As Democrats rebel against federal immigration law, is the nullification crisis here? (10-08-2025--Hour3)

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I think it's called Demography Unplugged, and this was this idea of the four turnings was developed by how along with a co author back in the nineties, and in fact, I think it was Bill Clinton told people to read this book when it was first published. I think that's right. It's been a while. I covered this back in March, and so yesterday, while discussing what is now to me an obvious example of a nullification crisis that's unfolding in these democrat run cities and states regarding the enforcement of immigration, I mentioned the Fourth Turning. So I went and I pulled those audio clips. So let me start with Neil Howe again, one of the authors of this concept. And it's all suffused with its image of armageddon and violence, meaning that if the wrong side wins, it's all over for America. And I think there's a lot of worry in America about the increasing imagery of violence and dead ends, you know, for our democracy. Okay, So there are four different periods in the fourth in the fourth Turnings Fourth turnings, obviously, the first they called the high, the second turning is the awakening, the third is the unraveling, and then the fourth is crisis. And so the fourth turning, crisis is what he believes we are in. He has said this in interviews on his podcast. This audio actually comes from his appearance on a podcast hosted by David Lynn, and he was asked, like, what are some of the signs that the fourth turning or the crisis is here. We see a growing pessimism about in most high income countries and in fact in a lot of emerging market countries about the long term future well, people in their own lives and people thinking about their kids' lives, and that this is a striking decline. It's a greater pessimism than and I've looked back at polls going all the way back to the late nineteen seventies, which in America was a time of great pessimism, and yet this exceeds that. And there were reasons why people were very pessimistic in the late seventies, This exceeds that, and particularly the sense of long term wrong track, right. You just all the polls indicate that. And along with that, you see this growing trend toward populism around the world in politics, often combined with a certain sort of ethnocentric authoritarian leadership model. I'm thinking particularly in East Asia, South Asia, but you know, look at Europe, look at South America, look at the United States, right, and these are both facets of the same generational trend. We've seen it again and again. This is this long eighty year cycle we're talking about, right, And what comes at the end of that is this time of crisis where we reinvent the system, a system which have become very sclerotic and unresponsive because of all the time this passed since the last crisis. Right. So what he's arguing here is that each one of these seasons, essentially of a society, is about twenty years long. And after you get to the end of the full cycle, which would run somewhere you know, north of eighty years, the people have all been replaced now because everybody has died just through you know, normal lifespan. Everybody is dead, and so have you enter into the crisis phase and then you emerge after that with another high phase. And if you go back eighty years from where we are now, right, like the tracks, you've got these these periods where you'd World War two, go back prior to that crisis, Civil war, right. So like these the trend lines all kind of act the same way. And if you think about it, the way like the natural cycle of things, whether it's economic, whether it's natural winter, spring, summer, fall, right, And that's essentially what they're they're laying out, and there is I don't know, there's there. There's a certain cleanness to the theory, right, and a continuity to this theory to all things that we see around us. That things move in cycles. He says, it is a cycle that tracks with the aging of populations. The bottom line is is that you eventually reach a time where absolutely no one alive remembers how institutions actually dealt with crisis. Right. Okay, it's at that time where the crisis is again most likely. And that is that is absolutely a pattern of history, and that was part of the whole point of the book is to see how that works. And this is why I talk about different types of generations. You know, why we have boomer like generations born right after a crisis, you know, usually coming of age, you know, stormy against the strong institutions built by their parents, often their war winning fathers. And how after that the system disintegrates, right, we call this the unraveling. We become a much more individualistic society. We have it find it very difficult to respond cohesively and collectively to collective problems. And ultimately that leads us into the fourth turning, which is where we have to reinvent ourselves under an urgent threat, and usually that threat involves organized conflict. Right, He says the types of conflict can be internal, external, or both. At the same time the book was written in nineteen ninety seven, they predicted events. For example, that there would be a major financial crisis in the two thousands to twenty tens. They got that one. They said there'd be a pandemic at some point, nailed that one. They predicted a tea party movement aimed at limiting federal debt, they got that one. They predicted that Russia would start invading former Soviet states. Nailed that one too. And as part of the crisis phase, what Neil Howe predicted was that the crisis phase would probably be sparked by some kind of nullification crisis. And at the time he said this was probably about five years ago. I saw in an interview he said that it was going to be immigration related. And at the time I mentioned this yesterday, that Texas was trying