Hello convention of state's podcast listeners. This is our weekly podcast featuring historic
legacy content from our audio archives. We hope you are educated and inspired by this
week's episode. At the 2022 convention of state's Reclaiming Liberty Summit, President
and co-founder Mark Meckler gives his talk on the Great Decouple. Then, he sits down for
an interview with his daughter, Lucy Vanderlone.
I want to talk to you this morning about the state of play in America generally. I think
America is coming apart at the seams. Anybody disagree with that? You know, people seem
to hate each other. Left and right, Democrat, Republican, believer, non-believer, gay,
straight, black, white. It's just men and women. Wait, that's not a thing anymore. It's
coming apart. People seem like they can't get along. They can't talk to each other. Sometimes
you watch the news and it feels like it's worse than it's ever been. I watch the news
and I feel like, and I'm 60 years old, it's worse than it's ever been in my lifetime.
It's never been like this in the United States of America. It feels like we're two separate
countries. We can't get along with each other. I look at this and I see this happening in
the country and I feel like we're coming apart. I call it the Great Decoupling that's happening
in the United States of America. It's happening socially. It's happening inside families. I
really accelerated when Trump was running for president and got elected. We're doing
business with different companies now. We're being censored on a lot of the social media
platforms. We're seeing new social media platforms rise that are catering to conservatives. That
means we're speaking into echo chambers. I worry a little bit about that. I think about
it. I don't want to give my money to woke companies. I want to give my money to people
who believe the way I believe. Companies are in the fight. They're excluding us. Credit
card companies now say that they're going to track people who use their credit cards to
buy guns. Patronize your local gun shopping cash now. I'm just saying the Great Decoupling
is taking place in America. People are very worried about this. I'm not the only person
talking about it. I hear it on television all the time. You can hear it on Fox News. You
can hear it on MSNBC. It's bad. You know, when you look at the state of play in the country
right now, you look at what people think of each other. You heard Steve Day's talk about
the idea of even civil war. It's bad. The interesting thing, if we look at American history, all
of American history, go back to the pre-revolutionary period, the encouraging thing to me is it's
always been exactly like this. We happen to think that we live in unique times. There's
nothing new under the sun. And we look at it because everybody looks at their own times
through their own filter, through their own perception of what we know, how we feel, of
how it seems to us that the country's coming apart, but this country has always been coming
apart. If you go back pre-American revolution, right, you've got the colonies and the colonies
largely hated each other. They were like foreign countries. We forget that very few people
had traveled. You heard Colonel Mason. He had never traveled out of his own colony, right,
before the convention, out of his own state, under the Articles of Confederation, never
been out. He didn't know people in other colonies. They were foreigners. And in large
measure, they were Christian sectarians and they were blasphemers. Like if the people
in other colonies, you didn't understand their culture, you didn't understand their
religion. They spoke differently. They had different dialects. I mean, mostly English,
of course, but different dialects, different mother countries people had come over from.
There was a lot of dissent and dissension. And yet, what happens is there's an existential
threat. The king threatens the freedom of the colonies. Parliament, they issued the
declaratory acts and they say, we can tell you what to do whenever we want, however we
want. And you have to go along. And so there's an existential threat and the colonies and
the colonists link arms and they fight a war. Our war. The great American revolution where
the country is born. And you know the story. I assume you know the story. It's not the
1619 project in case you're wondering. And liberty is victorious. And the United States
of America is born. And you would think after fighting a war together, after being in the
trenches on the battlefields together, literally units from different colonies, from different
states that are together and they fight this war that it would be like the band of brothers.
They've come through this together. They're victorious. And so now, and you guys know this
from American history, now everybody just gets along perfectly, right? It's not what
happens. In fact, they dislike each other so much. They distrust each other so much that
they form the Articles of Confederation. And because I know you know your history, you
know that doesn't work. And it doesn't work because they create a form of government
specifically designed for people who really, really hate each other. Because that government
says, look, I'm not giving you any power. I'm not letting you tell me what to do in my
state. There's no way I'm going to let you tax me. I'm not going to let you pay for
a standing army with money from my state. So there's no power in the central government
because they distrust and dislike one another. And so it fails. And so they come back together
in 1787. We know the story. They're there in Independence Hall. They're debating and
drafting the Constitution. Now the great thing about when they get together in Independence
Hall is those men are so perfect and so godly and so without ego and so humble there's
not a single argument in convention. They just love each other. They sift tea at night. They
drink a pint of ale together. And like three days they whip out a Constitution, right?
