke and flames which burnt hands and faces and even the whole house where they were working burned down. Then someone realized that this might be better used to kill people than cure them and it was quickly put into use in the military against the invading Mongols.
Not long after, the very first weapon recognized as a gun was invented in the 10th century in China. These were bamboo or metal tubes which projected flames and shrapnel by packing gunpower in the tube behind metal shards. These were known as fire lances.
By the 1200s, gunpowder was exported to the Middle East by invading Monguls and to Europe, either over the Silk Road or also by Monguls, where it quickly was put to use in cannons to take down walled fortresses and castles which were previously damn near impossible to penetrate. These cannon changed the entire face of armed conflict.
Cannon first appeared in Italy around 1320 and spread quickly throughout Europe. However, there were problems with them. They weren’t very accurate, gunpowder was extremely expensive and the cannon operators hurt themselves as often as their targets.
Smaller hand cannons were created in Italy in the 14th century and the first handguns appeared in the mid-15th century in France when cannons were also essentially shrunk down to individual size. The invention of the lock – the firing mechanism – was the big break here and resulted in the arquebus. This created a new class of soldier, the infantry, and gave birth to modern warfare, although it would look quite different from what we’re used to today since it took two minutes to load just one shot and was still not a totally practical replacement for archers or bowmen.
Something important to note here is that the reason guns caught on at first was not because of how lethal they were, but because of how they equalized the players on the battlefield. Almost anyone could be quickly trained to load and fire a gun, whereas archers and swordsmen required years of training to be any good. This slowly but surely changed the entire nature of warfare, strategy and tactics. Inventors and innovators made guns more and more efficient at their single purpose – killing people – and thus made it more and more economically feasible to create larger and more powerful armies which could do more damage than anything that came before. The fact that guns could be used for any other purpose such as hunting or sport was completely ancillary to their main purpose, which was to kill other human beings.
So we come to the United States and the European colonists who originally came to settle it. Before the Europeans arrived, there were no guns in the Americas, but that doesn’t mean the Americas were a pastoral land of peace and tranquility which was ruined by the arrival of the white man. No, it was quite the opposite. The Native Americans across the plains of North America and the deserts and jungles of South America had developed quite a variety of lethal weapons including the bow and arrow, spear, tomahawk and knife. In South America, they had even created a kind of sword using obsidian embedded into the side of wooden clubs, with edges sharper than high quality, steel razor blades. However, the European developments were far in advance of what had been invented in the Americas. As anthropologist Jared Diamond pointed out, the advances of Eurasian society gave the Europeans three things that the Native Americans did not have: guns, germs and steel.
David Silverman, a professor of history at George Washington University, wrote:
“Germs refer to plague, measles, flu, whooping cough and, especially, the smallpox that whipsawed through indigenous populations, sometimes with a mortality rate of 90 per cent. The epidemics left survivors ill-equipped to fend off predatory encroachments, either from indigenous or from European peoples, who seized captives, land and plunder in the wake of these diseases.
“Guns and steel, of course, represent Europeans’ technological prowess. Metal swords, pikes, armour and firearms, along with ships, livestock and even wheeled carts, gave European colonists significant military advantages over Native American people wielding bows and arrows, clubs, hatchets and spears. The attractiveness of such goods also meant that Indians desired trade with Europeans, despite the danger the newcomers represented. The lure of trade enabled Europeans to secure beachheads on the East Coast of North America, and make inroads to the interior of the continent. Intertribal competition for European trade also enabled colonists to employ ‘divide and conquer’ strategies against much larger indigenous populations.”
But contrary to some popular belief, the Native American populations did not just stand by and get slaughtered. They were keen to trade with the new settlers and got their hands quickly on the guns and other superior bits of technology the Europeans brought with them. As Silverman wrote:
“In early Quebec, Jamestown and Plymouth, colonists held an advantage in firearms only for a handful of years before Native people began building their own arsenals. The founders of later colonies, such as Pennsylvania or Georgia, arrived to find indigenous people already furnished with the best gun technology Europe could produce and keen to acquire more. Except under the rarest circumstances, no one state authority had the ability to choke Indians off from guns, powder and shot. There were just too many rival imperial powers and colonies in North America, their governments were weak, and the trade ran through a labyrinth of unofficial channels.”
The point being that it took almost no time at all for armed conflict to occur between the Native Americans and the Europeans and between tribes too. In fact, guns became a kind of currency and various colonial interests competed with one another for the Natives support by placating them with weapons.
