Abraham Lincoln: Hero or Tyrant?

Speaker 1 (00:02.306)
Boom. Hello. Welcome to this edition of At the Mic. I am your host, Keith Malinak. And this is the Thursday deep dive we do every Thursday at 3 PM Eastern. And my goodness, this is where we approach a topic and we do a deep dive on it. And I have been so looking forward to this conversation today.

Uh-huh. Ha ha Last Thursday, we did the America Stonehenge up in New Hampshire Please go and check that out if you haven't already the show is of course available It's pinned to the top with the archives at the top of the feed here also available on YouTube and rumble And as you know, it's always roll the dice if we're gonna be live and it looks like YouTube seems to be working so Fingers crossed y'all if you want to go and watch over there as well

Audio versions, course, available Spotify, iTunes, other locales. Thank you to Hero West for constantly getting that stuff up and running. And also big kudos to Gabby as well. She's always hard at work putting stuff on the At the Mic Show Instagram page. So follow over there as well. All right. Like I said, can't wait for this conversation. America's first dictator, Abraham Lincoln. Three facts about me at the onset.

I grew up in the south in the shadow of a Civil War battlefield, Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia. As a matter of fact, my grandparents who I visited often, Nana, as you may know, if you follow me here on X, her neighborhood backed up to Kennesaw National Battlefield Park. And it's metro Atlanta, Georgia, know, General Sherman burned that town to the ground. Sorry, I'm sorry. I said three facts. I don't want to get off on a tangent here. Okay, I love the Constitution. That's fact number two, okay?

And fact number three, I'm not a fan of Abraham Lincoln. And that disdain for Abraham Lincoln has nothing to do with fact number one that I was born and raised in the South. It has everything to do with fact number two. And it's really disheartening when you see poll after poll after poll that show 80 % of Americans regularly vote Abraham Lincoln as a great president.

Speaker 1 (02:27.594)
It's shocking because the evidence against that and against him being a great president is voluminous. It's out there, yet nobody seems to know it or care. The facts just don't seem to matter. But there is a guy, and he goes by the name of RazorFist. And I've invited him for a little chat today about ol' Honest Abe and why

That man, Abraham Lincoln, should be nowhere near the top of our best presidents in history. Razorfist is an author. You should check out his books at Amazon.com. And I was pleasantly surprised to see that it's under the author name Razorfist, which is, that's cool. I was glad. I don't know how he pulled that off, but that's awesome. So check out his books, go to his YouTube channel, The Rageaholic.

You cover so much over there. I don't even know how to describe your channel, man.

Depending on any given subject, that's what I would say. I can talk about the pop culture, I can talk about a video game, I can talk about... I have a two hour long video essay about the long times of Abraham Lincoln and Sherman.

Yes, yes. You want to write what? I love it. Well, I'm grateful for your time today. Follow him on X if you aren't already. RazorFist, and don't forget that it's not an O, it's a zero. R-E-Z-Zero. R-F-I-S-T. Well, welcome to the deep dive on Abraham Lincoln, America's first dictator. I think I stole that title from you. I may have done that.

Speaker 2 (04:11.734)
No, not quite, not quite. It's one Tumblr click away. I said, my video is Abraham Lincoln American D-

Okay, okay, there you go. Very good. So let's start here because I definitely want to get into all of the minutiae that is Abraham Lincoln. But if you had to give an elevator pitch, if someone's tuning in right now, they're rolling their eyes, they're like, all right, whatever, I got it. He was a bad guy. What would you do as far as a quick little spiel on an elevator to convince somebody?

Pretty simple. He suspended habeas corpus without any congressional approval. That's a common misconception that like, Congress stepped in and suspended habeas corpus because we were at war. First off, he helped engineer the war, so he doesn't have that excuse.

that's going to be part of your presentation. can't wait.

Yeah, and then of course he did it himself. He was already abusing the powers before Congress sort of rubber stamped it, which is exactly what they did. And I talked about this story a little bit, but they basically convened an illegal session of Congress months after he was already abusing his habeas corpus powers and said, well, because he's already using it, well, therefore passes, they stopped the vote and everybody voiced their protests. They basically just banged the gavel and then, I mean, there were just such horrific abrogations of

Speaker 2 (05:37.07)
American liberty and the congressional process. He was already a dictator. He made himself a dictator before any of that happened.

Yeah, and you do such a great job on your channel with that presentation that we're referring to. And you make it clear that the South, that's the thing. Can we have an honest conversation without everyone just assuming that, so you sided with the South. so you must be pro-slavery. No, not at all. And you make the point in your presentation that the South doesn't have

to be the good guys for Abraham Lincoln to be this evil dictator. I really appreciate that point.

Well, and one tends to ratify the other. When you're saying the Civil War was fought over slavery, it's like you're kind of playing into their hands. human beings were a facility of commerce at that time. So by arguing that the war was fought over slavery, you're really arguing that it was fought over economics, which is true. So if they were opposing, if they seceded, and this is another thing, it's conflating two separate things that are distinct.

Yes.

Speaker 2 (06:52.706)
There was a secession crisis, then there was an interim period where they had technically seceded and a few more states seceded, and then there was the Civil War. And these are two distinct but interrelated events.

That is so important to see that, man, because yes, the secession came in the months before Fort Sumter. And I appreciated your explanation. Tell us what happened with Fort Sumter and how Abraham Lincoln manipulated that and set the stage for the war through his actions of manipulation through that event.

Lincoln wanted a war desperately because it was the only way that he could preserve the taxation and territorial monopoly. That's what you have to understand is if he allows the South to secede and simply be their own thing, he's got big, big problems because the South had the fourth largest economy in the world at that point by themselves or during the antebellum period they did. There's some debate about whether at the time of the civil war they were or not, but they were certainly trading a lot with Europe.

And if there was a southern port that Europe could trade with instead of in the north, the north was screwed. And they had to keep this perception, the perception that sadly still persists today, that the north was industrialized and it was the economic center. They needed to preserve that in order to preserve the north's prestige, the union's prestige. that whenever you hear Abraham Lincoln say something like, need to preserve the union, what he's really saying is I need to preserve my taxation and territorial monopoly.

Again, not because I say so, not because of your lost cause, straw man, but because after the first shots were fired and Lincoln's propaganda campaign of preserving the Union was well underway, Lincoln himself said it. So he makes to re-provision the fort. He had already said in the media he was going to give the fort to the South, as he had with several other military forts in the South.