Three months arguing accusatory stuff, slanderous stuff being said back and forth between the
delegation's large states against small states, slave states against free states, commercial
factionalism, personal ambition, greed, avarice, ego, all in that room, in that hot summer
in Philadelphia. It's bad. They don't like each other. Some of them would never talk
to each other again after that. It was bad. And out of that, out of that hot steamy room
in that summer in Philadelphia comes the finest form of government ever instituted among mankind
for the preservation of liberty because they designed a form of government that was intended
to withstand and intended to prosper from all this dissension. It's called a constitutional
republic and it's based on the idea of federalism. See because federalism says we got to do some
stuff together. The world is a dangerous place. There are existential threats. In their case
England was still an existential threat. Spain was an existential threat. France was an
erstwhile ally that we owed a lot of money to. They were an existential threat, right?
They faced Native American threats on the borders. There were threats everywhere. And
they realized that they had to be unified for a limited amount of stuff so that they
could survive. 17 things they decided. The enumerated powers in the United States Constitution,
they created a federal system specifically out of the rancor, out of the distrust, out
of the hatred, out of the dislike, out of the prejudice, a system of governance that
was designed specifically to withstand that. And not only withstand that but to prosper
from it. It's an incredible idea and it has lasted the test of time. 246 years now. It's
absolutely incredible. The oldest living constitution in the history of the world, the average
age that a constitution makes it to is 17 years. 246 years. Because in my opinion because
of federalism. Now the good news is if you know your history immediately after convention,
everything is just like wine and roses among the colonies, right? Now the states. They all
love each other. Everybody's happy. And you know for the rest of American history we all
just get along. So well we get along that in the 1860s we decide we need to have a civil
war. An actual full blown civil war. Brother against brother. Township against township.
State against state. And ultimately 700,000 killed or wounded in that war. The great conflagration
in the United States of America. And in the end we force a union on half of the country.
Incredible. We force people to be in a country that they were trying to leave. It's not really
unity. We have this national catch phrase I call. I don't even really like it to be honest with you.
It's E. Plurbus Unum from many one. And this idea that we're all unified. And we're all one thing.
But it's not really true. It wasn't true certainly before the American Revolution. It wasn't true
after the American Revolution. It wasn't true in the Civil War. I don't know. Maybe after the Civil
War. Everything was just calm and everybody loved each other after the Civil War. Is that how it went?
No America was very divided. It continued to be divided. It's always been divided.
But something unique happens in the 1940s. Right? We get into World War II. And in World War II we
have collective national sacrifice. And we go out and we face tyranny all over the world.
We face down totalitarianism that threatens the entire world. And we win an unbelievable,
miraculous, providential victory. But everybody sacrifices. There's recycling, there's savings
bonds. Women go into the workforce like never happened before. Everybody knows people who
went overseas and didn't come home. It is a collective national sacrifice. And after that there is a
sense of unity in the country. And this is where we get the idea, the concept of the American dream.
And this is where it's born. Right? At this time in American history we have the most prosperous
period in American history. You get the house and the picket fence and the dogs in the yard and
the kids going to public schools back when it was okay to send your kids to public schools.
And this veneer of unity starts to cover the country in my opinion. If you think of it as the
Liberty Bell, the Liberty Bell is beautiful. Right? You guys have probably seen it. But it's got a big
crack in it. But we don't look at it and say it's ugly. We still say that's beautiful. But it does
have a crack in it. But after World War II we lay this veneer of unity over the crack in the Liberty
Bell and we start to think, we're kind of all the same. We're all together in this country. We're
all in it together. And in the 1950s you get national network television, ABC, CBS, NBC. And we start
consuming culture together. You know, maybe you're like me, maybe you grew up on this stuff and
you know the honeymooners and Father knows best and leave it to beaver and all these classic
television shows. And if you were from Mississippi or you were from New York City you could watch
the same television shows. You could consume the same culture. That's an incredible thing. And we
take this for granted. But back then, if you were in Biloxi, Mississippi or New York City you lived
in separate countries. If you were from Biloxi and you went to New York City you felt like you had
gone to a foreign country. You didn't belong there. You didn't fit in. The culture is completely
different. But then we start watching TV. It's like, oh, leave it to beaver. I know that. Honeymooners,
I know that. Moving to the 1960s, late 50s, 1960s you get franchising comes onto the scene. You get
major league sports that start to form up national sports leagues, major league baseball, NFL, NBA.
Some of us are weird and I'll even say NHL because I'm a hockey fan. And so we start doing all this
stuff together nationally. Because now we feel like we're all the same. And there's another
layer of veneer that goes over the Liberty Bell and covers that crack. Because we're all the same.