In the 1630s, the colonization of the US began in real earnest. English Puritans arrived by the thousands to create the colony of Massachusetts, and quickly spread into the Connecticut River Valley, Narragansett Bay and eastern Long Island. And the Mohawks were the first tribe to take advantage of the opportunities for trade in firearms. Within ten years, the Mohawk tribe had 400 muskets and plenty of ammunition, while the Iroquois had at least twice as many. And these Native American tribes did not hesitate to use them against other tribes for conquest and to take their resources.
In 1640, a major advancement in gun technology was the invention of the flintlock. The idea was that by using a bit of flint in the hammer, a spark could be created that would ignite a small bit of gunpowder which would in turn ignite the gunpowder packed in the gun’s barrel and that would launch a small round pellet or bullet. Loading and firing took as long as it would take to pour the gunpowder into the barrel, stuff the bullet down in there, cock the hammer, aim and pull the trigger. However, their range was not very far, they were noisy and created smoke so were not very good for hunting and, more often than not, were seen as a secondary weapon to a sword or knife. So it would be wrong to get the idea that every colonist or Native American was walking around packing heat.
However, by the mid-1700s there had been enough flintlocks brought over from Europe that the colonists managed to successfully wage open rebellion against Great Britain and gain their independence. The Revolutionary War went down and it’s been so well documented and described that there’s nothing more I have to add about that. Once it was over, it came time for the newly created United States of America to figure out what it wanted to do with and about guns. They ended up settling on the 2nd Amendment to the Bill of Rights which states:
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
The US Constitution and Bill of Rights are unusual for many reasons, not the least of which is that we specify a right to bear arms. Out of the nearly 200 constitutions in the world today, only three include the right to bear arms: Guatemala, Mexico and the US and only ours does not include explicit restrictive conditions. There is no international law that gives the right to bear arms and in every catalog of human rights around the world, there is no human right to self-defense. According to human rights scholars, states are actually obliged to limit access to firearms as part of their duty to protect the right to life. There’s an important distinction there. You as a human being have the right to live and that right should not be infringed. You don’t have the right to kill. A cornerstone of every civilization on this planet is making this distinction and giving the state the power to enforce that its citizens do not indiscriminately kill one another. This is one of the most fundamental reasons we have societies and civilizations in the first place. To the degree any society has rampant and random violence against its members is the degree that society is not fulfilling its actual purpose.
So getting back to the early United States, why did the Founding Fathers feel compelled to add the Second Amendment to our Bill of Rights? Well, one reason was because that right had already been spelled out in the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776, the first state constitution ratified following the Declaration of Independence. Article 13 stated “That the people have a right to bear arms for the defense of themselves and the state; and as standing armies in the time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up; And that the military should be kept under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.”
Additionally, when the Revolution was over, each newly independent state adopted the existing English common law except where such laws were explicitly rejected or nullified by American legislation. This is where many of our legal traditions came into force for the first time, including habeas corpus, trial by jury and the right to keep and bear arms.
However, if you dive deeper into the debates and conversations that were going on to convince the states to sign off on the Constitution, you find some interesting points being made about this Second Amendment. Actually, this time in American history is crammed with interesting facts and arguments, because not everyone was on the same page when it came to how our newly formed independent nation should be organized. There were Federalists and Anti-Federalists and they were duking it out over a number of issues.
Initially, our first attempt at a constitution between the 13 original colonies was called the Articles of Confederation and a Federalist was someone who supported these. The problem was that the Articles of Confederation had created a central government which lacked enough authority to actually be able to deal with issues with interstate relations, commerce and trade. Before the Revolutionary War was even over, it became apparent and something had to be done if this central government was going to work at all. This is why the Constitutional Convention was held in Philadelphia in 1787 and why the Articles of Confederation ended up being scrapped and our existing Constitution was drafted. The 55 attendees of this Convention are the people we now call our Founding Fathers.