Speaker 2 (08:52.878)
So in a letter dated like May 1861, just weeks after the Fort Sumter attack, know, he says, you and I both anticipated that the cause of the country would be advanced by making an attempt to provision the fort, even if it should fail. And I am delighted to see that that presumption was ratified by the results.

Basically Abraham Lincoln admitting he caused the Civil War and that to Gustavus Fox who was one of the naval commanders who led that. They sent by the way armed battleships into the south to reprovision this. It wasn't like they were sending dinghies. They did it on purpose as a provocative measure.

There is.

Speaker 1 (09:42.06)
That is a fact that, I never even thought about that I learned from your presentation. But it just clearly shows someone was itching for a war.

Absolutely. Captain Gustavus Fox, by the way, later was quoted as saying, it was important to, he felt that it was important to Lincoln that the South be shown to be firing upon food. Wow. That was the idea. That was his kind of summation of what he thought was going on there. And again, if modern day journalists and historians call this lost cause rhetoric, Northern newspapers apparently didn't get that memo.

Yeah.

The Providence Daily Post said, you know, for three weeks, Lincoln assured us Fort Sumter would be abandoned. Now Mr. Lincoln sees an opportunity to inaugurate a civil war without appearing to be the guy who fires the first shot.

Speaker 2 (10:38.71)
His own secretaries, John Nicolai and John Hay, they admitted not only did Lincoln maneuver the South into a situation where they would have to be the first to fire, but that it was important that the rebellion be seen to be in the wrong. His own aides, people in his own administration admitted this. This was not an unpopular view. It was a prevailing one. And it became more prevailing.

after Lincoln's death. is another thing. like Lincoln was very unpopular in his lifetime. Even being assassinated didn't help his party much. They had problems in the next several elections. There are reasons for this. This didn't happen in a vacuum. You have to kind of ignore all historical context in order to support this, well, they're all lost causers kind of rhetoric.

So you're bringing up the press and I have lots of questions that I want you to address later on when we get deeper into the war itself and how Lincoln dealt with the press and it only cements his legacy as in earning that title dictator. But just back up just a moment, you're talking about how it was absolutely a war on economics. I mean, there was almost a civil war over tariffs, South Carolina being ground zero.

as well, 30 years before this. mean, this had been brewing with issues other than slavery, which again, to your point, Abraham Lincoln made it very clear, and I know you have the sources on that, that this was not fought to end slavery. And again, something else I want you to address later is the New York City riots. And I have a stat here that I took down from your... Yeah, here we go, here we go, here we go.

I got this, did I write this down correctly? 200,000 Union soldiers deserted after the Emancipation Proclamation.

Speaker 2 (12:28.585)
That's the root.

Which didn't think by the way.

Yeah, there were northern newspapers and you can even read some of the Civil War letters from the North and whatnot. And one of the terms that keeps popping up, please don't cancel us YouTube, is the Negro Proclamation is what they were calling it in the North, in the North. Look, this was a whole thing. Like the North was not wild about the idea that there would be blacks integrating in their population because in the South,

They were sadly treated like property, right? But in the North, they were treated like job competition. So they were hated in that way. They were hated in the same way that like the Irish coming over to America and the Iowa were, and only way more intensely because you had that racist kind of their black people kind of element to it. so this is kind of how they were treated at the time. There were foreign diplomats at the time who observed both South and North and said the racism was.

way more intense in the north, which makes sense if you really think about it. In the south, they have to cohabitate with blacks. They have to work with them. They're working in their fields. They're living on their estates and in their plantation houses. Look, a lot of African-American vernacular to this day comes from southern slang and stuff for this reason. There was a level of integration between white and black in the south that didn't exist in the north. So there was necessarily a lot of prejudice. so

Speaker 2 (13:54.968)
Consequently, there was a bunch of desertion. And then Abraham Lincoln decides that with these draft riots, which still are the largest domestic disturbance in American history, like the Floyd stuff doesn't come close, nothing comes close, Rodney King, whatever, that he's gonna pull troops off the front line at Gettysburg to go put down the riots and.

in an order, and it's controversial because a lot of Lincoln's letters suspiciously were burned by Mary Todd Lincoln, so we don't have a lot of his correspondence after his death. someone orders that the troops fire and start murdering civilians in large numbers. And we still don't have accurate fatality figures on that, by the way. Like there's been a lot of obfuscation on that subject, but someone decides to fire and it winds up being the most violent conflict, domestic conflagration.

in US history.

And those are the New York City draft riots post Emancipation Proclamation and now the war is over slavery.

Again, was one of the big things I pointed out. know, if the war was fought over slavery, somebody forgot to tell the North. That many troops deserted immediately after the proclamation.

Speaker 1 (15:07.362)
Yeah

Speaker 1 (15:13.346)
You know, and another thing that you do that gets overlooked, that you do a great job of in that presentation of yours, which I will make sure that the link is shared if you would like to check that out because there's so much information in there. I've watched it multiple times, man. It's so good. Yeah. And but thank you for agreeing to try and join me here for this conversation. I will say that

It's like over. sure is.

Speaker 1 (15:41.834)
One of the great things that you do is you explain how this thread through American history from Alexander Hamilton to Henry Clay to Abraham Lincoln, could you explain the American system of government and I guess the three elements that you referenced in the video, substance, state, national, national banking.

Yeah, this is kind of germane to modern politics because today our left-right paradigm is kind of borrowed from Europe. It's like, are you a commie or are you a fascist? People, and I hear white nationalists and all the Christian nationalists adopt this false dichotomy and of course it's a misread of American history. You cannot call yourself America first if you are embracing a European political binary between fascism and communism. The American homegrown political binary.

is Jefferson, Hamilton, small government, large government, like small government states rights, borderline monarchy, like Alexander Hamilton advocated a president for life. Effectively an elected king was his kind of summation. And so from Hamilton, you you go on to Adams and Quincy Adams, you go on to, right, it's, you see this direct through line. This gets down to Clay.

You're free to go.

Speaker 2 (17:03.754)
Abraham Lincoln worships Clay at his funeral. He's talking about how you can summarize all of my political positions with just quotations from Henry Clay. And Henry Clay is a big figure in the central bank, right? He winds up working at the central bank. He accrues, this is crazy, he accrues such crazy debts on the public money tit that his solution to the problem is to go work for the central bank and earn it all back.