Whether we live in Alabama or Arkansas or Idaho or California or New York City, we're all consuming
the same culture. And you've got franchising. You can actually drive literally from Alabama to
New York City. And you can stop at the same gas station by the same brand of gas in every single
state along the way. You could stay in the same brand of hotel. You could eat the same food all
the way. And once you get to New York City, you won't feel like a foreigner because you can still eat a
big Mac at McDonald's. It's the culture. It's another layer of veneer on the culture. We're all the same.
Now we all get along, quote unquote, right? It's all the same. And when you get to the 1970s and the
1970s in America, we have the zenith of the era of big government. Some year old enough to remember
government in the 1970s. So I'm going to do a little pop quiz here. Who in Washington, D.C.
was the champion for limited government, for small government in the 1970s in Washington, D.C.
Nobody. Nobody. Everybody thought bigger is better. The economy of scale. That's where that phrase
comes from. Like the federal government can do it better because they can buy more and get a better
price and they can be more efficient. And you know what's awesome about that? Because all the
smart people will tell us what to do. That's the 1970s. In the 1970s, we have a Republican president
that gives us the EPA and the Department of Energy. It's unimaginable to us today.
Because we think, oh, Republicans, we're against the bureaucracy. We don't like it. We want to get
rid of bureaucracy. Richard Nixon gave us the EPA and the Department of Energy. So this is an
incredible thing in American history. Nobody's arguing against big government. But something
is happening in our society by the 1970s under that veneer of unity. We think we're all the same.
But by 19 in the 1960s, there's a pivotal event that takes place in the United States of America
and we get involved in the Vietnam War. And the Vietnam War takes place in honestly a lot of what's
going on in society today feels a lot like that. People are marching in the streets. People
actually throwing Molotov cocktails at police cars. You got half naked people with body paint in the
streets on psychedelic drugs saying make love not war. You know, if you're a guy like me,
I was just a little kid back then. But if I've been an adult back then, I'd have been looking at that
exactly like I looked at the riots in 2020. I'm going to think what in God's name is going on
in this country. I don't know who are those people. I don't understand psychedelic drugs,
make love not war. I support the military. I'm a Christian guy. I don't get all that stuff.
So that crack in the Liberty Bell underneath that veneer starts to get a little bit bigger.
And I'm going to fast forward us. So I don't run out of time here. But if you fast forward us in
American history today, and if I'll give you my perspective, you know, I'm a 60 year old white
Christian conservative gun-toten tea party guy, that'll get me kicked off a lot of television
networks by the way. This is what I see when I look out across America. What I see that completely
blows my mind is I see people who actually say openly that you should be able to kill babies up
to nine months in the womb. And frankly, if you're in Virginia and the old governor there, maybe
after they're out of the womb. And fantasize, like people are actually talking about this,
like it's okay. Like it's not some kind of weird primal sacrifice. Right? Like it's not evil.
We've got people saying that it's okay to mutilate children, to pump them full of chemical castration
drugs. They want to teach our kids, our grandkids in schools, that boys can be girls and girls can
be boys and that there's no definition for what is a woman. In our schools, they want to teach our
kids that the most important thing about the person sitting next to you is the color of their
skin. You know, I grew up in an era where it's like, we never even thought about that. Martin Luther
King and the idea that you judge somebody by the content of their character and not the color of
their skin was just a given when I grew up. Like it wasn't even debated. And now they're telling
us it's the exact opposite. Right? It's the color of your skin that matters most. That will determine
your destiny. It will determine whether you're a victim or whether you're in a pr- this is what
they're teaching. It's that there's no consequences to sexuality or to sex or to immorality. And I'm
looking out at that and I am saying, I don't understand what the hell is going on in this country.
Now I look at that and I say that's evil. And I look at that and I think
I'm not sure I can live in a country with those people. I'm not sure I want to live in a country
with those people. That's kind of civil war thinking. And then I want to give you a different
perspective because if this were a conference and we were on the left, it would be very different
than this. And first of all, there'd be a bunch of guys in dresses, so I would not feel comfortable
there. But in all seriousness, they would look at a guy like me and this is what they would think.
He's a racist. He's a homophobe. He's a transphobe. He's an Islamophobe. He's a Neanderthal.
You know, he's one of those crazy Christians who believes in a bunch of voodoo from the Bible.
And they would literally say he's a Nazi. It's especially ironic for me, you know,
some people know that some people don't. I'm a Jewish Christian, both sides of my family Jewish.
And they would say, I'm a Nazi. And they would say, I'm not sure I want to live in a country with
people like him, with people like you. So we come to this moment. Something is going to happen in
this country. I don't know what it is. I can't predict. Only God knows what's actually going to happen.