It took them four months to get the work done of hammering out the Constitution, but once it got around to the states, not everyone was on board with a strong central or federal government. As their name implies, the Anti-Federalists were wary of anything resembling an English monarchy and opposed creating a strong central government. It was because of the Anti-Federalists, led by Patrick Henry of Virginia, that a Bill of Rights was created at all. During the debates in the Constitutional Convention, a Bill of Rights was suggested but in what has been called “a political blunder of the first magnitude” it was voted down and may have even been thought of as a kind of delaying tactic. The Founding Fathers had not predicted what a strong issue this would eventually become.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that many of the points of concern the Anti-Federalists had about the proposed 1787 Constitution had merit. They didn’t want too much power invested in the Office of the President for fear it would become tyrannical, they wanted the power of the courts clearly defined so we wouldn’t have an out of control judiciary and they demanded a Bill of Rights so common citizens would not be trampled by an over-reaching and all-too-powerful central government.
They didn’t have social media in the same way we do now, but the same level of passion we often see today over key political or social issues was the order of the day then too, including the use of aliases to disguise the identity of those who wrote pamphlets and articles advocating for their positions. This happened on both the Federalist and Anti-Federalist sides and the best of these have been compiled by historians into the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers. And the resistance to this new Constitution was not just academic. Judge William West of Rhode Island, for example, led 1,000 armed men to a celebratory rally to protest how the new Constitution was being passed elsewhere. Interesting, Rhode Island was also the one state that refused to send any delegates to the Constitutional Convention in the first place. While everyone was happy to be out from under the yoke of British rule, the new United States were not really very united.
The number one point of contention really came down to civil rights. What would citizens have the right to do under this new government and how would a new tyranny be prevented? These were the questions on most people’s minds and they were answered in the Bill of Rights which were issued and ratified immediately following most of the states’ approval of the Constitution itself.
It was funny to me to find in researching all this, that James Madison, one of the darlings of the NRA and who is often quoted in support of the Second Amendment, actually opposed the entire idea of the Bill of Rights from the very beginning. He was a Federalist and felt the state governments would take care of personal liberty issues, which he wrote about in No. 46 of the Federalist Papers. What changed his mind was the fact that he was not going to be elected into the newly formed Congress if he did not make a campaign pledge to introduce constitutional amendmendments at the First Congress. To be fair, that was not his only reason though. The whole subject of a Bill of Rights had been vigorously and even physically debated and Madison saw the writing on the wall. He didn’t want to have to re-do another Constitutional Convention to re-work every bit of that document again. In the end, he said that the Bill of Rights was useful but not essential.
Drawing on the Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights and existing state constitutions, especially Virginia’s, Madison penned a draft of the Bill of Rights. On the issue of guns, his first draft said this:
“The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.”
Interesting wording, huh? Everyone has a right to own and use weapons as part of a well regulated militia but if your religion calls for you to be a pacifist, you won’t be forced to take part in the military.
The entire proposal is quite an interesting read, but not everyone readily agreed to what Madison wrote. A special committee was formed to edit and revise these rights and the changes then went through both the House and Senate, who changed and condensed them even further. Our current wording of the Second Amendment came from these changes. The final version was approved by joint resolution on September 25, 1789. Whereas Madison may not have been fully on board early in the process, he was active through every part of this process to push them through because he did not want the Anti-Federalists to gain the upper hand and force another Constitutional Convention. Better to push through what they had created than have to start over.
So were the citizens dancing in the streets with parades and marching bands once the Bill of Rights went through? Not really. Were there immediate challenges to the Supreme Court and epic legal battles for or against gun rights? No, not at all. In fact, from a legal standpoint, no one really paid much attention to the Second Amendment or to any of the amendments for that matter. There were no serious legal challenges to any of these rights for about 150 years.
As to the intent of Madison and the First Congress in writing and editing the Second Amendment, what were they thinking? What did they mean by a “well regulated militia”? A Google search to find this out will quickly end you up on many gun advocate sites. In fact, the NRA even maintains the James Madison Research Library and Information Center where they offer numerous quotes from those early state constitutions such as:
“Virginia: That a well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defence of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided, as dangerous to liberty; and that in all cases, the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.”
“Maryland: That a well-regulated militia is the proper and natural defence of a free government.”
“Massachusetts: The people have a right to keep and bear arms for the common defence.”
Notice a common theme here? If you didn’t let me spell it out for you. The point of people having guns was to arm members of local militia who would act in the interests of the common defense. This is literally spelled out plainly in almost every one of these state constitutions. Having just come out of an era of British rule, which had been heavily enforced by a standing army on American shores, the newly independent states did not want to have anything to do with standing armies, garrisoning troops in private homes or any such thing. The militia was the solution to this problem and so the right of citizens to own and use their weapons couldn’t be infringed because then there would be no militia.