They've been out smart in the system since the early days of the nation, man.

Complete scum, this guy. So Abraham Lincoln worships naturally.

natural fit right. Yeah I was just gonna say you had this the what was the quote that you had about Henry Clay talking about future vengeance against the South yeah like there was a great quote in there I'd have to go back and find it but if I remember correctly.

I apologize. don't remember every single quote in that.

Speaker 1 (18:03.948)
take my word for it, man. I probably have something wrong here. But it was so stuck. And it was something along the lines of Henry Clay looked forward to some future vengeance against the South or something like that. I may have this wrong, brother, if I do. I don't want to put you on the spot there. it really foretold. You can get into the mind. And this is another great thing that you do with the presentation. You get into the mind of Abraham Lincoln just by looking at, like you just said, how much he loved.

Henry Clay.

big tariffs, big spendin American system was that t railroads come around is president. That's not just because of the Amer

Yes

Welfare, government subsidization of business, government cohabitation with this. Mercantilism is what it is. Functionally speaking, it's English mercantilism. And this is one of the things that Thomas Jefferson so bitterly feuds with Alexander Hamilton about is you fought the British this hard just to import their system. What are you doing? Right. We have an opportunity to do something different here and we should avail ourselves of it. And so

Speaker 2 (19:24.098)
really the American by play for a long time really until the Civil War is that it's Jefferson Hamilton. And it's only in the early 20th century that you start to get some Republicans who go the other way. It's a common misconception that we had a partisan flip in this country where Democrats went from being conservative to liberal and Republicans went right, went from being liberal to conservative.

you make a great point in that, show me when, where was that?

Yeah, didn't happen. What really occurred was that you had two different wings of the Democratic Party. You had these Hamiltonian Democrats and you had the Jefferson Democrats. And after the Civil War, the Jefferson Democrats get blamed for the Civil War, even though they resisted it, right? They resisted wanting to go to war for the most part, right? It was mostly Hamiltonians, Whigs. The death of the Whig Party is really a big reason why we get the Civil War, right?

Lincoln is a Whig fundamentally. He's a Whig and he in fact had plans to bring back the Whig party after the Civil War. His idea of the Republicans was they're just a means to an end. He had to be persuaded to run on their ticket after the Civil War. He's thinking I'll have enough political cache to bring back the Whig party. And of course it never happens. So the Whigs can't get elected in the South. So what do they do? They become Democrats. They become Hamiltonian Democrats. So the...

Thanks.

Speaker 2 (20:50.254)
current day Democratic Party is the same Democratic Party, it's just a different wing of it. It's the Hamiltonian Democrat Party. The Democrats used to be the conservative party in this country. So it's not a partisan flip, it's that one part of the Democratic Party just kind of took over. And then something fascinating happens in the early 20th century where as a result the presidents like, I think the linchpin really is Taft, William Howard Taft, who you have Roosevelt who's more of a progressive and kind of a leftist.

and he installs Taft, he wants to go kill animals in Africa. So, hey, hold down the fort, Taft, you get to be president and wait and Taft is just supposed to carry his water. And then Taft starts looking at the ledger book and going, this is untenable and it's unconstitutional. It's not right. And so Taft slowly becomes his own man, starts slashing the size of government, starts firing some of the bureaucrats of Roosevelt. And suddenly you have the first of what we have today is kind of the smaller government.

Republicans just little by little that kind of happens you wind up with Coolidge and right in Lee and on and on

Yeah, cool it, We're a big fan of his here. I don't know what I did with the greatest picture ever taken of a president, but it's around here somewhere. But you're right.

You ought to read the Amity Shlice.

Speaker 1 (22:05.006)
have. have. huh. Sir. And I will say that that that infighting within the Republican Party of course opens the door to Woodrow Wilson. Progressivism takes root that has to this day infested itself in the American

Calvin Coolidge, they're incredible.

Speaker 2 (22:20.674)
Which incidentally, Wilson, I just referenced this in a video I put out this morning. Wilson is in many ways the ideological inheritor of Lincoln, so it's FDR. He's at Progressive, so any... Was that accurately timed there? No.

that. That's good. Yeah, need to. Okay. And by the way, just want to housekeeping real quick. I must have dreamed that that quote. I can't I couldn't find it in a quick cursory search. it's too perfect, right? The Henry Clay talking about future vengeance against the well, I don't know.

mean, you don't even need to go that far. A lot of people talk about the second inaugural address of Abraham Lincoln. The cult of Lincoln will talk about the second inaugural address alike a lot because it talks about a lot of the things they love to pretend the Civil War was about. But the first inaugural address was a lot closer to the Civil War or the outbreak of it. And so you really need to go look at the text of that because if I could summarize it, it would be the

Slavery forever, slavery for everyone. Let's preserve the institution for all time. And hey, by the way, let's invade the South if they don't pay their taxes. That's the first inaugural address of Abraham Lincoln. And they have memory hold that inaugural address, just like they've memory hold Abraham Lincoln's lifelong atheism. know, like they've memory hold an entire litany of things, but that's one of the things they really, really love to do.

Okay, so during the war, you know, a lot of people, and I referenced this at the onset, General William Tecumseh Sherman, destroying my hometown of Atlanta, Georgia, and all points in between there and the coast. Abraham Lincoln was not disconnected from what was going on during the war.

Speaker 1 (24:13.46)
explain how he was downright giddy and and and how he monitored the developments for the March to the Sea.

He micromanaged the war heavily. That's one of the reasons the game of brinksmanship got so intense. The failures of the war, which there were a lot of them on the North, they were losing despite a massive manpower and logistical advantage. They were losing to the South, at least in the East they were. In the West, it was a little bit of a different story. So, you know, in a lot of ways, the Emancipation Proclamation was kind of a first.

major indication, sort of formalized in doctrine that Lincoln no longer intended to confine his list of opponents to merely military targets in the Confederate South. But now he was extending it to encompass civilians. The Emancipation Proclamation in a lot of ways, you know, it doesn't really free anyone where he actually has authority. In the North, slavery continues. It continues well into the war. last state to outlaw slavery is New Jersey.

Right? So the Emancipation Proclamation emancipates no one. The European press and even the Northern press, those newspapers that Abraham Lincoln didn't close and arrest their operators.

So we're gonna talk about that.

Speaker 2 (25:30.712)
They called him out on this, right? We basically, I think his secretary of state actually says something like, we're holding slaves at a distance where we can free them, you know, that kind of thing. We have jurisdiction in these areas, but we're specifically saying that slavery gets to stay here, right? Yeah.