But something has to happen. Something has to break that pressure because this veneer of unity,
that's cultural unity, this idea that we're all the same and we can all be governed in exactly
the same way, it's all going to be from Washington, D.C. That veneer is completely torn away and that
crack in the Liberty Bell is very obvious in our society. And it could split the bell.
Days talked about it. It could result in a civil war. So we have two choices as I see it. We're at
a proverbial fork in the road and one choice is secession, revolution, civil war. I so appreciate
what Steve Day said because I get people in our movement, I'm in the conservative movement,
it would come up to me, all we need is good civil war. They have no idea what they're talking about.
I know we got a bunch of veterans in the room. We probably got combat veterans in the room.
I've never seen combat. I'm not a veteran. I don't know what I'm talking about but I'm going to tell
you, every one of them I talk to would tell you, you're out of your mind if you think we want to
civil war. Because if you haven't seen that, if you don't know what that actually is, you don't know.
If you want to know, if you want to get the closest look you possibly can to what that looks
like, look at actual video on the ground in Ukraine today. And what you will see is dead children in
the streets. What you will see is families bombed out of their homes. What you will see this winter
is people freezing to death. And that's what would happen if we had that. That is one potential path.
Steve Day's talked about that yesterday. It is potential. The country's coming apart. That is
one way a country comes apart. People talk about secession. We're going from Texas. Texans love to
talk about secession. Texas is the best place. It's big. We can do anything, right? Really? Because
as I look at Texas, I live just outside of Austin. Austin's blue, Dallas' blue, San Antonio's blue,
El Paso's blue, although looking better I have to say. But all the major cities in Texas are, well,
how do you divide Texas? I mean, theoretically, I guess you could kick all the liberals out of Texas.
I mean that might sound good. Probably not practical. I got friends in Texas who would help me with
that though. So if that's not it, if it's not secession, if it's not revolution, if it's not civil war,
then what is it? The country is coming apart. The great decoupling is taking place. And there's
not a dang thing any of us can do to stop it. So if it's not all that stuff, what is it? What's
the solution? And as I started to think my way through this, I did not have a conclusion. I was
just watching what was happening as a hopefully astute observer of politics, of sociology, of what's
going on out there in America, because I travel around and I hang out with y'all and I see it up
close and I hear it from you. So what's the solution? The solution that's not violent,
that doesn't lead to bloodshed, that allows us all to live together, was designed by the founders
in 1787 in Independence Hall and it's called federalism. See, because federalism is designed for what?
People who don't like each other. The way it's always been, the way it was back then, the way it
was in the civil war, the way it is today. And federalism says that if I don't really like you,
if I don't really get along with you, if I don't really want to do a lot of stuff with you, if I
don't want you telling me what to do in my state where my culture in Texas is different than
your state and your culture and wherever else you live, then we can live together in a federalist
system. So how do we get there? How do you get from where we're at today, which is not really
living under federalism anymore? How do you get back to federalism? Unbelievable, the founders gave
us away. Anybody know what that might be? Call a convention of states, right?
So how incredible is this that you live in a moment when the tool that the founders gave us
for the preservation of the nation at a time when the nation is coming apart is in your hands and
you know about it. And you go around, I know you talk to a lot of people, you've been seeing the
elevator speeches for how to talk to new people. Most people that you've mentioned article five in
convention of states have no idea. Article five, is that the fifth article in the New York time?
What is that? I don't know what that is, but you have the solution. You have the way to repair what
ails the nation because the truth is we still can live as a country. We can because we got to let
the states be the states. We got to let individuals in the states live according to the cultures of
their own states, live where they want to live, be how they want to be. If you're like me and I lived
in California and eventually I was born and raised there, it just got too crazy for me. I can vote
with my feet. I can move to Texas and live in a place that has a different culture. That is the
essence of federalism. And you are the point of the spear. This is why only you with the help of God
can save this nation because the nation is coming apart. The great decoupling is taking place and
there's nothing we can do to stop it. And we as people who love the United States of America,
who understand our history, who understand that God had a hand in forming this country,
who understand that this is the one place on earth where we have the ability to exercise free will
that God gave us to a greater extent than any other place on the earth. You have the tool in your
hands to save the United States of America. I'll close with this. It is a grave and difficult burden.
Steve Day said, maybe it's a Hail Mary. Maybe it's impossible. Mike Ferris told you he's done
impossible things. A lot of people will tell you this is impossible. But what's the alternative?
The alternative is it all falls apart. And the alternative is in the end that people look back at us
and say, grandpa, grandma, what was it like when people were free in America? And what I can tell
you is for me, I will not go down without a fight. So thank you guys for being here. God bless you.