This term,”militia,” is commonly misunderstood because its meaning has changed over time, reflecting the changes in our society as we have gained international stature and have created not just one but four branches of our armed forces. What many do not appreciate is how different our society was when our nation was first formed. I
n 1789, there was no Army, Navy, Air Force or Marines or even a Coast Guard. Once we kicked the British out, there was not only no standing army, but there was general antipathy to the entire concept. Literally no one was interested in creating a new, centralized army under our new centralized government. Instead, the responsibility of civil defense was left to towns and states, who had a lot more autonomy in those frontier days than they do now. Those men who could be called upon to deal with situations requiring an armed response were called “militia.” It was simply expected that they show up when called and that they bring weapons with them since the federal government did not have the means or equipment to arm all these militia men on a moment’s notice.
Alexander Hamilton had argued in Federalist Paper No. 29, titled “Concerning the Militia” that it was a necessary and important element of a central government that it have the “power of regulating the militia, and of commanding its services in times of insurrection and invasion…” He made it clear that without such authority, and without a regulated and uniform militia to command, the federal government would be all but powerless to enforce its laws or to defend the nation as a whole. With no standing army at its command, the federal government would have no other alternative when it came to calling up the use of force for offensive or defensive purposes. He also made the point that just because the federal government had such authority did not mean or even infer that armed force was the only tool in its toolkit to get things done. There were people afraid that federal government could become tyrannical at the drop of a hat and they didn’t want to invest any power behind it. Yet this had already proven to not work with the Articles of Confederation and so some power and authority over the militia had to be conceded, otherwise the whole concept of our new Constitution would fail.
Hamilton addressed other concerns in his paper as well, all to the point that a militia consisting of volunteer citizens who fulfill their duty when called was the safest and most practical alternative to the standing army which no one wanted. It was impractical, he admitted, to think that these militia men would report for duty numerous times a year for drilling and training since they were mainly farmers or tradesmen who didn’t have the time or inclination for such a thing. However, that didn’t mean they shouldn’t be trained or regulated at all. The militia was not a free-for-all. To this he said “Little more can reasonably be aimed at, with respect to the people at large, than to have them properly armed and equipped; and in order to see that this be not neglected, it will be necessary to assemble them once or twice in the course of a year.”
James Madison also dipped his foot in the militia controversy when he wrote Federalist Paper No. 46. Both he and Hamilton openly ridiculed the concerns of Anti-Federalists who supposed that a federally commanded militia force might be used to abuse or even subjugate the population, and their arguments against this were quite good, pointing out amongst other things that a militia would be composed of the very citizens who would be subjugated and no one with an ounce of integrity or common sense would follow orders to do such things. Madison went even further and argued that even if a standing federal army were created, it would be only about 30,000 men strong and so wouldn’t stand a chance against an armed populace of half a million armed citizen-soldiers who could fight back. The American Revolution itself was the proof of that argument, yet it’s pretty clear that this argument is not a valid one now. Our society has changed greatly since the time of James Madison and to use his arguments from that time and place to support why anyone who wants a gun now should have one is not only intellectually dishonest but runs counter to the entire foundation of Madison’s original argument. Context matters and Madison’s words have unfortunately been taken grossly out of context in modern times.
In fact, it seems an all-too-common theme amongst the NRA and gun advocates in general to flatly ignore the circumstances and context of the arguments of Hamilton, Madison and anyone else from the 1700s. I’ve discussed confirmation bias on my channel so many times, I feel like a broken record on the subject, but I have to comment here that its a prevalent problem amongst gun advocates who read only what they want to in our Founding Fathers’ words rather than get the whole message of what they were saying. It would be quite amusing if we could see Hamilton or Madison brought forward to today and see what they would have to say about our current ideas about guns. I would contend that they would not even recognize their own words, given how grossly out of context they are sometimes taken.
Anyway, time moved forward and our country grew under the new Constitution and prospered as it expanded across the entire continent. Despite, or maybe because of this prosperity, and also simply because people are people, their urge to kill other people didn’t go away and so the technology of gun manufacturing continued to develop.
One of the big problem with the flintlocks was they tended to not fire or misfire in humid or wet environments. The percussion cap was invented around 1820 to deal with this problem.
In 1835, Samuel Colt invented the first multishot, revolving chamber firearm which enabled someone to take multiple shots without having to stop and re-load. This was a huge deal which again changed the entire face of combat and was put into immediate use around the country.