Yeah, and I'm glad you made that point.

Let me just finish that. It's basically kind of a dog whistle in a way I hate using that term, but it basically, the only function that it really has is it's kind of a way of letting slaves in the South know, hey, if you revolt against your masters, you'll have free passage to the North and you'll get to come over here and there'll be no constant. It's essentially a subtle way of trying to instigate a slave revolt. And it doesn't work. actually, which is interesting.

It doesn't work. It's also pretty contemptuous too, because by that stage in the war, most of the able-bodied men, meaning plantation owners even, would have already been away at war or killed or whatever. So the plantations are being run by wives, women of the house and things like that. So basically, hey, go rape and murder the head of your plantation house there. And you can have free passage to the north. It'll be a gay old time, or at least by curious.

And not only was it a dog whistle to go in and and rape and pillage the countryside where slave owners still are but if People would take just a moment I wish Americans would even if you don't want to read the entirety of the emancipation proclamation It's not that long, but where he talks about freeing the slaves It's in the following locations and and I want you to address

Speaker 1 (27:18.028)
Why is it so specific? Arkansas, you're free. Texas, you're free. Louisiana, you're free. Well, hold on, except for the parishes of any list to all these parishes. Mississippi, you're free. Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia. Well, except for those 48 counties that are now West Virginia and also the counties of Berkeley,

And West Virginia is an interesting case too, because even if you make the case that he was just keeping the union together and didn't believe in secession, number one, that's contradicted by his own quotes. He supported secession many, many times over the years, but he also supported secession during the secession crisis, as long as they were succeeding on the side of the union, right? He engineered a coup in Virginia.

I'm telling you man. So why carve it up like that? Why only tell the slaves in the South that they're free now except for these other places? Explain to us Razor Fist. Why was it so specific like that?

because those are the only areas of the South that he had military control of. Yeah. They got to keep their slaves. And of course there are hellish stories. I had a part in my video about the slaves who started following the Union troops because they believed the propaganda. we'll be free. It'll be fine. They're going to lead us to freedom. And Sherman just treated these people like

complete detritus. followed him. They went way ahead of him. He wasn't going to let him slow it down. He winds up crossing a river and they try and follow him and they all drown. Like it's, and he just kind of sits there on the shore and watches it happen. it's.

Speaker 1 (29:06.998)
He pulled up the bridge or something, right?

pulled up the bridge behind them and they all drowned. Unbelievable. Because he didn't want them following him that bad. And again, the Geneva Convention convenes in 1863 to formalize and agree upon rules of conduct in military conflicts in no small part to address the now evident and escalating atrocities committed against civilian populations in the American Civil War. You cannot mention the Geneva Convention.

without acknowledging that the North were committing war crimes in the Civil War, because that's one of the reasons they're convened at all. We've already established Lincoln micromanaged the war to an appalling degree. So the standard historian's line that Lincoln was unaware of all of these war crimes holds water like a Swiss cheese submarine. You can praise Abraham Lincoln for micromanaging every daily affair of the Northern war effort that he ultimately wins, or you can absolve Lincoln of culpability in apocalyptic acts such as Sherman's March to the Sea and Shenandoah.

You cannot logically do both. You can't hold both those positions at once. He either micromanaged anyone or he micromanaged and he's responsible for war crimes. And incidentally, Grant, President Grant later says, you know, basically Abraham Lincoln impressed to him that if they didn't raise Shenandoah, if they didn't march to the sea, Republicans were not gonna win the next election and then he was gonna be out of a job and the union was gonna dissolve and right.

He was more worried about Republicans' electoral chances in the upcoming election than he was about any war crime. And the war crimes may have actually been instigated. I, of course, talked about the Bumbers, Sherman's Bumbers, who would go into towns and just, I mean, rape, kill, steal, burn. It was just...

Speaker 1 (30:52.712)
the diaries of some of the women.

There are towns to this day that still don't exist because of the bummers and Sherman's march to the sea. You'll occasionally be driving through the South and you'll just come across a plaque. Just a plaque. There's nothing around for miles. And there used to be a township here until Sherman came through. Or Grant. Grant is responsible for no small number of war crimes during the war as

Yeah, my goodness, yeah. I need to get a collection, like a book with letters from that period of the Civil War because it cannot be forgotten, the heinous things that Americans did to other Americans during that war. Okay, we touched on it earlier. I'd like you to expound on it if you wouldn't mind. What did Abraham Lincoln do to journalists and newspapers that dared to

criticize him during the war.

I mean, the numbers of people who were jailed without charge or trial, a lot of them were journalists. Like there's this common misconception when you cite the number of people that Abraham Lincoln arrested. And again, no charge or trial, similar to January 6th, you know, it's kind of, they're foreign actors. There's spies or foreign combatants. No, a lot of them, preponderance of them in fact, were journalists or critics. were politicians. He locked up.

Speaker 1 (31:52.013)
you

Speaker 2 (32:19.478)
judge, he deported a senator, like he's just for criticizing him is, you know, he locks up Francis Scott Key's grandson in the same fort that Francis Scott Key was inspired to write the Star Spangled Banner at. He locks him up there for 14 months. He writes a book 14 months in American Bastille's.

and becomes kind of a rallying figure. You want to know where the lost cause myth comes from. It's from the fact that you lock up people like Frank Howard Key, that's his name, and they wind up writing books about how they were treated under the Lincoln administration. And that was all kind of part of the Maryland secession. There was a lot of chicanery that went on in the state of Maryland. A lot of chicanery. They were rigged elections. They had the military in there. They kept...

moving the military in when it was time for a vote to swing one way or the other. They had color coded ballots.

I wanted you to talk about the color-coded ballots the the removal of that Maryland legislature Yeah, and and I'm sorry was it thirty eight thousand is that estimates as high as thirty eight thousand Americans were arrested by Lincoln during the war

Something like that and hundreds of newspapers. You have to remember, dude, this was a huge, this is the height in a lot of ways of like good old fashioned, roll up your sleeves, printing press journalism. And so there were newspapers upon newspapers upon newspapers and most were in the North and they were critical of Lincoln and pointing out that he was not popular in his time. Like this is something that needs to be impressed. This guy was lionized near, near sainted really.