You are the hope for America.
Okay, so this is my favorite part of everything we do at these events. I love all of it. So
every part is my favorite part maybe. But I love the interaction with you guys. That's the best
thing that we do. Everything that we do in convention of states that's good. Everything that we do
that works that's great comes from the grassroots. That's what makes this organization special.
You know, every organization has an organizational pyramid. And so usually the way it works and you
guys know you're in businesses yourselves. You got the CEO and then you got an executive staff and
then you got mid-level management and then you got kind of the line workers out there. And that's
the way an organizational pyramid is structured. And we have an organizational pyramid just like
any other organization except for our organizational pyramid is actually flipped upside down because
we believe in servant leadership as taught to us by Dave Cooner and Tim Dunn and as we draw from
the Bible. And what that means is as the president of the organization, I'm at the bottom of the
organizational pyramid. And I don't mean that facetiously. I mean, my job is to serve every single
person in the organization. That's my responsibility. My job is to make sure you have what you need.
If you're struggling, we do our best to help you not struggle. My job is to serve
our incredible executive team and make sure they have what they need to do their jobs and so on
until we get to the very top of that organizational pyramid at the at one, I would say at one layer
below the top is you guys because you guys are the troops in the field, our leaders, our grassroots
that make all this stuff happen that actually do all the hard work. And then there are just the
volunteers that are out there and especially I would say the very top of the pyramid is the brand
new volunteer. The person who just clicked the button and said I'm willing to do something.
And that's the nature of our organizational pyramid. So your input matters to us more than
anything else. And so what we're going to do is we're going to do some Q&A right now. A bunch of
you put questions in. And so I'm going to bring up our director of operations because she's the
person responsible for making sure that everything happens. She works directly under Mike Ruthenberg,
our chief operating officer. And so it's my pleasure and my honor to introduce Lucy Vanderline.
So I heard a rumor you've got some hard questions for me. I do. And they're from those in the audience.
But my first question is actually for me, which is a lot of people have heard the story where
I criticize you for some terrible socks you have worn. So I wanted to know what your socks are if
you could show them off. Okay, yeah. We'll show socks today. So this is actually, it's not a C.O.S.
pair. That's my favorite pair of socks. Okay, so the story briefly for those of you who don't know
is one morning I was on Fox and Friends with Pete Hegsef. And I was sitting like this, right? Just
normal posture and Pete was sitting in a chair like this. And he was wearing some beautiful,
I think there were some fire orange socks, crazy stuff. And I called Lucy afterwards because I
like to have people critique what I do when I'm on television. I said, how was it? I was a great
hit. I have very good. I thought everything went really well. Pete's awesome. And she said,
what's with your socks? Yeah, I don't know. I was wearing dress socks. Like, what do you mean?
And she said, you're wearing old man socks. Like, take a clue from Pete, go back and watch the
segment and get some real socks. So now you'll notice, generally speaking, I'm not wearing quote
unquote old man socks. So thank you for the fashion too. I'm glad I didn't get the opportunity
to embarrass you today. I'll try again tomorrow. But yes, so we're going to jump right in. The
first question is from Mark White and Hawaii, who asked. As always. Yes, flew the furthest.
We know that one. Okay, so his question is, as decoupling increases federalism, how do we hold
the country together? Are we going to need a unifying event like a world war? I hope not.
Though I got to say with what's going on out there right now, we're closer to world war, certainly
than we've been at any time in my lifetime. And we had the president over the last couple of days,
I don't know if you all heard openly talking about nuclear war. Okay, this just, in my opinion,
highly irresponsible, but actually maybe real. It's not necessarily that what he was saying was
untrue. It's something that he shouldn't be saying out loud. Yeah, of course, that what I think would
unify the country. And we saw this after 9-11, the country for a short period of time was highly
unified by a really terrible event. I hope that's not what it takes. What I actually think could
unify the country, believe it or not, is calling a convention of states. And this is something that
I think a lot of people fail to understand that if we could get together and have a national discussion
around the idea of what is the proper role of the federal government, I think that would be a
unifying event. And also, it gives us a chance to say to people who are very different, like,
I don't want you to be like me. I actually respect the diversity, right? Not the diversity of skin
color or whatever, but different ways of thinking, different ways of living. I respect that and I
want a country where that's respected. So I think the unifying event actually could be a convention of
states. I think too, I mean, that's a historic event, obviously calling the first convention of
states. And so, in a sense, not just those who are at the convention are also supported, but those
all across the country are going to be tuning in. It expands more than just us in this room or those
volunteer activists that we have all across the country. Yeah, thank you. You know, we would actually
see that it'll be the biggest, literally, the biggest political event in the history of the world.