By 1850, shotguns had been invented and in 1860, the Spencer repeating rifle could fire 7 shots in just 15 seconds. Interestingly, the Army didn’t want them at first because they thought soldiers would just overshoot their supply of bullets and use up all their supplies firing too often. That changed after President Lincoln himself test-fired a Spencer and gave it his stamp of approval.
The American Civil War began in 1861 and was one of the bloodiest conflicts in all of human history. During the time of the war in the 1860s, two men with pacifistic intentions created weapons that enabled men to kill other men in greater numbers than ever dreamed of before. With a certain degree of irony as well as tragedy, both thought that by making war too awful, people would come to their senses and stop fighting. Of course, it wasn’t that simple when you get into the details, but I will say that both men had far too high an opinion of people in general.
Around 1862, Doctor Richard Gatling patented the Gatling Gun, a six-barreled machine capable of firing 200-300 rounds per minute using a hand-driven crank and usually mounted on the back of a wagon. This gun could fire as long as bullets could be fed into it and so long as the barrels stayed cool enough to retain their shape, which often required an assistant pouring water on them while it was in use. Gatling produced this gun in the middle of the Civil War with the idea that his invention required fewer people to operate and thus, fewer soldiers would be needed in battle and so lives would actually be saved by using it. Surprisingly, the US Army wasn’t so interested and didn’t actually place any orders until just after the Civil War ended.
It was the Native Americans who ended up seeing the business end of this weapon during the Indian Wars. Of course, Russia and Britain also purchased their fair share of Gatling guns and used them against native tribes in their colonies too. It was used to mow down Native American tribes and whole fields of roaming buffalo upon which the Native Americans relied for their food. Instead of ending conflict, all Gatling did was make it easier for the white man to fuel his genocidal tendencies against minority populations all over the world. That is not a statement of opinion or bias, but just a fact.
Alfred Nobel worked to make unstable nitroglycerin an effective weapon and eventually invented dynamite in 1867 as a more stable alternative. This was originally intended for use in mining operations but when you have a substance that causes that much damage with so little effort, of course it’s going to find its way into military applications. Nobel is famously quoted from 1876 when he told Austrian countess Bertha von Suttner:
“Perhaps my factories will put an end to war sooner than your congresses: on the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilised nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops.”
Nobel was a smart guy when it came to chemistry, but was a bit of an idiot at psychology. After creating dynamite, he then invented gelignite and in 1887 patented ballistite. He gained a great deal of wealth from the waging of war but was a pacifist at heart and when he realized that his legacy would be one of death, he created the Nobel Prize trust in an attempt to encourage solving the world’s problems through peaceable means.
The Gatling gun became obsolete within just 20 years, as weapons manufacturers continued innovating and pushing for faster and more efficient ways to kill. The mechanisms to create the first truly automatic machine gun – a weapon that fires continuously when the trigger is held down – was invented in the 1880s by Hiram Maxim. In 1892, the first automatic pistol was created by Joseph Laumann. The first automatic rifle appeared from Winchester in 1903.
And now let’s talk about what challenges have been presented over the years to the Supreme Court and how have they interpreted each challenge?
The first is United States v. Cruikshank from 1875. This was not a straight-up guns rights case but was instead a challenge in the post-Civil War years to states rights versus federal regulations. What happened was Republican candidate William Pitt Kellogg was elected governor of Louisiana in 1872 with 57% of the popular vote. Federal troops had to step in to enforce his election because it was so hotly contested and eventually President Grant personally stepped in and acknowledged Kellogg as the winner to end the controversy but not before the Colfax massacre where 105 blacks and 3 whites were killed on Easter Sunday 1873.
At the time, the Democrats were the party of the racist South. A group of white Democrats armed with rifles and a small cannon, overpowered Republican freedmen and state militia who were guarding the Grant Parish courthouse in Colfax. Most of the freedmen were killed after they surrendered; nearly 50 were killed later that night after being held as prisoners for several hours. Estimates of the number of dead have varied, ranging from 62 to 153; three whites died but the number of black victims was difficult to determine because bodies had been thrown into the river or removed for burial.
I won’t get into commenting further on the barbaric Southern activities of that time period, except to say that the Colfax massacre was but one instance of the racially charged violence directed against the newly freed blacks in the South and any whites who were on the side of individual freedom and equality for all human beings. Between 1868 and 1875, violence and voter fraud were the two hallmarks of elections in the South. There is nothing wonderful or great about what went on during this time period. In fact, it should be remembered as one of the worst periods in our country’s history, but all too often incidents like the Colfax Massacre are simply swept under the rug of historical revisionism.