to put up a barrier along its border with Mexico along the Rio Grande, and the Biden administration sued to get them to tear it down, and the question at the time was is Texas going to abide by the federal government's demands? Are they going to abide the federal court? And they did. But that's what how was pointing to as an example of how this nullification crisis would unfold. Of course, fast forward five years and now you have Trump in office trying to actually enforce federal law, and now you've got Democrat led jurisdictions trying to nullify that federal law. That's what we're seeing. That's what I'm seeing. You know, stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things, to understand experiences. Stories connect us to the people of our past while transcending generations. They help us process the meaning of life, and our stories are told through images and videos. Preserve your stories with Creative Video. 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No, I do not believe that the marriage of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelcey was predicted in the Fourth Turning as a sign of the crisis, But some Swifties are taking it as such. Yeah they're mad because she's now like she's normalizing marriage or something. Yeah. I don't follow it either, but whatever. Neil Howe, author of the Fourth Turning, talking about the nullification issue as the issue that would animate the crisis in the Fourth Turning. There are four turnings, four periods. One of them is called crisis. It's the fourth one. It's sort of the winter, I guess, and this is when things before the unraveling, or sorry, after the unraveling, comes the crisis, when nobody alive remembers how any of the systems can solve these collective problems, and so the unraveling begins and then it turns into a crisis. Now you have this nullification issue. He predicted it would be regarding immigration, but at the time it was Biden trying to make states not enforced immigration law where states wanted to. Now five years later it is the opposite. Nullification is an old theory which really dates back to the original Constitution. It was there, by the way, with the anti federalists who were arguing against Hamilton Madison and Jay Right the federalist papers. They were arguing that the states should have more autonomy, they should preserve more autonomy. If there was a law or an edict by the federal government that an individual state really did not want, it should be able to excuse itself from it, right, I mean, this is the idea that we are truly a federal republic and that states should have their own maneuvering room. You know, we came together as separate nations, so to speak, to form the United States. And this was actually promulgated by both the Jefferson and Madison in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions in response to what John Adams did with the alien sedition loss. This is in the late seventeen nineties, and it came back again and again in the ante Bellamya, with Calhoun and the tariff crisis, and ultimately with the Civil War, which led us into I mean that was the ultimate not just nullification but secession. Right, This is when the states decided to secede. But it has come up since then, in other words, at what point can a state decide to opt out of certain federal arrangements? Right? And he said, you're never going to know what the issue that sparks it will be. It could be immigration, could be an education issue, taxes, regulation, something anything that states don't want to enforce. But what will happen is they will not enforce it. The administration will say, well, you must enforce it, and the states will kind of you know, a number of states will ban together and they said, well, we actually don't. And ultimately you see where this leads, David, is the states say, in effect, we're not going to enforce it. We're here on the ground, we're not going to collect this revenue or enforce these regulations. And in fact, that the the communication of the federal government, what are you going to do about it, you know, and that then becomes a standoff of authority. And then if the if the federal government does not enforce its will, well, then of course the gate is open. Then states can start doing other things, you know what I mean. And by the way, this came up historically, David, in the in the Civil War when the states seceded, and this is you know, they all succeeded. They actually formed a confederacy even before Abraham Lincoln even got into office. We swore in presidents later then we swore them in in March, right, so that that five months everything had already happened before he even came into office. And many people came to him and said, let the South go, many abolitionists. David said to Abraham Lincoln, let the South go. I mean, they're gone. Now we can actually do all the reforms that we wanted in the United the States. And I think this is going to be what causes the issue to escalate, because it will be very clear that the president and his or her party will not be alligned to back down. They can't back down. They will lose all credibility if they back down. So they got to step it up. The other side will step it up. You see how this works. These things never start intending to be a conflict, but they end up as a conflict because both sides can't back down. So the Department of Homeland Security Secretary Christy Nome appeared on Fox News yesterday and said she issued an ultimatum to Portland's top officials to contain the antifond demonstrations. Antifont now designated terrorist organization the Administration the DOJ tracking the funding. President Donald Trump said in September that he ordered troops to defend ICE facilities in Portland from Antifa after Christynom requested reinforcements. Nom said she told Portland's mayor point blank that federal authorities would cover him up with a surge of manpower if city leadership failed to enforce basic security measures. She said. She appeared on a Jesse Waters show after she had just met with the mayor and said she was extremely disappointed. Here's a great idea. How about making an escape to a really special and secluded getaway in western North Carolina. Just a quick drive up the mountain and cabins of Asheville. Is your connection. 