Speaker 1 (34:00.238)
Yeah, it's almost considered blasphemy to criticize the man at all. Here we are a hundred and, gosh, 160 years later. I don't know. You do the math. But it's like, still to this day, you dare to try to have a civil discourse about why he sucked as a president and people are like, whoa, you still can't have an honest discussion about the man.

Yeah, absolutely. But the lionization occurs after his death. I showed that painting, Congress later commissioned of Abraham Lincoln being transfigured into heaven flanked by angels. looks like deviant art, fan art. It is a legit painting commissioned by Congress, paid for by the taxpayers after his death. Unbelievable.

Yes, yes.

Speaker 1 (34:50.83)
Yeah, let me let me I got actually I I was able to Google that quickly here and find that

Yes, throw that up on the screen. It's pretty sobering and it's not alone. mean, look, the Lincoln Memorial for crying out loud is him sitting on a throne. There you are.

Can you see that being lifted up into heaven right there? Lincoln ladies and gentlemen. Boy, okay Where yeah the Maryland that fact I Don't I don't think I ever heard that one before Where you mentioned Marilyn? Look, I don't like the way things are going at the Maryland legislature arrest them all

And not only that, but they were going to vote on secession, which was. Which was their right, because again, the states created the federal government. This is part of the by play between Jefferson and Hamilton. Hamilton's a centralized, but even Hamilton didn't make the argument that the federal government was not created by the states. Abraham Lincoln posits a false premise that the states were created by the federal government that didn't exist.

That's what it was. Yes.

Speaker 1 (36:02.712)
It didn't exist!

until a constitutional convention of states, right? So he makes a false, ahistorical premise, and this is the entire rationalization really for the Civil War at all, right? Like that's really where it comes from. And make no mistake, the Virginia, when we created the federal government, when we drafted the Constitution, the Virginia, Rhode Island, and New York Constitutions all reserved the right to dissolve their membership in the union. All of them were admitted without any amendment required to their state constitution.

All of them. So secession was very much allowed. It was in these states' constitutions. That's one of the reasons this all breaks out in the state that it does, by the way, because it was one of the states that had it written into their constitution, hey, we can leave any time we want. that's stuck in Abraham Lincoln's craw, understandably.

I'll make it the end.

Speaker 1 (36:53.496)
Right, doesn't that, that's just seems like common sense. We all got together as individual states. my gosh, hold on, man. Hold on, I have to have you address this. I got so my brain just, welcome to my world. So, if you exist before there's a federal government and you just made this point, but I think it needs to be emphasized, then clearly you can exist.

Separate from the federal government because you existed before there was a federal government you are entering into this act Voluntarily it drives me nuts to hear that people say you have no right to succeed And and then although the best part is they point to the Civil War well Civil War showed that my gosh Don't you even get me started. I'll send them a damn link of your presentation

But not only that, but it's part of the massive lie. He waged the war to preserve the Union. He not only did he not wage the war to preserve the Union after the Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln was the person to explicate this. The southern states that had rebelled are formally expelled from the Union so that they can be incorporated. It's the only constitutional way, as suddenly cares about the Constitution, the only constitutional way of reincorporating them.

Yes.

Speaker 2 (38:11.054)
as an occupied military districts, which is what happens. And this is a way of preventing a lot of the electoral backlash because there's still a lot of blacks in the South. Believe it or not, a lot of the blacks in the South probably would have voted on the South side. And so a lot of the measures that needed to be passed during the Reconstruction era would have been forestalled if the South still had electoral authority at that time.

So they have to be incorporated as occupied military zones. So the idea that he was preserving the Union, he literally breaks the Union by any reasonable and legal metric, he breaks the Union in half. He formalizes secession after the Civil War in order to incorporate them as occupied military districts.

And if folks want to go down a history rabbit hole later on, I would love to know your opinion on how long you think Reconstruction would have continued if not for the controversy of the 1876 election. That's what broke up that stalemate. And I wonder how much longer federal troops would have been occupying the South. So if you have a take on that, but then I have to get to this point that I was going nuts here.

Do you have a thought on how long it would have lasted without the electoral issue in 1876?

Who knows? the interesting thing about Abraham Lincoln was, mean, gosh, I didn't even talk about this in my video. I talked about it in a later one. I highly recommend this book. I've been going through it. It's called a highly politically incorrect title. What Shall We Do With The Negro? It details a meeting toward the end of the Civil War. So I talked about this a little bit. were Confederate peace commissioners who tried to...

Speaker 2 (40:02.494)
head off the Civil War at beginning of the festivities and Abraham Lincoln refuses to meet with them, right? Because he doesn't have the upper hand. He's losing. So towards the end of the war, now he's firmly in the driver's seat. Now he's winning. Okay, now I'll meet with the Confederate Peace...

Yes!

Speaker 1 (40:21.356)
That's the thing they tried multiple times to cut this out to have a peaceful resolution long before bullets were flying. But anyway, continue.

His proposal is, if you guys will lay down your arms and rejoin the union, you'll have the votes required to prevent slavery from being abolished.

I don't know this!

So if Abraham Lincoln gets his way, yes, slavery doesn't expand into Western territories, but slavery is law of the land. And I would remind you, he supported the Corwin Amendment. I referenced the first inaugural address earlier. He references the Corwin Amendment, which he lies in his first inaugural address and says, I've heard of this law. I wouldn't oppose it. The Corwin Amendment would have made, it's the original amendment.

that was going to basically formalize slavery. It was going to make it inviolable per the Constitution. You could never outlaw slavery. And we learn later through Doris Curren's Goodwin. Sorry, I always mix up her name. Team of Rivals, her book, she uncovers primary sources in correspondence between Abraham Lincoln and Seward, that Abraham Lincoln was one of the primary authors of this document.

Speaker 1 (41:32.214)
Yeah, that's

Speaker 2 (41:44.212)
It was not the Carwin Amendment, it was the Abraham Lincoln Amendment. Abraham Lincoln tried to make slavery the permanent law of the land. So on this riverboat meeting with the Confederate Peace Commission, he's basically making all of these, you yeah, you get to keep slavery. And per his plan, slavery, if it was even gradually drawn down, it probably would have continued well. The estimate really is well into the 1920s.

Which incidentally, like the way they deal with Native Americans after this, it's like they seem perfectly fine to let Native Americans keep slaves after the Civil War. They use it as pretext sometimes to shithammer them, but otherwise they're perfectly fine with Native Americans having chattel slavery. And indeed, Native Americans had chattel slavery and practiced that well into the 1920s and 30s. They still have them.