Now as to how this relates to gun rights, the Supreme Court basically enforced the racist agenda of the South in what I consider to be one of the most shameful decisions it has ever rendered but which, unfortunately, was not the only time the Supreme Court came down on the wrong side of history. What we have to remember about the Supreme Court is that it is made up of people who have just as many biases, prejudices and personal blind spots as anyone else and they have made some incredibly huge blunders of the years.
You see, Congress passed three bills between 1870 and 1871 to protect African-Americans’ right to vote, hold office, serve on juries and receive equal protection under the law. These were known as the Enforcement Acts and allowed the federal government to intervene in cases where states did not protect these rights. These all came on the heels of the 14th Amendment, which had given full citizenship to anyone born in the US and the 15th Amendment which banned racial discrimination in voting.
Federal prosecutors pursued charges against some of the murderers of the Colfax Massacre under the Enforcement Acts and this ended up being appealed to the Supreme Court. That court ruled that the protections of the 14th Amendment don’t apply to individuals or private conspiracies but only to actions committed by the state itself. The court said plaintiffs who believed their rights were violated had to seek protection from the state. Louisiana did not prosecute any of the perpetrators of the Colfax Massacre; most southern states would not prosecute white men for attacks against freed black men.
Historian Eric Foner wrote about this:
“The bloodiest single instance of racial carnage in the Reconstruction era, the Colfax massacre taught many lessons, including the lengths to which some opponents of Reconstruction would go to regain their accustomed authority. Among blacks in Louisiana, the incident was long remembered as proof that in any large confrontation, they stood at a fatal disadvantage.”
Louisiana teacher and legislator John G. Lewis wrote “The organization against them is too strong. They attempted [armed self-defense] in Colfax. The result was that on Easter Sunday of 1873 when the sun went down that night, it went down on the corpses of two hundred and eighty negroes.”
In terms of their use of guns, the Supreme Court ruled that “the right to bear arms is not granted by the Constitution; neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence. The Second Amendment means no more than that it shall not be infringed by Congress, and has no other effect than to restrict the powers of the National Government.”
Now let’s fast forward to 1934 when Congress passed the National Firearms Act, which was an effort to regulate registration of firearms in the wake of an attempted assassination of President Franklin Roosevelt and the end of Prohibition, which had seen a huge rise in gun violence, such as the Valentine’s Day Massacre. The case of United States vs. Miller in 1939 was a challenge to that Firearms Act. The Act called for fully automatic firearms, short-barrelled rifles and shotguns to be registered with what was the then-equivalent of the ATF.
Basically, Jack Miller challenged the legality of the National Firearms Act according to what he claimed were his Second Amendment rights. On March 30, 1939, the Supreme Court heard the case. The defendant and his attorney did not even show up for the hearing. The court ruled that the National Firearms Act was constitutional and did not violate the Second Amendment.
The majority opinion stated “In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a ‘shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length’ at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment, or that its use could contribute to the common defense.”
However, gun rights advocates have cited this case as a victory because they say that shotguns were used by the military in World War I, and therefore such weapons were protected under the “well-regulated militia” clause. Now let’s be clear here. Jack Miller was a known criminal who didn’t show up for his own court case because he was found shot to death in retaliation for ratting out his gang. He was not using or transporting his short-barrelled shotgun because he was using it as a member of any militia. He was a bank robber. And yet the statement of record by the Supreme Court is thought of as some kind of victory for gun advocates.
Is it only me who finds it kind of sickly fascinating that any gun rights advocate would stand by a bank robber’s use of a shotgun to kill innocent people as a justification for their right to own shotguns? Does that make sense to anyone outside of the NRA? The Supreme Court didn’t see it that way and this remained that way for decades.
In fact, in Adams vs. Williams in 1972, the Miller case was cited and the judge wrote that the Second Amendment “must be interpreted and applied” with the view of maintaining a “militia.” The law was upheld, there being no evidence that a sawed-off shotgun had “some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia.”
The Supreme Court heard no other case directly involving the Second Amendment until District of Columbia vs Heller in 2008. If you were ever wondering why it’s important who puts Supreme Court judges in place, you won’t after you hear this.