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Call her text eight two eight, three, six seven seventy sixty eight or check out all there is to offer at Cabins Offashville dot com and make memories that'll last a lifetime. Here is the quote from Christy Nome. She said, yesterday, I just met with the mayor of Chicago, sorry Portland, and I'm s' so extremely disappointed he's continuing to play politics. Did not commit to any of the promises and said that he'd give me an answer by tomorrow, and I'm hopeful he will. What I told him is that if he did not follow through on some of these security measures for our officers, that we are going to cover him up with more federal resources, and that we were going to send four times the amount of federal officers here so the people of Portland could have some safety. So this is how as Neil Howe was explaining, right, this is how each side ratchets up. So we're not going to do anything to secure the ice agent's safety at the ice facilities in our city, even though that's our job, right, even though when an officer is surrounded by a mob, any officer in any federal or local or state law enforcement division comes to their aid to help their quote brother in blue. But except I guess in Portland now you'll get stand down orders like we had in Chicago. Just leave the scene, don't help those ice agents, and so that's ratcheting up. And so now the FEDS come in and they're like, Okay, well, if you're not going to do it, we're going to send even more. We're not going to have instead of four hundred troops or whatever, we're going to send in two thousand National Guard. And then what like, then what's the next ratchet up from the cities and the states. Well, Chicago has opted for ice free zones, which is fine because I think at this point, you know, summer's over, you don't really need so much ice anymore. It's like kind of cooling off in Chicago. Anyway, I'll get to that in a minute. First let's get to Scott. Hello, Scott, welcome to the show. I see, thanks am I College. On the subject of nullification and perhaps secession, I've always wondered, why do we pay our taxes to the state and then separately pay to the federal government. Is it possible, on the subject of modification, that the state could ever take control of that and collect all the tax revenue and then distribute to the Feds that portion in which they agree to, let's say, And then that way each state would have its own bigger set of autonomy. It would have its own control mechanism to keep the Feds honest. And I'm gonna take my I'm driving, so I'm going. To take yeah, no, all right, Yeah, it's an interesting idea, Scott, I've never heard that before. You are correct that the state has its own department of revenue and then you know the IRS at the federal level. But they're different mechanisms because some states don't have income taxes, right, so they're not drawing that out of your paycheck. So yeah, I'm not so sure that. Well, I would I would be willing to wager money, good money, although I would not do that because I'm not a gambling man. But if I were a gambling man, I would be willing to wager good money as opposed to counterfeit money that the Feds would never allow that. They would never allow that because it would allow the states to then withhold that funding, and that's not the relationship the federal government wants with the states. The Feds want to withhold the money. They're the ones that want to withhold the money, whether it's you know, highway money or you know grants that kick down to the states or whatever. They want the money to wash through the federal government. And this is what happens. This is what Neil Howe had mentioned also, And I see this where you said that you got these organizations that become sclerotic, right, Well, that's the federal government and it's you know, state and local governments as well. They get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, and they start doing all of these different things that they shouldn't be doing. They lose sight of their first priorities like safety on a light rail train, for example. They start creating different departments and agencies and directives to do stuff that nobody really asked them to do, except maybe like two people that come down every single city council meeting and clamor about, you know, some pet project they want to see done. So I think that and that then becomes part of the you know, unraveling, where you are presented with problems and you no longer know how to address them. And maybe part of that can be explained with our inability to have debate anymore. People have forgotten how to have a debate, how to have a conversation, how to have a discussion. At the beginning of the last hour hour two. We had a caller named Tom, and he was calling because he wanted to talk about something that he wanted or he wanted me to talk about something that he thought was going to make a point about the Jews. And I engaged with him and asked him some questions. You know me, I'm a why guy. I like to ask the question why. So I asked him some why questions and his response and I saw somebody they picked up on it on the text line. I forget who I saw say this, but they picked up on it. Is that every time I asked him to explain why he was saying something or why he believed something that he was saying, he would shift the conversation to a what about or this other topic. He would try to deflect away. This is what I mean. We've lost the ability to have an actual debate about a discreete topic or issue. Right If you're going to call