And that's not hyperbole to say. Like, I'm not trying to be to speak overly broadly or
overly enthusiastically. Imagine that we gather in convention, kids in schools will be watching it.
And when I say kids in schools, I mean from kindergarten all the way through postgraduate schools,
it'll be turned on in TVs in every break room and every company around the country.
I think, you know, every legislature will be watching it. It'll be covered by all the networks.
It'll be C-SPAN, end-to-end, reporters from all over the country will descend on it.
What an incredible unifying event for all of us to be paying attention. Like the Super Bowl and
Indy 500 and all, you know, World Cup, I know maybe you're not a soccer fan. I love soccer.
It's like all of it put together at once for weeks on end talking about the most important
thing we could talk about, which is who decides the federal government or the American people.
So I agree with you. I think it's bigger and broader than we just think of going to a convention.
I want to switch gears here. I know you talked a little bit about decoupling in a sense,
embracing some of the differences that we have across the country. Obviously, I'm from Texas too,
and I'm happy with us being uniquely Texan. So we don't necessarily all want to be the same,
but in the same sense, Gary Harbaugh from Indiana has a question, what is the most practical
loving thing we can do to win over our opponents and undecided to help some of that unifying effort?
You know, I talked about this a little bit in a breakout session, so I'm going to start,
there's layers to that. I'm going to start with the deepest layer, and it's not for everybody.
I'm not saying we have to, everybody has to do this, but I watched this happen in the Texas
legislature. It was really interesting. And this was before I moved to Texas, but the Texas team
did a prayer, organized prayer effort for the legislators by calling each office in sequence
opponents included, Democrats included, and just rotated through, and they would call the
offices and say, hey, this is Tim from Convention of States, and we're praying for the legislators
and your offices up today. We just want to know, is there anybody we can pray for? Is there anything
going on in your office you need help with? Just general prayers for the office. And what I saw,
what they saw, and what was reported by the team, was this incredible shock in a lot of cases,
right, that offices who thought, well, wait, you're my enemy. What do you call them, my office,
foreign praying, and it opened hearts. It didn't necessarily, by the way, change minds, which is
okay, but I think it created this sense of goodwill that was really strong. The second thing I would
say is, and I find this very difficult personally. So it's not, a lot of times I'm telling you things
that I'm sort of preaching to myself so that I remember it. Mostly our opponents are not our
enemies, mostly. There are enemies out there, trust me, and they're leadership.
So we always want to acknowledge that there are enemies, the enemy's out there, but most of the
people in America who believe very differently than us, they're not evil people. They're not
bad people. They believe things that are different than what we believe. We might even think some of
the things they think are evil, but they've been taught that stuff. They live in an environment
where that's all they've ever heard. So if we can treat our opponents as opponents, that's okay,
and know that we're facing off against them in the field of political battle, but not see them as
enemies. I think that's a practical way internally that we can take the right posture with people.
Yeah. Nobody ever convinced someone through hate. Yeah. Or through yelling at them, or
arguing, like if you want to convince somebody, don't argue with them. There's a difference
between, and I get this in grassroots all the time, Lucy, where people like they really want me to
go debate somebody, right? And the purpose of a debate, and this is important to remember this
distinction in your life, the purpose of a debate is to win. And in that win, part of the purpose of
the win, and this is going to sound really aggressive, and in a sense it is, you're in a combat when
you're in a debate, if you do really well in a debate, your opponent is not convinced of your
position. They are humiliated and defeated, and they will leave, and they will not agree with you,
and they will not have learned anything other than they probably like you less, right? And
sometimes that's appropriate. I'm not criticizing that. I've done lots of debates, and I want to
undercut my opponent, and when they leave, I want them to feel the wounds, because I hopefully was
successful in that debate arena. That's not how we should be most of the time. So sometimes people
want me to debate. I don't want to beat somebody up. I don't want to defeat them. Look, it feels good.
I'll be honest with you, on a very visceral human level, going in, duking it out, knowing you won
the debate, you scored your points, but what I really want to do is have a discussion with somebody.
Because if I have a discussion with somebody, I might win their heart. I might get them to see
at least a part of my point of view. And so how we talk to people, and whether we think of it as
I'm having an argument or a debate versus I'm having a discussion really matters.
Yeah, keep that conversation going. I want to ask a question, or someone from the audience does,
which is kind of an extension from what we were just talking about. This is from Lance Faust in
Illinois, and he says, is there a way we can win over moderates and moderate Democrats?