DC vs. Heller was an artificially built case put together and funded by Robert A. Levy, chairman of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank founded by Charles Koch of Koch Brothers infamy. Levy has never owned a gun but on general principles wanted to do anything he could to restrict government interference in people’s lives so he found six plaintiffs of varying backgrounds, ages and race to challenge a Washington DC statute which had banned handgun ownership in DC and mandated that shotguns and rifles must be “unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock.”
Their case was initially dismissed but the appeals court reversed the dismissal and held that the Second Amendment “protects an individual right to keep and bear arms”, that the “right existed prior to the formation of the new government under the Constitution”, also stating that the right was “premised on the private use of arms for activities such as hunting and self-defense, the latter being understood as resistance to either private lawlessness or the depredations of a tyrannical government (or a threat from abroad).” They also noted that though the right to bear arms also helped preserve the citizen militia, “the activities [the Amendment] protects are not limited to militia service, nor is an individual’s enjoyment of the right contingent upon his or her continued or intermittent enrollment in the militia.” The court determined that handguns fit the definition of “arms” and so cannot be banned by Washington DC, nor was it acceptable to mandate that rifles or shotguns be disassembled within a person’s home.
As we went over earlier, this appeals court decision is in direct opposition to the entire purpose and reason for the Second Amendment. If you compare what these appeals court judges wrote to what James Madison, the author of the Second Amendment, wrote, you find that they are in contradiction to one another. All of these judges were Republican appointees and there is no question their personal bias entered in to their decision making process, because they certainly didn’t consult the Second Amendment itself.
The case was petitioned to the Supreme Court and it was a hot topic issue, with the majority of the United States Congress signing a brief advising that the case be affirmed. They were joined by Vice President Dick Cheney as well as a majority of states who signed a brief written by Senator Ted Cruz for the Attorney General, Greg Abbott. The Fraternal Order of Police and Southern States Police Benevolent Association also joined in, urging the case to be affirmed.
A number of organizations signed similar briefs suggesting to the Supreme Court to remand the case including the Department of Justice and attorneys general from New York, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Puerto Rico as well as a number of religious and anti-violence groups.
After all was said and done, the Court ruled that the Second Amendment “codified a pre-existing right” and that it “protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home” but also stated that “the right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose”. Of course, this last statement just muddies the waters and makes it entirely unclear what rights a person does or doesn’t have under the Second Amendment. Instead of clarifying the Constitution, Scalia and the other judges who voted for this just made it more confusing.
It is my position that the Supreme Court made a gross and glaring error in their interpretation of the Second Amendment and I have offered this podcast as my rationale for saying that. I realize that no one at the level of the Supreme Court particularly cares what I think but as a citizen, I feel it’s my right and duty to speak out about this, because what Scalia and the other judges did in 2008 was just plain wrong.
To be clear in wrapping up this episode, I am not of the opinion that all guns should be confiscated and done away with. The practicalities of doing such a thing, especially in the United States, are beyond all reason. However, I am of the firm belief that if the federal government is not going to act to protect its citizens from the danger that our gun epidemic poses to all of us, then the states must. There are other issues and conditions which cause more death in the United States than guns, but few that are as violent or upsetting or publicized. And when children become the innocent victims of gun violence, it stirs up a great deal of righteous anger against guns and those who would claim that their rights to own guns is somehow more important than the lives of innocent children. Somehow we have to find a common ground and a balance between these things if we are going to ever address this rationally. Both sides are going to have to give, because the way things are now, the situation is untenable and cannot continue as it has.
I’ll be doing more podcasts on this subject. First I wanted to lay out the historical narrative and how we got to where we are. I’m not pretending to have covered every single relevant court case, statute or regulation, and I’m aware that there are all kinds of semantics controversies as to what does and does not constitute military grade hardware. From my point of view, we’ve only gotten to playing such semantics games because we’ve lost sight as a nation of what’s actually important.
The divisive rhetoric of gun manufacturers and the NRA have created a kind of cult mentality when it comes to guns. Not all gun owners fall into this, of course, just like not all gun owners are card carrying members of the NRA. The number of lies and obfuscations that are printed and spoken on this subject are legion and are not easy to sift through. I’ve been intensively studying this for weeks just to put this together and I’ve barely scratched the surface of the issues involved. However, I do feel that a true and deep understanding of our Constitution and Bill of Rights is a vital foundation to any rational conversation on this topic and that’s been the purpose of today’s podcast.
Thank you for watching. I’ll see you next week.
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