By the way, who's the author of the book that you just held up? Scott. Okay. Fantastic book. Well, as long as we're showing off books, I'm sure you're familiar with Thomas D. Lorenzo's The Real Lincoln. my gosh.

from Hall DS.

Speaker 2 (42:47.978)
there's a winner.

Speaker 2 (42:53.23)
that was one of the books that I read in preparation for mine. He also did Lincoln Unmasked and I think he also made a slightly more recent one and I'm forgetting what it's called. haven't picked it up yet.

I didn't know that. Okay, here's the point that I cannot forget and kudos to me for I didn't even have to write this down. Can you believe that? Ladies and gentlemen, I remembered a point I wanted to make without writing it down. You make an excellent, excellent point that I have not heard anywhere else on any video in any book. Please explain to people the way you described the United States.

The United States up until the Civil War was described plural. That's why if you read older documents, late 1700s, early 1800s, it's these United States.

Mwahahahaha

Abraham Lincoln's the guy and you see it happen over the course of his speeches who stops saying these United States and goes the United States. It goes from plural to singular. And this is one of the reasons that the Abraham Lincoln myth has to be dismantled. The Abraham Lincoln myth was used to justify the January 6th detainees for four years without charge or trial. That's worse than Abraham Lincoln, by the way. It's only 14 months in American best deals. Frank Howard Key, right?

Speaker 2 (44:16.044)
The January 6th detainees spent four years in prison without charge or trial. Guys, Biden used Abraham Lincoln as pretext for his authoritarianism. This is an important myth for us to dismantle. The longer we allow Abraham Lincoln to go uncriticized for these war crimes, for his dictatorial slant, the more we allow that to occur in the present, the more likely we make it in the present. And we can see it bearing fruit in the present.

Oh, ho ho.

Speaker 2 (44:45.194)
It was these United States because these United States created the federal government and the federal government, you know, only existed basically by their by your leave.

Yeah, no, that's so important.

And again, Abraham Lincoln did absolutely on numerous occasions support secession for exactly that reason. again, Thomas Jefferson, or Thomas Jefferson, you referenced it earlier, dealt with a near secession crisis, the New England secession movement. If you basically invert the complaints of the South prior to the Civil War, you have the New England secession movement. It's...

as

Speaker 1 (45:15.554)
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:24.224)
Slavery is an aspect tariffs are an aspect but basically invert them and that's the New England succession movement Thomas Jefferson never said we can go to war with New England because they're threatening to see in fact And I quote if that be there a lot let us part in peace This is his private Thomas Jefferson one of the founding fathers

Abraham Lincoln felt, even though he wasn't part of the founding generation, even though he had nothing to do with the foundation of the country, even if men like him were involved in the founding of the country, it probably would have wound up a very, very different country, right? He knew a little bit better than the founding fathers. He knew a little bit better than Thomas Jefferson in dealing with the secession crisis. So he decided to, can you imagine if Lincoln was in power during that, you know, in the early 1800s, right? He absolutely would have instigated an earlier civil war. In fact, in a lot of ways,

some of the questions of the New England secession movement were sort of prosecuted in the later civil war that we fought.

So you just reminded me of something else. Lincoln was pissed when he was a congressman that James K. Polk went to war with Mexico because of this. So the way it goes, Mexican troops, I guess, crossed just barely into the US or shot into the US or something like that. And James K. Polk's like, here we go. Let's go. We're off to war. And Lincoln was pissed at that justification.

to get the Mexican-American war started. But yet, you just explained how he effectively rigged the Civil War beginning at Fort Sumter. This guy, I can't.

Speaker 2 (47:03.578)
Yeah, basically. And again, there was a whole host of this is another thing. The Civil War was almost fought at like a half dozen other forts. Like this almost happened several times. It was like Abraham Lincoln was just marching up to the precipice of the Civil War and then pulling back again and again. And one fort after another was given to this. I mean, it's their territory. It's their fort. And they were happy to pay for it. They paid for some of these, right? It wasn't like they just seized.

Huh?

It was like there was dress rehearsal after dress rehearsal after dress rehearsal. As I mentioned in my video, like there were actually orders for Northern troops to march on the South that were given ahead of Fort Sumter. Those preceded the Fort Sumter firing. So this was not an accident. Like Lincoln was, he knew how the South was likely to respond. He was engineering it this way.

He needed for the South to seem like the bad guys. was the only way he would have kind of an ingress of propaganda. And it was really wafer thin, which is why the North turns against Lincoln very, very

Man, yeah. Okay, and in that turn...

Speaker 2 (48:10.616)
Again, it's like the slavery pretext I talked in my video, forget if I even quoted this, where there was like a London newspaper, The Spectator.

They put it- yeah, yeah, yeah, please explain this, yes.

The European press was all over this because they were trading with the South. So they had a reason to see their side of things, right? So they saw things a little bit more soberly, I guess. But they basically call out and say, you know, the principle is not that a human being cannot justify owning another, but that he cannot own him if he's not a loyal member of the United States.

I seriously I and you do make that point in the video about how the British press and over in Europe They were they were actually covering the war whereas in this country at the same time over 700 newspapers go out of business during Lincoln's time in office. Do I have that number right? Is that

It's in that neighborhood. The estimates vary. I've heard 500. I've heard six. It's a lot and a lot of people. A lot of the newspapers that were shuttered. The people who are running them wind up getting. They wind up in those American Bastille's we reference.

Speaker 1 (49:25.562)
Yeah, yeah, and and you make the point in your presentation that there was one newspaper where the owner even said okay look if you're gonna be like this then because Lincoln had said we're not gonna deliver your newspaper through the US Postal Service.

Yeah. The conservative refuses to deliver their papers.

Here in America land of the free and and so the guy goes alright, I'll just deliver it privately And you know, I'll just I'll I'll deliver it on my own with my at my own expense. Nope Not even that was allowed, huh?

Yep, he seized that wound up and I think here's the funny part. That newspaper I believe was owned by the guy who became the mayor of New York or something like that. This was not an unconnected guy. Probably one of the only reasons he wasn't immediately arrested because he was politically connected.

Okay, I'm trying to think of what else here. God. Great. Yeah, no, no, no, you make the great point that, because we were talking about the United States and the argument, which shouldn't be an argument as far as you and I are concerned that if you voluntarily join a group, then you should be able to voluntarily withdraw from that group. I thought we had freedom of association, but maybe not. But you make the point that even in the Soviet Union.