You know, we had a whole session on this yesterday, and I would say honestly this is
really difficult. I don't want to sugarcoat this. And this is something I've been hearing
since the very beginning of the movement. And especially for those of you who live in a really
blue state, I remember I can relate to this. I come from California. Or also, I see the Hawaii
team signing deeply. If you know about a really blue state, go to Hawaii. It's all beautiful on
the beaches, but when you get in a legislature, it doesn't, it's not like that. Or if you live in
an area, that's really blue. I mean, you might live in a red state like Texas, but you live in Austin,
like near where we live. It's tough. And it's getting tougher. The great decoupling is making
this much harder. Pre-Trump, this was easier. And I'm not blaming Trump. I'm saying that there's a
switch that flipped in the country when Trump ran for president. And there's just so much vitriol
mostly from the left. There are people on the right that participate in that. And so we got to
be careful of that. It's not, you know, our house is not perfectly clean. But it's just become
difficult. So I want to start with that because I don't want, I think sometimes people think,
oh, it's easy for you, Mark. I mean, you live in Texas and you get all the states, the red states,
where this passes and also it's easy. I feel your pain. So here's how I deal with it. And then I'll
close with why it's still hard. I'm, the way I talk to people about convention estates is that
it's really just the answer to the question who decides. Convention estates is not a policy argument.
We're not telling anybody how we want them to live, what the policy should be in their state,
how much welfare they should have, how much money government should spend,
what their education system should look like. There's no policy. This is a weird thing. Like,
we're lobbying for no policy. Very unusual. And so what I'm actually lobbying for is for,
if I'm talking to a legislator, is for that legislator to have more power in their own state
legislature. I'm lobbying for liberal people in liberal states to have the power to do that
which they believe is correct for their state. And so that's how I talk to moderates. And look,
I think when Trump got elected, this in a way became easier. And as we go through the midterms,
it's going to become easier with Democrats and moderates in the sense that I say,
like when Trump got elected, I would say to a Democrat, do you like the idea of Donald Trump
and Mitch McConnell and a more conservative Supreme Court telling you what to do? I would ask
that question. Now usually I wanted to make sure there was a desk between me and them so I didn't,
because they might come flying at me. If that didn't happen, what would happen is they'd be like,
no, of course not. You know, those people are crazy and bad and they're blah, blah, blah. And I
would say, I don't want them telling you what to do either. And by the way, I like Donald Trump.
And I like conservatives, but I don't want them telling you what to do. In fact,
I don't want them telling me what to do. And I share their ideology, right? Because what I want
is for people in the states to have the power to decide for themselves, to answer the question
who decides with they should decide for themselves. So to me, that's the best argument for moderates
and moderate Democrats. Thanks for sharing some of that. And I know individuals saw some of that
conversation yesterday and got to see it more in depth. And it was really engaging to understand
that in a sense, we can unify over our differences. We understand that we all share different sets
of values. But having that control at the state level really allows those states to embrace what
they want seen in their state. So thank you for that answer. One last thing I want to add on this,
because I get asked this all the time. Our website is red meat for conservatives. Am I right about that?
Yeah, we can clap for that. But if you're a Democrat state or you're dealing with a blue area,
that's tough. Right? Because you tell somebody and then they're interested and then they go look
and they see Mark Meckler and Mike Ferris and Mark Levin and Sean Hannity and Ben Shapiro and they go,
well maybe they don't use the sign of the cross. But whatever there's, I don't know,
I don't know what their symbol would be, whatever pronoun they would use.
But we've had this problem for years and there isn't a fix for it. It's not that we can't find
one, I'm convinced there isn't one. And here's why, because we're actually honest and most of us
are conservatives and all of our endorsers are conservatives. And I would be happy to have a
non-conservative endorser if I could find one at a long conversation with Tulsi Gabbard about a year
ago roughly. I was out at frontside, I spent 90 minutes on the phone with Tulsi. Very smart
woman by the way. Really, I have a lot of respect for her. I disagree with a lot of stuff
politically with her. Very smart, very honest. And I wish the country was filled with a lot
of Democrats like Tulsi Gabbard. It would be a better country, right?
But the reality is our audience is primarily conservative and our endorsers are conservative.
And we can't really hide that. There was a time where the suggestion was made that we
should have two websites, right? One that we can give out in blue states and one that we
could give out in red states. It was a serious suggestion. We seriously looked at this. And then
we realized, well, wait, that's not honest. We're going to send people to the cleansed left-wing
website. And then they're going to find the right-wing website at some point. Like, what kind of
bait and switcher are you guys playing on us? So the reality is we have to be who we are. And we
lead with love, but we are conservatives. That's our core constituency. And we haven't even come
close to winning our core constituency. So that has to be our focus. We'll win our base first,
and then we'll go beyond that. That doesn't mean we should stop talking to Democrats or people on
the left or monitors. We always should focus on that, but it's going to be rougher for you guys.