me and say that I should be talking about the Talmud when I was talking about Christian perssecutution globally and bringing in data about that in the slaughtering of Nigerians and such one, I'm covering that topic and your response is what about the talmud, why aren't you talking about the Jews? I then ask, why are you asking me to talk about that topic when I was talking about something unrelated And he couldn't answer it. But I know the answer. I know the answer is that he wants me to bash the Jews, like that's he that's where he wants the focus of my ire to be. But he doesn't want to say it, and so he comes up with this silly question, which is not you know, in good faith, it's not part of like a Socratic method search for truth. It's a it's a deflective device. It's what about ism? And it's a it's a very cheap debate tactic, which once you realize, like once you hear it and you know it for what it is, then you just keep dragging the person back to the original question, to the topic. It gets exhausting. I know you've heard me do it many many times, I'm sure with callers that want to move off of the thing because they know they are not on solid ground, so they want to get to a more advantageous position. So they want to shift my focus to a different thing because they're losing the current argument. We've lost that as well. That's part of the unraveling. So when I was a kid, my grandpa died with Alzheimer's, and before he died, my mom and my dad took care of him as he got worse. Forty years ago, there were no treatments and not much support for caregivers and family. But things are different today because of the work of so many people, including the Alzheimer's Association of Western Carolina. It's a great organization with awesome people with huge hearts. I've been a supporter for twenty five years. This cause means a lot to me. I participate in the annual Walk to end Alzheimer's and I'm leading a Charlotte team again this year, and it's called once again Pete's Pack. Sign up and you can join the team and walk with us. It's on October eighteenth, that truest field. Sign up at alz dot org slash walk and then you could search for my team name Pete's Peck. There's also a link at thepetepod dot com. There's also a link in the description of this podcast. Also, I'll be am seeing the Gastonia Walk on October eleventh then, so you can make a team and join that one too, or make a donation and help me hit my goal of five thousand dollars. If you do, I really appreciate it. There are a bunch of other walks all over the Carolinas. You can go to alz dot org slash walk for all the dates and locations. We're closer than ever to stopping Alzheimer's. Can you help us get there? Will you walk with me? For a different future, for families, for more time for treatments. This is why we walk? And somebody asks, what the heck is an ice free zone? Glad you asked. According to the Chicago Sun Times article, city property, including parking lots next to Chicago public schools, libraries, parks, and city buildings, cannot be used as staging grounds for raids by US Immigration and Customs enforcement agents under an executive order signed Monday aimed at what President or Mayor Brandon Johnson Let's go Brandon called President Donald Trump's forceful display of tyranny. So law enforcement is a forceful display of tyranny. I guess all the Democrats are libertarians? Now? Is that what's happening here? No, of course not. This is just because it's Donald Trump Orange Man bed and also they you know, Democrats are viewing this as an existential threat to their power, right, It's about power dynamics. They are afraid that if this mass campaign of deportation continues, Democrats will lose seats in the House of Representives. Because if you deport ten to twenty million people, and I believe we are now on track to have deported like between one to two million people in the first year, and a lot of them self deporting. I should add that that decreases your population count in the twenty twenty census, and that means you don't get as many House seats. It also means you don't get as many Electoral College votes for president. See, this is an existential threat to Democrats' power. That's why they are ramping this up. It's the latest of three executive orders that Johnson has signed in what so far has been a failed attempt to stop or slow the deportation campaign that has sewed fear and chaos in the Chicago area and at times triggered clashes between protesters and ICE agents in the city and suburbs over the By the way, why is it sowing fear? Why would it be sowing chaos. What's the chaos about? Is that from the leftist protesters blocking streets, docksing ICE agents getting into fisticuffs with the federal law enforcemental officers ramming their vehicles while armed. Is that the kind of chaos you're talking about. So that's the ICE agent's fault because they're following law, because they've been tasked with enforcing a law, because you guys haven't been enforcing the law, and now somebody is coming to town to enforce the law. Over the weekend, Trump ordered hundreds of National Guard troops, including three hundred from Illinois and four hundred from Texas, to assist in his deportation campaign in Chicago as well as other cities, which this has now prompted the left to claim the at Texas is invading Illinois. Lefties, if Texas invaded you, like for real, you would know it, okay, you would know that the Texans have invaded Chicago. But wait, I thought Chicago was already Maga country, didn't. Juicy Smoley tell us that right in his in defense of his foot long subway sandwich in a hate crime attack in the dead of night during a polar vortex. He said that some people had come up and screamed at him that it's Maga country in Chicago, so maybe they're right, maybe Texas is invading. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to dpecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.