Speaker 2 (50:27.95)
It's so riddled to talk about!

Speaker 1 (50:51.79)
It's hit the republics.

The Soviet Union allowed secession, that's why the Soviet Union wound up breaking up, right? They allowed independent states to withdraw Georgia and such and consequently, so, but that's the hilarious part. They basically like when the Soviet Union was the Soviet Union, that was essentially the Union that Abraham Lincoln posited and enacted. After, prior to the Civil War, the Union was voluntary.

The idea that Abraham Lincoln saved the Union is false on its face. He doesn't preserve that Union. He ends it definitively. If he didn't end it in causing the war, he ended it when he expelled the Southern states following the war in order to reincorporate them as military districts, right? After the Civil War, he turns our voluntary Union into a Soviet one. It's involuntary. The federal government top down creates this Union and now you're all under

And all of the abrogations of personal liberty, it's no coincidence, know, income tax is shut down twice in the 19th century. Then in the 20th century, following the Civil War, suddenly we're allowed to have income tax. All the constitutional arguments no longer apply because now the federal government gets to tell us all what's okay. We make this mistake, I'm a gun guy, right? We make this mistake on guns, on gun rights.

We're always trying to get some federal law passed that's gonna give us our gun rights. And it's like, your gun rights are better safeguarded at home in your home state. Most states have better pro-gun laws than the federal government does. And this is a misunderstanding. This is one of the reasons the Abraham Lincoln myth needs to be annihilated because we have now turned our government upside down. The federal government is giving us gun rights. That is not the way that George Washington understood it. That is not the way Thomas Jefferson understood it.

Speaker 2 (52:46.978)
Right? And they demonstrated that when they had their own secession crises. It was clear that the states had primacy over the federal government. The federal government exists at the by your leave of the states.

And if people don't want to get on, if Americans don't want to get on board with their or your God-given rights, then just explain to them natural law. But the bottom line, at end of the day, we can at least all agree that our rights do not come from our government. Because if our rights come from our government, then they can take them away. And there is so much here, man. No, no, no.

know I'm saying so many rabbit holes. Imagine trying to make this into an hour long.

gosh. God bless you. God bless you.

So hard to organize, I'm like, I think like a mongoose on crystal meth when I'm creating a video. I'm just all over the place. That's why I had to split it into chapters. I got to talk about slavery now. I got to talk about secession now. I got to categorize it. It was tough. And then I wound up making like two more videos talking about aspects of the war that I didn't discuss. I mean, gosh, the first clue that Abraham Lincoln

Speaker 2 (54:02.434)
Myth is BS is when the guy called honest Abe is a lawyer.

Hahaha!

He's a lawyer president and what's more, he's not only a lawyer president, he's a lawyer for railroads. The most like corrupt industry in the 1800s.

of fact! I don't think people really... Oh gosh, man, we can do this for days. Okay, so, but what I wanted to mention there, because you were talking about how the system of government that we had in this country just got flipped on its head after the Civil War, and I should have looked this up before this presentation, but another thing that just got triggered in my mind was I read somewhere a long time ago, and I apologize that I can't verify this, and I don't have my memory exactly, but...

I I read somewhere that before the Civil War, before Lincoln, that every employee of the federal government could fit in one building. Which, of course, is like a Doge dream. you know, obviously that's not the case anymore.

Speaker 2 (55:04.95)
Yeah, now you couldn't even fit Chris Christie in the building.

Okay, wait hold on again my brain is everywhere here you made another point in your video speaking of Chris Christie speaking of New Jersey and talk about and and nobody's making the case that slavery was ever a good thing, but I was I was I was Shocked by by the the things that you said about slavery in the south compared to slavery in the north, New Jersey in particular

Yeah, there were diplomats. Alexis de Tocqueville famously went to South and North in a diplomatic capacity. And so he did a lot of observations in the antebellum period, meaning pre-Civil War for those of you who heard this term very often. He made a lot of observations in that period about the nature of slavery. And he asserted pretty strongly slavery not only was present in the North, but it was much more brutal in the North, which again,

If you think about it, makes a little more sense because they weren't culturally integrated. Whatever you want to say about the institution of slavery, you had one byproduct that is still felt today. And that is that blacks and whites had to associate with each other more in the South than the North. So they came to, I don't know, kind of a weird, there was just a lot more cross pollination, right? So in the North, it was much easier to slave, what you would call othering today.

It was easier to see them as savages, savages, barely even human. Right? It was that kind of thing. And so they were beaten with merciless protraction. And it was vicious, especially in New Jersey. Alexis de Tocqueville went out of his way to talk about some of the stuff that he witnessed in New Jersey. And again, asserted repeatedly that racism toward blacks was far worse based on what he observed in the North than in the South. Again,

Speaker 2 (57:03.246)
The sad fact is one possibility, you hear lots of alternate proposals for how slavery could have ended in the United States without war and make no mistake, it could have. I would argue it already was arcing in that direction. North Carolina and such, there were states where you were getting into a territory where it was taking on features of serfdom, Slaveries were being, plantations were being managed by a slave form.

and the foreman was bringing in a salary, right? The guy who creates the steamboat propeller, patents the steamboat propeller, is a black slave in the South, which by the way, in the North, he wouldn't have legally been able to In the South, he's legally able to file that patent. Anyway, he winds up getting that patent. So you're starting to get more of a, you don't tend to.

pay slaves, right? This is not really a feature of slavery. So I would argue it was slowly, again, it was still brutal in a lot of states in the South. You can't minimize that. It was, and it was a foolish practice that we should have done away with. But you can see that it was slowly kind of going away. And if you look at the trajectory that it was kind of taking, they were starting to realize the reason they were adding the incentives is because it was making the workers more productive.

slavery was becoming less economically feasible. And once something becomes less economically feasible, it's not gonna be long before it slowly transitions away into something else. I think you could look into the Carolinas and you could clearly see, okay, probably something more akin to serfdom is what this is gonna transition into. And why that's significant is only a few years before the American Civil War, Russia freed its serfs.

It's way easier to free serfs than it is to free slaves. It's way less likely to become violent and end in revolt. So I would argue if we had kind of left it alone a little bit or maybe just nudged it along with little incentives here and there, we never would have had to have the most deadly conflict. mean, gosh, more people died in the American Civil War and the fatality figures are being revised every single year.