I think to add on that too, I mean, we've had this conversation about how the truth or reality
skews conservative. And that sounds odd, but in conservatism, we embrace facts and reality. And so
portraying a website that is conservative, in a sense, it's just a reflection of what reality
and truth looks like in our search form. Yeah, that fits the theme, right? I've been saying taste
for reality. Unfortunately, a lot of folks on the left don't have a taste for reality. If you can't
define a woman, you don't have a taste for reality. Moving on to the next question. Jim
Consworth from New Jersey asks, as we know, the 17th amendment was taken up as a result of an
Article 5 Convention of States. What is your expectation if Congress decides to put up these
own amendments for term limits? So 17th amendment, just to make sure everybody's on the same page,
I didn't know what this was years ago. You don't really study the 17th amendment much in school.
We don't study the Constitution much in school. 17th amendment provided for the direct election
of the United States senators. They used to be appointed by the state legislatures. This is
really important in the constitutional balance. What it did is it gave the states a voice in
Washington, D.C., and senators primary job. You really didn't even have to speak English because
all you had to do was be able to say no. That was their job. No to the federal government. No,
you can't do that. You can't encroach on that. You can't take that power away from us. So the
17th amendment really broke our system, in my opinion, because it took a voice away from the
states as entities. It was a response to what was going on in the states, and the states were pushing
for a convention to directly elect their senators. It's important to understand the
historical context that we're doing that because in order to become a senator, mostly
it was really rich people who already had a lot of influence in their state and could afford
to become senators. That was the problem that was perceived. Today, what's awesome is
people who run through the Senate are mostly really rich people with a lot of influence in
their states. We didn't really fix the problem, and it created a whole other set of problems.
The question really is what happens if Congress does something like this on term limits?
Look, I hope they do. I actually expect that they will. I would expect that Congress,
as we get close to convention, they will start reacting. In 1982, when we were close to a
balanced budget convention, they passed the Graham-Redman Act, which was a fake balanced budget act.
That's really what they... So this is what I expect is that Congress will be like,
hey, you guys want to limit the powers of the federal government? Who have we got a package for
you? Would you like one here? They're going to open up the coat and they're going to show us a
bunch of shiny watches. What we're going to say is we're so happy for you, and you're so cute
with your little amendments that you're proposing. You're welcome to watch our convention, and you
can give us some input if you like. So we're going to go to convention no matter what.
The next question is from Shelly Harrison from Missouri, and she asks,
the federal bureaucracy seems so deep, so wide, and so powerful. Is calling a convention able to
limit the authority that the unelected bureaucrats wield? Yes, yes, and hell yes.
That's very nonspecific, but it excites me more than anything about convention,
and here's how it works. There's multiple ways that it works, and multiple things that can be
done in convention with the bureaucracy. The administrative state is the disease on the American
population right now, and the founders would have been stunned that we have it. It is, by and large,
99% unconstitutional. It's been made constitutional by the Supreme Court through commerce clause,
through general welfare clause, through necessary improper clause. I heard Mike Ferris talk about
that yesterday. So by redefining that stuff, as Mike said in a much more sophisticated way than I
can, we can do away with the authority for these agencies. What that means is, for example, if we
redefine the commerce clause for what it originally was, what that would do is remove the authority
for probably 40% of the federal government. It wouldn't happen overnight. You can applaud for
that, because that is good. It's not me. And then the other thing that the other approach to this
is, to the extent we can't get rid of bureaucracies, part of the disease in the bureaucracy is
federal employee unions, which are a cancer upon the republic. By the way, the great conservative
Franklin Delano Roosevelt said that public service and unionization were incompatible,
and they are incompatible. And so the reason that we have federal employee unions is they're
chartered by the federal government, and we can make that unconstitutional and do away with all
federal employees. And then finally, on that subject to the extent that we still have
administrative agencies, we can, under the term limits clause, term limit federal officials,
and that includes bureaucrats like maybe Dr. Fauci types, right? And set it so that it's not a
lifetime career track to be a federal bureaucrat that's very unhealthy. The founders wouldn't have
tolerated that, and it's destroying the republic, so we need to fix those things.
Well, we're at the end of our time here, but thank you so much for answering questions from
the audience, and thank you all for submitting them. It's been a great conversation. Thanks for
asking them. Appreciate it. Lucy Vanderlahn, our director of operations.
To learn more, visit conventionofstates.com slash pop.
You
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