Speaker 2 (59:21.89)
More American men died in the American Civil War than in both World Wars combined. This was a catastrophic human death toll, and it's entirely down to Abraham Lincoln. Yes, you can say the South responded in the way they did, and there were parties in the South who wanted no part of the Civil War, by the way. They did not want to go to war with the North. There were a lot of people, but at the end of the day, Abraham Lincoln wanted a Civil War because it was the only way he could preserve that.

taxation and territorial monopoly and he got what he wanted. He got exactly what he wanted.

uh you know the estimate is it 800 000 deaths somewhere in there today

Hey, it's getting in that territory. It seems like every year it's starting to climb closer and closer to a million because it turns out in the aftermath of a deadly civil war when you're trying to lionize the president who helped kind of put it together, you tend to kind of lowball those figures.

that. So, my goodness. Man, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:00:24.174)
I'm get in slop talking about this, because I don't get to talk about it.

I love it. love it. So I think it's fair to say that the character of the nation completely changed after the Civil War. made the point earlier, Jefferson faced the secession crisis. talked about James Madison.

as well.

Did not suspend me.

Speaker 1 (01:01:07.296)
And as much as Andrew Jackson wanted to and damn near did invade... Right, that's the thing. Andrew Jackson showed restraint against South Carolina over tariffs. South Carolina had a good point, by the way. Even that guy showed restraint on going to war. But no, was Abraham Lincoln that took us there. So let's talk about...

Andrew Jackson was an authoritarian.

Speaker 1 (01:01:36.84)
Abraham Lincoln and the term war power.

What more powers? The ones that he invented whole cloth from the Constitution? Right?

Speaker 1 (01:01:49.167)
my gosh, this guy.

He basically reads something into the Constitution that no prior president, including all the founders, saw there. God, what fortune for us. Was able to come along at, know. The problem with the, he had wartime powers defense is that Abraham Lincoln's presidential war powers were invented by Abraham Lincoln, in short, that's it.

Keep going, dude.

Speaker 2 (01:02:19.042)
James Madison never invoked or acknowledged any war powers when New England refused to send troops like I referenced in the War of 1812. They effectively seceded from that conflict and from the Union by association. Yet, honest Abe, he found him just a-lying around, just lying around in plain sight through just a barkingly batshit interpretation of the Constitution that construes the president's duty, this is ridiculous, to take care that duties be faithfully executed.

This guy

With the president essentially making himself the duty, making himself the law, that was it. He doesn't have the, it was war defense because he helped engineer that war, and he doesn't have the war powers defense because he invented them. They don't exist. Take care of the laws, be faithfully executed. That means you can be a dictator when you want to. What?

And the oxymoron is completely lost on him, I'm sure. It's like you're viking the law in order to uphold them.

Yeah, there were people who said he was a I mean, I call him a dictator because like calling him a king is charitable. When when Seward who he was not only the Secretary of State, he was the head of Abraham Lincoln Secret Police. That's another fun aspect of.

Speaker 1 (01:03:42.228)
Yes, talk to us about Lincoln's secret police.

Yeah, Lincoln had his own Gestapo. That was nice, especially in New York during the draft riots. Like that was a big reason the draft riots happened is because the secret police are running around disappearing people and everything else. So Seward goes and meets with the British and he brags to British diplomats that he has more power than York. I actually have more power than your King right now. I have to answer to fewer people than...

Seward! Seward is bragging that he has more power than- and that's just Seward, right? That's just him.

brother, okay. So, are there other points here that you want to make sure that we cover as we talk about Lincoln and make the case that he was America's first dictator? Because, I mean, you've covered so much ground here. You're just in over an hour.

Yeah, it's tough. It's like every little thing you mention, I remember some point. It's been a couple of years since I made the video.

Speaker 1 (01:04:45.826)
Yeah

No, and it's excellent. So this is what I want to do actually. I wasn't aware that you had made two follow-up videos. Would you mind messaging me the links to the rant that I've been referencing and the other two that you're referencing? I want to tweet those out to my followers.

Yeah, one of them was called and it was a response to Nikki Haley in the primaries. Remember this episode talking about how the Civil War wasn't fought over slavery? And I was like, Whoa, Nikki Haley, the first intelligent thing of the entire primary. And then Biden waited in the Civil War was fought over slavery, Jack. I ought to know I was there.

Hahaha

That whole thing. I made a response to that and I got some of these other points about the Civil War out there. I was able to talk about this book and some of the other stuff later. But yeah, like I said, would have been if the Civil War was fought about slavery, someone forgot to tell Union troops. They sure did riot over it.

Speaker 1 (01:05:50.028)
Yeah.

Boy, so true. so definitely make sure that you like and subscribe here, of course. But then as soon as you're done with that, go to, it's, it, is Rageaholic, correct?

Yes, sir. The Rageaholic on YouTube.

like and subscribe over there as well and peruse his videos. mean the presentation is so well done sir. And how many books do you have now? Because I

I've got the two Night Vale books and I've got Ghost of the Badlands, which you can see back there. It's a Western comic that I just came out of graphic novel.

Speaker 1 (01:06:31.052)
How cool. Man, you stay busy, bro.

Yeah, and we can talk a little bit about some Union stuff in that comic, just a little bit.

out.

Speaker 1 (01:06:41.362)
Okay, all right. You're just a It's a great combination of entertainment and enlightenment quite frankly So I hope people will check out your YouTube channel and like I said I'll post those videos that you're referencing because I want to see them myself Razor fist is there anything that that you want to add here before we say goodbye,

Six semper tyrannus

Tell everybody what that quote who's that quote

from a bike, nobody, Brutus, Brutus, that's him.

Speaker 2 (01:07:17.326)
All the people who keep sharing could someone if I if we could take one thing away from this little talk could we stop the freaking retards on the right sharing that stupid meme of John Wilkes Booth shooting Abraham Lincoln and this is what happened the last time the Democrats got mad John Wilkes Booth was not a Democrat he was a member of the no nothing party stop retards

There you go, heard the guy. All right, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us today. Please share this and this will join the archives pinned to the top here of my Twitter page tomorrow at 3 p.m. Eastern. I'll hang out with Jeffy and Brad and we'll end the week with some drinks. Razor Fist, I hope we talk again at some point. It's been a pleasure, sir, and thank you for joining us today.

Yeah, it's a blast. Thank you for having me. Godspeed!